Free Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography by Andrew Morton Page B

who returns to the boxing ring to justify his son’s belief in him and ends up dying in his arms, hadAngie in floods of tears. The youngster truly believed that the man cuddling her that night was going to die. She was inconsolable at the thought of losing her dad. “Don’t worry, darling; it’s only a movie,” Jon assured her.
    It was Angie’s mother who was in tears, this time of blind fury, at the way her demo tape was treated by Jon and his agency, William Morris. As her tape neared completion, Marche asked Jon to introduce her to an agent. He put her in touch with a young gun, Steven Reuther, now a big-time producer, who took her and Bill out for dinner a couple of times to discuss her career. Bill smelled a rat, believing that Reuther was under orders from Jon to placate Marche rather than find her work. To test his theory, he gave a tape to Reuther, telling him that it was Marche’s new demo when it was just a blank tape. Reluctantly Marche went along with the ruse. A few days later, Reuther called Marche and waxed lyrical about her “terrific” performance and requested a further ten tapes to send to various Hollywood producers.
    She kept her cool during the call, but erupted angrily as soon as she put down the phone. At that moment, Jon arrived to pick up the children for the evening. “Hey, Billy, how’s it going?” he asked as Day exited stage left.
    “Don’t worry, Jonny, you’ll find out,” he replied.
    After facing the verbal lash from Marche, a chastened Jon Voight and Steve Reuther promised to help her out. They were as good as their word. Jon was working on a project called Lookin’ to Get Out, based on a script by Al Schwartz, the manager of Jon’s brother Chip. Jon promised to give her a role in the movie, about the comic misadventures of two New York gamblers in Las Vegas, if he ever got the project off the ground. That said, he was also cowriting another script, The Shore, with troubled troubadour Dory Previn, so Marche’s movie role was more of a possibility than a probability.
    Reuther quickly earned his agent’s chops, placing Marche in a Revlon commercial due to be filmed in New York in July. As a thank-you for all his help, she asked Bill to come with her, the couple staying at the St. Moritz hotel on Central Park. That commercial was one of the high points, if not the apex, of her career. Certainly Marche was never happier, posing by the Plaza hotel surrounded by an attentive film crew, finally the star of the show. At that moment it was her mother’s dream come true. During a break in filming, she came over and hugged Bill. “I really think I should move here. I don’t know why, I just think I have a future here.”
    She was serious, making plans for another trip to the Big Apple as soon as they returned to Beverly Hills. In the end, Marche, Bill, and the children spent Christmas and New Year’s at the St. Moritz, enjoying a “wild” vacation in the snow. They treated the children to carriage rides in Central Park, went ice-skating at Rockefeller Center, and took in Broadway shows. The craziest moment was midnight on New Year’s Eve, when the four of them threw clothes out of their hotel window in celebration. “We had a lot of fun,” recalls Bill. “Marche was at her happiest, filled with hope, spontaneous, and open to all kinds of crazy ideas.”
    By contrast, her Oscar-winning husband was in crisis, about his career, his faith, and his future. It was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that Jon Voight would enter the dark night of the soul. In a classic Hollywood moment, Jon took a stroll along the beach at Malibu ruminating about love, life, and the whole damn thing. As he muttered to himself, “I don’t know what I’m doing with myself; I don’t know if I can do this much longer,” he bumped into his friend Al Pacino. Voight poured out his heart. Pacino listened intently, then said, in that raspy voice of his, “You are such a great actor.” Crisis