Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found

by Allegra Huston

  Once it was dark, we’d drive in the Corniche down to the dock neighborhood of San Pedro. Usually I sat on the armrest between the two front seats, while Griffin burrowed like a little animal in the back. Ryan draped his right arm across me to rest his hand on Anjel’s thigh as he drove.

  In an alleyway near the set I found a tiny cat, barely bigger than my hand, with long gray-brown fur and a perfectly triangular face. She seemed completely alone. She let me pick her up and carry her back to Ryan’s Winnebago.

  “She’s probably hungry,” said Anjel. We had bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches—Ryan’s favorite food, aside from tomato soup. Her tiny teeth seemed too small to deal with bacon, so I held a tomato slice out to her. She reared up on her hind legs and batted at it with her front paws.

  “She’s a boxer,” said Ryan, delighted. He loved boxing. He had a heavy bag and a speed bag hanging in his bedroom at the beach house. He’d given Anjelica boxing gloves too and taught her to punch.

  We called the kitten Sugar, after Sugar Ray Leonard. Anjel said the name was street tough, which fit her. We went back to the Beverly Hills house that morning, and Sugar lived in Tatum’s white-carpeted suite with me. It was a separate building only a few feet from the master bedroom—I thought of it as sitting at the right hand of God. Griffin’s bedroom was on the far horn of the U-shaped house: a room the architect had intended for the maid.

  When I got out of bed Sugar attacked my ankles—scratching and biting me, drawing tiny pricks of blood—until she realized it was me. She made a run for the door whenever I opened it, but I didn’t want to let her out in case a coyote got her, or she ran away. I felt like her jailer. Soon she did escape, and I never saw her again.

  On our last night in San Pedro, a big stunt was planned. The location was a vast parking garage with a row of concrete posts down the center, and a wide trench in the floor alongside them; a car would run up a ramp on two wheels, flip over, and slide along the trench. The stuntman, Billy Burton, was a friend of Cici’s: a cowboy with a drawl, tight jeans, and a slow smile. I’d met him once before that night, so I felt I knew him.

  Even though Ryan wasn’t in the shot, we all gathered, in the small hours of the morning, to watch the stunt. Billy, wearing a padded suit, walked casually to the car.

  “Roll it. Action.” The car hit the ramp and flipped over—and then, sideways, smashed into the concrete pillars, bounced off the sharp edge of the trench, and came to a dead stop. That wasn’t the plan: crushed metal, jagged thuds, a pinballing car smashing to pieces. My heart stopped. The trench in which it came to rest made the car look like it had been pounded flat by a crusher.

  The last clangs echoed away into the silence. Nobody called “cut.” The cavernous space, and everyone in it, was frozen in shock. I expected people to run to the car, but nobody did. It seemed like minutes passed. Probably it was only seconds.

  A hand emerged from the car window. Billy’s hand. Now people ran to pull him out. I heard them ask why he hadn’t let them know he was okay.

  “Didn’t want to ruin the shot,” he said. His voice was as soft and slow as ever. “Never heard nobody say ‘cut.’”

  I was shaking, and trying to hide it. Once the relief had sunk in, the set went back to normal—people hurrying this way and that with equipment, clipboards, cases. As Ryan, Anjel, Griffin, and I went back to the trailer, I caught sight of Billy, still in his padded suit, heading over to the craft-services table to get a cup of coffee. I didn’t dare look at him, fearing that somehow the pressure of my eyes would make him vanish; I still couldn’t believe he was really there. I’d seen him get smashed to pieces in a car wreck. I’d seen him come back from the dead.

  Marymount High School, and its associated convent, of the order of the Sacred Heart of Mary, was in an old Spanish mission-style building on Sunset Boulevard. Dad had filmed a commercial there. He loved nuns, and they loved him—especially Irish ones. He flirted with them in a gentlemanly sort of way. Few men, probably, treated them like ladies.

  “I think I’ll send my daughter here next year.” I could hear his voice rolling the words like bonbons to be wrapped up in tissue paper and given to the nuns.

  They weren’t proper nuns, in black habits and wimples, as the nuns in Loughrea had been. They wore murky pink and green polyester outfits, and you could see their legs, which were smothered in thick flesh-colored stockings. I thought that was very improper. Their only nun-mark was the big silver cross on a long chain that hung around each nun’s neck. The principal’s name was Sister Colette—unsuitable, I felt, for a nun.

  Sister Charles was the Irish one. She taught sewing, and she was a big fan of Dad’s. “Such a wonderful artist, your father,” she’d say almost every time she saw me. “That fillum of his, Ryan’s Daughter, sure it’s the most beautiful fillum I’ve ever seen, the love of Ireland that’s in every inch of it…”

  I was confused. I didn’t think Dad had made a film called Ryan’s Daughter, though I wasn’t a hundred percent sure; could she, somehow, mean Tatum? Ryan had made a film in Ireland recently, Barry Lyndon, but I didn’t think Tatum was in it. I didn’t want to correct Sister Charles, she was in such raptures over the film, and that meant she liked me. When I did finally discover that a film called Ryan’s Daughter existed, and that David Lean had directed it, I didn’t dare tell her in case she lost interest in Dad and me—or, worse, in case she thought I’d bamboozled her, out of a tawdry and hypocritical desire to be liked, into thinking the film was Dad’s.

  I wanted the girls at school to know of my connection with Ryan, so I dropped his name whenever I could. When one of the older girls mentioned that some girls had boyfriends at Loyola, the boys’ school twinned with ours, I said, “I’ve already got someone. Ryan. My sister’s boyfriend. Who drove me to school. Ryan O’Neal.”

  She looked at me weirdly, and stopped talking to me. I knew it had come out wrong. I’d made it sound like I was sleeping with him too. I felt ridiculous. Why did I have to be a name-dropper, and then make a hash of it? Still, I was glad I’d said it. My movie-star connections made me interesting—I’d never been a popular girl, or good at sports—and if I hadn’t said it, maybe no one would notice who was at the wheel of the magenta Corniche that sometimes dropped me off or picked me up in the curving school driveway.

  When I was alone with him in the car, Ryan rested his right hand on my thigh, the same way he rested it on Anjel’s when she was in the passenger seat.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” he asked me once.

  “No,” I said casually, though I wasn’t sure it was okay. For one thing, it didn’t seem safe for him to drive with only his left hand.

  “I can’t drive any other way,” he said, and held the silence until he was sure I understood that he was telling the truth.

  The Pacific Coast Highway was solid with traffic in the mornings, and Ryan would pull onto the hard shoulder and put his foot down on the gas. I watched the needle climb—50, 60, 70, 80—terrified that another driver would have the same idea and pull out in front of us, and we’d have no time to stop and no way not to crash into them. I didn’t wear my seat belt; I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone wear one. I wanted to put it on, but I was afraid Ryan would take it as an insult to his driving. I tried to relax my thigh so that tense muscles under his hand wouldn’t give me away.

  Before long, I was spending most of my time with Anjelica and Ryan. I knew Cici wasn’t happy about it, but I put that down to things like no proper bedtime and the fact that Griffin was allowed to smoke dope and snort coke and maybe she thought I was doing that too, which I wasn’t.

  The whole idea of taking smoke into my lungs revolted me. I didn’t make much distinction between cigarettes and joints: Anjel seemed to smoke them pretty much interchangeably. I liked the smell of grass better than the smell of tobacco. Beyond that, I didn’t see any difference. People smoked to relax, or just because they smoked. I knew marijuana was illegal, but then so was speeding and everybody did that.


  Cocaine was different. That obviously was a drug—and Anjelica had been arrested for possession of it during the Roman Polanski scandal, when the cops searched Jack’s house after Polanski took a thirteen-year-old girl there. I was twelve, but the whole thing seemed remote from anything that might happen to me. I’d seen people snorting coke: bent over a mirror with a rolled-up twenty-dollar bill or a fat silver straw stuck up their noses, their heads wobbling and their eyes crossed as they followed the white powder line. Then they sat around leaning their heads back and occasionally saying “oohhhh.” The whole thing looked idiotic. I had no interest in trying it.

  After a while, Anjelica asked me if I wanted to live with her. Of course I said yes: Anjel was my sister, my goddess, everything I wanted to be. And I was, basically, living with her already. On the phone, Dad asked me formally to confirm it, and whether I agreed to have my half of the rent for a house paid out of the trust fund he’d set up for me. Anjel had found a house in Hollywood, in the shadow of the Chateau Marmont. She ordered a hazelnut-colored sofa, upholstered in fat rolls like the Michelin man. I bagged the room with the bookshelves.

  Cici, in a fury, put all my stuff out on the driveway. It ended up at Gloom Castle, since Anjel wasn’t yet ready to move into the Hollywood house. In the end, she never was. We spent one night there, camping, for fun. Six months later the lease expired.

  Cici and Anjelica were battling over me, and I didn’t know it. None of us can remember exactly what happened.

  I’ve read Cici’s letters to Dad, and John Julius’s replies to the ones she wrote to him. She described me, more than once, as “a creature of love and purity.” She said, again and again, how important it was to protect my innocence. She urged John Julius to take me, step in, do something. John Julius said he couldn’t do anything just then; his own family life was in upheaval. He asked whether she believed I was truly in “moral danger.” He offered her his backing—whatever that was worth—if she wanted to legally adopt me.

  I imagine she felt taken for a patsy. Of all the people around me, she seemed to be the only one who was putting my interests first—she who wasn’t related to me, who had met me only a few years before, who was being vilified by Dad—and she was powerless. She was being accused, I think, of lax morals; but her home was stable and Collin and I knew our place in it. She gave us rules and responsibilities and made sure we felt loved. She may have had many lovers and minimal clothes, but she had an iron sense of right and wrong where children were concerned.

  By her standards, Dad had virtually abandoned me—and though he had left me with her, he would back anyone against her. My real father (who had after all only met me once since Mum’s death) was unwilling to accept commitment, even in the emergency circumstances that Cici laid out for him. And my sister, heedless and headstrong, was insisting on taking me into a circle where, Cici knew, there were no rules for children at all.

  I dimly understood Cici’s qualms, but I didn’t care. If Anjel wanted me, I would be there. I sensed that she felt a chance of making us all a family: her and Ryan, his children and me. I hadn’t had a place at Jack’s house, except on weekends, but at Ryan’s—especially with Tatum away—I fitted in. I knew how much Anjel wanted to fill the loss of Mum for me, though she never said it in so many words. But every casual mention of Mum added another filament to the cord that united us, and nobody else: the Soma girls. We’d both lost our mother, but we had each other. What was broken for me was broken for her too. I was coming to realize that it had broken long before Mum died.

  14

  I was sitting on Tatum’s bed in the beach house with Griffin, talking. In her absence, it was my room—and like Griffin’s it was big enough for a king-size bed and nothing else. No bookshelf, no desk. Suddenly Anjel ran in and slid open the closet door.

  “Don’t tell him I’m in here,” she whispered to us. She looked really afraid. She was shaking. “If he asks, don’t tell him, please.”

  She squeezed in behind Tatum’s Rive Gauche–scented clothes. I could barely see her bare feet behind the ranks of Maud Frizon shoes. My heart started to race. I didn’t know how close behind her Ryan might be. I couldn’t hear footsteps; but maybe he was being quiet, to surprise us all. From inside, Anjel slid the door closed.

  Griffin and I made an instant, silent pact not to even look at the closet. I hoped we’d be brave enough to keep Anjel safe if Ryan came in looking for her. How could we stand up to him, if she couldn’t?

  I hadn’t heard any arguing or fighting from upstairs. I wanted to know what had happened, but I didn’t dare talk to Anjel through the closet door in case Ryan was listening outside, waiting for me to give her away.

  Five minutes passed. Griffin and I forced out casual words, waiting for the crash of the door slamming open. I imagined Ryan, as big as a bear in that small room, tearing open the closet door…And then? I wasn’t sure. I tried to keep my breathing slow and steady so that whatever happened, I’d be prepared for it.

  I knew he didn’t have any reason to be so angry. Anjel couldn’t have given him one: both because she was too good to have done anything bad enough to deserve this, and because she knew him well enough to be afraid of his temper. I also knew he didn’t need a reason. He enjoyed the power.

  I heard a grating creak. The closet door was sliding open, catching in its runners. My eyes caromed from the closet to the door and back again as Anjel pushed Tatum’s clothes aside and came out.

  Her eyes were swollen and red. From crying, I thought—not from being hit. She was still shaking.

  “Are you okay?” I asked her.

  She didn’t answer. I hugged her. She hugged me back, tight. I felt I was the only person she had to rely on—and I wished I was stronger, that I could go upstairs to Ryan and face him down, scold him and shame him for scaring my sister like that.

  I never thought for a second that she was overreacting. I was afraid of him too. He had a way of coming up behind me and placing his hands on either side of my head, over my ears. I had to relax into it, because the next thing would be a sharp twist as he cracked my neck. It was supposed to be affectionate, and he did it to everybody; but however good it felt afterward, to me it was a reminder that he was strong enough to break my neck if he chose to.

  One day when I got back from school (a friend of Tatum’s had been hired to drive me), Anjel wasn’t there. Griffin was in his room watching TV, looking hunted.

  “Allegra!” A barking shout from above.

  I went to the foot of the stairs. “Yes, Ryan?”

  “Bring me some soup. And a Coke.”

  Soup was always Campbell’s tomato. Coke was always on ice, with half a lemon squeezed into it.

  I heated the soup, poured it into a bowl, put the tall glass of Coke beside it, carried the tray upstairs, and set it on the bed in front of Ryan. He took a spoonful.

  “Where’s the pepper.” It wasn’t really a question.

  “Sorry. I’ll go get it…”

  He stood up. He seemed bigger than usual. I took a step back. His hands were clenched into half fists.

  “Get down those stairs before I throw you down.”

  I sensed, without thought, that the sight of fear in me might make him snap, as if I were accusing him of something. So I went with calm, mute obedience. The stairs were wood slats, and I tried not to let my feet make too much noise. I didn’t look back. With each step down, I expected to feel the blow of a china bowl on the back of my head, and hot soup scalding me.

  I made it to the corner where the stairs doglegged. I heard Ryan leave the upstairs landing and go back into his room. Then I ran.

  I didn’t know where to go. I was too scared to get the pepper and go back upstairs. I didn’t think he’d come downstairs after me, but if he did, I didn’t want him to find me in Griffin’s room. I wasn’t sure if he’d dare hit me, but he might well hit Griffin instead. I didn’t want to stay in the living room, right underneath him, where the stairs came down; he’d think I
was spying on him, or maybe I’d make some noise that would set him off again. I could go outside onto the beach, but that felt exposed, with nowhere to hide or run to, and the ocean was stormy. Anjel would be back soon, and she’d worry if I wasn’t there.

  So I sat on Tatum’s bed, nervously doing my homework. The window was a slit high up on the wall, like a jail cell, too small to climb out of. If I heard Ryan’s footsteps coming downstairs, I decided, I’d run for the back door and just stay on the edge of the Pacific Coast Highway until Anjel got back. Cars could see me; I’d be protected there.

  I heard the garage open, and Anjel’s footsteps. I caught her eye through the open bedroom door.

  “How is he?” She sounded wary. He must have been in a bad mood when she left.

  “He wanted soup and I forgot the pepper. He threatened to throw me down the stairs.”

  She nodded. Her face was gray and cloudy. She looked like someone going to execution as she headed on down the hallway.

  The important thing was that he hadn’t thrown me down the stairs. He would come out of this bad mood, and everything could carry on as before.

  Ryan used to boast that his birthday was the same day as Hitler’s. It was in mid-April, on the cusp of Aries and Taurus, which seemed significant to me. If you were neither one thing nor the other, you could be anything—or both. The cosmic tides acting on the fluids in his brain meant that he and Hitler shared something. That explained his dark side—even that he seemed to be proud of it.

  His moods alternated: a few days wonderful, a few days demonic. When he was in a good mood, he was the nicest person in the world, and it was hard to hold the bad side against him. He picked me up from school and took me shopping: to Maxfield Bleu, to a boutique on Sunset Plaza—where he bought me a beautiful off-the-shoulder chiffon dress, brown-speckled like a bird’s egg—and to Maud Frizon for shoes. Other days, we would all go to his favorite car wash, on the gay part of Santa Monica Boulevard opposite the store Ah! Men! (I loved that name), and get burgers from the burger stand and buy handpainted hairbrushes and glittery things from Oray’s Salon across the road.