Finally, a celebrity memoir worth reading

Unlike many celebrity memoirs, Anjelica Huston’s is worth reading. In her Prologue she writes that as a child she modeled herself on Morticia Addams, and where a lesser celebrity memoirist would go on to say that she eventually played Morticia in a film of The Addams Family, Huston is generous enough not to labour the point. Instead of the usual ghosted drivel, she offers — as she does in her acting — a quirky charm and a reckless honesty. Her story is an interesting one, and is generally well written, sometimes even beautifully so.

Her father was the great film director John Huston. Her mother ‘Ricki’, an ex-ballerina and his fourth wife, taught her to shine her own shoes and iron her shirts: ‘Mum said you had to be able to do these things in case you grew up to be poor and couldn’t have servants.’ Her childhood was spent mainly at St Clerans, the estate her father bought in Co. Galway, which she evokes with an artist’s eye — its drawing- room, for instance, ‘pale gold, gray, pink, and turquoise’, with an 18th-century French chandelier, a Tang horse, and a ‘large, incandescent’ Monet ‘Water Lily’, which he had won gambling at Deauville.

‘Dad’ was often away — in 1951, when Anjelica was born, he was making The African Queen — but was still the dominant presence. She remembers him as ‘taller and stronger and with a more beautiful voice than anybody’ and, as she noticed over breakfast in his bedroom, ‘extremely well endowed’. His eyes were brown and intelligent, ‘like monkeys’ eyes’, but ‘when he got angry, they would turn red’. He sounds rather like Noah Cross, the evil patriarch he played in Chinatown.

He had ‘a firm regard for artists, athletes, the titled, the very rich, and the very talented’, so guests at St Clerans included Guinnesses, John Steinbeck, Peter O’Toole and Marlon Brando, as well as such girlfriends of Huston’s as Min Hogg and Edna O’Brien, who told Anjelica, ‘Your father is a terrible man, a cruel, dangerous man.’