Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography (3 page)

As for Jon, he got the chill factor designing and painting sets for his school’s theater productions. Though he did also take to the stage—his mother, a part-time teacher, was his first director, when he was in sixth grade—at that time he had no thoughts of taking up the profession.

Like his brothers, Jon attended the Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains, New York, and in between classes was an enthusiastic and talented stage designer. “We were in a real safe place to be creative, experiment,” he recalls. It was the school’s longtime drama teacher, the Reverend Bernard McMahon, now retired, who convinced a baby-faced Voight to move from stage design to playing the comedy lead of Count Pepi Le Loup
in the school’s annual musical,
Song of Norway,
an operetta about the life of composer Edvard Grieg. In his senior class the next year, Voight took the part of the valet Lutz in
The Student Prince
. The 1956 yearbook raved: “Complete with German accent and whiskers, Jon surpassed his amazing triumph of last year with a masterful handling of the play’s main comic role.” His leading lady was Barbara Locke, a student at the all-girls Good Counsel Academy High School in White Plains. “Oh, he was talented and charismatic,” recalls Locke, who still gets the occasional surprise telephone call from her onetime leading man. “He was charming and always a nice-looking young man. The girls were crazy about him.”

He was equally crazy about the stage and would pore over English theater critic Kenneth Tynan’s reviews of West End plays. The work of actor Laurence Olivier held a particular fascination. “I would read these sections over and over—much before I ever made a decision about being an actor—fascinated by Olivier’s ability to design these great roles so that they would come alive for modern audiences. It was intriguing how he set the performance for a beginning, a middle, and a climactic ending.”

Yet even when Jon went off to college, he remained ambivalent about pursuing a career in acting. In 1957, after his freshman year at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., he changed his major from speech and drama to art while continuing to do stage design. Voight, who played college basketball, designed the cardinal that adorned the center of the basketball court, a section of flooring that is now on display in the school’s Pryzbyla University Center. Serious-minded, ascetic, and thoughtful, he entertained thoughts of becoming a priest, but that ambition soon evaporated. “I couldn’t have taken it,” he explains frankly. “I loved gals too much.” During his four years at the university, Voight, blond, blue-eyed, and touching six foot four inches, was sufficiently popular with both sexes to be elected president of the student body.

After completing his degree in 1960, he seems to have had yet another change of heart and returned to New York to try his hand at acting rather than art. With the political baton about to be passed from Eisenhower to Kennedy, the theater scene in downtown Manhattan reflected the rapidly changing cultural climate. Young actors saw themselves as artists and idealists, agents of change. The idea of chasing fame and celebrity was treated with disdain by the new breed of downtown thespians, among them
Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman, and Jon Voight. Their hero was Marlon Brando, who, after performing in Tennessee Williams’s
A Streetcar Named Desire
onstage in New York, boarded a plane to Hollywood to make a movie and declared that he would return to his first love, the theater, the instant filming was finished. These young tyros may have been idealistic, but they were also as competitive as any Wall Street trader. As Hoffman later recalled, “Actors are like women. Women check each other out in a way that men don’t. They look at the breasts, they look at the legs . . . because they are in competition with each other. Actors check each other out in a not dissimilar way.”

Voight enrolled with the legendary acting coach Sanford Meisner, who taught Method acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse. Along with contemporaries who included James Caan and Robert Duvall, he absorbed Meisner’s dictum that “acting is the ability to live truthfully under imaginary circumstances.”

Voight’s off-Broadway debut in the long-forgotten
O Oysters
revue at the Village Gate nightclub on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village was less than impressive. According to one critic—Voight remembers he was from Vermont—he could “neither walk nor talk.” Nevertheless, he persevered. Voight and his roommate James Bateman, whom he had met at Catholic University, developed a comedy double act featuring two naïve hillbilly characters, Harold and Henry Gibson, the latter a derivative of playwright Henrik Ibsen’s name. Bateman took Henry Gibson as his stage name, later finding fame as the flower-holding poet in the TV show
Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.

For his next effort, in 1961, Voight returned to the musical, a medium in which he had excelled in high school. He appeared as a temporary replacement for the Welsh actor Brian Davies in the role of Rolf Gruber, a Nazi who introduced the song “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” in the original Broadway production of the Rodgers and Hammerstein smash
The Sound of Music.

Although he was with the show for only a short time, he made an impression on Detroit-born actress Lauri Peters, who played Liesl, the eldest Von Trapp daughter. Just sixteen when Richard Rodgers cast her in 1959, by the time she met Voight, Lauri was already a stage veteran and had been
nominated for a prestigious Tony Award for her performance. They started dating, Voight struggling to find work while his girlfriend was trying to fit film roles around her nightly Broadway appearances. The blonde actress with the girl-next-door looks starred with teen heartthrob Fabian, the star of
American Bandstand,
and Hollywood veteran James Stewart in the family comedy
Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation.
Although it was inevitable that she would be romantically linked with Fabian, it was Voight who won her heart.

Lauri Peters was only nineteen going on twenty when she married Jon Voight in 1962. That year she starred alongside singer Cliff Richard in the classic British feel-good film
Summer Holiday,
released the following year, while her husband won his first TV role, a bit part in the long-running
Gunsmoke.
When the curtain finally came down on
The Sound of Music
in June 1963, Peters took on the role of Louisette in the play
A Murderer Among Us,
directed by Sam Wanamaker, which closed after its opening night in March 1964.

After other small TV walk-ons in
Naked City
and
The Defenders,
Voight snagged his first film role as the eponymous Fearless Frank, a dim-witted hayseed with matinee idol good looks who heads to the big city and is murdered and resurrected as a kind of comic-book hero. He was more successful on the stage, getting his first big break in an acclaimed off-Broadway revival of the 1955 Arthur Miller drama
A View From the Bridge
in January 1965, working opposite Robert Duvall and getting to know Dustin Hoffman, who was the show’s assistant director and stage manager. Voight and Hoffman were both young, idealistic, and passionate about their craft, artistic purity held in far higher esteem than any siren call from Hollywood.

Then it was Voight who was making waves—if not money. After his success off-Broadway, he was invited to San Diego, where he was the star in the 1966 National Shakespeare Festival at the Old Globe Theatre. Significantly, in the downtime between rehearsal and performance, he was gripped by James Leo Herlihy’s novel
Midnight Cowboy,
about the unlikely friendship between New York hustler Ratso Rizzo and a naïve Texas dishwasher who comes to the Big Apple to earn a living servicing sex-starved women. The oddball love story, published in 1965, rapidly attained cult status.

He put the book aside and continued his steady progress in off-Broadway
theater, in March 1967 winning a Theatre World Award for his performance opposite Greek actress Irene Papas in the Frank D. Gilroy play
That Summer—That Fall.
He was not the only Voight boy to be making a name for himself: His elder brother, Barry, was on his way to becoming a world-renowned volcanologist, while his kid brother, Chip, had penned the song “Wild Thing,” first performed by the Troggs, which became the summer anthem of 1966. As Jon Voight recalls: “I was one of the first people that he played it for, and I remember falling down on the floor laughing, and coming up saying, ‘It’s a hit! It’s a hit! People won’t be able to get it off their tongues!’ It’s a fun song.”

His five-year marriage, however, was no laughing matter. An ambitious actor, tall, rangy, with soulful blue eyes and a ready smile, he attracted women like moths to a flame. “My God, the girls loved him. They would come backstage,” recalls Dustin Hoffman. “They wanted to marry him and to mother him. He was a matinee idol off-Broadway.”

Unsurprisingly, Peters and Voight decided to part company, their youth, time spent apart, and the temptations of success all playing a part in their decision to divorce in 1967. As Voight later recalled of that period in his life, “If you come out of nowhere, then suddenly everyone wants a piece of you, you get an inflated view of yourself. I always wanted to do the right things, responsible pieces and charity work, but in terms of the personal attention I got from gals, well, success is the greatest aphrodisiac of all.”

Still, that same year he found himself eclipsed by his friend and rival Dustin Hoffman, whose performance in
The Graduate
rocketed him to stardom. By contrast, while Voight was gaining a degree of critical respect on the boards, he had done little on the big screen. “Jon had been the rising star in the theater, but after
The Graduate
it was Dustin who was the star,” recalls photographer Michael Childers. “They were very competitive, but it wasn’t bitchy. Everyone was trying to do their best work.”

When Voight heard that the legendary director John Schlesinger had agreed to film
Midnight Cowboy,
the novel he had read the previous summer, he was desperate for a part, especially when Dustin Hoffman snagged the plum role of Ratso Rizzo. At the time, he and Hoffman were working together on the U.S. premiere of Harold Pinter’s play
The Dwarfs
at David Wheeler’s Theatre Company of Boston. “The way I saw my industry in the sixties was that the movies weren’t about anything,” Voight now recalls.
“We didn’t have the equivalent of a Kurosawa or a Bergman or a Fellini. Schlesinger was the answer for me.”

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.