Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography by Andrew Morton Page B

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.
    The apartment, once so spare, was soon bursting at the seams, to the point that she held a couple of garage sales to dispose of some of her goodies. Expensive crockery and objets d’art went for bargain-basement prices. Although consumed with guilt over his behavior, Jon was infuriated with his estranged wife when he discovered that total strangers were wandering around his apartment picking and choosing mainly new and unused goods that he had paid for. Marche’s stepmother, Elke, a frugal woman, was also perplexed and somewhat irritated by Marche’s penchant for buying everything, even the children’s underwear, from fancy stores like Saks Fifth Avenue. “She became a huge shopaholic,” recalls Krisann. “The idea that she didn’t have any money is nonsense.”
    Marche was naïve and rather careless about cash. Having always had money, she never felt the need to worry, especially as all the bills went straight to her husband’s accountant for payment. On one occasion, for example, she signed an entire checkbook, leaving the amounts blank. It wasa clear security risk, especially given the constant ebb and flow of transient babysitters, actors, and others at the apartment.
    As in most separations, money soon became an issue. While Jon was concerned about Marche’s outlays for babysitters, clothes, and furniture, Marche’s blood boiled if she sensed that he was spending money on his mistress. On at least one occasion she was driven to fury when she saw a credit-card statement containing details about clothes from a store she did not frequent. “Look. He’s out buying clothes for that tramp, his whore,” she proclaimed.
    Yet far from walking out on his wife and children and never returning, Jon Voight spent as much time as he could with Jamie and Angie. He was a constant presence at the apartment building, even taking Marche house-hunting, though she found nothing that suited her. It was a time of anguish, passion, and soul-searching. He alluded to that period in a later interview: “ ‘Free love’—what a poison that was. Free love, the destruction of family life and loyalties and the responsibilities of parents, and I’ve gone through that.” In his defense he argues that in the morality of the times, what he did was not “so unusual or pernicious.”
    As much as he now rejected his Catholic faith, he could never escape the nostrums and beliefs stamped on his soul since childhood. When he visited the children, the struggle between the primal, lusty lover and the caring father was transparent. “Here is Jon Voight having a roll in the hay like he’s never had before,” recalls Krisann. “He has that exuberance you have when you are enjoying wonderful sex. And then he plays the role of dad. And quite honestly, I never saw any father who loved and cared for his children as he did. When he was not working, he came over all the time, if only for an hour.” He regularly took the children to the park to play ball, and on several occasions Krisann was mistaken for his wife. As a change from Roxbury Park, Krisann would suggest that they all go “topless in