A Story Lately Told by Anjelica Huston

It’s easy to understand why actress, model and 70s “It Girl” Anjelica Huston has divided her memoir in two. The first half, A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in London, Ireland and New York (Scribner, 2013) primarily chronicles her youth in the countryside of Ireland. The second, Watch Me (Scribner, 2014), explores Huston’s coming into her own both professionally, as an actress, and as a woman trying to understand a series of complex relationships with everyone from her father to long-time love Jack Nicholson. After all, what’s it like to grow up with one of Hollywood’s most celebrated directors (John Huston) as a father and a prima-ballerina mother (Ricki Soma) whose enigmatic smile on the July 1947 LIFE Magazine cover crowned her, “the Mona Lisa Girl”? Larger-than-life. Enchanting. Privileged, passionate – but often unstable and isolating.

“…what’s it like to grow up with one of Hollywood’s most celebrated directors as a father and a prima-ballerina mother? Larger-than-life. Enchanting. Privileged, passionate – but often unstable and isolating.”

Huston’s relationship with her father was long, even if they weren’t always close. The family lived in rural Ireland during most of her youth on a sprawling estate. It seems almost as if Huston’s father encouraged her to use that landscape as picturesque backdrop for a childhood spent in trees and on horseback. With John Huston, the quotidian became cinematic. “What news?” he would always ask the author and her brother, expecting a story of some panache no matter how dull the day. “It was good to have an anecdote at hand,” writes Huston, “even though it was often hard to come up with one, given that we were all living in the same compound and had seen him at dinner the night before. If one didn’t have an item of interest to report, more likely than not, a lecture would begin.”

In that sense, Huston’s father was a strong, positive influence on the young actress. He enjoyed sharing his wisdom with her and never wanted her to stop learning. But in other ways he was, well, unreachable; either he would be in the jungle filming the African Queen or hopping from wife to wife after divorcing Huston’s mother.

John Huston with his daughter, Anjelica
(Credit: notesonfilm1.com)

As a reader, we have the sense that young Huston understood the reality of her relationship with her father, a man who belonged to no one. But we also have the feeling that she accepted it with a lot of grace. And whatever transient nature he had was compensated for by the anchoring presence of her mother, Ricki.

Ricki, as Huston writes, “was five feet eight and finely made [with] the expression of a Renaissance Madonna.” At just 18 years old, her mother had become a celebrated ballet dancer and model, but she put her career aside when she married Huston’s father. Even through a harsh period of postpartum depression, Ricki loved Anjelica and her brother, Tony, deeply. Yet, as we particularly see in the second half of Huston’s memoir, Ricki’s ability to suffer through an unfaithful marriage led Huston to a similar behavioural pattern of suffering fools. Just as she was getting old enough to start a conversation with her mother about such topics, “the unthinkable had happened”; her mother was killed in a car crash.

“I felt my heart imploding…the light had gone out of everything. It was like being in a pile of ashes…”

— Anjelica Huston on the death of her mother, Ricki.

Anjelica’s mother, Ricki Soma
(Credit: Vanity Fair)

“I felt my heart imploding…the light had gone out of everything. It was like being in a pile of ashes,” writes Huston, “I went to mum’s closet. Her dresses didn’t even smell like her anymore. Flowers were coming, lots of flowers; violets from Dick Avedon, violets from Diana Cooper. I was furious at the flowers. What the hell? Flowers can’t replace my mum.”

Huston’s mother was only 39. The author recalls joking around about her mother leaving her this-and-that in her will, only to realize that their conversations would soon come to fruition. “It never occurred to me that my mother would die young,” she says, “My father, it was one thing, he could’ve gone at any minute. All anyone did was talk about his health. But my mother – it was different.”

The ensuing chapters trace the many confusing but brilliant roads of Huston’s youth, which was so mercilessly turned upside-down by Death — an “abduction,” she writes, of love and normalcy. But the remarkable nature of loss, as we learn, is its ability to carve new grooves into other, perhaps more stale relationships. We see Huston connect with other members of her family — and particularly her father — in a way that tests her courage and gives her wisdom beyond her years.

A Story Lately Told is, like Huston’s own life, defined by so many things: stories of exotic treasures and travels, of a childhood spent with icons of film and art and the radical departure from 50s era Americana. But at its tender core, Huston’s memoir is a love letter toa unique family — through thick and thin, life and death.