Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | SCD 921 HUSTON 9 DISCS | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Academy Award-winning actress Huston's "tireless fascination with the world is thrilling..." ( Elle ), and Watch Me is an "elegant and entertaining" ( Chicago Tribune ) account of her seventeen-year love affair with Jack Nicholson, her rise to stardom, and her mastery of the craft of acting.
Picking up where her first memoir A Story Lately Told leaves off, Watch Me is a chronicle of Anjelica Huston's glamorous and eventful Hollywood years. "With a conversational intimacy, inhabiting the role of the new best friend" ( San Francisco Chronicle ), she writes about falling in love with Jack Nicholson and her adventurous, turbulent, high-profile, spirited relationship with him and his intoxicating circle of friends. She writes about learning how to act; about her Academy Award-winning portrayal of Maerose Prizzi in Prizzi's Honor ; about her collaborations with many of the greatest directors in Hollywood, including Woody Allen, Wes Anderson, Richard Condon, Bob Rafelson, Mike Nichols, and Stephen Frears. She movingly and beautifully describes the death of her father John Huston and her marriage to sculptor Robert Graham. She is candid, mischievous, warm, passionate, funny, and a fabulous storyteller. Watch Me is a magnificent memoir "from a lady so simultaneously real, tough, vulnerable, privileged and candid, I want to hear whatever she tells me" (Lisa Schwarzbaum, The New York Times Book Review ).
Author Notes
Anjelica Huston (born July 8, 1951) is an American actress and director. Huston became the third generation of her family to win an Academy Award when she won Best Supporting Actress for her performance in 1985's Prizzi's Honor, joining her father, director John Huston, and grandfather, actor Walter Huston. She also received Academy Award nominations for Enemies, a Love Story (1989) and The Grifters (1990).
Although she was born in Santa Monica, California, Huston spent much of her childhood in Ireland. In 2014, her memoir entitled Watch Me made it to the New York Times bestseller list.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
An insecure girl makes herself into an Oscar-winning actress in this captivating memoir. Following up on her well-received coming-of-age memoir A Story Lately Told, Huston recounts her decades-long passage from callow runway model to breakout roles in Prizzi's Honor, The Grifters and The Addams Family and accomplished directing stints. The narrative centers on her turbulent relationships with two larger-than-life men: her father, John Huston, a legendary director and alternately supportive and hyper-critical dad; and her long-time boyfriend, the movie star Jack Nicholson, who in her description veers between ebullient charisma, cold callousness and heartless womanizing. (Brazenly propositioned by a Frenchwoman at Cannes, Nicholson allegedly zoomed off on her motorbike, leaving Huston in tears on the sidewalk.) The author is candid about the self-doubts that often held her back, which makes her professional blossoming all the more interesting. The book's real triumph is in her bewitching prose, which features vivid profiles of innumerable dropped names, wonderfully impressionistic sketches of showbiz scenes and poetic evocations of happiness and loss, especially in her simple, luminous account of the death of her husband, the sculptor Robert Graham. Huston again proves herself a sensitive writer and a born raconteur. Photos. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Watch her, they have. Huston has been cast in some of the most iconic roles of the past several decades, from the Academy Award-winning performance as Maerose Prizzi in Prizzi's Honor to the comically eerie embodiment of Morticia Addams in The Addams Family. But perhaps no roles have been more challenging than those of companion to the capricious Jack Nicholson or daughter to her equally mercurial father, legendary actor/director John Huston. Determined to learn to be an actress in her own right, Huston worked with some of the most innovative directors in the industry, from Wes Anderson to Woody Allen, but as her career soared, her personal life collapsed under the demise of love affairs and through the deaths of both her father and husband, sculptor Bob Graham. In her second memoir, following A Story Lately Told (2013), that is as genuine as it is gossipy, Huston lays bare the anguish she felt at being perennially in the shadow of such giant talents and the courageous steps she took to forge her own identity.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
WHEN DID SELF-PROCLAIMED movie geekdom supplant fandom as a badge of superior commitment to cinema love? Being more fan than geek and therefore not beholden to quantifiable research, I blithely estimate that the mutation began about the time Darth Vader first started wearing his CPAP machine around the house and frightening the children. Geekdom was born under the moon of the modern Hollywood blockbuster era and nurtured by the simultaneous development of home computers and cable television - which in turn begat the Internet, TCM, Fandango and trivia-enhanced moviegoing life as we know it. Fans may be happy with publicity stills, but geeks want content, and context too. Fans may enjoy autographs, but geeks demand Reddit Ask Me Anything threads. In our time, geekdom - once popularly viewed as a social deficiency with no subterranean cachet of cool attached - has become a club to which even the popular kids clamor for membership. Entry is granted through the gates of Twitter, the IMDb forest of factoids, the Box Office Mojo vault of knowledge. Movie geeks want statistics about ticket sales and the number of takes expended for each scene of a movie directed by Stanley Kubrick or David Fincher. They want aspect ratio specs and access to multiple drafts of shooting scripts. Movie geeks thrive on argument and think in lists : Who or what was the best, the worst, the most (sadly) overrated or (criminally) underrated? Which movies before 1968 have an animal or body part in the title? And they want personal details. They are hungry not so much for gossip about sex lives of the stars (although that, too, is entered into the mental database) as for the scoop on how the affair between X and Y or the drug use of Z affected the production schedules of Projects A, B and C. Which then bumped releases back. Which sent Oscar strategists scurrying to devise new awardsseason campaigns. Which involved underdog positioning and a subtweet whisper attack maligning the political inclinations of the star of Project D. Movie geeks will thumb through ONE LUCKY BASTARD: Tales From Tinseltown (Lyons Press, $26.95), by Roger Moore with Gareth Owen, and YESTERDAY, TODAY, TOMORROW: My Life (Atria, $28), by Sophia Loren, with the kind of indulgent pat on the shoulder given to Grandma as she demonstrates her Jitterbug flip phone. This pair of slight, late-life macramé projects - a loose collection of Hollywood anecdotes from 87-year-old Moore and a gentle autobiographical sketch from 80-year-old Loren - are best bought by and for classic fans. Both authors have already delighted their respective bases with previous volumes of similar provenance. The urbanely British Moore - seven times the big-screen embodiment of Her Majesty's secret agent James Bond between 1973 and 1985, making him a record-holder for the gig - published his autobiography, "My Word Is My Bond," in 2008, as well as two books of Bondiana. The voluptuously Italian Loren - winner of the 1962 Oscar for best actress (in "Two Women") and an honorary Oscar in 1991 - collaborated with A. E. Hotchner on "Sophia. Living and Loving: Her Own Story," published in 1979, and has her byline attached to a book about beauty and one of "recipes and memories." There is no story in either of these volumes that will appreciably deepen or broaden what a fan already knows and presumably loves about each of these old-time stars. Instead, the books are valedictory extensions of personal brand. In the case of Moore, that brand is a debonair chap about town, so well connected after decades of Hollywood high life that he can now rattle off stories that didn't even happen to him, but instead were told to him by various other chaps about town. Here is a raconteur so jolly about his long career that he actually refers to show business as "the business we call 'show.'" The work, he writes, in a flourish of palaver, is "always interesting, often challenging and if Lady Luck favors us, and benevolent producers take pity on us, then it's quite possible to make a living out of doing something really enjoyable." The fellow who writes this lulling chitchat is a little cheeky, a bit droll. And for fans more tickled by Lady Luck stuff than I am, that may be enough. Published in Britain as "Last Man Standing," the book meanders through stories about old-school players including Lana Turner ("another wonderful actress and feisty lady"), John Gielgud (whose "continuing gaffs really were the stuff of legend") and Sammy Davis Jr. ("a hugely funny man"). "One Lucky Bastard" probably goes down best when read at a bar, book in one hand and something shaken-not-stirred in the other. For her part of the act, Loren works the Italian grandma angle with endearing theatricality. As a framing device, she establishes her reminiscences as memories summoned before nodding off to sleep, having spent the day cooking Christmas recipes with her grandchildren. (Attenzione, professional Italian nonna/cookbook star Lidia Bastianich, you've got competition.) Loren's stories are unfailingly sweet, modest, patient. "The ugly duckling was turning into a swan," she notes about her girlhood, with becoming understatement. "We pinched each other's cheeks to make sure we weren't dreaming," she says about arriving in Los Angeles for the first time in 1957 as an international movie star, with her younger sister, Maria, as her companion. And for fans more tickled by cheek-pinching stuff than I am, this, too, is surely enough. Aside from a steady, controlled burn of anger at the bounder father who never did right by Loren's mother - young, unwed and miserably poor, Romilda Villani raised Sofia (as her name was then spelled) and Maria, with crucial help from her own mother - the memoirist is in a magnanimously reflective mood. When, at the age of 17, she met 39-year-old Carlo Ponti, who would become her producer, her Pygmalion and eventually her husband (after headlines had proclaimed their relationship a scandal and after popular, church and state condemnation), she explains that "I had the strange impression that he'd understood me, that behind my impetuous beauty he had read the traces of a reserved personality, my difficult past, my great longing to be successful, seriously and with passion." She is gracious about her own success, and protective about her family. She is also tender about the other men who affected her life, both personally as well as professionally - never more so than about Cary Grant, with whom she became close during the making of "The Pride and the Passion" in 1957, and who (despite being married to his third wife, Betsy Drake, at the time) proposed marriage. "I knew that my place was next to Carlo," she writes. "At the same time, it was hard to resist the magnetism of a man like Cary, who said he was willing to give up everything for me." Loren and Grant remained lifelong friends. So move right along, movie geeks, there is nothing to gawp at here. This is a story that rewards nice readers who are contented to give lovers some privacy, even if they happen to be movie stars. Geek-style collectors of stories and stats will feel much more at home with DE NIRO: A Life (Crown Archetype, $32.50), by the film critic and movie journalist Shawn Levy, or WATCH ME: A Memoir (Scribner, $27.99), the second volume of memoirs by Anjelica Huston. The two books couldn't be farther apart in tone and intention: "De Niro" is a highly researched, analytical study of the life and work of one of the greatest actors of his generation; "Watch Me" is a personal narrative by a charismatic 63-year-old woman and child of Hollywood whose own creative identity has, for much of her life, been defined by her relationship to powerful men - including but not limited to the director John Huston (her father) and to the actor Jack Nicholson (her on-and-off beau for some 17 years). Yet together, both books reflect prevailing modern approaches to writing about movies, Hollywood and, my dears, the business we call show. Levy faces a couple of challenges well: For one, his is hardly the first, nor is it very likely to be the last, biographical study of the now 71-year-old De Niro, who is as famous for his personal impenetrability and conversational reticence as for his towering public performances in American cinema masterpieces including "Mean Streets," "The Deer Hunter," "Taxi Driver," "Raging Bull," "Goodfellas" and "The Godfather II." What's more, the book is "unauthorized," in that the actor repeatedly declined to be interviewed, and as a result, so did many others who have known him over the years. "However," Levy sensibly explains, "as I often remind people, unauthorized doesn't mean salacious, and it is entirely possible to write a full and fair biography without ever speaking to the subject." "Robert De Niro: A Life" is full and fair, and in his role as critic, Levy states his operating P.O.V. clearly at the top: It is sometimes difficult "to see De Niro's early glories through what had become the muddle of his later career." Yet, Levy continues, "every time he appears before us, no matter the costume, the voice, the name, the story, there he is, stark and plain before the world." And so, armed with scholarship culled from studying De Niro's archives, along with insights gained from interviewees unconstrained by omertà, Levy (who has previously written books about challenging showbiz types including Paul Newman, Jerry Lewis and the Sinatra-era Rat Pack) has created a thorough, measured, fact-filled, 600-page, movie-by-movie, girlfriend-by-girlfriend study that is right up a movie geek's alley. The trade-off is that the thoroughness of all those facts, in all those pages, may cause a casual fan's eyes to glaze over. The steady, measured pace of "De Niro" contrasts with the page-turning trot of "Watch Me." While Levy proceeds at the deliberate tempo of an anthropologist, Huston glides around like a nightclub singer with an interesting, erratic set list, singing some blues, some power ballads, a torch song or two, and Sondheim's "I'm Still Here" as a closer. And this, too, is a phenomenon of the contemporary era of movie geekdom: A memoirist can swing a little, pull some attitude, narrate selectively, and her readers will only appreciate her more for her confidence. Huston's first volume, "A Story Lately Told," covered her childhood, her teens in London and her relationship in New York with the photographer Bob Richardson. "Watch Me" picks up with the good stuff - life in Los Angeles, Nicholson, her work in "Prizzi's Honor," her sometimes violent romance with Ryan O'Neal and her marriage to the sculptor Robert Graham, from 1992 until his death in 2008. Huston names names, rewards friends, settles scores and powers her way through sentences with a bluntness that might daunt a more tentative dame. Like this: "Even though Warren Beatty was one of his best friends, I wasn't recognizing Jack as a world-class philanderer at the time." Or this: "Everyone was getting high in my circle. Coke and grass were ubiquitous." From a lady simultaneously so real, tough, vulnerable, privileged and candid, I want to hear whatever she wants to tell me, up to and including a description of every designer dress she ever wore. Because, reading "Watch Me," I become as engrossed as a dork attending Comic Con, a film studies student at a Czech cinema series at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater or a feminist movie critic who blogs at length about the male gaze as it applies to the oeuvre of Judd Apatow and Jon Favreau. None of whom, by the way, may be hard-core enough to survive the ultra geekdom of how star wars conquered THE UNIVERSE: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise (Basic Books, $28.99), by Chris Taylor. Here, finally, is a book that, in its very title, separates the tough from the wusses when it comes to exactly the kind of pop-culture consumption, digestion, regurgitation and entrail-reading that began with George Lucas's space fairy tale. The amusingly hyperbolic (but serious) title, with its cheerily fevered (but serious) assumption of agreement with the premise and delightfully blinkered (but serious) conviction in the importance of the topic, distills everything one needs to know about the kind of insanely microresearched and breezily written book this is. The British-born Taylor, the deputy editor of the website Mashable, is partial to hey bro! statements like "Do not try this at home," "R2-D2 is the man" and "As 1976 dawned, Lucas found himself the ringleader in a circus of genius, the head of one of those once-in-a-generation teams of fiery young turks eager to prove themselves." Taylor is also impressively committed to, as he calls it, his "biography of the franchise that turned Planet Earth into Planet 'Star Wars.'" Searching for somebody, somewhere, who has never seen and knows nothing about the franchise, Taylor visits a settlement of Navajo people in Arizona and unspools a print of the movie dubbed in the Navajo language. I'm not sure this proves anything, but it does allow him to take a nice trip to the Southwest, meet some elders and teach "Star Wars" readers about the Navajo code talkers of World War II. True movie geeks get a meta high from the giddy knowledge that they are being obsessive even while they are being obsessive. And they are nothing if not excited to hang out with others who share their particular subspecialty passions - whether for pre-Code films, Iranian cinema, Blaxploitation flicks, Robert De Niro or Anjelica Huston. I reckon there are millions, or at least thousands, who will be eager to go where Taylor goes, probing the secret corners of the galaxy invented by George Lucas and his fiery young turks. And if I am not among them, don't be alarmed. There is a new book out called CHARLIE CHAPLIN: A Brief Life (Doubleday, $25.95), by the award-winning British writer and biographer Peter Ackroyd, and it is quietly enthralling. It is, as advertised, concise. It assumes basic familiarity with "the first human being ever to be the object of global adulation far beyond the later cult of 'celebrity.'" (Taylor the "Star Wars" scholar might have had an even harder time finding somebody, somewhere, who has never heard of Chaplin.) Ackroyd's Chaplin is a not-very-nice man, he is hell to work with, he is an incorrigible womanizer (of very young women) with a "priapic reputation," a bad husband, self-absorbed, moody, known for his "meanness" and "stinginess" and a devastatingly effective artist. Ackroyd's coolly perceptive literary style and equally devastatingly effective observations suggest that he doesn't care a fig about pleasing geeks or fans or anyone else. I have become a groupie. LISA SCHWARZBAUM, a former critic at Entertainment Weekly, is a freelance journalist.
Kirkus Review
The second and final volume of the celebrated actress's memoir charts her beginnings as an actress and director, her emotional gains and losses, and the births and deaths that affected her.In her first volume (A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London, and New York, 2013), Huston focused on her childhood and her emergence as a fashion model while growing up the daughter of John Huston, the legendary director and actor. That volume had an airy superficiality that continues here, as well. The author includes myriad details about the parties she attended, the designer fashions she wore, the celebrities she hung with (Robert Duvall and Bill Murray) and the colleagues she liked (Drew Barrymore, John Cusack). This can become eye-glazing, but Huston does provide some remarkable passages. She tells about her tempestuous relationship with Ryan O'Neal (who physically abused her), her long on-and-off-and-on-again affair with Jack Nicholson (who could not, it seems, manage fidelitythough Huston also confesses to a number of her own transgressions). She fell in love withand marriedsculptor Robert Graham; the author pauses occasionally to tell us about some of his notable works. She also talks about many of her film roles, including her Oscar-winning performance (supporting actress) in Prizzi's Honor, starring Nicholson and directed by her father. She shares some anecdotes about the casts and crews she worked with (sometimesas in Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissoushe emerged with hurt feelings). But the most powerful segments concern the decline and death of her fatherand, later, of her husband. Here, Huston stares directly into life's horrors and does not blink. There's a brief passage, as well, about her tangential involvement in Roman Polanski's 1977 legal troubles. Amid the fluff and the flutter are some true passion and pain. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Starred Review. In this follow-up to Huston's 2013 memoir, A Story Lately Told, which left off with Huston in her 20s, leaving an abusive relationship with photographer Bob Richardson, listeners are catapulted into Huston's star-studded world post-Richardson, complete with 1980s shoulder pads, champagne, cocaine, world travel, and famous lovers. Fun as this can be, there are moments when Huston's attitudes about such things as her altercations with Jack Nicholson might rub some listeners the wrong way, and though it's significantly longer, the story still skips enough to lack the emotional continuity of the first volume. However, Huston is articulate as always and unapologetically reveals details of her stormy relationships and other juicy tidbits. When it comes to her professional life, there's a certain reserve to the information she shares. Still, what Huston does recount is enough to convince even the most casual movie fan that in spite of her glamorous life, it is Huston's iconic characters, from Maerose Prizzi to Morticia Addams to Etheline Tannenbaum, that will maintain our lasting interest. Her understated accounting of her roles is so impressive that it ultimately provides the biggest surprise of the book. VERDICT Listeners need not have read or listened to the first volume to enjoy this lyrical Hollywood memoir, read to great effect by the author herself. ["This memoir with both substance and flair is a must-read for Huston fans, those who enjoy film, and anyone who wishes to be inspired by a richly textured life well presented," read the starred review of the Scribner hc, LJ 11/15/14.]-Heather Malcolm, Bow, WA (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Watch Me CHAPTER 1 My old life ended and my new life began as I was standing next to a baggage carousel in the customs hall at LAX in March 1973. It was there, at the age of twenty-one, that I parted ways with Bob Richardson, the man I had lived with for the last four years, a bold and provocative fashion photographer twenty-four years older than I, with whom I'd been involved in a tempestuous affair. Until this moment we had been sharing an apartment in Gramercy Park, New York. Had it not been for the presence of my father and his latest wife, Cici, with whom Bob and I had just been vacationing in La Paz, Mexico, I doubt that I ever would have had the final stroke of courage it would take to leave him. I would be staying temporarily at the ranch house in the Pacific Palisades that Cici had owned prior to her marriage to Dad and that she was redecorating to accommodate some treasures from our old life at St. Clerans, a pastoral estate in the west of Ireland where I grew up with my brother Tony--before we moved with our mother to London; before the birth of my half siblings, Danny and Allegra; before I acted in a movie at the age of sixteen with my father directing; before my mother's death by car crash in 1969, a cataclysmic experience that for me ended that beautiful, hopeful decade, when I moved from England to America. One morning early in my stay at Cici's, I ordered a taxi and told the driver to take me to Hollywood. "Do you mean Vine Street?" he asked vaguely. I had guessed that Hollywood wasn't really a place but rather a state of mind, with a great many parking lots sandwiched between shops and storefronts advertising sex and liquor. But oddly, there was a sense of coming home to California. Although I had grown up in Europe, I was born in Los Angeles. The desert skies were clear blue and untroubled. Living with my father again felt strange, but he would be leaving soon to resume work on The Mackintosh Man in New York. I was eager to buy some marabou bedroom stilettos to match the pink swan's-down-trimmed negligee that Cici had generously just given me. Driving along Sunset in the pale sunshine, I noticed that the panorama was bare and garish, mostly warehouses and two-story facades. There were rows of tall palm trees and purple jacarandas. The air was windy and dry and sweet-scented. Beverly Hills, it seemed, was all about who you were, what you were driving, your pastimes, and your playgrounds. A few days before, Cici had taken me shopping on Rodeo Drive, where there was a yellow-striped awning above Giorgio's boutique, with outdoor atomizers that puffed their signature Giorgio perfume. Indulgent husbands drank espresso at a shiny brass bar inside as their wives shopped for feathered gowns and beaded cocktail dresses. For lingerie, the local sirens went to Juel Park, who was known to seal the deal for many aspirants based on the strength of her hand-stitched negligees and satin underwear trimmed with French lace. We lunched at the Luau, a Polynesian watering hole, the darkest oasis on the street, where you could hear rummy confessions from the next-door booth as you tucked behind your ear a fresh gardenia from the scorpion punch. Los Angeles was a small town then; it felt both incredibly glamorous and a little provincial. Cici, who was in her mid-thirties, had a son, Collin, by a former marriage to the documentary filmmaker and screenwriter Walon Green. Cici had gone to private schools in Beverly Hills and Montecito, and her friends were the hot beauties of the day, from Jill St. John and Stefanie Powers to Bo Derek and Stephanie Zimbalist--glamorous sportswomen and great horseback riders who had grown up privileged in the western sunbelt. She had played baseball with Elvis Presley at Beverly Glen Park in the fifties and roomed with Grace Slick at Finch College in New York. Cici also had a lively retinue of gay friends who were sportive and gossipy and informal. Cici's energy was buoyant. She cursed like a sailor and loved a bit of illicit fun, as did I. Our practice, at least a couple of times a week, was to do an impromptu raid on other people's gardens in the neighboring canyons. I would wield the shears, and with a trunkful of flowers and branches, Cici would drive her candy-apple-red Maserati like a getaway car, burning rubber to peals of laughter; although we tempted fate, for some miraculous reason we never got caught. Sometimes Allegra would accompany us on these forays. After the sale of St. Clerans, Allegra had moved in with her Irish nanny, Kathleen Shine, whom we called "Nurse," to share a rented house in Santa Monica with Gladys Hill, Dad's co-writer and secretary. Heartbroken by the death of our mother and still painfully loyal to her, Nurse had been a staple of Tony's and my childhood. Gladys was calm, deliberate, intelligent, and kind. A pale-complexioned woman with ice-blond hair from West Virginia, she was devoted to Dad and shared his passion for pre-Columbian art. She had worked for him in the previous decade and was part of the family in Ireland when I was growing up. Allegra was going on nine and was extremely smart; it was already her intention to go to Oxford University. From the time she was a baby, she'd had an innate, deep wisdom and a sweet formality about her. I looked up Jeremy Railton, a handsome Rhodesian friend from my former life, when I was going to school in London. He had been designing the sets for a play by Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, and was living in an apartment on Fountain Avenue. We picked up our friendship where we'd left off five years before. He introduced me to his social circle, which included the comedy writer Kenny Solms and his collaborator, Gail Parent; the talent agent Sandy Gallin; Michael Douglas and Brenda Vaccaro; Paula and Lisa Weinstein; and Neil Diamond. Kenny and Gail wrote for The Carol Burnett Show and numerous television specials for Mary Tyler Moore, Dick Van Dyke, and Julie Andrews. Cici knew that I was still shaken from my split with Bob Richardson. She did her best to take me out and introduce me to people, but I was more interested in riding her horses and walking in the next-door garden. She and Dad had just celebrated the completion of a new Jacuzzi, and one afternoon I found the actor Don Johnson and a male friend of his floating in it. Though I was grateful to Cici for her efforts, I was somewhat embarrassed and ran back to the camellia trees. A Swedish friend of hers, Brigitta, who owned Strip Thrills, a dress shop on Sunset, told Cici that she was going to a party at Jack Nicholson's house that evening and invited her to come along. Cici asked if she could bring her stepdaughter, and Brigitta said fine, that it was his birthday, and Jack loved pretty girls. I borrowed an evening dress from Cici--black, long, open at the back, with a diamanté clasp. Brigitta and another Swedish girl picked us up, and the four of us drove in Brigitta's car to Jack's house on Mulholland Drive, on a high ridge separating Beverly Hills from the San Fernando Valley on the other side. It felt like we were on top of the world. The front door of a modest two-story ranch-style house opened, and there was that smile. Later, after he became a superstar and was on the cover of Time magazine, Diana Vreeland was to christen it "The Killer Smile." But at the time I thought, "Ah! Yes. Now, there's a man you could fall for." In 1969, when I was still living in London, I had gone with some friends to see Easy Rider in a movie theater in Piccadilly Circus, and had returned alone some days later to see it again. It was Jack's combination of ease and exuberance that had captured me from the moment he came on-screen. I think it was probably upon seeing the film that, like many others, I first fell in love with Jack. The second time was when he opened the door to his house that early evening in April, with the late sun still golden in the sky. "Good evening, ladies," he said, beaming, and added in a slow drawl, "I'm Jack, and I'm glad you could make it." He motioned for us to enter. The front room was low-ceilinged, candlelit, and filled with strangers. There was Greek food, and music playing. I danced with Jack for hours. And when he invited me to stay the night, I asked Cici what she thought. "Are you kidding?" she said. "Of course!" In the morning, when I woke up and put on my evening dress from the night before, Jack was already downstairs. Someone I came to recognize later as the screenwriter Robert Towne walked through the front door into the house and looked at me appraisingly as I stood on the upper landing. Then Jack appeared and said, "I'm gonna send you home in a taxi, if that's okay, because I'm going to a ball game." The cab took me back the half hour to the Palisades. When I got out in the backless evening dress, Cici was at the door. She looked at me and just shook her head. "I can't believe you didn't insist that he drive you home," she said. "What are you thinking? If he's going to take you out again, he must come and pick you up and take you home." Jack called a few days later to ask me out. I said, "Yes. But you have to pick me up, and you have to drive me home." And he said, "Okay. All right. How about Saturday?" And I said, "Okay. But you have to come and pick me up." Then I got a follow-up call on Saturday saying he was sorry, he had to cancel our date, because he had a previous obligation. "Does that make me a secondary one?" I asked. "Don't say that," he said. "It's not witty enough, and it's derogatory to both of us." I hung up the phone, disappointed. That evening I decided to go out with Jeremy and Kenny Solms and Gail Parent. We were dining at the Old World café on Sunset Boulevard, when they started to whisper and giggle. When I asked what was going on, Gail said, "You were supposed to see Jack tonight, right?" And I replied, "Yes, but he had a previous obligation," and Kenny said, "Well, his previous obligation is a very pretty blonde, and he just went upstairs with her." I took my wineglass in hand and, with heart pumping, climbed the stairs to the upper section of the restaurant and approached Jack's booth. He was sitting with a beautiful young woman whom I immediately recognized as his ex-girlfriend Michelle Phillips. I had seen them photographed together in magazines when I was living in New York. She was in the group the Mamas and the Papas. As I reached the table, a shadow passed quickly over his face, like a cloud crossing the sun. I lifted my glass airily and said, "I'm downstairs, and I just thought I'd come up to say hi." He introduced Michelle to me, not missing a beat. She was charming. I guess they were at the end of their relationship at that point. One morning, some weeks later, she drove to his house on Mulholland Drive to collect something she had stored there. Upon discovering that I was with Jack, she came upstairs to his bedroom with two glasses of orange juice. From that moment, we became friends. * * * On one of my first dates with Jack, he took me to the races at Hollywood Park. He wore a beautiful cream wool suit with an American flag in rhinestones pinned to his lapel. He got a hard time at the gate to the grandstand for not wearing a tie. Jack gave me fifty dollars' betting money. I won sixty-seven and returned his fifty. I was still wrapped up in thoughts of Bob Richardson and the suddenness of our parting. I wrote in a diary I was keeping at the time that I didn't know what was me and what wasn't anymore, that I'd been Bob's possession and his construct, saying the things he might say, even smoking his brand of cigarettes. I thought it must be planetary, all this disruption and indecision. Someone said it was fragments of helium floating about the atmosphere, because everyone I met at the time seemed touched by a peculiar madness. Even Richard Nixon had lost his moorings and was on his way to being impeached. In the overture to our relationship, Jack sent mixed messages. Alternately, he would ask me to stick around or would not call when he said he would. At one point he told me he had decided that we should cool it, and followed that up with a call suggesting we dine together. Sometimes he called me "Pal," which I hated. It implied a lack of romantic feeling. I didn't want to be his crony but, rather, the love of his life. I thought he was still very involved with Michelle, who seemed to have made up her mind to move along. Jack gave me a variety of nicknames. I started off as "Fab." As in "The Big Fabulous," which became, with a German accent, "Ze Bik Fabuliss." This was because when I first came to Los Angeles, Jeremy and Kenny used to say "the most fabulous" all the time, a habit that I had adopted. Then, I don't know why, my name developed into "Toot," rhyming with "foot," or "Tootie," which became "Tootman Fabuliss." Then it became "Ze Bik," and then simply "Mine," or "Minyl." Jack had nicknames for most people. Warren Beatty was "The Pro." Marlon Brando was "Marloon." Fred Roos was "The Rooster." Arthur Garfunkel was "The Old New G." Jack had a thing about names. He liked Harry Dean Stanton's name so much that he wrote it somewhere in every film that he did. So, whether it was his initials on a prison wall in graffiti or carved into a tree in a Western, if you look closely at this period of his movies, you'll see HDS somewhere. He called Michelle "Rat" in the nicest way possible. His car, a magnificent Mercedes 600 the color of black cherries, was christened "Bing." One of the first things I noticed about Jack was that he had a great many people around who performed all sorts of functions for him. On Saturdays the guys would all sit in the TV room at the back of the house and drink beer and eat hot dogs and watch sports all day. Jack might leap up to demonstrate a slam dunk. As long as he had a friend sitting by, nodding his head, a smile decorating his face, life was good. I think, for the most part, that's all Jack needed. In some ways, he was a man of simple tastes. A receptive and appreciative audience always charmed him. Others had the job of helping Jack keep his life running smoothly. He called his assistant, Annie Marshall, "My staff." The daughter of the late actor Herbert Marshall, Annie was tall, dark, and pretty, brilliantly funny, neurotic, and smart as a whip. There was Helena Kallianiotes, who was a complete mystery to me at the beginning. Helena was "Boston Blackie"; born in Greece, dark and brooding, she had mahogany eyes, a waist-length snarl of black hair, and a compact, lithe body, and had been a belly dancer in Boston. She was also a great cook, and provided the Mediterranean food at Jack's party. She was a fascinating woman, complicated, intense, and secretive. The writer of Five Easy Pieces, Carole Eastman, a very good friend of Jack's, had seen Helena dancing in the late sixties and had been so impressed that she'd introduced Helena to Jack and the director, Bob Rafelson, who gave her a small but memorable role in the movie. Knowing she was at loose ends afterward, Jack offered her a position looking after his house. She was living there when we first met, at his party, and eventually moved to a house that he acquired next door. Helena wasn't really a housekeeper. She was Jack's chief of staff, to a degree, although there was often confusion about the running of the house, as Jack would appropriate many people to perform the same task. Helena was also the keeper of his confidences and trust, and always had Jack's best interest at heart. Sometimes they had fights, and he would blame her if something broke down or went missing; she took some heat but was always fiercely loyal to him. * * * During my first months in L.A., I spent a lot of time at Kenny Solms's house, alternately nursing and bullying my friend Jeremy, who had developed a very high temperature but refused to discuss his ailments. At one point, Kenny and I decided to drive him to the nearest emergency room, at Cedars-Sinai. He was terribly ill and ultimately needed an operation. I was riding Cici's horses in the mornings up at Will Rogers Park, then going into Beverly Hills to visit with Kenny while Jeremy was in the hospital. Sometimes I would stay at Kenny's house, and together we would enact scenes from A Little Night Music for our own personal amusement. We liked to believe our version of "Send in the Clowns" was nonpareil, and our performance became something of a daily ritual that I greatly enjoyed. * * * After Jeremy recuperated, I decided to rent a place with him high up on Beachwood Drive under the Hollywood sign, opposite a rustic little riding school that, for ten dollars an hour, would rent you a horse you could ride on a trail over the pass to Glendale. There you could hang a feed bag on the horse and halter it to a post while you ate tacos and drank beer. The house itself was Spanish, with white walls and yellow trim around the windows, cool inside, with tiled and wooden floors, alcoves, rounded portals, and French doors leading to a central courtyard. Upstairs there were balconies overlooking the garden, and my bedroom was a perfect little white box. Cici gave me a selection of housewarming presents, including a Sony record player, beds, chairs, tables, and lamps. We had a lot of fun parties in Beachwood Canyon, but because it was the beginning of my relationship with Jack, I was spending my nights more often than not at his house on Mulholland Drive, then taking taxis in the early morning down Coldwater Canyon across town to Beachwood. My practice was to arrive at the house and start washing the dirty dishes soaking in the sink from the previous night. Allegra came to visit with me sometimes at Beachwood Drive on weekends. Once I dressed her in my grandmother Angelica's Edwardian gown that I had salvaged from St. Clerans, and tried to take her picture in a hammock, but she was reluctant and camera-shy; even at nine, she reminded me so much of Mum--loyal, sensitive, sweet, and wise, but without the advantage of having had our mother for long. Jeremy and I planted a pretty garden at Beachwood, full of foxgloves and forget-me-nots, wisteria, chrysanthemums, passion flowers, and dahlias. Jeremy started to keep quail in the back yard, and we had a lovely pair of resident raccoons and their babies. We vowed one day to have a farm together, a place where we could be totally free and creative, and make a haven for animals. One morning when I entered the kitchen, I met an extremely handsome young man with black hair and dark eyes. His name was Tim Wilson. We smoked some grass and bonded instantly. He told me that he was studying Transcendental Meditation. That summer Jeremy, Tim, and I planned out our dream farm on paper, drawing a map describing where each of us might live, what our animals might be, where each of us might have ponds and plant gardens. Eventually, this would become a reality. * * * There was a nascent western branch of the New York clan in Los Angeles. A lot of people were making the shift--Berry Berenson, Pat Ast, Peter Lester, Juan Fernández, Dennis Christopher. European friends, too, were making the journey west. There were about ten places to eat in town--the Bistro, Trader Vic's, Perino's, Chasen's, the Cock'n Bull, La Scala, Scandia, the Old World, the Source, the Brown Derby. Things happened at a leisurely pace. Unlike New York, where the pavements abounded with energy and purpose and everyone seemed to have an objective, Los Angeles was filled with friendly people who seemed content to hang out at home in tracksuits and kaftans, waiting for good things to come to them, or those who relied on whimsy for advancement: A girl in a pink Corvette had her own billboard opposite Schwab's pharmacy. Her name was Angelyne; she had blow-up breasts and seemingly did nothing other than advertise herself. Andy Warhol had just originated the idea that everyone in the world could be famous for fifteen minutes. Up on the Strip, the hot clubs of the moment--the Roxy, the Whisky, and the Rainbow Room--were all owned by Jack's best friend, Lou Adler, who was president of Ode Records, and his partner, Elmer Valentine; they catered to a young, hip crowd. But we also celebrated Groucho Marx's eighty-second birthday at the Hillcrest Country Club. Groucho had a companion and secretary, a woman called Erin Fleming who, along with the young actors Ed Begley, Jr., and Bud Cort, was helping him to come out of retirement. As I recall, he sang "Animal Crackers" and made a pass at me before he temporarily lost consciousness. Excerpted from Watch Me: A Memoir by Anjelica Huston All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.