Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography

by Andrew Morton

  While Voight, now forty-three, was at an age to recognize, if not correct, his mistakes, he thrashed himself publicly about the possible psychological damage he had caused his young children by his romantic choices. When the film was released in February 1983 to generally favorable reviews, he spoke more presciently than he could have imagined. “The kids are aware of the deep disruption that went on early in their lives. The guilt, anger and confusion made their way into their subconscious and I don’t know what dues we’ll pay later on.”

  For good measure, the former Catholic flagellated himself about the high price Stacey Pickren had paid for being by his side. He believed that being Jon Voight’s girlfriend had cursed her career—though that didn’t prevent her from getting a part in that year’s summer smash, Flashdance. At the same time, he recognized that his possessive streak had ruined their six-year relationship. “There’s really been quite a lot of pain,” he said.

  Amid this emotional angst, on the surface Angie and James seemed like ordinary kids. Even with their Beverly Hills background and famous father, they coped reasonably well with the other children at William O. Schaefer Elementary School in nearby Tappan. James was increasingly intrigued by Bill’s world of cameras and filmmaking gear, while Angie, like her father, had an artist’s eye; Bill proudly displayed some of her early drawings in the local diner. During school breaks they shuttled to California to spend time with their father or to Florida to join granny Barbara at her vacation home in Palm Beach.

  Around this time Angie and James learned a lesson that lasted rather longer than the average New York minute. Within her circle of friends and family, Marche had a reputation for outlandish generosity, planning birthdays and other celebrations in lavish detail and always taking a bag of goodies when she visited friends. Ever the perfectionist, as her daughter recalls, “She would write four drafts to get the right birthday card ready.” Sometimes she went way over the top, as when Bill had to hire a U-Haul trailer to carry the Christmas presents when they stayed at Papa Bertrand’s home in Las Vegas.

  Another feature of her benevolence was the way she “adopted” families of modest means and bestowed her love and generosity on them. She regularly visited blue-collar cousins of her brother-in-law Ron Martin’s in Van Nuys in San Fernando Valley, California, giving them furniture and baby and children’s clothes, and even making a video using pictures from their old family albums. Other distant Bertrand relatives would receive first-class airplane tickets to Hawaii and an endless array of gifts.

  When they lived at Woods Road, that pattern continued, Marche focusing her largesse on the family of her African-American handyman, Thomas. For the first time, she got Angie and James involved, asking them to pick out some of their clothes to wrap up as gifts for the family. They were not overly interested, squabbling over the wrapping paper, but, with bad grace, they finally wrapped the chosen clothes.

  Then they drove to the ramshackle two-story wooden house near the small town of Piedmont, where Thomas’s grandparents, parents, and assorted other relatives lived. Marche was very comfortable in their company, and after a suitable period of small talk, she asked Angie and James to hand over their presents. At first they were uncomfortable, but as soon as they saw the smiles on the faces of the recipients, their mood changed. “Something just clicked in them,” recalls Bill Day, who believes that encounter was a seminal episode in their lives. “They got it and seemed very pleased with themselves. It looked like they had discovered the joy of giving and wanted to know when they could do it again.”

  These visits were the exception rather than the norm for Marche. Naturally shy and reserved, she found it hard to make friends in the new community and missed her tight-knit Beverly Hills circle. She was at her happiest visiting the Malibu home of longtime friend Belinha Beatty, the ex-wife of Deliverance star Ned Beatty, and her two children, Johnny and Blossom, or seeing friends like the actresses Geneviève Bujold and Jacqueline Bisset.

  Even though she was raised in the Midwest, she and the rest of the family found the East Coast winters hard to bear. With its huge windows and timber frame, their two-story house on Woods Road was constantly cold, especially with the winter chill off the Hudson. Most winter weekends were spent chopping wood and weekdays keeping the open fire going. Before too long Marche was looking to get back to the “Slums of Beverly Hills.”

  When her father, Rolland, was diagnosed with cancer in 1984 and began chemotherapy, it seemed a clear sign that she should be nearer to him. The children were shipped back to Los Angeles to spend the summer with their father, while Marche and Bill packed up the house. On August 25, the day before they were due to close up the unsold house and drive across country, their real-estate agent arrived with an elderly couple, Cass Canfield, president of the publishing house Harper & Row, and his wife, Joan H. King. After a cursory viewing, Canfield sat down and wrote them a check for a down payment on the $500,000 asking price, a number Bill made up on the spot.

  Destiny, it seemed, was guiding the family back to Beverly Hills.

  FOUR

  Angie puts on the tough kid act, but underneath she is very sensitive. It’s a cover-up.

  —MARCHELINE BERTRAND

  In 1984, when she was nine, Angelina won an Olympic medal. It was for English, probably for a report she wrote on President Hoover when she was at El Rodeo School in Beverly Hills. Though English was not as yet a recognized Olympic discipline, Los Angeles was hosting the games that year, and the school held its own competition, in which every pupil was awarded a medal, whether for the arts, math, or, of course, sports.

  It was not, however, an entirely winning return for Angelina to her hometown. As she enrolled midway through grade school, she was playing catch-up, in class and on the playground. With her skinny body, braces, and outsize lips, it was not long before her fellow pupils nicknamed her “Nigger Lips” and “Catfish.” She gave as good as she got, endlessly teasing a Taiwanese deaf boy, Windsor Lai, with the rhyme: “Chinese, Japanese . . .” One day he couldn’t take it anymore and hit her, and a teacher forced him to apologize for his behavior. Despite what must have seemed, at the time, a terrible injustice, they eventually became friendly, Angie seeing Windsor as an outsider like herself: a misfit among the wealthy and pretty children of privilege and money.

  Quiet and self-contained, Angie was a clever student and eventually blended in. She was always busy, taking ballet lessons, learning the piano, joining the soccer team, and becoming involved in school drama. Her interest did not surprise her father, who recalls: “She was dramatic when she was a young girl, and she was always dressing up and designing little things, skits for her friends and so on. I thought maybe this gal would become an actress.”

  Her parents and brother were always in the audience, as was Bill Day, who lovingly videoed those first efforts on the stage. For much of 1984, however, Bill had been occupied with filming the vicious Sandinistra/Contra war in Nicaragua, the graduate film student finding it a struggle to switch from “fire fights, death counts, wild parties, and meetings with Werner Herzog” to domestic routine in Beverly Hills. He had always been a stabilizing influence, though, a fun, avuncular figure; and the children, especially Jamie, who shared his love of working behind the camera, were glad to have him around. It is no coincidence that James today exhibits many of Bill’s mannerisms: He is fast-talking, quick-witted, and a brilliant mimic, especially of his father.

  Bill’s arrival home from the war did change the family dynamic, however, reigniting the rivalry between him and Angie’s father. Jon Voight was a constant if largely unwanted presence for Marche and Bill, especially since he was now on his own, Stacey Pickren having left him for another woman, a hairstylist with whom she lived for several years. It caused endless friction that led to shouting matches and arguments that often ended with Bill storming out and spending the night in the office. “I don’t know how Bill weathered the whole thing,” recalls Lauren Taines.

  All too often Marche seemed to be
playing Bill off against Jon, and vice versa, happy to be Mrs. Jon Voight at social events one minute, wanting Bill by her side the next. Just as her mother, Lois, had brought up her children to love her more than their father, so, too, did Marche treat Bill and Jon as children, their protests and complaints summarily dismissed by the head of the household. James and Angie were constantly buffeted by this atmosphere of reproach and acrimony. It was as confusing as it was unstable.

  That year the family, who first stayed in an apartment on Spalding Avenue before moving to a spacious duplex a few buildings north on Roxbury Drive, regularly drove to Las Vegas to spend time with Marche’s sister and her ailing father. In a last-ditch bid to curb his cancer, Rolland Bertrand checked into a clinic in New Mexico, where he was injected with massive doses of vitamin A. It was not a success, and on April 8, 1985, he succumbed to the curse of the family. He was only sixty-one.

  A gentle soul who utterly adored his children and grandchildren, Rolland Bertrand was much missed. Young Angie, then nine, was deeply affected by his funeral, intrigued not only by the physical process of death itself but also by how the occasion allowed individuals to reach out and connect. She found solace in a religious ritual invested with centuries of tradition and significance. It was comforting in its predictability, making her feel in control, less lost. In her imagination she dreamed of one day becoming a funeral director.

  Her love of ritual also found expression in a fascination with knives and swords. She enjoyed not only their cold, unforgiving beauty and the intriguing stories they suggested, but also the thrill of holding, spinning, and throwing them. Knives, often decorated with ornate symbolism, stained with honor and battle, excited and inspired the collector in her. They spoke, too, to a deeper, unfulfilled need. As contemporary psychoanalyst Dr. Franziska De George explains: “Collecting—and perhaps ritual—is an attempt to soothe the emptiness where the connection to the self is missing. You become attached to things rather than people. You realize early on it is a bad thing to collect people, so you collect things. You cannot control people, but you can control things.”

  Angie was beginning to search for ways to understand and reconcile her inner turmoil. When she was just ten years old, she recalls playing a game with a friend, but no longer being able to conjure up the necessary fantasy world. From that time, life “started not to be fun.”

  It was an unsettling and unhappy time not just for Angie but for the whole family. Naturally her grieving mother, now thirty-five, was deeply affected by her father’s passing, and her thoughts turned once more to marriage. Now it was Bill Day who was hesitant, not only because even after a relationship lasting eight years, Marche still refused to engage with his family, but also because of Jon Voight’s constant presence.

  For Angie, her father’s increasingly eccentric behavior added a further layer of uncertainty in her life. On the surface, Jon was the perfect divorced dad, always around to help in the day-to-day lives of the children. He was not only the assistant soccer coach for the team both his children played on at El Rodeo, but he also regularly took James for baseball and basketball practice. Jon and Marche were always together for their children’s open houses and parent-teacher conferences. “I don’t think any parent was more known by the teachers,” Jon recalls proudly.

  Nevertheless, from 1985 on, the constant dad was drifting, physically present but engrossed in a tortuous and often tortured journey of the soul. He drifted farther and farther from the shores of his own family as he embraced different causes, religions, and, most hurtful, another family. In the narrative of Angie’s life, the father who had abandoned her as an infant was once again abandoning his daughter.

  The changes in her father were visible to all, the famously attractive Jon Voight beginning to resemble Nick Nolte’s unkempt character from Down and Out in Beverly Hills. For a People profile in 1985, writer John Stark described him as he shuffled around his kitchen making an unappetizing bowl of oatmeal: “His tousled hair is in need of a trim. His plaid shirt looks as if he had slept in it and his jeans have food stains. His face is thin and pasty.” He was a far cry from the strong, assured, didactic dad that Angie was used to. Jon took to quoting from the book of meditations and prayers by Mother Teresa, surrounded by portraits on his living-room wall of his spiritual guides: Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., rabbi and philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel, John and Bobby Kennedy, Helen Keller, and Hindu teacher Paramahansa Yogandanda.

  Producer Richard Fischoff worked with Jon in 1985 on Desert Bloom, in which Jon played a troubled World War II veteran. “It was after the filming that he went on macrobiotics and lost a lot of weight and seemed to have found God, spiritualism, and mysticism. I got the feeling that he had been through rough times.” This spiritual struggle was also apparent in his performance that same year in Runaway Train, the story of two escaped convicts whose destiny and doom is to hide from their sadistic prison pursuers on an out-of-control freight train in the bleakest of Alaskan winters. The final scene portrays their wild, almost messianic hunger for freedom as Voight’s character, Manny, stands atop the thundering train, arms outstretched like an ice-bound Christ, headed toward the embrace of a certain death. The spirituality of the role spoke so strongly to Jon that costar Rebecca De Mornay pointed out that it was her character who was supposed to connect with God rather than his.

  Always a seeker of life’s mysteries, he now seemed absorbed in this pursuit to the near exclusion of everything else, including his interest in the quotidian details of his children’s lives. He did, however, win a Golden Globe in January 1986 for his performance in Runaway Train, giving an acceptance speech that owed more to the pulpit than to the teleprompter. “I am so thankful that I can portray suffering souls, that you may see in some form or other a small light of God,” he told a rather bemused audience. Before he left to celebrate with his mother, Barbara, and Stacey Pickren, who no longer shared his life but had a role in the movie, Voight remarked that his receiving the award had been ordained by God.

  Perhaps appropriately, he took to the red carpet again in March for the Academy Awards with an ersatz angel by his side. Angelina, uncomfortably dressed in a white, frothy outfit chosen by her mother, even gave her first red carpet interview, all of four words. She confirmed that it was her first time at the Academy Awards, thanked the interviewer for complimenting her on her dress, and said she was “sort of” nervous for her father. She, James, and granny Barbara were in the audience as their father lost out to William Hurt for the award for Best Actor in a Leading Role. “I remember having to pee” was her abiding memory of the glittering evening.

  It was her father’s choice of his next movie, an ostensibly high-minded story called Eternity about a journalist’s attempt to expose government corruption, that was to affect her life. Or, more accurately, his decision to work with an obscure filmmaking family, the Pauls. It was baffling. Their approach to movies, treating them as just another commodity, seemed diametrically opposed to everything the Oscar-winning activist held dear. As family patriarch Hank Paul made clear: “It’s very similar to financial sales—putting together a presentation, having a product or service, packaging it, and approaching people.” In business since 1978, Paul Entertainment had produced two low-budget movies, costs kept to a minimum partly because this close-knit family did virtually everything themselves: Hank’s wife, Dorothy, had a casting agency; his son Steven, a child star from the 1970s, was company president; his son Stuart wrote scripts and directed; and his daughter, Bonnie, was a country singer and an actor. Bonnie first met Jon when she was working in a hip Beverly Hills restaurant, the Old World, but she got to know him best through Stacey Pickren, who took acting classes with her. As his relationship with Stacey unraveled, he was drawn closer to the Paul family.

  Voight was blind to any criticism of the Pauls or their work. While he basked in the critical afterglow for his bravura performance in Runaway Train, the Pauls’ concurrent effort, Never Too Young to Die, about a hermaphrodite roc
k star’s attempt to pollute the Los Angeles water supply, was described by the Los Angeles Times as “not just bad . . . aggressively bad: bad with a vengeance.” Undaunted, Voight agreed to work with the film’s scriptwriter, Stuart Paul, inscribing on a napkin that he and the Jewish family had a “spiritual contract” to “love, respect, and protect each other’s psyches.” Friends and family saw instead a gullible, lonely, and rather naïve artist taking a dangerous path, financially and creatively.

  The storm clouds were not immediately apparent. After the Oscars, Bill Day gallantly treated Marcheline, Angie, and James to another vacation in Hawaii, though the struggling documentary producer had to be financially bailed out by Marche. It was a favorite place for all of them, and the vacation was a happy time, a break from their quarreling—and a chance to get away from the pervasive presence of Jon Voight. Shortly afterward, in March 1986, Bill and Marche joined Debbie, Ron, and their children in Las Vegas to spend more family time together as well as to deal with Rolland’s estate. In his will, Papa Bertrand left his second wife, Elke, the bulk of his fortune, while his three children, Marcheline, Debbie, and Raleigh, shared what was left from the bowling alley business. There was a dispute with Elke over the disposal of the family chattels, namely, silverware, china, and Rolland’s collection of antique grandfather clocks, all earmarked for the grandchildren, which led to a family argument and an expensive court case in August 1986. Marcheline was so angry with Elke, with whom she had always had an uncomfortable relationship, that she made sure James and Angie never saw her again. Her decision broke their step-grandmother’s heart. “She loved those kids, but Marche wouldn’t allow her to see them,” recalls Krisann Morel, who met with Elke some years later. Marche’s righteous indignation was an all-too-familiar feature of her complex character. The Bertrand freeze, an unwillingness to forgive and move on, was a quality that blighted the rest of her life.