Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography

by Andrew Morton

  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.

  Moreover, she had few, if any, adult boundaries to rein her in. Certainly the word “no” did not figure in her mother’s lexicon, Marcheline reasoning that if she was her daughter’s friend Angie would tell her everything. Whereas James was a biddable son, Angie was wild and adventurous, sneaking out of the house at night and going to Westwood to join her gang.

  She tried every drug going, developing a particular taste for cocaine. On at least one occasion she or her friends called Marcheline to pick up Angie when she collapsed, freaking out and out of control, after taking a psychedelic drug.

  “I was raised by my mom and everything was emotional, and even if I would do something crazy, if I would be out all night and would come back, you know, at thirteen, and be doing stuff, she’d cry and then I’d feel like the worst person in the world because I hurt my friend, my girlfriend.”

  Her mother’s reaction is instructive. While most parents, worried about their children’s safety, would angrily chastise their young daughter for staying out all night, Marche not only accepted her behavior but also made it about her own pain. Her mother, as Angie said, was not her mother but a girlfriend, moreover a girlfriend who was asking her daughter to manage her hurt—in effect, to mother her.

  Marche’s odd response was critical at a time when her daughter was entering puberty and experiencing the classic teenage hormone rush. The days when Angie had a crush on Mr. Spock from Star Trek—also Jon’s favorite TV show—were long gone, although she did, through her father, get to meet Platoon star Willem Dafoe, who she thought was “hot.” “I wanted to be promiscuous and was starting to be sexual,” she recalled.

  Shortly after moving from El Rodeo to Beverly Hills High School in September 1989, Angie was dating—and losing her virginity to—her first boyfriend, a distinctively attired teenager called Anton with a big fat silver chain that started from his belt, fell to the back of his knee, and then climbed up to his back pocket, where it was attached to his empty wallet.

  At her mother’s suggestion, the fourteen-year-old Angie and her boyfriend started living together at her home on Roxbury Drive. Young Anton, whose family had moved away to Encino, stayed with Angie, her mother, and, at times, her brother—at least on school nights. To make the young couple more comfortable, Marcheline gave up the master bedroom with its huge Chinese wedding bed and moved into a smaller bedroom. While she thought her liberal behavior meant that she would be able to keep an eye on them, the proximity of the master bedroom to the street made it easy for them to sneak out at night, which they did regularly. By all accounts Angie’s live-in boyfriend was polite, quiet, but something of a handful. “If Anton wasn’t a nice boy beneath the punk gear, Marche wouldn’t have let him in,” argues Lauren Taines.

  Angie herself says that she lived with Anton for two years from the age of fourteen, though her family and friends remember that the young punk was only around for six months or so. Her mother’s logic was that Angie was going to have sex anyway, so best to encourage her to stay at home, where Marcheline could exercise some control. “She pushed Angie into living with him so she could keep an eye on them,” said Lauren Taines. Not that Angie found her first experience of sex particularly fulfilling—especially with her mother sleeping next door.

  With hindsight, Angie believes her mother’s indulgence was a “very smart thing.” She told James Lipton: “I wasn’t sneaking around. I had my home, my base, so I was safe.” This rationalization obscures the fact that the absence of boundaries encouraged her to behave like a wild child bride, whether she wanted to or not. Psychoanalyst Dr. Franziska De George observes: “This behavior seems like an attempt at avoiding conflict on the part of the mother, rather than thinking of the developmental needs of the child, who may be too young to deal with the feelings of a live-in relationship and premature sexuality.”

  Certainly it didn’t make sense to Jon Voight, either, when he found out what was going on, or to Bill Day, when he arrived back in Beverly Hills after a trip to the Amazon. Their objections were brushed aside, Marcheline explaining that she didn’t want her daughter having sex in the back of a car. On domestic matters, Marche’s word was law. (There is no word about how the boy’s parents felt.)

  Nonetheless, Jon Voight confronted his sullen daughter about her live-in boyfriend, her drug abuse, and other issues, voicing his disapproval in “a big fight” with her. The irony is that while Angie viewed her father as a stern disciplinarian, he believes that, because of his abiding guilt over the divorce, he failed to challenge her enough.

  Voight later told CNN’s Paula Zahn that he was “very upset” about Angie’s experimentation with drugs during high school. “This was the beginning of her retaliation against me for the anger she felt when I left her mother. It was very difficult for me to scold or reprimand her. I backed down partially because I felt some guilt about the divorce and partially because I was hoping that things would go away. It was a big mistake.”

  Voight would have been even more horrified if he had known what was actually going on in the master bedroom. As time went on, Angie felt there was too little connection between her and her boyfriend when they had sex. She could not “feel,” that is to say, enjoy an orgasm. One drunken night, she grabbed one of her knives and cut her boyfriend, and he cut her back; they were both covered in blood. It was a moment, as she saw it, of primitive honesty, giving her a sense o
f being both dangerous and alive. By cutting she felt she had broken free of her emotional bonds.

  She later described the consequences of that evening: Her jugular vein narrowly missed being severed, and after going to the local hospital she was patched up with gauze bandages covering her wounds. As she tells it, the worst moment of this night of honesty was lying to her mother the morning after about how her injuries had come about. While she was certainly cutting, there is a degree of dramatic hyperbole in this story. Even Marche would have noticed something as obvious as a bandage on her neck.

  There was an incident, less physically serious, which considerably alarmed her mother. One morning Angie emerged after cutting some of her hair with a knife, in the process of which she had also cut her neck behind her ear. As Marche discussed this incident at length with her circle of friends, it’s hard to imagine that they wouldn’t have heard about it if indeed her daughter had nearly cut her throat.

  This is not to downplay Angie’s behavior, which exposes a deeply troubled psyche. That the first time she experienced the act of cutting gave Angie such a sense of honesty, of being alive, is typical of those who ultimately become “cutters,” addicted to slicing their own flesh. Most people have the ability to self-regulate internal pressure and conflict. However, those in what Dr. De George describes as a “global undifferentiated state,” emotionally unformed because of their childhood trauma, are not able to manage their feelings. So for cutters, the physical pain is a welcome release, a kind of melting inside, and an escape from unmanageable emotional torment. Paradoxically, after a cutting episode, which normal people would find distressing, cutters feel a sense of control. Once again the world makes sense—the bleeding rationalizes the emotional distress. But it is only a temporary solution, the sense of relief attended by shame and confusion. So the pain starts coming back. When the darkness becomes overwhelming, cutting is once again the release.

  Even at the time, Angie realized that this was not a healthy relationship, particularly for her boyfriend, who was not by nature aggressive. “My first boyfriend cried a lot and it was a load of high drama that I could do without.” Those pesky “feelings” again.

  Nonetheless, the demons roiled within. Angie continued to cut herself for several more years, the act of self-mutilation soothing her troubled psyche, releasing emotional pain and inner rage. “It was somehow therapeutic to me,” she later told CNN, acknowledging the effect but not understanding the cause underlying her cutting behavior. Those who saw her naked noted that the cuts were deep and almost entirely related to sexual anatomy—her breasts and inner thighs—as though she was revolted by her own sexuality, perhaps reflecting her sense of not being “clean.” “The cuts go deep. She was really hard on herself,” noted a friend.

  While Anton was on the scene, of most concern to her family was her dramatic weight loss; Angie was clearly suffering from an eating disorder. Her anorexia nervosa was literally fed by her cocaine use, the drug dulling her shaky appetite. She was taken to a psychologist, who told her that she had a choice: either start eating or be admitted to the hospital. Angie started eating. Current wisdom suggests that the origin of most eating disorders lies in the complex relationship between parent and child and the desire for control. So perhaps it was Marcheline’s trifecta of setting no real boundaries, her quiet yet relentless ambition for her daughter, and her own perfectionism that sent Angie into a tailspin of seeking to control something, anything, in her own life. No one, certainly not the messy Angie, could live up to Marche’s standards. She controlled her daughter in a way that Angie couldn’t fight. So she fought herself, controlling her eating habits, the one aspect of her life she alone was in charge of in a fractured and scattered world.

  “Angie couldn’t risk expressing that primal rage against her mother, so the rage was directed against the self,” says psychologist Iris Martin. “What comes with that is suicidal thoughts and self-mutilation, as well as eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia. They are all assaults on the self.”

  For most of her life Angie had been defined by her mother’s vision of femininity, which simply wasn’t hers: the beautiful Victorian smock dresses that she deliberately ruined by climbing trees, the inappropriate white angel outfit she wore for the Oscars, the modeling cattle calls that the gawky teenager with a mouthful of braces found excruciatingly embarrassing, and the acting classes she was too young to cope with. Her mother was living through her daughter, just as her own mother had lived through her. For a sensitive, intelligent young girl, the pressure of needing to be successful to avoid her mother’s disappointment and the dread of being abandoned again if she failed must have been overwhelming.

  As her mother rightly observed, beneath the bravado was a susceptible little girl. Marche once said: “Angie puts on the tough kid act, but underneath she is very sensitive. It’s a cover-up.” And that sensitive little girl couldn’t handle what she had gotten herself into. So she retreated by going back into childhood, her anorexia a way of desexualizing herself. The last thing she needed was to be living with a teenage boy when she was just fourteen. She needed to hear the word no. As Angie struggled with anorexia, Marcheline decided it would be best if Anton left the family home. His departure effectively ended their relationship.

  As tough as Angie may have appeared to be on the outside, her inability to cope with the young woman she was becoming—or was expected to become—affected her day-to-day life. Her schoolwork suffered, and she moved to Moreno High (Continuation), the “alternative” school-within-a-school at Beverly Hills High that specialized in providing flexible study for students with behavioral problems such as substance abuse and chronic truancy. It was also a fast track for bright pupils like Angie who wanted to graduate early so they could focus on a career in the entertainment industry. As part of the program, she underwent regular counseling, now joking that only at Beverly Hills High School could students gain credits for therapy sessions.

  Naturally, her counselor focused on the damaging impact on her life of her parents’ breakup. She now recalls, with typical bravado: “The doctor was probably going on about my father and mother while I was doing acid on the weekends and bleeding underneath my clothes.” As dismissive as she was about this focus—describing the process as “manipulative”—her counselor was at least trying to address the root cause of her problems. Angie’s drug use, eating disorder, and cutting were clearly symptoms, a way of dulling or avoiding her emotional pain. In the presenting narrative of her life, she had been abandoned by her father, and sustained by her mother, who had given up her career to raise her. Black and white, dark and light, devil and angel. While the story she told herself contained an element of truth, it was not the whole story. It was her true story, not the true story.

  Her father sensed the way the wind was blowing when he drove her to a friend’s house after picking her up from school one day. When he asked about the people she was seeing, her reply was both disturbing and bemusing. “We’re all alike; we’re kids whose fathers aren’t there for them.” At that moment he realized she was speaking from a script prepared, at least in part, by her mother. As he later told TV host Pat O’Brien: “There was this programming of the kids, obviously from the terrible hurt and anger that her mother had. It was passed on to the kids and I was working against that continuously to let everybody know of my love.” Often feeling excluded from his daughter’s life, he now started writing letters to Angie in an attempt to connect with her.

  The glowering resentment between father and children was obvious to all. For a couple of years, gawky teenager Brian Evans, who first met Jon Voight in 1989 at a Beverly Hills charity event in aid of the homeless, got a ringside seat to this endless boxing match. The Oscar winner took a shine to the seventeen-year-old, who was trying to make it in comedy improv, introducing him to James and suggesting that he take Angie out “sometime”—presumably to wean her away from her live-in boyfriend, who soon found himself out of her life anyway.

  Brian E
vans was only too happy to comply, and he took Angie on a few innocuous dates. Even though he was two years older than Angie, Evans felt like an “awkward nerd” in her presence, daunted by her sheen of self-contained sophistication. “She was quite introverted but knew how to stand up for herself,” he recalls. “She struck me as being very much in control of herself. Not a lost soul in any way.”

  When she was with her father, the distance between them was immediately apparent. “I could feel her sadness,” Evans recalls. “She was not a happy person, and she was very unhappy with her dad. She just didn’t like him much and gave him one-word answers to his questions like she was only there because she had to be.”

  Her brother, James, was constantly locking horns with his dad. Even though he was now living mainly with his father at his home, Evans noticed that he still sided with his mother in family arguments.

  Over the next few months, Evans came to see Voight as a surrogate dad. Coming from a checkered background himself, Evans rather objects to the hostility James and Angie displayed toward their father. “He was such a cool guy who did all the dad things. They didn’t want for anything, didn’t have to struggle, and yet resented their father.”

  Just as his children wanted to be independent of Jon Voight, so, too, did Marcheline and Bill Day. They were convinced that their film production company was the avenue to financial freedom; all they needed was to snag a big deal. When they heard of the true story of an environmental David facing a corporate Goliath in the Amazon, they thought they had struck gold. The concept, which they called Amazonia, attracted Hollywood heavyweights of the caliber of Ridley and Tony Scott. Their joy, though, was short-lived; the project languished throughout 1989 in the eternal damnation of development hell.