BOOK OF THE DAY: DONALD CLARKEreviews Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and FoundBy Allegra Huston
IT MUST be hard living life as one of the more stable members of the Huston clan. The first half of Allegra Huston's elegantly written memoir presents the author as a less prim version of Saffron, drunken Edina's temperate daughter, from the BBC sitcom Absolutely Fabulous.
Following the death of her mother, ballerina Enrica Soma, in 1969, the four-year-old Allegra was sent to live with her father, John Huston, in St Cleran's House near Galway. To this point, Allegra, who was born in London, had been only dimly aware of Huston – director of such classics as The Maltese Falconand The Dead– but she managed to develop an affection for the yarn-spinning philanderer.
In her teenage years, she was dispatched to Los Angeles where, between stays with various factotums and a new, tolerant stepmother, she spent time hanging out with Anjelica Huston, her impossibly glamorous sister, and the aspiring actor’s boyfriends Jack Nicholson (dangerous, but fun) and Ryan O’Neill (eyewateringly ghastly). Joints are rolled. Various dependencies set in. John Huston dumps yet another wife and runs off with the Mexican servant. Through it all, Allegra, who hates the idea of allowing smoke into her lungs, retains a patient and watchful sangfroid.
A key passage in the book describes her first meeting with Marlon Brando. “Look at his eyes,” a theatrical Anjelica tells her much younger sister. “He has violet eyes.”
Staring hard, Allegra concludes that his eyes are, in fact, a rather ordinary blue-grey. “I’d failed a test,” she concludes. “I didn’t belong in this company. Living on the grand scale, like Dad and Anjelica, meant mythologising the great people.”
So sane. So clearheaded. Why, it’s almost as if she weren’t a Huston at all.
So it proved. In 1977, Allegra, barely a teenager, learnt that John Huston was not her biological father. During one of many wretched patches in her marriage, Enrica had fallen in love with John Julius Norwich – viscount and television personality – and conceived what was then called a love child. A glance at the photographs in the book confirms that, unlike her Huston siblings, Allegra has the Norwich clan’s round face and blonde colouring.
This sort of revelation could lead many weaker personalities into a morass of psychobabble. But Allegra, who has worked in publishing and knows not to dangle her participles, manages the difficult task of achieving detailed self-analysis without lapsing into Oprah-friendly melodrama. Consistently sensible, she eventually makes friends with Norwich (“my father”) while still continuing to indulge the fiery Huston (“Dad”).
The author makes sure to include plenty of saucy material on the most colourful personalities. What to make of John Huston? Allegra frequently states that she loved the man and that he radiated charisma. Yet the moments of intimacy between the two were so rare that she feels able to list them in full. He once touched her forehead during a fever. He once advised her to “never gamble with other people’s money”. The picture that emerges is of an unreconstructed macho romantic who, in thrall to the Hemingway doctrine, viewed women as vassals or ornaments. Upon hearing that a Mexican child, raised in one of his many homes, has been sexually abused, he shrugs and says: “Of course. Her mother was a whore.”
Allegra was appalled, but this undeniably decent woman retained her affection for the rogue up to his death in 1987.
The sensitive reader may not be quite so forgiving.
Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and FoundBy Allegra Huston Bloomsbury 293pp; £17.99
Donald Clarke writes about film for
The Irish Times