Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography (10 page)

It was more complicated than that, as Bill was still too weak to leave the apartment unaided. On impulse, Marche flew to Los Angeles, rented a car, picked him up, and took him to Woods Road in time for Thanksgiving.

Within days, Marche was talking of a new project. Now approaching thirty-two, she reluctantly acknowledged that her chances of getting an acting break were rapidly receding. Instead she wanted to start a production company with Bill. She had already spoken to her Beverly Hills–based financial advisor, Charles Silverberg, who saw Woods Road Productions as a tax-efficient project. Over the next couple of years Bill made a number of short films that not only fulfilled his course requirements but also turned in a modest profit. Thanks to Silverberg’s colleague Marc Graboff, now a big wheel at NBC, all of Bill’s films,
Holiday, Out of Order,
and
The Healer,
snagged licensing deals with HBO, Showtime, and others.

Marche and Bill were now a business team, and before long they were talking about marriage and having more children to finally cement the renewed relationship. In fact, Marche did get pregnant again but had a miscarriage early on. They felt their loss keenly, helping each other cope with a family tragedy.

At first Jon was unhappy that Bill was back, phoning him to express his displeasure at the changed domestic arrangements. In a heart-to-heart exchange, Bill explained that he and Jon’s ex-wife were a partnership and that it was time for Jon to move on. Given the fact that Jon was still living off and on with Stacey Pickren, this seemed a sensible view. For once Jon accepted the revised status quo, reducing his visits to Woods Road and staying with his mother in White Plains, twenty-five minutes’ drive away, when he was in New York. He even started to warm to Bill, becoming enthusiastic about a comedy idea he and his writing partner, Dan Ackerman, were working on called
Pulsar and Sullivan.
It was a take-off on the Bob Hope and Bing Crosby movies—but set in outer space. Jon was keen to play Sullivan. Unfortunately, the gap from story conference to commission was never bridged.

In fact, the fractious relationship between Bill and Jon became the basis of Voight’s next film,
Table for Five.
In an increasingly autobiographical career, this movie, filmed during 1982, was perhaps his most personal work to date, dealing with the relationships among a divorced father, his family, and the new man in his ex-wife’s life. Voight, who coproduced, played a business schemer and womanizer whose ex-wife moved from Los Angeles to New York and found a new man whom his children adored. He readily acknowledged the clear parallels with his own life, telling writer Jim Jerome: “There are male egos involved and there is friction—the whole territorial thing. We don’t necessarily sync, but we each give ground. [Bill Day is] crazy about Marche and really loves the kids. That discomfort—balance of power—is similar to what’s in the film.”

He realized that he was tapping into a deeper well of unarticulated grief at a tearful lunchtime script conference at the Warner Brothers cafeteria in Burbank. Every man present—director Robert Lieberman, producer Robert Schaffel, scriptwriter David Seltzer, and Voight himself—ended up crying their hearts out as the group, all divorced or separated, talked about the pain of enforced separation from their children. As Lieberman, now one
of Voight’s close friends, recalls: “The film laments love lost, a family lost, and a decision to step up and be a good father. Jon was a very pained guy. A generous man, a loving man, but feeling really bad about Angie and James.”

In spite of the sentimental theme—moviemakers Joel and Ethan Coen consider it their favorite tearjerker—Voight ensured that filming, which mainly took place on a cruise ship sailing the Mediterranean, had a family feel. He brought his mother, Barbara, on board as a cruise extra (along with an unknown Kevin Costner) and flew the children to Rome to watch the filming. In an elliptical reference to his own father, Elmer, Voight’s character was a former golf pro who he acknowledged was a lot like his dad; charming, frequently out of town, and in need of constant approval.

While Voight, now forty-three, was at an age to recognize, if not correct, his mistakes, he thrashed himself publicly about the possible psychological damage he had caused his young children by his romantic choices. When the film was released in February 1983 to generally favorable reviews, he spoke more presciently than he could have imagined. “The kids are aware of the deep disruption that went on early in their lives. The guilt, anger and confusion made their way into their subconscious and I don’t know what dues we’ll pay later on.”

For good measure, the former Catholic flagellated himself about the high price Stacey Pickren had paid for being by his side. He believed that being Jon Voight’s girlfriend had cursed her career—though that didn’t prevent her from getting a part in that year’s summer smash,
Flashdance.
At the same time, he recognized that his possessive streak had ruined their six-year relationship. “There’s really been quite a lot of pain,” he said.

Amid this emotional angst, on the surface Angie and James seemed like ordinary kids. Even with their Beverly Hills background and famous father, they coped reasonably well with the other children at William O. Schaefer Elementary School in nearby Tappan. James was increasingly intrigued by Bill’s world of cameras and filmmaking gear, while Angie, like her father, had an artist’s eye; Bill proudly displayed some of her early drawings in the local diner. During school breaks they shuttled to California to spend time with their father or to Florida to join granny Barbara at her vacation home in Palm Beach.

Around this time Angie and James learned a lesson that lasted rather longer than the average New York minute. Within her circle of friends and
family, Marche had a reputation for outlandish generosity, planning birthdays and other celebrations in lavish detail and always taking a bag of goodies when she visited friends. Ever the perfectionist, as her daughter recalls, “She would write four drafts to get the right birthday card ready.” Sometimes she went way over the top, as when Bill had to hire a U-Haul trailer to carry the Christmas presents when they stayed at Papa Bertrand’s home in Las Vegas.

Another feature of her benevolence was the way she “adopted” families of modest means and bestowed her love and generosity on them. She regularly visited blue-collar cousins of her brother-in-law Ron Martin’s in Van Nuys in San Fernando Valley, California, giving them furniture and baby and children’s clothes, and even making a video using pictures from their old family albums. Other distant Bertrand relatives would receive first-class airplane tickets to Hawaii and an endless array of gifts.

When they lived at Woods Road, that pattern continued, Marche focusing her largesse on the family of her African-American handyman, Thomas. For the first time, she got Angie and James involved, asking them to pick out some of their clothes to wrap up as gifts for the family. They were not overly interested, squabbling over the wrapping paper, but, with bad grace, they finally wrapped the chosen clothes.

Then they drove to the ramshackle two-story wooden house near the small town of Piedmont, where Thomas’s grandparents, parents, and assorted other relatives lived. Marche was very comfortable in their company, and after a suitable period of small talk, she asked Angie and James to hand over their presents. At first they were uncomfortable, but as soon as they saw the smiles on the faces of the recipients, their mood changed. “Something just clicked in them,” recalls Bill Day, who believes that encounter was a seminal episode in their lives. “They got it and seemed very pleased with themselves. It looked like they had discovered the joy of giving and wanted to know when they could do it again.”

These visits were the exception rather than the norm for Marche. Naturally shy and reserved, she found it hard to make friends in the new community and missed her tight-knit Beverly Hills circle. She was at her happiest visiting the Malibu home of longtime friend Belinha Beatty, the ex-wife of
Deliverance
star Ned Beatty, and her two children, Johnny and Blossom, or seeing friends like the actresses Geneviève Bujold and Jacqueline Bisset.

Even though she was raised in the Midwest, she and the rest of the family found the East Coast winters hard to bear. With its huge windows and timber frame, their two-story house on Woods Road was constantly cold, especially with the winter chill off the Hudson. Most winter weekends were spent chopping wood and weekdays keeping the open fire going. Before too long Marche was looking to get back to the “Slums of Beverly Hills.”

When her father, Rolland, was diagnosed with cancer in 1984 and began chemotherapy, it seemed a clear sign that she should be nearer to him. The children were shipped back to Los Angeles to spend the summer with their father, while Marche and Bill packed up the house. On August 25, the day before they were due to close up the unsold house and drive across country, their real-estate agent arrived with an elderly couple, Cass Canfield, president of the publishing house Harper & Row, and his wife, Joan H. King. After a cursory viewing, Canfield sat down and wrote them a check for a down payment on the $500,000 asking price, a number Bill made up on the spot.

Destiny, it seemed, was guiding the family back to Beverly Hills.

FOUR

Angie puts on the tough kid act, but underneath she is very sensitive. It’s a cover-up.

—M
ARCHELINE
B
ERTRAND

In 1984, when she was nine, Angelina won an Olympic medal. It was for English, probably for a report she wrote on President Hoover when she was at El Rodeo School in Beverly Hills. Though English was not as yet a recognized Olympic discipline, Los Angeles was hosting the games that year, and the school held its own competition, in which every pupil was awarded a medal, whether for the arts, math, or, of course, sports.

It was not, however, an entirely winning return for Angelina to her hometown. As she enrolled midway through grade school, she was playing catch-up, in class and on the playground. With her skinny body, braces, and outsize lips, it was not long before her fellow pupils nicknamed her “Nigger Lips” and “Catfish.” She gave as good as she got, endlessly teasing a Taiwanese deaf boy, Windsor Lai, with the rhyme: “Chinese, Japanese . . .” One day he couldn’t take it anymore and hit her, and a teacher forced him to apologize for his behavior. Despite what must have seemed, at the time, a terrible injustice, they eventually became friendly, Angie seeing Windsor as an outsider like herself: a misfit among the wealthy and pretty children of privilege and money.

Quiet and self-contained, Angie was a clever student and eventually blended in. She was always busy, taking ballet lessons, learning the piano, joining the soccer team, and becoming involved in school drama. Her interest did not surprise her father, who recalls: “She was dramatic when she was a young girl, and she was always dressing up and designing little things,
skits for her friends and so on. I thought maybe this gal would become an actress.”

Her parents and brother were always in the audience, as was Bill Day, who lovingly videoed those first efforts on the stage. For much of 1984, however, Bill had been occupied with filming the vicious Sandinistra/Contra war in Nicaragua, the graduate film student finding it a struggle to switch from “fire fights, death counts, wild parties, and meetings with Werner Herzog” to domestic routine in Beverly Hills. He had always been a stabilizing influence, though, a fun, avuncular figure; and the children, especially Jamie, who shared his love of working behind the camera, were glad to have him around. It is no coincidence that James today exhibits many of Bill’s mannerisms: He is fast-talking, quick-witted, and a brilliant mimic, especially of his father.

Bill’s arrival home from the war did change the family dynamic, however, reigniting the rivalry between him and Angie’s father. Jon Voight was a constant if largely unwanted presence for Marche and Bill, especially since he was now on his own, Stacey Pickren having left him for another woman, a hairstylist with whom she lived for several years. It caused endless friction that led to shouting matches and arguments that often ended with Bill storming out and spending the night in the office. “I don’t know how Bill weathered the whole thing,” recalls Lauren Taines.

All too often Marche seemed to be playing Bill off against Jon, and vice versa, happy to be Mrs. Jon Voight at social events one minute, wanting Bill by her side the next. Just as her mother, Lois, had brought up her children to love her more than their father, so, too, did Marche treat Bill and Jon as children, their protests and complaints summarily dismissed by the head of the household. James and Angie were constantly buffeted by this atmosphere of reproach and acrimony. It was as confusing as it was unstable.

That year the family, who first stayed in an apartment on Spalding Avenue before moving to a spacious duplex a few buildings north on Roxbury Drive, regularly drove to Las Vegas to spend time with Marche’s sister and her ailing father. In a last-ditch bid to curb his cancer, Rolland Bertrand checked into a clinic in New Mexico, where he was injected with massive doses of vitamin A. It was not a success, and on April 8, 1985, he succumbed to the curse of the family. He was only sixty-one.

A gentle soul who utterly adored his children and grandchildren, Rolland
Bertrand was much missed. Young Angie, then nine, was deeply affected by his funeral, intrigued not only by the physical process of death itself but also by how the occasion allowed individuals to reach out and connect. She found solace in a religious ritual invested with centuries of tradition and significance. It was comforting in its predictability, making her feel in control, less lost. In her imagination she dreamed of one day becoming a funeral director.

Her love of ritual also found expression in a fascination with knives and swords. She enjoyed not only their cold, unforgiving beauty and the intriguing stories they suggested, but also the thrill of holding, spinning, and throwing them. Knives, often decorated with ornate symbolism, stained with honor and battle, excited and inspired the collector in her. They spoke, too, to a deeper, unfulfilled need. As contemporary psychoanalyst Dr. Franziska De George explains: “Collecting—and perhaps ritual—is an attempt to soothe the emptiness where the connection to the self is missing. You become attached to things rather than people. You realize early on it is a bad thing to collect people, so you collect things. You cannot control people, but you can control things.”