Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography

by Andrew Morton

  Once he was cast, Voight bought himself a wheelchair, joined the Long Beach Raiders wheelchair team, and, in the fall of 1976, spent six weeks at the Rancho Los Amigos rehabilitation center in Downey, California, going home only to see his children. He immersed himself in the life of a paraplegic so completely that if one of his feet fell off the wheelchair, he would reach down and put it back on with his hands. A number of wheelchair-bound veterans came to Jon’s house to join him and Hal Ashby in filmed sessions where they talked about their families, their friends, their chances of work, even their sex lives.

  After the Christmas holidays, which Jon, Marche, and the children spent with her father and Elke, filming began in earnest. As much as he believed in the movie, Voight did not believe in himself. His acting nerve had gone, as it had before he agreed to make Deliverance. “I quit. I’m not good enough to do this part,” he told Ashby. “Get Al Pacino or somebody.” Like John Boorman, Ashby was able to gentle his troubled star and convince him to carry on even as he continued to fluff his lines.

  From time to time family members came to watch the filming. On one occasion Jon brought his daughter along for the day. As he didn’t have a portable crib, he used the drawer from a chest in his new apartment as a makeshift bed when she had her nap. While he was shooting a scene, Bruce Dern’s ten-year-old daughter, Laura, acted as babysitter, in time regularly babysitting the toddler.

  The set was closed, though, for the climax of Luke and Sally’s romance, when they make love for the first time. While Ashby wanted to portray penetrative sex, Fonda was keen to show that their lovemaking was oral. She triumphed by the simple tactic of refusing to move her position on the bed. Ashby stormed off the set, but in the end his editing implied that Luke gave Sally orgasmic oral sex. One critic wrote that a crippled Jon Voight had “projected more potency than any other actor for quite some time.” The film made such a strong case for the sensitivity and sexual prowess of “sensuous paras” that at the cast dance—attended by dozens of wheelchair-bound veterans who had served as extras—Jon said “No way” when one of the paraplegics invited Stacey for a wheelchair dance. “If you want to become a better lover,” Jon noted, “you should hang around with them.”

  He was not the only one to have his macho hang-ups challenged. Later in the year, Ashby gathered actors and crew together to watch a rough cut. While the film was moving, most remembered the comment of Jane Fonda’s husband, politician Tom Hayden. After the two-hour-and-forty-minute screening, he walked past Jon Voight and said: “Nice try.” As Ashby’s biographer Nick Dawson observes: “Hayden’s cutting comment was possibly due to his anger at Fonda’s sex scene with Voight.” Her father, Henry Fonda, was even more upset, demanding that the scene be cut entirely.

  The scene remained. On February 15, 1978, there were lines around the block for the movie’s first New York screening, a testament to the public appetite for films that would address contemporary concerns and issues. Two days earlier, Jon and Marche Voight had formally agreed to separate, the petition duly signed and filed in Los Angeles Superior Court. The star of Coming Home had officially left home.

  THREE

  When I grow up, I’m going to be an actress. A big actress.

  —ANGELINA JOLIE, SHORTLY BEFORE HER FIFTH BIRTHDAY

  In the summer of 1978, Marche played a journalist in Borderline, a student film by UCLA graduate Ramon Menendez. He brought in his friend Bill Day to help with the lighting on the set in an apartment building in Hancock Park. As Bill adjusted the lights, he looked down and saw Marche discussing her role. “She was beautiful and sensuous and a total ten,” he recalls. “I couldn’t keep my eyes off her.” The feeling was mutual. During a break in the filming, Marche invited the twenty-six-year-old student to her home to take pictures of the children. At least that was the excuse.

  A few weeks later, Bill drove over to Roxbury Park on his Honda 450cc motorcycle—and fell headlong into the emotional vortex that was the unresolved relationship between Marche and Jon. When Marche introduced him to the children, James was wary of the interloper, while Angie was, as Bill recalls, a “bundle of exuberance and joy. One big pair of happy lips on a small body.” Marche’s actress friend Jade Dixon was also around to give Bill the once-over.

  Suddenly Marche announced that Jon was coming to pick up the children. As Jon drew close, Angie started jumping up and down and clapping her hands. Instead of yelling “Daddy,” she shouted, “Bill’s here, Bill’s here.” Jon was not amused, saying, “Oh yeah? What’s so great about Bill?” That first uncomfortable meeting in the park gave Bill a glimpse into the marital dynamics between Marche and Jon. “Marcheline suddenly became really cold. It was like another person. There was a bad blood in the water . . . real bad blood.”

  First Jon took Angie to the swings while James stayed with his mother. Then Jon tried to take Angie to his car so that she could spend the afternoon with him. Her squeals of glee quickly turned to tears, and Marcheline eventually convinced Jon to leave without the children. Clearly angry, he went without saying goodbye. It was a scenario that served as a template for the tumult between estranged husband and wife that would play out in front of their children again and again.

  The romance between Marche and Bill blossomed, the film student occasionally staying over at her home. Her choice of boyfriend provoked different reactions inside the family. Even though he was now living with Stacey and squiring her around town, it was clear that Jon still carried a torch for Marche. The fact that Bill was a penniless student—rather than a big Hollywood swinging dick—gave him power and hope. Jon’s mother, Barbara, and Marche’s father, Rolland, were of different minds. Their message to Bill, roughly translated, was “Keep your hands off our girl.” Marche’s father would berate her in front of Bill as if he weren’t there, telling Marche that Bill was only using her for his own ambitions. If she wasn’t careful, she would lose her looks and Jon would never take her back. In their eyes Stacey and Bill did not exist; the only dynamic that mattered was the poisoned relationship between Jon and Marche.

  In spite of parental disapproval—in time Rollie did come to respect and admire Bill—the film student found himself invited to stay with Marche and the children in the Roxbury apartment. By the fall of 1978 Angie’s exile on the fifth floor was seemingly over. She shared the bedroom on the second floor with her older brother, while Bill and Marche spent their nights in the den.

  Even though the grandparents—and Jon—might have not been happy when Bill moved in, the children felt comfortable with the new status quo. Angie started calling him “Daddy,” which made Marche giggle. Bill was not so happy, thinking that if the redoubtable Barbara Voight ever heard Angie speak to him like this, she might hire a hit man to dispatch the interloper. Instead he suggested she call him “Daddy-O,” and for a long time she addressed birthday and Christmas cards to “Daddy-O.” On the other hand, James always called him Bill, endlessly amused by his full name, Bill Day.

  His new role as Daddy-O did have its mishaps. When they went shopping at Ralphs on Olympic Boulevard, Bill and the children would wait outside while Marche quickly bought the week’s groceries. To keep the children entertained, Bill devised a game called “Runaway Shopping Cart,” where he would put the children in the cart, let it run down a steep ramp, and catch it just before it hit a wall. Angie and James loved the game, yelling with excitement as the cart hurtled toward the concrete wall. On one occasion Marche came out of the supermarket to see her children speeding down the path with, it seemed to her, no Bill in sight. She started to scream, which distracted Bill, who then lost control of the cart. The runaway trolley hit the concrete wall at full tilt, flipping over on top of the terrified children. They were uninjured, but that was the end of the game.

  It was not Marche but the Beverly Hills cops who put an end to another childhood thrill. A regular after-dinner treat was Bill taking the children for a spin on his motorbike. Angie and James would take turns perching on the gas tank while he roared alo
ng Olympic Boulevard. One evening Bill and a helmetless three-year-old Angie were pulled over by a squad car. The uniformed police were so angry at his reckless behavior that he thought they were going to beat him up. After giving him a stern lecture, they followed him home—and then yelled at Marcheline, accusing her of being a bad mother.

  Although the children called their mother “Marche Mallow” (she called Angie “Bunny,” while Jon called his daughter “Jelly Bean”), there was nothing soft and squishy about her. She was a matriarch like her mother, Lois, and while she would defer to Bill—and Jon—on creative or business matters, she ran the household her way. She had few, if any, boundaries for the children, but that was the way she wanted it. Woe betide Bill if he tried to impose a little discipline on the daily routine—such as getting the kids out of bed and to day care on time. It led to numerous power struggles, and as often as not Bill ended up sleeping on a couch in the office they had rented in the seedy Palmer Building on Hollywood Boulevard. They decided to rent the $125-a-month office in the fall of 1978 after Marche consulted Warren Beatty about advancing her acting career. Not only did she want to fulfill her creative ambitions, but she also wanted financial independence from her estranged husband. Beatty agreed that she needed a professional show reel, and chipped in some cash for the office and for film equipment. The editor was Bill, who agreed to cut and splice Ramon Menendez’s film Borderline into a demo. (The finished reel can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/user/marchelinebertrand.)

  It was a slow process; the equipment was primitive, and Bill had his student papers to research and write. It was, though, a “blissful” time in their relationship. “She was a very, very generous person,” he recalls. “She would buy me clothes and wrap them up as gifts, made sure I was well fed and even made me a lunch bag—covered in sexual poetry—for when I went to the office.” He took the children to kindergarten in the morning and either Jon or Marche picked them up in the early afternoon. This arrangement suited the rhythm of their relationship, as Marche liked to have what she called “alone” time, during which she sat in her bedroom writing poetry, reading favorite authors like Anaïs Nin, and indulging her passion for astrology. She had a personal astrologer and spent a lot of time studying the planetary influences on her life.

  The stars were certainly out when Jon took his mother, Barbara, and girlfriend, Stacey Pickren, along the red carpet for the Fifty-first Academy Awards in April 1979. That night, while Bill worked late in the office putting the finishing touches on Marche’s demo tape, Jon was receiving an Oscar from Diana Ross and Ginger Rogers for his performance as the romantic paraplegic in Coming Home. His was not the only triumph; his costar Jane Fonda walked away with the award for Best Actress, and Waldo Salt and colleagues took the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. It is not hard to imagine Marche’s feelings that night, the girl from Riverdale with dreams of stardom watching the father of her children bask in the limelight. Angie has since said that she has never watched Coming Home because the film also features Stacey Pickren, the woman she blames for the breakup of her parents’ marriage. “I remember just growing up and thinking, ‘God, what a tough night that would’ve been for [my mother] in her sweatpants with her two babies.’ ”

  Angie did sit in her father’s lap a few weeks later and watch his latest film, The Champ, which was released at the same time as the Oscar ceremony. The heart-wrenching story, about a father who returns to the boxing ring to justify his son’s belief in him and ends up dying in his arms, had Angie in floods of tears. The youngster truly believed that the man cuddling her that night was going to die. She was inconsolable at the thought of losing her dad. “Don’t worry, darling; it’s only a movie,” Jon assured her.

  It was Angie’s mother who was in tears, this time of blind fury, at the way her demo tape was treated by Jon and his agency, William Morris. As her tape neared completion, Marche asked Jon to introduce her to an agent. He put her in touch with a young gun, Steven Reuther, now a big-time producer, who took her and Bill out for dinner a couple of times to discuss her career. Bill smelled a rat, believing that Reuther was under orders from Jon to placate Marche rather than find her work. To test his theory, he gave a tape to Reuther, telling him that it was Marche’s new demo when it was just a blank tape. Reluctantly Marche went along with the ruse. A few days later, Reuther called Marche and waxed lyrical about her “terrific” performance and requested a further ten tapes to send to various Hollywood producers.

  She kept her cool during the call, but erupted angrily as soon as she put down the phone. At that moment, Jon arrived to pick up the children for the evening. “Hey, Billy, how’s it going?” he asked as Day exited stage left.

  “Don’t worry, Jonny, you’ll find out,” he replied.

  After facing the verbal lash from Marche, a chastened Jon Voight and Steve Reuther promised to help her out. They were as good as their word. Jon was working on a project called Lookin’ to Get Out, based on a script by Al Schwartz, the manager of Jon’s brother Chip. Jon promised to give her a role in the movie, about the comic misadventures of two New York gamblers in Las Vegas, if he ever got the project off the ground. That said, he was also cowriting another script, The Shore, with troubled troubadour Dory Previn, so Marche’s movie role was more of a possibility than a probability.

  Reuther quickly earned his agent’s chops, placing Marche in a Revlon commercial due to be filmed in New York in July. As a thank-you for all his help, she asked Bill to come with her, the couple staying at the St. Moritz hotel on Central Park. That commercial was one of the high points, if not the apex, of her career. Certainly Marche was never happier, posing by the Plaza hotel surrounded by an attentive film crew, finally the star of the show. At that moment it was her mother’s dream come true. During a break in filming, she came over and hugged Bill. “I really think I should move here. I don’t know why, I just think I have a future here.”

  She was serious, making plans for another trip to the Big Apple as soon as they returned to Beverly Hills. In the end, Marche, Bill, and the children spent Christmas and New Year’s at the St. Moritz, enjoying a “wild” vacation in the snow. They treated the children to carriage rides in Central Park, went ice-skating at Rockefeller Center, and took in Broadway shows. The craziest moment was midnight on New Year’s Eve, when the four of them threw clothes out of their hotel window in celebration. “We had a lot of fun,” recalls Bill. “Marche was at her happiest, filled with hope, spontaneous, and open to all kinds of crazy ideas.”

  By contrast, her Oscar-winning husband was in crisis, about his career, his faith, and his future. It was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that Jon Voight would enter the dark night of the soul. In a classic Hollywood moment, Jon took a stroll along the beach at Malibu ruminating about love, life, and the whole damn thing. As he muttered to himself, “I don’t know what I’m doing with myself; I don’t know if I can do this much longer,” he bumped into his friend Al Pacino. Voight poured out his heart. Pacino listened intently, then said, in that raspy voice of his, “You are such a great actor.” Crisis over. At least for the night. “It’s nice when you have pals who believe in you,” recalled Voight, who nonetheless remained hugely conflicted.

  While he enjoyed what he called an “open-door” relationship with Stacey, he admitted that he was consumed by jealousy, which caused considerable difficulty in their six-year partnership. “She’s free to do what she wants, and I am free to do what I want. There are no rules,” he confessed to writer Will Tusher. Then he added, “I can’t handle the pain. I don’t want Othello [the tragic Shakespearean character maddened by jealousy] taking over my personality.” So it is not hard to imagine how Jon felt when Stacey later snagged a role as a hooker in The Border and flew to Mexico to film alongside three notorious womanizers, Jack Nicholson, Harvey Keitel, and Warren Oates.

  A strange encounter at the now-fashionable Chateau Marmont hotel on Sunset Boulevard with his good friend director John Boorman symbolized the yin an
d yang that is Jon Voight. The English director arrived after a ten-hour flight from London to find Jon waiting for him, a script in hand. It was a story about two brothers, one a good-looking Beverly Hills doctor who took drugs and enjoyed wild sex with raunchy women, the other a dutiful family man who loved his wife and children. As Boorman soon realized, the script essentially described Voight’s dual personality. Jon was so eager to hear Boorman’s verdict that he wanted him to read the script immediately. His director friend said it would have to wait, as he was tired after a long flight. He went to his room, showered, and was glancing through the script when there was a knock on the door. It was a very angry Stacey Pickren. “That’s my fucking life and I want it back,” she screamed, grabbing the script and stalking out of the room. Needless to say, the project came to naught.

  Voight’s conflicted heart was vividly exposed on Valentine’s Day 1980. Even as his lawyers worked on the divorce settlement, he sent a huge bouquet of flowers and a tender love note to his estranged wife. Unfortunately for him, Bill Day was home. He scooped up the bouquet and drove thirty minutes to Jon’s house in Hollywood and hurled the expensive floral arrangement at his front door.

  Just seven weeks later, on March 24, 1980, the divorce was finalized, Jon agreeing to a generous settlement. While California divorce legislation limits the time period for paying alimony, Jon, who was still paying support to his first wife, Lauri Peters, promised to give Marche $3,500 a month for life. In addition, he agreed to pay the same amount every month in child support.