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

by Huston, Anjelica

  The women of this time were singular beauties, at parties, clubs, walking down the Kings Road, wearing crochet caps, mink from the twenties, and see-through chiffon. There was a medley of breathtaking English roses—girls like Jill Kennington, Sue Murray, Celia Hammond, the indelibly beautiful Jean Shrimpton, and Pattie Boyd, who later married George Harrison. Jane Birkin, a rock-and-roll virgin with a gap between her teeth, who ran off with Serge Gainsbourg and sang the breathy “Je t’aime, moi non plus.” There were fantastic actresses breaking out on the scene, like Maggie Smith, Sarah Miles, Susannah York, Vanessa Redgrave and her sister, Lynn. The French beauties—Delphine Seyrig, Catherine Deneuve, Anna Karina. The ingénues—Judy Geeson, Hayley Mills, Jane Asher, Rita Tushingham. The American Jane Fonda as Barbarella. Marsha Hunt, with her crowning afro. The singers—the great Dusty Springfield; Cilla Black; the barefoot Sandie Shaw; cool, tall Françoise Hardy; and the bleached-blond Sylvie Vartan. The rock-goddess Julie Driscoll, whose interview with British Vogue, which began, “When I wake up in the morning my breath smells like a gorilla’s armpit,” was memorably descriptive. I remember thinking this woman was not out to impress the opposite sex.

  The scents of London in the sixties—Vetiver, Brut, and Old Spice for the boys; lavender, sandalwood, and Fracas for the girls; unwashed hair, cigarettes. Along the Portobello Road, fish and chips and vinegar, tobacco, patchouli, curry, freshly rotting fruit, bacon frying, a trace of body odor. The pubs would be spilling onto the sidewalks by lunchtime, everyone drinking cider and beer, football on the television. Up and down the Kings Road, the beauties in rumpled silk and denim would be out in force on Saturday afternoons. Playful exotics blooming all around in eighteenth-century frock coats—girls with faces like cameos. The blond temptresses Elke Sommer and Brigitte Bardot paving the way for the soulful beauty of Marianne Faithfull and Keith Richards’s dangerous German, Anita Pallenberg. The press called them Dolly Birds, but they were predatory—the sirens of modern sin.

  The guys wore bell-bottoms and velvet jackets, the cuffs dripping with lace; the girls had kohl-rimmed eyes, long straight hair, Afghani embroidered jerkins, printed dresses, military accessories, fingerless gloves, lace-up boots, bird feathers and monkey fur, high-collared Russian shirts, and miniskirts up to there. I found a drummer-boy’s jacket in red felt with gold braid that looked like something out of Sgt. Pepper’s, and wore it with tea gowns from the thirties and pale straw hats with wide brims beaded and feathered, a ring on every finger, earrings hanging to my collarbone.

  On the Sundays we stayed in town, Mum would cook an afternoon pork roast with crackling on top, fresh baked apples with cloves and cinnamon, roasted potatoes, and a big salad, Italian-style. Ten to twelve people sat down at the bleached-pine dining table in the kitchen, with the French doors open to the garden. Nurse would carry Allegra downstairs after her bath to kiss everyone good night. There was usually the core group of Mum’s friends—Peter Menegas, the Bucks, the O’Tooles, Gina Medcalf, and Leslie Waddington, whom Mum had recently asked to be Allegra’s godfather. Tony Richardson came often, with his partner, Neil Hartley, as did the actor Peter Eyre, the costume designer Bumble Dawson, Dirk Bogarde, the director Joseph Losey, and the artist Eduardo Paolozzi. And there were American friends who had just arrived in town, or sent their protégés over for Mum’s protection. She loved mixing up ages and nationalities at her table.

  When Diana Sands came to the West End, starring in The Great White Hope with James Earl Jones, she had introduced Mum to her friend the playwright Adrienne Kennedy. And when Goddard Lieberson’s son, Jonathan, came to London, Mum immediately included him on the calendar of events and took a shine to his good friend Penelope Tree, even though she was the daughter of Marietta, a longtime rival for Dad’s affections. Mum must have realized by then that there was little any woman could do to hold Dad’s attention. Many years later I was to become the godmother to Penelope’s daughter, Paloma.

  • • •

  The great fashion photographer Richard Avedon was a friend of my parents. I don’t know if it was his or Mum’s idea that he should photograph me. I posed for him at a studio off the Fulham Road in Chelsea. I was very shy and, true to form, I applied a lot of makeup. He told Mum later that my shoulders were too wide and that he very much doubted I would ever be a model.

  Some guys from NASA came to Holland Park. Their models and maquettes were mounted outside the auditorium in the assembly hall. There were big signs on them saying “Do Not Touch,” and we were warned that they cost a lot of money. In assembly, our headmaster, a humorless man prone to outbursts of rage, asked the students if we had any questions for the guys from NASA. I rose to my feet and asked why we were sending people into space when we couldn’t feed the world. I was told to sit down and be quiet. It’s a question that still bothers me.

  • • •

  On a school holiday in August 1966, I went to stay with the Bucks again for a few weeks at their rented house, Villa la Gabbia, in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. Returning to London through Paris, I went shopping with Joan and Joyce and bought a brown wool suit with a Nehru collar at a boutique called Snob’s on the rue de Berri. Joan took me to see Tartuffe at the Comédie-Française. After dinner one night we went to Castel’s, the happening nightclub, and I received a lot of attention from some old French playboys, which aggravated Joan enormously. I was taller and looked older than she did, and I was wearing makeup and a miniskirt.

  Betts introduced me to some Irish boys later that summer. She had invited them to come down for the Galway races. All three young men wore the classic uniform of the gentry—Harris Tweed jacket, beige twill trousers, brown felt trilby, and tan lace-up shoes with a high polish. Betts said, “This is Mikey.” I blushed as I shook his hand. Mikey was nineteen or twenty. Betts had described him as her favorite godson and told me that his father owned an estate called Mount Juliet in Co. Kilkenny. He was fine-boned, brown-haired, slight, of medium height, with kind eyes. He had a little scar, either at the corner of his eye or on his upper lip. He was using crutches and looked like a young soldier come back from the war. One leg was in plaster; he had broken it recently in a riding accident. He and his friends stayed for three days, during which I fell more deeply in his thrall. Betts had also invited two girls, the Harboards, daughters of racing friends of hers, to come down from the Curragh, in Co. Kildare, and round out the numbers. The boys were to occupy the loft and the girls the Little House.

  On the last night of their stay, after the races, we went to a dance at the Great Southern Hotel on Eyre Square, where a predominantly céilí band played a cover of a popular song by the Seekers titled, not inappropriately, “The Carnival Is Over.” Outside on the green, the buskers who ran the flying chairs, the carousel, and the bumper cars were packing up until the next year.

  When we returned to the Little House, Mikey came up to my bedroom. We lay down on my little four-poster bed and he held me in his arms. My heart was beating loud and fast, and the heavy inanimate weight of the plaster cast was like a wall between us. We never even kissed. We stayed frozen in silence for a short while, then he went to join his friends in the loft across the courtyard. The following morning, he left with them to go back up to Dublin.

  I was sad when he left. Betty gave me a photograph of him, atop a tall chestnut, wearing jockey silks. Later, she showed me the letters she’d received from all three boys, dutifully thanking her for the outing to Galway. There was no mention of me in any of them.

  • • •

  Dad had met Carson McCullers during the war when he was visiting Paulette Goddard and Burgess Meredith in upstate New York. She was already very fragile, having survived the first in a series of strokes in her thirties. Twenty years later, Dad and Ray Stark decided to make McCullers’s Reflections in a Golden Eye, and chose the Scottish novelist Chaplin Mortimer to write the screenplay. In September 1966, after Carson had read the script, Dad went to discuss it with her at her home in Nyack, New York. As they sat sipping bourbon, Dad
suddenly invited Carson to St. Clerans, not thinking for an instant that she might accept. But she told him she would come to visit the following February, when he would have wrapped work on Reflections.

  Dad picked Carson up from Shannon Airport in an ambulance; she was in the company of her devoted companion, Ida Reeder, a sweet, cheerful black woman. When they arrived at St. Clerans, Carson requested a tour. Her stretcher was carried from room to room as she asked questions about each object’s history and each painting’s provenance. After she was settled in a hospital bed in the Grey Room, Carson’s head was just a tiny round skull above the sheets; she was half doll, half mouse; her transparent shoulders melted into the pillows. There was no discernible shape of a body, save for a delicate little hand, white as porcelain, that held fast to a silver stirrup cup. Tony and I stood at her bedside as she absorbed us with enormous eyes, like blotting paper.

  She never left the Grey Room for the remainder of the visit. Soon she departed as she had arrived, in the ambulance. She died just a few months later, leaving the little silver cup to my father, engraved “John Love Carson, 1967.”

  When Marlon Brando came to St. Clerans to see Dad before starting work on Reflections in a Golden Eye, there was great excitement among the girls in the kitchen. They were squeezing orange juice in their eyes to make them bright, and their updos, stiff with hair spray, lasted from Friday all the way through to Monday.

  I went up to the Big House one morning and found a tanned, even-featured man in a maroon velour sweatshirt standing on the upstairs landing, talking to Dad, who introduced me to him. Marlon smiled and his lips curled. He spoke through his nose. That afternoon in the study, Marlon gave me a tortoiseshell ring from Tahiti, inlaid with silver, and asked me if I’d like to visit him there someday. Later he went for a walk in a lashing horizontal rain, and Betts and I went out in the car to search for him. Finally, we located Marlon, staggering along against the wind on the dirt road near the Sarsfield Bridge, but he refused Betts’s offer of a lift.

  Burgess Meredith came to stay from California. We all loved “Buzz.” He had a deep gravelly voice and a great sense of humor. He was a good rider and loved hunting with the Galway Blazers. Betts found him a beautiful chestnut mare he called Kinvara, which he shipped back to America when he went home.

  • • •

  Dad made a film called Sinful Davey in Ireland in 1968. It starred John Hurt, with a supporting cast that included Nigel Davenport and Robert Morley. They were filming at Leenane, in the wilds of Connemara. Cherokee Habe had a production job on the movie. Because Mum was in London and Cherokee’s daughter, Marina, was now in college at the University of Hawaii, Cherokee and I gravitated to each other. Cherokee was a great-looking woman with a shock of platinum-blond hair, tanned skin, and Native American features. She was fun to hang out with. Although I was just a teenager and she was in her late forties, Cherokee became my best friend on the set of Sinful Davey. She shared confidences with me. I had a crush on the leading man, John Hurt, and she was having a set romance with Nigel Davenport. I did some day work riding sidesaddle in a hunt for the film; otherwise, I was a little bored hanging out with the cast in the evenings.

  Betty arranged for me to go up to the Curragh, to stay with the Harboard girls. I went to several race meets with them, and everywhere we went, I hoped I might run into Mikey. Then Carol, the elder sister, told me he was seeing an American girl.

  When the film crew moved to Dublin, I started going to the hunt balls and staying out late, which upset Dad. I think he half-expected me to stay in my room at night. I went to the Dublin Horse Show and finally re-met Mikey McCalmont, who barely gave me the time of day.

  Toward the end of filming, I had a brief and disillusioning episode with the son of Dad’s production manager. Darkly handsome, in his early twenties, he came to my room after a party at the Gresham Hotel. I was wearing false eyelashes and a fall. The encounter was unpleasant, in that he attempted unsuccessfully to force me to give him pleasure. He was completely insensitive, like an immutable force. When I woke up to a trail of false eyelashes, fake hair, and push-up bra, I felt like Paddy Lynch’s song “Oh Wasn’t She Charming for Nineteen Years Old.” I was not yet seventeen.

  • • •

  Back at school, I had developed a crush on the brother of one of the girls in my class, Joe, a handsome boy who had left Holland Park the year before and was often seen in the neighborhood wearing a black policeman’s cape. One afternoon found four of us together at a bleak bed-sit on the Harrow Road. The other couple disappeared to a room next door. Suddenly confronted with the object of my desire, I found the consequent attempt at lovemaking disastrous, love having nothing to do with it. After a hasty, fumbling effort, he rose from the bed to make a strawberry-jam sandwich on white bread. I was ashamed and embarrassed. I left and waited at a bus stop on the Harrow Road. A dirty old man showed me crude pencil drawings of women in compromising positions. I tried to ignore him.

  Emily’s parents discovered that she was skipping classes with me. We were separated and she was sent to Saffron Walden, a Quaker boarding school in Essex. My friend from Town and Country, Anne Rothenstein, agreed to go with me to see Emily during visitors’ weekend. I had told Mum that I was staying at Anne’s house in North London. We traveled down to Essex several hours by train, fully meaning to make it back to town that night. The boarding school was very depressing—Emily showed me a row of cigarette butts she had lined up outside the windowsill of a room she shared with another girl. Anne and I were supposed to leave early and catch the train back to London, but we lingered and were caught later trying to sleep over in the cloakroom by one of the teachers and asked to leave the school grounds. I can’t remember how we got home, but by some miracle Mum didn’t find out. She had gone to Oslo, Norway, with Nurse and Allegra to visit her friend Richard Svara.

  • • •

  Soon after my visit with Emily, I went on a trip to Los Angeles with Mum. Cherokee and Marina met us at the airport at the top of the elevator by the arrivals gate. Marina was not as tall as I was, but ever since our Christmas at St. Clerans as children, when we played the three witches and she wore the red flannel nightgown that said “don’t tease me,” I’d thought she was one of the most beautiful girls I had ever seen.

  At seventeen, she still had long blond hair and was sloe-eyed, with graceful, delicate features. We laughed about how obsessed I’d been with her Barbie dolls years before. I don’t remember seeing her again before Mum and I went back to London.

  Mum told me later that on December 29, 1968, Marina was brutally murdered on Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles. She had come back to California for a vacation and one evening had gone to see her boyfriend and stayed out late. After driving home, she was abducted in the driveway of Cherokee’s house at 3:30 A.M. Her killer was never identified.

  • • •

  Around this time, Joan and I had a temporary falling-out because Dad and her father, Jules, had undergone an irreparable work-related breach and become estranged. But this in no way affected Joan’s deep affection for Mum, nor my love for Jules and Joyce.

  A school search was being launched for a girl for Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet. I had talked to one of the producers, Dyson Lovell, when he came to Holland Park, and he wanted me to audition. But that summer, in Ireland, it became clear that Dad had other plans for me. Having completed the first movie in a three-picture deal for Fox, he had decided that the second would be the film to launch me as an actress. I wasn’t sure I wanted to do it. It was called A Walk with Love and Death. When I read the script, I didn’t connect with the role. I thought the dialogue was corny, and, more important, I was still uncomfortable and wary around Dad. When I returned to London, I talked to Mum about it—she seemed concerned and sympathetic, but I don’t think she wanted to confront Dad with this indecision and insecurity any more than I did. She said, “He wants you to do it. He’s doing it for you. I think you’re going to have to do it.” Dad consequently
wrote a letter to Zeffirelli, telling him that I was unavailable for the part of Juliet.

  I would have much preferred to work with Zeffirelli. The prospect of making a movie with Dad, his directing me, surrounded by his regular crew, most of whom had known me since babyhood—Basil Fenton-Smith on sound, script supervisor Angela Allen, the lighting cameraman Ed Scaife, Russ Lloyd in the cutting room—would diminish my power to self-invent on my own terms. It was as important for me to present a new persona off-camera as it was to play an original character on film.

  CHAPTER 12

  Anjelica at home, British Vogue, December 1967

  On country weekends in England, house parties would assemble for friends to share living quarters, go to the races, have lovely meals, play tennis, do a little gardening, wander with the dogs in the local fields and woods, ride on horseback, visit other friends for Bloody Marys or Pimm’s Cups, drive to the beach, and eat delicious Sunday roasts with Yorkshire pudding. Mum and I often went to Dirk Bogarde and Tony Forwood’s beautiful old farmhouse in Kent. Before lunch, the usual party of smart, attractive, sophisticated people—from Joe Losey to Boaty Boatwright, then a top executive at Universal, and her husband, the producer Terence Baker, to Bumble Dawson, the actors Georgia Brown, Roddy McDowall, and Michael York, to Jean Kennedy Smith and Sybil Burton—would gather in the bright living room with its pastel sofas and chintz pillows, its bowls of pink roses and bluebells, to talk about art and theater and movies and books.