Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography by Andrew Morton Read Free Book Online

see his family but also to coproduce a Broadway play, The Hashish Club, the story of five men on a drug trip written by Lance Larsen, which lasted for only eleven performances at the Bijou Theatre. The play was about as far away from regular Hollywood fare as could be imagined, but Voight had the ability to straddle the fringe and the mainstream.
    At the Academy Awards in April 1975 he and the buxom Raquel Welch enjoyed a back-and-forth about peaks and valleys, Voight deliberately leering at her embonpoint before handing over the Oscar for Best Cinematography to the makers of The Towering Inferno. For Marcheline, not yet twenty-five and heavily pregnant, meeting an endless array of movie stars made it a night to remember. The high point for both of them was their conversation with Hollywood legend Fred Astaire, who was nominated for his supporting role in The Towering Inferno. When they returned to their modest apartment, Marcheline was glowing with the excitement of the evening. “She was thrilled to be mixing in this company,” recalls Krisann, who babysat for James that night. “This girl from Illinois was simply starstruck—and who can blame her? It was so cute and sweet. She was in seventh heaven.”
    That same month the couple enjoyed another happy event when Jon was best man and Marche maid of honor at the wedding of their good friends Carlo and Lauren Stogel at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “During the ceremony they were looking at each other like they were renewing their vows,” recalls Lauren, who first met Jon and Marche the previous Christmas, an encounter that Marche later said was “destined.” What turned out to be an intimate thirty-year friendship came about thanks to Carlo’s father, Syd Stogel, a producer for Columbia Pictures, who had taken a shine to Jon during the filming of The Odessa File in Munich. His wife, Angelina, adored Marche and baby James. When the Voight family later visited Rome, his son Carloshowed them around the city. They got on so well that Jon and Carlo discussed starting a film production company when Lauren and Carlo decided to move to Beverly Hills to start a new life.
    On June 4, 1975, Marche and Jon celebrated the latest little star to join the family when Marche gave birth to a baby girl at the Cedars-Sinai hospital in Beverly Hills. They named her Angelina after Marche’s Quebec-born grandmother, Marie-Louise Angelina, and Angelina Stogel. A further omen was the fact that Marche’s favorite band, the Rolling Stones, had recently had a huge number-one hit, “Angie,” which meant an awful lot to her. Along with Angelina, Marche gave her daughter the middle name of Jolie so that, like her brother, she could drop her surname when she went into show business.
    As a Gemini, the child was destined to have a dual personality, the forces of good and evil, darkness and light, male and female, wrestling in her psyche. She would be at once adaptable, versatile, witty, and intellectual and nervous, tense, cunning, and inconsistent. Those who came to know her in the coming years would repeatedly attest to the fact that she was a true Gemini. In Jon’s eyes she was perfect. He saw Krisann a couple of days after Angelina’s birth and waxed lyrical about his “blue-eyed, beautiful daughter.”
    Years later, in a radio interview during which Angelina was in a different studio in another city, her father spoke movingly of the special moment when he first met her. “The last public conversation we had was when you were born. 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 best old friend. I started to tell you how your mom and I were so happy to finally have you there 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