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frequently spoken in recent years of his bitterness towards his father for leaving them in the lurch. But the facts appear to speak otherwise. Bertrand and Voight shared custody in a very amicable agreement and split their time with the children fairly.
    According to Groen, “Jon doted on his kids. I don’t remember a lot of animosity between Jon and Mar. They stayed friends, and they had the kids in common. They handled the breakup fairly healthily, I think. Angie and James were very close to their mom, no question about it, but they always had fun with Jon, and he took a real interest in their lives. They spent a lot of time with him.”
    Indeed, one of Jolie’s kindergarten teachers related to Jolie’s biographer Rhona Mercer that Voight was very present. “Her father was always picking up her and her brother,” the teacher recalled. “He was always around. I don’t know if they had a good relationship; all I know is that he did the fatherly thing. He came to sports day. He came to the school. They lived in Palisades, where all the big stars like Al Pacino lived.”
    And even Jolie herself, before her estrangement from her father in 2003, seemed sympathetic to his side of the marriage breakup, explaining, “My father is a perfect example of an artist who couldn’t be married. He had the perfect family, but there’s something about that that’s very scary for him.”
    In an interview Voight gave to People magazine when Angelina was seven years old, he addressed his role as a divorced father. “The focus,” he explained, “is always the kids. Whatever Marche and I go through, we consider how it affects them. We’ve each made mistakes. The kids are aware of the deep disruption that went on early in their lives. The guilt, anger, and confusion made their way into their subconscious, and I don’t know what dues we’ll pay later on. But they will have learned how to deal with adversity.”
    Shortly after the couple finally divorced, in 1978, Marcheline took up with UCLA filmmaking student and later documentary filmmaker Bill Day, who was fond of young James and Angelina. This prompted occasional jealousy on the part of Voight. “The kids are crazy about this guy,” he acknowledged in an interview at the time. “There are male egos involved, and there is friction, the whole territorial thing. We don’t necessarily sync, but we each give ground. He’s crazy about Marche and really loves the kids.” For her part, Marcheline always defended Voight’s role as a father. “Nothing means more to Jon than the children,” she told People magazine in 1993.
    When Angelina was only six years old, Voight wrote and starred in a movie called Looking to Get Out , teaming up again with the brilliant director of Coming Home , Hal Ashby. They couldn’t recreate the magic of their first collaboration, however; most critics agreed the film was awful. But Voight did manage to arrange a small role for Angelina, her first big-screen appearance, as a cute little girl named Tosh, who appears in a long scene with her father. The acting wasn’t memorable, but it was clear even at that age that the camera loved her.
    The same year, Bertrand moved east to escape the brutal smog of Los Angeles, which had been wreaking havoc with her allergies. She settled with her children in a small community on the Hudson River north of New York City, Sneden’s Landing. The separation was hard on Voight, who was used to seeing James and Angie several days a week. He told one interviewer at the time that he missed his children terribly. Before long, he was commuting east each month to spend time with the kids, staying at his mother’s home in Scarsdale, about half an hour away.
    Since their estrangement in 2003, Jolie has given a number of interviews downplaying her father’s involvement in the lives of his children, often claiming “he wasn’t there.” But in 2001, she sounded very different: “I never remember a time when I needed my