Anjelica Huston - Dead On

November 17, 1991

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Cigarette-holding is just one of the arts -- loaded with dignity and pain -- that is clearly not dead when you meet Anjelica Huston: aloft, a twist of the wrist, an arch of a thin eyebrow, the downturn of a mighty shoulder, two fingers not so much supporting anything as raised carelessly, by accident. She can cross her legs too, with the animal grace of a pagan goddess.

Everything is full body. All six feet. Her big back is for modeling backless dresses in Vogue for the rest of her life. Her hands are for horseback riding at her ranch three hours north of Los Angeles. Her nose has known tragedy -- teenage crying jags, awkward fashion photographs, a car crash. When Huston looks at you, it's like she's wearing sunglasses when she isn't, and then she takes them off. Her mascara is so black and so thick that it makes her brown eyes seem hazel.

"I was brought up a country girl," she says, "and New York is a far cry from the Irish countryside."

Aw shucks, country girl? But so many things don't seem to fit. This is her magic. This is the surprise of her, the shock. She's done up, made up, haute-glamour, curiously masculine and feminine and artificial -- and yet her voice betrays gentility and sorrow. So soft, it makes your ears itch way inside.

Years ago, her acting teacher said, "Anjelica, you don't have to emphasize so much. You say something, we'll listen. Don't say it five times, or bang your fist when you speak. We hear you."

She needed a lift after "The Grifters." Something light and fun after playing a con artist who kills her own son for money. Who could blame her? She was looking for "a romp." Hence, "The Addams Family" -- which opens Friday. Hence Morticia Addams -- a role Huston was probably fated to play, and just had to walk through, frankly, shrugging her mighty-shoulder shrug and delivering lines deadpan, like: "Thing, you're a handful."

Gomez: "Unhappy, darling?"

Morticia: "Yes, com-plete-ly."

She can't remember when she finished shooting "The Addams Family." It seems like a long time ago to her. Maybe last Christmas. Maybe last February. "The acting part was fun," she says. "The waiting-around part was not so fun, particularly on this movie, because I couldn't get any rest -- being that I was in the heavy confines of this costume."

The Morticia get-up, let's just be honest, isn't all that attractive. (Gomez and Morticia reminisce at one point about their first meeting -- at a funeral. "You were so pale and mysterious, so beautiful," Gomez gushes. "Nobody even looked at the corpse.")

For the role, besides the bluish-white pancake and charcoal eye shadow -- an exaggeration of an exaggeration of her old '70s look -- Huston wore a corset, press-on nails and "eye-pulls," which were glued with spirit gum to the sides of her face and held on with an elastic band around her head under a very long, heavy black wig.

Why eye-pulls? She's only 40.

"To give Morticia that sideways glance," Huston says. "And good for a really intense headache."

Her looks, she says, are the thing she worries most about -- not her performances, which have won her an Academy Award, choice roles, ceaseless praise from critics. "It depends on the movie," she says. "There was a time, particularly when I was starting out, that I would simply loathe how I looked, which was the main basis for any self-criticism. How I looked. But at a certain point, you grow into your face and your body and you don't so much despise your features as you do the onset of age. In a movie, I like to get a lot of light and hope people don't cross-shadow me."

But ... she's so beautiful.

"Yeah," she says with a shrug. "And it's a stupid hang-up."

Cross-Shadowed

She sat for an Annie Leibovitz photograph in the living room of her L.A. house in 1985 wearing canary riding breeches, black dressage boots and a sleeveless working-class undershirt. Slicked hair, biceps, gaze. She was holding a lighted cigarette. She was slouched and relaxed. Her boots rested on a tiger-skin rug.

People who read magazines like Vanity Fair and Vogue and HG know all about Anjelica Huston. They knew all about her before she became a great actress, nominated, it would seem, every time out of the gate. For years now, she's been a touchstone of refined sensibility, rare looks and good choices -- of father, of boyfriend, of clothes.

She was a model for Diana Vreeland. She sat for Richard Avedon and Helmut Newton, even though, at the time, she wanted to look more "like Twiggy." When people wrote about Anjelica Huston, over the years, they'd start off with lovely things about legacy, about her famous grandfather, actor Walter Huston, about her famous father, director John Huston. They'd write about her beautiful but tragically dead mother, Ricki Soma, a former Balanchine ballerina, herself the daughter of a well-known Italian restaurateur. And they wrote about Anjelica's big-personality boyfriend, Jack Nicholson. They saw each other for 17 years.

She was cross-shadowed, but never quite invisible. She was a good picture, a nice story, the elegant girlfriend-daughter, but nobody thought she could actually do anything. She wasn't really a wannabe; she didn't even wanna.

"I simply checked out of life," she once said to Vanity Fair, "for a long, long time."

Very good things. Very bad things. She was born when her father was making "The African Queen." (He received notice by foot messenger in the Congo.) When she was 2, he moved the family to St. Clerans, a Georgian manor house on the west coast of Ireland, and took off most of the year to make movies and get involved with other women. Sometimes he'd bring them back to the house for the holidays.

"Yes, I knew he was important," she says. "He was taller than anyone else. He had a tremendous physical presence. And I remember when my father was working, one was -- as a child -- kept clear of him. My earliest memories in Ireland were very much, you know, a traditional Anglo-Irish upbringing. The children were really with a nanny, and in the nursery. We'd come down and kiss our parents good night at drinks time. Then we'd retire to our own dinner. There was a lot of time spent with ponies and running around, that kind of thing."

The only movies she saw were Dad's. "We had a projector, which, for some reason, nobody knew how to work," she remembers. "It would take at least three hours to set it up and slot the movie. I grew up on 'Treasure of Sierra Madre' and 'African Queen.' Those two movies in particular, and very little else... .

"There were very few trips to town. I do remember seeing 'Ben Hur' and being wildly impressed, and 'The Alamo.' When I saw 'Tammy Tell Me True,' I'd thought I'd died and gone to Heaven. This was real moviemaking to me.

"We took trips and spent winters in Switzerland," she says, "so it wasn't a deprived childhood, but we were left very much to our own devices. We weren't parked in front of the television to watch cartoons."

She never saw "The Addams Family" on TV, she says. "But my brother Tony and I were given to Pugsley- and Wednesday-like machinations. There were lots of storms coming in from the Atlantic. There were lots of ghosts -- as there always are in Irish houses. When there weren't available ghosts, we would create them. It wasn't that unlike the Addamses' life."

When she was 10, her parents separated. When she was 16, her father insisted she star in his movie "A Walk With Love and Death," despite her protests. It was a flop. It was "roundly criticized," she says, "and I'm sure this was as painful for my father as it was for me." While promoting the movie, her mother -- only 39 -- was killed in a car accident in France.

She has an artist's way of describing things, her feelings, her life. Of her mother's funeral, she said to Vanity Fair: "My mother's houses were always so extravagantly beautiful. But when I got back that morning, it was as if everything had died. The entire house was lost, gone, finished. It is hard to describe what it is like when actual objects lose their lives. I went into her closet -- all her beautiful Balenciagas I used to crave, it was as if they had gone limp. They didn't even smell like her anymore."

Deep Class

In 1973, her stepmother took her to a party at Nicholson's house. It was the year "The Last Detail" came out, and the year he was to make "Chinatown." They liked each other right away. "I can't come up with words poetic enough to describe her," Nicholson has said. "She has a very strong aura. She struck me as being stunning. Not pretty, but very beautiful in a powerful way. Deep class."

She moved in with him almost immediately. "And when I was first with Jack, I didn't want to work," she says. "I had exhausted modeling possibilities, in terms of what I'd done in New York and Europe. And Los Angeles, at that time, wasn't really a center of fashion. It still isn't. They were doing a lot of commercials, but I knew enough to know that I wasn't the sort of toothsome, winsome California girl."

She had a tiny walk-on in "The Last Tycoon" and a memorable but small part in "The Postman Always Rings Twice." After a serious car accident that broke her nose in four places, she reviewed her life and moved out of Nicholson's house -- though she kept seeing him. Life seemed more precious suddenly, and she wasn't doing much with hers. It wasn't easy, she says, but she went to acting class. She was on "Laverne and Shirley" and performed in tiny theaters where nobody knew who she was.

"I knew what I wanted," she says, "and I wanted it on my own terms. It wasn't a matter of picturing myself at the top of the heap, but I knew somewhere in my heart that I was good. It was just finding out if I was any good to others. I didn't want handouts or leg-ups at the time. It was more important for me to make my own way, and make my own mistakes -- outside the auspices of my friends and family."

Her father, though, directed her in "Prizzi's Honor," and her life changed again. She won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, and it seemed another Huston star was born. Nicholson himself said at the time, " 'Prizzi's Honor' dropped a lot of dead weight off Anjelica's psyche."In 1987, after directing her again in "The Dead," John Huston died. Since, she's played a winning string of women who have suffered, but who are now strong, perhaps a little tough. The lonely flight attendant in love with a married man who won't leave his wife in Woody Allen's "Crimes and Misdemeanors." The Holocaust survivor in "Enemies, a Love Story." The sturdy frontier woman in television's "Lonesome Dove" who's got a bedridden husband upstairs. The con-mother in "The Grifters." The head witch in "Witches."

Last year, she broke up her 17-year relationship with Nicholson when she discovered that actress Rebecca Broussard was going to have his child. She had no idea, she says. "Very surprised," is how she put it to Barbara Walters two weeks ago.

He seems to have tarnished a little now, without her.

Behind Her

There's nothing common about her. And she doesn't play it down. Her looks are high art, high beauty. High everything. She wears a blue suit with a silk shirt that's the color of blueberry juice mixed with vanilla ice cream. There are pale stockings, patent leather pumps. A mossy crystal hangs around her neck.

When she talks about Nicholson, or her father, she leans forward and stares straight ahead, as though she's trying to hear herself talking from across the room. She's gotten engaged now, to Los Angeles sculptor Robert Graham. All that is behind her -- Nicholson, her father, the years of checking out on life.

She never sounds bitter.

"Well, I do think it would be pretty bad form," she says. "Maybe it's good manners, I don't know. But why diminish their importance in life, by sort of backbiting or resistance? My father was famous before I was born. And I never had any feeling of being overshadowed. I was very proud of him. I was sorry that he wasn't around more. I remember being very upset when he'd have to leave and go to work. My brother and I didn't see a tremendous amount of him, except at Christmas and sometimes during other times of the year -- two or three weeks at a time, and generally not longer. And because we were going to school, had to be educated and socialized, we couldn't be with him on film sets as much as we would have liked to.

"But we understood that he was working to keep everything going, to keep us in the manner that we'd happily become accustomed. I never felt competitive with him. I never resented his power or success. ...

"And that goes for Jack Nicholson too. I think one's fortunate to have achieved something in life, and he is somebody who single-handedly, without any help from anyone else, created what he was, and is. So I think that's to be applauded, not derided.

"And, I think, it's down to you finally -- whether you want to do something. What you're after, what you're going for. ... And anyway, you have to get behind yourself. And you have to get behind anyone else who's doing anything of worth. There's altogether too little of that."