Anjelica Huston (January 2018)
I’m at Anjelica Huston’s Los Angeles home. It’s both cosy and luxurious, extremely artistic and totally charming, rather like the woman herself. I am greeted by a fox terrier called Oscar, a Havanese called Pootie and four cats. It’s the day after the Golden Globes. Anjelica, in dark jeans and pink cashmere wonders what I thought of the ceremony.
She says, “I was not born a #metoo girl. It wasn’t who I wanted to be at school and it’s not what I want to be now – a snitch. I think it’s a very idealistic idea of young women to think that we’re going to change men because we haven’t done it thus far in history. Nothing has happened since the day they were wearing bearskins and wielding clubs. Men have never changed about certain things. And by the way, you may have noticed last night there were not a lot of mea culpas (men admitting to take the blame). As long as women go beating on the chests of men with tight little fists this thing is never going to happen.
Seems like Huston is with the 100 eminent women French school of thought who denounced the #metoo movement as a puritan backlash that treats women as children. Intellectuals, actresses including Catherine Deneuve have come out against the Weinstein inspired scandal amid accusations that men’s careers were being ruined “When their only wrong was touching a knee or stealing a kiss.” They say “far from helping women to become independent, this in reality serves the interest of the enemies of sexual freedom and religious extremists who believe in the name of Victorian morality that women are children with the faces of adults.” They argue that the #metoo generation are chaining women down to be eternal victims.
Huston has been round the block with more than one caveman type. “The only way you can get round a man is to behave like you want to be in the cage with the 300-pound gorilla. That’s all. It’s just the way it is.”
Huston’s history involves a lot of gorilla taming or at least sitting in the cage. The men in her life have always been giants. Her father John Huston was the ultimate man’s man. He made macho epic movies, liked hunting and womanising, a powerful man who loved and admired Jack Nicholson, her first long term boyfriend. They were together 17 years. Their relationship ended in 1990. Huston was married to the sculptor Robert Graham from – a gentle but nonetheless powerful figure.
Huston offers me tea or white wine. It’s the afternoon and I love the old schoolness of the white wine but there’s a pot of medicinal lemon, ginger and honey tea already made and it seems more appropriate. We talk about the start of #metoo and the disgraced Harvey Weinstein and Gwyneth Paltrow’s white towelling bathrobe accusation after more than two decades of appearing on Oscar podiums and yachts with Weinstein. Perhaps #metoo should be changed to #whynow? She laughs.
“Harvey was always a bully. I was bullied by Harvey, never sexually thank God. The idea, eww. But when his company bought The Grifters I had been living with Jack for a while and Jack never appeared on television talk shows which I thought was a really good idea. I said to Harvey “I don’t do television talk shows…” Well, I did every television talk show there was following that conversation. What can I say? I lost the fight. You shut up and that was that.
Of course I was bullied but big deal. For as long as I’ve known them, men have always bullied women. My father bullied me into all kinds of things but also he bullied me into some good things. He bullied me into the first movie I ever made (which he directed – A Walk with Love and Death). It should not have been a horrible thing but I felt that I had to give up my identity, my rather negative identity to do it. I thought I knew a lot better…”
We weave back to the silent protest of #metoo – the Globes with everyone wearing black. “It was nice for once not to see everyone bathed in colour. It looked quite serious and Oprah – that waist!” She makes a gesture to replicate the tiny corset like waist of Oprah. “She looked great. She spoke very directly and was very powerful.”
Huston herself was not at the ceremony. “I wasn’t asked to present and I didn’t have much that came out last year but it’s not something I’d want to do. Trawl the red carpet for no reason although I’m shocked at who does.”
She pours more tea from the white china pot with green shamrocks. Last year she did a movie called Trouble (out this year) with Theresa Rebeck who is the creator and coproducer of the TV show Smash.
“It actually traces back to the Golden Globes 2014. I was sitting at a table. We had been nominated and Theresa said ‘I had no idea this would be so long and boring.’ I said welcome to my world and she said ‘Let’s make some lemonade out of this and glanced across the room where my brother was siting nominated for Magic City and she said ‘How about I write a screenplay for you and your brother?’ I said it should be about a fight and she said ‘What about?’ and I said land. She went off and wrote it. I didn’t do it with Danny because he was busy with something else but I did it with Bill Pullman and David Morris. It’s coming out soon.”
She also worked with Rashida Jones (daughter of Quincy) and appeared in a couple of episodes of Transparent. “We pluck along,” she shrugs. She is 66, looking elegant, her glossy hair in dark sheets falls past her shoulders. She has a striking charisma. She doesn’t bemoan the world of acting is tougher for women of a certain age, she doesn’t bemoan ten deaths of close friends that happened last year. She just gets on with it.
She was delighted when RTE came to her with the idea of presenting a show about James Joyce (Anjelica Huston on James Joyce – A Shout in the Street – BBC Four January 15)
She grew up in Galway and her father was made an Irish citizen in 1964. Her father’s last movie was The Dead – not one she had to be bullied into doing. “I was very willing to be in that.” The Dead was adapted from Joyce’s selection of short stories The Dubliners. It was the last story and widely considered the best.
I found the documentary about Joyce intriguing. His story was not one I knew about and I’ve never made it through Ulysses. Huston rather beautifully explains the relationship with his wife Nora, a country girl who grew up in the poor house. Joyce was middle class and broke and allergic to middle class snobbery and they were bonded for life – a bond that grew out of large sexual appetites on both parts.
I enjoyed the clips from Irish luminaries such as Edna O’Brien.
“I think she looks 30 years younger than me. She looks amazing. I’ve known Edna for a long time. I’m always surprised when I see her on film how youthful she is and how much she cares. I think August is a wicked month was written about her romance with my father.”
Her father appears on screen talking about The Dead in a very direct and profound way, yet when he made the film he was in his death throes. He growls onscreen and his words are always particularly resonant for Huston. After her first effort in working with her father she vowed she’d never do it again and she didn’t for 16 years and then in 1985 she won an Oscar for Prizzi’s Honour and then two years later she played Greta in his final film The Dead which was much applauded.
“At first my father was the only one who wanted to work with me. I went to acting class, got my thing together and then understood more about the dynamic, that even though he was my father I didn’t have to take everything personally as an actress. We worked well together. We had a good shorthand. He still terrified me to a certain degree and I always wanted to be spot on for him and to be in a position where I would not be humiliated in front of the camera crew. I would do anything not to be so I think it improved my game a bit.
The Dead came as he was in hospital having an eye operation. I went in every day to see him and his eyes were bandaged up and he asked me to read the script on the nightstand. I saw on the opening page ‘adapted by Tony Huston’ (her brother). I was shocked that this whole thing had gone on and I didn’t know anything about it but I read it and it was great, really good. And he said ‘What do you think? Should we do it?’ He was not only in hospital having his eyes done. He had an aneurysm operation and was having trouble breathing so he had to be on oxygen at all times.
I remember Donal McCann (her screen husband) coming to meet him and we read a couple of scenes in the house dad was renting and then we went to a warehouse district opposite Magic Mountain in the middle of nowhere to shoot it. None of us had trailers. We had cubicles. When the Irish were waiting to work they waltzed around, they played cards and smoked and went back to their hotel which was called the Black Angus which should have been called The Black Anguish and they learnt line dancing there. It all happened pretty fast.”
They shot very much in sequence and Huston didn’t have much to do to the last scene when it became her movie.
“I was sat there all hyped up and nervous. My dad said, ‘honey how’s your horse?’ I said ‘My horse is fine. I was having none of it…We did the scene as a dress rehearsal and he said ‘very good honey now put it in the past’ and that was his one direction for me for that scene.” She smiles, a mixture of love, respect and nostalgia.
Huston has always been very moved by her own father, possibly because she grew up in a fractured way, sometimes separated from him when he was making movies or had moved on to women other than her mother. There was always a sense of longing. She wrote – very well – a two volume autobiography the first called A Story Lately Told was largely about her father. Was being involved in the documentary about James Joyce a way to get back to him?
“Oh, he’s always there. Sometimes he’ll crop up almost like a message. The other day a friend of mine was telling me about a house in Ireland that was up for sale right near where we used to live and on the same day my sister Allegra sent me a little piece on my dad becoming a naturalised Irish citizen. Two things together out of the blue… he was talking about the effect of being an Irishman and how his children were feeling about it. I was twelve and my brother was thirteen and he talks about the Irish weather and then the Irish weather (rain and mists) came today.”
Her home with its cream woodenness, its lush green garden and wet emerald grass all seem very Irish. Huston also has a ranch above Central Valley with some ancient horses, including a brown and white one Charlie who is forty. “He barely has a tooth in his head anymore. We give him special food. All my animals live to be old. I look after them well.”
Huston is in that way very old school. She looks after things. Her latest Innamorato died last year. The fox terrier was his dog. She was with him for nearly four years. “He was a marvellous man. I knew he was not well but I didn’t know how not well but that became apparent to me. He was also very defiant in the face of his illness. Very courageous and interesting and powerful person. He was an entrepreneur and businessman. He was partner with Norman Lear at one point and organised the Ali fights. His name was Jerry Perenchio.” Perenchio was a big deal in Hollywood. He was an original investor in Caesar’s Palace, was the money man behind Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Driving Miss Daisy. He was 86 when he died of lung cancer last summer.
We’re back to the theme of powerful men. “They are so much more fun than weak. Weak is annoying and cloying and while it might be fun to rule the roost for a bit, I don’t want to be the one calling the shots. I much prefer to have the shots called and rise to the challenge if there is one. I think I was just fated to be this way because of the way my dad was. He developed in us minor contempt for people who could not carry their own weight or who were shallow or grasping.
When my mother died my mother and father weren’t together so he didn’t know what I was up to. He didn’t have a chance to be critical of my boyfriends. The first boyfriend he knew about was Jack and they were deeply in love.” We laugh and snuggle with the lemon, ginger, honey tea and randomly I’m reminded of a story from her book which touched me. After she and Nicholson broke up – she found out that he’d got a woman Rebecca Broussard pregnant while she had been going through IVF treatment herself. The relationship was unpalatable. A few years later for Christmas for he sent her an exquisite piece of jewellery – a pearl and diamond bracelet that Frank Sinatra had sent to Ava Gardener and with it a note saying ‘these pearls from your swine…yr Jack’.
She smiles at the recount of this story but is not as undone by it as she once was as she had found it devastatingly charming. “This year for Christmas he got me a scarf from Barneys, very pretty and a mug.” She goes to get it for me. The mug has a picture of Jack on it from the eighties. It looks ridiculous. We laugh.
“I know, the mind boggles sometimes.” One minute you’re a powerful man in Hollywood and then the next you’re somebody’s mug.