Brangelina (2 page)

Years later, Jon Voight recalled his father: “He was just a delightful man, a wonderful man, full of fun. And he had very strong principles. He didn’t tolerate dishonesty, didn’t like liars, and didn’t suffer fools gladly … People loved him.”

Each of Elmer’s sons went on to considerable success in his chosen field. James became a songwriter and wrote a number of hits under his pseudonym, Chip Taylor, including the classic rock song, “Wild Thing.” Jon’s older brother Barry became one of the world’s leading volcanologists.

Jon Voight attended Catholic University in Washington, D.C., where he first caught the acting bug and appeared in a number of student productions. In 1959, a year before he graduated, he landed his first professional acting assignment in the off-Broadway production,
O Oysters Revue
. After one critic panned him, declaring that he could “neither talk nor walk,” Voight seriously considered giving up acting. But he persevered and landed the role of the singing Nazi, Rolf, in
The Sound of Music
on Broadway in 1961, replacing the original cast member. It was in this production that he met Lauri Peters, an accomplished young actress who played Liesl and who, along with her stage siblings, received a Tony nomination for best supporting actor. Each night onstage, Voight and Peters performed the memorable love song “I am Sixteen” together, in which Rolf promises to take care of Liesl. Although Rolf’s devotion to the Nazi party gets in the way of his budding romance with Liesl in the story onstage, offstage a real-life romance began to develop between the two, and in 1962 they were married.

Through the mid-1960s, Voight’s acting career developed slowly. He played a number of small roles on TV shows such as
Gunsmoke
and
Coronet Blue
, along with bit parts in Hollywood westerns and B-movies. In 1966, he started to get more notice for his acting abilities when he spent a season with the California National Shakespeare Festival, and in 1967 he won a Theater World award for his role in the stage production of
That Summer, That Fall
, acting opposite a young Tyne Daly. Success had its price, though; his marriage to Peters ended that same year, apparently due to their conflicting acting schedules, which seldom allowed them to be in the same part of the country for any length of time.

In 1969, Voight’s groundbreaking role in
Midnight Cowboy
vaulted him into the Hollywood elite. Shortly thereafter he met a stunningly beautiful young actress, the late Marcheline Bertrand, at a party in the Hollywood Hills. In 1971, they were married.

Bertrand was born in a suburb of Chicago, the daughter of a working-class French Canadian, Rolland Bertrand, and his wife, Lois June Gouwens.

Although Bertrand is often described as a French actress, Jolie tried to set the record straight in a 2001 interview with
Allure
magazine: “My mom is as far from French Parisian as you can get. She’s part Iroquois Indian, from Chicago. She grew up in a bowling alley that my grandparents owned.” It is unknown whether Bertrand actually had any Iroquois blood; the story seems to come from something Voight told Angelina when she was little about her French Canadian ancestry to make it seem more exotic. (It is well-known that there was a lot of intermarriage between the early French settlers in Canada and the native peoples.)

When Bertrand was fifteen, her family moved to Los Angeles. There, Bertrand got the acting bug and promptly enrolled at the Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio. It is often said that Bertrand gave up a promising acting career when, at the age of twenty-one, she married Voight, but this is an exaggeration. Before she met her future husband, she had no professional experience to speak of, not that she hadn’t made an impression on people. “She was an unusually good person in the best sense of the word,” remembers Strasberg’s widow, Anna, with whom Bertrand trained. “It’s rare in your life when you meet somebody like her.” In 1971, Voight used his connections to land his fiancée a small role on the TV show
Ironside
, but this and a number of subsequent minor movie roles made no impression, and her career stagnated.

In May 1973, less than two years after their marriage, Bertrand gave birth to a son, James Haven Voight. A baby daughter arrived two years later, in June 1975. They christened her Angelina Jolie Voight. Later it was explained that the children’s middle names were specifically chosen to give them potential stage names in the event they decided to take up acting. Interviewing his daughter for the June 1997 issue of
Interview
magazine, Voight described for her his recollection of her birth:

You don’t remember it, but when you emerged from your mother’s womb, I picked you up, held you in my hand, and looked at your face. You had your finger by the side of your cheek, and you looked very, very wise, like my old best friend. I started to tell you how your mom and I were so happy to have you here, and that we were going to take great care of you and watch for all those signs of who you were and how we could help you achieve all that wonderful potential God gave you. I made that pledge and everybody in the room started crying.

Sadly, less than a year after Angelina was born, Voight and Bertrand separated, amid reports of Voight’s womanizing. A mutual friend, Larry Groen, provided some insight into the couple’s relationship:

Jon was absolutely smitten with Mar. She was drop-dead gorgeous, and heads would always turn when she entered the room, even in a town where beautiful women were everywhere. I wouldn’t call their relationship tumultuous; they didn’t fight. But she was at home raising two small children and Jon was this movie star who everybody wanted a piece of. And I mean everybody. These were the days when swinging started to be in vogue, and there were orgies literally every night, especially in Malibu, where people threw wild parties at their beach houses. The temptations were everywhere and most people succumbed, not just Jon. Keep in mind that after
Midnight Cowboy
, he was very, very hot. Women threw themselves at the guy wherever he went. And not just women, men too. He had played this famous gay character, and people assumed that he was homosexual. Most actors were, or they went both ways. But not Jon, at least not that I could tell … He liked women a lot. I think somebody told Mar about a party where they saw Jon all over a woman, and that’s what alerted her. As far as I remember, it wasn’t one affair that broke up their marriage. Of course, everybody was cheating; everybody in Hollywood was getting married and divorcing. Very few marriages survived those crazy times. There was a lot of sex; a lot more than today, that’s for sure.

Other accounts say that Voight was having an affair with another actress. He himself will not elaborate, explaining simply, “I was having difficulty with the marriage. I had an affair, and there was a divorce.” Voight moved out and paid enough alimony and child support for Bertrand to live comfortably but not extravagantly. According to numerous allegations, Voight virtually abandoned his young family, causing his son and daughter to harbor years of resentment. “My father and I were never close,” Angelina told
People
magazine in August 2003. Voight “seldom saw his daughter while she was growing up,” wrote
Vanity Fair
in November 2004 after interviewing Jolie. “My mom raised me,” Angelina now tells interviewers. Likewise, James has frequently spoken in recent years of his bitterness towards his father for leaving them in the lurch. But the facts appear to speak otherwise. Bertrand and Voight shared custody in a very amicable agreement and split their time with the children fairly.

According to Groen, “Jon doted on his kids. I don’t remember a lot of animosity between Jon and Mar. They stayed friends, and they had the kids in common. They handled the breakup fairly healthily, I think. Angie and James were very close to their mom, no question about it, but they always had fun with Jon, and he took a real interest in their lives. They spent a lot of time with him.”

Indeed, one of Jolie’s kindergarten teachers related to Jolie’s biographer Rhona Mercer that Voight was very present. “Her father was always picking up her and her brother,” the teacher recalled. “He was always around. I don’t know if they had a good relationship; all I know is that he did the fatherly thing. He came to sports day. He came to the school. They lived in Palisades, where all the big stars like Al Pacino lived.”

And even Jolie herself, before her estrangement from her father in 2003, seemed sympathetic to his side of the marriage breakup, explaining, “My father is a perfect example of an artist who couldn’t be married. He had the perfect family, but there’s something about that that’s very scary for him.”

In an interview Voight gave to
People
magazine when Angelina was seven years old, he addressed his role as a divorced father. “The focus,” he explained, “is always the kids. Whatever Marche and I go through, we consider how it affects them. We’ve each made mistakes. 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. But they will have learned how to deal with adversity.”

Shortly after the couple finally divorced, in 1978, Marcheline took up with UCLA filmmaking student and later documentary filmmaker Bill Day, who was fond of young James and Angelina. This prompted occasional jealousy on the part of Voight. “The kids are crazy about this guy,” he acknowledged in an interview at the time. “There are male egos involved, and there is friction, the whole territorial thing. We don’t necessarily sync, but we each give ground. He’s crazy about Marche and really loves the kids.” For her part, Marcheline always defended Voight’s role as a father. “Nothing means more to Jon than the children,” she told
People
magazine in 1993.

When Angelina was only six years old, Voight wrote and starred in a movie called
Looking to Get Out
, teaming up again with the brilliant director of
Coming Home
, Hal Ashby. They couldn’t recreate the magic of their first collaboration, however; most critics agreed the film was awful. But Voight did manage to arrange a small role for Angelina, her first big-screen appearance, as a cute little girl named Tosh, who appears in a long scene with her father. The acting wasn’t memorable, but it was clear even at that age that the camera loved her.

The same year, Bertrand moved east to escape the brutal smog of Los Angeles, which had been wreaking havoc with her allergies. She settled with her children in a small community on the Hudson River north of New York City, Sneden’s Landing. The separation was hard on Voight, who was used to seeing James and Angie several days a week. He told one interviewer at the time that he missed his children terribly. Before long, he was commuting east each month to spend time with the kids, staying at his mother’s home in Scarsdale, about half an hour away.

Since their estrangement in 2003, Jolie has given a number of interviews downplaying her father’s involvement in the lives of his children, often claiming “he wasn’t there.” But in 2001, she sounded very different: “I never remember a time when I needed my father and he wasn’t there. But he’s an artist, and it was the ’70s, a strange time for everybody. To this day, I think my parents really love each other. It’s a beautiful story. I saw them at Christmas; they came to our house.” Jolie even addressed the occasional press report that claimed that Voight had been estranged from his family: “The press likes to use the family angle, because then they get to include this whole other aspect of my life, but they’re always disappointed to hear I’m not trying to hide anything about some huge, sordid estrangement between us. The fact is, he’s very much a part of my life, but I’ve always been pretty independent of him, too.”

By most earlier accounts, including her own, Jolie’s L.A. childhood was a happy one before she moved east. She loved to watch Disney movies with her brother and play with her pet lizard named Vladimir and her snake, called Harry Dean Stanton, after the actor. “I think a lot of people think I had a very different childhood than I had,” she said years later. “I probably had a more normal childhood than most people would think.”

To Voight’s delight, when Angelina was twelve years old, Bertrand moved back to L.A. with her children. The details of Angelina’s life in New York are murky, but it was clear that something about her had changed by the time she returned to the West Coast. Angelina Jolie had discovered her dark side.

By the time Angelina moved back to Los Angeles with her mother and brother in 1986, she was no longer the fun-loving little girl people remembered. This may have been due to her frequent forays into Manhattan, accompanying her mother on auditions. In the city, Angelina had been exposed to a seamier, edgier world, one that she had never experienced in California or in tranquil upstate New York. And she liked it. She began to change herself to fit in with the sort of people that were increasingly attracting her. By the time they arrived back in L.A., she was in full rebellion mode.

“When we moved back from New York I had really gotten into leather,” she later recalled. “I think I loved Michael Jackson or something. I used to wear the leather jackets with the zippers or collars with studs on them, and I used to ask if I could go to school wearing them.” To complete her look, the eleven-year-old started dyeing her hair jet black.

The family moved to an apartment building in a middle-class section of Beverly Hills. Once they were settled, Bertrand immediately enrolled Angelina in the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute’s Young Actors Program. The legendary Strasberg had passed away four years earlier, but his influential method acting technique lived on. The Method, a refinement of the earlier Stanislavski technique, teaches actors to recall emotions or reactions from their own lives and use them to create lifelike performances.

Among the actors who studied under Strasberg and who have credited the Method with their success are James Dean, Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Paul Newman, and, most famously, Marilyn Monroe, who came to regard Strasberg and his wife as surrogate parents and to whom she left the bulk of her estate. Bertrand herself had studied there several years earlier, and for two years Angelina attended the institute regularly on weekends, but she wasn’t entirely convinced it was for her: “They’d ask me to go back five years in my life and relive something, and at age six there isn’t that much to work with.”