A Story Lately Told (2 page)

After several attempts at conventional jobs, Walter and Archie earned enough money to enroll in acting school, then joined a traveling theater troupe. Although they rarely received a salary, they loved the life and decided to jump a boxcar on a
freight train to New York. They were seventeen years old and ready to hit the big time.

Constant auditioning in New York soon paid off: both boys began to get small parts in plays, and Walter met the character actor William H. Thompson, who gave him “a whole approach to acting.”

When Walter joined the touring company of
The Sign of the Cross
and performed in St. Louis, he encountered “a little girl, full of energy and everything pertaining to the arts.” She didn’t laugh at his slippers. Rhea was a petite five feet four, a horsewoman, a smoker, and a sports reporter. Walter and Rhea got married in secret on the last day of the year 1904, after knowing each other only a week. Rhea wore a black veil and an ill-fitting dress that she tried to cover up with her bridal bouquet for the pictures.

My father’s first memory was of riding in front of his mother on a black horse over cobblestones. She loved a challenge, and Dad said she was better with animals than with people. Walter and Rhea separated when Dad was six, and he spent his early years in boarding schools. On holidays, he would travel with his father on the vaudeville circuit and with his mother to the racetracks and ballparks.

In 1917, Dad was misdiagnosed with an enlarged heart and Bright’s disease, a sometimes fatal kidney ailment. Rhea moved him to the desert climate of Arizona, where he was confined to his bed for nearly two years. In that condition, unable to leave his room, he invented stories. He also had started to draw and paint, which he did for the rest of his life.

A later, more accurate diagnosis allowed Dad to escape his detention, and he moved with his mother from Arizona to Los Angeles, where he acquired a serious interest in boxing. After school, he often took a long bus ride across town to watch the
matches at the Olympic Auditorium. Encouraged by a friend who shared his enthusiasm for the sport, Dad took boxing lessons at a city playground and eventually won a Lincoln Heights High School championship in his weight division and twenty-three out of twenty-five boxing-club matches. He dropped out of high school two years early, hoping to become a professional fighter, but his growing passion for writing, painting, and theater soon pulled him in other directions.

When Dad was eighteen, he reunited in New York with Walter, who was working on Broadway. Watching his father on the stage would provide him with the best education on the mechanics of acting, and enabled him to obtain a few small roles. When Dad underwent mastoid surgery that winter, Walter thought it would be best for him to go somewhere warm to recover. He gave Dad five hundred dollars and sent him to Vera Cruz, Mexico, for a couple of months. It was post-revolution, and the streets were filled with beggars and outlaws.

After taking a train to Mexico City, a journey made all the more exciting by the constant threat of ambush by bandits, Dad moved into the Hotel Genova, a former hacienda. Through its manager, a woman called Mrs. Porter, who had a glass eye and a wooden leg and wore a wig, he met Hattie Weldon, who ran the finest riding establishment in the city. Hattie introduced him to Colonel José Olimbrada, a soldier in the Mexican army who specialized in dressage. Because Dad was running short on money, Olimbrada suggested that he take an honorary position in the cavalry and have his choice of the best horses in Mexico to ride. By now he was running with a dangerous crowd, and soon Rhea arrived to persuade him to return to California, threatening that Walter would cut off the supply of money if he did not comply with her wishes.

•  •  •

Once talkies began in Hollywood, Walter Huston came into his own as a film actor. His first major role was opposite Gary Cooper in
The Virginian.
He would go on to become a great character actor and leading man, starring on stage and screen for the next twenty years. He portrayed Dodsworth on Broadway and appeared in the movie adaptation, in addition to acting in films such as
Abraham Lincoln, Rain, The Devil and Daniel Webster,
and
Yankee Doodle Dandy.
He had a beautiful voice and was famous for his rendition of “September Song,” from the musical
Knickerbocker Holiday.

Although Walter helped Dad get writing jobs on two films he was starring in,
A House Divided
and
Law and Order,
Dad’s first few years in Hollywood were disappointing to him not only as a writer but in other ways as well. There was a marriage in 1925 to a girl he’d known in high school, Dorothy Harvey, that lasted only a year. Then in 1933 his career came to a halt when a car he was driving struck and killed a young woman who darted out into the street. Dad was absolved but traumatized, and left for Paris and London, where he became a drifter, down and out, playing harmonica for change in Hyde Park. After five years in Europe, during which he took the time to reassess his life, he returned to Hollywood, intent on making it.

In 1937 he married Lesley Black, an English girl whom he described as “a gentlewoman” in his autobiography,
An Open Book.
He divorced Black in 1946, when he was forty years old, and made Evelyn Keyes, the actress who played the sister of Scarlett O’Hara in
Gone With the Wind,
his third wife, on a spur-of-the-moment trip to Las Vegas after a vodka-fueled dinner at Romanoff’s.

•  •  •

When the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began its intimidating interrogations in Hollywood in 1947, at the outset of the Communist witch hunts, Dad, with the writer Philip Dunne, formed the Committee for the First Amendment and, alongside a group of other well-known artists, such as Gene Kelly, Humphrey Bogart, Billy Wilder, Burt Lancaster, Judy Garland, and Edward G. Robinson, bought space in the trade papers to argue that the hearings were unconstitutional.

For several years following, many innocent people suffered as a result of having been labeled Communist supporters, even though many of them, including Dad, had never had an affiliation with the party. This experience fired his interest in working and living outside the United States.

In 1947, Dad directed Walter in
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,
for which they both won Academy Awards.

•  •  •

My mother, Enrica Georgia Soma, was a ballet dancer before Tony and I were born. She was five feet eight and finely made. She had translucent skin, dark hair to her shoulders parted in the middle, and the expression of a Renaissance Madonna, a look both wise and naïve. She had a small waist, full hips and strong legs, graceful arms, delicate wrists, and beautiful hands with long, tapering fingers. To this day, my mother’s face is the loveliest in my memory—her high cheekbones and wide forehead; the arc of her eyebrows over her eyes, gray-blue as slate; her mouth in repose, the lips curving in a half smile. To her friends, she was Ricki.

She was the daughter of a self-proclaimed yogi, Tony Soma, who owned an Italian restaurant called Tony’s Wife on West Fifty-second Street in New York, where all of Broadway would come, including the Nelson Rockefellers, Frank Sinatra, and
Mario Lanza. Grandpa would teach them all how to sing. Ricki’s mother, Angelica Fantoni, who had been an opera singer in Milan, died of pneumonia when Ricki was four. That broke Grandpa’s heart. But he took a second wife, Dorothy Fraser, whom we called Nana, a pleasant, no-nonsense woman who raised my mother under a strict regime. Grandpa was dictatorial and prone to aphorisms such as “There’s no intelligence without the tongue!” or “Through the knowledge of me, I wish to share my happiness with you!” When we visited, he liked to have us stand on our heads and sing “Oh, what a beautiful morning, oh, what a beautiful day.” Then he would continue on with a few arias.

Tony’s Wife had the warm, genteel atmosphere of Northern Italy in its dark wood, red carpeting, flocked wallpaper, and photographs of Grandpa in a bow tie posing on his head with various Hollywood luminaries. Off to the right, my uncle Nappy, in a sky-blue blazer, shaking up martinis behind the mirrored bar, bathed in a pink light. In the back of the restaurant were the kitchens, which I visited a few times with Grandpa, to see the pots boiling and the steaks sizzling, men in white shouting at one another through the steam.

The family lived upstairs in an apartment, which felt disconnected from the restaurant. It was quiet and dark with uneven carpeted floors. In the living room there was a piano with sheet music from which Nana played each morning for Grandpa to sing while he stood on his head. He claimed to have married Nana on the basis of her talent as an accompanist.

Grandpa also had a summer house, in Miller Place, a hamlet on the north shore of Long Island. Grandpa had great reverence for the foundations of the English language and spent long hours in his round blue mosaic tub meditating on a dictionary
in a bathroom atop his shingled two-story house, overlooking steep bluffs and the Sound below. When you ran down to the beach, the sand made an avalanche at your heels.

Philip was my mother’s one full sibling. Angelica and Tony’s first child, who had been called George, died as a baby. When my grandfather remarried, Dorothy gave birth to a girl and two boys—Linda, Nappy, and Fraser. Nappy was named after Napoleon, because Grandpa claimed to have Corsican blood running through his veins and thought he was a descendant of the great emperor. They all lived in the apartment above the restaurant.

Occasionally, Grandpa would have Ricki come downstairs to greet the guests, some of whom were likely to be show people—Tony’s Wife had become a speakeasy for a time and had remained a favorite stopover among the Hollywood set ever since. One evening, my father walked in and was met by a beautiful fourteen-year-old girl. She told him that she wanted to be the world’s finest ballerina and described how she wore out her ballet shoes, making her toes bleed. When he asked her if she went to the ballet often, she said, “Well, no,” unfortunately, she couldn’t. It was difficult, she explained, because she was expected to write a four-page essay for her father every time she went. So Dad said, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll take you to the ballet, and you won’t have to write an essay. How about that?”

But Dad was called away to war. As he later told the story, quite romantically, he’d intended to hire a carriage, buy Ricki a corsage, and make it an event. Four years later, sitting at a dinner table at the producer David Selznick’s house in Los Angeles, he found himself placed beside a beautiful young woman. He turned to her and introduced himself: “We haven’t met. My name is John Huston.” And she replied, “Oh, but we have. You
stood me up once.” My mother hadn’t seen him since she was fourteen. Having studied under George Balanchine and danced on Broadway for Jerome Robbins, Mum had been the youngest member to join the best dance company in the nation, Ballet Theatre, which later became American Ballet Theatre. Now, at eighteen, she was under contract to David Selznick, and her photograph had been published on the June 9, 1947, cover of
Life
magazine. Philippe Halsman had come to photograph the company’s prima ballerina but had chosen to take my mother’s picture instead. In the photo spread inside the magazine, she was likened to the
Mona Lisa
—they shared that secret smile.

M
y mother got pregnant with Tony when she was eighteen and my father was in his mid-forties. She’d obviously fallen deeply in love with Dad, and sacrificed a future career for him. He took her across the border to Mexico on February 10, 1950, got a divorce from Evelyn Keyes, and had a justice of the peace marry him and Mum that same night in La Paz, Baja. Billy Pearson, an art collector and one of the leading jockeys in the United States, was their best man. He had offered to ride Dad’s filly, Bargain Lass, at Santa Anita, in exchange for a piece of pre-Columbian art if he won the race, which he did. This
was the start of their lifelong friendship—a mismatched physical sight gag, they were the tall and the short of it, with Dad towering above the agile, diminutive Billy.

An article from Monday, March 20, 1950, in the
Los Angeles Times
under the headline “Director Confirms His Marriage to Starlet,” read:

Offhand, he can’t remember the date of the ceremony, but John Huston, Academy Award winning film director, today confirmed the rumor that he has been secretly married for some time to Ricki Soma, film starlet and former model, whose enigmatic smile caused her to be dubbed “The Mona Lisa Girl.” The wedding, Huston declared, took place in La Paz, immediately following his February 10 divorce to Evelyn Keyes in Mexico. “Ricki and I started going together during the period of my separation from Evelyn,” the director said. “But I believe I met her when she was a little girl at her father’s restaurant on Fifty-second Street in New York.”

According to Huston, his wife is spending a few days at the mountain home of his father, Walter Huston. Asked if he and his bride planned a honeymoon, now that the secret’s out, the director laughed and said, “No, I have given up those things.” It was his fourth marriage.