Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found

by Allegra Huston

  Helena distracted me from Anjel’s absence, and I began to hang out with her, helping her with whatever she was doing. Even when Anjel came back, the foursome that she and Jack, Jen and I had once made was gone. Jen would move to Hawaii with her mother within a year—but our spontaneous little family didn’t survive the interlude with Ryan. I sensed, without ever quite formulating the thought, that Anjel had been defeated.

  She didn’t come back in time for the Academy Awards either. Jack was presenting the award for Best Picture, and he took Jen and me instead. Aunt Dorothy’s handyman Roberto picked me up from school early and drove me to Jack’s house, where I changed into a silk outfit patterned with tiny rosebuds that had been my Christmas present from Anjel. As I dabbed makeup that Anjel had given me onto the acne on my forehead and chin, I could hear him getting ready above me: water turning on and off, bare feet padding from bedroom to bathroom and back again, then the heavier tread of the pointed shoes he liked so much. The limo picked us up at two and, after we collected Jennifer, dropped us disappointingly at the back door of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Jack shepherded us to the two seats reserved for him, and disappeared off to spend the entire ceremony backstage.

  Our seats were next to Pat Boone, whose daughter Debby was singing “You Light Up My Life.” I felt completely cheated. How could the Academy seat Jack Nicholson next to Pat Boone? Mrs. Boone looked pretty pissed off too, when Jack deposited two spotty teenage girls and headed off backstage. I didn’t have any sympathy for her. She should have been someone exciting, like Warren Beatty or John Travolta. Plus, I loathed that syrupy song, and it was even worse to have to listen to it with Debby Boone’s parents beside me. They left during the next commercial break, and two men in tuxedos filled their places.

  In 1975, just after I’d met Jack, I’d watched the Oscars in the house on Euclid. “Come on, Jack!” I’d said silently to myself, willing him to win Best Actor for The Last Detail. Jack Lemmon won, for Save the Tiger. I blamed myself for not being specific enough so that God, or fate, would know which Jack should win. This time, as far as he was concerned, I would get the Oscars right: I would repay his trust—as he left us, by ourselves, with cameras on us—by behaving perfectly. If I’d been Tatum, I knew, I would have gone to the aftershow parties—but Jack put us in the limo and said good night, and I didn’t mind.

  When I told one of the girls at school how generous he had been to give us his seats and stand for the whole four hours backstage, she laughed at me. Backstage, she said, was where all the fun was. I hadn’t thought of that—that there were rooms, and sofas, and a bar. For some reason I’d thought there was nothing beyond the wings of the stage. Still, it didn’t diminish the gift—and he had given it to me even when Anjel wasn’t there, and so very soon after we’d come back from Ryan’s house. I worried sometimes that he might feel I’d been a traitor, in accepting Ryan. But he never showed any sign of it, never mentioned Ryan at all.

  A week after Anjel and I arrived in London, Bob Dylan played Hyde Park. Anjel was excited; it was a Sunday and Jack wasn’t working, so he could go too. I knew we’d get VIP treatment. We’d go backstage, maybe spend the whole concert backstage; we’d meet Dylan. I had the impression that Jack and Anjel knew him already.

  That morning, when Anjel came upstairs to get me, I wasn’t dressed. I clutched my stomach. “I feel sick,” I said. “I can’t go.”

  I made believe I was very upset to be missing it. “I’m sorry,” I said, seeing her disappointment and confusion. She knew I loved Dylan’s music. I was pretty sure she saw through my sickness, though she didn’t accuse me of faking it.

  I couldn’t explain why I couldn’t face it. I didn’t want to be the invisible little sister that I’d been when we met the Lakers after a basketball game and I’d felt like a speck among those famous giants. Not with Dylan, who had become a kind of totem of my closeness with Anjel ever since that day when we drove along San Vicente Boulevard singing along to “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” If Dylan looked through me, I truly would disappear.

  I spent the day in the room at the top of the house the production had rented for Jack. It had purple carpet, and fake gilt chairs upholstered in purple velvet, like the cast-off furniture from a sheik’s newly redecorated diplomatic reception room. Flat sunlight poured in through the windows that lined one side, curdling the purple dyes into hallucinogenic shades. There was a little portable TV on the floor, and a stack of classic movies on video that I watched one after another, all day long. Even though I was alone in the house, I clutched my stomach from time to time, as if to convince myself that I really was sick and couldn’t have gone.

  Anjel brought me back a program. I kept it, and looked at it every day. On the cover, Dylan ringed his eyes with thumb and forefinger. His thumbnails were almost an inch long, thick and yellow like a bird’s talons. Behind them, his eyes were shadowed and dark. I stared into them, imagining I’d been there, imagining those eyes looking at me. Would they have seen me? They weren’t a normal person’s eyes; I knew from his songs that they saw things normal people didn’t see. I hated my cowardice for staying behind.

  “Come on, Legs,” said Anjel one day soon after that. “We’re going jogging.”

  I’d never known her to go jogging before, or do any kind of exercise just for the sake of it. Once, when we were cruising along Mulholland Drive with the top down, Anjel had yelled out at a fat jogger laboring along, “Keep going, sucker, it’s not gonna do you any good!” I thought that was hilarious. It confirmed—as if I needed confirmation—how glamorous and special she was.

  I made a face. But I knew she was trying to look after me, make me get outside, which was good for me, like Cici had. Left to myself, I’d just read all day. We had tried going to Hyde Park to play Frisbee, but that invoked the shade of Ryan, so we hadn’t done it again.

  “We need to get healthy! It’s so great to be in London again, where the air is clean.”

  The house we were living in was on Cheyne Walk, overlooking the river Thames—but with four lanes of heavy traffic in between. Trucks pounded along it twenty-four hours a day, belching diesel fumes. Every outside window ledge was black with the residue. It wasn’t possible that Anjel hadn’t noticed. I realized she didn’t want to, didn’t want to give it any importance. She meant the famous L.A. smog. London was for her, even more than for me, a special place, which had to be, in every way, better than L.A.—and which she wanted me to love.

  I did what I was told, though with a bad grace. Truck drivers honked at us in our shorts. I felt ridiculous, jogging in place on the pavement as we waited for the light to turn green. Nobody jogged in London—especially not on the streets, especially not on that truck-choked arterial road. I was conscious of how American we looked. I hated it: hated standing out, hated looking different. Fortunately, jogging was never mentioned again.

  Mostly we went shopping, browsing the stalls in Antiquarius, a vast antiques market on the King’s Road. Anjel told me that Mum had loved poking around in antiques shops. When we walked past the Chelsea Cobbler, she told me that Mum had had shoes made there. She pointed out these spots more in the manner of a tour guide at a holy site than as incidents from her own life with Mum. She didn’t want to tell stories of what they had done together, and I didn’t want to hear them. It would have made me feel even more insignificant, since they weren’t mine.

  This was 1978, and the King’s Road was punk central. Mohicans glued into foot-long spikes, dyed black and blue and green; ripped jeans and leather and fishnets; chains and safety pins through the skin. I’d never seen anything so extreme. I stared at them, trying not to let them catch me staring in case it made them mad at me. I envied them. They seemed so sure of who they were: punks. And where they belonged: right there on the King’s Road.

  They were angry. That awed me: I’d wrung my anger out of me, and I didn’t know what it felt like anymore. I felt disembodied compared to them. And I felt that the genteel streets of Chelsea, where Jack a
nd Anjel’s friends lived, were unreal compared to this. So was Los Angeles, where everyone went about in little personal shells with a wheel on each corner, insulated from the real world.

  I’d also never seen so much physical deformity: bad teeth, gammy legs, people with growths on their faces or blind, thalidomide victims with stunted arms. They were on the buses, walking the streets. I decided it was one of the things I liked about London: people didn’t have to be perfect, they didn’t have to hide or all look the same. Or sound the same either: I loved the different accents, the chummy way people called me “luv,” the laughter and arguments spilling out of pubs, the cheering coming from behind the streamer curtains in the doorways of betting shops. Life wasn’t sanitized and wrapped in cellophane the way it was in L.A.

  I loved that I could walk out the door of the house and go somewhere. At Cici’s house I’d had a canyon, with a mountainside and a creek, to wander; but since then I’d been marooned either on a beach or on a mountaintop, unable to go anywhere without someone to drive me. If where I wanted to go was farther than I wanted to walk, in London I could just stick out my arm for a taxi.

  There was still brits out graffiti on the railway bridges, and bombed-out buildings left over from the Blitz. They fascinated me: buildings with their sides sliced away to expose zigzagging staircases, faded wallpaper, plumbing with nowhere to go. I loved walking the streets and looking into people’s windows: lots of round paper lampshades hanging from the ceilings, and beneath them people cooking, working, playing, or just moving around.

  Joan Buck was back in London now, living in a book-crammed top-floor flat in Earls Court Square with her new husband. She showed me her wedding dress, ruched and pleated in a deep smoky purple, her signature color. She told me what a bitchy columnist had written: “The bride looked purple in a radiant dress.” It was the kind of witticism I wished I could come up with, and I admired Joan for being able to laugh about it even though it was cruel and aimed at her. She took me to the offices of Vogue, where she worked, and introduced me to people as her little sister. She didn’t have a sister of her own, and I was thrilled to be that for her. She had known me since I was born.

  We’d walk down the street playing general-knowledge games like Botticelli, or a category game where you had to guess a person by asking questions like “What kind of kitchen implement is he?” Joan was clever and read lots of books, but she wasn’t bookish and boring—which meant that I didn’t have to be either. She was fun and glamorous and knew famous and interesting people; and she actually wanted to spend time with me. Our minds seemed to work the same way—which was a new experience for me. Usually I had to try hard to get it right, to be the kind of girl I thought the person I was with wanted me to be. When I was with Joan, I seemed to get it right without thinking about it.

  Knowing of my crush on John Travolta, she gave me her ticket to a press screening of Grease at the Fox offices on Soho Square. The journalists howled with laughter, and I did too—and felt my crush thin, like paint mixed with turpentine. When I came out of the screening room at ten o’clock, there was still light in the sky: an otherworldly, luminous gray-blue, as if every atom of air and solid matter glowed from within. In L.A., so much farther south, the space between day and night was short, and the light was never like that. Somewhere in the blind passages of my memory, maybe, summer evenings at St. Cleran’s or in London glowed with that same magical light. I drank in its energy through my eyes; I wanted to swim in it, as if it was the elixir of joy.

  The house we lived in was strange, with the gilt-and-purple sunroom on top (next to my bedroom, which had a wallpaper of green trellis that made it feel like a birdcage, and me the bird), and a windowless dining room furnished like a monastery on the ground floor, with a long table and hard, narrow pews to sit on. Every room was ringed with cast-iron heating vents, which tripped you up if you were wearing high heels, and the only way out was down a tightly spiraling cast-iron staircase, which you had to take on tiptoe in order not to sink through the holes.

  Jack and Anjel’s room was on the middle floor, off the living room, which was rarely used. I thought of that as a movie-star thing: they hung out in their bedrooms, and living rooms were more like transit zones. The only time I ever saw anyone sit in the living room of Ryan’s Beverly Hills house was when he was meeting with a producer about The Champ, which he hoped to star in with Griffin. When I visited Marlon Brando’s house, the living room had that same deserted air. That lifeless room separated us, so that we seemed to be living in the house separately, not together.

  In the mornings, after Jack left for the studio, I’d go downstairs and sit with Anjel on her bed, watching her put on her makeup. She kept it in a pouch in her enormous handbag, and she’d apply coat after coat of mascara, twirling the brush into her eyelashes, which grew longer and longer in curved arcs, in perfectly parallel lines. I wished my own short eyelashes would do that, but they just stuck together in tarry clumps. The whites of Anjel’s eyes glittered like quartz, and the greeny-brown irises shimmered like sunlight on a tree-shaded pond.

  When she finished, she’d open a baggie and put a generous pinch of grass into the lid of a shoe box. Then she opened a packet of rolling papers and used the flap to winnow out the seeds. I thought of this as Anjel’s job, since she always did it, not Jack. A sweet smell rose up, and the seeds rattled dully against the cardboard. Her wrist, cocked just so, was bony and elegant, the stroking of cardboard against cardboard rhythmic and soothing.

  “Can I do it?” I asked one day.

  “Sure.”

  She handed over the shoe box lid and the Rizla packet. It was harder than I thought; either the clumps of seedy grass just got pushed up the box, or the whole lot fell to the lower edge. But soon I got the hang of it: I learned to look for the black-green spots in the densest clumps, and tease them free. It was work I could do for hours—a service for Anjel, a meditation. Maybe it chimed with some strand of our Italian peasant DNA: the satisfaction of a good harvest.

  She showed me how to roll the grass into a joint: stick two Rizlas together, spread the pinch of grass so that the sausage was a little fatter at the ends than in the middle, then fold over the edge of the paper and tuck it in, pressing down the outside edges of my index fingers while my thumbs rolled it tight. Then a quick, businesslike lick from left to right to seal it, slide it under the elastic strap of an enameled Art Deco cigarette case, and start on the next.

  I never wanted to smoke one, and she never offered one to me. Fiction was my drug of choice. I could lose myself in a story for hours, but snap back to reality in a millisecond. My emotions were so exhausted that I felt very little, and I liked it that way. The thought of getting stoned, of losing control of my thoughts or my body, terrified me.

  Anjel’s birthday came in early July, and not knowing what to give her, I gave her the thing I valued most in the world: a print of the photo of Mum that had been on the cover of Life. It had been in a portfolio of Halsman photos of her, which was among the things that had arrived at Gloom Castle one day: a trunkload of my stuff from St. Cleran’s. I didn’t know where the trunk had been during those years that I’d lived at Cici’s house, but seemingly Dad had decided, as soon as I’d been parked at Gloom Castle, that my situation was now permanent enough to have it delivered to me.

  Aunt Dorothy had put the photograph—Mum posed as the Mona Lisa—in a pale green-and-gold frame. I’d brought it with me to London—a guardian angel.

  Thrilled with myself, I wrapped it and gave it to Anjel. When she opened it, tears came to her eyes.

  “Thank you, Legs.” Her voice broke as she said it. I knew I’d given her something no one else could have given her, something far more valuable than the diamonds and rubies she got from Jack.

  My fourteenth birthday was six weeks later. We went to stay at someone’s country house for the weekend, and I was put at the children’s table for dinner. I felt that Anjel had betrayed me, so I sulked. When everyone went for a walk the
next day, I refused to go. The woman whose house it was didn’t go either, but sat on the step in the sunshine, shelling peas. They dropped with ghostly pings into a metal bowl, making little whispers as they skittered around and came to rest. I stopped reading, and watched. She was so serene, warmed by the sun, green pearls falling from her fingers. That was who I wanted to be.

  We’d been in London for a month or more before John Julius called and asked to see me. I had made no effort to get in touch with him. Probably Cici told him I was there, and gave him the number. I didn’t particularly want to see him, but I accepted the meeting—just as I had to accept the fact that he existed. I would have preferred it if he hadn’t, but at least his existence made sense of things. That logical puzzle went around in my brain, but I felt nothing. There must be something wrong with me, I thought: I should feel something, anything. I was sleepwalking. I was taking steps forward in some kind of unconscious agreement with myself, without having any sense of what or why—or of where that “forward” might lead.

  John Julius asked if I’d like to see Bath. I didn’t know what Bath was—only that it was a strange name for a place. So I said yes. “No” would have been argumentative and troublemaking, and might have made him ask what I would like to see. I wouldn’t have been able to answer.

  The drive to Bath took two hours—a long way for a day trip. I wondered if he was trying to put distance between us and the rest of his life. I hoped he wouldn’t ask me if I’d read the books he’d sent: three volumes of his mother’s autobiography, and one volume of his father’s, and each December a new little pamphlet called A Christmas Cracker. I hadn’t opened any of them.

  I had a strange sense of dislocation as I watched my father drive us west down the M4. Dad never drove. Someone always had to drive him: Betty, Paddy Lynch, Cici, Gladys, chauffeurs and taxis. It hadn’t occurred to me, before that day, that there was anything unusual in this. Suddenly, as I sat in the passenger seat of John Julius’s silver-blue sedan, Dad’s kingliness seemed demanding and grandiose. Despite his title, John Julius was more solidly a part of the real, democratic world.