I. The Girl in the Mirror
There was a shrine in my mother’s bedroom when I was growing up. The built-in wardrobe had a mirror on the interior of both doors and a bureau inside, higher than I was, with an array of perfume bottles and small objects on the surface and a wall of burlap stretched above it. Pinned to the burlap was a collage of things she’d collected: pictures she’d torn out of magazines, poems, pomander balls, a fox’s tail tied with a red ribbon, a brooch I’d bought her from Woolworth’s that spelled “Mother” in malachite, a photograph of Siobhán McKenna as St. Joan. Standing between the doors, I loved to look at her possessions, the mirrors reflecting me into infinity.
I was a lonely child. My brother Tony and I were never very close, neither as children nor as adults, but I was tightly bound to him. We were forced to be together because we were really quite alone. We were in the middle of the Irish countryside, in County Galway, in the West of Ireland, and we didn’t see many other kids. We were tutored. Our father was mostly away.
I spent quite a lot of time in front of the bathroom mirror. Nearby there was a stack of books. My favorites were The Death of Manolete and the cartoons of Charles Addams. I would pretend to be Morticia Addams. I was drawn to her. I used to pull my eyes back and see how I’d look with slanted eyelids. I liked Sophia Loren. I’d seen pictures of her, and she was my ideal of female beauty at the time. Then I would pore over the photographs of the great bullfighter Manolete, dressed in his suit of lights, praying to the Madonna for her protection, taking the cape under his arm, preparing to enter the bullring. The solemnity, the ritual of the occasion, was tangible in the pictures. Then the terrible aftermath—Manolete gored in the groin, the blood black on the sand. There were also photographs illustrating the subsequent slaughter of the bull, which mystified me, since he had obviously won the fight. I felt it was a gross injustice, and my heart wept for both the bull and Manolete.
I found that I could make myself cry. Very easily. The question started to come up from Tony as to whether I was using this ability to my advantage. I think he had a point. But, for me, it was always about feeling. People often think that looking in the mirror is about narcissism. Children look at their reflection to see who they are. And they want to see what they can do with it, how plastic they can be, if they can touch their nose with their tongue, or what it looks like when they cross their eyes. There are a lot of things to do in the mirror apart from just feasting on a sense of one’s physical beauty.
II. “For God’s Sakes, John . . . ”
I was born at 6:29 P.M. on July 8, 1951, at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, in Los Angeles. The news of my arrival was cabled promptly to the post office in the township of Butiaba, in western Uganda. Two days later, a barefoot runner bearing a telegram finally arrived at Murchison Falls, a waterfall on the Nile, deep in the heart of the Belgian Congo, where The African Queen was being filmed.
My father, John Marcellus Huston, was a director renowned for his adventurous style and audacious nature. Even though it was considered foolhardy, he had persuaded not only Katharine Hepburn, an actress in her prime, but also Humphrey Bogart, who brought along his famously beautiful wife, the movie star Lauren Bacall, to share the hazardous journey. My mother, heavily pregnant, had stayed behind in Los Angeles with my one-year-old brother.
When the messenger handed the telegram to my father, he glanced at it, then put it in his pocket. Hepburn exclaimed, “For God’s sakes, John, what does it say?” and Dad replied, “It’s a girl. Her name is Anjelica.”
Dad was six feet two and long-legged, taller and stronger and with a more beautiful voice than anybody. His hair was salt-and-pepper; he had the broken nose of a boxer and a dramatic air about him. I don’t remember ever seeing him run; rather, he ambled, or took long, fast strides. He walked loose-limbed and swaybacked, like an American, but dressed like an English gentleman: corduroy trousers, crisp shirts, knotted silk ties, jackets with suede elbows, tweed caps, fine custom-made leather shoes, and pajamas from Sulka with his initials on the pocket. He smelled of fresh tobacco and Guerlain’s lime cologne. An omnipresent cigarette dangled from his fingers; it was almost an extension of his body.
Over the years, I’ve heard my father described as a Lothario, a drinker, a gambler, a man’s man, more interested in killing big game than in making movies. It is true that he was extravagant and opinionated. But Dad was complicated, self-educated for the most part, inquisitive, and well read. Not only women but men of all ages fell in love with my father, with that strange loyalty and forbearance men reserve for one another. They were drawn to his wisdom, his humor, his magnanimous power; they considered him a lion, a leader, the pirate they wished they had the audacity to be. Although there were few who commanded his attention, Dad liked to admire other men, and he had a firm regard for artists, athletes, the titled, the very rich, and the very talented. Most of all, he loved characters, people who made him laugh and wonder about life.
Dad always said he wanted to be a painter but was never going to be great at it, which was why he became a director. He was born in Nevada, Missouri, on August 5, 1906, the only child of Rhea Gore and Walter Huston. Rhea’s mother, Adelia, had married a prospector, John Gore, who started up several newspapers from Kansas to New York. A cowboy, a settler, a saloon owner, a judge, a professional gambler, and a confirmed alcoholic, he once won the town of Nevada in a poker game. Dad’s father was, of course, an actor, and in 1947, Dad directed Walter in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, for which they both won Academy Awards.
My mother, Enrica Georgia Soma, had been a ballet dancer before Tony and I were born. She was five feet eight and finely made. She had translucent skin, dark hair to her shoulders parted in the middle, and the expression of a Renaissance Madonna, a look both wise and naïve. She had a small waist, full hips and strong legs, graceful arms, delicate wrists, and beautiful hands with long, tapering fingers. To this day, my mother’s face is the loveliest in my memory—her high cheekbones and wide forehead; the arc of her eyebrows over her eyes, gray blue as slate; her mouth in repose, the lips curving in a half-smile. To her friends, she was Ricki.
She was the daughter of a self-proclaimed yogi, Tony Soma, who owned an Italian restaurant called Tony’s Wife, on West 52nd Street, in New York. Ricki’s mother, Angelica Fantoni, who had been an opera singer in Milan, died of pneumonia when my mother was four. That broke Grandpa’s heart. But he took a second wife, Dorothy Fraser, whom we called Nana, a pleasant, no-nonsense woman who raised my mother under a strict regime. Grandpa was dictatorial and prone to aphorisms such as “There’s no intelligence without the tongue!” and “Through the knowledge of me, I wish to share my happiness with you!”
Occasionally, Grandpa would have Ricki come downstairs to greet the guests, some of whom were likely to be show people—Tony’s Wife had become a speakeasy for a time and had remained a favorite stopover among the Broadway and Hollywood set ever since. One evening, my father walked in and was met by a beautiful 14-year-old girl. She told him that she wanted to be the world’s finest ballerina and described how she wore out her ballet shoes, making her toes bleed. When he asked her if she went to the ballet often, she said, “Well, no,” unfortunately, she couldn’t. It was difficult, she explained, because she was expected to write a four-page essay for her father every time she went. So Dad said, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll take you to the ballet, and you won’t have to write an essay. How about that?”
But Dad was called away to the war. As he later told the story, quite romantically, he’d intended to hire a carriage, buy Ricki a corsage, and make it an event. Four years later, sitting at a dinner table at the producer David Selznick’s house in Los Angeles, he found himself placed beside a beautiful young woman. He turned to her and introduced himself: “We haven’t met. My name is John Huston.” And she replied, “Oh, but we have. You stood me up once.” Having studied under George Balanchine and danced on Broadway for Jerome Robbins, Mum had been the youngest member to join the best dance company in the nation, Ballet Theatre, which later became American Ballet Theatre. Now, at 18, she was under contract to Selznick, and her photograph had been published on the June 9, 1947, cover of Life magazine. In the photo spread inside the magazine, she was likened to the Mona Lisa—they shared that secret smile.
