Free Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography by Andrew Morton Page A

Beverly Hills cops who put an end to another childhood thrill. A regular after-dinner treat was Bill taking the children for a spin on his motorbike. Angie and James would take turns perching on the gas tank while he roared along Olympic Boulevard. One evening Bill and a helmetless three-year-old Angie were pulled over by a squad car. The uniformed police were so angry at his reckless behavior that he thought they were going to beat him up. After giving him a stern lecture, they followed him home—and then yelled at Marcheline, accusing her of being a bad mother.
    Although the children called their mother “Marche Mallow” (she called Angie “Bunny,” while Jon called his daughter “Jelly Bean”), there was nothing soft and squishy about her. She was a matriarch like her mother, Lois, and while she would defer to Bill—and Jon—on creative or business matters, she ran the household her way. She had few, if any, boundaries for the children, but that was the way she wanted it. Woe betide Bill if he tried to impose a little discipline on the daily routine—such as getting the kids out of bed and to day care on time. It led to numerous power struggles, and as often as not Bill ended up sleeping on a couch in the office they had rented in the seedy Palmer Building on Hollywood Boulevard. They decided to rent the $125-a-month office in the fall of 1978 after Marche consulted Warren Beatty about advancing her acting career. Not only did she want to fulfill her creative ambitions, but she also wanted financial independencefrom her estranged husband. Beatty agreed that she needed a professional show reel, and chipped in some cash for the office and for film equipment. The editor was Bill, who agreed to cut and splice Ramon Menendez’s film Borderline into a demo. (The finished reel can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/user/marchelinebertrand .)
    It was a slow process; the equipment was primitive, and Bill had his student papers to research and write. It was, though, a “blissful” time in their relationship. “She was a very, very generous person,” he recalls. “She would buy me clothes and wrap them up as gifts, made sure I was well fed and even made me a lunch bag—covered in sexual poetry—for when I went to the office.” He took the children to kindergarten in the morning and either Jon or Marche picked them up in the early afternoon. This arrangement suited the rhythm of their relationship, as Marche liked to have what she called “alone” time, during which she sat in her bedroom writing poetry, reading favorite authors like Anaïs Nin, and indulging her passion for astrology. She had a personal astrologer and spent a lot of time studying the planetary influences on her life.
    The stars were certainly out when Jon took his mother, Barbara, and girlfriend, Stacey Pickren, along the red carpet for the Fifty-first Academy Awards in April 1979. That night, while Bill worked late in the office putting the finishing touches on Marche’s demo tape, Jon was receiving an Oscar from Diana Ross and Ginger Rogers for his performance as the romantic paraplegic in Coming Home. His was not the only triumph; his costar Jane Fonda walked away with the award for Best Actress, and Waldo Salt and colleagues took the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. It is not hard to imagine Marche’s feelings that night, the girl from Riverdale with dreams of stardom watching the father of her children bask in the limelight. Angie has since said that she has never watched Coming Home because the film also features Stacey Pickren, the woman she blames for the breakup of her parents’ marriage. “I remember just growing up and thinking, ‘God, what a tough night that would’ve been for [my mother] in her sweatpants with her two babies.’ ”
    Angie did sit in her father’s lap a few weeks later and watch his latest film, The Champ, which was released at the same time as the Oscar ceremony. The heart-wrenching story, about a father