The divorce did little to stem the undertow of rivalry that had started the moment Bill and Jon met. In the verbal arm-wrestling that characterized their relationship, they addressed each other as “Billy” and “Jonny,” knowing that it got on the other’s nerves. When James and Angie were enrolled in K–12 soccer, Jon and Bill took turns driving them to practice and were usually at the games—on opposite sides of the field.
An incident on Angie’s fifth birthday, in June 1980, symbolized their uneasy relationship. In typical Marche style, the apartment was brimming with balloons and overflowing with food, presents, and excited children. An absolute perfectionist, Marche had spent hours hand-engraving invitations, carefully wrapping presents, and writing special notes. No one could ever match the care she took—a trait that would have unforseen implications for her scruffy tomboy daughter. Taking pride of place was a dainty tea service, a birthday gift Angie had carefully set out in a corner of the room. The birthday girl ordered her parents and Bill to join her for tea. Once everyone was seated, she decreed, “No eating or drinking until we have said grace.” Marche, who was becoming ever more devout, smiled and said, “That is so sweet, Angie.” At that point Jon said they should all hold hands. There was no chance of Bill’s holding hands with his rival, so instead he grabbed a tiny plate as if he wanted to eat straightaway. This piece of playacting didn’t work, and again Jon tried to hold his hand. In the end Bill pulled away, saying, “I’m sorry, you and I are not holding hands.” Increasingly angry, Jon made another grab for Bill’s hand. Eventually they ended up praying rather than holding hands, Angie’s prayer including a wish that the adults in her life could stop acting like children. The incident is a window into Angie’s interior world: Raised in chaos and uncertainty, here was a little girl who was trying, in her own fashion, to find a safe place. Making peace between the people who dominated her life and provided that security was a start.
The other takeaway from this domestic quarrel was how precocious, independent, and self-aware five-year-old Angie was. She had a talent for the dramatic, too. As her father recalls: “Since she was a baby she wouldn’t let you help her even with her ABC’s. She’d say: ‘No, I do it. I do it.’ That’s the way she is.” Being brought up in a household with few, if any, boundaries, and a mother who practiced the Lee Strasberg method of parenting—always asking Angie how she felt when she was upset—encouraged Angie to express herself to the fullest. At kindergarten she formed a group called “the Kissy Girls,” who went around kissing all the boys and giving them love bites. Some of the boys got so carried away, according to Angie, that they took their clothes off. “I got into a lot of trouble,” she later told James Lipton, the host of Inside the Actors Studio. “I was pretty sexual at kindergarten and my mom often got calls.”
From an early age she was confident in front of the camera, hardly surprising as film student Bill Day constantly had a video camera at hand. An early performance was when they visited Papa and Elke, who had moved to Las Vegas and opened a Little King delicatessen, and Angie stood in front of the camera selling the delights of her grandfather’s restaurant. She told the pretend customers to eat at Little King or she would “punch [them] in the mouth.” When Bill stopped rolling, James would try his hand with the video, Angie always the star of his productions. One of her first memories is James shouting, “Come on, give us a show.” While James was an utterly beautiful boy, it was his sister who was the more photogenic, her face coming alive in front of the camera in a way that James could never match. So it seemed inevitable that he would follow his dreams behind the camera, while Angie remained up front and center.
Angie knew what she wanted—as she made clear to a former babysitter turned actress whom she and her mother encountered on San Vicente Boulevard in Beverly Hills shortly before her fifth birthday. “When I grow up I’m going to be an actress,” Angie told her firmly. “A big actress.”
A few weeks after this meeting, she made her film debut in Lookin’ to Get Out, a film her father had carefully nursed into life but which only limped into movie theaters two years later to lamentable reviews. It was an intriguing family affair; Angie, her mother, and Stacey Pickren all had parts in the comedy, about two hapless gamblers who go to Las Vegas in an attempt to win back money they owe a New York gangster. Directed by Hal Ashby and filmed on location in the summer and fall of 1980, the wafer-thin story was most interesting for some of its parallels to the lives of the actors and director. One of the opening scenes features Jon Voight, all cocky swagger as compulsive gambler Alex Kovac, trying to chat up a pretty girl in a Jeep as he waits at a traffic light in his white Rolls-Royce. Jon flirtatiously asks the girl, played by the newly divorced Marcheline Bertrand, if she will marry him. She replies, with a knowing smile, “Not a chance.” In a later scene, cut from the original movie, he watches, with benign indifference, when his partner takes the hotel hooker, played by Stacey Pickren, into their suite for sex. It was almost as if Jon Voight were gambling with his own heart, acknowledging the desire and jealousy he had for both the women in his life.
Perhaps the most autobiographical scene, though, involved Jon and his daughter. Voight’s character has a child by Ann-Margret’s character, who’s now involved with the casino owner, but he doesn’t realize until the end of the movie that he is the girl’s biological father. When they meet, he feigns cursory interest. The girl is cute in her floral dress and straw hat, but he is in a hurry and not especially touched by the joy of fatherhood. In the original script, the child was a boy called Josh, and James, the Voight child deemed to have star potential, was penciled in to play the part. At the last minute Hal Ashby decided it should be a girl called Tosh. In fact, it was so last-minute that on the morning the scene was due to be shot, Angie had to fly from Las Vegas to Los Angeles in a private jet in order to be presented to the appropriate authorities so that she could obtain a minor’s work permit.
What no one knew at the time was that Hal Ashby had a daughter named Leigh, whom he had never been able to bring himself to meet, even though she had tried to contact him on numerous occasions. Now the scene where Alex meets Tosh is interpreted as Ashby’s attempt to vicariously experience the moment of reconciliation with his long-lost daughter. At an emotional viewing of the movie, a tearful Leigh, who never met her father before he died, commented, “I always thought that message in the film was there for me. I always knew he was my father. In Angelina he recognized me at the end of the movie and I knew how sad he was and how sorry he was.” In later years that scene between father and daughter would take on further emotional resonance.
The filming of Lookin’ to Get Out coincided with a rapprochement between Bill Day and Jon Voight. After prompting by Marche, Jon took the trouble to look over a screenplay Bill and his writing partner, Dan Ackerman, had produced for a course at UCLA. He liked what he read, as did his assistant, Kathleen, who passed it on to Lookin’ to Get Out producer Robert Schaffel. Schaffel paid Day and Ackerman $5,000 for an option. “You have a little bit of talent there,” Jon grudgingly told Bill Day.
In the seesaw of this emotional triangle, as mutual respect was entering the lexicon of Bill and Jon’s relationship, Bill’s romance with Marche was hitting the skids. Day sensed that now that she was hitting her thirties she was looking at the horizon and thinking about some of the big Hollywood names she could have had. A particular bone of contention was when Angie’s godfather, Maximilian Schell, decided to visit when Bill was not around. Mostly, however, their arguments centered around his family. She refused to attend his brother’s wedding, his grandfather’s funeral, or any other family gatherings, this reticence leading Bill’s two sisters to conclude that Marche just wasn’t that into the man in her life.
Bill put those thoughts aside when he announced that he was blowing his option money on a vacation with Marche and the children in Hawaii. Their break, in early 1981, was a week of bliss, the children enjoying the surf, the sun, and the sand. Every morning white doves flew onto their ho
tel balcony—much to Angie’s delight. She scoured the room for every morsel of bread and called them over: “Yeah, that’s it, baby. . . . Eat, babies. . . . There you go.” While the episode revealed her mothering instincts, it also pointed out the contrast between her and her older brother.
As a youngster she loved animals, though they did not survive long under her casual ministrations. She dyed a mouse blue, which caused its imminent demise; a rabbit she called Tweety Pie (her brother nabbed the name Bugs Bunny for his own rabbit) died when she accidentally dropped the cage on it; a pet hamster she took into the shower died of pneumonia; and her lizard, Vladimir, was fried in the heat when a friend left him caged in the sun.
By contrast, James, who identified with Linus, of the blue blanket, from the “Peanuts” cartoon, was so passionate about inanimate objects that from an early age he got upset if he saw a condemned or ruined building. In time he would be one of the first in his class to have a personal computer, an Apple Mac. The young computer geek loved poring over manuals and talking about apps. His sister couldn’t have cared less, being not remotely interested in “boy toys.” She was, however, a tomboy, climbing trees in the expensive white French smocks her mother liked to dress her in—much to Marche’s despair—or sliding down mud banks. She was mischievous, too. On a visit to her father and Stacey Pickren, she emptied a bottle of Mountain Dew and then peed in the plastic bottle. After letting it cool in the fridge, she offered the “drink” to her father’s girlfriend. She was the only one who thought it was amusing. While Angie was reckless, adventurous, and willful—“always busy, busy, busy, just like her grandma Barbara,” recalls Lauren Taines—James was much more considered, placid, and dutiful. She was a garrulous handful; he was quietly obedient. In short, Angie was a Voight, James a Bertrand.
Most weekends in Beverly Hills, Bill, James, and Angie would ride their bikes up and down the ramps at Century City shopping mall or go to a movie. Afterward, they would eat at a diner on Wilshire Boulevard, where as often as not Bill challenged the youngsters to a dare, such as eating all the butter on the plate or mixing ketchup and mustard in the water glass and drinking it. “Angie would always take the dare without question,” recalls Bill. “James, on the other hand, would always try and negotiate a higher price.” Marche never did work out why they regularly arrived home with tummy aches.
Shortly after the Hawaii trip, Marche upset the family balance when she told Bill that she was moving to New York with the children. Since the Revlon commercial, her career seemed to be going nowhere, even though she had enrolled in more acting classes and made a fresh video with a classmate. She loved New York, felt its energy would kick-start her career, and anyway, Jon promised to lend her money to enable her to buy a house there. In her mind this offer was translated into his buying her a house as part of the divorce settlement, which was not the case. As Bill Day still had to finish graduate school in Los Angeles, it seemed that Marche would be making the move on her own; and as Bill gradually realized, the offer of a house came with strings attached. It seems that Jon insisted that he was not paying for a place for Bill Day to hang his hat.
Unbeknownst to both men, there was another subplot in play. Before she flew to New York, Marche consulted her erstwhile suitor Al Pacino, who had a place in Snedens Landing on the banks of the Hudson River north of New York City. He recommended a suitable real-estate agent, and after looking at properties in Connecticut, Marche picked out a beautiful secluded wooden home on Woods Road at Snedens Landing, a few minutes’ walk from Pacino’s pile. Known locally as Hollywood on the Hudson, Snedens Landing was quite the artists’ colony, home to dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov and actors Bill Murray, William Hurt, and Jessica Lange as well as Pacino. While Bill Day feared that Marche would become further enmeshed with the Voight family—Barbara Voight lived across the river in White Plains—it seems that Marcheline was also considering her options with regard to Pacino.
She was firm in her resolve, leaving for New York in the summer of 1981. In typical Marche style, she gave Bill Day her Datsun station wagon in return for a ride to the airport.
While Bill, numb and shell-shocked, retreated to live in the seedy office on Hollywood Boulevard, Marche, Angie, and James settled into life in their hidden house in the country. The children roamed through the woods and played in the streams, enjoying a very different life from that in the urban world of Roxbury Park. As predicted, Barbara Voight—who kept her distance from Jon and Stacey in deference to her daughter-in-law—was a constant presence, helping Marche to settle in. Marche later joked that she was being turned into a “Voight Wife,” a reference to the movie The Stepford Wives, about a small community where the women pander to their husbands’ every whim.
As for the men in her life, Jon Voight visited her more frequently than she was comfortable with, ostensibly to see the children but as often as not staying the night. More intriguing, that summer she regularly took the children to the home of her neighbor Al Pacino. Whether her move to New York was in part motivated by dreams of reigniting her romance with the Bronx-born actor is unclear, but “whatever was going on there, it didn’t work out,” recalls Bill Day.
Ironically, Marche was instrumental in introducing Pacino to her friend Jan Tarrant, a New York acting coach with whom he had a daughter, Julie Marie, in 1989. While Marche was initially surprised at the relationship—at the time Pacino was dating Diane Keaton—when the baby was born, in characteristic style, she showered the couple with presents and later became Julie Marie’s godmother.
Whatever hidden agenda lay behind her move to New York, in early November she called Bill Day after learning that he had been taken seriously ill with hepatitis A. It was an emotional conversation, the nervous small talk soon giving way to mutual tears and declarations of love, Marche saying over and over again: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I must have been crazy.” Over the next few days the rapprochement continued apace, and Marche eventually asked him to join her and the children in New York.
It was more complicated than that, as Bill was still too weak to leave the apartment unaided. On impulse, Marche flew to Los Angeles, rented a car, picked him up, and took him to Woods Road in time for Thanksgiving.
Within days, Marche was talking of a new project. Now approaching thirty-two, she reluctantly acknowledged that her chances of getting an acting break were rapidly receding. Instead she wanted to start a production company with Bill. She had already spoken to her Beverly Hills–based financial advisor, Charles Silverberg, who saw Woods Road Productions as a tax-efficient project. Over the next couple of years Bill made a number of short films that not only fulfilled his course requirements but also turned in a modest profit. Thanks to Silverberg’s colleague Marc Graboff, now a big wheel at NBC, all of Bill’s films, Holiday, Out of Order, and The Healer, snagged licensing deals with HBO, Showtime, and others.
Marche and Bill were now a business team, and before long they were talking about marriage and having more children to finally cement the renewed relationship. In fact, Marche did get pregnant again but had a miscarriage early on. They felt their loss keenly, helping each other cope with a family tragedy.
At first Jon was unhappy that Bill was back, phoning him to express his displeasure at the changed domestic arrangements. In a heart-to-heart exchange, Bill explained that he and Jon’s ex-wife were a partnership and that it was time for Jon to move on. Given the fact that Jon was still living off and on with Stacey Pickren, this seemed a sensible view. For once Jon accepted the revised status quo, reducing his visits to Woods Road and staying with his mother in White Plains, twenty-five minutes’ drive away, when he was in New York. He even started to warm to Bill, becoming enthusiastic about a comedy idea he and his writing partner, Dan Ackerman, were working on called Pulsar and Sullivan. It was a take-off on the Bob Hope and Bing Crosby movies—but set in outer space. Jon was keen to play Sullivan. Unfortunately, the gap from story conference to commission was never bridged.
In fact, the fractious rel
ationship between Bill and Jon became the basis of Voight’s next film, Table for Five. In an increasingly autobiographical career, this movie, filmed during 1982, was perhaps his most personal work to date, dealing with the relationships among a divorced father, his family, and the new man in his ex-wife’s life. Voight, who coproduced, played a business schemer and womanizer whose ex-wife moved from Los Angeles to New York and found a new man whom his children adored. He readily acknowledged the clear parallels with his own life, telling writer Jim Jerome: “There are male egos involved and there is friction—the whole territorial thing. We don’t necessarily sync, but we each give ground. [Bill Day is] crazy about Marche and really loves the kids. That discomfort—balance of power—is similar to what’s in the film.”
He realized that he was tapping into a deeper well of unarticulated grief at a tearful lunchtime script conference at the Warner Brothers cafeteria in Burbank. Every man present—director Robert Lieberman, producer Robert Schaffel, scriptwriter David Seltzer, and Voight himself—ended up crying their hearts out as the group, all divorced or separated, talked about the pain of enforced separation from their children. As Lieberman, now one of Voight’s close friends, recalls: “The film laments love lost, a family lost, and a decision to step up and be a good father. Jon was a very pained guy. A generous man, a loving man, but feeling really bad about Angie and James.”
In spite of the sentimental theme—moviemakers Joel and Ethan Coen consider it their favorite tearjerker—Voight ensured that filming, which mainly took place on a cruise ship sailing the Mediterranean, had a family feel. He brought his mother, Barbara, on board as a cruise extra (along with an unknown Kevin Costner) and flew the children to Rome to watch the filming. In an elliptical reference to his own father, Elmer, Voight’s character was a former golf pro who he acknowledged was a lot like his dad; charming, frequently out of town, and in need of constant approval.
Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography Page 7
