Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found

by Allegra Huston

  But even with this suitcase of letters spread around me, still I can’t touch her. Father, friends, lovers tell her how well she writes, but all I have is a filigree of gaps where her letters should be. I found only two letters in her hand, never sent, full of pain and blame of herself, and three tiny scraps of diary, one humorous, one anguished, the third clear-eyed and rational. I feel as I am hearing her voice across a vast distance, a word here and there intelligible, the rest sucked away by the dull air.

  Most of the letters she wrote are gone. Her parents’ house burned down. Dad’s papers didn’t survive him for long. The lovers, mainly, returned to their own married lives. The friends are mostly dead, and Mum means nothing to their heirs.

  As I read through elliptical remarks on indecipherable problems and mundane accounts of daily life, frustration chafes against the sense of thievery I’ve never managed to shake. Fate—or chance, or the blind carelessness of the universe—stole her from me. I had hoped to catch her again in these letters, but I feel like I’m snatching at the hem of her coat as she flies unknowingly away.

  Still, there are motes of insight, single stars that break through a clouded sky. On Mother’s Day, my grandmother writes that my mother is her first child, “and who needs to know that you were five when I married Daddy.” I knew that, like me, Mum had lost her mother when she was young, but I’d always thought she’d been a toddler, barely conscious of it. Now I saw, on a hazy mirror of tears, that she’d been a little girl. With two small children to be tended, Grampa wouldn’t have waited long before marrying again. Let’s say he waited a minimal, decent year—which makes Mum four when, probably, she was taken in to see her mother on her deathbed and hear her last words. Four: the same age as I was when I sat on my mother’s bed in a room that had suddenly become her shrine. In that second, as I held Nana’s letter in my shaking hands, I felt my heart change shape. Mum, who had been my imperfectly healed wound, became my ally, my twin. She and I had had the same strength of understanding when we were told that we would never see our mothers again.

  As Dad told the story, he and Mum each saw St. Cleran’s separately while out hunting: an elegant Georgian half ruin, graciously proportioned, its big windows inviting, nestled amid green pastures crazed by stone walls, the fairy-tale woods bisected by that storybook river. This part is true. The implied excitement of a married couple discovering their first family home—the “Shall we?” and “Oh, let’s!”—is not. They had been married for about five years, together for another year or so before that, but when the decision to buy St. Cleran’s was made, Mum and Dad were, at best, doing a kind of stately dance around each other, a flow of synchronized avoidance through geography and time.

  When she was barely eighteen, Mum had appeared on the cover of Life magazine, for no reason other than her breath-stopping beauty. She was, at the time, a dancer with the New York City Ballet. The producer David O. Selznick put her under contract and brought her to Hollywood. She appeared in Life again as one of the young starlets of 1949, identified as Rick Soma, the name she went by then; sitting front center in the photograph is Marilyn Monroe.

  Mum never made a movie. Selznick sent her to acting classes and paired her with actors being screen-tested, but she seems never to have been given a screen test of her own. She performed on stage in La Jolla, outside L.A., and made two shorts for the Red Cross. When her contract came up for renewal, Selznick dropped her.

  Her father urged her to stand on her head and sing in Selznick’s office, to show what she could do. He was Italian and owned a restaurant in Manhattan called Tony’s, where film and theater people liked to go, perhaps because the padrone would stand on his head and sing operatic arias on request. He fancied himself a yogi and sent out Christmas cards with messages like “May the spirit of Prana be with you.” In his mind prana, breath, was a kind of elixir of the superhuman.

  Until this point, Mum had always met with success. Not only did she dance for Balanchine; she was a soloist at the age of seventeen. As the beautiful daughter of the restaurant, her autograph book full of good wishes from patrons such as Zero Mostel, she grew up in the knowledge that a place in that pantheon of glamour and artistic accomplishment was reserved for her, and all she had to do was claim it. I can hear, between the lines of the letters her father wrote to her, echoes of her baffled despair. She didn’t know what to do in Hollywood; she didn’t know what she was doing wrong. Did the loss of her mother teach her—as it taught me—that it’s useless to struggle? Mum was not as determined, not as single-minded, not as convinced of her superiority to the rest of humanity as her father thought she should be.

  He barraged Mum with letters full of exhortations to become ever more flexible and disciplined, to be always bright and delightful and never show weakness or sorrow, to become a Nietzschean superhuman like himself. He told her that nobody could judge her but herself, that exalted humans like themselves were always right—though reading his letters, I wonder if Mum felt she was ever good enough. I imagine her walking to the mailbox in the lobby of her apartment building and seeing her father’s scrawl on yet another fat envelope, and steeling herself to open it.

  She was his firstborn and favorite. His moods swung from fury when she didn’t write often enough, or long enough, to an embarrasingly detailed appreciation of every beauty of her physical and mental form. He admonished her constantly on everything from how to be prepared to escape from a blazing hotel to the exact position in which she should hold her lips when she sang or read aloud—away from her teeth, with her voice projected from her diaphragm. I sense her losing her bearings under the onslaught. How could she be natural on-screen or onstage when she was forced into a pricklingly minute self-consciousness by her father’s fusillade of instructions?

  Still only nineteen, she was by this time involved with the legendarily hell-raising director John Huston, twenty-three years her senior. He was exactly the sort of man my Grampa dreamed of for his daughter: celebrated, artistic, intellectual, larger than life, and the son of an even more famous actor, Walter Huston. Grampa knew them both, from the restaurant. Grampa was thrilled, too, by the news that Mum was pregnant, even though Dad was still married to the actress Evelyn Keyes, his third wife. There was no scandal in his eyes; all he saw was a grand meeting of dynasties. A divorce would be obtained and a marriage performed just in time, a month before my brother Tony was born.

  Again and again, Grampa refers to “the Soma-Peppa strain”: the genes Mum has inherited from him and his sainted mother, whose name was Peppa. He puns on the Greek meaning of soma—the physical body—as somehow expressing the idea that the Somas are the ultimate humans. Occasionally he extends this to the “Bona-Peppa-Soma strain.” Grampa’s grandfather was a foundling, and Grampa was convinced he was descended from Napoleon Bonaparte.

  He makes constant swipes at his first wife’s materialism, her shallowness, her general inferiority to the Soma-Peppa strain. How anguished and confused Mum must have felt, alone on the treacherous soil of Hollywood, as she read her father’s cutting words about her mother. Like me, she had memories of her mother—but fitful ones. She knew she hadn’t known her really, hadn’t known what kind of a person she was. Even if she tried not to believe what Grampa said, his insults must have thrown shadows on her memory. Which side of herself, which half of her blood, did Mum want to be? In Grampa’s eyes, every complaint, every worry, every sign of weakness, betrayed the insidious mediocrity of her mother’s heritage.

  Grampa made swipes at his second wife too, my Nana, who loved Mum like her own daughter. In response, evidently, to Mum’s complaints about her husband, he placed Nana and Dad together in the category of introverted, cold Anglo-Saxons, in contrast to the life-affirming extraversion of the Italian Bona-Peppa-Soma strain. They were the inferior mates that he and Mum, the exalted Somas, were doomed to suffer. It can’t have been much comfort. I imagine Mum isolated and lonely in Malibu (then even farther north of L.A. than it is now), fighting a grim and silent resistan
ce against her father’s attempts to alienate her from the mother she’d lost and the stepmother she loved, and yet, by force of habit and training, wanting to please him; buffeted by the hormones of pregnancy and Grampa’s violent swings between adulation and fury; with a husband cavorting from California to the Congo, and a career for which she had spent her short life preparing dying in her hands.

  By the time she was twenty-two, Mum had two children: Walter Anthony, named for his two grandfathers, and Anjelica. No “Rhea,” for Dad’s mother, or “Dorothy,” for Nana. Dad was filming The African Queen and reachable only by tom-tom when Anjelica was born, so Mum had a free hand with the birth certificate. She named her daughter firmly for her own lost mother—with Nana’s blessing, for she had suggested it with genuine delight in how beautiful the combination “Angelica Huston” sounded. But Mum chose to spell it differently, with a “j” instead of a “g.”

  Was it superstition, like the tags on her jewelry and the lack of a will? This baby would not do what the first Angelica did. She would not die and leave Mum behind—nor would she repeat the past and lose her mother as Mum had.

  When Mum died, my sister Anjelica was seventeen. I was the little half-orphaned girl that Mum had been—the daughter named Allegra, Italian for “happy,” the daughter whose name promised, in an Italian proverb, the protection of the gods. La gente allegra i dei proteggono. A friend of Mum’s, the padrona of an Italian restaurant in London, wrote it out for me twenty years after Mum died.

  Anjelica was only a month old when Dad insisted Mum go with him to London, where he was to do postproduction work on The African Queen. She left her babies with Nana and Grampa. I read the letters from Nana describing their progress—Tony’s walking, Anjelica’s babbles and smiles—and I feel the wrenching anguish Mum must have felt at leaving them, every maternal instinct screaming against it, but the two men who ruled her life insisting she go. She was Mrs. Huston, and it was her duty to live up to it.

  Dad was a difficult person to be married to, and Mum was the fourth woman to attempt it. He was unfaithful, egocentric, impatient, judgmental, cuttingly sarcastic, and a gambler. The role of Mrs. Huston—“you know, he directed Moulin Rouge or Moby Dick or whatever the film is,” as she put it in her diary, with the bluntness of a stick to the head—gave her prestige in the world, but it was barren. Grampa, in his cruelly boastful superiority, needled her for expecting that marriage should bring happiness; while he obviously wanted her to be with a famous man, he seemed to believe that she would be better off as a courtesan than a wife. (He was, by now, writing that her biggest mistake had been to marry Dad.) I don’t believe she really believed him; but in her darker moments, he must have seemed right.

  The first mention of lawyers comes in 1954, the first clear mention of a lover in 1956, though later letters show that he was not the first. When Mum and Dad were together, as Ray Bradbury recalls in Green Shadows, White Whale, their fights approached violence. One letter from Nana to Mum mentions casually that “Daddy still knocks me around a little”—and it makes me sick to realize that this is an expression of sympathy for Mum telling her that she is suffering the same.

  Mum wrote to her parents—in letters I don’t have—of her despair at the vast commitment St. Cleran’s represented. Both Nana and Grampa firmly referred to it as “John’s fantasy castle.” Mum and Dad had been renting a huge pile of a house called Courttown, outside Dublin; with Dad away making movies, Mum had a reasonable life there, hunting to hounds, going to the races and parties and balls. Galway was in the crude west, the width of Ireland away from her friends, and St. Cleran’s, ruinous as it was, required a vast expense of energy and imagination. All this, for a house she doubted she’d ever live in.

  She seems lost—and worse, not to know what she is searching for. In one scrap of diary she writes of her “squirrel-cage brain.” I can see her in that cage, running in circles, trapped by comfortless wire, cold and exposed, frantic to escape, her tormented and tormenting brain holding her in a small squirrel body which her spirit yearns to transcend. She has been raised to be one of two things, or perhaps both of them, one leading to the next: a performer, or the mate and muse of a great man. Both hopes have turned to ash—one in failure, the other in poisoned success—but still she spends her breath on them, trying to restart the fire.

  In 1956, as work on St. Cleran’s was starting, Mum wrote to Otto Preminger asking to be considered for the lead role in Saint Joan. She had fallen in love that winter, while skiing in Klosters, but the man was young and still struggling to make his place in the world. Though Mum had been cherishing fantasies of leaving Dad, she couldn’t conceive of it without some other ready-made identity to slip on. The young man could not provide it; perhaps she could make it for herself. Preminger’s politely uninterested reply must have hit her like the slam of a door.

  Two years before, Dad had shown no sign of wanting to cast her in Moulin Rouge, despite the fact that, as a dancer, she was a natural for the part. Obviously, he too thought she couldn’t act—and his new mistress, Suzanne Flon, could. What did she have to offer him, now that the first flush of enthusiasm for her beauty was past and motherhood and marriage had grounded the adventure? I am sure she longed for respect. Ballet was ten years in her past. She had talent as a writer, correspondents less partisan than her father told her so—but how could she dare set herself up as a serious writer when men such as Ray Bradbury, Jean-Paul Sartre, Truman Capote, and Arthur Miller paraded regularly through Dad’s doors?

  She knew that she had an intoxicating effect on men, and she used it, probably less cynically than she accused herself of, for ego boosts in her darker times. She congratulated herself sarcastically for captivating a party. But much as she craved it, she couldn’t convince herself that love alone was enough.

  Dad, meanwhile, had the best of both worlds: a beautiful wife to show off, to keep his house and bring up his children, and freedom to cavort openly with other women as he pleased. “Dad didn’t like to let go of anything,” my brother Tony says when we talk about why Mum didn’t leave Dad earlier. He controlled the money, and he could be delicately seductive in pursuit of his own wishes. In the midst of Mum’s turmoil, he wrote from location in Tobago suggesting that she and the children come and visit, or—the silken rope, this—just send the children with Nurse so that she can take some time for herself. She is, in the scrap of diary, virtually bewitched by this throwaway offer—which I had barely noticed when I read Dad’s telegram. I can hear her convincing herself that life as Dad’s wife isn’t so bad after all. “No reason for divorce,” she writes. “A pit I am sure, a reluctance for the big irrevocable, a shrinking from decision. I am so warmed by John’s letter…” Twice she circles back to how kind his letter is, how thoughtful. Dad’s shadow may be cold and lonely, but it is safe.

  She did go to Tobago. However enticing the thought of a month or more of freedom, she refused to be away from Tony and Anjelica for so long again. She rented a separate cottage on the beach for the three of them. According to Tony, they barely saw Dad at all.

  For three decades, since I started to understand something of Mum’s history, I felt like a traitor to her for having been happy at St. Cleran’s. I knew she hadn’t wanted me to live there. To me, it was Dad’s world, printed everywhere with the marks of his travels and obsessions. But reading the letters, I came to see that it was Mum who created the St. Cleran’s I loved, the serene world sheltered by walls and open gates. She polished the surface, ready for the stamp of Dad’s hand—and even then she held the hand so that its placement would be right.

  Once she began work on this huge project, Mum found herself ambushed by happiness. The Little House was completed first. It was entirely hers; when Dad came, he slept in his studio on the far side of the courtyard. Then she turned her energy to the Big House, which would be his. With the deadening plaster knocked off the facade, the gray stone glowed in the intermittent blazes of Galway sun. She traveled to estate sales around Ireland an
d combed antique shops in Dublin, London, and Paris in search of treasures. Dad’s letters to her, from film sets around the world, consist entirely of requests for news of the children and ideas for the house.

  Suddenly, maybe surprisingly, she became for the first time Dad’s equal and his partner. She loves the romance of the tumbling stones of the stableyard, and with Dad’s enthusiastic agreement she leaves them in a tumble and plants roses to climb over them. She has found the perfect fireplace for his room; he is having hand-blocked Japanese wallpaper made for the dining room (he is in Japan making a film, but it’s obviously St. Cleran’s that excites his imagination). He sends bonsai trees for the hall, which will travel by ship with their own nursemaid; he asks Mum to pull strings at the Ministry of Agriculture to get an entry permit for them. Specifications arrive for the Japanese bath to be excavated in a room in the basement.

  Dad urged Mum to buy the best, whatever it cost. He trusted her taste. He believed in her power to effect a transformation. Perhaps she no longer needed his respect. She could see the evidence of her hard work and her unerring aesthetic judgment for herself, as first the Little House, then the courtyard and stableyard, then the Big House, blossomed into striking and comfortable beauty.

  She had, I think for the first time in her life, found real creative expression. I suspect that ballet never gave it to her: hypercritical, perfectionist, regimented, and prescriptive—and she was, then, too young and protected to feel the longing for her own creative identity. (Though she continued to love ballet and later served on the board of Sadler’s Wells ballet company in London, she didn’t send me to ballet class—in an era when that’s what well-brought-up little English girls did.) Suddenly, in the letters from the trunk, there is talk of her opening an interiors shop in Dublin, of selling Irish tweeds to Chanel and Aran sweaters and shawls to the chic boutiques of Paris. Taste has become her currency, and she feels herself rich.