All the Lives I Want

by Alana Massey

  I spent my childhood and adolescence devouring celebrity scandals and gossip, but it was not until meeting Phoebe in college that I turned the interest backward in time in search of more worthy legends from Hollywood. I was amazed by Phoebe’s wealth of knowledge in matters ranging from pop culture to high art and still wonder how she came to possess it. She inexplicably knew how to speak Italian and bought fur stoles on a whim and recounted Hollywood legends with a familiarity that suggested she’d witnessed the scandalous events with her own eyes. Phoebe and I took a road trip from New York to California in 2008 when we were both twenty-three and stopped at a large, cavernous thrift store in South Dakota along the way. With its massive inventory of both classic and kitsch vintage goods, it would have been a gold mine in a major metropolitan area. Phoebe bought a basket full of well-maintained old magazines, including a 1990 Vanity Fair with Anjelica on the cover and the headline “Anjelica Huston Hots Up: Life After Jack.” Phoebe tells me that Anjelica Huston first came to her attention in a different Vanity Fair spread that was dedicated to portraits of Hollywood dynasties. “All of the other families were mugging, leaning into each other, looking relatable and comfortable,” she told me. “Then I turned the page and it was the Hustons. Standing in a line, wearing mostly black, nobody smiling with teeth, against a kind of bleak outdoor terrain. It goes without saying that this was the Hollywood family I would want to join.” The gods, after all, do not have anyone to impress with smiling. The 1990 cover is shot in the desert, and Anjelica wears a sparkling red off-the-shoulder evening gown and matching pumps, with a bold but coy grin animating her handsome face. It is in sharp contrast to the family portrait but at home in her tradition of remaining elegant even when she is being defiant.

  As the child of film titan, actor, and director John Huston and prima ballerina Enrica Soma, Anjelica was destined for both glamour and grace. Her beauty was striking from the beginning but did not become severe until her teens, when she took up the mantle of her inheritance by becoming a fashion model and beautiful woman about town in Hollywood. She had the dark eyes and hair of her mother’s Italian heritage from an early age, but in her teens she developed the prominent Roman nose that set her apart from the delicate Anglo-Saxon features that dominated fashion spreads in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Unlike her wide-eyed counterparts in modeling, her almond eyes were deep-set and unsurprised. And though she may not have felt sure of herself, hers was a face that conveyed certainty. The beauty was in the strength of her face rather than the frailty of it. “The babe the gangster would like to have,” said director Paul Mazursky of her to Vanity Fair in 1990.1 Though Jack Nicholson was not a gangster, he was the closest thing Hollywood had to one in the 1970s when the two of them fell in love.

  Before making her way to the Hollywood Hills, she was living an almost comically charmed life in Ireland and the United Kingdom. “The only thing she isn’t, it seems, is the girl next door,” wrote Ben Brantley of her looks in a 1990 profile, though the observation applies to much more than her appearance.2 Her recollections of the past have always read a bit the way I imagine a story narrated by Eloise, the beloved children’s book character who lives in the Plaza Hotel, would sound if she had grown up. “It was wonderful, untrampled country… Enormous flowering rhododendron and miles and miles of gorse that smelled like butter. We romped through it all with the dogs and rode for hours on beautiful horses—my father kept 50 Thoroughbreds in his stables. Sometimes we waded in the river and caught eels, or played hide-and-seek in the formal gardens, or jumped and jumped on the trampoline in the barn, or crept about in the twilight looking for fairies,” she remembered to People.3 You can almost see her delivering this memory in the self-serious elegance that is her signature. I can think of no person on earth but her whom I could forgive for looking me dead in the eye and recalling fairy chases and fucking eel hunts in the Irish countryside without any irony.

  Her teen years were similarly dreamy as she transitioned from the literal magic of her childhood to the subtle glamour of fashion and film. At seventeen, she was photographed by Richard Avedon for what would become a thirty-page spread in Vogue. “So Harvey came on the shoot, and I was horrible to him. I remember teasing him all the time and making him go to get water lilies for me in the ice-cold bog water. I think I was just nasty back then. I had a bad attitude,” she wrote of her treatment of her male counterpart in an essay about the iconic shoot for Vogue in 2001.4 Though she concludes that she had a bad attitude, I can think of no greater form of heroism than that of a high-spirited teen girl sending a hot male model to fetch her lilies from a bog.

  Durga Chew-Bose described the mystery of star quality in an essay in 2015 as “usually a matter of height, clothes, gloss, grooming, there is, too, that quality movie stars possess: their very own aspect ratio. Luster sourced from some place secret. An exclusive deal with the elements.”5 It is difficult to imagine two stars better acquainted with these elements than Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston.

  “The front door of a modest two-story ranch-style house opened, and there was that smile,” she writes of her first encounter with Nicholson at his home in the Hollywood Hills. “Diana Vreeland was to christen it, ‘The Killer Smile.’ But at the time I thought, ‘Ah! Yes. Now, there’s a man you could fall for.’”6 With the knowledge of hindsight, I could see the heartbreak coming from a mile away but was ready to recklessly devour their love story as something as enduring as the stars. His legendary hedonism and devilish charm were always too universal to peg him as having an attraction to any particular type of woman, but she still seemed an unlikely candidate for the love of his life. Her handsome angles and elegant swagger have always been something straight men don’t quite know what to do with. Hers was the kind of cool that only the most notorious and charismatic womanizer in cinema history could understand and whose most logical response to that understanding was to fall madly in love. When asked by People what he saw in Anjelica when they first met, he replied, “Cla-a-a-ss.”7 And class she had, in abundance.

  Following the opulent traditions of her youth, the two of them took their affair around the globe with their famous friends. Anjelica had her own modeling schedule but mostly trailed Nicholson’s film set from London and Paris to remote cities in Spain. There is informality in the way she weaves famous names into her narratives. In London, she hears of how Britt Ekland gave birth “and demanded champagne and caviar upon delivery. Lou, Annie, Jack, and I were all a bit unruly in the waiting room, and the matron almost got nasty.” I have nothing but respect for a woman giving birth and making wild demands, but the apparent sourness she has toward the matron dealing with movie stars drunkenly gallivanting in the maternity ward signals some obliviousness.

  On a shoot in Corsica, she meets up with photographer David Bailey and legendary Vogue editor Grace Coddington and meets designer Manolo Blahnik, who is instantly smitten with her because of course he was. She recalls playing adult dress-up with fashion icons as a typical afternoon: “Grace joined us in another picture, putting on a cloak and a black beret with her red hair flying in the wind, and Manolo dressed like Picasso in a striped shirt and espadrilles. Manolo and I toasted the sunset with champagne, and Bailey took the photograph, which later got to be on the cover of a magazine.”8 Because of course it did. But amid all the glamour of those halcyon days is a romance that you don’t need Corsican villas to understand.

  Even though One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was nominated for six Golden Globes, Jack decided to skip the ceremony, a move that sent Michael Douglas pounding on his door demanding Jack come to the awards. Jack and Anjelica hid in the TV room giggling while Douglas grew frustrated and left, but not before ordering a limo driver to stay parked outside. When Cuckoo’s Nest won all six awards, Jack turned to her and said, “Well, Toots, it looks like we’ll be going to the Oscars.” It reads as a tender moment between two goofballs more than a Hollywood fairy tale. On her birthday, years later, he’d write her an undeniably charming poem declari
ng it “Tootie’s day” and playfully positing the possibility of gifts of “a Bigger Fairy dress” or “a jool to flaunt” before concluding:

  You know, my dear, this doggerel here

  Is written all in fun

  ’Cause in my heart, and every part

  You’re simply called “The One”9

  Their troubled love story is sprinkled with Nicholson’s lavishing expensive gifts of cars and jewels and art on her, but there is something about an especially schmaltzy love poem on a birthday that could make a woman stay longer than she ought to.

  “She’s a dark, coiled spring of a woman with long flowing lines… She’s got a mind and a literary sense of style, and you better believe she’s got imaginative energies. She’s absolutely unpredictable and she’s very beautiful. What is it that holds me to her? It’s love, I guess, and only love!” Nicholson told People in 1985. They had just costarred in Prizzi’s Honor, for which Anjelica won an Academy Award. Peers of the two corroborated his claims to love her madly but stopped short of intimating that Nicholson was faithful. “He’s never going to leave Anjelica. There’s no one else he really wants. He was a glittering vagrant, and she gave him the solid core he needed,” said producer Bob Evans in the same feature story. But never leaving is not the same thing as never straying, and Anjelica herself alluded to his infidelity in stating, “I don’t like the word commitment. It has a gloomy sound. When I hear it, I see myself enduring a long dreary ritual. Understanding is a better word than commitment. Jack and I have an understanding.”10

  The terms of this understanding were wrecked, however, when Nicholson broke the news to her in 1989 that he was having a child with a twenty-six-year-old woman. News of the split made headlines, and women with whom he’d had affairs emerged from the woodwork with sordid tales that the tabloids ate up. “An article on Jack’s sexual prowess at Christmas is hardly my idea of a nice present over the Yuletide season. It’s something that I won’t look at on the newsstand, or condescend to open and invest with my interest and my power,” she told Vanity Fair in the year after the breakup.11 Since reading the profile, “I won’t invest my power in that” has become my go-to response when refusing to suffer indignities, fools, or bullshit more generally.

  And Nicholson’s bullshitting days were far from finished. After the split, he sent her a diamond-and-pearl bracelet that had once been given to Ava Gardner by Frank Sinatra. “These pearls from your swine. With happiest wishes for the holidays—Enjoy—Yr Jack,” he signed off in the note, perhaps unaware that the only thing he refused to be was hers.12 Nicholson would linger in her periphery for years, popping back into the frame with gifts and terms of endearment that had his signature charm. But in the light outside of his shadow, she had more clarity than ever about just how bright her future might be.

  Nicholson was furious about the Vanity Fair cover story that soon followed. In Marc Eliot’s biography of him, Nicholson claimed, “It hurt. It wasn’t realistic. She knew there was another woman and a baby, and then it was just all out there in the public eye and the privacy and intimacy were gone.”13 He seemed not to register that embarrassment is not the same thing as hurt, nor that he had robbed his relationship with Anjelica of its intimacy for the decades he spent being unfaithful to her. His reaction has an air of bafflement, the classic “How could she do this to me?” that doesn’t acknowledge what he’s done to her all along. It is the panicked realization that a woman will take only so much. In the article, Anjelica recalls how her own mother navigated her unfaithful relationships in noting, “She could have moments of great gaiety, but she was very unhappy a lot of the time. And I think it’s because she wasn’t selfish enough.”14 Anjelica’s commitment to selfishness, and even to self-indulgence at times, is what draws women like me closer to her despite having none of her breeding, money, or inherent charm.

  Phoebe tells me it was the Vanity Fair she bought in South Dakota that elevated her interest in Anjelica from admiration to idolization. “It was the first time I thought about her in this long romance where the average woman would have left much earlier. But this is part of what makes a woman strong, and ultimately the most important thing that I’ve learned from loving Anjelica: You get to set your own boundaries and don’t have to live by everyone else’s.” I already empathized with her for staying with Nicholson too long, but I think of this often when I judge the way Anjelica writes of her jet-setting lifestyle and casualness about ostentatious purchases. The circumstances into which Anjelica was born destined her for wealth and privilege, and her refusal to play it down or ingratiate herself to readers by constantly stating how grateful she is for her good fortune is a relief. Anjelica’s memories are unapologetically steeped in Hollywood decadence and the class privilege that accompanied her fellow travelers on these journeys. She is just fucking cool about it.

  Within three years of parting ways with Nicholson, Anjelica married sculptor Bob Graham. With twenty years behind her, she did not respond to attraction with a “Now, there’s a man you could fall for” but with the more cautious but still hopeful “‘Hmm, I wonder.’ It was a strange feeling, being around him. There was a strong attraction but also a feeling of destiny.”15 Unlike her descriptions of awe at watching Nicholson perform and engage, she writes of Graham with an intimate admiration for the quiet elegance of his work: “Bob was a beautiful man at all times.”16 His gentleness was not in competition with his passion, and though they traveled often, the most touching anecdotes from their love story took place in the home he designed for them and in which they lived together until his death in 2008. They were married for sixteen years, just one year shy of the length of time she spent with Jack. It is uncommon to have two once-in-a-lifetime romances, but it should not be surprising that Anjelica is among those who have experienced that.

  In the year after Graham passed, Anjelica sat for another interview with Vanity Fair. The subheadline reads, “Anjelica Huston remembers her late husband, the renowned sculptor Robert Graham, with love and champagne,” a fitting tribute to both of them. When asked what she wants to do next, Anjelica says she will oversee Graham’s artistic legacy. Beyond that, her answer reflects the same peculiar coyness and class that she’s worn since her youth. “Two folded newspapers carrying his obituary lay under scattered flowers. She pointed to a surprising headline from one that read: wait and see. ‘That’s been my guide,’ she explained. ‘It’s absolutely Bob. I recognize it as his voice.’”17

  Anjelica remains as handsome a woman as ever, and the same boldness that allowed her to send boys into bogs on her behalf as a girl now informs her creative choices as she appears in film and television. Nicholson continued his philandering well into the 1990s and early 2000s, but as he settles into old age, he finds himself less able to attract women. He no longer parties and wakes with a glass of milk in proper senior citizen fashion. “I would love that one last romance but I’m not very realistic about it happening. What I can’t deny is my yearning,” Nicholson told Closer in 2015 at the age of seventy-seven.18 There is something at once pathetic and inevitable about his fate and his fear that he will die alone. Whether or not Anjelica finds another long-term partner is immaterial, but not because she has already had such enduring romances with extraordinary men. It is instead because of the unabashedly rich relationship she has to the woman she was and the one she has become. She may be long retired from the otherworldly lifestyle of dancing and loving her way around the world awash in the affections of artists, yet she retains a belief in their magic. Her treasure trove of memories seems a reliable companion and if the memories ever fade, there will always be the fairies.

  Long-Game Bitches

  On Princess Di, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, and the Fine Art of Crazy Exing

  IN THE WARMER MONTHS, IT is not hard to find several blocks in lower Manhattan cordoned off for weekend street fairs, offering space to vendors selling everything from barbecue and ice cream to massages and wholesale jewelry. I feel my most acute sense of buyer’s
remorse when I think of such a street fair I went to in 2006. There I came across an airbrush artist selling T-shirts bearing the images of iconic musicians, alive and dead. Among the shirts featuring well-known hip-hop artists, one adorned with the faces of Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, Aaliyah, and Princess Diana caught my eye for its baffling juxtaposition of these two young women of hip-hop alongside a former monarch, with the words “RIP Baby Girls” scrawled below them for added effect. It was a black shirt, and their faces were rendered flawlessly in somber grays and whites that indicated Diana’s seemingly incongruous presence was not some kind of joke. Left Eye wears her signature rectangle of eye black under the left eye and a tough expression, Aaliyah’s preternatural beauty peeks out in a knowing grim and seductive look from the one eye that is not covered in the dramatic sweep of her bangs, and Diana smiles ear to ear as she effortlessly wears a small crown and pearl necklace in the portrait that covered People magazine the week following her death.

  Everyone I have ever told about the shirt has laughed in agreement that Diana’s presence is amusing. “Baby girl” is such a distinctly American term of endearment and is linked specifically to Aaliyah, and Diana’s brand of royal glamour is so different from the particular aesthetics of R & B luxury embodied by her shirt-mates. But on the eighteenth anniversary of Diana’s death, I fell into an Internet rabbit hole of articles about the last few years of her life that made me reconsider Diana’s suitability to be represented there. It is easy to think of Diana as much older than she was because she married at twenty and began having children soon thereafter, rendering her more of a parental figure than a style or sex icon. But to be a bride at twenty is indeed to be a baby girl. The princess emerged as a clever and brave divorcée who had unmoored herself from the vampires in the British royal family. I recently GChatted with a friend who is similarly preoccupied with popular culture about the princess, and she replied, “Oh yeah, Diana was the ultimate stealth psycho ex.”