‘I’m not just something who started in her 20s with Jack Nicholson’—Anjelica Huston
THE AUTHOR wrote this book by hand. Photo courtesy of Scribner Publishing
LOS ANGELES—“I am not just something who started in her 20s with Jack Nicholson,” Anjelica Huston declared, replying to a reporter who asked what misconceptions about her might be dispelled by her memoir. “A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London, and New York,” is Part 1 of the two-part memoir of the actress whose father, John Huston, and grandfather, Walter, were legendary men in Hollywood.
Anjelica is the first person in the Academy’s history to win an Oscar like a parent and grandparent did. The actress is memorable in such films as “Prizzi’s Honor” (for which she won the 1985 Oscar for Best Supporting Actress), “Enemies: A Love Story” and “The Grifters.” Today’s generation may know her as Eileen Rand in the TV series, “Smash.”
“Who I am,” was her book’s emphasis, Anjelica said. Unknown to many, she was a successful model, having posed for the greats, like Richard Avedon and Helmut Newton, before she became a successful actress. “I am something who started a long time before in the West of Ireland. Maybe it’s claiming my own recognition of who I am that is most important to me about this book, even though I loved being Jack’s girlfriend. That’s all great and wonderful, but it’s not the only thing I am.”
Still a stunner
The statuesque woman, born in Santa Monica, California, but raised in Europe, is still a stunner at 62 on this beautiful sun-dappled day in LA. While her looks suggest an aristocratic hauteur, she is warm, even sweet, candid and prone to smiling.
The book, published by Scribner, has earned mostly favorable reviews. Anjelica explained how the memoir, which she wrote by hand, came about: “About four years ago, Random House
ANJELICA Huston on the day of this interview: “It has not been easy for me, but that’s just because I made things hard for myself.” photo by RUBEN NEPALES
made a rather nice offer, but not nice enough by my estimation. I talked about it with my agent and he said, ‘Well, are you interested?’ I said, ‘Maybe.’ He said, ‘Why don’t you write 250 to 300 words and we will see what we can do about that.’ So we made a plan. I met with about four or five publishers. They read what I had offered. I liked Nan Graham immediately. I trusted her and felt that Scribner would be a really good home.”
Fascinating childhood
In this first part of Anjelica’s memoir, she chronicles her fascinating childhood in Ireland with her father John, the man with the booming voice (his was the voice of God in “The Bible: In the Beginning” which he directed and costarred in as Noah; he also helmed such classics as “The African Queen,” “The Treasure of Sierra Madre” and “The Maltese Falcon”) and her mother, prima ballerina Enrica Soma whom Life magazine described as a Mona Lisa look-alike; her teenage years in London and coming of age in New York.
While she was penning the memoir, her editors decided to split it into two parts (the second will come out in fall this year).
“The second part will pick up where the first one leaves off—when I arrive in California,” Anjelica said. “I am looking around and I don’t know anybody yet. The second book will include my meeting Jack Nicholson, my first efforts to work as an actress again after a failed attempt with my father when I was 16. Also, all about negotiating Los Angeles and the various people I met here, the people I trained with to become an actress, and my father’s illness.”
Always lonely
JOHN Huston (foreground) directed daughter Anjelica (right) in “Prizzi’s Honor” (1985) with Jack Nicholson (left) and Kathleen Turner. photo: CINEPLEX.COM
Looking back, the woman whose relationship with Jack Nicholson ended when she learned that actress Rebecca Broussard was pregnant with his baby, said, “I am not someone who regrets things a lot. Sometimes you get into relationships that don’t work and you think, why did I stay for so long? I was an idiot. Maybe it’s because you have something to learn from that. I try to think more about the things that I am happy about—or, things that I am not happy with, but can change. Life is not particularly easy.”
Admitted Anjelica, who was married to noted sculptor Robert Graham until his death in 2008, “I am always lonely to a degree. I think we all are. It’s a bit of a fantasy to think that we are not. That loneliness allowed me to survive the death of my parents [and] my husband. It’s [this] intrinsic knowledge of my aloneness that allows me to succeed as a woman alone. It hasn’t been particularly easy for me, but it’s getting easier.”
She continued, “When I lost my husband five years ago, that was a huge thing in my life. If I hadn’t had that seed inside me, that knows that I am alone, I wouldn’t have survived it. That’s how it went, too, with my father’s death and my mother’s, which was the first to make a huge impact on my life (Enrica died at 39; John, at 81).”
Major epiphany
Smiling, she volunteered, “I had one major epiphany [while] writing the book. I was working with this extraordinary, wonderful editor called Bill Whitworth, editor of The Atlantic
AS MORTICIA in “Addams Family”
Monthly and, for a while, The New York Herald Tribune and The New Yorker. He’s an old hand and he knows his stuff. We were talking one day and he said, ‘You never really mentioned to me that you were a very successful model and that you worked with practically everybody.’
“I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Don’t you think that it was rather unusual that things came to you easily?’ I said, ‘Things didn’t come to me easily!’ Then I thought, Oh, yes, they did. I was in the middle of protesting, ‘No, I had to work’ and then I realized, I was the one who made it hard. I was the one who felt like I had to earn everything. When my father said, at the age of 60, ‘Here, I have a movie for you,’ I said, ‘No, I don’t want to do that.’ I didn’t want to work with my father; I wanted to work with Franco Zeffirelli.
“Everything that came to me, I gave it a hard time. That was an extraordinary thing because, I realized, it was all me. I was the one saying, “No, no, no. I have to earn this. It was absolutely true. I was offered a lot of things. I did very well on very little reputation. That was the biggest epiphany.”
She recounted one of the rare times that John acknowledged her acting talent. “My father wasn’t loose on compliments, but it was the first time I knew that he knew I had something when he said to me, ‘You have good instinct. Use it. Rely on your instinct. Don’t think too much about it.’ He was right. When I over-think things, they get messy and pale. When I act on my instincts, it’s usually right. I depend more on it as I go in.”
On Hollywood’s fixation with youth, she remarked, “There is this constant thing of youth is beauty. Photographs are hard after a certain point because you don’t look 20 anymore. You have to deal with the aging process. All I can say is that Maggie Smith is one of the most interesting actors on screen today. She said a funny thing to me a few years ago when she was here. I said, ‘Maggie, you should come back more often to Los Angeles. We love you so much here.’ Maggie said (imitates Maggie’s voice), ‘No, darling, they don’t like old people in Los Angeles.’ Well, I like old people and I like her.
Losing battle
WITH her husband, sculptor Robert Graham, in 2006. He died two years later at age 70. His massive bronze works mark civic monuments across America, including the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington. AP
“There’s the choice of pinning it all back behind your head [but] what do you do with your hands? For all of us, particularly women who have vanity, it’s not easy getting older. It’s a losing battle, isn’t it, with all this plastic surgery? I don’t like pain (laughs). There’s so much we should do to keep ourselves healthy and alive, vibrant and so forth, so why does the knife have to be included in that set of objectives?”
In the book, Anjelica wrote that John was “extremely well endowed.” She said, “My brother (actor Danny Huston) and I used to go up my father’s room at the big house. My mother lived in the little house and my father lived in the big house. We would go up to have breakfast with him in the mornings. He would usually be there with his breakfast tray, sketching, books all around in his big bed with intertwined doves on top. It was very elaborate. Then, slowly he would get up, wander around and the pajamas would come off. He would make his way into his bathroom and double lock the door in the bathroom even though we had seen him stark naked minutes before.
“There is a kind of fascination about watching your parent walking around [naked]. Am I going to look like that? Is my brother going to look like that? That was an observation that a child has of her parent. His being well-endowed was just a part of his physicality. He had long… everything. His arms, legs were long. He was six foot three inches or something—a big man.”
Best friend
While she said that she considers Danny her “best friend and beloved sibling,” Anjelica stressed that the she is very close to the rest of her family.
A next-generation Huston is rising—Jack Huston (son of her brother, actor and writer Tony), whose credits include “American Hustle” and “Kill Your Darlings.” “I am particularly proud of Jack right now,” said the pleased aunt. “He completed three years’ work on ‘Boardwalk Empire.’ He’s doing ‘Strangers on a Train’ at the Gielgud in London. He has received great notices. I love the fact that he’s gone from series television to the British stage. He’s the real thing. I expect to go on being proud of him for many years to come.”
(E-mail the columnist at [email protected]. Follow him at www.twitter.com/nepalesruben.)
