A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London, and New York Read online

  The family lived upstairs in an apartment, which felt disconnected from the restaurant. It was quiet and dark with uneven carpeted floors. In the living room there was a piano with sheet music from which Nana played each morning for Grandpa to sing while he stood on his head. He claimed to have married Nana on the basis of her talent as an accompanist.

  Grandpa also had a summer house, in Miller Place, a hamlet on the north shore of Long Island. Grandpa had great reverence for the foundations of the English language and spent long hours in his round blue mosaic tub meditating on a dictionary in a bathroom atop his shingled two-story house, overlooking steep bluffs and the Sound below. When you ran down to the beach, the sand made an avalanche at your heels.

  Philip was my mother’s one full sibling. Angelica and Tony’s first child, who had been called George, died as a baby. When my grandfather remarried, Dorothy gave birth to a girl and two boys—Linda, Nappy, and Fraser. Nappy was named after Napoleon, because Grandpa claimed to have Corsican blood running through his veins and thought he was a descendant of the great emperor. They all lived in the apartment above the restaurant.

  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 Hollywood set ever since. One evening, my father walked in and was met by a beautiful fourteen-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 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.” My mother hadn’t seen him since she was fourteen. 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 eighteen, she was under contract to David Selznick, and her photograph had been published on the June 9, 1947, cover of Life magazine. Philippe Halsman had come to photograph the company’s prima ballerina but had chosen to take my mother’s picture instead. In the photo spread inside the magazine, she was likened to the Mona Lisa—they shared that secret smile.

  CHAPTER 2

  Anjelica and Tony with Ricki, Long Island, 1951

  My mother got pregnant with Tony when she was eighteen and my father was in his mid-forties. She’d obviously fallen deeply in love with Dad, and sacrificed a future career for him. He took her across the border to Mexico on February 10, 1950, got a divorce from Evelyn Keyes, and had a justice of the peace marry him and Mum that same night in La Paz, Baja. Billy Pearson, an art collector and one of the leading jockeys in the United States, was their best man. He had offered to ride Dad’s filly, Bargain Lass, at Santa Anita, in exchange for a piece of pre-Columbian art if he won the race, which he did. This was the start of their lifelong friendship—a mismatched physical sight gag, they were the tall and the short of it, with Dad towering above the agile, diminutive Billy.

  An article from Monday, March 20, 1950, in the Los Angeles Times under the headline “Director Confirms His Marriage to Starlet,” read:

  Offhand, he can’t remember the date of the ceremony, but John Huston, Academy Award winning film director, today confirmed the rumor that he has been secretly married for some time to Ricki Soma, film starlet and former model, whose enigmatic smile caused her to be dubbed “The Mona Lisa Girl.” The wedding, Huston declared, took place in La Paz, immediately following his February 10 divorce to Evelyn Keyes in Mexico. “Ricki and I started going together during the period of my separation from Evelyn,” the director said. “But I believe I met her when she was a little girl at her father’s restaurant on Fifty-second Street in New York.”

  According to Huston, his wife is spending a few days at the mountain home of his father, Walter Huston. Asked if he and his bride planned a honeymoon, now that the secret’s out, the director laughed and said, “No, I have given up those things.” It was his fourth marriage.

  Tony was born on April 16, 1950, nine days after the death of our grandfather Walter Huston. Fifteen months later, my mother had me and went into a serious postpartum depression. I’m sure she was desperately lonely for my father. Nana and Grandpa offered to look after Tony and me on Long Island, in order to allow Mum to travel to London to be with Dad, who was in post-production on The African Queen. I was six weeks old and Tony was still in diapers when Mum flew us from L.A. to New York to stay with the Somas. Then she left to join Dad in Paris, where he was now in pre-production for Moulin Rouge. I was covered from head to toe with a terrible rash. I had been crying between feedings, so the pediatrician in California had prescribed phenobarbital. They had basically been doping me to keep me quiet. Nana put me on baby formula and soon I was flourishing.

  Mum returned several months later to take Tony and me to France. From what I understand, Dad was causing her a lot of anxiety. The situation was particularly difficult for my mother, because Dad would not allow her to stay in Paris and had packed her off to a castle in Chantilly with us children. She must have resented our whining, greedy, egotistical little selves, so hungry for her attention. She wrote to Nana that Dad was “tired” and the children “exhausting.” She complained that John “has pulled his preproduction trick, and just stays there all the time while I cart his laundry back and forth.” But she warned, “He’s about to get screwed though, because I have ordered a suit from Schiaparelli, bought another suit on sale at Dior, and am about to buy out Balenciaga, who I think makes the most wonderful coats and dresses in the world. Also ordered some hats, and if I don’t turn out to be the cat’s pajamas when I get through, it won’t be my fault.”

  She went on to say that the screenwriter Tony Veiller’s wife, Grace, had told her that her husband thought Mum was the “only person to play the part of Myriamme Hayim” in Dad’s next film, Moulin Rouge, and that the girls they’d tested so far had all turned out wrong. Mum was “concentrating quietly on the natural law that says if you want something hard enough, you’ll get it.” She hoped they would allow her to test. But she thought “Dear John is subconsciously against it, because despite suggestions from every quarter, he says, ‘Oh no.’ ”

  Mum did not think he felt brave enough to put his wife in one of his pictures. Obviously not. Within a few weeks, he had cast the film and was making love to the woman set to play Myriamme—Suzanne Flon, a popular stage actress with the Comédie-Française. This liaison, which was to become a lifelong affair, must have hit Mum terribly hard. She had given birth to two babies in under two years, and already Dad had moved on.

  In a letter to Nana, she confided how he indulged Tony for only a few minutes and then asked her to take him away. She described Tony and me as “wretched today. Tony trying to cut his two bottom teeth or whatever they are, and in addition to that, has an awful cold. Anjelica suffers from diarrhea frequently now that she’s cutting teeth right and left. Thanks so much for the rubber pants.” She must have been in hell. Over the summer Dad rented us a farmhouse in Deauville, on the northern coast of France.

  In her letters to Grandpa, Mum expressed a wish to join a repertory company, or to see if there might be auditions at the Windsor Playhouse in New York. It must have been very frustrating, in view of her training as a dancer, her ambition and her
discipline, and all she had left behind when she married Dad. I cannot but imagine that she had dreams of being his muse; and even though she affectionately described Tony’s and my first utterances, and seemed to derive joy from us, there was also a note of exasperation at having found herself made something of a prisoner by her exhausting, if adorable, children. I am sure she felt let down by circumstance.

  • • •

  In a white silk moiré baby book, its cover hand-painted with the image of a smiling baby sucking on her toes, my mother diligently recorded the first facts of my existence: First smile at four weeks. First walk (five steps) at thirteen months, two weeks. First words, “Bye-bye.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Anjelica, Ricki, and Tony, 1956

  My first memories are of Ireland. Dad moved us there in 1953. He had visited Ireland two years earlier, in 1951, before I was born. He’d been invited by Oonagh, Lady Oranmore and Browne, to stay at her house, Luggala, and attend a hunt ball in Dublin at the Gresham Hotel. Dad had watched as the members of the legendary Galway Blazers played a game of follow-the-leader that involved angry waiters swinging champagne buckets, and young men leaping off a balcony onto the dining tables, as the music played on into the night and the whiskey flowed. Dad had said that he expected someone would be killed before the ball was over. In the days following, he fell in love with the scenic beauty of the country.

  I remember being in bed at Courtown House—a tall, gray stone Victorian manor that Mum and Dad were renting, in Co. Kildare. Mum came into my room, wrapped me in a blanket, and carried me downstairs. The house was dark and silent. Outside on the front steps in the frosted night, Dad held Tony in his arms. The sky was raining meteors. I remember Mum saying, “If you make a wish, it will come true,” and together, the four of us watched the mysterious passage of dying stars fading through the firmament.

  Tony and I were given rocking horses at Christmas. At least his rocked—it was dark, dappled gray, had a red patent-leather saddle and bridle, and plunged back on its base like a bucking bronco. My horse was heavy, mottled brown, made of painted tin. It humped up and down according to the pressure applied to its foot pedals, and groaned like something in pain. I found the disparity between them highly irritating and cried pitifully when Tony refused to let me up on his, even for a few minutes.

  The famous combat photographer Robert Capa came to Courtown and was one of the first to take pictures of Tony and me as toddlers, crawling on a polished wood floor, wide-eyed, like two little birds that had fallen out of their nest.

  Tony and I would sit on the upstairs landing at the top of the long quadrangle staircase of Courtown House and watch Dad at work from above, as he stalked slowly back and forth on the black-and-white inlaid marble squares that paved the hallway. This was a serious process. His secretary, Lorrie Sherwood, told us he was writing and never to interrupt.

  Early on, we were warned that certain things should by no means be touched. One such item was an automatic clothes wringer, a contraption screwed atop the washing machine, consisting of two porcelain rollers that squeezed the last drops of water from washed clothes before they were hung on the line. I have no idea why this object held me in a seductive thrall, but the attempt I made to send a towel through it one morning when backs were turned ended traumatically with my entire arm mashed up to the armpit between the wringers. Likewise, an attempt to rescue a daisy before the lawn mower got there resulted in losing a chunk of my little finger.

  Once in a while, the adults would agree to play us the score of Peter and the Wolf, which I found both thrilling and terrifying, and from which we invariably ran away screaming to hide in the nursery. There was a frightening book called Struwwelpeter—a German cautionary story about a child who sucked his thumb and had all his fingers cut off by a tailor, which included a horrible illustration of the poor boy, his hair standing on end, bleeding profusely from his severed digits. This alarmed me, because I was a confirmed thumb-sucker, although I noticed a certain grim amusement my parents seemed to derive from the book, and I guessed I would be spared the tailor’s pinking shears.

  Tony and I were fed breakfast in the nursery. Molly, a member of the kitchen staff, tall and lank, with the hint of a dark mustache, served us cold porridge floating in milk. I had a loathing for milk, even the way it looked in the bottle, opaque and thick with a blue tint at the edge of the glass—my diaphragm constricted at the sight of it. My place mat had illustrations from the rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” I knew what the words meant, and I would read the text over and over as I waited to be released from the table. For some unknown reason, it was considered appropriate to present children with foods they hated and then to keep them prisoner until they ate.

  In a corridor next to the dining room stood the highly sophisticated dollhouse that belonged to our landlord’s daughter, which I was forbidden to touch. I would peer through its perfectly curtained windows, marveling at the world in miniature—the tiny grand piano, the little stuffed armchairs. I dreamed of being a fairy and taking up residence inside.

  When I was three, Kathleen Shine came to look after us. With a small, tidy frame, calm blue eyes, short frizzy brown hair, and high cheekbones, she looked very much like Katharine Hepburn. She was modest, tolerant, gentle, and firm—sort of like Mary Poppins without the umbrella, and Irish. She wore the high starched collars and light-cotton denim dresses that she had worn at her former job, looking after babies in a Dublin hospital. When Mum asked her how she wanted to be addressed, she replied simply, “Nurse.” She was as fair and kind as any soul I’ve ever met, and Tony and I adored her. Nurse was a steadying force throughout our childhood and devoted herself selflessly to us. Above all, she was dedicated to Mum.

  I remember Betty O’Kelly coming into my room to say good night and asking if I could fasten the little crystal-cut buttons at the nape of her pale lemon silk blouse. She had been a debutante, a well-born Anglo-Irish girl, cheerful and innocent. Now in her late twenties, she was sportive, fun, pretty, and an exceptionally fine horsewoman. She lived in the nearby village of Kilcullen with her family and had taken to riding over to Courtown House with some regularity; she had befriended my parents and introduced them to the local gentry and to the members of the Kildare Hunt Club. My father had great regard for women on horseback. The sight of Betty mounted on a fine Irish mare must have enchanted him. “Betts,” as we came to know her, had an intrepid spirit. She had driven an ambulance for the Wrens, the Women’s Royal Naval Service, during the Second World War and could change a tire in ten minutes, which was a good thing if you were ever stranded out in the bogs with her.

  It was Betty who brought Paddy Lynch, an ex-jockey, to work as a groom for Dad’s horses, and he remained with us for the following twenty years. Small in stature, Paddy was fine-boned with blue eyes and clear brown skin, and he always wore a tweed jacket, glasses, and a cloth cap.

  In the fall, we would go with Paddy into the woods to plug up foxholes; if the cubs were shut out of their dens, there would be more to chase when they were homeless in hunting season. We had a beautiful little pony trap—a varnished two-wheeler that moved along at a pretty fast clip. I loved being bundled up in blankets on Mum’s lap, watching Betts wield the reins and crack the whip. In the winter, I wore a green snowsuit, a hand-me-down from Tony. I hated the look and feel of it when it was zipped up tight to my chin. It made me claustrophobic.

  Betts taught Tony and me how to make an apple-pie bed, with the sheet folded back on itself halfway, as a practical joke, so the victim could not get into bed. And when Dad’s friend and producer Ray Stark came to stay, she showed us how to place and activate an electric razor between the sheets so as to terrify him during the night.

  Another visitor was Count Friedrich von Ledebur, a member of the Austrian cavalry and a legendary horseman, who was married to Iris Tree, the daughter of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Friedrich was even taller than Dad and had piercing eyes in a sharply defined, aristocratic face. Dad had cast him as Q
ueequeg in Moby Dick. I was afraid of him. He reminded me of a lion. It was obvious that Dad loved him and had great respect for him.

  Dalton Trumbo, the blacklisted writer, also stayed at Courtown. He was a kind man, a sweet soul. It seems to me that of my father’s friends, the ones who were writers were more understanding, more interested, more engaged than the rest.

  We rode ponies early. I was given Honeymoon when I was four. She was very old and expired under me mysteriously as I was cantering her around a field. One morning, walking with Nurse, we were surprised when Tony came out of the woods riding his pony, Paddy Lynch holding the lead rein. When the animal saw us, he suddenly reared up and bolted. Paddy lost hold of the halter and Tony fell. We watched in horror as his foot caught in the stirrup and he was dragged, his head bouncing on the gravel, all the way up the driveway. When the pony came to a shivering halt outside the front doors of the house, my parents rushed out and disengaged Tony from the saddle. He had to go to the hospital in Dublin. Mum told me they didn’t know how bad it was; he was pretty much scraped bald. I made a plaster cast from a mold of one of the seven dwarfs, painted and varnished it with Nurse, and took it to him on a visit there. Tony’s head was wrapped in bandages. I remember feeling separate and distant from him at the hospital, because it was a place that I didn’t know, and it scared me. He was on another level. This big thing had happened to him. It set him apart.