Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography Read Online Free PDF Page A

during shooting when Hoffman put so much energy into his character’s tubercular cough that he vomited all over his costar’s cowboy boots. “There’s no way I can upstage vomit,” Voight commented laconically.
    What an increasingly anxious Schlesinger referred to during the shoot as “a pile of shit”—the mounting cans of uncut dailies—was edited into a film that would garner seven Oscar nominations. At the moment of Schlesinger’s greatest fears about the yet-to-be-released movie, Voight took him by the shoulders and told him: “John, we will live the rest of our artistic lives in the shadow of this great masterpiece.” Voight might have been gazing into the future at his own career.
    In spite of Schlesinger’s doubts and the censors’ giving it an X rating, Midnight Cowboy, which was released in May 1969, the year of Woodstock, Altamont, the Manson murders, and mounting protest over the Vietnam War, scored a cultural bull’s eye with the audience and most critics, the right movie at the right time with the right message. Ironically, its surface modernity, sexual frankness, and cynicism masked the fact that the film was, in the words of Hoffman’s biographer Ronald Bergan, “an old-fashioned movie about an innocent coming from the sticks to the big city and not finding the sidewalks paved with gold.”
    Now that he was a hot property in his own right, Voight remainedtrue to his counterculture roots, eschewing films that merely exploited his good looks. He flew to London to star as the leader of a radical student organization in The Revolutionary, Voight sincerely believing that his medium held the message for change. As his girlfriend Jennifer Salt recalls: “Jon had that kind of ‘I’d like to save the world with my work’ attitude.”
    He seemed a natural choice to be included in the starry cast of Catch-22, director Mike Nichols’s adaptation of Joseph Heller’s classic black comedy, which skewered the cruel absurdity of modern warfare. While Gene Wilder claimed that he was the first choice for the role of the fast-talking, self-promoting black marketer Milo Minderbinder, Voight more than held his own in a cast that included Alan Arkin, Orson Welles, Bob Newhart, Art Garfunkel, and Martin Sheen. Like The Revolutionary, the film was neither a critical nor a commercial success, Voight’s two choices post– Midnight Cowboy failing to capitalize on his initial triumph.
    The Academy Awards in the spring of 1970 seemed to encapsulate the changing social and cultural landscape. As Voight told writer Peter Biskind: “When I went to the Academy Awards there was a split down the middle. Frank Sinatra, John Wayne and Bob Hope, I’d grown up with them, I admired them, but I was also of the new breed that wanted to see something changed. We were the sons of Brando.” When he prepared to present one of the awards for Best Writing, he and the legendary Fred Astaire exchanged courtesies backstage. It symbolized to Voight the meeting of two generations, a civilized passing of the cultural baton.
    That night, however, Voight handed an award to screenwriter Waldo Salt, while John Schlesinger won the statuette for Best Director, and Midnight Cowboy came away with Best Picture. Both Voight and Hoffman had been nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role, but the challenge of the new generation was beaten off by the old guard when John Wayne won for his performance in True Grit.
    Hoffman, who was paying a thousand dollars a week for daily psychotherapy sessions to cope with the pressures of his success, was so devastated by the result that he fled Hollywood and spent three months in Europe licking his wounds. His costar was deep into his role in another ill-fated film, Charles Eastman’s The All-American Boy, playing a small-town boxer who refuses to acknowledge his talent and squanders his many opportunities,when John Boorman approached him about appearing in the movie version of James Dickey’s book