A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London and New York, Anjelica Huston, Scribner, 2013, 253 pp, ill., $25.00Anjelica Huston seemed to have it all—a famous and talented father whose wealth gave her an idyllic childhood in Ireland and whose many contacts exposed her to some of the world’s most exciting people; a beautiful mother; success as a model; fox hunting with the Galway Blazers. But her memoir, A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London and New York, reveals the dark detours her life took after her parents separated and her thirty-nine-year-old mother was killed in a car crash.
Huston eventually followed her father, renowned director John Huston (Joint-MFH of the Galway Blazers), and her grandfather, actor Walter Huston, in finding success as an actress and a director. The American actress became the first third generation winner of an Academy Award, for her performance in the 1985 film, Prizzi’s Honor.
But acting was not a path she originally wanted to take, she reveals in this memoir. She adored her father, yet feared him, too, resisting his domineering attempts to push her into becoming an actress. Instead, she opted for a modeling career, knowing it would displease him. And she fell into a relationship at age eighteen with a brilliant but troubled fashion photographer twenty-four years her senior.
Huston’s modeling career made her part of the glittering scene in New York, London, and Paris during the go-go Seventies, when she frequently graced the pages of Vogue and other top fashion mags. But life with photographer Bob Richardson could be hell. His schizophrenia kept them broke and living from job to job in seedy hotels, increasingly isolating her from family and friends. Huston once tried to shock Richardson by slicing her wrist with a razor. “I never felt so fragile or vulnerable as when Bob became demonic and flew into a rage, or worse, when afterward he retreated into his shell,” she writes.
It was a long way away from her days growing up at St. Clerans, in Craughwell, Co. Galway, where the family moved in 1953. The “Big House,” as she called it, was in disrepair, and Huston’s mother Ricki spent four years restoring and decorating it. It’s considered one of the most beautiful houses in Ireland, and a teen-aged Huston was devastated when her father abruptly sold it in 1971. (After changing hands a number of times, the estate was bought in 1997 by TV talk show host Merv Griffin who fell in love with the Georgian mansion. He converted it into a hotel, which closed in 2008.)
Huston writes fondly of her family’s hunting days with the Galway Blazers, where her father was Joint-Master. She recalls that “the stone walls were high and the hunting was hell-for-leather … drop-ins from other hunts or farmers with unshod horses were out for the sport, and nothing was going to get in their way … they were a good reason not to get left behind—they’d ride right over you.”
Anjelica rode an Arab-Connemara cross, Victoria, who was so agile that, if a stone wall was too high to clear, she jumped on top of it and then leaped down without dislodging a stone. One day Victoria’s girth broke, and Huston found herself under the horse, sidesaddle, at a full gallop. “Nobody paused to give me a hand.”
But hunting also had its humorous side. Blooded on his first hunt at age thirteen, her older brother Tony was chagrined when he took a nap afterwards and the blood came off on his pillow. Tony then took a red Magic Marker to his cheeks, pleased when it lasted several days.
This memoir is a good read, especially for those who also came of age in the 1960s and ’70s. But don’t expect a lot about foxhunting or horses. It’s clear Huston loved the horses (her father also had race horses, and many of the photos show her with horses and ponies), but after St. Clerans was sold, she was, like many teens, more interested in boys than horses.
When she was finally able to break free of Richardson, part of her healing was returning to a life with horses. She had managed to walk away, she writes, “and now I was back up on the horse.” As most women could have told her, horses are the key to life.
A Story Lately Told ends before Huston becomes a Hollywood star. She covers that in part two of her autobiography, Watch Me, due out in Fall 2014.
Click for Bob Richardson’s remarkable modeling photos of Anjelica Huston.
Posted March 8, 2014