by Alexander Larman
A Story Lately Told by Anjelica Huston – review
As the third generation of one of Hollywood's most famous dynasties, you'd expect Anjelica Huston's memoir to be rich in stories from the golden days of cinema, but what's particularly enjoyable about her story is the rhapsodic way that she beautifully describes that bygone world. Her director father John dominates much of the book, as she describes her childhood in shabby splendour on the west coast of Ireland, where the likes of John Steinbeck ("I loved him… he was kind and generous and treated me as an equal") and Peter O'Toole were dinner guests, and where life consisted of hunting, adventuring and elaborately staged amateur dramatics, although the young Anjelica loathed the experience at the time.
As the story moves first to 1960s London, and then to New York, and she tells the story of her torrid love affair with the photographer Bob Richardson, the focus shifts away from her remarkable family, especially after her mother's death, and more towards her nascent career, which she describes with clear self-awareness; an early appearance in her father's film A Walk with Love and Death led to her receiving "some breathtakingly negative reviews", and nearly led to her abandoning the business altogether.
Yet it is the flawed men in her life who are the most compellingly sketched. Richardson's talent went hand in hand with his insecurity, mood swings and mental health issues; as Huston writes: "I thought of Bob as a wounded soul and believed it was my mission to save him." And as for her magnificent bastard of a father, it comes as no surprise that Huston noted at a young age that, as he rose from bed and threw off his clothes without a care who saw him, "he was extremely well endowed". A second volume of the book promises to continue the story from 1974 onwards; on this evidence, it should be beguiling stuff.
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