The Huston family’s story is uncommonly intriguing because of what family members have left unsaid. The patriarch, John Huston, was a gloriously theatrical character as well as a great filmmaker; his force of personality filled the family manse all by itself. St. Clerans had a Big House, where he lived in baronial splendor, and a Little House, where his wife and children spent much of their time. Anjelica, in thrall of her father, grew up with no reason to see this arrangement as peculiar.
As “A Story Lately Told” explains, Anjelica was the daughter of Mr. Huston’s fourth wife, the ballerina Enrica Georgia Soma, who looked so much like Leonardo’s Mona Lisa that Life magazine said so. Ricki was much younger than her husband, and she did not hold his undivided attention for long. By the time Anjelica began wondering what went on between her parents (apparently not much), family life mostly revolved around Mr. Huston’s exits and grand entrances. On one typically flamboyant occasion, he reappeared from a film shoot “dressed all in black leather, an African gray parrot with a scarlet head balanced on his shoulder.”
Ms. Huston chooses to write about this from a foggily girlish perspective. She loved the gifts her father bestowed: She once got a ruby to match her measles, while her older brother, Tony, received “an antique orrery and a carved cherrywood crossbow from the court of Louis XIV.” She loved dressing up, and describes her costumes. She was thrilled by a tutu. She believed in fairies.
Less clearly, she registered her father’s string of girlfriends and her mother’s unhappiness, not to mention her own urgent desire for her parents’ attention. Allegra Huston, Anjelica’s much younger half-sister (who knew Mr. Huston as Dad but was not his biological child), wrote a more revealing memoir called “Love Child” (2009). And there is considerably meowing to be found when those books are compared. Allegra remembered that her father had named a boat after her, then renamed it the Anjelica after her big sister came to visit. Anjelica writes: “Allegra was staying in my old bedroom at the Little House but didn’t realize that everything there was once mine.”
But none of the Huston children held onto anything for very long. Anjelica was startled to learn that her parents were separating, that her idyllic country life was ending, and that she was headed for London with Ricki and Tony. So the book switches from glamorous fox-hunting stories to listing shops, styles, celebrities and even perfumes that Ms. Huston, now figuring out how to wear lots of eye makeup, discovered during her London years. “There was one to suit your every mood,” she writes of the Beatles, in one of this book’s wittier lines.
“A Story Lately Told” chooses not to dwell on what happened to Ms. Huston when she reached the age of her father’s youngest conquests. But surely those were awkward years. She acted for him in “A Walk With Love and Death” and performed a seminude love scene “two inches away from the nose of my angry, impatient father.”
John Huston seemed both intrigued and galled by his daughter’s new sexual allure. But she had reached that stage when Marlon Brando, visiting Mr. Huston at St. Clerans, invited her to visit him in Tahiti. Ms. Huston recalls not only this proof of her appeal but also the way girls in the kitchen, excited about Brando, squeezed orange juice into their eyes to make them brighter.
Ms. Huston began modeling. She had both the looks and the connections for it. “In every generation a flock of pretty girls was released into society with the help of their mothers, via the pages of the glamour magazines,” she writes. “They wore the bright plumage of the newly initiated, and the adornments of their ancestors only served to enhance their youth. Often they were the progeny of good bloodlines — rich, clever, famous fathers and the beautiful women who married them.”
And often this history repeated itself. Or tried to. At 18, Ms. Huston became attached to a much older man, just as her mother had. Bob Richardson was a fashion photographer, and the book describes the way his instability and rage held Ms. Huston hostage — but must somehow have reminded her of home. Ricki had died in a car accident by this point, and her daughter was re-enacting part of her mother’s story.
Late in the book, she spends enough time in New York to reel off the denizens of Max’s Kansas City and the Chelsea Hotel, where she and Mr. Richardson spent time as they became more and more impoverished. The stories of abuse get more extreme. But Ms. Huston could not end that destructive relationship by herself. She needed her father’s help, and she got it.
Ms. Huston is now known for her strong screen presence and striking personal style. And at 62, she has attained a stature that befits her pedigree. But in this book, she paints herself as a girl dominated by the men in her life. And Part 2 is likely to be more of the same. Her publisher promises that much of the sequel will be about Jack Nicholson.
