Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography (12 page)

Eventually Bill and Marche spoke briefly to John Boorman and his then wife, costume designer Christel. Chain-smoking, sharp, and funny, Christel was a theatrical grand dame with little time for Hollywood froth. Ever since meeting Marche during the filming of
Deliverance,
she had kept a parental eye on her, sympathizing with her and encouraging her during the ups and downs of her relationships with Jon and Bill. They agreed to meet the next day to discuss the Robin Hood project, as well as Jon Voight, the Pauls, and Marcheline’s financial concerns.

For once Marche got much more than she bargained for—and for once Bill got his due. Before listening to their pitch for Robin Hood, Marche’s surrogate mother gave her a verbal dressing-down. “I’m really disappointed in you,” Christel told her. “You have let Jon Voight ruin your life. And now you are letting him threaten your relationship with Bill.” As much as she adored Marche, Christel had seen through her ploy of playing “Mrs. Jon Voight” in public, careless of the hurt it caused Bill and the resulting damage to her relationship, not to mention the confusion it sowed in the minds of her children.

At the same time, Jon Boorman promised to use his good offices to find a top lawyer to help Marcheline recover what she considered to be her money. Knowing how passive Marche was, he made the offer with the
proviso that she should only contact the lawyer once she had decided to go ahead with the case. She never made the call. Instead she started going to church and lighting candles in the hope that her prayers would be answered.

Nonetheless, the issue of the money ate away at Marcheline, adding to her abiding sense of betrayal and bitterness. Marche conveyed her grievances, however unfounded, to her children, leaving Angie and James wondering why their father had favored another family above his own.

It didn’t help that while Jon labored long and hard over the script for
Eternity,
he was no longer working. Unlike Marcheline, who was quite materialistic, Jon was utterly careless of possessions, living a simple, almost monastic life. Apart from a tuxedo and a couple of silk scarves, his wardrobe was threadbare. His wants were simple; he was reputedly so concerned about the environment that when he wrote a script he looked at the length and worried about the number of trees to be cut down.

“I don’t believe in using money to make investments to make more money” was his mantra. By the late 1980s, he literally had none, and for a time his phone and electricity were cut off. “It was one of the toughest times of my life,” he later recalled. “I just didn’t feel good about myself. I was doing some much-needed soul-searching, but it played havoc with my career.”

It played havoc with his children, too. As James and Angie moved into adolescence, a time in life when keeping up with one’s peers is hugely important, they felt the lack of money acutely. James, who moved in with his father, later recalled that one of the “saddest” events in his life was having to do without a car when he reached sixteen. He told writer Sharon Feinstein: “Try to imagine. You go to Beverly Hills High, one of the wealthiest high schools in the nation. Even the cheapest car that anyone has is brand-new. All my friends are well-off. I have a movie-star father and no car. It was debilitating.” He didn’t even attend his high-school prom because of the shame of having to be driven by his father. “The significant years of dating and getting to know yourself, I didn’t experience any of that,” he complained, though he failed to mention that he’d never bothered to get a driver’s license because he was nervous about driving.

His sister, who is as unworldly and nonmaterialistic as her father, has recalled shopping for clothes in thrift stores while her friends went to posh stores like Fred Segal. She remembers moving into apartments that got
“smaller and smaller” because her father was not focused on Hollywood and work. Yet the roomy duplex apartment they had on Roxbury Drive was much bigger than the one they’d had before they left for New York. And they didn’t move from it once they got there.

One story of deprivation that Angie tells is of protesting to a teacher that she couldn’t type her papers on a computer because she didn’t own one and having her teacher respond, “Have your father buy you one.” As her brother was one of the first kids to own a much-coveted Mac, this is a surprising assertion. Certainly she had enough pocket money to amass an extensive and expensive collection of knives and swords. In truth, she may have had no interest in computers and preferred writing with a pencil.

Whether or not she and James wanted to admit it, their father’s humanitarian missions on behalf of Vietnam vets, American Indians, the homeless, and many other causes deeply imprinted itself on their social conscience. As bombastic as he could be in an argument, Angie learned to give as she got, enjoying the back-and-forth of debate with her father.

Like Jon Voight, Bill Day experienced his own conversion as Angie reached adolescence. In 1988 he became heavily involved in environmental activism, with activists from Greenpeace and the Rainforest Action Network as well as committed celebrities like actor Dennis Weaver and producer Bonnie Bruckheimer gathering at the Roxbury apartment.

Somewhat incongruously, Angie got a vivid taste of the world beyond Beverly Hills thanks to her passion for collecting knives. She and her parents were regulars at a store in Santa Monica that sold African artifacts, including masks, shields, and drums as well as spears, knives, and swords. It was run and owned by an outsize character, Jean-Pierre Hallet, who had survived nineteen brushes with death in his dedicated struggle to save the Efe pygmy tribe in the African Congo. Bearded, brave, and eternally optimistic, Hallet gave her a taste of what it is to be passionate about a cause and to work hard to protect a people who were misunderstood and vulnerable. Angie found him utterly mesmerizing, Hallet regaling the twelve-year-old with hair-raising stories about his adventures in the heart of Africa, perhaps recounting how he killed a charging lion with a spear to win initiation into the fierce Masai tribe or the time deadly poison from a pygmy dart was leached from his wound, saving his life in the nick of time. “She would have been left with a lasting humanitarian impression from
someone deeply connected with primitive people,” observes his son Bernard. “He was an inspiration to many and described his concern about the survival of the Efe pygmies with passion and fervor.” This charismatic explorer, who died at age seventy-six in 2004, had a deep impact on Angie, possibly inspiring her own future concern about the world’s forgotten. She later talked of him with affection, saying how she would have liked to have had the opportunity to photograph him.

Angie, though, was now on her own adventure, exploring the untamed but gloomy jungle of her adolescence, wrestling with her emerging sexuality, her feelings of worthlessness, and a restless need to discover who she was.

Her transformation was stark. Gone forever were the giddy girly clothes, games of dress up, and silly sparkly sequins. For the morbid and maudlin teenager, black was indeed the new black. She swapped her pink ballet ensemble for that of a modern-day, vampire-fascinated goth: lace-up Doc Martens boots, T-shirts, jeans, dog collars, lipstick, eye shadow, and nail polish in every shade—as long as it was black. For a change the punky goth did wear red—in the form of a dog collar, mimicking the clothes Michael Jackson wore for the
Thriller
album.

Angie’s appearances at the Oscar ceremonies of 1986 and 1988 seemed to symbolize the transformation from white to black, light to dark. The first time she walked down the red carpet, Angie, then ten, suitably shy and bashful, wore a white net fairy-princess dress that looked as if it had been chosen by a well-meaning mother who didn’t quite get the fact that her daughter was no longer in kindergarten. For her second appearance, just before her thirteenth birthday, Angie, unsmiling and ill at ease, was all in black. While it seems she had chosen the outfit herself, she looked as though she would rather have been anywhere than on the red carpet with her father. Asked if she aspired to follow in his footsteps and become an actor, she replied coolly: “Not really.” In later years she had no recollection of attending the event.

Teased because she was so skinny as well as for her punk getups—at that time common teenage attire in London or New York but not in sunny Beverly Hills—she hung out
with a small clique of like-minded outsiders in Roxbury Park or at Westwood Arcade, which was a short bus ride away. In those days Westwood Arcade was the place where kids went to experiment with drugs (magic mushrooms were popular) and where rival gangs of surfers, skateboarders, and graffiti artists tested their mettle—and muscle. “Angie was a rebel ahead of her time,” recalls a classmate. “If someone was going to get into trouble, it would be her.”

Budding artist Windsor Lai, socially excluded and bullied because of his hearing disability, remembers seeing Angie and her gang in Westwood Arcade, where he smoked his first cigarette, a Marlboro, thanks to her. “As a person she was very quiet and just blended in,” he recalls, “but then she did all kinds of mad things. Sometimes she would act spaced-out like a drug addict or seem wasted. Then she would grab you unexpectedly and start silly dancing like a mad waltz.”

Her circle included Evelyn Ungvari, whose sister Natalie later became inadvertently embroiled in the White House scandal involving her friend and fellow Beverly Hills High alumna Monica Lewinsky; Elan Atias, who became a reggae singer; child actor Keith Coogan; and Chris Landon, son of
Little House on the Prairie
star Michael Landon. During this time Landon and Angie were “inseparable,” united by the fact that both were cursed with famous fathers, and both felt they were misunderstood outsiders.

She affected a brittle, intimidating presence, chilly and unapproachable, with the edgy “don’t mess with me” attitude of the outcast. Doodles on her school notebook give an insight into her adolescent mind-set. There are drawings of the devil and of swords, knives, and other weapons, and phrases like “Death: extinction of life, hell, suicide, mental suffering,” and “Autopsy: examination of a corpse.”

As macabre as her musings seem, there was a practical and personal purpose behind them. She had an ambition to be a funeral director, and even sent away for the Funeral Service Institute handbook, which she still has, and completed the multiple-choice test. In her eyes, the role of a funeral director was life-affirming, helping people come to terms with their grief and celebrating the life of the loved one they had lost. At the same time, she had a dawning awareness that longevity was not a Bertrand family characteristic. “Death never scared me,” she later observed. “Death is always something I wanted to understand.”

Her friendship with Chris Landon accelerated this sense of the macabre, as well as her fascination with the mechanics of death. He and his director father would spend their Saturday evenings watching horror movies, a genre
that inspired Chris’s future career as a scriptwriter. Not only was it a way of bonding with his dad, but his escape into movie horror also helped dull the constant bullying he suffered at school because he was effeminate and gay.

For a time he couldn’t sleep without the comforting sounds of a horror movie playing in the background. “I would go to bed and fall asleep to the sound of Mia Farrow screaming,” he says. “[
Rosemary’s Baby
is] one of the most flawless horror movies ever.” Closer to home, when Michael Landon contracted pancreatic cancer, Angie would have seen or heard about the stages of his decline—he died in 1991—firsthand.

With the shadow of death came thoughts of suicide, the thirteen-year-old feeling “low about living” and thinking about “not being around.” “It was when the reality of life set in, the reality of surviving,” she says.

Psychologist Iris Martin sees her black moods differently. “Her suicidal thoughts came about because she has no sense of self. She had internalized all that abandonment as a baby and that was expressed as feeling that she was invisible and worthless. Any time she felt valuable she would have to punish herself.”

Angie’s first response was to withdraw. There was a central numbness in her soul; she was a teenage girl super-saturated with a life of drama who could no longer bring herself to connect. All this swirl of emotion became too much to cope with. She had lived through the uncertain vortex that was her parents’ on-and-off, up-and-down, too-close, too-distant, ultimately enigmatic codependent relationship, watched her father turn from a swaggering Hollywood star to a pitiable and impoverished seeker, and witnessed the drama of life between Bill and her mother, the shouting matches and the slamming doors on the way to another night in office exile. But her feelings were much more primal, rooted in those days in a crib in the Ivory Tower, anxious, terrified, and often alone. From this sense of abandonment, although she was not aware of it, all else flowed. She later recalled, “I had that problem early on when I couldn’t feel a bond with another human being. Mostly it was all about trying to connect.” One day she announced that she no longer wanted to be hugged, and even today friends know to welcome her not with a hug but with a handshake. She decided that tears, too, were a waste of emotion; unable to cry herself, she felt disdain when others did.

It is interesting that, at her mother’s urging, she enrolled at the Lee Strasberg acting school but dropped out after only a short time, saying she didn’t have the “memories” to undertake the emotionally challenging course. When her mother took her to acting auditions, she deliberately wore the wrong clothes or refused to read the lines and act out the scene. Her aggravation seemed aimed as much at her mother, who was only repeating her own mother’s maternal ambition, as at these auditions, Angie seeming to resent being pushed in this direction. Undaunted, Marcheline also took her to modeling cattle calls, but, self-conscious and nervous, Angie couldn’t bear being looked at like a piece of meat. In the end she told her mother that she just couldn’t do it.

On some level, she was simply revolted by herself. “I was always that punk in school,” Angie told writer Nancy Jo Sales years later. “I didn’t feel clean, and, like, pretty. And I always felt interesting or odd or dark maybe, uh, you know, could feel sexy.” While the language is very awkward and inarticulate, it is revealing about her juvenile mind-set. The word “clean”—a word that crops up time and again—is a curious choice to describe her feelings in the context of her sexual desires. When most adults look back on their teenage angst, they find themselves reaching for words like “gawky,” “shy,” and “awkward.” Angie was feeling sexual at an age when she believed she ought to be feeling clean and innocent, suggesting that she was too immature to cope with her own precocious desires and needs.