Meyers - John huston: courage and art

BOOKS BY JEFFREY MEYERS

BIOGRAPHY

A Fever at the Core: The Idealist in Politics
Married to Genius
Katherine Mansfield
The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis
Hemingway
Manic Power: Robert Lowell and His Circle
D. H. Lawrence
Joseph Conrad
Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy
Scott Fitzgerald
Edmund Wilson
Robert Frost
Bogart: A Life in Hollywood
Gary Cooper: American Hero
Privileged Moments: Encounters with Writers
Wintry Conscience: A Biography of George Orwell
Inherited Risk: Errol and Sean Flynn in Hollywood and Vietnam
Somerset Maugham
Impressionist Quartet: The Intimate Genius of
Manet and Morisot, Degas and Cassatt
Modigliani
Samuel Johnson: The Struggle
The Genius and the Goddess: Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe

CRITICISM

Fiction and the Colonial Experience
The Wounded Spirit: T. E. Lawrences Seven Pillars of Wisdom
A Readers Guide to George Orwell
Painting and the Novel
Homosexuality and Literature
D. H. Lawrence and the Experience of Italy
Disease and the Novel
The Spirit of Biography
Hemingway: Life into Art
Orwell: Life and Art

BIBLIOGRAPHY

T. E. Lawrence: A Bibliography
Catalogue of the Library of the Late Siegfried Sassoon
George Orwell: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism

EDITED COLLECTIONS

George Orwell: The Critical Heritage
Hemingway: The Critical Heritage
Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs
The Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Reader
The W. Somerset Maugham Reader

EDITED ORIGINAL ESSAYS

Wyndham Lewis: A Revaluation
Wyndham Lewis by Roy Campbell
D. H. Lawrence and Tradition
The Legacy of D. H. Lawrence
The Craft of Literary Biography
The Biographers Art
T. E. Lawrence: Soldier, Writer, Legend
Graham Greene: A Revaluation

Copyright 2011 by Jeffrey Meyers

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

Crown Archetype with colophon is a trademark of
Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Meyers, Jeffrey.
John Huston: courage and art / Jeffrey Meyers.1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Huston, John, 19061987. 2. Motion picture producers and directorsUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.
PN1998.3H87M49 2011
791.430233092dc22
[ B ] 2010047642

eISBN: 978-0-307-59069-5

JACKET DESIGN BY WHITNEY COOKMAN
JACKET PHOTOGRAPHY: (front, spine) Chinatown Photofest,
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre The Everett Collection,
The African Queen and The Maltese Falcon Photofest

v3.1_r1

John Hustons birthplace, 402 S. Adams Street, Nevada, Missouri (Bushwhacker Museum, Nevada, MO)

Walter and John Huston, early 1930s

Dorothy Harvey, c. 1943

Johns house in Tarzana (Valerie Meyers)

Eloise Hardt, late 1930s (Eloise Hardt)

Marietta Tree, mid-1940s (Frances FitzGerald)

Peter Viertel, John and Ernest Hemingway, 1954 (Literary Estate of Peter Viertel)

Ricki Huston, 1960s (Allegra Huston)

St. Clerans

John with Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller on the set of The Misfits, 1961 (Frank and Curtice Taylor Archive)

Anna van der Heide, early 1960s (Anna van der Heide)

Zoe Sallis, early 1960s (Zoe Sallis)

John as Noah in The Bible, 1966 (Frank and Curtice Taylor Archive)

John directing George Sanders in The Kremlin Letter, 1970 (Frank and Curtice Taylor Archive)

John and Celeste Huston, 1972 (Celeste Huston)

John and Maricela Hernandez, 1973 (Celeste Huston)

John with Anjelica, Tony, Danny and Allegra at Tonys wedding, 1978

John and Danny Huston, early 1980s (Danny Huston)

J ohn Huston would be worth a biography even if hed never made a film. I am pleased to acknowledge the generous and always illuminating help I received from many people who knew him. For interviews I would like to thank Jacqueline Bisset, Seamus Byrne, Barnaby Conrad, Carter De Haven III, Charles Elliott, Hampton Fancher III, Frances FitzGerald, Michael Fitzgerald, Guy Gallo, Leonard Gardner, William Gardner, Eloise Hardt, Patrick Hemingway, John Hurt, Allegra Huston, Celeste Huston, Danny Huston, Stacy Keach, Pancho Kohner, Susan Kohner, Jan Lavender, Joseph McBride, Walter Mirisch, Michael Parks, Tim Pigott-Smith, Janet Roach, Zoe Sallis, Wieland Schulz-Keil, Roberto Silvi, Thom Steinbeck, Curtice Taylor, Penelope Tree, Anna van der Heide, Bayard Veiller, Christine Viertel and Susannah York. Charles Elliott, Guy Gallo, Celeste Huston, Zoe Sallis and Anna van der Heidea newly discovered loveralso sent valuable material.

I previously interviewed (many of them now gone) Lesley Black, Jack Cardiff, Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, Afdera Fonda, Evelyn Keyes, Ring Lardner, Jr., Joseph Losey, Arthur Miller, Ivan Moffat, Inge Morath, Oswald Morris, Vincent Sherman, Peter Viertel and Sir John Woolf. For letters I am grateful to Angela Allen, Albert Finney, Robert Gottlieb, Julie Harris, Anjelica Huston, Tony Huston and Edna OBrien.

Many friends and colleagues made useful introductions; provided new medical, legal and cinematic information; and sent films, books, articles and unpublished papers: Dr. Ellen Alkon, Paul Alkon, Rudy Behlmer, Mary Berg, Lesley Brill, William Chace, Allen Cohen, Lisa Coletta, Denis Donoghue, Rory Flynn, Robert Freeman, Kevin Froggatt, Andrew Gordon, Valerie Hemingway, Norman Holland, Annette Insdorf, Darin Jensen, Francis King, Thomas Kuhnke, Harry Lawton, Patrick McGilligan, Mario Menocal, Rachel Meyers, David Peoples, Claude Potts, Loren Rothschild, Caroline Seebohm, Paul Sidey, Paul Tiessen and Tony Tracy.

I did my most extensive research in the Huston papers at the Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, California (Jenny Romero and Stacey Behlmer). These papers span the years 193281, encompass sixty-three linear feet and reveal what problems Huston encountered and how his films were made. The archive consists of production files, including script material and research, correspondence and subject files. They contain material related to both produced and unrealized projects, including budgets, employment agreements, casting information, shooting schedules, interoffice memos, cutting notes, censorship correspondence, publicity clippings and reviews. I also received important material from the Bibliothque Nationale, Paris (Cllia Guillemot); Bien Public, Dijon (Jean Viansson Ponte); Carson McCullers Center for Writers, Columbus, Georgia; Department of the Army; FBI, for Hustons once-secret files; Film Comment; German Film Institute, Berlin; J. Paul Getty Museum; GQ: Gentlemens Quarterly;