Glamour and Grit: Anjelica Huston’s Cultured Coolness

“Remember,” Anjelica Huston’s father, John, used to tell her, “You can always put your hands in your pockets and walk away.”

Huston never took the legendary director’s advice. She’s been the scion of a famed Hollywood family, a top model, and an Oscar-winning actress in films like Prizzi’s Honor, The Grifters, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Dead, The Addams Family, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and The Witches. In Huston’s two autobiographies—2013’s A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London, and New York and 2014’s Watch Me: A Memoir—she also reveals herself to be an excellent writer whose keen eye for aesthetics and detail would have made her a great fashion editor, travel writer, or gossip columnist as well.

Her words allow the slightly tough and achingly chic Huston to reveal a strikingly cuddly, softhearted streak, especially regarding children and animals. “For a sophisticated girl,” she notes, “I could be tragically gullible.”

Her rolodex of experience is impressive. Scan these pages, and you’ll find Huston reminiscing about her encounters with Montgomery Clift, Diane von Furstenberg, Bill Murray, Michael Jackson, Marlon Brando, Joni Mitchell, Prince Albert, Josephine Baker, John Cusack, Helmut Lang, Groucho Marx, Diana Vreeland, Huey P. Newton, and Mick Jagger, among others.

Most of all, Huston’s books show her determination to evolve and defy expectations—a drive that’s both inspiring and timely. In the early 1980s, famed director Tony Richardson cruelly told Huston, “Poor little you. So much talent and so little to show for it. You’re never going to do anything with your life.” Huston’s reaction will resonate with readers everywhere:

“Perhaps you’re right,” I answered. Inside I was thinking, “Watch me.”

An Irish Fairy Tale

“My life was mostly fantasy,” Huston writes of her imaginative childhood. Indeed, in A Story Lately Told she paints a lush, evocative, sensual portrait of a charmed, if lonely, storybook youth.

Anjelica Huston was born on July 8, 1951, in Los Angeles. Her father, John, was a legendary figure who captivated men, women and children alike. “They were drawn to his wisdom, his humor, his magnanimous power,” she writes. “They considered him a lion, a leader, the pirate they wished they had the audacity to be.”

Her mother, much younger than her middle-aged husband, was the ethereal former ballerina Enrica “Ricki” Soma. Ricki was equally iconic: generous, chic, and talented, with “the expression of a Renaissance Madonna, a look both wise and naïve.”

In 1953, the family moved to the Irish countryside and eventually settled at the magnificent St. Clerans Estate in County Galway. The philandering and adventurous John was usually away on location, and their stifled, sophisticated mother was often traveling as well, leaving Anjelica and her older brother Tony to be raised mostly by their benevolent nurse.

“I knew how to play people,” she writes of her girlhood. “I was romantic and companionable and a bit of a crybaby. But I also knew how to make people laugh.”

St. Clerans and its eccentric occupants—as well as august visitors like Peter O’Toole and John Steinbeck—loom large in A Story Lately Told, making the memoir a true feast for the senses. The siblings spent hours playing in the ruins of a nearby ancient castle. Little Anjelica loved dressing up, inspecting herself in the mirror, horseback riding, collecting blackberries, dancing reels, and communing with animals. She had a particular fascination with the comic strip character of Morticia Addams, and nursed an ambition to be a nun.

But there were undercurrents of mystery and intrigue coursing through St. Clerans, which seem to have titillated and confused young Anjelica. “There were always places to inspect, to excavate,” she writes. “So many secrets buried at St. Clerens.”

Blow Up

“Mum and Dad never told Tony and me that they were separating, so I was confused when Mum started a sort of slow-motion move to London,” Huston writes.

In 1961, she and Tony moved with Ricki to London to attend school. Although still technically married, her parents’ love affairs continued. Huston was blindsided when John introduced her to her half-brother Danny, his son with actress Zoe Sallis. In 1964, her mother gave birth to daughter Allegra, whose father was the married aristocrat John Julius Norwich.

Much like Michael Caine’s memoirs, A Story Told Lately vibrates with the revolutionary spirit and cool of London in the 1960s. Huston’s sumptuous recounting of her in-crowd, art-filled teen years makes the reader green with envy: going to see shows featuring Nina Simone, Pink Floyd, and Jimi Hendrix; hanging out with Davy Jones; modeling with her mother in British Vogue.

“It was remarkable how things came so easily to me. In every generation a flock of pretty girls was released into society…. Often they were the progeny of good bloodlines—rich, clever famous fathers and the beautiful women who married them,” Huston writes. “I was no exception to this fortunate rule, but in retrospect I remember wishing I had something to fight for. This was the beginning of a habit of making things harder for myself than they needed to be.”

John cast Anjelica as the star in his film A Walk With Love and Death, a disastrous debut. Then in 1969, as she was understudying for Marianne Faithfull in a hip stage production of Hamlet, disaster struck when her beloved mother was killed in a car accident in Italy. “The light had gone out of everything,” Huston writes. “It was like being in a pile of ashes.”

A frenzied four years followed as Huston became a globe-trotting top model (doing runway shows with Halston and spreads with Richard Avedon) under the control of her much older boyfriend, the photographer Bob Richardson. But all that glittered was not gold. The abusive Richardson tormented a grieving Huston, leading her to attempt suicide. “I walked into our bathroom at the Chelsea and in desperation drew a razor blade across my left wrist,” Huston writes. “I ran back into the bedroom, blood spurting from the vein crying to him, ‘Will this make you love me?’”

The Joker and the Jock

“There was a sense of coming home to California,” Huston writes in Watch Me. “Although I had grown up in Europe, I was born in Los Angeles. The desert skies were clear blue and untroubled.”

In 1973, with the help of her father and his fifth wife, Cici, Huston escaped Bob Richardson and started over in LA. Soon after, she and Cici went to a party at Jack Nicholson’s legendary estate on Mulholland Drive. The attraction was instant. “I danced with Jack for hours,” Huston writes. “And when he invited me to stay the night, I asked Cici what she thought. ‘Are you kidding?’ she said. ‘Of course!’”

Despite his flakiness, Huston soon became part of the iconic charmer’s entourage as his besotted girlfriend. “Jack was not fazed by much,” Huston writes. “He liked his creature comforts and had a real zest for life…. He loved to collect people. Paternally, he would call us ‘my people.’ At the time the generality of it bugged me; I wanted to be special, and I felt a loss of identity. ‘Where are my people?’”

There was also the problem of Nicholson’s womanizing, which Huston countered with a brief affair with photographer Arnaud de Rosnay. As Huston notes, she was reenacting the relationship between her mother and father. During a meal to discuss the filming of Chinatown, the two men in her life collided:

Out of nowhere, my father, eyeing [Jack] malevolently, said, “I hear you are sleeping with my daughter”—long pause—“Mr. Gittes.” I went bright red, and then I realized: they were rehearsing. Everyone burst out laughing.

Confused and jealous, Huston soon fell into the arms of Ryan O’Neal. “In my memory of Ryan, I see a golden specimen, always in motion, an Apollo,” she writes. “He was an athlete, a runner, a boxer, and a bully.”

Over the next year and a half, Huston was torn between two superstars, but gradually became aware of O’Neal’s inherent unkindness. “In the big picture I don’t believe that Ryan had much of a conscience, guilty or otherwise,” she notes. After one terrifying incident in which O’Neal headbutted her, she desperately asked her sister Allegra (who had been adopted by John) for advice.

“’What shall I do, Allegra? What can I do?’ She looked over at me coolly. She was 13 years old. ‘Leave him,’ she replied.”

The Drama of the Decade

“Roman was restless, opinionated, urban, brilliant, impatient and mercurial,” Huston writes of the infamous director Roman Polanski. “I felt that perhaps he was always on the verge of being bored or irritated. You had to work to keep up with him.”

On March 9, 1977, Polanski asked Huston to dinner and a movie. Flattered, she said yes, but seems to have felt uneasy. “I wondered, as his taillights receded down Beverly Drive, if it was true that everything in Roman’s life turned to tragedy,” she writes.

She would find out the next day. According to Huston’s account in Watch Me, when she arrived at Nicholson’s otherwise empty house, she vaguely noticed Polanski’s jacket and a camera. She called out to see if anyone was there, only for Roman to yell they’d be right out. He soon walked into the living room with a tall girl in platforms who played with Huston’s dog. Polanski explained they were taking pictures and then they left. Huston thought nothing more of it.

But Huston was blindsided the next night when Polanski arrived at the Nicholson estate with plainclothes detectives, claiming they were there to clear up confusion from the night before. Huston was too shocked to ask for a search warrant, and police went through her handbag and found a gram of cocaine. She was placed under arrest. Polanski would be arrested for the alleged rape of a 13-year-old girl.

As they walked past each other in the police station, Polanski said, “I’m so sorry for this, Anjelica.” Huston gave Allegra and her father as next of kin to the police. “The seriousness of the situation hit me hard,” Huston recalls. “That they would have to suffer for my sake. That I had shamed the family name.”

Although Huston’s drug charge would be dropped, the fallout from the alleged rape and Hollywood’s exploitative culture reverberated around the globe. Polanski later accepted a plea bargain, but when he heard that the case’s judge planned to ignore the plea, he fled America in 1978, never to return. “This hurt most of all,” Huston writes of one of Hollywood’s greatest scandals. “I had witnessed nothing untoward and had never seen both Roman and the girl in a bedroom.”

Up, Up and Away

For Huston, the 1980s would be a decade of discovery and growth, spurred on by a horrifying car crash where she broke her nose. “The memory of the headlights of the oncoming car lived in my mind, woke me up at night, reminded me that life is short,” she writes. “I needed to do my own thing, to have something that was mine alone. So I decided to go to work on that.”

Already a successful model and an It couple with Nicholson, Huston began to seriously study acting. In some of the most touching passages of Watch Me, she recounts the triumph of her 1985 breakout role costarring alongside Nicholson in Prizzi’s Honor (for which she won the supporting-actress Oscar), directed by her father. “For me and Dad, it was proof that if you believe in each other, are willing to risk humiliation, and put your heart on the line, miracles can happen,” she writes.

Huston also delivers a her vividly poetic recounting of A-list parties and events: soul food at Carrie Fisher’s, old Hollywood at Roddy McDowall’s, weekly skate nights with Robin Williams and Cher (wearing a rubber bottom in case she fell), and substance-drenched weeks in Aspen hanging with the Eagles and Hunter S. Thompson while Jimmy Buffett cooked up gumbo. At one Aspen political fundraiser, she met a 12-year-old Gwyneth Paltrow:

“Looking nervously across the room at Jack, she said, ‘That man scares me.’

‘With good reason,’ I replied. ‘He scares me too.’”

Huston is always kind about the effervescent, surprisingly sensitive Nicholson, while being honest about his womanizing and carelessness. During rehearsals for 1990’s The Grifters, an uncharacteristically nervous Nicholson invited Huston to dinner, where he announced he was having a baby with Rebecca Broussard, a friend of his daughter Jennifer.

“Life was irretrievably altered, the way it feels around a death,” Huston writes, “the irony being that this was an impending birth.”

That Christmas, Nicholson sent Huston an exquisite pearl necklace, which Frank Sinatra once gifted Ava Gardner. Attached was a note: “These pearls from your swine. With happiest wishes for the holidays- Enjoy-Yr. Jack.”

Solid Ground

Huston’s memoirs are in many ways the feminist story of a woman stepping out of the shadows of powerful men, coming into her own as an artist who just gets stronger with age.

After Huston’s breakup with Nicholson, she would be nominated for an Oscar for The Grifters, become a cultural icon as Morticia Addams (whose softer side she borrowed from her great friend Jerry Hall), direct the acclaimed TV movie Bastard Out of Carolina, and find lasting love with Mexican sculptor Robert Graham, whom she married in 1992.

Huston’s tender and detailed recollections of Graham comprise Watch Me’s most heart-rendering passages. “He had all the best parts of Dad and Jack but none of the temper, or the women,” she writes. “He amused me by walking fully clothed into a swimming pool at a fundraiser…. Bob was also pyrotechnically inclined and liked to mess around gas and lard and flame, frying up a whole turkey sitting on a can of beer.…he loved jazz. He was elegant and wise and devil-may-care. He smelled of mint soap and clay and fresh cigar ash.”

Their idyllic life would end with Graham’s untimely death in 2008. (Nicholson stuck by her side all throughout his funeral.) In both of her memoirs, Huston meditates on grief, anger and loss emotionally and honestly, never playing the victim but honestly recounting how it has shaped and affected her and made her who she is. “I never thought I would get this far and have so many years behind me,” Huston writes. “Life’s kaleidoscope of colors, its sounds, emotions, and special effects, its memories receding like rainbows.”

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