Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography (11 page)

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 rock 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.

Although Angie lost a step-grandmother and gained a grandfather clock in this legal battle, it was her father’s financial decisions that had an impact on her life. Significantly, Jon transferred his financial affairs from his longtime advisor Charles Silverberg, who had kept Marche and Bill’s Woods Road company afloat, to the Paul family, who remain his representatives
to this day. Jon had given the Pauls a loan to fund their film projects, the money taken from the sale of the Snedens Landing house and from cashing in his pension early—and taking the tax hit. His son, James, was present when he offered the Pauls the cash, describing how they first turned down the money and then grudgingly accepted it as though they were doing him a favor.

It was a decision that had far-reaching consequences, ultimately souring relations between father and daughter, among others. Even after he had given his savings to the Paul family, Marcheline still believed that as part of the divorce agreement, he owed her a house as well as alimony and child support. While this was not legally accurate, she had a strong case. He had offered to buy her a house when they separated and had handed Stacey the deed to the house they had lived in after they split. He was morally if not legally obligated to support the mother of his children. As the years ticked by and, as Marche understood it, the money loaned to the Pauls was not returned, she became increasingly agitated.

Jon continued on his self-appointed mission to help the Pauls, who portrayed themselves as plucky independent filmmakers taking on the might of Hollywood. With their encouragement, he began to explore Judaism more closely, contributing to Jewish charities like Chabad and in time, according to his friend John Boorman, even considering converting to Judaism. “He was always giving his money away to various causes,” Boorman says. “Now it was Jewish charities.”

When Boorman and Jon met, their discussions ranged far and wide. Now Boorman noticed that Jon would pepper his language with intemperate phrases like “Christianity is the heresy of Judaism.” It was a new mind-set that seemed to reflect the certainty of the zealot rather than the seeker after enlightenment. In a quest to deny the existence of Christ—an intellectual flip-flop even from his speech at the Golden Globes—he took to calling friends in the early hours of the morning and reading passages from the Bible in support of his contention. In Boorman’s view the Paul family now “controlled” his friend.

Indeed, such was the concern that Marcheline discussed with family friends the possibility of staging an intervention, a procedure used to save individuals from drugs or cults. In truth, Jon Voight needed saving from himself, not from the Paul family. As another friend of the Bertrand family
observed bluntly: “All was well through
Runaway Train,
and then he literally came off the rails.”

Jon agreed to be godfather to Skyler Shuster, the daughter of Bonnie Paul and Beverly Hills cigar bar owner Stanley Shuster, who was born in October 1986, the year Angie was eleven. Indeed, it often seemed that he was able to forge a better connection with other kids than with his own, mentoring and advising numerous youngsters over the years. That said, Angie later became very close to Sharon Shuster, Skyler’s older cousin.

As Jon’s friend director Rob Lieberman explained: “He is a lonely man. Very tortured. At the core of him is the search for a family and for a god. That has taken him down a number of different roads. The Pauls are a pious, close-knit Jewish family, and Jon found that very appealing. They welcomed him in, and I often saw him in restaurants with the entire Paul family. Not occasionally but regularly. It’s a trade-off. He got a family, a religion, and a goddaughter; they used his name to gain access and funding.”

Most weekends he took Angie and James along to gatherings with the Paul family. While James mastered a wicked impersonation of Steven Paul, Angie, now aged twelve and going through puberty, loathed these lunches and dinners. For all her subsequent behavior, she was a naïve and rather gangly girl who felt awkward when she was the subject of attention. She was uncomfortable when Steven Paul, then twenty-seven, looked her up and down, and was embarrassed, too, by the life-size portraits of
Playboy
centerfolds on the walls. The girl who already had an acute sense of being out of step with the world didn’t feel able to discuss the issue with her parents, not even her mother. Nothing happened but she talked to a family friend, who recalls: “She didn’t understand it. She said the guy was creepy and looking at her funny. She was just a kid and upset.”

Angie was interested in boys but still coming to terms with the hormones racing through her skinny body. When Lauren Taines took her and a friend camping on the beach at Carpinteria on Memorial Day weekend in 1987, for example, Angie and her pal behaved like classic pubescent girls: giggling together and watching the boys walk by their tent, their gaze shielded by huge sunglasses. “They were adorable,” recalls Lauren. At a friend’s twelfth birthday party, held at the Closet Stars karaoke bar in Burbank, she and her friends took to the stage in a variety of outfits, ranging from outsize plastic ears for a tuneless version of “Stand by Me” to a nun’s
habit for an equally discordant if funny rendition of “New York, New York” and what can only be described as a black angel’s outfit for a shambolic sing-along to Prince’s “Purple Rain.” They were silly, giggly, and having fun. The adults in Angie’s world saw her rather dramatic fascination with death and knives as no more than a passing juvenile fancy, like stamp collecting.

If anything, she was behaving more like a grown-up than her parents, who were forever squabbling, the ugly dance among Jon, Marche, and Bill endlessly upsetting and unsettling. A showbiz party at the Beverly Hills home of producer and agent Edgar Gross one Saturday in 1987 was typical. Marche wanted to attend the social event with Jon rather than with Bill Day. There was commercial logic behind the decision—she wanted to buttonhole director John Boorman about the latest Woods Road project, a fresh take on the Robin Hood story. After a ten-year relationship, this was a breaking point for Bill Day, who was no longer prepared to take part in a “freak show.” Meanwhile, there was another shouting match in front of the children, more nights in the office, and another messy compromise.