Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography

by Andrew Morton

The disappointment was crushing, the collapse of their joint project effectively marking the end of Woods Road Productions and the beginning of the end of Bill and Marche’s eleven-year relationship. One night after dinner at Moonshadows, a beachfront restaurant in Malibu, they walked on the shore, acknowledging that the tide had gone out on their relationship. Marche, now approaching forty, turned her attention instead to the potential of her children and their future. Bill was intent on building his own film career. Shortly afterward, he left to film another ecological documentary in Ecuador.

  Like her mother before her, Marcheline was now living her own dreams vicariously through her children. She expected great things of them.

  Nor was she the only one. One summer’s day Windsor Lai, who had a growing reputation as an artist within the Beverly Hills High School community, came over to chat with Angie. She was sitting on the grass with her friend Evelyn Ungvari, quietly reading a book about Andy Warhol. Evelyn looked up and said to him: “You should draw her. One day she is going to be famous.”

  FIVE

  Here she was seventeen and naked in front of a camera, watched by a bunch of strange guys. I couldn’t understand why she did it, but I felt that this was a girl who knew what her goals were.

  —CYBORG2 ACTRESS KAREN SHEPERD

  Like father, like daughter. As much as it may have irked her to admit it, Angie was as ambivalent about her future career as the teenage Jon Voight had been. With her unsatisfactory experience at the Lee Strasberg theater studio still fresh in her mind and with her mother’s guidance, Angie was leaning toward modeling. Not that she embraced that path with any special enthusiasm; she was doing it to please her mother.

  Modeling versus acting, her father versus her mother, life versus death: The yin and yang of her adolescent Gemini soul was on mawkish display when she agreed to accompany her father, who was guest of honor, to the Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival in February 1990. She claimed to be disinterested in her father and in the film industry, but here she was flying halfway around the world to a Japanese mining town.

  Not that she proved especially effusive company. Her father was shocked at her withdrawn manner and wraithlike appearance. “She was almost like a ghost. I found out later about the cutting, the self-mutilation,” he recalled. During the five-day visit to the land of symbolism and imagery, Angie got her first tattoo. Appropriately, it was the word “kanji,” Japanese for “death.”

  Her absorption with death did not stop her from following her mother into that most ephemeral and superficial of professions, modeling. It was her second attempt at this career path, Angie having been too self-conscious when her mother first took her to auditions at the age of ten. Now fourteen and struggling with anorexia, somewhat perversely she made the grade. In the fashion world, skinny is good; skinnier is better. With her bee-stung lips, flawless skin, and aura of reluctant, somewhat sullen, sexuality, the schoolgirl was soon in demand, at least in the European market. Back home, American magazine editors wanted models with girl-next-door appeal. It was not long before Angie was flown to shoots in London and New York, accompanied by her mother.

  As with many models, the focus on her looks made her more critical of herself. “I always thought I looked like that blonde Muppet Janice with a big mouth and hair parted in the middle,” she told writer Jane Rusoff. “When I was starting out I just wanted to be like a regular kind of pretty and not have ‘different’ features.” It became a refrain; her desire to be “the other girl.” At the same time, she dressed like a punk and identified with outsiders like the hero of Edward Scissorhands, the cult movie released in December 1990 that was a must-see for every goth worth her black mascara. Angie was smitten with actor Johnny Depp, who played Edward, an isolated figure with scissors for hands who lives in an attic and falls for the teenage daughter of a suburban family who cares for him. The movie’s themes of alienation and self-discovery, as well as the disheveled figure of Edward Scissorhands, spoke to the angst-ridden Angie.

  She may have been uncertain about herself and her looks, but modeling agencies soon recognized her potential. During 1990 she signed with Elite Model Management, home of supermodels Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell, and Cindy Crawford. It was at the height of the agency’s influence; that same year Evangelista uttered the immortal quote about her profession: “We don’t wake up for less than ten thousand dollars a day.” While not quite in that league, Angie, still only fifteen and in her final year at school, was earning rather more than pin money, doing catalog work for stores like JCPenney and featuring in a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream commercial.

  At this time she showed little ambition to go into acting. Certainly that was her reaction when aspiring singer Brian Evans asked if she wanted to go into films. “I don’t want to be in the entertainment industry like my dad,” she told him emphatically as they sat in a limousine on the way to the October 1990 premiere of Book of Love, a gaudy rite-of-passage movie set in the 1950s. Perhaps it was just as well. During his fleeting if memorable appearance as a Boy Scout with a candle sticking out of his rear end, Evans glanced over at the daughter of an Oscar winner. She smiled and shook her head in disbelief. “Thankfully she did not ask me if I was a Method actor,” he says ruefully. “At least she was not in the same business at the time.”

  Her antipathy toward acting had more to do with her father than with the profession. Anything she was going to achieve in life, she told herself, she was going to do without her father’s help. She made this sentiment plain the moment she walked through the door of Robert Kim’s photography studio in Los Angeles in early 1991. Even though her father had given her a ride there, she pleaded with makeup artist Rita Montanez: “Please don’t tell Robert who my dad is.” Rita was as good as her word, and throughout the four-hour shoot the portrait photographer had no clue about Angie’s famous father. Rita recalls: “She was very self-contained and never wanted anyone to help. She wanted to do it all herself. It was very important for her to achieve her goals without her father’s help.” Indeed, Angie insisted that he stay in his car rather than come into the studio to pick her up. It was only later, when Rita was working on another of Angie’s jobs, at the Photo Studio in Sherman Oaks, that she realized there might be another reason why Angie was so keen to keep her father in the background. Though it was early in the morning, Jon was disheveled, hadn’t slept, and seemed disoriented. “Angie never gave anything away about her father. When I saw him, I understood why.”

  Meanwhile, the photographer, Kim, himself a former child actor, thought Angie had made the right choice to focus on modeling rather than acting. During the shoot the bespectacled schoolgirl never said a word. “She was a skinny teenager wet behind the ears and was so quiet that I could not possibly see her emoting in a movie.” Yet the camera loved her; Angie came alive under the lights. “She had an edgy kind of energy,” he recalls.

  During a phone conversation, Marche told Kim that Angie’s sultry yet youthful look had come to the attention of French Vogue. Magazine executives had frequently phoned mother and daughter in an attempt to lure her to Europe, telling them that within two years Angie would become a star. Angie was not interested. “She’s a big girl; I can’t force her to do anything,” Marche told the photographer. Whether this was an accurate reflection of Angie’s career or Marche’s overactive imagination at work, Kim had his own opinion about what she should do next. At the end of the shoot, he took Angie aside: “Go to Paris for a couple of years and come back rich and famous,” he counseled. She shook her head in disagreement. “I want to make it just like my daddy made it—through hard work and talent,” she told him.

  Yet just weeks after posing for head shots at Kim’s studio, she was telling quite another story. In the spring of 1991 Jon Voight, remembering that Peter Pan had been Angie’s favorite story, arranged for her and James to visit his friend Dustin Hoffman, who was playing Captain Hook in Steven Spielberg’s continuation of J. M. Barrie’s classic children’s novel. As thoughtful as his
gesture was, it seemed to reflect how Angie’s father was always several steps behind her development. By the time she was ten, she had realized that she could no longer live in her imagination like a child, and yet here she was, almost six years later, watching the making of a movie about a child who never grows up. For the brooding teenager, her age of wonder had long gone.

  Nor was Hoffman overly impressed when he met her on set, describing Angie as a “tall, thin, gawky-looking girl with a mouth full of braces.” When he casually asked what James and Angie planned to do with their lives, he was surprised at Angie’s certainty. “She gave me a laserlike look of intensity and she says, ‘I’m going to be an actress.’ And I went home to my wife and I said, ‘I don’t think this kid has any idea what a tough road she’s got.’ ”

  It was a road made all the tougher by her gradual estrangement from her father. In their complex relationship, her adolescent contempt and disdain, fueled by an underlying competitive drive, warred with an almost maternal concern for his well-being.

  Around the time they visited Dustin Hoffman on the set of a fairy tale, her father was involved in a personal tragedy that could only exacerbate parental concerns about Angie’s flirtation with death and suicide. Jon had let a young woman, Julie “Cindy” Jones, take temporary occupancy of an apartment he was renting near his home in Hollywood. Vivacious, glamorous, and fun, the thirty-three-year-old had a dark side, and had twice attempted suicide. One weekend early in March 1991, Julie and a girlfriend went skiing at the Lake Arrowhead resort in California. They arrived back late, Julie’s friend noticing Jon Voight walking his dog as she dropped Julie off. While Julie, who was troubled by a bitter divorce battle, had frequently been distraught during the ski trip, she seemed to have calmed down.

  As police records would later show, a few minutes after arriving home, Voight spoke with Julie on the telephone. Shortly after that one A.M. phone call, Julie put a .25-caliber Beretta handgun to her chest and shot herself through the heart. At seven o’clock on the morning of March 11, Jon Voight went to see her and found Julie dead in a pool of blood on the living room floor. She was dressed entirely in white—even down to a pair of white socks and white shoes, as though she were a bride about to meet her maker. The autopsy stated the cause of death as “gunshot wound,” and noted that there was a great deal of alcohol in her system.

  After her funeral in Sacramento, Voight organized the cleaning of her blood-spattered apartment as well as a ceremony of remembrance at his home involving Native American chanting for her departed soul. At the time, he was filming The Last of His Tribe, a TV movie about Ishi, the last survivor of the Yahi Indians of California, which earned him a Golden Globe nomination.

  Julie’s death—and the circumstances surrounding it—affected him deeply. That he was the last person to speak to her ignited incredible guilt. Voight wondered if he could have done more to save her—and if his daughter, emaciated, hostile, and prone to suicidal thoughts, could end up the same way. The trauma of finding Julie Jones’s body shaped and heightened his concerns about Angie, Voight never forgetting the blood and the horror of that terrible day.

  In the summer of 1991, after earning a California High School certificate—the equivalent of graduating—from Moreno High (Continuation), Angie again enrolled in her mother’s alma mater, the Lee Strasberg studio, and later joined the Met Theatre Company, where her first role was as a talking salamander. As much as she might have fought against it, her father was in the audience for her first public workshop performance, in an adaptation of the 1930s slapstick comedy Room Service, made famous by the Marx Brothers. He was surprised at what he saw. Angie played the part of Gregory Wagner, a fat, balding German, as a female dominatrix. “I was a little shocked,” Jon later recalled. “But the shock came from the realization that, oh my God, she’s just like me. She’ll take these crazy parts and be thrilled that she can make people chuckle or whatever.” Whether she liked it or not, she was closely following in her father’s footsteps. Later, her reading of Catherine in Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge would move Jon Voight to tears, no doubt in part as it reminded him of his early success on Broadway in the same play nearly thirty years before.

  To prove her commitment to her new career, Angie took her collection of punk and ska CDs, as well as books by European philosophers and authors like Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, and moved out of her mother’s roomy duplex and into a studio apartment above a garage just a few blocks away. The move also enabled her to demonstrate to casting agents and others in the industry that she was “emancipated,” that is to say, independent of her parents and no longer affected by child labor laws. Her mother had for once put her foot down, telling her that she would help her achieve her goals only if she focused on her chosen path, be it acting or modeling or a combination of both. Even Marche was not prepared to take her on another round of sullen auditions.

  This period of her life marked a genuine sea change, Angie giving up the aimless days hanging out at Westwood Arcade and the nights taking drugs, watching movies, and socializing. As for Anton, he was now history. She actually gave acting her all, determined to make it without her father’s help. Among all the pleasures of living on her own, perhaps the greatest thrill was that she got to use her own phone. Normally it is teenagers who spend their lives on the phone, but at Roxbury Drive it was Marche, leaving Angie frustrated and irritated that she couldn’t speak to her friends.

  If acting was a competitive sport, then it was a competition Angie was determined to win. She got herself in shape by learning to box at Bodies in Motion gym in Santa Monica. “I don’t get in the ring, as I don’t want to get my teeth knocked out. But it’s great for self-defense,” she told Rita Montanez.

  Already fascinated with knives and swords, she took up fencing at the Westside Fencing Center under the watchful eye of an instructor who doubled as a movie stuntwoman. After the sessions, she and friends practiced the moves she had learned, using wooden brooms as swords.

  For a time the young, black-garbed goth learned the waltz and the tango at the Arthur Murray Dance Studio in Beverly Hills. (Like her father, she suffers from curvature of the spine, which is why when people meet her they are impressed more by her ramrod straight posture, which she learned in order to correct the defect, than by her “pillow” lips.) Teacher Kent Sterling, who has been instructing for thirty years, recalls: “She was a fast learner but did not stick with it long enough to really become a dancer.” Still, with her lean good looks and an upright natural grace, the school was keen for her to help sell lessons to potential clients.

  Jon Voight was impressed. “It was like she put herself through the Royal Academy of Los Angeles,” he recalled. “She took acting classes, voice lessons, fencing lessons, boxing—whatever she thought she needed as an actress.”

  It was her mother, however, who provided day-to-day guidance as Angie went through the daunting process of Method acting, learning, for example, to feel “in orange.”

  “I used to work with my mom,” Angie recalled. “She was the most amazing support for an actor. She used to write letters to my characters. She always read the script, made a bunch of notes, and wrote these letters. She was a great person to talk to about things, and she loved the process so much.” Rather like Lee Strasberg himself, who was a better teacher than he was an actor, Marcheline, who never had the sense of timing necessary to make it in movies, proved herself to be an excellent manager and coach for her daughter.

  There was an extra dimension that propelled Angie onward. Beneath her public persona of an unnervingly quiet, self-contained, well-mannered, and seemingly docile girl, albeit dressed like a punk, was a young woman desperate to use acting as a vehicle to express and explore her inner turmoil. She placed her passion for acting on a par with her need to cut herself, as a way of communicating her feelings. As she later told James Lipton, “There’s something inside of us that we want to reach out, we want to talk to each other, we want to throw our emotions and our feel
ings out and hope that we make some sense and we get an answer. The best way to do that is emote and hope that there would be a response.”

  As for many young actors, that response was the sound of silence. Dustin Hoffman had been right in predicting it was going to be a tough road. According to Angie’s reckoning, she and her mother attended at least a hundred auditions. At first she went for girlfriend roles or the girl at high school, but she was always rejected. “I was just never that girl,” she says. As far as casting agents were concerned, she was not regular or conventional-looking enough; they told her that she was too dark or too ethnic. “It was clear that my career was going to be full of very bizarre, strange women—which ended up being the ones I liked anyway,” she recalls, her later bravado masking her intense disappointment at a time when she almost gave up hope of getting a break.

  Ironically, when Angie snagged her first gig, in a music video of “It’s About Time” by the Lemonheads, she played “the other girl,” a love-struck schoolgirl. She got the part because she could “tear up” on command.

  If casting agents were still to be convinced by her on-screen persona, rock star Lenny Kravitz was certainly intrigued when she appeared in his video. After the shoot, he asked her “stage mother,” Lauren Taines, who she was. “She’s going to be a big star,” said Lauren coolly. “Yeah, I know, but who is she?” Kravitz persisted. “You take one step near her and I’ll cut your hands off,” Lauren replied.

  It was easy to understand why Kravitz was fascinated. Angie’s next performance, as an elusive yet beguiling teenage temptress in Antonello Venditti’s steamy music video of “Alta Marea (Don’t Dream It’s Over),” shot on Venice Beach, anticipated her slinky sexuality. After the shoot Angie and her family went to the Redondo Beach home of Chip Taylor’s son Christian to celebrate her minor success.