In 1951, a telegram was sent from Los Angeles to the Ugandan township of Butiaba. A local man then took the missive from the post office and ran, barefoot, for two days, until he reached Murchison Falls, “a waterfall on the Nile, deep in the heart of the Belgian Congo.”
There, legendary director John Huston was filming “The African Queen” with Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart.
As soon as the runner gave him the note, he glanced at it, then put it in his pocket.
Hepburn exclaimed, “For God’s sake, John, what does it say?”
Huston replied: “It’s a girl. Her name is Anjelica.”
In Anjelica Huston’s new memoir, which covers the time from her childhood in Ireland to her early 20s as a fashion model in New York, the veteran actress makes it clear that growing up in the shadow of a giant means that no aspect of your life will be normal, even down to your birth announcement.
John Huston was a larger-than-life Ernest Hemingway type who relished danger, treasured risk and despised those who lived without full emotional commitment to every moment.
His exploits were consistently grandiose. One time in Mexico, he encountered a group of local soldiers. “When a general drew a .45 on Dad, [he] responded by putting his finger in the gun barrel.
Naturally, Dad and the general wound up getting drunk and singing songs together.”
Another time there, as a prank, he dropped thousands of Ping-Pong balls carrying slogans like “Go home you Yankee bastards” from a plane, straight onto the opening ceremonies of a local luxury golf course.
But this eccentric creativity played less well in domestic life.
Huston once owned a pet monkey, and one night he allowed it to stay in the bedroom he shared with his third wife, Evelyn Keyes.
“When the curtains were drawn in the morning, the room was destroyed,” Anjelica writes. “Evelyn’s clothes were in shreds, and the monkey had defecated all over her underwear.”
Keyes gave Huston an ultimatum —“It’s the monkey or me!” — and Huston replied, “I’m sorry, honey, I just can’t bear to be parted from the monkey.”
Huston’s old-world masculinity came with predictable dark sides. He was a relentless womanizer, and he grew uncomfortable when his daughter began to exhibit her own sexuality.
When Anjelica was 14, her father called her in for a talk one morning after a party the previous night.
“I have it on good authority that you were doing the bumps last night,” he said, referring to her dancing a little dirtier than he might have liked. She didn’t know what he meant, and the argument escalated. She screamed, in tears, “You don’t love me,” and “suddenly, his arm swung back and his hand hit me hard in the face, backward and forward; the force of it was like walking into a wall.”
Huston and Nicholson at the Academy Awards April, 1975
As an adult, the men in her life often, unsurprisingly, shared her father’s best and worst traits. (Given its focus on her early life, Jack Nicholson, her 17-year lover and a man with many of her father’s traits, is not mentioned in this memoir.)
After a brief, unpleasant stint as a teenage actress, she found her initial calling in modeling, working with photographers such as Richard Avedon and Helmut Newton.
But the man with the greatest effect on her then was Bob Richardson, a master fashion photographer known for a sense of erotic danger in his work.
On her first shoot for Richardson, Anjelica described him as staring at her “so penetratingly, I felt that he could follow the ebb and flow of my emotions.” Soon, Richardson — whose then-infant son Terry would also become a notoriously sexual fashion photographer — seduced Anjelica and left his wife, and Anjelica, who had just turned 18, began an often treacherous four-year relationship with the 42-year-old.
At first, he seemed like her dream lover.
“I felt that he could see into my soul almost in a psychic way,” she writes. “I believed that he would be my champion and teacher and protector.”
But she soon learned that this ideal lover was actually “bipolar, schizophrenic, and bisexual,” with a long history of hallucinations, suicide attempts and even incarceration in mental facilities.
One morning, after taping her first-ever “Tonight Show” appearance, she returned to their hotel room to find him strewn across the couch surrounded by her clothing and jewelry, which had all been either shredded, smashed to bits or tossed out the window.
“‘What have I done?’ I cried, casting off my stiff python suit and standing before him half-naked. ‘Tell me, what have I done?’” she writes.
After hours of begging for forgiveness, she finally learned the crime that set him off — that she had not unpacked her bags when she arrived the night before.
Rather than bolt, she began to think of Richardson as “a wounded soul and believed it was my mission to save him,” as similar episodes became a regular occurrence.
Things got so bad that one morning, four days into one of Richardson’s meltdowns, Huston “walked into our bedroom and, in desperation, drew a razor blade across my left wrist. I ran back into the bedroom, blood spurting from my veins, crying to him, ‘Will this make you love me?’ ”
The turmoil finally ended when, after arriving late to their room one morning, she entered to find a tequila bottle whizzing past her head. After running down the street to the beach, barely able to breath from the stress and the fear, she returned and said, “That’s the last time this will ever happen,” and packed her things.
The next morning, after a night of Richardson alternately calling her vile names and begging her to stay, she was ready to go. As they prepared to part, Richardson, under-standing the finality, reached out to shake her hand.
“If you were the last person alive, I wouldn’t shake it,” she said, speaking to Richardson for the last time ever as she moved on to her next adventure, and the next man who would demonstrate how deeply her father’s legacy had affected her romantic life.