Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography (7 page)

The apartment, once so spare, was soon bursting at the seams, to the point that she held a couple of garage sales to dispose of some of her goodies. Expensive crockery and objets d’art went for bargain-basement prices. Although consumed with guilt over his behavior, Jon was infuriated with his estranged wife when he discovered that total strangers were wandering around his apartment picking and choosing mainly new and unused goods that he had paid for. Marche’s stepmother, Elke, a frugal woman, was also perplexed and somewhat irritated by Marche’s penchant for buying everything, even the children’s underwear, from fancy stores like Saks Fifth Avenue. “She became a
huge
shopaholic,” recalls Krisann. “The idea that she didn’t have any money is nonsense.”

Marche was naïve and rather careless about cash. Having always had money, she never felt the need to worry, especially as all the bills went straight to her husband’s accountant for payment. On one occasion, for example, she signed an entire checkbook, leaving the amounts blank. It was
a clear security risk, especially given the constant ebb and flow of transient babysitters, actors, and others at the apartment.

As in most separations, money soon became an issue. While Jon was concerned about Marche’s outlays for babysitters, clothes, and furniture, Marche’s blood boiled if she sensed that he was spending money on his mistress. On at least one occasion she was driven to fury when she saw a credit-card statement containing details about clothes from a store she did not frequent. “Look. He’s out buying clothes for that tramp, his whore,” she proclaimed.

Yet far from walking out on his wife and children and never returning, Jon Voight spent as much time as he could with Jamie and Angie. He was a constant presence at the apartment building, even taking Marche house-hunting, though she found nothing that suited her. It was a time of anguish, passion, and soul-searching. He alluded to that period in a later interview: “ ‘Free love’—what a poison that was. Free love, the destruction of family life and loyalties and the responsibilities of parents, and I’ve gone through that.” In his defense he argues that in the morality of the times, what he did was not “so unusual or pernicious.”

As much as he now rejected his Catholic faith, he could never escape the nostrums and beliefs stamped on his soul since childhood. When he visited the children, the struggle between the primal, lusty lover and the caring father was transparent. “Here is Jon Voight having a roll in the hay like he’s never had before,” recalls Krisann. “He has that exuberance you have when you are enjoying wonderful sex. And then he plays the role of dad. And quite honestly, I never saw any father who loved and cared for his children as he did. When he was not working, he came over all the time, if only for an hour.” He regularly took the children to the park to play ball, and on several occasions Krisann was mistaken for his wife. As a change from Roxbury Park, Krisann would suggest that they all go “topless in Miranda,” her nickname for her convertible sports car, and she, Jon, James, and Angie would head off to Venice Beach. (It suited Krisann, as she loved watching the bodybuilders work out in the open-air gym.) During one parental visit James and Angie performed their first “show.” They were blacked up by Krisann and learned the words and gestures to the song “Mammy.” Then Angie, two, and James, four, peformed their routine for their somewhat
bemused father. “James was into it, Angie a bit confused,” recalls Krisann.

While Jon got into debt—and therapy—in time Marche began to get her own love life back on track. She and several other recently separated or divorced women were members of an informal “First Wives’ Club” of Beverly Hills, meeting over lunch or dinner. She and fellow acting student Jade Dixon regularly went out on the town, joining another acting student, Barbi Benton, then the lover of
Playboy
publisher Hugh Hefner, at the Playboy mansion. “We double-dated and shared all the secrets best friends share,” recalls Jade.

As the estranged wife of aspiring Hollywood royalty—as well as a beauty in her own right—it was not long before Marche was being courted by any number of suitors. She enjoyed a flirtation early on with a then-unknown muscleman, Austrian bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was, like Marche, trying to break into Hollywood. When Marche told Jon about her encounter, he dismissed Schwarzenegger’s ambitions, saying that his accent was too thick for him ever to get a speaking part in a movie.

Then there was Burt Reynolds, Voight’s costar in
Deliverance,
whom she dated for a time and sent gifts to for his forty-first birthday in February 1977. He in turn sent oversize stuffed animals for James and Angie. Angie’s godfather, Maximilian Schell, was another admirer who visited Marche at home, on one occasion giving Angie an expensive porcelain doll, one of her first-ever presents. Of course, no self-respecting young actress at that time could avoid an encounter with the legendary lothario Warren Beatty, who has had, according to his biographer Peter Biskind, around 12,775 lovers. Marche considered Beatty to be worthy of his reputation. One Christmas she bought him an expensive gift and had it delivered to his penthouse apartment at the Beverly Wilshire hotel.

What about Al Pacino, the man who had tried to dissuade her from marrying Jon Voight? They circled around each other for a while, Marche joining in with his weekend games of softball in a local park. “They had a mutual-admiration society,” recalls Lauren Taines. The moment, though, had passed; they were both too quiet and passive to rekindle a romance. In addition, Pacino felt guilty about the prospect of dating his friend’s wife. In her vivid imagination, Marcheline’s dalliance with Pacino assumed a greater
significance than perhaps it warranted. She would later tell her daughter that she had deliberately chosen the names of her children—Angelina and James—as anagrams or copies of Pacino’s full name, Alfredo James Pacino.

It is difficult to know what to make of this story. Those who knew the Voights early in their relationship are adamant that Marche was absolutely devoted to Jon. In any case, Pacino’s name is only a partial anagram of her children’s names. Perhaps her assertion was a way of diminishing Jon’s impact on her life, an attempt to redress the emotional balance. As a friend notes: “She had all these major players after her, and if she had gone with any of those guys, the war between her and Jon would have been over, since she would no longer have needed to rely on him for money.”

A few months after the split, Marche decided that her career would be best served if she went to New York more often for auditions. She felt she had a better chance of finding work away from Jon’s Hollywood shadow. Certainly there was no indication, as her daughter has since maintained, that she gave up her career for the sake of her children. Marche and an artist friend, who was on the babysitting rota, now regularly flew to the Big Apple, where Marche tried out for various roles. During one visit she met businessman Allan Mezo—sniffily described by one friend as a pots and pans salesman—in a New York nightclub. She enjoyed a short romance with the New York–based trader, and while he was never going to inspire her acting career, he helped her rebuild her self-esteem and cope with the rejection she felt from her husband. The thirty-one-year-old was a comforting shoulder for her to lean on—and to cry on. As he later told the
New York Post:
“She told me that Jon had not treated her well, and I think there were other women involved. She found it so painful, and it made it hard for her to trust another man.” They met at the wrong time, Marche explaining as much in a letter she sent Mezo more than a decade later. “Perhaps I was just in too much emotional pain back then to appreciate you. The truth is, I never would have made it through that difficult time without you.”

From time to time her excursions to New York coincided with Jon’s work, leaving the children solely in the care of babysitters. Late at night on one of these occasions, Angie woke up screaming with a burning fever. Krisann, who was caring for her, bathed her in cool water to reduce her temperature. Frantically she tried to find Jon or Marche, but neither answered
her calls. The next day Krisann took the sick toddler to a doctor in Beverly Hills. He was furious and told Krisann in no uncertain terms that he had no legal right to examine or medicate Angie without parental permission. He diagnosed an ear infection and reluctantly agreed to prescribe antibiotics. “It was a really frightening situation,” recalled Krisann.

While Marche was looking for a break in New York, in the summer of 1976 Jon reprised the role of Hamlet at the Levin Theater at Rutgers University in New Jersey. The prize he really coveted, though, was a lead in a new Hal Ashby movie,
Coming Home,
about the unlikely romance between a serving soldier’s wife and a paralyzed war veteran. Actor and vociferous antiwar activist Jane Fonda—known as “Hanoi Jane” following her visit to North Vietnam—was the driving force behind the movie. The idea had come to her after an inspirational meeting with wheelchair-bound Ron Kovic, whose painful memoir,
Born on the Fourth of July,
described his own injuries suffered during the Vietnam War.

While Fonda was to play the role of Sally Hyde, the frustrated wife of a U.S. Army captain serving in Vietnam, the film’s producers were looking for a big-name actor like Sylvester Stallone, Al Pacino—now riding high on the success of
Serpico
and
The Godfather
—or Jack Nicholson to take on the part of the paraplegic, Luke Martin. Although Bruce Dern and Jon Voight were short-listed for the role of Sally’s husband, Voight told Ashby he would much sooner have the role of Luke. Ashby was impressed with his early commitment. Not only was Voight a known antiwar campaigner, but even before he snagged the part of Luke, he started talking to vets to get a sense of their lives and experiences. This cut no ice with the producers. Ironically, given his torrid domestic life, Voight was dismissed as having “no sex appeal.” Ashby stuck to his guns, and Voight took the lead role, with Bruce Dern cast as the hawkish husband. As a further sweetener, Stacey Pickren won the small part of Sophie.

Once he was cast, Voight bought himself a wheelchair, joined the Long Beach Raiders wheelchair team, and, in the fall of 1976, spent six weeks at the Rancho Los Amigos rehabilitation center in Downey, California, going home only to see his children. He immersed himself in the life of a paraplegic so completely that if one of his feet fell off the wheelchair, he would reach down and put it back on with his hands. A number of wheelchair-bound
veterans came to Jon’s house to join him and Hal Ashby in filmed sessions where they talked about their families, their friends, their chances of work, even their sex lives.

After the Christmas holidays, which Jon, Marche, and the children spent with her father and Elke, filming began in earnest. As much as he believed in the movie, Voight did not believe in himself. His acting nerve had gone, as it had before he agreed to make
Deliverance
. “I quit. I’m not good enough to do this part,” he told Ashby. “Get Al Pacino or somebody.” Like John Boorman, Ashby was able to gentle his troubled star and convince him to carry on even as he continued to fluff his lines.

From time to time family members came to watch the filming. On one occasion Jon brought his daughter along for the day. As he didn’t have a portable crib, he used the drawer from a chest in his new apartment as a makeshift bed when she had her nap. While he was shooting a scene, Bruce Dern’s ten-year-old daughter, Laura, acted as babysitter, in time regularly babysitting the toddler.

The set was closed, though, for the climax of Luke and Sally’s romance, when they make love for the first time. While Ashby wanted to portray penetrative sex, Fonda was keen to show that their lovemaking was oral. She triumphed by the simple tactic of refusing to move her position on the bed. Ashby stormed off the set, but in the end his editing implied that Luke gave Sally orgasmic oral sex. One critic wrote that a crippled Jon Voight had “projected more potency than any other actor for quite some time.” The film made such a strong case for the sensitivity and sexual prowess of “sensuous paras” that at the cast dance—attended by dozens of wheelchair-bound veterans who had served as extras—Jon said “No way” when one of the paraplegics invited Stacey for a wheelchair dance. “If you want to become a better lover,” Jon noted, “you should hang around with them.”

He was not the only one to have his macho hang-ups challenged. Later in the year, Ashby gathered actors and crew together to watch a rough cut. While the film was moving, most remembered the comment of Jane Fonda’s husband, politician Tom Hayden. After the two-hour-and-forty-minute screening, he walked past Jon Voight and said: “Nice try.” As Ashby’s biographer Nick Dawson observes: “Hayden’s cutting comment was possibly due to his anger at Fonda’s sex scene with Voight.” Her father, Henry Fonda, was even more upset, demanding that the scene be cut entirely.

The scene remained. On February 15, 1978, there were lines around the block for the movie’s first New York screening, a testament to the public appetite for films that would address contemporary concerns and issues. Two days earlier, Jon and Marche Voight had formally agreed to separate, the petition duly signed and filed in Los Angeles Superior Court. The star of
Coming Home
had officially left home.

THREE

When I grow up, I’m going to be an actress. A big actress.

—A
NGELINA
J
OLIE, SHORTLY BEFORE HER FIFTH BIRTHDAY

In the summer of 1978, Marche played a journalist in
Borderline,
a student film by UCLA graduate Ramon Menendez. He brought in his friend Bill Day to help with the lighting on the set in an apartment building in Hancock Park. As Bill adjusted the lights, he looked down and saw Marche discussing her role. “She was beautiful and sensuous and a total ten,” he recalls. “I couldn’t keep my eyes off her.” The feeling was mutual. During a break in the filming, Marche invited the twenty-six-year-old student to her home to take pictures of the children. At least that was the excuse.