Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography (6 page)

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 mother, 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.”

While Jon admits that the rift between them was “very severe,” in the beginning they were civil to each other, a part of Marche hoping that he
would return to his family and that she would awaken from what seemed like a bad dream. For a time Jon treated his estranged wife almost like a mother confessor, revealing intimate details of his relationship with Stacey. He was almost too honest about his new life, telling Marche about his drug use and bedroom antics. Krisann recalls: “She would say things like, ‘They go to the bathroom in front of each other!’ She was horrified. I told her that if she wanted to win Jon back, she was going to have to step up her sexual game. She was very straitlaced and conventional when it came to sex. At that time, Jon was a very sexy man. He walked into a room and he turned heads.

“I can tell you that Angie does not get her sexuality from her mother, that’s for damn sure. It comes from her father. Marche was graceful, sweet, and kind, but she became a bitter, scorned woman and she never let that anger out of her heart. She never moved on when she lost her role as Mrs. Jon Voight, and made sure she clung to that fame for as long as possible. Don’t get me wrong—I loved and adored Marche. But she never let go of her anger. Jon took away her fairy tale, and she felt bereft. I felt sorry for her.”

After he moved out, Jon rented an apartment on the fifth floor of the same building on Roxbury where he had lived with Marcheline. It was a white, unfurnished room that he planned to use as a business address to which his mail, film scripts, and other work-related materials could be delivered.

Shortly afterward, Marche had Angie’s white crib taken to Jon’s fifth-floor apartment. This was the “Ivory Tower” where Angie lived for more than a year, with a random assortment of babysitters looking after her twenty-four hours a day. Marche’s brother, Raleigh, would often recruit out-of-work actors or acquaintances to work in shifts at three dollars an hour.

Meanwhile, Angie’s older brother, Jamie, stayed with his mother on the second floor. For a long time Jamie and Angie remained apart, except for occasional outings together to Roxbury Park. Randy Alpert, a friend of Marche’s brother Raleigh, helped out for a time, making both Angie and James breakfast and taking them to the park. “I loved working for them,” he recalls. “Marche was so gorgeous and sweet and kind. Truly an angel.”

When I interviewed Krisann Morel for this book, she painted a rather
different portrait of the household. Two years younger than Marche and a part-time model herself, at first she was confident, in control, chatting amiably about her days working at the Rainbow Bar and Grill on Sunset, remembering the night John Lennon was thrown out by overenthusiastic bouncers.

Nestled deep in her story lay a dark secret she had struggled to keep for more than half a lifetime. Now was time for confession. First, though, she wanted to set the scene. So she talked about Jon Voight; his blooming wife, Marche; the birth of Angie.

Her voice, so strong and firm, began to crack as, in her mind’s eye, she journeyed back in time to what she called the Ivory Tower, the white room with the white carpet, the white doors, the white drapes, the white walls, and the white crib. And the baby girl, helpless and alone.

Remembering those days, Krisann twisted her wedding ring, and her face contorted in an effort to suppress the welling emotion. “This has been my burden for thirty-three years. I saw what happened to Angelina Jolie, and it haunts me to this day. As much as I wanted to help, I couldn’t fix the hurt. I loved Marche, and I think she really loved her daughter, but the truth is the truth.

“Marche took her pain out on that child. She separated herself from that child because she looked a lot like Jon. She was fair like him and had his eyes.”

Not surprisingly, Angie was very different from her brother, who enjoyed a close relationship with his mother. She learned to talk late, never crawled but walked at ten months, did not play with dolls or stuffed animals, and was rather aloof. “She now says that she doesn’t like to be hugged. I can understand why,” says Krisann. “You could hold her, but I could feel her pain. I was not the mother holding her. Angie had happy moments, but for the first two years of her life she was not a happy child. I hate to say it, but it’s the truth. I can understand if Angie has abandonment issues, because she was abandoned as a child. Even she doesn’t know why.”

Certainly the way Angie was raised in the early months of her life raises red flags among clinical psychologists and psychoanalysts. The key to understanding this issue is the fact that babies are born without the capacity to differentiate or articulate their feelings and needs. They are in what is termed
a “global undifferentiated state,” their emotions, if not met, lurching from anxiety to panic and finally disassociation. It is the attention and response of the mother or other consistent caregiver that allows infants to develop basic trust, the capacity to regulate their emotional state. In short, a mother turns distress into comfort.

Babies who do not get this kind of response often develop self-destructive coping mechanisms for the intolerable emotion they feel. This means that a child who has not had a relationship with a mother or an adequate substitute remains in a global undifferentiated state, living without the words, ideas, or capacity to relate to his or her own experience. In later life this angst can be manifested in alcoholism, drug abuse, cutting, and suicidal tendencies.

As contemporary psychoanalyst Dr. Franziska De George, who has practiced in Beverly Hills for nearly twenty years and never treated Angelina or her family, says: “The child whose mother abandons them at six months not only has severe trauma, but beyond that the child is lacking a relationship with itself. The basic emotional building blocks are missing. It is a house, or personality, built on shifting sands. While the rest of the house may be working beautifully, the emotional part is missing. In later life this is even more confusing.”

Marche’s own depression and trauma would have communicated themselves to her daughter, further exacerbating the infant’s feelings of alienation. Psychologist and author Iris Martin, who has specialized in working with chief executives and their families for the last twenty-five years but also never treated Angelina or her family, observes: “Angelina Jolie will have experienced profound abandonment, anxiety, and may have experienced depression. Early experience is based on two things: structure and trust. So her early attachment was fragmented, full of painful emotions. Her foundation of who she is is a mess.”

At some point Marche agreed that her children could start to play with each other rather than be looked after on separate floors of the apartment building by different sets of babysitters. It was an economic as much as an emotional argument that won the day, Marche agreeing to pay her babysitters five dollars an hour to watch both children rather than hire two babysitters at three dollars each. The children played well together, and eventually James kept some of his toys, such as an electric car, in Angie’s room on the fifth floor. As Iris Martin observes: “Jamie was probably a buffer for her. He
comforted her. She was not getting human contact from anyone but the babysitters.”

At the same time, Jamie was always the favored child, the one who was the focus of attention, the one expected to succeed in life. He was the monarch of the family, as the beautifully hand-drawn and hand-painted fourth birthday card saying “King James” showed. For that same birthday, Krisann embroidered a number four on his denim dungarees, while Jon’s friend film director Charles Eastman came over to take pictures. Eastman later recalled that Angie was “kind of in the background that day. All eyes were on her brother.” Angie’s birthdays were much more low-key affairs.

Marche’s anger and depression manifested itself not only in her distracted behavior toward her daughter, but also in the frenzied way she lived her life. Outwardly all smiles, generous and loving, adored by everyone, Marche, still only twenty-six, was nursing a wound so deep that nothing could really mend her broken heart. She became obsessed with her acting career, spending most days as a student at the Lee Strasberg school while a team of babysitters looked after her children. When she was not focusing on her craft, she was shopping for clothes—there was an ocean liner chest filled with unworn antique French baby clothes for Angelina—or buying expensive antiques, mainly country French style, from high-end stores in Beverly Hills.