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

potential God gave you. Your mom and I made that pledge, and everyone in the room started crying. But we [Jon and Angelina] weren’t crying. We were enraptured in each other’s gaze.”
    Even though Jon was no longer a true believer, Angelina was christened a couple of months later, with Maximilian Schell and Jacqueline Bisset, who had met the couple during the filming of The End of the Game, serving as godparents.
    That fall Jon was invited by the theater department at the University of California in Northridge, north of Los Angeles, to be artist in residence for a semester and take the lead role in Shakespeare’s Hamlet . The prospect appealed to him: Not only is Hamlet a rite of passage for any serious actor, but the production would also combine the talents of students and professionals. With his own father’s death still fresh—he and his two brothers scaled a Montana peak to install a plaque in Elmer’s memory—he saw the play as a way of exploring the father-son relationship.
    He opened an office on campus and began recruiting his friends and colleagues, sending notes that began: “Do some Shakespeare, man; it will clear your head.” The young off-Broadway producer Jon Avnet, who later went to produce Tom Cruise’s breakout film, Risky Business, was brought in as the money man; Jerome Guardino, who directed Voight in A Streetcar Named Desire in Buffalo, agreed to direct; while Lance Larsen, Jon’s close friend who appeared in The Hashish Club, was cast in the role of Horatio. His Deliverance costar Ned Beatty also agreed to take part but later dropped out. The cover of the program featured a sketch of Voight by the noted portrait artist Don Bachardy, lifelong lover of English novelist Christopher Isherwood.
    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 menend 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