Actress, model and movie royalty – her father, the leonine director John Huston, was responsible for cinematic classics such as The Maltese Falcon and The African Queen – Anjelica Huston has written a memoir so spattered with glamorous people and exquisite possessions that it could be cloying, if it weren't for her ice-cool self-awareness and gift for choosing the details that make a toe‑tinglingly good story (not to mention the wealth of excellent material she obviously had to draw on).
While her father ("a lion, a leader, the pirate [everyone] wished they had the audacity to be") made movies in far-flung locations including the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Mexico, he installed Ricki, wife number four (out of five), in a grand, romantic and draughty country house called St Clerans in the west of Ireland. While the "big house" was inhabited only when John was in residence, Anjelica, her mother Ricki and brother Tony (and staff) lived in the estate's "little house" half a mile away. Ricki, pregnant aged 18 and plucked from a promising career as a ballerina, had gone into a "serious post-partum depression" following Anjelica's birth, 15 months after Tony's. This was probably not helped by her husband starting an affair with Suzanne Flon, the lead in his production of Moulin Rouge (a part Ricki had auditioned and been rejected for).
Although young Anjelica lived a life of extreme privilege – underlined by the long lists of desirable objects she was surrounded by, suited to an extended feature in Vogue ("Venetian glass, dancing Indian Shivas, Japanese screens, Chinese gongs, Imperial jade, Etruscan gold…" I could go on) – what stops the reader from dismissing her as a poor rich girl is the dispassionate eye she has for the things that matter: lethally, she notes that John's adopted son Pablo "no longer seemed to be part of the collection".
Famous figures make casual appearances throughout the pages of this memoir: Peter O'Toole, Marlon Brando and Carson McCullers are just some of the guests at St Clerans. Later, in London, after her parents have split and Anjelica lives in Ricki's Maida Vale home, 1960s London bohemians parade through Anjelica's "fortunate" life: Richard Avedon, Marianne Faithful, David Bailey.
Aged 18, Anjelica takes a starring role – against her better judgment – in A Walk With Love and Death, directed by her father. She receives exceptionally negative reviews. Aged 19, her mother dies in a car crash. Anjelica buries her ambition to be an actress, instead modelling in London, New York and Paris, and hooking up with the unsavoury Bob Richardson – a long and draining liaison that finally gives her father the opportunity to be a hero. Clinically observed, bittersweet and unsentimental, this accomplished memoir condenses anecdotes that in other books would last pages into a paragraph; a good omen for the next volume, which takes up the baton in 1973.
