Axel Madsen - John Huston: A Biography

John Huston

A Biography

Axel Madsen

Chapter 1

John Huston

John Huston is a tall, vigorous man whose voice has the quality of melted caramel. The red-brown eyes, set in the face of an ancient tortoise, glow like sapphires above enormous puffy bags. As he sits on a rock in the Beverly Hills palm garden, his hands dangle from the steep angle of his bony knees.

Huston is a movie director who has always dressed the part, always flown to remote locations with hundreds of kilos of excess wardrobe baggage. At the Beverly Hills Hotel, which is linked to various episodes of his life, he is in a ginger suit and tweedy deerstalker. Unusual clouds race across the California sky. Huston has had a wonderful time making a lot of wonderful movies and the circumstances of their making are often more memorable than the movies themselves.

He is living slightly more cautiously since aneurism of the aorta had him at deaths door in 1977 while he was preparing Love and Bullets, Charlie. That filmlike Saud, which he started less than six months after he left the hospital was a modern production, packaged in a way that was inconceivable ten or fifteen years earlier. Huston has stayed relevant in the new math of moviemaking. In a world of stars obeying their own arithmetic, of deal memos, arbitrations, amendments and of financiers who in addition to box office certainty need tax shelters, he is very much in command, even if his directors chair is a self-effacing distance from his actors emoting. John has always been good at keeping the risk-reward adrenalin flowing.

He gets up from his stone and gives the sky a long, wrinkled squint. He carries himself in a stiff slouch as he crosses the cramped lawn toward the main building and heads for the deep shadow of the Polo Lounge. The springy lope has slowed to a graceful gait, but in his seventies he looks ten years younger than he is, with his close-cropped white hair and beard framing the corrugated mosaic of his handsome, lived-in face. His voice and his way of leaning in and wrapping velvet resonances around you add a rustle of promise and mood to his expressions of enthusiasm, surprise, and ennui. His vocabulary ranges from words of eight syllables to four letters, but there are no showbiz italics. His body English is round and rich and conveys literacy and dignity. Some years ago he was, after his friend Orson Welles, the most sought-after narrator. In The Bible, the voice of God was, appropriately, his.

Some have said he is out of touch with real human emotions, that he is a laughing sadist who will jab at your soul with an icepick. Others have said he is a shy, tender idealist, still others that he is really a very forlorn, lonely man whose public style is an impenetrable bluff of rude theatrical charm. When interviewed too closely, he is glib and puckish, parrying questions rather than answering them. His ready laugh can give way to a non-verbal Noa stabbing stare. The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean was an extravagant concoctionnot in money but in ideas. Stare. End of discussion. As another phrase crosses his mind he smiles. Perhaps my greatest contribution has been that of keeping certain films from being out-and-out disgraces, of turning them into mediocrities instead. Take The Mackintosh Man. We all needed money, Paul Newman, John Foreman, and I. Im not rich. Ive spent it as Ive gone along. I have to work. But Ive had a helluva good time.

In the Polo Lounge, he finds an unobtrusive table and orders a discreet drink. Since the illness he is supposed to watch his health but he hasnt been able to cut out the smoking. As for alcohol, he says he didnt ask the doctors and they didnt mention it. So, I still enjoy a drink. His last feature shot entirely in the United States was Fat City, another of his works to have found vindication in history rather than the box office. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was only a modest moneymaker in its first release. The Asphalt Jungle never earned its cost back, nor did Beat the Devil. And people very often say to me that The Misfits is their favorite among my works. Well, it is to me too. But it got mixed reviews at the time and was not a success, to my disappointment and also to my surprise.

At other times Moby Dick is his favorite. Puffing cautiously on a Don Diego, he will frown and say critics never recognized the idea of Moby Dick. And that is that the whole thing is a blasphemy. Melville hated God! I never saw Ahab as a ranting madman and Peck furnished a kind of nobility, a heroic stature, ONeillesque. But the role didnt coincide with their ideas about Ahab.

His father died in the Beverly Hills Hotel. Johns chance, his big chance, he says when the Jack Daniels and water arrives, was being the son of Walter Huston and of Rhea Gore, a newspaperwoman. It was his father who kept him from skidding totally out of control in his youth. After John tried out as an itinerant prize-fighter and between stabs at being a short-story writer, a journalist on his mothers paper, and a sidewalk artist in Paris, Walter Huston had him hired as a writer on the pictures he starred in. Walter and John had a rare, loving father-son relationship that John didnt manage to give his own children. Anjelica remembers a childhood between a young mother whose talents were not acknowledged and a father who wasnt there much. To get his daughters forgiveness, John gave her A Walk with Love and Death as a seventeenth-birthday gift. It didnt occur to him to ask her first if she wanted to be a movie star.

Darryl Zanuck has said he doesnt envy John his talent or his success but his friends. Huston collects peoplebums, moochers, philosophical drunks, talkative tarts; and his various homes have always been half full of people in need of getting back on their feet. But he easily gets bored and needs new people to feed on. When you are with him you have his undivided attentionuntil he feels the need to move on, Lauren Bacall says, then there you are with egg on your face. Humphrey Bogart loved him like a brother and affectionately called him The Monster and Double Ugly. John was Bogeys kind of snake charmer, a natural-born antiauthoritarian, a guy with panache and style. Bogey thought John had more color than 90 per cent of Hollywoods actors. When John called and said, Hey, kid, lets make this picture, Bogey knew he was being conned but he also knew he would have a great time. John has always called grown men, Kid, and men say he is all guy, a mans man.

Women think differently. Marilyn Monroe said she couldnt see how a woman could be around John without falling in love with him. His secretaries always do, because of the caramel voice and because they become victims of his torture. He made one of them his fifth wife. Olivia de Havilland, who almost became the third Mrs. Huston, says he is capable of tremendous love of a very tense order. Evelyn Keyes, who did become No. 3, says that when married he continues to conduct himself as a bachelor, meaning that at parties he takes ladyfriends into the next room and closes the door on wife and guests. She remembers tender togetherness and moments when she thought the marriage might actually work, even if now and then he was still flying apart. When he divorced her, in a hurry in Mexico, he had nineteen-year-old Enrica Soma seven months pregnant. Ricki was the wife who lasted the longest.

No matter what experience people have gone through with him, he leaves them a little dazed. He is unpredictable to work with, inconsistent and volatile and, like a prosecuting attorney, he has a way of taking people apart. He cant write by himself but must have someone with him. When I put pencil to paper, I find myself sketching, he says. I cant write aloneI get too lonely. In his moments of inspiration, his script collaborators have stood in awe. At other times they have found the experience degrading and needed months to find themselves again. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote an unfilmable eight-hundred-page