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

by Huston, Anjelica

  Mum took me to see Rudolf Nureyev in Marguerite and Armand, in which, from the blackness of the wings, he appeared midair in a suspended leap, throwing off his cape to land at Margot Fonteyn’s feet. She took me to see Maria Callas singing Tosca at Covent Garden on opening night, Laurence Olivier as Othello, Alec Guinness and Simone Signoret in Macbeth, Micheál Mac Liammóir in The Importance of Being Oscar (a one-man show about Oscar Wilde), Ian Holm in Richard III at the National, and Madeleine Renaud in Oh les beaux jours.

  She took me to a club called the Revolution, where I saw a phenomenon called Tina Turner. And we were together in the living room in Maida Avenue when we heard Bob Dylan for the first time. Dylan had a beautiful woman, the folksinger Joan Baez. We listened to the Dylan album from start to finish and then played it all over again. Mum also had a big affection for Ruth Etting, a torch singer from the twenties, who sang “Ten Cents a Dance.”

  Every few months a heavy cardboard box full of the latest releases would arrive in the mail, courtesy of Goddard Lieberson, a friend of Mum’s who was the president of Columbia Records. The first time this happened, we were confronted with a selection of about ten albums, including Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’, Tim Hardin, Big Brother and the Holding Company featuring the fledgling Janis Joplin as their lead singer, and Barbra Streisand’s People, with a photograph of her facing away on a beach in white toreador pants and a red-striped shirt. Mum had a beautiful new sound system, buff stainless steel; I think it was Swedish or Danish or maybe German. It had a little weight that balanced on the end of the playing arm. When you set the stylus down, it floated gently on the surface of the record.

  • • •

  On his way to Rome to film The Bible, Dad stopped off in London and came over to the house. He told Tony and me that he would be having a meeting with Maria Callas, whom he was interviewing for the part of Sarah, and asked if we had any advice.

  “Don’t get drunk,” said Tony.

  “Don’t sing,” said I.

  Later, when they met, Dad recounted our observations to Ms. Callas. “Do you sing?” she asked Dad.

  “Only when I’m drunk,” he replied.

  Filming The Bible was without doubt an immense task for a director. Dad worked on it for close to three years. I received a letter about it from him, memorable in that it was one of the very few he ever wrote to me. It was in pencil and he had drawn illustrations of himself in character as Noah, bringing animals into the ark, a pair of giraffes observing the scene. It seemed as if the letter were written by someone other than the stern patriarch who cast a cold eye on Tony and me during our school holidays.

  Darling daughter: I’m delighted at your wonderful school report. You must be very set up. All but math . . . I’m inclined to think simple arithmetic will pretty well serve you through life. But then you might become an architect, so you’d better stay with it, I guess.

  I do wish you were here right now to become acquainted with all the animals. I really know them now and they me: elephants, bears, giraffe, ostriches, pelicans, ravens. In a way I hate to see this part of the picture come to an end—and have them go out of my life, back to their circuses and zoos. . . .

  Spring has come on, all at once. The Italian campo is strewn with fields of margaritas and the almond trees are flowering. The white blossoms always seem to come first. We’ve had a solid week of sunshine, the pouring golden kind that you can feel through your coat. But of course now we want rainy dark skies. I mean the picture does herald the flood. No, you can’t win them all. In Egypt where we went to get brassy skies it rained for the first time in January in 38 years. Do you remember—I’d hoped to be finished shooting by last December—and I won’t be home for Easter. Meanwhile though I have my animals—if not my kids.

  I like your drawings of arms, by the way, and ballet legs. Do tell me what’s made such a hit with you about your new art teacher, herself, her own drawing, her remarks on the foot that she recognizes your talent?

  Betts has a very fine mount for you—or did she already at Christmastime? You’ve probably heard Sheila-Ann, the first of the two brood-mares, threw a fine filly foal. Shall we keep her and race her or sell her as a yearling and make a quick profit?

  The ark sequences should be finished in about a fortnight. After that I’ll have about a month of polishing up to do—so I’ll have been more than a year at actually shooting—a long time. My beard is now down to—well not quite to my navel, but almost.

  Give Joan and Lizzie my love—some of it—but keep a bigger helping for yourself.

  As ever,

  Daddy

  Over school holiday, I went to Rome to visit Dad. He took me to Dino De Laurentiis’s Dinocittà Studios, where an entire lot had been transformed to simulate the Garden of Eden, with fake oranges and mysterious plastic fruits hanging from the trees. A small stream of water trickled through a trench lined with transparent PVC. Grips and technicians ran in all directions, babbling in Italian and smoking cigarettes while Dad introduced me to the young woman playing Eve. She was very pretty but not what I expected, which would have been someone more ethnic, someone along the lines of Sophia Loren. Eve’s real name was Ulla Bergryd; she had freckles and fair skin and was wearing a strawberry-red wig down to her waist, which I immediately coveted, with a white bathrobe and slippers. I thought it brave of her to volunteer to be naked in the film. I actually received the wig at Christmas later that year, but everyone agreed it didn’t suit me at all.

  A group of men followed Dad through the Garden of Eden, receiving his instructions. Occasionally one of them would ask a question and write the answer down in a notebook; others would field his questions and offer explanations. We entered a concrete building and went to the makeup department to see the progress on what was to be a full bodysuit for the serpent. They had begun to paint the latex that morning, and even to my untrained eye, it looked a little lurid. Dad took one glance at the costume and became enraged. I’d seen that happen once before, when an antique dealer had chosen to gold-leaf an ancient mirror after its purchase and before delivery, only meaning the best. Now, as then, steam was coming out of Dad’s ears.

  “You’ve ruined the costume!” he declared in disgust. One of the men was ashen and seemed about to cry. Dad could be ruthless around incompetence or lapses of taste.

  Dad had recently heard through Mum by way of Betty that I had developed a corn on my toe. He hit the roof. He didn’t realize that I was wearing the same shoes, the same skirt, every day. Mum was not receiving the check from the business managers with any regularity, and there had been no shopping outings of late. The next day Gladys spirited me down the Via Condotti and bought me seven pairs of shoes, with high or stacked heels, according to my wishes. They signified adulthood.

  From Rome I went to the Taormina Film Festival with Dad. We sailed for several hours on a large pleasure boat with the producers Darryl Zanuck, Roberto Haggiag, and Dino De Laurentiis. Italy’s most famous pop star was entertaining the guests on deck, and Zanuck persuaded him to sing “Strangers in the Night” over and over, knowing that Dad loathed the song. Dad just sat there, all the way, smiling cheerfully back at the pop star and calling Zanuck a son of a bitch under his breath.

  • • •

  Just when things were going relatively well at Town and Country, Mum moved me to Holland Park Comprehensive, in the comparative wilderness of Notting Hill Gate. She never explained why, although it is possible she made her decision based on my report card, which usually described me as lethargic and vague. The neighborhood was sketchy, bordered by tenement housing and cheap one-bedroom rental flats close to the open-air market on the Portobello Road. Likewise, the school was an uneasy conflation of socially and economically diverse students. It was run along the lines of a university; between classes, you walked around the building with your books. Having toured the campus, Mum felt that this angle would appeal to me and would encourage me to act responsibly. It had the opposite effect.

  At Ho
lland Park Comprehensive, I was the tallest girl in class in my bare feet, but in spite of having to wear the compulsory school uniform, I had managed to incorporate my shoes from Rome with the Gucci bit and the stacked heels. This was as good a reason as any to get picked on by some of the wandering harridans in the corridors who cornered me to say they knew I had a father who was famous but they didn’t know for what, and threatened to beat me up.

  In the cold winter schoolyard, seated outside the music room window, I had spotted a small apple-cheeked girl with round horn-rimmed glasses. She was shielding her face with the lapel of her pea jacket and blowing smoke out through her sleeve. It billowed in the frosty air. She asked if I wanted a drag. It sounded like a pretty good idea. I took a puff of her cigarette and held the smoke in my mouth. Several other girls had gathered around. “Aren’t you going to take it in?” one asked. Even after all the cigarettes Betts had shared with me, it had never occurred to me to inhale. “What do you mean?” I responded, and breathed in deeply. I almost fell over, I was so dizzy. The bell sounded and we dispersed for class. The following day, the same ritual happened, and this time Emily asked if I’d like to bunk off with her. “Skip school?” I asked. “It’s only math,” she said.

  Emily Young quickly became my best friend. Her father was Wayland Hilton Young, 2nd Baron Kennet, a British writer and politician who served as chief whip of the Social Democratic Party in the House of Lords. He was the first parliamentarian to propose environmental laws, and had written the famous and daring book Eros Denied, a manifesto of the sexual revolution, which was causing something of a social stir among the older set.

  Emily and I began a steady pattern of playing hooky. On Fridays, when Mum came home from the bank with cash for the week, she would put the white envelope inside a top drawer in her dresser. I would slip into her bedroom when she was out, or downstairs, and deftly swipe a couple of five-pound notes. I used the money to taxi back and forth to school. Once I’d arrive, I would walk into assembly, sign the register, then stroll out of the school gates with Emily to ponder the rest of the day.

  Emily’s eyes were startlingly blue, and when she took off her glasses, she’d blink at you like a baby, but she was the leader and made most of the decisions about where to go and what to do. Outside the grounds of Holland Park, Emily and I would roll our skirts up at the waist until they hit a point about eight inches above the knee, check ourselves out in the cracked mirror of a Max Factor compact, apply black pencil to the rims of our eyes, and dab Mary Quant white pearlized gloss on our lips.

  Casually, we’d walk down the hill from Holland Park into Notting Hill Gate, stopping briefly to see what was playing at the Electric Cinema. They often imported movies from Italy and France, avant-garde stuff and documentaries. Then, onward to the Moulin Rouge Café, where we would order ice-cold Coca-Colas and smoke a few cigarettes. Sometimes the drummer Mick Fleetwood would come in with his brother-in-law, John Jesse, who owned an antique shop across the way, on Kensington Church Street. We never spoke to them; they were older than we were and the epitome of cool. I coveted an art nouveau pin in the window of John Jesse’s shop, a cameo likeness of the actress Sarah Bernhardt, mounted in gold with opals, moonstones, and diamonds.

  Down the street was the Lacquer Chest, an antique shop my mother favored, with an assortment of hardy-looking butcher’s tables and rough-hewn furniture from the countryside. And a little farther down, round the bend toward Kensington High Street, was Biba’s, the shoplifting mecca for teenage girls and the grooviest boutique in town. The interior of the store was deep plum, with drapings of black velvet, which provided ample opportunity for light fingers under the cover of darkness. We’d pore over the racks of dresses and stuff a few under our uniforms, and on the way out we’d check the velvet ottoman in the center of the floor to see if there were any rejects worthy of inclusion, waiting to be rehung.

  Once we saw Cher and Sonny Bono get out of their limousine. She was wearing fur chaps and feathers and beads in her braids; we thought she looked amazing, like an Amazon ice queen. Everyone at school told me I looked like her, which pleased me a lot.

  Later, in the nineties, I met Barbara Hulanicki, the creator of Biba, at a lunch. She reached for her pocketbook when the check came. I had to stop her. “No,” I said, “I don’t think you understand.” But she did, and part of Barbara’s genius was allowing us schoolgirls to get away with it—all the cutest girls in London were wearing her designs, and they were her best advertising.

  Emily and I adopted a group of penniless hippies who occupied a basement under a fish-and-chip shop in Powis Terrace. They were the founding members of the London Free School, a disorganized group of hash-smoking dissidents, and we supported them by hitting up strangers for money around Notting Hill. Sometimes when our parents were out of town, we’d take them to our houses to bathe. The glut of filthy towels was occasionally difficult to explain, and my cat got a really bad reputation.

  • • •

  I had been home from a trip to Ireland for some days before and didn’t know Mum was unaware that Nora Fitzgerald had died, quite suddenly, from cancer. When I made a reference to Nora’s death, Mum burst into tears and asked how could I be so cold and uncaring as not to have told her. Was I made of stone? It hadn’t occurred to me that no one had bothered to phone from Ireland to tell her Nora had been sick. It seemed to me that these days I found myself more at fault with Mum than ever before. Because she was unable to trust one word of my sloppy excuses, she resorted to interrogation. I was called to her room for a talking-to and forced to look her in the eye. Why had I lied about stealing Tony’s sixpences? Was I smoking cigarettes? She could smell the tobacco on my clothes; she could see in my expression that I was lying to her. But when I think of it now, my parents were not being candid with me either.

  Without missing a beat, I could meet Mum’s gaze and swear that I’d kept my dental appointments with Dr. Endicott in Cavendish Square, the memory of his hairy knuckles in my mouth as visceral as if it had happened the day before (this was an era before dentists wore rubber gloves).

  There was the recurring nightmare of not having taken the buttons to the local dressmaker, Miss Amshel, whom Mum had chosen to make up some clothes for me. In order to cover my tracks, I hid the buttons, some twenty or more, separately in drawers, pockets, under the carpet, in my bed. Like a trained retriever, Mum had tracked down each one to its hiding place, as I stood there, finally forced to blush and cry with shame, shaking my head as if denial were still an option.

  John Julius Norwich was often at the house in the morning, doing the Times crossword puzzle with her. He lived directly across the canal, on Blomfield Road. Although he was genial, I didn’t warm to him. He was obviously smart and interesting looking. He was titled (2nd Viscount Norwich) and was a historian, travel writer, and TV personality. He had very fine silvery hair and wore oval glasses. He wasn’t anything like my father. But he and Mum seemed pretty cozy, having coffee at sunup, when I would come down to the kitchen for breakfast.

  I was also a disappointing prospect to Miss Milner, a sweet elderly woman who had taught John Julius to play the piano in his youth. His influence on my mother, to my reasoning, was as good an excuse as any to resist learning even the simplest passage of music from his old teacher. Most of the lesson was spent beguiling Miss Milner into sharing her chocolate-covered digestive biscuits with me. I had honed my diversionary tactics years before on Mother Mary Borgia, at the convent in Loughrea, and they were now working effectively on Miss Milner.

  • • •

  In the summer of 1964 I went with the Spenders to their house in St. Jerôme, in Provence. My little black poodle, Mindy, had just died from kidney disease. My sadness at her loss was compounded with guilt at having been too lazy to walk her on school days and having left her in Ireland some months before. The house had no electricity, and on Saturday nights Lizzie and I danced with young, handsome Frenchmen wearing miniature Shetland sweaters in the village square
.

  Soon after I returned to London, I was in the car with Mum when she said, “Your father wants you and Tony to fly to Rome.” My immediate response was “I don’t want to go.”

  “Is it because of Zoë?” she asked. I thought that was weird—I hadn’t seen Zoë, our beautiful Indian visitor, on the last couple of trips home to St. Clerans. She’d been out of the picture.

  “No,” I said. “I just don’t want to go.”

  “Well,” she said, “I think you have to.”

  Tony and I arrived in Rome a few days later. I was surprised when Betty opened the door to Dad’s suite at the Grand Hotel. I wondered what she was doing there. She was wearing the three-quarter black mink jacket he had given her for Christmas that year. We entered the room. His back to the fireplace, Dad clapped his hands together as if scarcely able to contain his excitement. “Sit down, kids!” he commanded. Tony and I sat apart, stiffly, in wary expectation. “I’ve got some great news,” said Dad. After a long dramatic pause, a heroic grin lit up his face. “You have a little brother!” he announced. It hung in the air for a moment like a dead fish.

  I ran out of the suite into the nearest bathroom and locked the door. I was shaking. Finally I let Betty in and sobbed onto the shoulder of the mink jacket. “I hate him, I hate him.”

  Soon after, Tony and I got back into the car and were taken by Dad to a building in a gentrified part of town. We walked up some stairs to an apartment and Dad rang a bell. Zoë opened the door. Zoë, my friend. A small child was on all fours in the living room, barking. Dad thought it was hysterical that the toddler was acting like a dog, and kept telling him what a good little doggy he was. After a short time, we got up to go.