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.
—CYBORG2 ACTRESS KAREN SHEPERD
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 Her father was shocked at her withdrawn manner and wraithlike appearance.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.
To prove her commitment to her new career, Angie took her collection of punk and ska CDs, as well as books by European philosophers and authors like Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, and moved out of her mother’s roomy duplex and into a studio apartment above a garage just a few blocks away. The move also enabled her to demonstrate to casting agents and others in the industry that she was “emancipated,” that is to say, independent of her parents and no longer affected by child labor laws. Her mother had for once put her foot down, telling her that she would help her achieve her goals only if she focused on her chosen path, be it acting or modeling or a combination of both. Even Marche was not prepared to take her on another round of sullen auditions.
This period of her life marked a genuine sea change, Angie giving up the aimless days hanging out at Westwood Arcade and the nights taking drugs, watching movies, and socializing. As for Anton, he was now history. She actually gave acting her all, determined to make it without her father’s help. Among all the pleasures of living on her own, perhaps the greatest thrill was that she got to use her own phone. Normally it is teenagers who spend their lives on the phone, but at Roxbury Drive it was Marche, leaving Angie frustrated and irritated that she couldn’t speak to her friends.
If acting was a competitive sport, then it was a competition Angie was determined to win. She got herself in shape by learning to box at Bodies in Motion gym in Santa Monica. “I don’t get in the ring, as I don’t want to get my teeth knocked out. But it’s great for self-defense,” she told Rita Montanez.
Already fascinated with knives and swords, she took up fencing at the Westside Fencing Center under the watchful eye of an instructor who doubled as a movie stuntwoman. After the sessions, she and friends practiced the moves she had learned, using wooden brooms as swords.
For a time the young, black-garbed goth learned the waltz and the tango at the Arthur Murray Dance Studio in Beverly Hills. (Like her father, she suffers from curvature of the spine, which is why when people meet her they are impressed more by her ramrod straight posture, which she learned in order to correct the defect, than by her “pillow” lips.) Teacher Kent Sterling, who has been instructing for thirty years, recalls: “She was a fast learner but did not stick with it long enough to really become a dancer.” Still, with her lean good looks and an upright natural grace, the school was keen for her to help sell lessons to potential clients.
Jon Voight was impressed. “It was like she put herself through the Royal Academy of Los Angeles,” he recalled. “She took acting classes, voice lessons, fencing lessons, boxing—whatever she thought she needed as an actress.”
It was her mother, however, who provided day-to-day guidance as Angie went through the daunting process of Method acting, learning, for example, to feel “in orange.”
“I used to work with my mom,” Angie recalled. “She was the most amazing support for an actor. She used to write letters to my characters. She always read the script, made a bunch of notes, and wrote these letters. She was a great person to talk to about things, and she loved the process so much.” Rather like Lee Strasberg himself, who was a better teacher than he was an actor, Marcheline, who never had the sense of timing necessary to make it in movies, proved herself to be an excellent manager and coach for her daughter.
There was an extra dimension that propelled Angie onward. Beneath her public persona of an unnervingly quiet, self-contained, well-mannered, and seemingly docile girl, albeit dressed like a punk, was a young woman desperate to use acting as a vehicle to express and explore her inner turmoil. She placed her passion for acting on a par with her need to cut herself, as a way of communicating her feelings. As she later told James Lipton, “There’s something inside of us that we want to reach out, we want to talk to each other, we want to throw our emotions and our feelings out and hope that we make some sense and we get an answer. The best way to do that is emote and hope that there would be a response.”
As for many young actors, that response was the sound of silence. Dustin Hoffman had been right in predicting it was going to be a tough road. According to Angie’s reckoning, she and her mother attended at least a hundred auditions. At first she went for girlfriend roles or the girl at high school, but she was always rejected. “I was just never that girl,” she says. As far as casting agents were concerned, she was not regular or conventional-looking enough; they told her that she was too dark or too ethnic. “It was clear that my career was going to be full of very bizarre, strange women—which ended up being the ones I liked anyway,” she recalls, her later bravado masking her intense disappointment at a time when she almost gave up hope of getting a break.
Ironically, when Angie snagged her first gig, in a music video of “It’s About Time” by the Lemonheads, she played “the other girl,” a love-struck schoolgirl. She got the part because she could “tear up” on command.
If casting agents were still to be convinced by her on-screen persona, rock star Lenny Kravitz was certainly intrigued when she appeared in his video. After the shoot, he asked her “stage mother,” Lauren Taines, who she was. “She’s going to be a big star,” said Lauren coolly. “Yeah, I know, but who is she?” Kravitz persisted. “You take one step near her and I’ll cut your hands off,” Lauren replied.
It was easy to understand why Kravitz was fascinated. Angie’s next performance, as an elusive yet beguiling teenage temptress in Antonello Venditti’s steamy music video of “Alta Marea (Don’t Dream It’s Over),” shot on Venice Beach, anticipated her slinky sexuality. After the shoot Angie and her family went to the Redondo Beach home of Chip Taylor’s son Christian to celebrate her minor success.
Although the music videos were a stepping-stone, she had yet to land a speaking part in an actual movie. Though her film career seemed stalled, her modeling work continued apace. In April 1992, shortly before her seventeenth birthday, she faced the toughest choice of her fledgling career.
A swimwear company wanted a fresh face to replace supermodel Cindy Crawford, whose celebrity meant that she was better known than the line. After spending hours looking through books of models, photographer Sean McCall was going cross-eyed searching for the right girl. It was only when Rita Montanez, who had now worked with Angie on several shoots, showed him Angie’s Elite card that he realized he had found her. “She was the obvious choice,” he recalls.
While at five feet, seven inches she was short for a top model—though that never stopped Kate Moss—she had the exotic European look he was searching for. With her long limbs, perfect skin—her only blemishes a few scratches on her hand from the cat—and a certain elusive sexual poise, she seemed ideal. There seemed to be no obvious sign of cutting.
As she changed into various swimsuits for the shoot in McCall’s cramped condo in Brentwood, she was upbeat and self-confident, a real natural. “For her age she was the most natural girl in front of a camera I had ever seen,” recalls McCall. “She was unself-conscious, whereas many teenage girls are like deer in headlights.” At one point she complained about the hot studio lights, and McCall told her that compared to movie lights, these were like candles. “I would go through that for a movie,” she said nonchalantly.
Certainly she was a shoo-in to be the face of the brand. The swimwear executives loved what they saw and arranged for a full-scale shoot on location in the State Park at Malibu, the home of the TV show Baywatch. Shortly before she was due to take over from supermodel Cindy Crawford, however, Angie decided against going on the shoot, saying that she had decided to focus on acting. “If that doesn’t work, I will go back to modeling,” she explained. In the end, Californian blonde Caprice Bourret got the gig, going on to become best known as a lingerie model and a favorite of British men’s magazines.
Angie’s decision was risky. If she had gone into modeling full-time, she would quickly have made a name for herself, whereas in the world of acting she was still a nobody. Within a matter of weeks, however, the gamble paid off. Angie had the chance to test McCall’s theory about studio lights when she auditioned for a big-budget sci-fi film initially titled Glass Shadow. Then the producers slashed the budget from $40 million to B-movie proportions and changed the title to Cyborg 2—making it the sequel to the 1989 original starring muscleman Jean-Claude Van Damme. In spite of the film’s vastly reduced scope, there were still three actresses—Legends of the Fall star Karina Lombard, martial-arts expert Cynthia Rothrock, and a model named Blueberry—vying for the role of Casella “Cash” Reese, an “almost human” cyborg designed to seduce and destroy. While Angie had a modest show reel (her modeling shoots augmented by five student shorts made by her brother while he attended USC film school), the moment she walked into the casting suite, she nailed the gig. “She sucked the air out of the room, she was so gorgeous,” recalls director Michael Schroeder. “She was special from the get-go, so talented she is a force of nature. She seemed to have the acting chops in her genes. I had a good feeling about this girl.”
Not everyone on the set was so impressed. Her costar Elias Koteas had reservations about a girl just seventeen being cast as his love interest, given their age difference—he was thirty-two at the time. Since it was a tight twenty-nine-day shoot and she had to appear nude in a love scene, it was important that she was emanicipated and therefore exempt from child labor laws.
While Michael Schroeder soothed the concerns of his leading man, others were equally doubtful about his choice of leading lady. Former world judo champion Karen Sheperd, who was playing an evil cyborg, was asked to give Angie some basic instruction in martial arts. When her mother dropped Angie off at a North Hollywood dojo—a garage turned into a karate studio—Karen, like the rest of the cast, was well aware that this was Jon Voight’s daughter. “She was skinny as a bird, arms like twigs, and she was so young and so brittle I had real doubts and thought, ‘Here we go, Hollywood nepotism.’ I was afraid I was going to hurt her.”
Angie told her that she had “dabbled” in boxing, which Karen took as a way of saying she’d done nothing before. So she expected little from the two-hour session, teaching Angie how to punch without breaking her wrist as well as kicks, blocks, spins, and the basics of holding her body in a fighting stance. “She was lacking coordination and not that agile but really focused.” As well as learning her lines, she was instructed to spend the next few days doing her fighting homework—punching in front of a mirror.
When shooting began on September 28, 1992, Angie quickly impressed her fellow actors with her dedication, her supple grace, and a willingness to work hard and take instruction. While the $2,500-a-week paycheck came in very handy, the experience mattered more to Angie. “She was an old soul,” recalls Karen Sheperd. “Not a flippant girl but mature beyond her years. I’ve worked with up-and-coming actors like Angie and they are punks. They throw tantrums and think that the whole world revolves around them. She wasn’t like that; she was self-controlled but open-minded to ideas on set no matter where they came from.”
Angie had only one rule—her father’s name was not to be mentioned. Even though she used her middle name, Jolie, which her mother had presciently chosen when she was born, Voight’s shadow was ever present. Fellow actor Ric Young had just finished a charity telethon with Jon to raise funds for Chabad, while Michael Schroeder had worked with him on a film about the Chernobyl nuclear accident a couple of years before. Young takes an artistically matter-of-fact view of Angie’s inner turmoil concerning her father. “Every actor has a scar, some conflict,” he observes. “They are always at war with somebody. If you have a wonderful childhood, there is no conflict. But acting doesn’t work that way; a person has to go through a lot.”
As much as Angie might have disapproved, Jon visited the set a couple of times, pleased that his daughter was in the hands of a “caring” director. At the time, he was rehearsing for his first stage role since playing the title role in Hamlet, the play that had cost him his marriage sixteen years before. In November 1992 he starred alongside Ethan Hawke in Chekhov’s The Seagull at New York’s Lyceum Theatre. It was a move that was to have bizarre consequences for his tenuous relationship with his daughter.
Notwithstanding her famous father, Angie came to be seen by cast and crew as quiet but not aloof, serious about making a good job of her first movie role. She normally kept to her trailer, resting, smoking, or learning her scenes. One break from the exhausting routine came when legendary Hollywood star Jack Palance arrived on set for a couple of days to film his scenes. Other actors, including Angie, gathered in his trailer to listen to the actor, who is of Ukrainian descent, declaim Russian poetry. For the most part, though, Angie was focused on the work, knowing that this was her movie and her break, and she had to make the best of it. “She was really responsive to direction and could make changes without hesitation,” recalls Michael Schroeder. “Being brought up in the business, she understood instinctively how movies are made.”
Her nude scene with Elias Koteas, which was filmed on a closed set toward the end of the shoot, did give her pause. Michael Schroeder made it as easy as possible. As the cameras rolled, he played a seductive aria from Erich Korngold’s 1920 opera, The Dead City. While her nude scene was tasteful and relatively tame, other cast members were concerned. “I felt sorry for her,” recalls Ric Young, appreciating that young actors can be “cursed by beauty,” like Marilyn Monroe was. “Everyone wants a piece of you, yet you have to be ruthless about keeping yourself to yourself. Angie has that inner toughness.”
It was a toughness that might have been helped, or honed, by what psychoanalyst Franziska De George describes as Angie’s ability to dissociate, which was related to the impulse that caused her to cut herself. If it was awkward to do a scene naked, she simply removed herself emotionally, switched gears, as cutting switched her pain from emotional to physical. Finally, her troubled background could serve an even better purpose than supplying a well of chaotic feelings to draw upon as an actress. It could give her the means to do what she had to, suffer what she had to, in order to succeed as an artist.
After the scene, Karen Sheperd, who had become a mother figure during filming, took her aside and asked if she was okay. “She said that she was glad that it was behind her. 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. She could see the big picture. She knew that she had the looks, the connections, and that if she stayed focused and absorbed it all, this film was going to be her stepping-stone.”
While she may have given that impression then, that was not the way Angie saw herself when she first viewed the completed movie. “When I saw it I threw up for three days” is her now-famous account of her movie debut. “My brother held me and I went back to school and didn’t want to work again.” Indeed, she says that it was a year before she summoned the courage to go for another audition.
Given the fact that she had left school, perhaps it wasn’t surprising that the film’s director remembers the incident rather differently. She came over to his house in Hollywood for dinner and a viewing. Understandably apprehensive, she sat with Schroeder, and when the movie ended, she told him that she had to be by herself and drove off into the night. The next day she called him to apologize. “Sorry, I was blown away by the movie and had to leave,” she told him. She called again a couple of days later to tell him how much she liked the film. That night he took her to a bar in West Hollywood and bought Angie her first martini. “I love the movie and I love you; it’s all great,” she told her director. As he says, “A lot of actors won’t go to the movies they are in. When she came out with me she was fine.” She had once again moved past her own feelings.
Such was her enthusiasm that she immediately agreed to reprise her role of Cash for the sequel due to be filmed in 1993. She had already started prepping the script when the film’s new star, Zach Galligan, then riding high after Gremlins, insisted that a “name” actress be cast in Angie’s part. When the new producers chose Emmy Award–winning TV actor Khrystyne Haje, director Michael Schroeder was so angry that he quit the movie and returned only when he was threatened with legal action. “When I told Angie that they had decided to go with someone else, she was so gracious,” he says, describing his time making Cyborg 3 as the worst experience of his career.
It was almost as bad for Angie. She had pinned her hopes on having a breakthrough with this movie. As it turned out, she hardly worked for more than a year. During this hiatus, Marche did an “amazing” job with her daughter, encouraging her to work hard at modeling so that she would have a lot of material for her acting show reel.
Marche had other, more ethereal plans to help Angie snag a foothold on the acting ladder. They met with Marche’s regular psychic, who also helps the San Francisco police on unsolved cases, and she would take an object Angie was wearing and “see” her destiny through the vibrations she felt. Her mother also pinned her hopes on a subject that had fascinated her for years: astrology. Mother and daughter would read the runes, or rather the stars, seeking a pathway for Angie’s acting journey.
Marcheline even bought an astrology computer program to pick out the signposts in the stars that would guide Angie’s career. Unfortunately, she did not like the astrological map that the computer spat out: Angie’s chart specifically pinpointed a “controlling mother” who could make or break her career. Marche refused to let Angie see this chart, insisting that her friend Lauren Taines alter the actual computer program so that it was wiped from the memory. It was a telling incident.
In general, however, Marche and Lauren were so pleased with the program that they decided to set up their own company, Open Sky, to advise clients about their astrological charts. Unfortunately, the perfectionist in Marche ensured that the project was stillborn. She spent so long worrying about the punctuation and grammar for the company brochure that the venture never got off the ground—or, more appropriately, came to earth.
While Marche was poring over syntax, Angie enjoyed some consolation for losing Cyborg 3 when she beat hundreds of other young hopefuls to become the face of Young Miss magazine. The resulting commercial, made in the summer of 1993 by Se7en and Fight Club director David Fincher, showed a sultry Angelina walking down a dark and dirty New York street as cars marked with words like “sex,” “drugs,” and “career” careened into one another. As the face of Young Miss, she was the knowing go-to girl to guide other teenagers through these hazards. The voice-over said, “It’s her world, you just live in it,” a phrase that could serve as a metaphor for her life—at least outwardly.
It was that knowing, self-possessed, somewhat enigmatic quality that attracted the attention of cameraman Mark Gordon, a recent graduate of the American Film Institute, who was producing a couple of surreal “haiku-style” short films for his portfolio. He hired Steven Shainberg, who would later direct Secretary, to write and direct them. When they were considering actors, Gordon’s stylist friend Brad Bowman raved about a beautiful new model he had seen at an agency. It was Angelina Jolie. They arranged to see her and hired her for one spot, Angela and Viril. Filmed in black and white in June 1993, the short film depicted Angie sitting on a bed in the lotus position, meditating, while Viril typed rhythmically the numbers one through one thousand on an old typewriter. Just eighteen, she was, according to Gordon, “extraordinarily beautiful and exotic.” As he observes: “She appeared shy but also had a reserved confidence with the shooting process.” Gordon and Shainberg liked Angie so much that they hired her for the second short, Alice and Viril. This time, Viril meets Alice at a convention for lawn products. She asks him to hold his head underwater for three minutes, so he plunges his head into a fish tank while Angie’s character lounges nonchalantly.
As surreal as this no-budget movie was, it paled in comparison to Angie’s real life. During his Broadway run in The Seagull, her father had met Laura Pels, a wealthy French-born theatrical producer who agreed to finance a filmmaking company, Jon Voight Productions. Pels invested $4 million, and the Paul family agreed to produce a slate of movies, including Double Russian Roulette, Reverse Heaven, and a trio of films based on Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales. A few months later, in late 1993, Pels first became suspicious of the Paul family after receiving, as she later told the New York Post, an anonymous letter detailing lawsuits involving the family. While the sender of the letter has never come forward, the result was that Pels decided to sue Steven Paul as well as Stuart and Dorothy Paul and their companies for fraud and embezzlement.
That same year, Jon Voight’s manager, Steven Paul, moved into a palatial mansion in Coldwater Canyon. This rankled with Marcheline, who was still waiting for her ex-husband to get his money back and buy her a house. Not only had he given Stacey Pickren the deed to the home they lived in when they parted, but now his manager was moving into an exclusive area, while Voight struggled to pay his bills.
What to do? Marche could buy a home only if Jon gave her the money she felt she was due—which couldn’t happen until the Paul family had repaid the loan. According to her, they had told Jon that they couldn’t afford to give him the money. So, she reasoned, what if she showed Jon financial paperwork to prove that they had ample cash to pay him back?
That was the logic behind a madcap scheme cooked up by Marche, Angie, and a couple of close friends to find the proof: They would take the trash from the street outside Steven Paul’s house, go through it in search of financial documents, and present them to Jon, who would see the light and demand his money. If that didn’t work, they would bundle up any incriminating papers and pass them on to the FBI.
The first part of the plan went off without a hitch. One night shortly after the Los Angeles earthquake in January 1994, Marche’s girlfriend and her friend’s boyfriend (brought in for “muscle”) quietly drove to Steven Paul’s home and filled the backseat of their Mustang convertible with large trash bags that were awaiting collection. Then they drove to Marche’s apartment and poured the trash on the kitchen table, and Angie and her mother, wearing rubber gloves, went to work sorting through the garbage. Angie and Marche uncovered a thick file of documents relating to expensive office furniture and other fittings, various film production companies, and other paperwork that suggested, certainly in Marche’s mind, that the Pauls had much to answer for. “Angie loved playing detective; she found the whole thing very amusing,” admits a coconspirator.
Part two of the operation—confronting Jon Voight and passing on the information to the FBI—never came off, however. Marcheline lost her nerve not only about approaching her ex-husband but also about compiling a dossier that the authorities would take seriously. There is no evidence of any actual wrongdoing on behalf of the Pauls, and Jon remains closely affiliated with them.
The saga had several more plot twists. In the summer of 1994 Voight filed a countersuit against Pels, accusing the sixty-three-year-old of treating him like a “sex object,” and claiming that Pels withdrew financing for his projects when he rebuffed her advances. She responded by describing his lawsuit as “inane,” a smoke screen to distract attention from her $4 million lawsuit against his manager and the rest of the Paul family. (After further legal maneuvers, he retracted his allegations in September 1994, apologizing for the pain he had caused Pels and her family, and Pels’s lawsuit against the Pauls was subsequently settled and dismissed.)
In the meantime, Angie was not finished playing detective. At her mother’s urging, she visited her father’s home in Hollywood to snoop around for more financial paperwork linking her father to the Pauls. Marche was concerned that he had signed legal papers that would make him liable for any lawsuits or costs associated with the Pauls’ financial schemes. Angie was able to report back that he was not involved as a partner, nor was he financially liable. “It was a great relief for Marche,” recalls a friend with intimate knowledge of the matter. “A huge weight was lifted from her shoulders.”
Still, Angie continued to poke her nose into her father’s financial affairs. On one occasion she met a woman movie executive at her father’s home and, according to the story she told friends, advised her not to invest in any of her father’s schemes. The executive took Angie’s advice at face value and refused to invest.
While this made an amusing anecdote for Angie, the underlying story was rather tragic, exposing her utter lack of respect for her father. As entertaining as Angie may have found it to embarrass Jon Voight and interfere in his private financial dealings, she was ultimately a helpless pawn in the long-running war between her mother and father, usually siding, whether she wanted to or not, with her mother.
Ironically, during this family detective drama, she landed another film role, that of a witness to a murder who refuses to give evidence in court. She played a street junkie, Jodie Swearingen, in the conspiracy thriller Without Evidence, based on the true story of the unsolved murder of Michael Francke, the head of Corrections for the State of Oregon, who was thought to have uncovered a drug ring shortly before his death. The movie was filmed in Salem, Oregon, during May and June 1994, and Angie’s performance was described as “heartbreakingly touching” by Variety when the low-budget independent was released two years later.
A few weeks after that film wrapped, she enjoyed a complete change of pace, appearing in Love Is All There Is, a romantic comedy loosely based on Romeo and Juliet that was filmed in the Bronx and at Greentree Country Club in New Rochelle, New York. She played a girl who falls in love with the son of a rival Italian catering family. Once again Angie found herself having sex on camera, except this time her star-crossed lover, played by Nathaniel Marston, was a month younger than Angie, and their love scene was played for laughs, Marston’s character’s parents walking in as they got hot and heavy beneath the sheets. When the comedy was finally released in May 1996 to generally lukewarm reviews—“woefully unfunny,” said the Hollywood Reporter—it was notable for the way Angie handled an Italian accent.
Life was decidedly unfunny for Angie, too. After the shoot she experienced the typical depression associated with the ending of a collegial venture such as making a movie. In Angie’s case, though, it was compounded by her feelings of worthlessness and alienation. She didn’t want to return to Hollywood, where she would be prey to her parents’ interminable skirmishing, so she stayed in a New York hotel room, contemplating life. Or rather, contemplating taking her life. “I didn’t know if I wanted to live because I just didn’t know what I was living for,” she later told Rolling Stone. She decided to take sleeping tablets and cut her wrists with one of her knives. She didn’t have enough pills, however, and she asked her mother, once again her passive if innocent enabler, to mail her more. Then she wrote a note for the hotel’s housekeeping staff asking them to call the police so that no one would have the distress of finding her body. She spent the rest of the day wandering the streets of New York, at one point looking at a kimono. Angie hesitated about buying it, realizing how absurd such a purchase would be given her immediate intent.
As she considered her decision, she appreciated that her mother would feel guilty for providing the sleeping pills. At some point, lying on the bed, she came to a conclusion of sorts: “You might as well live a lot, really hard, and not give a shit, because you can always walk through that door. So I started to live as if I could die any day.” The next day, she went back and bought the kimono.
For a girl who pondered suicide on numerous occasions, her next purchase suggested an underlying will to live. Her last two movies, together with her modeling work and an appearance that year in a Meatloaf rock video, enabled this unconventional girl to behave in a very conventional way. Just nineteen, she had enough money to put a down payment on an apartment in West Hollywood. She had seen her mother have to rely on the intermittent largesse of her father, and that life was not for her. Even as she triumphantly asserted her independence, her father still acted as guarantor for the loan.
Once again, though, she felt a profound depression afterward, spiraling into a mood of anger, sadness, and hopelessness. As much as she embraced life, burning faster and running harder than her contemporaries, so did she reject life, as she rejected herself. It was almost as if she felt she didn’t really deserve a home of her own.
Once she got the keys to the apartment, she found herself sitting on the floor sobbing because she had to pick out a carpet color and didn’t think she would live long enough to see the carpet installed. Having a nice home of her own, it turned out, didn’t resolve her inner torment. And now she was truly lost: If a home didn’t provide the feeling of being finally “home,” what would?
But Angie is a survivor. As writer Chris Heath laconically observed, “Crying over the pointlessness of home decoration in an impermanent and unreliable world, she eventually did the smart thing and chose a carpet anyway.”
“Dark gray,” she recalls. “I didn’t get that happy. It was a very, very dark gray.”