Across The Margin / ATM Publishing presents Chapter One of Arthur Hoyle’s The Jealous Muse — Anjelica Huston : Child of Fame…
Chapter One — Anjelica Huston : Child of Fame
The American actress Anjelica Huston descended from a dynastic American entertainment family. Her birthright gave her great social and professional advantages, and with them, great personal deprivations. She was born in the wings of the performing arts stage, but her parents, distracted by fame, often neglected her emotional needs, especially during her childhood. She took the stage and performed well, but struggled to find her own emotional center and psychological equilibrium. She sought this through both her work as a model and an actress, and through trial by fire in challenging relationships with men. When we applaud her success and prominence on the American cultural scene, we must also acknowledge the suffering that marked her path.
Anjelica’s father, John Huston, was a film director—famed for crafting such honored motion pictures as The Maltese Falcon, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African Queen, Prizzi’s Honor, and The Dead; notorious for his gambling, drinking, and womanizing, and for his elaborate and sometimes cruel pranks inflicted on friends and fellow celebrities. Anjelica’s mother, Enrica (Ricki) Soma, was a classically trained ballerina who danced for George Balanchine in New York as a teenager. When she was eighteen, her face appeared on the cover of Life magazine in a photograph taken by Philippe Halsman that likened her to the Mona Lisa. Both Anjelica’s parents were iconic Americans, admired by many, envied by some.
John Huston was an extravagant man with large appetites and a restless spirit, shaped by his own tumultuous upbringing. His father was Walter Huston, an itinerant vaudeville and stage actor originally from Canada. His mother Rhea Gore was a nomadic journalist, daughter of a hard-drinking father prone to cycles of financial boom and bust. Walter and Rhea met in 1904 in a hotel lobby during the St. Louis World’s Fair and a week later were married, setting in motion a pattern of impulsive and short lived marriages that wove through John Huston’s life.
Walter and Rhea moved frequently, following the fortunes of Rhea’s father, John Gore. Their son, John Huston, was born in Nevada, Missouri on August 5, 1906. The Hustons then moved to Texas, and when John was three his parents separated, Walter returning to New York to pursue a career in theater, Rhea moving in with her mother Adelia who lived in Dallas. Adelia looked after John while Rhea sought work as a freelance journalist. John was home schooled by his grandmother, and grew up without a sense of strong family bonds. When he was three and a half years old, Adelia dressed him in an Uncle Sam uniform and put him on a vaudeville stage singing “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”
As a youth, John perpetrated destructive pranks and acts of vandalism, early signs of a simmering anger that would erupt periodically over the course of his life. To rein him in, Rhea enrolled him in a military academy in San Diego. He took up boxing, and fought twenty-five amateur bouts, compiling a 23-2 record. In 1924, at the age of eighteen, he went to New York to live with his father and entered the theater world.
In starts and fits, John’s career in show business moved forward and the patterns of his life began to unfold. He was contracted by the Goldwyn Studio to write screenplays, and in 1931 he went to work for Universal writing dialogue. He soon developed a reputation in Hollywood as a rowdy, larger-than life character, unrestrained by conventional standards of behavior.
His career took off after he sold a script to Warner Brothers. His break-through film was The Maltese Falcon, starring Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor, and now considered to be the birth of a new Hollywood genre, film noir. After the success of this film, John worked steadily for the Hollywood studios over a period of nearly fifty years, directing and acting in more than forty films, most of them filmed in locations far from Hollywood.
In 1949, during a party at David Selznick’s home, John was introduced to Ricki Soma, then under contract to Selznick’s production company. John was attending the party with his third wife, the actress Evelyn Keyes. Ricki reminded him that they had met in 1943 when John was dining at her father’s restaurant in New York and he had promised to take her, then a girl of thirteen, to a ballet. John scandalized Selznick’s guests and infuriated Evelyn by necking openly with Ricki at the party. Soon she was pregnant with John’s first child, Tony. On February 10, 1950 John divorced Evelyn Keyes in La Paz, Mexico. On February 11, 1950 he married Ricki, making her his fourth wife. Tony Huston was born on April 16. A year later, while John was in the Belgian Congo directing The African Queen, Ricki delivered a girl at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles. Ricki named the girl Anjelica, after her deceased mother Angelica. When John went to London for post-production of The African Queen, Ricki, who was suffering from post-partum depression, left her two infant children on Long Island with her father and step-mother, and went to England to join her husband. John’s new family was fractured from the outset.
After the war, John was in the forefront of resistance to the harassment and prosecution of Hollywood artists by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Disgusted by the imprisonment of several of his friends and by the studios’ timid response to the Committee’s bullying, he decided to leave Hollywood and live in Ireland, home of his ancestral roots. In 1953 he leased a property in County Kildare, then purchased at auction for ten thousand pounds a run-down Georgian manor called St. Clerans. The manor sat on 110 acres of land, and the property included a smaller stone house and a fourteenth century Norman ruin. For the first ten years of Anjelica’s life, St. Clerans was home to her and Tony and Ricki—and, occasionally, John.
John was continuing his nomadic way of life, directing picture after picture in exotic and far flung locations: Moulin Rouge in Paris, Beat the Devil in Rome, Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison on Tobago Island in the Caribbean, Moby Dick in multiple locations on the Atlantic Ocean and the Irish sea. While making Moulin Rouge he began an affair with the actress Suzanne Flon whom he had cast in the film. Many years later, reflecting on his numerous infidelities, John said, “I regret that lack within myself that enables a man to pour all his affections into one individual.” (Huston, An Open Book, p. 85)
Ricki’s project while John wandered the globe and enjoyed dalliances was the restoration of St. Clerans, an undertaking that lasted four years and consumed three million dollars. Ricki had a strong aesthetic sense, was fashion conscious, and worked with a virtually limitless budget, since John had no qualms about being in debt. She made St. Clerans a showplace over which John presided like a feudal lord when he returned during intervals from filming or at Christmas.
The main hall was paved in marble, and the rooms were filled with Chinese porcelain, paintings by Juan Gris and Morris Graves, ceramics dating from the Etruscan period forward, a Japanese fan painting collection, African bronzes and fabrics, antiques from England and France, Mexican tiles in the kitchen and all bathrooms, a thirteen-foot long Georgian dining table with matching chairs, a Louis XV drawing room, Egyptian pieces, and one of Monet’s “Water Lily” paintings. Huston’s bedroom had a big, canopied, four-poster Florentine matrimonial bed, carved with doves and flowers. It also had two Louis XIV chairs, a chest that had originally stored vestments in a French church, and a thirteenth-century Greek icon. All the bedrooms and baths had fireplaces. (Harris, p. 93)
But Ricki, Anjelica, and Tony did not live in the manor house; they lived in the smaller, adjoining stone house—the Little House, formerly the steward’s residence. The manor house at St. Clerans—the Big House—was John’s domain. In her memoir A Story Lately Told, published in 2013, Anjelica revealed that she had never seen her father and mother in the same bedroom. “ My parents were quite formal with each other . . . I don’t remember much touching between them, or many demonstrations of affection.” (p. 55)
Two separate but overlapping lives were led at St. Clerans, one in the Big House that revolved around John, another in the Little House that revolved around Ricki, Tony, and Anjelica. It was as though John’s family was just another part of his collection, kept in its own display case and brought out for visitors to see and touch when he was at home.
The Little House provided the domestic setting where Ricki, assisted by a parade of governesses, raised Tony and Anjelica. Their childhood was, in many ways, an idyllic period, free of many of the restraints and limitations that most children experience as they grow up. They were home schooled by a succession of tutors, culminating with Leslie Waddington, an Englishman who became virtually a member of the family. Tony and Anjelica had the run of the estate, playing hide and seek with the children of the groom Paddy Lynch in the ruins of the Norman castle, and riding their ponies. Ricki had an extensive library and record collection. She read to her children and played the songs of The Kingston Trio and Harry Belafonte. As playmates other than the groom’s children were scarce, Anjelica developed an active fantasy life, dressing up as characters from stories she had read and performing for her parents and their guests. Early on she delighted in altering her identity through costume and make-up.
The Big House was dormant most of the year during John’s lengthy absences. He would return occasionally at intervals between films, and always at Christmas. “Then, like a sleeping beauty, awakened, the house would come alive,” Anjelica wrote in her memoir, “glowing from the inside, turf fires burning in every room . . . Dad always brought wonderful presents: kimonos and pearls for Mum, a blue polka-dot Spanish dancing dress for me, a matador’s suit of lights for Tony . . .” (p. 55). There would be fox hunts followed by gay parties featuring notable guests—Eric Sevareid, Peter O’Toole, Marlon Brando, John Steinbeck, who one year dressed up as Santa Claus.
When their father was in residence, Anjelica and Tony would visit his bedroom to take breakfast with him. As he dressed, he quizzed them about their activities. He could be a harsh listener. Once, when Anjelica remarked that she did not care for the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh, John challenged her to name three paintings by the artist. Flustered and unable to name even one, Anjelica was subjected to a lecture about the evils of ignorant opinions.
In 1958, when she was seven, Anjelica’s routine at St. Clerans altered. Her parents enrolled her in the Convent of the Sisters of Mercy in the nearby town Loughrea. Tony was also sent away to school. With children no longer under her wing at St. Clerans, Ricki decided to separate formally from John, leave Ireland, where she felt out of her element (she did not enjoy fox hunting), and move to London, one of the great cosmopolitan centers of the world. John hired Betty O’Kelly, a local woman, to manage the estate, and Gladys Hill as his personal assistant. Anjelica remained at St. Clerans until she was ten, then joined her mother in London.
During the 1960s in London Anjelica endured a series of shocks to her psychic equilibrium that would have wounded an adult, let alone a vulnerable adolescent. At the end of the decade, after the final tragedy, she moved to the United States in an attempt to restart her life. But troubles came with her.
Ricki had purchased a house in the Little Venice section of London and while it was undergoing restoration Anjelica lived with her friend Lizzie Spender, daughter of the English poet Stephen Spender. Anjelica’s schooling during this critical period in her life was erratic and, ultimately, incomplete. Ricki enrolled her in the Lycée Francais, a questionable choice since the courses were conducted in French, a language Anjelica did not speak. Presumably, Ricki thought that fluency in French would have cultural advantages for Anjelica and that full immersion was the quickest way to achieve it. But not surprisingly Anjelica immediately felt isolated at the school, fell behind, and had to repeat a year. She begged Ricki to remove her. After two years, Ricki acted when the nursing staff ignored a schoolyard accident that left Anjelica with a broken vertebra that required six months in a plaster cast to heal. She was transferred to St. Mary’s Town and Country School, and subsequently to Holland Park Comprehensive when Anjelica was thirteen. By then, according to her own admission, she was acting out—often truant, smoking, shoplifting, and engaging in petty thievery with her school friend Emily Young. Her parents were giving her reason to be angry.
In 1961, while filming Freud with Montgomery Clift in Munich, John began an affair with Zoe Ismail, an Indian actress whom he had cast in the film. Zoe became pregnant, her condition visible to all the production crew. She withdrew from the film, moved to Rome, and delivered a boy who was named Danny. Anjelica learned of the existence of this illegitimate half-brother not through either of her parents, but from friends at school repeating London gossip about the Hustons.
As though to retaliate, Ricki began an affair with John Julius Norwich, a married English lord with two children. In December 1963 she became pregnant, and the following August a baby girl named Allegra was born. On her birth certificate her father was listed as “unknown.” John Huston gave her his surname and for many years Allegra believed that he was her father. But Huston was furious, and banned Ricki from St. Clerans.
Anjelica’s relations with her father became increasingly tense. She and Tony spent summers at St. Clerans, and still went there for Christmas, despite Ricki’s banishment. She also visited John periodically at his film locations, going to Munich and Berlin for Freud, to Rome, where she met Danny and Zoe, for The Bible, and to Milan for the premiere of The Mines of Sulfur, an opera John had directed. There, we catch sight of Anjelica in an early glamour shot, looking shy but friendly in the company of Hollywood royalty, her father and Ava Gardner.
Anjelica wrote that she did not enjoy being in the midst of her father’s productions. “I never much liked going to Dad’s films—his first assistant director, Tommy Shaw, was always shouting at Tony and me to be quiet, and there was nothing going on beyond the set.” (A Story lately Told, p. 116) Then an incident at St. Clerans during Christmas 1965 made Anjelica afraid of her father.
As was her custom, Anjelica dressed up and performed for her father and his guests on Christmas Eve. She danced provocatively in front of them, and the next morning she was summoned to her father’s bedroom in the Big House. He accused her of dancing in a sexually seductive way—“the bumps” —then struck her twice across the face, back and forth, with his open hand. In tears, Anjelica fled back to the Little House, where Tony, who had been having his own battles with John, comforted her.
The controlling side of John Huston’s nature was in evidence again when Franco Zeffirelli, in pre-production for his film of Romeo and Juliet, invited Anjelica to audition for the part of Juliet. Perhaps he had seen the photographs of her taken for British Vogue by Richard Avedon, a friend of Ricki. John brushed aside Zeffirelli’s offer, informing him that he intended to cast Anjelica as the lead actress in A Walk with Love and Death, a film he was then preparing to shoot in Austria. Anjelica was a reluctant and unhappy performer, self-conscious about her looks and fearful of her father’s direction. The film did not turn out well, and her performance was panned by the critics. Eight years passed before she would perform again for a motion picture camera.
But still photographs of her taken at the location in Austria reveal her affinity for the gaze of the lens. Standing in front of a heavy stone wall surrounded by woods, wearing a simple high-waisted, scoop neck dress, her chest and shoulders exposed, her dark hair falling to her breast, her face serene and beautiful, faintly smiling, Anjelica projects an ideal of innocent young womanhood, desiring and desirable. Alone with the camera, like her mirror, she is at home with herself, self-contained and self-assured.
Despite the complications and disturbances of her domestic life, Anjelica found much to enjoy as a teenager living in London during the cultural upheavals of the 1960s. With her friend Emily Young she went to concerts to hear the music of Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, and The Rolling Stones. Her mother took her to films and the theater. It was a time of cinematic greatness in Europe, with British filmmakers turning out biting social commentaries like Darling, Room at the Top, and The Servant, the French new wave breaking with the work of Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, Ingmar Bergman creating dark investigations of the human soul, Antonioni commenting on the London scene with Blow-Up. On Saturdays Anjelica would join the fashion parade of young women on Kings Road, and on Sunday attend suppers prepared by Ricki for celebrity guests such as Dirk Bogarde, Joseph Losey, Tony Richardson, and Peter O’Toole.
Though her brother was continuing his education at London University, Anjelica more and more seemed destined for the spotlight and the camera. During a party at Tony Richardson’s apartment, he told Anjelica that he was preparing a stage production of Hamlet with Nicol Williamson, and asked if she would like to read for the part of Ophelia. Though the role went to Marianne Faithful, Anjelica joined the production as her understudy and performed on occasions when Faithful was ill.
In January 1969, when Anjelica was seventeen, her world caved in on her. Ricki, who was traveling to Venice with her lover Brian Anderson Thomas, was killed instantly when their car struck a pothole in the road, swerved into oncoming traffic, and was rammed head-on by a van. Ricki, riding in the passenger seat, was thrown through the windshield. Thomas suffered facial lacerations and cracked ribs. The driver of the van lost a leg. John, filming The Kremlin Letter in Rome, returned to London to attend Ricki’s Quaker funeral. Not long after the funeral, Anjelica left England for the United States to tour with Hamlet. Her old tutor Leslie Waddington adopted Allegra. Anjelica was adrift.
After settling in New York, Anjelica took up modeling in earnest. She moved into the 47th Street apartment of her childhood friend Joan Buck, whose father, a frequent guest at St. Clerans, had once worked with John as a cameraman and producer. Joan was two years older than Anjelica. She had gotten a foothold in the New York fashion world as an assistant to an editor at Glamour. When a fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar asked Anjelica to model for a shoot—Anjelica was then in the midst of promoting A Walk with Love and Death—Joan suggested Bob Richardson as the photographer. Their session, carried out on Long Island, turned into a tumultuous four-year relationship that ended Richardson’s second marriage and put Anjelica on an emotional roller coaster.
Richardson had developed a reputation as the bad boy of fashion photography, known for his striking, often disturbing images, and for his erratic, drug fueled behavior. His photographs alluded to many of the dark themes of the 1960s—the urgent sexuality, the emotional isolation, the sordid lives of marginals. His images often presented a dramatic scene whose narrative took precedence over the fashions being displayed. The situations were edgy and provocative, and implied that the men and women wearing the clothes being marketed were extremely cool. His images sold a style of life for which the clothes were essential accessories.
Richardson had a complex and difficult personality. Forty-one years old when Anjelica met him, Richardson had since his mid-twenties experienced periods of mental derangement marked by fear and paranoia that he attempted to alleviate using illegal drugs—heroin, cocaine, speed. Shortly before he met Anjelica, he had been diagnosed as schizophrenic and had tried unsuccessfully to manage the illness using prescription medications. The illness made Richardson prone to dark moods, periods of prolonged silence that might last for days, and outbursts of violent anger.
Richardson enjoyed photographing beautiful women, and often ended his sessions by having sex with them. Steven Meisel, another fashion photographer who was influenced by Richardson, remarked that “the women he [Richardson] photographed were unusual beauties, and often they looked as if they were lost, desolate, or frightened.” (The New Yorker, April 10, 1995, p. 48) Surely this description fits Anjelica Huston in 1969, eighteen years old, bereft of her beloved mother, and untethered from her itinerant, self-absorbed father.
Anjelica moved in with Richardson. They lived for a while at the Chelsea Hotel in downtown Manhattan, an artists’ hub where they might cross paths with Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, or Patti Smith. That summer, Anjelica went to Ireland to be photographed by Avedon for Vogue, then joined Richardson in Paris. They went to Marrakech and traveled around Europe on fashion shoots, living like gypsies. Anjelica became a runway model in London for designers such as Halston and Giorgio de Sant’Angelo. She posed for other well-known fashion photographers, including David Bailey, Helmut Newton, and Ara Gallant. She had a distinctive look—cool, elegant, slightly haughty, unapproachable, perhaps even dangerous, as in a photo of her holding a revolver over her head taken by Gallant. She was neither the girl next door nor a sultry seductress. She embodied style.
By 1971 she and Richardson were back in New York, living in an apartment on Gramercy Park South. Richardson had been pressing Anjelica to have his child, which Anjelica saw as his attempt to put her further under his control. Anjelica was infertile, and her gynecologist recommended exploratory surgery. She refused, determined not to become a mother at age twenty and be tied irrevocably to Richardson. Then, changes in John Huston’s life set in motion a chain of events that terminated her relationship with Richardson and put her life on a new course.
In 1972, while John was preparing to film The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean in Arizona, he was introduced to Celeste Shane at a dinner party in Los Angeles. Celeste (Cici) was thirty-one, recently divorced, beautiful, independently wealthy, a horsewoman who lived in a ranch house in Pacific Palisades. Cici was taken with John Huston, pursued him aggressively, and in August 1972 they were married. Cici had a five-year old son named Collin who suffered from cerebral palsy. A young Mexican woman named Maricela Hernandez lived with Cici and looked after Collin.
Shortly after the marriage, Cici, Collin, and Maricela went with John to St. Clerans. There they met Zoe and Danny, as well as Allegra and her nurse Kathleen Shine, whom John had recently parked there. He had taken custody of Allegra when Leslie Waddington’s wife became resentful of her continued presence in their lives. Cici soon made the fur fly at St. Clerans. She ridiculed her rival Zoe and went to war with Gladys Hill and Betty O’Kelly over their management of the estate. Studying the account ledgers, she found that John’s staff had been taking advantage of his chronic absences, and concluded that the costs of maintaining the estate were unsustainable. John decided to sell St. Clerans, upsetting both Tony and Anjelica. Zoe and Danny returned to Rome. Allegra and Kathleen Shine were deposited with Ricki’s father and stepmother on Long Island
John then moved in with Cici in Pacific Palisades. In March 1973 they invited Anjelica and Richardson to join them on a fishing trip to La Paz in Baja California. It’s hard to imagine a more inappropriate setting for the fashion photographer Bob Richardson than the deck of a smelly, run-down Mexican fishing boat. He showed signs of stress from the moment they arrived, and when Anjelica left their motel room late one afternoon for a ten minute meeting with her father that stretched to an hour, he cracked. As Anjelica entered their room after the meeting, Richardson threw a bottle of tequila at her that struck the wall and shattered into pieces. Terrified, Anjelica fled to the beach where a stranger comforted her. After they returned to Los Angeles, Anjelica picked up her suitcase from the baggage carousel at the airport and said good-bye to Richardson. She refused his handshake. Later, she credited her father’s presence with giving her the strength to break with her abusive lover.
After the break with Richardson, Anjelica remained in Los Angeles, living with her father, Cici, Collin, and Maricela at Cici’s home in Pacific Palisades. In April, Cici was invited to Jack Nicholson’s birthday party at his house on Mulholland Drive, and she brought Anjelica with her. Thus began a tumultuous seventeen-year relationship that, while giving her constant emotional upheaval, transitioned Anjelica from a fashion model to a movie star.
When Anjelica met Nicholson, he was on his rise to the top of Hollywood’s A-list of male leads. His breakout role as sidekick to Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider had caught the attention of the film industry and led to leading parts as well as writing and directing assignments for major studios in films such as Five Easy Pieces, Carnal Knowledge, Drive, He Said, and A Safe Place, which also featured Orson Welles. At the time he met Anjelica, he had just finished filming The Last Detail, for which he subsequently received an Academy Award Nomination for Best Actor, the first of many to follow. The role that propelled him into the stratosphere, as Randle P. McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, was two years away.
Nicholson had come to Hollywood in 1954, after graduating from high school, to stay with June Nilson, a divorced mother of two, whom Nicholson believed to be his sister. June had come to Los Angeles to pursue a career as a dancer and actress, but had foundered. June was actually Nicholson’s mother, her children his siblings, though he did not learn this until 1974, when he was interviewed by two film students from the University of Southern California who had tracked down the true story of his parentage while researching a thesis on him.
He was born April 22, 1937 at a Roman Catholic hospital in Greenwich Village. Though his birth certificate stated that his mother was Ethel Rhoads and his father John Nicholson, her husband, in fact it was Ethel’s daughter June, a girl of sixteen, who had given birth to Jack. June had eloped with an older man, Don Furcillo-Rose, who married her on October 16, 1936, concealing from her that he was already married and the father of a child. After Jack’s birth, June left her marriage to travel on a vaudeville circuit. She came to rest in Ohio, where she found work in a defense plant, married a test pilot, and had two children by him. When the pilot deserted her for another woman, she moved to Los Angeles.
Jack was raised by his grandmother Ethel and her sometime companion, John Nicholson, a heavy drinker who worked sporadically. They lived in Neptune, New Jersey near the shore. Ethel had another daughter, Lorraine, who was married to George “Shorty” Smith, a blue-collar type who served as father figure to Jack during his youth. Jack grew up in a household that sustained the deception that Ethel Rhoads was his mother and John Nicholson was his father. It was all make-believe, just like a movie.
Jack did well in high school, a popular student too small at 5’ 9 ½” for football and basketball but excelling in drama. He was bright, earned high grades, was elected senior class vice-president, and was offered a scholarship at the University of Delaware. Ethel, a successful hairdresser who had opened a chain of beauty salons, expected Jack to seize this opportunity. But Jack had been an obsessive fan of comics and movies during his boyhood, and once in Hollywood with June he decided to remain. He found work as an office clerk in the animation department at MGM, took his own apartment in Culver City, and played the ponies at Hollywood Park. When MGM closed down its animation unit, Jack pursued work as an actor. He joined Jeff Corey’s acting class and there met Roger Corman, who was leading a new wave of independent filmmaking that started the careers of directors such as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Monte Hellman. Nicholson acted in a series of low budget exploitation films for Corman, and also joined the pool of talent orbiting around the independent production team of Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson. Easy Rider began as a biker film called The Loners being developed by Corman. When Corman’s distribution deal fell out, Nicholson brought the script to Rafelson, for whom he had worked as a screenwriter. Rafelson and Schneider obtained financing from Columbia, where Schneider’s father was an executive. The part of George Hanson, the alcoholic southern lawyer who joins the easy riders, went to Nicholson after Dennis Hopper insulted Rip Torn, the previous choice for the role. Such was the blend of persistence, connections, and good fortune that brought Nicholson into the mainstream of American film.
Jack had come to Hollywood a virgin, and was twenty before he had his first romance. His partner was Georgianna Carter, an actress he met in Corey’s class. They were a couple until she asked him to marry. Having tasted sex, Nicholson developed a prodigious appetite for it, becoming one of Hollywood’s legendary womanizers. In 1972 Jack married Sandra Knight, a beautiful actress he encountered on the set of a Corman movie. She introduced him to LSD, and then proposed to him. On September 13, 1963 Sandra delivered a girl they named Jennifer. Tired of Nicholson’s philandering, Sandra separated from him in 1967, and they divorced in 1968. Sandra moved to San Francisco, then to Hawaii, severely limiting Jack’s visitation opportunities.
In 1970, during the filming of Five Easy Pieces, Nicholson had an affair with the actress Susan Anspach. She bore a son named Caleb on September 11, 1970 and later claimed publicly that Nicholson was the father, a claim that Nicholson disputed, although he gave Anspach financial support when her career stalled. When Anjelica met Jack at his birthday party, he was just breaking up with Michelle Phillips, the former singer with the Mamas and the Papas. Michelle and her daughter Chynna by John Phillips had been living with Jack, and she had recently miscarried his child.
As Anjelica stepped across the threshold into Jack Nicholson’s life, she must have felt rumblings of her father’s presence. For like John Huston, Nicholson was a larger than life character, brimming with energy, humor, and mischief, but harboring a smoldering anger that found outlet in excess. Like Huston, Nicholson wrote, directed, and performed in movies, though he had yet to make any films that could match the stature of Huston’s work. Like Huston, Nicholson was somewhat of an outsider to the studio system, making films on his own terms, often on modest budgets, at locations far from Hollywood. Like Huston, he liked to gamble at the racetrack. Like Huston, Nicholson was frequently intoxicated, though he preferred marijuana, cocaine, and LSD over Huston’s martinis. Like Huston, who had a magnetic personality that drew people to him, Nicholson attracted an entourage of loyal friends with whom he made movies and frequently socialized. Allegra, who would spend considerable time at Nicholson’s home in company with Anjelica, wrote in her memoir Love Child, “It reminded me of Dad: another king, another court.” (Love Child, p. 132) And like Huston, Nicholson had an insatiable need for sexual intimacy with women. Both men had fathered children in and out of wedlock.
Anjelica recalled her first meeting with Nicholson in a poignant account:
He opened the door to his house that early evening in April, with the late sun still golden in the sky. “Good evening, ladies,” he said, beaming, and added in a slow drawl, “I’m Jack, and I’m glad you could make it.”
He motioned for us to enter. The front room was low-ceilinged, candlelit, and filled with strangers. There was Greek food, and music playing. I danced with Jack for hours. And when he invited me to stay the night, I asked Cici what she thought. “Are you kidding?” she said. “Of course.”
In the morning when I woke up and put on my evening dress from the night before, Jack was already downstairs . . . Then Jack appeared and said, “I’m gonna send you home in a taxi, if that’s OK, because I’m going to a ball game.” (Watch Me, pp. 7-8)
In the summer of 1973 Nicholson went to Europe to film The Passenger with Michelangelo Antonioni, and Anjelica went with him. She had no part in the production, and while Nicholson was on various locations in Germany, Spain, and Morocco, she took modeling jobs in London, Paris, and Milan. Unsettling stories of Nicholson’s affairs reached her. In Corsica on a fashion shoot for English Vogue with the model Manolo Blahnik and the designer Grace Coddington, she had an affair with the photographer David Bailey. She saw it as tit for tat. In her memoir Watch Me she wrote, “I wasn’t going to hang around and let Jack treat me badly.” (p.32) But when they returned to Los Angeles from Europe she moved in with Nicholson, and the pattern of betrayal and reprisal, a pattern she had experienced as a child through her parents ongoing infidelities, was repeated over and over.
For the next three years, Anjelica lived with Nicholson as his principal, but not only, love interest. She accompanied him on publicity junkets for his films, attended awards ceremonies with him in Cannes and Los Angeles as his career took off, and went with him to Aspen for the winter ski season. She did no work, either in modeling or in film. Nicholson showered her with gifts of jewelry, furs, and a Mercedes Benz. Anjelica played big sister to Allegra, then living with Cici, John, Collin, and Maricela in Pacific Palisades, taking her on shopping outings and bringing her to the location where Nicholson was filming Chinatown. This film brought Nicholson and John Huston together professionally for the first time as they both performed under the direction of Roman Polanski, Nicholson as the hero, Huston as the villain.
Nineteen seventy-five brought turmoil into the domestic lives of Anjelica and her father. John Huston began an affair with Maricela, and after Cici learned of it from John’s son Tony, Huston moved out of their house into a hotel, taking Maricela with him. This brought misfortune on Allegra, as the couple hired as caregivers to replace Maricela mistreated her. Over the summer, Anjelica went to Montana to be with Nicholson, who was filming The Missouri Breaks there with Marlon Brando. She brought Allegra with her as companion for Nicholson’s daughter Jennifer. Shortly after she arrived, she found love letters from a woman in the bedroom of the house Nicholson was renting. Distraught, she confronted Nicholson, who offered the explanation that the letters were intended not for him, but for his friend Harry Dean Stanton.
In the fall, Anjelica performed a small part in The Last Tycoon, her first film work since A Walk with Love and Death. The film, directed by Elia Kazan, featured performances by Nicholson and Robert De Niro. After the filming, while Nicholson was in New York promoting One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Anjelica began an affair with Ryan O’Neal, the star of Love Story, Paper Moon, and Barry Lyndon, whom she had dated before moving in with Nicholson.
When Nicholson returned from New York, Anjelica told him she was in love with O’Neal. Nicholson was surprised, but took the news calmly. For a while, Anjelica continued to live with Nicholson, but spent her weekends at O’Neal’s beach house in Malibu, often taking Allegra with her as companion to O’Neal’s daughter Tatum. Then she moved in with O’Neal, and lived with him for a year and a half. Allegra stayed with them on weekends, and during a six-month stretch, lived with them full time, over Cici’s objections.
O’Neal was another charismatic man with a dark side and a violent temper. He was a heavy user of drugs, and prone to sudden shifts of mood. He liked to play Frisbee for hours on the beach with his friends. He took Allegra to and from Marymount High School in Westwood and treated her to ice cream. But he was controlling, a philanderer like Nicholson, capable of abusing Anjelica verbally and physically. She broke with him after a violent episode that must have reminded her of Richardson and the tequila bottle. Angered because she had left him momentarily at a party to use the bathroom, O’Neal head butted her in the forehead while waiting for a parking valet to bring his car. Terrified, Anjelica fled back into the party and hid in the bathroom. Nonetheless, she returned to O’Neal’s house later that night. O’Neal complained to her that he had a headache. The next day, while driving with Allegra, Anjelica asked her thirteen-year-old sister what she should do. “Leave him,” Allegra replied. And that is what Anjelica did. She resumed her relationship with Nicholson, but lived apart from him in a small house he bought for her in the Beverly Glen canyon below Mulholland Drive.
Near the end of the period that she was living with O’Neal, Anjelica had an unpleasant encounter with the law. On March 10, 1977 she went to Nicholson’s house to pick up some of her belongings. When she entered the house, she noticed some camera equipment and a jacket she had seen worn by Roman Polanski the night before, when they had gone to the movies together. She called out, and immediately the door to the TV room opened. Polanski and a tall young girl emerged, looking disheveled. Anjelica had intruded on a crime scene—Polanski’s rape of a thirteen-year-old girl he had brought to the house to photograph, then drugged and sodomized. Mumbling excuses, Polanski and the girl left.
The next night, Anjelica was again in the house when Polanski arrived in the company of several plainclothes detectives. Nicholson was in Aspen. Anjelica let them in, and the police searched the house for drugs after seeing rolling paper in an ashtray. They found marijuana in Nicholson’s bedroom and cocaine in Anjelica’s purse. She and Polanski were arrested and taken to the West Los Angeles police station, where they were fingerprinted and booked. A friend of Anjelica raised bail money at two am and she was released. Subsequently, Polanski was indicted on six felony counts, including rape by use of drugs. Charges against Anjelica were dropped when she agreed to testify for the prosecution that she had seen Polanski and the girl at Nicholson’s house. Because Polanski agreed to a plea bargain, Anjelica never testified. The incident shamed her; she had brought scandal to the Huston family. Soon thereafter, Anjelica left O’Neal and moved temporarily into a studio apartment she rented from Cici. Then she resumed her relationship with Nicholson.
Around the time of the Polanski episode, Cici told Allegra that John Julius Norwich, not John Huston, was her father. Norwich was in Los Angeles when Cici broke the news, and the next day he visited Allegra for an hour at Cici’s house. Allegra learned that John Julius was married, and that she had a brother and a sister living in London, a revelation that echoed Nicholson’s discovery of his true parentage. Not long after, Allegra moved back to Beverly Hills to live once again with Cici’s parents. Recalling those days in her memoir Love Child Allegra wrote, “I traveled through life so lightly loaded—not much more than my clothes and my suitcase went with me from house to house, clothes which I grew out of within months—that I was sometimes waylaid by a sense that my own existence wasn’t quite real.” (Love Child, p. 150)
Although Anjelica was living apart from Nicholson, her life was centered on him. She lived in the shadow of his career and was doing nothing to develop herself as an actress. Through her father and Nicholson, she knew many people in the upper reaches of the film industry, but her connection to them was social, not professional. She had worked successfully as a model, but her sophisticated, high fashion look was better suited to the haut couture worlds of London, Paris, and New York than to the laid back sun and surf culture of Southern California.
In the summer of 1978 Nicholson was cast by Stanley Kubrick to play the lead in his horror film The Shining, based on the novel by Stephen King. Nicholson went to London, where most of the film was shot, and Anjelica came with him, bringing Allegra. Filming proceeded at a snail’s pace due to Kubrick’s obsessive perfectionism and a fire that destroyed a major set. Nicholson injured his back jumping the fence to his rented house because he had forgotten his keys. He was laid up on his back for weeks, and could barely walk. During a break in filming, Anjelica took him and Allegra to Ireland to visit St. Clerans, but they were refused entry by the new owners. Allegra visited John Julius in London and met her brother and sister.
Around this time John Huston told Anjelica that at twenty-seven she might be too old to start an acting career. This warning jolted her out of her lethargy, and when Nicholson asked his friend Bob Rafelson to add a part for her to the remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice that Rafelson was directing, Anjelica made no objection, although up until then she had been reluctant to ride on Nicholson’s coat tails. Anjelica was given the part of Madge, a hippie type who appears topless in a comic scene with Nicholson, who is wearing the headdress of an Egyptian pharaoh. Though her part was small, she was on the credit crawl with Nicholson and Jessica Lange.
A more profound jolt came to Anjelica in the form of a car accident. When she was back in Los Angeles after filming The Postman Always Rings Twice in Santa Barbara, the car she was driving down Coldwater Canyon Avenue was struck head-on by a speeding drunk driver. Unrestrained by a seat belt, Anjelica was thrown into the windshield. Her nose was broken in four places, her eyes were blackened, and her teeth became loose in her jaw. A friend took her to Cedars-Sinai Hospital, where a plastic surgeon repaired the damage. She liked her nose better after the surgery. The accident was a wake-up call for Anjelica. It must have reminded her of the death of her mother, killed in the prime of her life. “I made up my mind to take greater advantage of my life,” she wrote in Watch Me. “How things come and go. How people come and go . . . I needed to do my own thing, to have something that was mine alone.” (Watch Me, p. 117)
Following this accident, she was cast by Lee Grant in the film version of August Strindberg’s drama Playing with Fire. Carol Kane and Maximilian Schell had the leads. During rehearsals it became apparent to Grant and the other performers that Anjelica had no acting technique. Grant took over her role during one rehearsal to show her how to perform it, humiliating Anjelica. Carol Kane suggested that Anjelica take acting classes, advice that she followed by enrolling as a novice in Peggy Feury’s Loft Studio.
Feury immediately honed in on the character flaw that was holding Anjelica back—her lack of self-confidence. In Watch Me, Anjelica describes the scene in which Feury exposed this flaw:
The first exercise Peggy gave me was to acquire an object from another actor . . . I worked hard throughout the scene. After it was over, Peggy said, “Anjelica, you’re a tall and imposing girl, a big presence. When you ask for something, you don’t need to extend your hand. You have our attention.” It was a great piece of advice. It was the awakening in me to the illusion of confidence. I had not realized it until that moment, but I was pleading for things that I could simply have asked for. (Watch Me, p. 128)
Tony Richardson, with whom she worked on Hamlet, also gave her a nudge. Sitting next to her at a dinner party in Los Angeles, he chided her for doing nothing with her talent. He told her that she needed to start taking parts, no matter how small, to get experience and exposure. She subsequently appeared on the TV series Laverne & Shirley, in Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre, in the short film A Rose for Emily, then in the cult film This Is Spinal Tap. Her breakthrough came when John Foreman, who produced films for her father, cast her in the lightweight summer movie Ice Pirates. Foreman was in the process of setting up Prizzi’s Honor for John Huston to direct. He thought that Anjelica was well suited for the role of Maerose Prizzi, and Huston agreed. Nicholson was cast as Charlie Partanna, a hit man for the Prizzi family and godson of Don Corrado Prizzi, the mafia chief.
The film centers on a love triangle involving Partanna, Maerose, and Irene (Kathleen Turner), a professional killer Charlie falls in love with. Maerose is the Don’s niece. She disgraced the Prizzi family honor when she ran away to Mexico with an outsider after Charlie jilted her. Her mission in life is to win back Charlie even though he has fallen for Irene and married her. Maerose’s strategy is to expose Irene as party to a Las Vegas gambling scam that robbed the Prizzi’s of $720,000.
The plot is driven by the deceit of women, who refuse to live by the code of honor upheld by men. Irene is the embodiment of this feminine deceit, but she is out-maneuvered by her rival Maerose. Irene not only participated in the gambling scam, she is married to the man who orchestrated it, facts that she conceals from Charlie. Maerose goes to Las Vegas, locates a witness who can implicate Irene, then tells the Don. The Don orders Charlie to kill Irene as a test of his loyalty to the family. The scheming Maerose further complicates the situation by falsely telling her father that Charlie recently forced himself on her. Her father hires Irene to kill Charlie. Irene takes the $10,000 down payment, then tells Charlie. This tangled web of lies and betrayals amongst family members, with its obvious parallels to John Huston’s personal life, brought forth from the director a dark and witty comedy that earned the film eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor (Nicholson), Best Supporting Actor, and Best Supporting Actress (Anjelica). Only Anjelica won.
Anjelica performed the role of Maerose as a sophisticated, street-smart manipulator bent on revenge and redemption. Wearing striking outfits of black and purple topped with attention grabbing wide brim hats, jewelry clanging on her arms, speaking in a low, drawn out Brooklyn accent, Maerose had an edge. The screen popped with electricity during her scenes. Anjelica was fond of the character. “Maerose is a woman scorned,” she said, “but she has the wisdom to know that the only way to keep something forever is to let it go . . . I learned from Maerose that you have to allow the things you love to be free.” (Grober, p. 764) This acceptance, while obviously not borne out by Maerose’s behavior in the film, reflects Anjelica’s recognition of the limits of her relationship with Nicholson, who was not prepared to make the deep commitment to her that she wanted, though he loved her in his own way.
After her Oscar for Prizzi’s Honor, Anjelica was a Hollywood celebrity in her own right, and she worked steadily as a character actress for a number of prominent directors, including Woody Allen (Crimes and Misdemeanors), Francis Ford Coppola (Gardens of Stone), Paul Mazursky (Enemies: A Love Story), and Stephen Frears (The Grifters, for which she received a Best Actress Nomination from the Motion Picture Academy). She also had a recurring role in the television mini-series Lonesome Dove. She played a wide range of strongly etched, distinctive characters. In Crimes and Misdemeanors she was Dolores Paley, the clinging, needy, mistress of the Martin Landau character, a woman who refuses to accept that their affair is over, that his promises were empty. In The Grifters, she was Lilly Dillon, a hard faced con woman who unintentionally kills her own son in an argument over money. In Lonesome Dove she was Clara Allen, a well-to-do widow on the prairie who offers love and hospitality to restless, homeless wanderers. In all of these parts her character experiences unfulfilled, incomplete relationships with people she loves.
Her most important role in this period was as Gretta Conroy in The Dead, John Huston’s adaptation of the short story by James Joyce about a Christmas dinner hosted in Dublin by two elderly sisters. The film was especially significant for the Huston family, because it brought together professionally John, Angelica, and John’s son Tony, who wrote the screenplay, and because of its Irish setting and subject matter. All of the actors, excepting Anjelica, were Irish. Owing to John Huston’s poor health, the film was shot at a warehouse in Los Angeles rather than in Dublin.
Gretta Conroy is a married woman with children. Her husband Gabriel, an apparently self-assured man confident of his wife’s love, is ill-at-ease throughout the evening, worried about the speech he must give in tribute to the hosts. He delivers the speech graciously, and can finally relax. As he and Gretta are descending the stairs at the end of the evening, they hear the beautiful tenor voice of one of the guests singing a love song. Gretta pauses on the stairs to listen, and a look of great sadness and yearning passes over her face. In their hotel room, as they undress for bed, Gabriel remarks the change in Gretta’s mood. She tells him that the song reminded her of a youthful suitor who died with his love for her unrequited. Gabriel is stunned at this revelation. Gretta throws herself on the bed, sobbing inconsolably. The camera moves outside to film snow falling on the Irish countryside.
In an interview, Anjelica was asked what she drew on for the wordless scene on the stairs when she reacted to the love song, registering both sadness and longing. She said that when she did the scene, she was looking down the stairs at her dying father, who was directing from below. Six months after completing The Dead, on August 28, 1987, John Huston died, his body destroyed by severe emphysema. Three years later, Anjelica ended her relationship with Jack Nicholson after he told her that Rebecca Broussard, a woman he had been seeing, was carrying his child.
In June 1990 Anjelica met Robert Graham, the man who would become her devoted husband and friend. They were introduced by a mutual friend, Earl McGrath, who managed The Rolling Stones and owned an art gallery in Los Angeles. Graham was a prominent Los Angeles sculptor who had exhibited his work in McGrath’s gallery. McGrath had invited both Anjelica and Graham to a dinner party at his home in West Hollywood, and knowing of Anjelica’s break with Nicholson, suggested to Graham that her bring her to the dinner. They had an instant rapport, and the following day Anjelica visited Graham at his studio in Venice, where they became lovers.
Over the next two years, Anjelica and Graham saw each other regularly. She brought him to the 120-acre ranch she owns in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and bought him a horse, which he rode only once. They made a trip to Ireland where Anjelica took Graham to her childhood home St. Clerans, now a boutique hotel owned by Merv Griffin. They stayed overnight at Dromoland Castle near Shannon, and in the morning Graham proposed marriage. On May 23, 1992 they were married at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles, followed by a boisterous reception under a tent on property that Graham owned in Venice. They honeymooned in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Graham was born in 1938 in Mexico City, the child of a Mexican-Indian mother and a Scotch-English father. Graham’s father deserted the family when the boy was five and he saw his father only once after that. He was raised by his mother, his aunt, and his grandmother, who were all members of the occult Rosicrucian order. When Graham was twelve, the family moved to San Jose, California, headquarters of the Rosicrucians. Graham studied art at San Jose State University, joined the Air Force and was stationed in Japan, then continued his art studies at the San Francisco Art Institute. He married twice before he met Anjelica, and had an adult son named Steven by his first wife.
Graham had followed a singular path as an artist, working with live models to create highly realistic, representational human figures at a time when the prevailing art movements were either pop or minimalist. His first works were dioramas in which miniature human figures made of wax and painted were placed in plexiglass boxes in a variety of poses and positions. These pieces made the viewer a voyeur of humans occupying a private, insular space.
This early period of Graham’s work spanned the 1960s and included two years in London. In 1970 he returned to Los Angeles where he had established a studio and began working with the human figure on a larger scale, casting it in bronze. His work was being exhibited in major museums and shown internationally in galleries. In 1978 he received his first private commission, from the art collector Frederick Weisman, to produce a piece called Dance Door, which positioned small human figures on the top edge of a large metal door. This piece was installed at the Los Angeles Music Center, and was the first of many sculptures to be placed in public spaces. Perhaps influenced by the Mexican muralists, Graham believed that art should be public, not solely the province of museums, galleries, and collectors. Following Dance Door, Graham created a number of monumental public works, including the Olympic Gateway at the entrance to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, a memorial to Joe Louis in Detroit, another to Duke Ellington in Harlem.
When Anjelica met Robert Graham, he was a celebrity in the art world, known and respected by collectors, critics, museum curators, and other artists in America and Europe. He was largely unknown to the general public. His celebrity was of a different order than Anjelica’s, because it centered more on the work he created rather than on his personality, as shaped and promoted by the publicity machinery of Hollywood. Graham was not a mass culture phenomenon, as movie stars are. He was celebrated for his workmanship, and did not crave the public eye, or depend upon it for his livelihood. In fact, he disdained it, debunking the notion of the artist as culture hero that was attached to artists like Picasso. “An artist’s authorship is not important,” he once told an interviewer. “A work takes on its own specific life. The modernist notion of an artist making art for himself is an aberration . . .” (Vanity Fair, September 1992)
Graham’s humility was reflected in his work ethic. He was usually in his studio by eight am and worked until about seven pm, with a break for lunch. He was disciplined in his habits, and moderate in his lifestyle. His chief vices were a fondness for Cuban cigars and a taste for tequila. With him, Anjelica entered a period of contentment and stability she had not known since the death of her mother. “We have a connection, “ Anjelica told an interviewer. “He gives me comfort and support. It’s a very basic thing, but very difficult to find. It makes it easier to go about the rest of your life and work.” (Vanity Fair, September 1992)
While honeymooning in Oaxaca, the newlyweds stayed at the El Presidente, a luxury hotel that had been converted from a sixteenth century convent. The structure gave them the idea to create an insulated living space on the lot that Graham owned in Venice. The lot was on Windward Avenue, a busy commercial street just off the Venice boardwalk, where homeless transients begged and slept, vendors sold flimsy wares, street performers passed the hat, and tourists strolled. Graham designed a two and three story home they called “ the fortress,” 5,500 square feet walled on four sides around a central courtyard planted with a coral tree and bordered by a black bottom lap pool. The residence echoes on a large scale the plexiglass boxes that housed Graham’s miniature human figures. Anjelica sold her home in Beverly Hills and moved to “the fortress” in acceptance of her husband’s need to live in Venice where he had built his own foundry and established his studio. Since her film work took her everywhere, she could live almost anywhere.
Anjelica worked steadily as a character actress in both film and television. She became the iconic Morticia Addams in The Addams Family and Addams Family Values, appeared as herself in Robert Altman’s The Player, worked again with Woody Allen in Manhattan Murder Mystery, and was a favorite performer for Wes Anderson, who cast her in The Royal Tennenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and The Darjeeling Limited. In 1996, she was given her first directing assignment, Bastard Out of Carolina, a film about child abuse that was shown at Cannes and nominated for an Emmy, despite the fact that Ted Turner, the backer of the film, refused to show it on his network because of its graphic content.
Although Anjelica was in her early forties, she and Graham wanted to have a child. Because of her infertility, they attempted pregnancy through in vitro fertilization and then an implant. The procedure failed several attempts, and Anjelica resigned herself to being childless, directing her nurturing instincts to stray cats and injured birds. Her siblings Tony, Danny, and Allegra all started families. Tony had three children by his wife Margot Chalmondeley before they divorced. Allegra moved from London to Taos, New Mexico to marry Cisco Guevara, a river guide she met while visiting Tony, who had settled there. They had a son named Rafael. Danny married Katie Evans, an English woman, and with her had a daughter named Stella. Anjelica thus had a considerable extended family and maintained close relations with her nieces and nephews.
Early in 2007, after nearly fifteen years of marriage during which both her own and her husband’s careers had flourished, Anjelica became troubled by signs that Graham was not well. He was undergoing treatment for neuropathy, and complained of numbness in his extremities and back pain. He had resisted seeing a doctor, but as the symptoms persisted, he relented, and in August 2008 he returned home from a visit to his son Steven’s doctor with a diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis. So began a rapid deterioration of Graham’s health that soon reached crisis proportions. He suffered a heart attack in the middle of the night and was rushed to UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica by paramedics who kept him alive using a defibrillator. That night in the intensive care unit he had a stroke that partially paralyzed him, and impeded his speech and memory. His doctors transferred him to the Ronald Reagan Medical Center at UCLA in Westwood. When his kidneys stopped functioning, a specialist told Anjelica that Graham had Wegener’s granulomatosis, a disease for which no cure or effective treatment had been found. He was put on dialysis, and fed large doses of Cytoxan, a drug used to treat cancer patients.
After seven weeks, Graham’s condition had not improved, and he was released from the hospital. He underwent dialysis for seven hours every other day, and received therapy for the effects of his stroke. In the midst of this crisis, on October 16, came the news that Stella’s mother Katie, divorced from Danny and struggling with drug addiction and depression, had committed suicide in Manhattan Beach by jumping from the roof of her condominium. Stella was four years old, the same age as Allegra at Ricki’s death. Two months later, on December 27, Robert Graham died in the intensive care unit of the UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica after Anjelica and Steven agreed to disconnect the respirator that was keeping his unconscious body alive. Anjelica drove around Los Angeles placing flowers at the base of public monuments he had created, and others did the same in Detroit, New York, and Washington, D.C. Back at “the fortress” Anjelica started a garden for her husband’s memory.
Cardinal Roger Mahony held a funeral mass for Graham at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, whose bronze doors Graham had made. Anthony Villaraigosa, the Mayor of Los Angeles, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Governor of California, and Schwarzenegger’s wife Maria Shriver attended, along with many of Graham’s friends and fellow artists, and the members of Anjelica’s family, including Tony, Allegra, Danny, Stella, and Zoe. In Watch Me, Anjelica wrote of her loss, “The world as I knew it had ended, but I was surrounded by friends.” (p. 366) Stella, in a reprise of Allegra’s nomadic childhood, went to live with Danny’s mother Zoe in London.
Though, as she put it, “loss became part of my landscape,” Anjelica soldiered on. In March 2011 she was offered the lead in Smash, a TV series about a Broadway musical. As the production was located in New York and Anjelica’s contract required a six year commitment, she decided to sell the Venice house that she and Graham had built, and that had been, in her words, “ a very beautiful shell in which to place my oyster.” (Architectural Digest, April 1996) After a two-year run, Smash was discontinued and Anjelica returned to Los Angeles, where she continues to live and work.
* * *
We Americans live in a celebrity-driven culture. Whether they are highly skilled athletes playing professional sports under multi-million dollar contracts, or movie stars whose glamorous faces are beamed at us from movie screens, televisions, and the covers of glossy supermarket magazines, or popular musicians performing live before delirious fans, or daredevils who astonish us riding monster fifty-foot waves, celebrities perform an almost religious function in our society, embodying our ideals and aspirations and setting the pace for our lifestyles and patterns of consumption.
In the modern capitalist economy, consumption is the engine that powers growth and produces wealth. For the system to continue, consumption must be perpetual, products constantly changing, being “improved.” Our needs and desires must be manipulated through advertising and other forms of propaganda to keep the engine purring. Some degree of dissatisfaction with what we already have must be encouraged if we are constantly to desire renewal through purchases of things. The wheels of fashion, whatever the merchandise, must perpetually turn.
Celebrities play an essential role in maintaining this system. Their fame is attached to products through sponsorship and advertising, turning ordinary objects into talismans with magical properties, like relics of the saints peddled by religious quacks. Their lavish lifestyles, promoted and publicized in the mass media, remind us of the seemingly limitless possibilities for ascension that democratic capitalism offers the individual. The ordinariness of their origins is stressed, implying that each of us is capable of joining their company.
Most celebrities earn their fame through remarkable achievements and long practice. Actors learn their craft and go endlessly to auditions; athletes and musicians practice for hours each day. Their skills and reputation accumulate over years of dogged persistence. Many are called, few are chosen, but the few who reach the limelight hold out their arms to others, beckoning them to follow. Only in the post-modern digital age have social media allowed celebrity to become a title divorced from the merit of any meaningful achievement beyond skillful networking and self-promotion. Celebrity itself is a twentieth-century phenomenon, an industry based on the image making capabilities of media that can transform ordinary people into icons.
Anjelica Huston is a celebrity. She has performed in over seventy motion picture and television films, and numerous photographs of her displaying high fashion have appeared in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Town and Country, and on the cover of Vanity Fair. She has been declared one of the ten most beautiful women in the world, a fatuous if promotionally useful designation that can be neither proven nor disproven. Her residences in California have been the subject of full page spreads in Architectural Digest, giving curious readers a close-up view of her possessions, her wardrobe, her tastes, and tempting them with the sight of possible attainments. A keyword search of her name in a database for mass media periodicals published in English yields over twelve hundred citations, most of which are the output of the film industry’s promotional machinery, providing information about her film roles. Lengthier interviews in publications like The New York Times and Vanity Fair weave well-known facts about her personal life into plugs for her movies, creating a blend of the ordinary and the mythical that becomes her public persona and commodifies her for consumption.
Recently she published a two-part memoir about her upbringing in John Huston’s Irish manor household and her career path as a model and actress. These read like extended versions of her widely disseminated publicity material. We learn about the vagaries of life with her parents, we learn about her love affairs and longer-term relationships, we learn about what she eats and drinks and buys, and where she goes on vacation, and we learn production details from her films. And we learn about her losses, which are numerous and often heartbreaking.
But the question that remains is: where does Anjelica Huston the woman, the human being who is at bottom no different than the rest of us, diverge from Anjelica Huston the public persona, professionally packaged as an entertainer and role model? Is there a divergence, or has her fundamental identity been subsumed in the public image manufactured for her by hair stylists, costume designers, photographers, screenwriters, and publicists?
Beneath the airbrushed surface of Anjelica Huston’s life story one feels an undercurrent of sadness at losses bravely endured. Her childhood, though exceptional for its luxuries and privileges found only in the homes of European nobility, was deeply scarred by the neglect of her brilliant but self-indulgent father, who spent precious little time with her during her most important formative years. The loss of her mother when she was only seventeen effectively made her an orphan, vulnerable to the attentions of fickle older men (Richardson, Nicholson) in positions of cultural power like her father. She confessed in her memoir A Story Lately Told to her childhood insecurities and lack of self-esteem, and to creating alternate identities through costume and play acting in order to amuse her father on his infrequent visits. These childish inventions were prelude to her careers as model and actress, performing fantasies for others through the camera, which is after all only another kind of mirror that allows her to be seen. The importance of being visible to others is stressed in the title of her second memoir volume, Watch Me.
Was the fictional persona she created for public consumption simply a professional mask that she wore in order to make a living, or was it more than that—an alternate identity that has given her refuge from a profound loneliness at her core?
Further Reading
Eliot, Marc. Nicholson: A Biography. New York: Crown Archetype, 2013.
Huston, Anjelica. A Story Lately Told. New York: Scribner, 2013.
——————–. Watch Me. New York: Scribner, 2014.
Huston, John. An Open Book. New York: Alfred A, Knopf, 1980.
View Photos of Anjelica Huston’s Family and Career here.
Arthur Hoyle (www.arthurhoyle.com) is the author of The Unknown Henry Miller: A Seeker in Big Sur and Mavericks, Mystics, and Misfits: Americans Against the Grain. He reviews biography for the New York Journal of Books. His Substack newsletter Off the Cuff offers periodic commentary on the American cultural scene. Subscribe at https://arthurhoyle.substack.
