Huston memoir recalls legends
Actress chronicles early years in Vol. 1
TORONTO Academy Award-winning actress Anjelica Huston says she owes a debt of gratitude to … a pencil? The Prizzi’s Honor star is unabashed in her praise for the writing instrument she used to create her new memoir, A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London, and New York.
“The Paper Mate Sharpwriter #2. A wonderful pencil,” Huston, 62, said recently from New York City, where she was about to be feted at a book party. “I like the flow of brain to hand. I think you have to do what comes naturally and what feels best.”
Indeed, the actress says the memoir itself evolved organically after a period of self-reflection following the 2008 death of her husband, sculptor Robert Graham.
The actress — the daughter of legendary film director John Huston and his fourth wife, ballerina Enrica (Ricki) Soma — soon found she had a lot to say. So much, in fact, that her editor at Scribner (Simon & Schuster) decided that she’d need two volumes to tell her story.
That said, don’t expect anecdotes about Huston’s longtime relationship with Jack Nicholson, or insights about working with Woody Allen in this instalment. The book chronicles Huston’s early life in Ireland, her teen years modelling in swinging London and — after her mother died in a car accident in 1969 — a stint in New York City living at the Chelsea Hotel with her much-older photographer boyfriend Bob Richardson.
John Huston looms large in the book, which opens with a remarkable anecdote about news of his daughter’s birth reaching him in the Belgian Congo on the set of The African Queen, where Katharine Hepburn urged him to share the contents of a telegram heralding the news.
Among the dizzying cast of characters who populated the Huston world and are chronicled in A Story Lately Told are writer John Steinbeck, actors Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando and poet W.H. Auden.