Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography Read Online Free PDF

Deliverance. At the dark heart of this story about four middle-class city dwellers who find much more than they bargained for when they go on a canoeing trip down a wild river was the unsettling rape of the city men by mountain men, which served as a metaphor for the rape of America and nature by mankind.
    For the artistically adventurous Voight, this should have been an enticing prospect. At this critical round in his career he considered himself out for the count. He had already turned down the lead in Love Story, arguing that he would have made the role “too complicated”—even though he was offered a share of the profits, which eventually rolled out at $50 million. As Boorman recalled in his autobiography, Adventures of a Suburban Boy: “He was in despair about his career. I wooed him. He resisted. He was too exhausted to do another picture. He felt he was too young for the role. He was too distraught to make decisions.” In short, he had lost his nerve. They met, and Voight had good ideas for the role of Ed, the comfortable advertising copywriter, but he refused to commit.
    Although Boorman didn’t know it, he had an unseen ally. Voight’s career might have been floundering, but one of the happy by-products of being a Hollywood heartthrob was that he got the girl, on or off the screen. Though he was still living with Jennifer Salt, he was very much in demand with the opposite sex. At that time, “free love” was not just a catchphrase, it was a movement, with sex as much a political statement as an act.
    Jon Voight first met Marcia Lynne—now calling herself Marcheline—Bertrand in the spring of 1971 after an agent at William Morris proudly showed him a picture of his girlfriend, an in-demand model who had recently snagged a part in the TV drama Ironside. The agent made a big mistake. Jon liked the look of Marcheline and called her up out of the blue, subsequently inviting her for tea at the five-star Beverly Hills Hotel. Over strawberries, scones, and small talk, the thirty-two-year-old actor blurted out that he wanted to have two children with the young woman about to celebrate her twenty-first birthday. “The words just came out of my mouth,” he later explained. “But she didn’t blink, and neither did I.”
    Their second date, a week later, was hardly the stuff of romance, but it was critical in terms of Voight’s conflicted career. As he later recalled, “Isaid, ‘Marcheline, I’m reading this script tonight. You wanna come over and I’ll read it out loud?’ She said: ‘I’d love to.’ So I read through the rape scene and she didn’t blink. I kept reading to the end and she said: ‘Oh, it’s a fantastic story! You should do this.’ ”
    While Voight’s recollection is that he called Boorman the following day to accept the role, Boorman tells a slightly different version of that phone call. Boorman says he telephoned Voight to report that he had snagged Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty, and Ronny Cox for the picture. After an hour on the phone wooing the still-reluctant Voight, Boorman said that if he didn’t decide in thirty seconds he was going to hang up. He did, and his brinkmanship worked. Voight called straight back and accepted the part.
    Significantly, at a pivotal time in his life, Voight credited Marcheline, the cool, willowy beauty with the languid eyes and soothing manner, with settling his nerves and giving him the courage to take on a challenging masculine drama. This snapshot of a sweet, nurturing helpmate was one he now held dear, insisting that Marcheline join him on the set in Clayton, Georgia. That he was living with another woman, Jennifer Salt, when they first met did not seem to trouble Marcheline unduly. She could be quietly fierce, however, when the tables were turned, having learned the Bertrand freeze from her mother in full measure. When she discovered, for example, that her teenage boyfriend had had a one-night stand with one of her girlfriends, he was history. Even