Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography (36 page)

Meanwhile, U.S. officials were delving deeply in the world of Lauryn Galindo. During the two-year probe, investigators alleged that Galindo paid Cambodian child finders to purchase or steal children from their families, and conspired to create false identity documents for the children. Angie’s response was to hire private detectives to look into allegations regarding Maddox’s origins. However, the findings of her detectives were not made public, nor did she hand them over to prosecutors compiling the case against Galindo.

Some time later, Galindo pleaded guilty and was sentenced to eighteen months in federal prison on charges of conspiracy to commit visa fraud and money laundering, but not trafficking. Her sister Lynn gave evidence against her. “You can get away with buying babies around the world as a United States citizen,” says Richard Cross, a senior special agent with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement who investigated Galindo. “It’s not a crime.”

It seemed nothing was straightforward in Angie’s world, the adoption of her beloved Maddox mired in years of controversy, both public and private. His arrival was a considerable factor in the breakdown of her relations with the two men in her life: her father and her husband. During the split from Billy Bob she had been playing her familiar game of hide-and-seek with her father, ignoring his phone calls and handwritten notes, still furious with him for telling the world about Maddox. On July 14, 2002, they had been separately invited to the Paramount ninetieth-anniversary celebrations in Hollywood, and Jon Voight planned to speak with his daughter about her lifestyle, her exhibitionism, and her erratic behavior. When he arrived at the event, he was as dapper as ever in a blue silk suit, but for once his smile was tight and his demeanor anxious. He spotted his daughter and made his way toward her through the throng of celebrities.

He later claimed that as he cried out her name, Geyer Kosinski, who transitioned from agent to manager as Marcheline’s illness left her less able to cope with organizing Angie’s life, blocked his way, telling him, “She doesn’t want to see you.” It could have turned ugly, as there is little love lost between manager and father. Kosinski remembers the incident
differently, telling
Access Hollywood
that he interceded because Voight “aggressively, physically grabbed her against her will.” Even so, the outcome was the same—another angry and frustrating stand-off between father and daughter.

Humiliated and scorned, Jon Voight pondered other ways to get through to his daughter. His next step was the gamble of a desperate man.

Angie, though, had other matters on her mind. On July 17, three days after her encounter with her father, she announced her divorce, leaving the man whom she’d credited with saving her life, a man whom she’d pledged to stay with until the end of time, without a backward glance. She had a new man in her life. While he couldn’t walk or talk, he now meant the world to her.

TWELVE

For Angelina to adopt a child from another country is symbolic of how alien she feels. Metaphorically they are on the fifth floor. Worlds away.

—D
R
. F
RANZISKA
D
E
G
EORGE

It was just a regular day in his Burbank office for Pat O’Brien, the dapper, moustachioed host of
Access Hollywood.
Then his phone rang. On the line was Jon Voight, asking if they could meet privately. He said “Sure,” and suggested they have a coffee at Nate n’ Al’s, a well-known casual meeting place for Hollywood movers and shakers. While O’Brien had met Voight a few times over the years, by no stretch of the imagination were they close. They were Hollywood friends, saying “Hi” to each other on the red carpet. “I had no idea what he wanted to talk about,” recalls O’Brien about the encounter in late July 2002, days after Angie had announced her official split with Billy Bob Thornton.

O’Brien arrived at the deli shortly before Voight, and when the actor walked in, he got straight down to business. “I want to talk to you about my daughter,” he said. “I’m brokenhearted. That’s the reason why I’m here. I feel I can trust you as a journalist.”

The TV host, who was a sports commentator before moving into TV entertainment, realized that Voight wanted to talk further. His antennae warned him to hold fire, to capture what Voight had to say on film. “Any chance you can do this on camera?” he asked. Voight nodded agreement. “That’s what I want. I want to tell you about my daughter.”

O’Brien returned to the office intrigued by exactly what was on Voight’s mind. He remembered another time when he got a call out of the blue; it was from actor Michael J. Fox, who admitted on live TV that he had
Parkinson’s disease and was bowing out of movies. O’Brien and his executive producer Rob Silverstein arranged to meet Voight in a suite at the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills. While it was a two-camera shoot, which in television terms signifies that the interview is of some importance, O’Brien had no idea what he was getting into when he walked into the room. His questions were brief, O’Brien savvy enough to know when to stay quiet and let the star do the talking.

When O’Brien asked him why he was coming forward, Voight was immediately in full flow, explaining that while the public might see a poised, smiling actor who had enjoyed numerous successes, inside he was a broken man. “I’ve been trying to reach my daughter and get her help. I have failed and I’m really sorry. I haven’t come forward and addressed these serious mental problems she has spoken about so candidly.” It “pained” him deeply to see these unspecified mental problems paraded over and over again. “They’re very serious symptoms of real, real problems, real, real illness.”

He explained that her problems were in part drug-related and that over the years he had confronted her about her behavior, but with little success. As far as he was concerned, she had avoided facing up to these issues, more often than not shielded by her manager, Geyer Kosinski, whom he described as a “parasite.” “I begged him to help many times and always he turned her against me,” he said in a portion of the interview left on the cutting-room floor. (Geyer later sent him a letter threatening to sue him, but he never followed through.)

Nor did Voight absolve himself of blame, acknowledging the pain and hurt his affair with Stacey Pickren, whom he did not name, had caused the family. His ex-wife also had to share the burden of guilt, Voight said, accusing Marche of programming the children against him in spite of all his “repentance,” combined with his efforts to be “an upstanding and strong example” for his kids.

While he emphasized Angie’s drug taking as the main reason for her “real psychic pain,” he also acknowledged her psychological damage. “There is something she has to work out,” he said. “There is some trauma there.”

Even though he had never held out much hope for his daughter’s second marriage, he did concede that Billy Bob Thornton had had a positive impact on her attempt to get clean of drugs. Now that Angie was considered to be a role model, he was bothered about her possible influence on
young people, pleading with her fans to send her their love and prayers. At this point he put his hand over his face and broke down in tears. It was an electrifying moment.

“All of a sudden he just broke down,” recalls Pat O’Brien. “It was the dad in him coming out. This was his baby girl he was trying to save. He so wanted to reach out to her. She hadn’t returned his calls and he didn’t know where she was living. He broke down like a father who had not yet cried over the rejection by his daughter. I just sat there and stared at him. I didn’t really know what to do. At that point I was no longer a journalist but one father to another who felt sorry for the guy. I put my hand on his knee and patted him to say: ‘It’s okay to cry.’ The tears just came out.” As he tried to compose himself, the veteran actor spoke of his greatest pain, not being allowed to see his first grandchild, Maddox.

When the cameras stopped rolling on the thirty-minute interview, the two men had lunch and swapped phone numbers. Voight went on his way, feeling that his mission had been accomplished. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

The first indication of trouble was when Angie’s lawyers, who were contacted before the Thursday-night broadcast on August 1, warned the TV show against even showing the material. “On no account can you run that interview,”
Access Hollywood
was told. Angie, who was staying in a London hotel with Maddox as she prepared to reprise her role as Lara Croft, issued a formal statement: “I don’t want to make public the reasons for my bad relationship with my father. I will only say that, like every child, Jamie and I would have loved to have had a warm and loving relationship with our dad. After all these years, I have determined that it is not healthy for me to be around my father, especially now that I am responsible for my own child.”

Having seen her father break down in front of his eyes, Pat O’Brien was surprised by Angie’s retort. “What shook me most about the whole episode was how cool her response was,” he says.

If he had been in her hotel suite, he would have seen a very different reaction. She was incandescent with rage, shouting, cursing, and throwing cushions at her father’s image on the TV screen. Her greatest fear was that her father’s righteous intervention could lead to her son’s being taken away
from her. “It’s horrible, it doesn’t make sense,” said the bewildered actress when first asked about the interview.

Voight had grotesquely misjudged the impact his words would have, not just on Angie but on his family and friends. As director Rob Lieberman, a friend for more than twenty years, observed: “Jon is a complicated, intense guy who is very thoughtful. I’ve scratched my head about him a number of times. Going on TV to talk about his daughter was not the greatest choice. He was desperate and trying to save his daughter as he saw it from drugs and bad choices.”

Angie was right, however; it didn’t make sense. He was once again treating her like a child—a daughter whose lifestyle had been a byword for independence: living with a boy at fourteen, moving into her own apartment at sixteen, making movies on her own at seventeen, buying her own place at nineteen, marrying for the first time at twenty and for the second time at twenty-four. In between she had become one of the world’s best-known actresses and a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador. In September, just a few weeks after the
Access Hollywood
broadcast, she became the first recipient of the Church World Service Immigration and Refugee Program Humanitarian Award. She was trying to be the good girl of her imagination. “No matter what he said, I realized that I was a good person, a good friend and a good mother,” she said afterward.

Actor Nathan Lee Graham, who had worked with Voight on
Zoolander
a couple of years before, got a brief taste of why Angie might feel so aggrieved after a lifetime of never quite making the mark—at least according to her dad. Graham found Voight constantly judgmental, never encouraging or consoling. “His intensity was unnerving. He looked down on you like he had the answers and you didn’t.”

After some months of reflection, Angie told the TV show
20/20: “
I think he truly believes he’s there to save me and my mother and my brother. And he’s somebody who has an opinion about all of us and what we should be doing and who we are. I’ve been crazy in my life and I’ve been wild in my life. I’ve never been a bad person. I’ve never intentionally hurt other people just to hurt them. And I’m trying to do a lot of good things with my life.”

If his concerns had some credence and credibility at one time, even Jon Voight would agree that Angie had clawed her way out of the pit of suicidal
despair. It seems the years of hide-and-seek, of endless rebuffs in person or on the phone, culminating in her public rejection of him at the Paramount anniversary celebrations, had taken a heavy toll, tipping the balance in his own mind. While both Angie and Jon had used the media for years to communicate with each other, his latest TV confessional proved an intercession too far.

His timing could not have been worse. She was still upset, vulnerable, and emotional following the abrupt collapse of her second marriage, and her adoption of Maddox was under intense international scrutiny; she risked losing two of the most precious things in her life: her son and her position as a UN Goodwill Ambassador. During this time of turmoil Angie might have expected support from her father rather than public criticism.

“My daughter is very sad. It’s a really tough time for her,” Marche told
People
magazine. Certainly Voight’s broadcast cast a shadow over Maddox’s first birthday party a couple of days later, on August 5. Not that Maddox seemed to care. “Maddox was very happy playing with his birthday cake. But he was only interested in eating his broccoli,” observed his proud grandmother.

As Jon Voight knew, his ex-wife was suffering her own health issues, still recovering from further cancer surgery and treatment. Since 1999 she had been in remission from cervical cancer, but in 2002 routine tests revealed that the cancer had returned, and her condition was treated with more surgery and chemotherapy. Her annual mammogram also revealed a malignant tumor that was detected early enough to be removed. “Every sunrise I experience is truly a gift,” she wrote later.

Marche felt sufficiently robust to issue her own defense of her daughter. “I’m shocked,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with Angelina’s mental health. Mentally and physically, she is magnificently healthy.” Certainly any problems, mental or otherwise, came as a surprise to
Lara Croft
producer Lawrence Gordon. “I have an excellent team around her,” he said. “If there was a problem I would know it.” Angie’s mother, who had been the conduit of information between estranged father and daughter, now refused to speak to Jon Voight ever again, a pledge she resolutely kept. There was another reason behind her decision. Her relationship with Bill Day had regularly been undermined by the proximity of Jon Voight. Now that her
love affair with John Trudell was flourishing, she wanted to give it a chance to grow without Jon’s interference.