Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography

by Andrew Morton

  Brando’s shadow loomed large that year. To celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Tennessee Williams’s sultry melodrama A Streetcar Named Desire, Jon Voight was asked to take on the role of Stanley Kowalski, the part made famous by the young Brando. It was not a successful revival. With Faye Dunaway as Blanche, the play, staged in April 1973 at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles, opened to lukewarm reviews. Critics felt that Voight underplayed the role in an attempt to offer a “non-Brando” interpretation. “He even throws dishes politely,” noted New York Times critic Stephen Farber.

  Voight had every right to be distracted. Both his sister-in-law Debbie and Marche were expecting. Jon even designed and drew a baby shower invitation for the sisters. On May 11, two days after her twenty-third birthday, Marche gave birth to their first child, a boy they named James Haven Voight. Taking a leaf out of her mother’s manual for parental ambition, she deliberately gave her son a middle name that could be used for his future stage or film career. Life was repeating itself; just as her mother had lived through her daughter, so Marcheline planned, from the moment her child was born, to live through him.

  The couple’s joy was short-lived. Just a few weeks after James’s birth, Jon’s father, Elmer Voight, was killed in a traffic accident. At least the family had the consolation of knowing that Elmer had seen his grandson before he died. As Jon and his mother and two brothers mourned their loss, Jon reflected that his sixty-three-year-old father had lived long enough to watch his children mature—and succeed. That year Jon’s brother Chip, whose song “Angel of the Morning” became an instant standard, released what Rolling Stone magazine described as one of the best country albums of the year.

  At the time of his father’s death, Jon was filming Conrack, based on Pat Conroy’s book about his experiences as an idealistic young teacher instructing a class of semiliterate black children on St. Simons Island in Georgia. The project was very dear to his heart, not only because of the powerful themes of racism, poverty, and civil rights, but also as a tribute to his adored father. As the New York Times critic astutely observed, “His performance has a conviction that suggests that the theme of the movie matters a great deal to him.” (In typical fashion, Voight treated the youngsters like members of his extended family, organizing several reunions in the coming years.)

  During a break in the filming, he and Marche went for a drive in the countryside. They ended up following a church bus with the words “Shiloh Baptist” painted on the back. Jon suggested that Shiloh would be a good name for their next child. In fact, he wanted to go whole hog and call their second baby Shiloh Baptist. Marche demurred, saying that the name was too Hebrew. In time she would reconsider her view, though not for her own children.

  Only months later, on November 1, the couple suffered another grievous loss when Marche’s mother, Lois Bertrand, died of cancer. She was only forty-five. Her daughter, nursing six-month-old Jamie, was devastated. “She grieved hard and she grieved long,” recalls a girlfriend. “Marche idolized her mother.” As she mourned, she fondly remembered the fairy tales her mother had read to her at night, the advice she dispensed when Marche was a teenager. On the day of the funeral at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Riverdale, where Lois and Rolland were married, Jon was in Buffalo, on tour with A Streetcar Named Desire. In true showbiz style, he hired a private plane to take him from upstate New York to Chicago for the service. A limousine waited discreetly nearby to whisk him back to O’Hare airport so he could perform that night. The family was impressed by his modesty and concern. “As a big movie star we didn’t know what to expect,” recalls Lois’s aunt, Esther Kasha, now ninety-three. “But he was really down-to-earth.”

  As a lasting memorial to Lois, the couple donated an altar cross to the church. It was a generous but somewhat ironic gesture: While Marche was very much a practicing Catholic, Jon had all but renounced his faith and was embarking on a lifelong search to find a god or gods who spoke to him. Describing himself as “totally nondenominational,” he said around that time: “I don’t know what the hell I am, but I’m on my way to finding out.” It was to be a journey of some pain and loneliness. As his friend Dustin Hoffman noted: “Jon is a strict lapsed Catholic boy who has to pay for his sins in guilt.”

  He had little time for reflection, taking Marche and baby James to Munich, Germany, and to Austria to film The Odessa File, the movie version of Frederick Forsyth’s thriller about a journalist who infiltrates a sinister group of former Nazis. He played opposite Maximilian Schell, who invited him to star in a film he planned to direct, The End of the Game, a sophisticated thriller about the cat-and-mouse game between a cop and a crook. Once again his family came along for the filming, which took place in Bern, Switzerland, in the summer of 1974 and featured English actor Robert Shaw, Jacqueline Bisset, and Donald Sutherland. Marcheline shocked the English contingent by breast-feeding James, now a toddler, in public. “We thought Marche was lovely—just an eccentric, a real hippie,” noted a more European member of the acting fraternity.

  Marcheline became friendly with Jacqueline Bisset and Maximilian Schell, enjoying the company of a celebrated troupe of actors, magazine images made flesh. Her father, Rolland, came along, too, not only for company after the loss of his wife but also to visit some of the battlefields he had seen during the Second World War. During the trip he met and fell for Elke, a German barmaid. After a whirlwind courtship, Elke, down-to-earth, hardworking, and frugal, became the second Mrs. Bertrand, moving into the Bertrand home in Trousdale with her teenage daughter, Gabriella. Rollie’s older daughter did not approve, feeling that it was far too soon after her mother’s death. As a consequence there was always friction between Marche and her stepmother, a coolness that time did not diminish. A sign of their strained relations was that when Marche organized parties for her friends and acquaintances she told—rather than asked—her father and stepmother that their home was the chosen venue.

  In spite of these familial undercurrents, this was probably the happiest time in Jon and Marcheline’s marriage. Not only was Jon productive, artistically and commercially, but Marche was pregnant again that fall. To their friends and family they seemed like a couple utterly devoted to each other. “They were very loving and tender,” recalls Krisann Morel, who babysat regularly for James. “He was the total gentleman, always polite, opening doors for her, making sure she was comfortable. It was sweet to see.”

  Krisann was equally enchanted by their eighteen-month-old son, Jamie. “He was adorable,” she recalls. “Supersmart, sensitive, and loving. Just a wonderful child.” With some of the money Jon was now earning, Marche bought herself a Mercedes 450SL sports car with her son’s name as the license plate: JHAVEN.

  During Marche’s pregnancy, they hired an out-of-work actress to cook for them, asking her to make “back East” food for the Yonkers-born Voight, who was missing his New York life. Meatballs, spaghetti, and veal cutlets were now all on the menu at apartment 206. “Marche looked so beautiful; we were enchanted by her,” recalls their part-time cook, now an established character actress. “They were beyond in love, but maybe I was oblivious to what was going on.”

  That Christmas Jon headed back to the Big Apple, not only to see his family but also to coproduce a Broadway play, The Hashish Club, the story of five men on a drug trip written by Lance Larsen, which lasted for only eleven performances at the Bijou Theatre. The play was about as far away from regular Hollywood fare as could be imagined, but Voight had the ability to straddle the fringe and the mainstream.

  At the Academy Awards in April 1975 he and the buxom Raquel Welch enjoyed a back-and-forth about peaks and valleys, Voight deliberately leering at her embonpoint before handing over the Oscar for Best Cinematography to the makers of The Towering Inferno. For Marcheline, not yet twenty-five and heavily pregnant, meeting an endless array of movie stars made it a night to remember. The high point for both of them was their conversation with Hollywood legend Fred Astaire, who was nominated for his supporting role in T
he Towering Inferno. When they returned to their modest apartment, Marcheline was glowing with the excitement of the evening. “She was thrilled to be mixing in this company,” recalls Krisann, who babysat for James that night. “This girl from Illinois was simply starstruck—and who can blame her? It was so cute and sweet. She was in seventh heaven.”

  That same month the couple enjoyed another happy event when Jon was best man and Marche maid of honor at the wedding of their good friends Carlo and Lauren Stogel at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “During the ceremony they were looking at each other like they were renewing their vows,” recalls Lauren, who first met Jon and Marche the previous Christmas, an encounter that Marche later said was “destined.” What turned out to be an intimate thirty-year friendship came about thanks to Carlo’s father, Syd Stogel, a producer for Columbia Pictures, who had taken a shine to Jon during the filming of The Odessa File in Munich. His wife, Angelina, adored Marche and baby James. When the Voight family later visited Rome, his son Carlo showed them around the city. They got on so well that Jon and Carlo discussed starting a film production company when Lauren and Carlo decided to move to Beverly Hills to start a new life.

  On June 4, 1975, Marche and Jon celebrated the latest little star to join the family when Marche gave birth to a baby girl at the Cedars-Sinai hospital in Beverly Hills. They named her Angelina after Marche’s Quebec-born grandmother, Marie-Louise Angelina, and Angelina Stogel. A further omen was the fact that Marche’s favorite band, the Rolling Stones, had recently had a huge number-one hit, “Angie,” which meant an awful lot to her. Along with Angelina, Marche gave her daughter the middle name of Jolie so that, like her brother, she could drop her surname when she went into show business.

  As a Gemini, the child was destined to have a dual personality, the forces of good and evil, darkness and light, male and female, wrestling in her psyche. She would be at once adaptable, versatile, witty, and intellectual and nervous, tense, cunning, and inconsistent. Those who came to know her in the coming years would repeatedly attest to the fact that she was a true Gemini. In Jon’s eyes she was perfect. He saw Krisann a couple of days after Angelina’s birth and waxed lyrical about his “blue-eyed, beautiful daughter.”

  Years later, in a radio interview during which Angelina was in a different studio in another city, her father spoke movingly of the special moment when he first met her. “The last public conversation we had was when you were born. You don’t remember it, but when you emerged from your mother’s womb, I picked you up, held you in my hand, and looked at your face. You had your finger by the side of your cheek and you looked very, very wise, like my best old friend. I started to tell you how your mom and I were so happy to finally have you there and that we were going to take great care of you and watch for all those signs of who you were and how we could help you achieve all that wonderful potential God gave you. Your mom and I made that pledge, and everyone in the room started crying. But we [Jon and Angelina] weren’t crying. We were enraptured in each other’s gaze.”

  Even though Jon was no longer a true believer, Angelina was christened a couple of months later, with Maximilian Schell and Jacqueline Bisset, who had met the couple during the filming of The End of the Game, serving as godparents.

  That fall Jon was invited by the theater department at the University of California in Northridge, north of Los Angeles, to be artist in residence for a semester and take the lead role in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The prospect appealed to him: Not only is Hamlet a rite of passage for any serious actor, but the production would also combine the talents of students and professionals. With his own father’s death still fresh—he and his two brothers scaled a Montana peak to install a plaque in Elmer’s memory—he saw the play as a way of exploring the father-son relationship.

  He opened an office on campus and began recruiting his friends and colleagues, sending notes that began: “Do some Shakespeare, man; it will clear your head.” The young off-Broadway producer Jon Avnet, who later went to produce Tom Cruise’s breakout film, Risky Business, was brought in as the money man; Jerome Guardino, who directed Voight in A Streetcar Named Desire in Buffalo, agreed to direct; while Lance Larsen, Jon’s close friend who appeared in The Hashish Club, was cast in the role of Horatio. His Deliverance costar Ned Beatty also agreed to take part but later dropped out. The cover of the program featured a sketch of Voight by the noted portrait artist Don Bachardy, lifelong lover of English novelist Christopher Isherwood.

  As Jon began casting, the campus was abuzz with excitement. Such was the clamor among female students to appear onstage with a bona fide Hollywood heartthrob that more than twenty girls went out for the role of Hamlet’s doomed lover, Ophelia. They all auditioned, but not one seemed to work in the part. As a standby Jon penciled in Lory Kochheim, who went on to appear in numerous TV shows, including Mulligan’s Stew. Somewhat incongruously, while Voight was learning his lines, he would have baby Angie with him. Cast member Jeff Austin found himself dandling the six-month-old infant on his knee on several occasions during the production. At the same time, Jon was frequently on the telephone to John Boorman, who wanted him to star in his next movie, Exorcist II: The Heretic. After endless back-and-forth, Voight turned down the Deliverance director. Instead the role was played by Richard Burton.

  Meanwhile, Jon went to see another play on campus, Lysistrata, a lewd and raunchy battle of the sexes by ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes, directed by the theater veteran Vincent Dowling. The plot concerns the decision by the women of Athens to withhold sexual favors until the men end the war they are fighting. When the men agree to their partners’ demands, the figure of “Reconciliation” appears onstage. In Dowling’s production the role was played by a beautiful student named Stacey Pickren, who walked onstage in a “nude-look” costume with a mass of flaming red hair. Voight was mesmerized, utterly entranced by the vision before him. “That is the woman I am going to spend the rest of my life with,” muttered the thirty-seven-year-old actor, a comment that signaled the death knell of his four-year marriage. It was almost a carbon copy of the romantic impulsiveness that characterized his courtship with his wife.

  Within a matter of days, theater student Stacey Pickren, who had not even auditioned for Voight’s Hamlet, was cast in the role of Ophelia—much to the chagrin of Lory Kochheim, who was considered by her peers to be a much better actress. “The dynamic between Lory and Stacey was not good,” recalls Jeff Austin, now an established actor. “Stacey felt threatened by her.”

  Jon and Stacey embarked on a wild and passionate affair that very soon became the talk of campus, with Stacey painted as an exotic and highly sexual young woman. It was later reported that Stacey, the daughter of a wealthy doctor, was a member of the Children of God sect, a free-love movement that practiced what the founder, David Berg, called “Flirty Fishing,” in which female members were encouraged to show God’s love by engaging in sexual activity with potential converts. Jon had reportedly shown his devotion to his new lover by wearing a “yoke” necklace designed and sold by the cult. “It was the Scandal of Northridge,” recalls a member of the faculty. In time the lurid gossip ended up in print. For example, in his biography of Angelina Jolie, Brandon Hurst stated that when Marche was pregnant with Angelina, she came downstairs in their apartment and saw Jon kissing Stacey. She went upstairs, according to Hurst, “and began shaking with shock and, as she thought she would have a miscarriage, called an ambulance.” Actually, the apartment was only on one floor, but the story stuck.

  In fact, it was months after Angie was born that Jon first met Stacey, and certainly when Marcheline and their friends went to see the play in March 1976, she never suspected that the woman onstage was her husband’s lover. One day he announced that he was going to tour with Hamlet and that Stacey Pickren was coming along. “Oh, are you having an affair with her?” Marche asked him innocently. It was said almost as a joke. After all, they were trying for their third child and had even gone away recently for a romantic weekend when his mot
her, Barbara, came to babysit. Everything seemed just peachy in their world, Al Pacino now a distant memory, a moment that had passed. “She hadn’t a clue what was going on; not a clue,” recalls her best friend, Lauren Taines, formerly Stogel.

  It would have been easy for Jon to lie and make light of the matter. At that time he had absolutely no intention of leaving Marche and the children and making a life with Stacey. She was a wild and secret fling, who had taught him as much, if not more, as he had taught her. Instead, consumed by a mixture of Catholic guilt and natural honesty, he said yes. It was probably the worst decision he ever made, changing not only his life but also the lives of his children forever.

  At that moment Marche’s world fell apart. As much as she loved Jon, in her eyes infidelity was unforgivable. They went for marriage counseling, but it did little to salve the hurt; indeed, Marche felt angry that the therapist seemed to be siding with her husband because he was a movie star. Even though they were still sleeping together and went away for another romantic weekend to try to rekindle their love, it was a losing proposition. In time Marche closed the door to her heart and gave Jon the “Bertrand freeze,” placing him in cold storage for life. As an intimate of the couple observed: “She learned the freeze from her mother. It is permanent. There is no recourse. It will hurt you in places you never knew could hurt. This is at the very heart of her tragedy, like nothing else.”

  While Jon was repentant, he was now unforgiven. As he wrestled with a domestic situation that had spiraled out of control, Stacey was the entrée to a life he could not resist: drugs and imaginative sex. He moved out of the apartment on Roxbury Drive and rented a place with Stacey, leaving behind a scene of emotional devastation. “Marche was so distraught about the breakup,” recalls Krisann Morel, who became more a counselor than a babysitter. “Jon was the absolute love of her life. Every morning she would pour her heart out. ‘What am I going to do, what am I going to do?’ Marche would say. She was baffled, absolutely tormented, by his affair. She couldn’t get her head around why he would leave her for another woman.”