Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography (14 page)

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.

The disappointment was crushing, the collapse of their joint project effectively marking the end of Woods Road Productions and the beginning of the end of Bill and Marche’s eleven-year relationship. One night after dinner at Moonshadows, a beachfront restaurant in Malibu, they walked on the shore, acknowledging that the tide had gone out on their relationship. Marche, now approaching forty, turned her attention instead to the potential of her children and their future. Bill was intent on building his own film career. Shortly afterward, he left to film another ecological documentary in Ecuador.

Like her mother before her, Marcheline was now living her own dreams vicariously through her children. She expected great things of them.

Nor was she the only one. One summer’s day Windsor Lai, who had a growing reputation as an artist within the Beverly Hills High School community, came over to chat with Angie. She was sitting on the grass with her friend Evelyn Ungvari, quietly reading a book about Andy Warhol. Evelyn looked up and said to him: “You should draw her. One day she is going to be famous.”

FIVE

Here she was seventeen and naked in front of a camera, watched by a bunch of strange guys. I couldn’t understand why she did it, but I felt that this was a girl who knew what her goals were.

—C
YBORG
2
ACTRESS
K
AREN
S
HEPERD

Like father, like daughter. As much as it may have irked her to admit it, Angie was as ambivalent about her future career as the teenage Jon Voight had been. With her unsatisfactory experience at the Lee Strasberg theater studio still fresh in her mind and with her mother’s guidance, Angie was leaning toward modeling. Not that she embraced that path with any special enthusiasm; she was doing it to please her mother.

Modeling versus acting, her father versus her mother, life versus death: The yin and yang of her adolescent Gemini soul was on mawkish display when she agreed to accompany her father, who was guest of honor, to the Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival in February 1990. She claimed to be disinterested in her father and in the film industry, but here she was flying halfway around the world to a Japanese mining town.

Not that she proved especially effusive company. Her father was shocked at her withdrawn manner and wraithlike appearance. “She was almost like a ghost. I found out later about the cutting, the self-mutilation,” he recalled. During the five-day visit to the land of symbolism and imagery, Angie got her first tattoo. Appropriately, it was the word
“kanji,”
Japanese for “death.”

Her absorption with death did not stop her from following her mother into that most ephemeral and superficial of professions, modeling. It was her second attempt at this career path, Angie having been too self-conscious when her mother first took her to auditions at the age of ten. Now fourteen
and struggling with anorexia, somewhat perversely she made the grade. In the fashion world, skinny is good; skinnier is better. With her bee-stung lips, flawless skin, and aura of reluctant, somewhat sullen, sexuality, the schoolgirl was soon in demand, at least in the European market. Back home, American magazine editors wanted models with girl-next-door appeal. It was not long before Angie was flown to shoots in London and New York, accompanied by her mother.

As with many models, the focus on her looks made her more critical of herself. “I always thought I looked like that blonde Muppet Janice with a big mouth and hair parted in the middle,” she told writer Jane Rusoff. “When I was starting out I just wanted to be like a regular kind of pretty and not have ‘different’ features.” It became a refrain; her desire to be “the other girl.” At the same time, she dressed like a punk and identified with outsiders like the hero of
Edward Scissorhands,
the cult movie released in December 1990 that was a must-see for every goth worth her black mascara. Angie was smitten with actor Johnny Depp, who played Edward, an isolated figure with scissors for hands who lives in an attic and falls for the teenage daughter of a suburban family who cares for him. The movie’s themes of alienation and self-discovery, as well as the disheveled figure of Edward Scissorhands, spoke to the angst-ridden Angie.

She may have been uncertain about herself and her looks, but modeling agencies soon recognized her potential. During 1990 she signed with Elite Model Management, home of supermodels Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell, and Cindy Crawford. It was at the height of the agency’s influence; that same year Evangelista uttered the immortal quote about her profession: “We don’t wake up for less than ten thousand dollars a day.” While not quite in that league, Angie, still only fifteen and in her final year at school, was earning rather more than pin money, doing catalog work for stores like JCPenney and featuring in a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream commercial.

At this time she showed little ambition to go into acting. Certainly that was her reaction when aspiring singer Brian Evans asked if she wanted to go into films. “I
don’t
want to be in the entertainment industry like my dad,” she told him emphatically as they sat in a limousine on the way to the October 1990 premiere of
Book of Love,
a gaudy rite-of-passage movie set in the 1950s. Perhaps it was just as well. During his fleeting if memorable appearance as a Boy Scout with a candle sticking out of his rear end, Evans
glanced over at the daughter of an Oscar winner. She smiled and shook her head in disbelief. “Thankfully she did not ask me if I was a Method actor,” he says ruefully. “At least she was not in the same business at the time.”

Her antipathy toward acting had more to do with her father than with the profession. Anything she was going to achieve in life, she told herself, she was going to do without her father’s help. She made this sentiment plain the moment she walked through the door of Robert Kim’s photography studio in Los Angeles in early 1991. Even though her father had given her a ride there, she pleaded with makeup artist Rita Montanez: “Please don’t tell Robert who my dad is.” Rita was as good as her word, and throughout the four-hour shoot the portrait photographer had no clue about Angie’s famous father. Rita recalls: “She was very self-contained and never wanted anyone to help. She wanted to do it all herself. It was very important for her to achieve her goals without her father’s help.” Indeed, Angie insisted that he stay in his car rather than come into the studio to pick her up. It was only later, when Rita was working on another of Angie’s jobs, at the Photo Studio in Sherman Oaks, that she realized there might be another reason why Angie was so keen to keep her father in the background. Though it was early in the morning, Jon was disheveled, hadn’t slept, and seemed disoriented. “Angie never gave anything away about her father. When I saw him, I understood why.”

Meanwhile, the photographer, Kim, himself a former child actor, thought Angie had made the right choice to focus on modeling rather than acting. During the shoot the bespectacled schoolgirl never said a word. “She was a skinny teenager wet behind the ears and was so quiet that I could not possibly see her emoting in a movie.” Yet the camera loved her; Angie came alive under the lights. “She had an edgy kind of energy,” he recalls.

During a phone conversation, Marche told Kim that Angie’s sultry yet youthful look had come to the attention of French
Vogue.
Magazine executives had frequently phoned mother and daughter in an attempt to lure her to Europe, telling them that within two years Angie would become a star. Angie was not interested. “She’s a big girl; I can’t force her to do anything,” Marche told the photographer. Whether this was an accurate reflection of Angie’s career or Marche’s overactive imagination at work, Kim had his own opinion about what she should do next. At the end of the shoot, he took Angie aside: “Go to Paris for a couple of years and come back rich
and famous,” he counseled. She shook her head in disagreement. “I want to make it just like my daddy made it—through hard work and talent,” she told him.

Yet just weeks after posing for head shots at Kim’s studio, she was telling quite another story. In the spring of 1991 Jon Voight, remembering that
Peter Pan
had been Angie’s favorite story, arranged for her and James to visit his friend Dustin Hoffman, who was playing Captain Hook in Steven Spielberg’s continuation of J. M. Barrie’s classic children’s novel. As thoughtful as his gesture was, it seemed to reflect how Angie’s father was always several steps behind her development. By the time she was ten, she had realized that she could no longer live in her imagination like a child, and yet here she was, almost six years later, watching the making of a movie about a child who never grows up. For the brooding teenager, her age of wonder had long gone.

Nor was Hoffman overly impressed when he met her on set, describing Angie as a “tall, thin, gawky-looking girl with a mouth full of braces.” When he casually asked what James and Angie planned to do with their lives, he was surprised at Angie’s certainty. “She gave me a laserlike look of intensity and she says, ‘I’m going to be an actress.’ And I went home to my wife and I said, ‘I don’t think this kid has any idea what a tough road she’s got.’ ”

It was a road made all the tougher by her gradual estrangement from her father. In their complex relationship, her adolescent contempt and disdain, fueled by an underlying competitive drive, warred with an almost maternal concern for his well-being.

Around the time they visited Dustin Hoffman on the set of a fairy tale, her father was involved in a personal tragedy that could only exacerbate parental concerns about Angie’s flirtation with death and suicide. Jon had let a young woman, Julie “Cindy” Jones, take temporary occupancy of an apartment he was renting near his home in Hollywood. Vivacious, glamorous, and fun, the thirty-three-year-old had a dark side, and had twice attempted suicide. One weekend early in March 1991, Julie and a girlfriend went skiing at the Lake Arrowhead resort in California. They arrived back late, Julie’s friend noticing Jon Voight walking his dog as she dropped Julie off. While Julie, who was troubled by a bitter divorce battle, had frequently been distraught during the ski trip, she seemed to have calmed down.

As police records would later show, a few minutes after arriving home, Voight spoke with Julie on the telephone. Shortly after that one
A.M
. phone call, Julie put a .25-caliber Beretta handgun to her chest and shot herself through the heart. At seven o’clock on the morning of March 11, Jon Voight went to see her and found Julie dead in a pool of blood on the living room floor. She was dressed entirely in white—even down to a pair of white socks and white shoes, as though she were a bride about to meet her maker. The autopsy stated the cause of death as “gunshot wound,” and noted that there was a great deal of alcohol in her system.

After her funeral in Sacramento, Voight organized the cleaning of her blood-spattered apartment as well as a ceremony of remembrance at his home involving Native American chanting for her departed soul. At the time, he was filming
The Last of His Tribe,
a TV movie about Ishi, the last survivor of the Yahi Indians of California, which earned him a Golden Globe nomination.

Julie’s death—and the circumstances surrounding it—affected him deeply. That he was the last person to speak to her ignited incredible guilt. Voight wondered if he could have done more to save her—and if his daughter, emaciated, hostile, and prone to suicidal thoughts, could end up the same way. The trauma of finding Julie Jones’s body shaped and heightened his concerns about Angie, Voight never forgetting the blood and the horror of that terrible day.

In the summer of 1991, after earning a California High School certificate—the equivalent of graduating—from Moreno High (Continuation), Angie again enrolled in her mother’s alma mater, the Lee Strasberg studio, and later joined the Met Theatre Company, where her first role was as a talking salamander. As much as she might have fought against it, her father was in the audience for her first public workshop performance, in an adaptation of the 1930s slapstick comedy
Room Service,
made famous by the Marx Brothers. He was surprised at what he saw. Angie played the part of Gregory Wagner, a fat, balding German, as a female dominatrix. “I was a little shocked,” Jon later recalled. “But the shock came from the realization that, oh my God, she’s just like me. She’ll take these crazy parts and be thrilled that she can make people chuckle or whatever.” Whether she liked it or not, she was closely following in her father’s footsteps. Later, her reading of
Catherine in Arthur Miller’s
A View From the Bridge
would move Jon Voight to tears, no doubt in part as it reminded him of his early success on Broadway in the same play nearly thirty years before.