Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography

by Andrew Morton

  Unfortunately, Voight was not the obvious answer for the English director. After screen-testing several actors for the role of Joe Buck, he settled on Michael Sarrazin, complaining that Voight looked too much like a Dutch boy. For Voight it came as a body blow, all the doubts and fears about himself and his career bubbling to the surface. He was approaching thirty, and what did he have to show for it—a crummy downtown apartment, a failed marriage, and a film career going nowhere? His father’s testy fears that he was too much of a dreamer to make a living in the real world seemed to be coming uncomfortably true. “I felt sick to my stomach,” he recalls. “I walked around like a wounded animal for a week.” He bumped into Hoffman backstage in Boston and, swallowing his pride, asked him to put in a good word with Schlesinger.

  Days later, he heard that Schlesinger might want to talk again after reviewing the audition tapes; the fact was that Sarrazin’s agent had asked for too high a fee. As he waited for the verdict, Voight went out for groceries to kill time. On his way home in the rain he ran into a boxer who lived rough in the neighborhood. On impulse, he bought him a bottle of Scotch, took him back to his apartment, and made him a tuna fish sandwich. As they talked, he told the homeless boxer that he was waiting for a phone call that could change his life. “It took the pressure off me,” he now recalls. “This guy had it a lot worse than me, so I felt more at ease.” When the call came and Schlesinger offered him the role, the young actor and the old pugilist did a victory dance in his apartment. So excited he couldn’t sit still, Voight gave the boxer his coat and then ran out into the teeming rain to really soak up the news. For his ticket to stardom, he was paid $17,500—a little over $100,000 in today’s money. Hoffman had graduated to a much higher salary, earning $150,000, which would be close to a million dollars today.

  While he might not have approved of the gamey subject matter (neither did the luminaries at Voight’s Catholic high school, for that matter), at least Elmer Voight had the satisfaction of knowing that his son finally seemed to be making a living. Hoffman bought himself a $700 desk from his earnings, while Voight was filled with love and peace, literally dipping into his pocket and giving his friend Al Pacino money to fund an intriguing Heathcote Williams play, The Local Stigmatic, at the Actors Studio in New York.

  Artistically Voight had hit the jackpot, working on a script with meat and meaning, with actors he admired and a director he respected. Filming, which began in April 1968, took place against a background of social unrest and rioting in Paris, London, Washington, and other major cities as dissatisfaction with the old order spilled out onto the streets. For two off-Broadway actors, the film somehow symbolized the changing mood. They realized that they were working on an edgy project at a risky time and gave it their all.

  During filming Jon Voight moved in with his lover, Jennifer Salt, daughter of the movie’s screenwriter, Waldo Salt, but it was the on-screen marriage of Hoffman and Voight that created the real buzz and excitement. Looking back, Hoffman describes their collaboration as like a boxing match. “It wasn’t a case of upstaging one another, but it was let’s see who can really act better in this scene,” recalls Hoffman. At times it was a tad too authentic. There was a moment during shooting when Hoffman put so much energy into his character’s tubercular cough that he vomited all over his costar’s cowboy boots. “There’s no way I can upstage vomit,” Voight commented laconically.

  What an increasingly anxious Schlesinger referred to during the shoot as “a pile of shit”—the mounting cans of uncut dailies—was edited into a film that would garner seven Oscar nominations. At the moment of Schlesinger’s greatest fears about the yet-to-be-released movie, Voight took him by the shoulders and told him: “John, we will live the rest of our artistic lives in the shadow of this great masterpiece.” Voight might have been gazing into the future at his own career.

  In spite of Schlesinger’s doubts and the censors’ giving it an X rating, Midnight Cowboy, which was released in May 1969, the year of Woodstock, Altamont, the Manson murders, and mounting protest over the Vietnam War, scored a cultural bull’s eye with the audience and most critics, the right movie at the right time with the right message. Ironically, its surface modernity, sexual frankness, and cynicism masked the fact that the film was, in the words of Hoffman’s biographer Ronald Bergan, “an old-fashioned movie about an innocent coming from the sticks to the big city and not finding the sidewalks paved with gold.”

  Now that he was a hot property in his own right, Voight remained true to his counterculture roots, eschewing films that merely exploited his good looks. He flew to London to star as the leader of a radical student organization in The Revolutionary, Voight sincerely believing that his medium held the message for change. As his girlfriend Jennifer Salt recalls: “Jon had that kind of ‘I’d like to save the world with my work’ attitude.”

  He seemed a natural choice to be included in the starry cast of Catch-22, director Mike Nichols’s adaptation of Joseph Heller’s classic black comedy, which skewered the cruel absurdity of modern warfare. While Gene Wilder claimed that he was the first choice for the role of the fast-talking, self-promoting black marketer Milo Minderbinder, Voight more than held his own in a cast that included Alan Arkin, Orson Welles, Bob Newhart, Art Garfunkel, and Martin Sheen. Like The Revolutionary, the film was neither a critical nor a commercial success, Voight’s two choices post–Midnight Cowboy failing to capitalize on his initial triumph.

  The Academy Awards in the spring of 1970 seemed to encapsulate the changing social and cultural landscape. As Voight told writer Peter Biskind: “When I went to the Academy Awards there was a split down the middle. Frank Sinatra, John Wayne and Bob Hope, I’d grown up with them, I admired them, but I was also of the new breed that wanted to see something changed. We were the sons of Brando.” When he prepared to present one of the awards for Best Writing, he and the legendary Fred Astaire exchanged courtesies backstage. It symbolized to Voight the meeting of two generations, a civilized passing of the cultural baton.

  That night, however, Voight handed an award to screenwriter Waldo Salt, while John Schlesinger won the statuette for Best Director, and Midnight Cowboy came away with Best Picture. Both Voight and Hoffman had been nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role, but the challenge of the new generation was beaten off by the old guard when John Wayne won for his performance in True Grit.

  Hoffman, who was paying a thousand dollars a week for daily psychotherapy sessions to cope with the pressures of his success, was so devastated by the result that he fled Hollywood and spent three months in Europe licking his wounds. His costar was deep into his role in another ill-fated film, Charles Eastman’s The All-American Boy, playing a small-town boxer who refuses to acknowledge his talent and squanders his many opportunities, when John Boorman approached him about appearing in the movie version of James Dickey’s book Deliverance. At the dark heart of this story about four middle-class city dwellers who find much more than they bargained for when they go on a canoeing trip down a wild river was the unsettling rape of the city men by mountain men, which served as a metaphor for the rape of America and nature by mankind.

  For the artistically adventurous Voight, this should have been an enticing prospect. At this critical round in his career he considered himself out for the count. He had already turned down the lead in Love Story, arguing that he would have made the role “too complicated”—even though he was offered a share of the profits, which eventually rolled out at $50 million. As Boorman recalled in his autobiography, Adventures of a Suburban Boy: “He was in despair about his career. I wooed him. He resisted. He was too exhausted to do another picture. He felt he was too young for the role. He was too distraught to make decisions.” In short, he had lost his nerve. They met, and Voight had good ideas for the role of Ed, the comfortable advertising copywriter, but he refused to commit.

  Although Boorman didn’t know it, he had an unseen ally. Voight’s career might have been floundering, but one of the happy by-products of be
ing a Hollywood heartthrob was that he got the girl, on or off the screen. Though he was still living with Jennifer Salt, he was very much in demand with the opposite sex. At that time, “free love” was not just a catchphrase, it was a movement, with sex as much a political statement as an act.

  Jon Voight first met Marcia Lynne—now calling herself Marcheline—Bertrand in the spring of 1971 after an agent at William Morris proudly showed him a picture of his girlfriend, an in-demand model who had recently snagged a part in the TV drama Ironside. The agent made a big mistake. Jon liked the look of Marcheline and called her up out of the blue, subsequently inviting her for tea at the five-star Beverly Hills Hotel. Over strawberries, scones, and small talk, the thirty-two-year-old actor blurted out that he wanted to have two children with the young woman about to celebrate her twenty-first birthday. “The words just came out of my mouth,” he later explained. “But she didn’t blink, and neither did I.”

  Their second date, a week later, was hardly the stuff of romance, but it was critical in terms of Voight’s conflicted career. As he later recalled, “I said, ‘Marcheline, I’m reading this script tonight. You wanna come over and I’ll read it out loud?’ She said: ‘I’d love to.’ So I read through the rape scene and she didn’t blink. I kept reading to the end and she said: ‘Oh, it’s a fantastic story! You should do this.’ ”

  While Voight’s recollection is that he called Boorman the following day to accept the role, Boorman tells a slightly different version of that phone call. Boorman says he telephoned Voight to report that he had snagged Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty, and Ronny Cox for the picture. After an hour on the phone wooing the still-reluctant Voight, Boorman said that if he didn’t decide in thirty seconds he was going to hang up. He did, and his brinkmanship worked. Voight called straight back and accepted the part.

  Significantly, at a pivotal time in his life, Voight credited Marcheline, the cool, willowy beauty with the languid eyes and soothing manner, with settling his nerves and giving him the courage to take on a challenging masculine drama. This snapshot of a sweet, nurturing helpmate was one he now held dear, insisting that Marcheline join him on the set in Clayton, Georgia. That he was living with another woman, Jennifer Salt, when they first met did not seem to trouble Marcheline unduly. She could be quietly fierce, however, when the tables were turned, having learned the Bertrand freeze from her mother in full measure. When she discovered, for example, that her teenage boyfriend had had a one-night stand with one of her girlfriends, he was history. Even thirty years later, the girl’s name could not be mentioned in her presence. She never forgot, nor could she ever forgive.

  On the set, she swatted aside the amorous attentions of Burt Reynolds as easily as she did the Georgia midges. Indeed, Reynolds’s increasing irritation with Jon Voight’s uncertainty, his desire to analyze every gesture, grunt, and groan in a scene, may have stemmed more from thwarted romantic desire than from the daily acting duel.

  As filming progressed in the treacherous rapids of the Chattooga River, Voight became more assured and confident. “He is the real thing: intelligent and intensely intuitive, skillful, yet with that mysterious something that great actors have, the ability to transcend acting, the ability to become,” observes Boorman. The film, remembered as much for the dueling banjos refrain and the powerful male rape scene as for the themes of man at odds with nature, resurrected Voight’s talent. It was his artistic deliverance. As Boorman recalls, “He says I saved his life by persuading him to do the picture, then did my best to kill him while making it.”

  Meanwhile, Marcheline was wrestling with her own romantic deliverance. At the time, she was in love with two men: Jon Voight and his friend Al Pacino. So when Jon asked her to marry him, she had to look deep into her heart. Shy and self-effacing, Pacino was not the type to try to steal a friend’s girlfriend, particularly as Voight had been so generous with money for his theater group. It is a sign of how deeply he had fallen for Marcheline that Pacino pleaded with her not to marry Voight unless she was sure. As she struggled with her emotions, the decisive voice was that of her mother, Lois, who encouraged her to marry the Oscar-nominated Jon, who was then much more successful than his rival. Marcheline followed her mother’s wishes and chose Jon Voight. But in her heart, Pacino would remain the great unrequited love of her life.

  Jon and Marcheline married just before Christmas, on December 12, at Jon’s home on Hanover Street in Brentwood, Los Angeles, which he was renting from TV director John Newland. John Boorman’s son Charley, who played Voight’s son in the movie, was ring bearer. Unlike the wedding of Marcheline’s parents, this was a modest affair, with only fifty guests in attendance. As he was marrying for the second time, Voight would not have been able to marry in a Catholic church even if he had wished to do so. In keeping with the relaxed, informal vibe, Marcheline, who was increasingly known as Marche (pronounced Marcia), made her wedding dress from one of her shawls, Elton John’s “Your Song” played, and the couple took their vows in the presence of Superior Court judge Marvin Freeman. Karen Ziff, an assistant TV producer, was one of the witnesses.

  Amid the confetti of congratulations, their age difference, their short courtship, Marcheline’s inner turmoil, and her husband’s easy sexual magnetism were all forgotten. The Bertrands were living the American dream, rubbing shoulders with Hollywood royalty. Certainly it was a fairy tale come to life for Marche’s mother, the fantasies she contemplated as she combed her hair in front of the mirror all those years ago becoming a glamorous reality. Any doubts Marche might have had about the match she kept to herself. As a close friend of hers commented later, “Her family all believed in the fairy tale and pushed their daughter into a marriage she didn’t really want in her heart.”

  A couple of years later, one of Marche’s friends was in turmoil about her own wedding plans. She wanted to marry hippie style, in bare feet with flowers in her hair in the local park. Her mother-in-law craved a church wedding. Marche’s advice was clear and to the point. “You don’t marry for yourself but your family,” she told her friend.

  TWO

  This has been my burden for thirty-three years. I saw what happened to Angelina Jolie, and it haunts me to this day.

  —KRISANN MOREL

  After their wedding, the Voights moved into a one-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a modest six-story building fringed by palm trees at 468 South Roxbury Drive, overlooking Roxbury Park, one of the few public spaces in Beverly Hills. While the casual observer would be impressed by the Beverly Hills address, it was, as far as locals were concerned, on the wrong side of the tracks, the tracks meaning anything south of Olympic Boulevard. Hollywood movie stars are thin on the ground in what is jocularly known as the “Slums of Beverly Hills.”

  Marcheline soon discovered that she was pregnant. They planned to call the baby Haven, but sadly she suffered a miscarriage. As much as they both wanted children, it clearly wasn’t time to start a family.

  The apartment had a den and a small galley kitchen, which was fine as neither of them cooked. Occasionally Marche would buy a bottle of red wine and throw a steak on the grill, but that was about the extent of her culinary expertise. Apart from a wooden hutch containing a few knickknacks and a photo montage of Marche in various modeling poses—head shots, in a long dress, in a bikini—the apartment was bare and spare. As one early visitor recalls, “When I opened the door I was struck by the simplicity of the way they lived. In a way it was comforting to know that a big movie star lived like this.” The only sense of abundance was in the closet that ran the length of the hallway. It was filled with Marche’s clothes, many with the tags from Bonwit Teller, her favorite Beverly Hills department store, still attached. “She was the kind of person who if she liked one thing would buy it in every color,” recalls a friend. “She was very generous and gave me lots of hand-me-downs.”

  In a kitchen cupboard was Marche’s guilty secret, a stack of tabloid magazines she kept hidden from her husband. Like her mother, she loved to r
ead about the lives of the rich and famous. It gave her an illicit thrill, a glimpse into a world that continued to elude her. For while the William Morris Agency could get her modeling assignments, acting work was hard to come by, Marche still a regular at the Lee Strasberg studio run by his wife, Anna. If he had ever discovered her secret fascination with the stars, Jon would have been baffled. It was not part of his psyche. While he basked in acting glory and success, he, like Dustin Hoffman and others of his era, was indifferent to fame. He rarely gave interviews, nor was he interested in personal publicity. As an artist he wanted to do good work, to express himself onstage or on camera.

  In July 1972, a few weeks after the Watergate break-in that would eventually lead to the resignation of President Richard Nixon, Deliverance was released. It was make-or-break not only for the director but also for his star actor. The omens did not look good. When he screened a first cut for Voight and other members of the cast in Beverly Hills, Boorman recalls, the movie was met with “utter silence and people hurrying out, avoiding my eye.” The studio complained that there had never been a hit movie in the history of Hollywood without a woman in it.

  They need not have worried. The movie captured the popular imagination, both commercially and culturally—to the extent that tragically thirty-one people died the following year while trying to paddle the same stretch of the Chattooga River portrayed in the movie. Not only did the film go on to be nominated for Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Film Editing, it marked the rebirth of Voight’s career; and symbolically, a few weeks after the film’s release, Marche discovered she was pregnant once more.

  Deliverance transformed Voight from a one-hit wonder to a genuine Hollywood heavyweight. He could be a contender. It was perhaps ironic that he and his friend Al Pacino were up against Marlon Brando for a Golden Globe that year. Voight remained on the canvas; at the awards ceremony in January 1973 it was Brando who walked away with the prize for his role in The Godfather.