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

by Huston, Anjelica

  At that time, having converted to Christian Science, she had decided not to accept presents at Christmas. This outraged Tony and me; we were adamant that she should accept our offerings, and left our gifts piled outside her door for her to step over whenever she left the room, until we were told by Mum not to annoy her, that she was fragile.

  As far as I reckoned, Nan had the resilience of a sequoia. She had great affection for Dad and would swoop to him, wrapping her arms about his neck, reciting snatches of poetry, or whispering in his ear. Later, when Dad moved to the Big House, she stayed up there, drifting about in a negligee of powder-blue satin, perched at the bay window on the upper landing, alongside the Greek marble horse’s head, reciting lines from Playboy of the Western World. She had been a stage and radio actress and had met Walter in 1928 when they were both performing on Broadway in Elmer the Great at the Lyceum Theatre. She was his third wife, following Rhea Gore and Bayonne Whipple, with whom he had partnered in vaudeville during the early twenties.

  • • •

  Tony and I were homeschooled, first by a pale redheaded Frenchman with a short temper called Monsieur Monquit. Gazing into a hand mirror during our lessons, he would trim his thin ginger mustache with small gold scissors. I successfully charmed him into allowing me to do pretty much anything I wanted. It worked particularly well if I spoke in a baby voice.

  Margot Stewart was our first governess—she had been secretary to the cultural attaché at the French embassy in London. Idelette followed Margot; she was French and pretty and wore angora sweaters and headbands. She had a vast collection of glass and porcelain miniatures, which Tony tossed into the mossy undergrowth beneath the giant branches of the yew tree in the garden. Idelette was followed by Leslie Waddington, whose father, Louis, a friend of Mum’s, owned the Waddington Art Galleries on Cork Street in London. I found Leslie a lot harder to charm than Monsieur Monquit. He had dark curly hair, fair skin, arched eyebrows, an aquiline nose, and a narrow mouth. He was erudite, a big reader of Proust. He was one of those people who seem like seniors before their time, with an air of forbearance. Leslie was very visual—he liked to show us flash cards of the Old Masters. In my first art lesson, he demonstrated the effects of light and shadow on an egg. But he was rigid when it came to multiplication tables.

  At six I was dreamy and had difficulty concentrating. Mum wrote to Dad in Japan, where he was filming The Barbarian and the Geisha, “Anjel, of course, is pure artist. Everything comes from intuition, some deep incontrovertible source knows all.”

  Because I spent long periods of time in front of the mirror, Leslie commented that I was by far the vainest girl he’d ever met. But I was determining my fate. I had overheard a conversation between Mum and Dad. They feared that I was not going to be a beauty. And from looking at photographs of the time, I can see that I was certainly not promising as a femme fatale. My eyebrows were high and rounded, my nose was the largest feature on my face, I had a weak chin, I walked with an apologetic hump. I swear it was by force of will that I was able to transform in any measure.

  • • •

  I remember ambling along the gravel driveway after Mum and Dad as they toured the site of the Big House with their architect, Michael Scott. Two medieval stone lions had been installed and were gazing out placidly from beside the columns at the entrance of a three-story Georgian manor composed of pale limestone blocks and tall windows with rounded cornices. My father once said, “The house itself was one of the most beautiful in all Ireland.” They were painstakingly restoring its graceful lines and taking out the extra walls that had partitioned the generous and beautifully proportioned formal rooms during the Victorian era. Mum was designing the interior, choosing colors and fabrics to create a background for the many extraordinary and diverse objects in my father’s personal collection—Greek marbles, Venetian glass, dancing Indian Shivas, Japanese screens and woodblocks, retablos, Chinese gongs, Italian carvings, bronzes, guns, ancient weaponry, Imperial jade, Etruscan gold, French tapestries, Louis XIV furniture, an eclectic assortment of fine paintings, and an important collection of pre-Columbian and African art from his trips to Mexico and the Congo.

  Dad collected people as well. Like his grandfather John Gore, who once appeared home from a trip with a boy, Henry, whom he claimed to have adopted, Dad had adopted a child, Pablo, while making The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, in Mexico. We’d met him only once or twice, but we understood that he belonged to Dad’s last life, in America. Pablo was a good deal older than Tony and me, married now, and living in California, and no longer seemed to be part of the collection.

  • • •

  Dad’s stories usually started with a long, deep pause at the beginning, as if reckoning with the narrative, his head thrown back, his brown eyes searching to visualize the memory, taking time to measure and reflect. There were a lot of “ums” and drawings on his cigar. Then the tale would begin.

  He talked about the war. During the shooting of a documentary for the War Department at the Battle of San Pietro, the 143rd Regiment needed eleven hundred new troops to come in after the initial combat. Steel cable was stretched across the Rapido River to allow the troops to cross at night to the other side. But the Germans struck and the soldiers took a terrible hit. On the opposite side of the river, a major stood waist-deep in the water, his hand blasted off, and saluted each of the soldiers as they crossed. Dad said, “I never gave a sloppy salute again.”

  There was the story of a crash landing in Adak, when Dad was filming another documentary, Report from the Aleutians. On his first flight out on a B-24, the plane’s brakes had frozen when they came in for a landing, skidding and slicing off the wings of two other B-24s on the runway. When the plane came to a halt, someone shouted to get out fast before it exploded. Dad tried to photograph the rescue team as they came aboard in an attempt to revive the unconscious pilot and copilot, but realized that he was shaking too hard to take the picture. He “put the camera down, and ran.” Mercifully, the explosion never happened. Dad told of another flight, over Kiska, an island in the Aleutians, when the Japanese pilots attacked and he tried to photograph the air battle over the body of the waist gunner, who had been killed in action.

  He described being in Rome at Thanksgiving, when American trucks poured into town stacked high with plucked turkeys. His terrible revulsion at seeing this spectacle rendered him unable to eat poultry for the rest of his life.

  Dad’s stories were quite like his movies—triumph and/or disaster in the face of adversity; the themes were manly. The stories often took place in foreign, exotic places with an emphasis on wildlife, which we loved. We begged to hear our favorite ones from the location of The African Queen: the marching red ants that ate everything they came across, and how the crew had to dig trenches, fill them with gasoline, and set them on fire because it was the only way to stop the ants from devouring everything in their path. There was the story of the missing villager whose pinkie finger turned up in the stew, and the hunt for the bull elephant and of being downwind of a water buffalo. And the one where the whole crew was suffering from dysentery, which was holding up the shoot, until a deadly poisonous black mamba was discovered wrapped around the latrine. Dad would laugh. “Suddenly, no one had to go to the bathroom anymore!”

  • • •

  For a short while a mannish German, Miss Perry, worked as a housekeeper up at the Big House, and Paddy Coyne came to work for us as a houseboy at the Little House. He had grown up in an orphanage in Cork; he was short and strong, with ebony eyes and a shock of black hair. Kitty was one of the staff that had come to St. Clerans from Courtown. She had a hooked nose and looked like the drawings of Granny in the Addams Family book. It took little effort for me to persuade Kitty to remove her dental bridge, shine a flashlight under her chin, and, wrapped in a sheet, chase Tony, me, and the Lynch kids up and down a darkened passage at the back of the Big House as we screamed in terror.

  Betts would come down from her home in Kilcullen, and she, Pad
dy Lynch, and my parents would go on outings to Connemara, Clare, Cork, and Limerick to scout the fields for horses. One such search led to the discovery of Blue Jeans, a horse that competed in the Olympics after Dad sold it. Another was the several-times winner of the Galway Championship Stone Wall, the winning show jumper at the Dublin Horse Show, the main trophy winner at Mountbellew in 1957, and the winner of two trophies later at Ballinasloe Fair. Mum had spotted a magnificent bay gelding on a range of mountains near Clifden called the Twelve Pins, and Dad had bought him for a song. Mum had christened him Errigal.

  To John from Ricki

  November 8, 1957

  My horse Errigal is going like a dream; I had him out yesterday, on the roads and in the field, and his mouth is so light you can do anything with him; this week had been push and go personified; and it has been about five in the evening, on two occasions, when we have ridden out, and yesterday was the first good daylight work he’d had all week. Riding in the evening has been something special and marvelous, though. The weather, since Monday, has been clear and clearer; yesterday was the first hard frost, and again this morning the garden lay somnolent under the glazing. The sky has blazed blue, the remaining few Beech leaves are brazen against the sky; the world is so fragilely, delicately still, it seems it must break. Riding in the bleached blue light of the moon was extraordinary—the air so clear and perfectly cold, temperature ideal for the life of a horse. Last night was the full, the moon rose bright blush pink, the same color as old, well cared for copper, so bright at first that the stars were quite outshone, save for one impudent—probably Venus—who defied extinguishing.

  My mother was out of her element in the rough West Country, trying to do everything beautifully. She was an exotic fish out of water, even though she made a good effort. She’d organized a hunt ball early on at St. Clerans. It was the dead of winter. The temperature was subzero. She put up a marquee in the Little House yard—Guinness and champagne were to be served. And oysters brought up from Paddy Burkes pub in Clarinbridge. And a band. She was wearing a white strapless taffeta evening dress. It was twinkling with hoarfrost inside the marquee, so cold that no one could bear to go out that night. I remember my mother, her eyes shining, hovering alone at the entrance as the band packed up their instruments early to go home. She was as beautiful, as translucent and remote, as one of the photographs I’d seen in the ballet books she had given to me, like Pavlova or the Queen of the Willis in Giselle.

  Over the summer, Tony and I went with Nurse and Mum to Achill Island for a few weeks’ holiday. Joined to the mainland by a causeway and fringed with deep-purple heather, Achill is an outcropping of limestone, where much of the amethyst in Ireland is quarried. A small hotel and a couple of shops were the only concessions to the outside world. Along the drive, there were thatched cottages, few and far between. Tony fished and I gathered seashells with Nurse on the beach near the harbor, where the black curraghs came in off the Atlantic with their catches of silver mackerel like lost souls on the end of catgut lines of colored feathers.

  Mum and Nora Fitzgerald, a good friend of my parents’ and Dublin’s premier wine merchant, would occasionally go out into the countryside by night and saw down billboards that they thought were a blight to the landscape. I remember some pranks of theirs, like stealing an enormous iron key and locking the baronial doors to the dining room of a hotel called Ashford Castle, trapping all the guests eating lunch inside. Then off they went, cackling.

  Mum and Nora had another big joke between them, “The Merkin Society,” and any stray sheep’s wool snagged on a line of barbed wire was fertile ground for hilarity. Although I had no idea that the source of this joke was the rather specialized information that a merkin was in fact a pubic wig, I sought to join their evident enjoyment by procuring some animal stickers at Woolworth’s and affixing them to the doors of the Little House with handwritten messages that went “Start the day the merkin way!” and “A merkin a day keeps the doctor away!” Evidently I had struck the right note, as this seemed to vastly amuse them.

  CHAPTER 5

  Tony, Ricki, and Anjelica, Klosters, Switzerland, March 1959

  Designed by the architect Richard Morrison, the Big House had been built in 1784. There was a fountain on the front lawn that Dad had found in Paris, and a ha-ha beyond it—a sunken wall that allowed for an unobstructed view across the wide horse pasture, with its two wind-and-rain-battered oak trees. The turf-brown river ran alongside, with daffodils on its banks, midges skating on the surface, and red-beaked moorhens nesting in the brackish reeds and dogwood at the river’s edge, icy cold when Tony and I waded in to fill a jam jar with glossy little eels, our legs so white, we looked phosphorescent in the bog water.

  The front door to the Big House was moss green, and on it hung a large brass knocker—a nobleman’s hand, with a lace cuff, holding a ball. You would hear it echo inside on the polished black marble floor of the front hall, with its imprint of fossils and ancient shells. To the right was the dining room. The walls were papered in a reproduction of a Kenzo screen, which Dad had a printmaker make up in Japan—a bird standing on a flowering stump of wood. The tiered Italian candelabra was hand-lit at night, and the long mahogany table shone with Georgian silver and Waterford crystal. Across the hall was the drawing room, its colors pale gold, gray, pink, and turquoise. Dad had found a gold-leaf sunburst in a Mexican church, which sprayed across the ceiling, from the center of which hung an eighteenth-century French chandelier. A Tang horse lifted a graceful foreleg. A large, incandescent Monet Water Lily hung on the south wall.

  The inner hall, with terra-cotta walls and an Aubusson carpet, boasted an extremely well-supplied bar. The study walls were painted Gauloises blue, and curtains of red báinín wool hung by the tall windows. Dad’s art books occupied a full wall above a mahogany cabinet that contained a record player and supported three large Veracruz figures sitting cross-legged atop it.

  In a spacious kitchen clad in antique tiles shipped from Mexico, there was an oil painting of a barefoot, airborne Madonna, raising her fingers in a blessing. A bow window looked out onto my octagonal playhouse, outfitted with a small cast-iron stove on which I would fry in butter the tiny potato chips that Dad loved. The playhouse once was a dairy to the main house, and the small ruin of a monastery beside it was now largely overgrown. When the house was being restored, some workmen who were connecting a water pipe dug up two human skeletons. The Gardaí were brought down from Dublin, but it was soon determined that the deceased were monks who had met their fate peacefully, in the previous century.

  Behind the kitchen were the pantry and the TV room, where we watched the first heavyweight prizefight televised in Ireland—the collision of Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston. Dad wrote in his autobiography, “The little TV room would be thick with smoke and expletives, the staff would join in modestly but with gusto; we were on common ground.”

  There was a larder in the basement where the kills of the day were hung, mostly birds that had seen the wrong end of Tony’s gun—wood pigeon, grouse, duck, snipe. At dinner you had to watch out not to break your teeth on the shot pellets that brought them down.

  The Gun Room had French doors that opened out onto a stone-and-concrete moat surrounding the house like a secret passage. On the bright forest-green walls hung taxidermy game that my father had shot in Africa and India—the head of a snarling young tiger hung opposite a placidly bovine water buffalo. The pelt of the tiger lay underfoot next to a pool table lined in red felt. Several impala gazed on the locked-down rifles with the glassy-eyed, dumb expressions of the unfortunately surprised. Next door, the office, with its top shelf of Oscars and other awards, was the destination of the long phone calls, the heated discussions with the business managers.

  Down the hall was the wine cellar. My mother had created an area by the back door for flower arranging, and original Toulouse-Lautrec posters from the Moulin Rouge hung on the surrounding walls.

  When Dad returned from filming The Barbarian
and the Geisha, he was enchanted by the ways of the Orient. He installed a full Japanese bath, which cooked at a temperature almost high enough to boil an egg, and imported shoji doors and mats and some large Japanese rocks from Hokkaido, despite the fact that similar stones littered the fields of Co. Galway. When we tried to circumnavigate the nudity rules and chose to wear bathing suits, we were seriously admonished by Dad, whose tolerance for our apparent lack of sophistication in these matters was obviously strained.

  On the top floor of the Big House, two carved mermaids from a Mexican church organ decorated the landing. All the upstairs rooms had fireplaces—even the bathrooms. Off the staircase was the Napoleon Room, so called because of its lavish Empire bed. Next door was the Lavender Room, a little claustrophobic, with French cotton fabric depicting shepherdesses lining the walls. And opposite, the Bhutan Room, with persimmon-and-indigo silk-embroidered curtains.

  The Red Sitting Room separated the Grey Room from my father’s wing on the upper landing. On special occasions, we would meet there by candlelight at sunset for drinks or champagne before dinner. It was an exquisite little room, with an open fireplace and flocked wallpaper the color of old poppies and a pale-blue-and-green Juan Gris harlequin on the wall. In the center of the room was a mysterious pietra dura Florentine table from the eighteenth century inlaid with colored stone to create an image of scattered playing cards, a dagger, a key, a ring, and a rose. The Grey Room was the most beautiful guest room in the Big House. Its walls were the shade of a pigeon’s wing, and a Renaissance crucifix hung above the bed.