As the child of film titan, actor, and director John Huston and prima ballerina Enrica Soma, Anjelica was destined for both glamour and grace. Her beauty was striking from the beginning but did not become severe until her teens, when she took up the mantle of her inheritance by becoming a fashion model and beautiful woman about town in Hollywood. She had the dark eyes and hair of her mother’s Italian heritage from an early age, but in her teens she developed the prominent Roman nose that set her apart from the delicate Anglo-Saxon features that dominated fashion spreads in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Unlike her wide-eyed counterparts in modeling, her almond eyes were deep-set and unsurprised. And though she may not have felt sure of herself, hers was a face that conveyed certainty. The beauty was in the strength of her face rather than the frailty of it. “The babe the gangster would like to have,” said director Paul Mazursky of her to Vanity Fair in 1990.1 Though Jack Nicholson was not a gangster, he was the closest thing Hollywood had to one in the 1970s when the two of them fell in love.
Before making her way to the Hollywood Hills, she was living an almost comically charmed life in Ireland and the United Kingdom. “The only thing she isn’t, it seems, is the girl next door,” wrote Ben Brantley of her looks in a 1990 profile, though the observation applies to much more than her appearance.2 Her recollections of the past have always read a bit the way I imagine a story narrated by Eloise, the beloved children’s book character who lives in the Plaza Hotel, would sound if she had grown up. “It was wonderful, untrampled country… Enormous flowering rhododendron and miles and miles of gorse that smelled like butter. We romped through it all with the dogs and rode for hours on beautiful horses—my father kept 50 Thoroughbreds in his stables. Sometimes we waded in the river and caught eels, or played hide-and-seek in the formal gardens, or jumped and jumped on the trampoline in the barn, or crept about in the twilight looking for fairies,” she remembered to People.3 You can almost see her delivering this memory in the self-serious elegance that is her signature. I can think of no person on earth but her whom I could forgive for looking me dead in the eye and recalling fairy chases and fucking eel hunts in the Irish countryside without any irony.
Her teen years were similarly dreamy as she transitioned from the literal magic of her childhood to the subtle glamour of fashion and film. At seventeen, she was photographed by Richard Avedon for what would become a thirty-page spread in Vogue. “So Harvey came on the shoot, and I was horrible to him. I remember teasing him all the time and making him go to get water lilies for me in the ice-cold bog water. I think I was just nasty back then. I had a bad attitude,” she wrote of her treatment of her male counterpart in an essay about the iconic shoot for Vogue in 2001.4 Though she concludes that she had a bad attitude, I can think of no greater form of heroism than that of a high-spirited teen girl sending a hot male model to fetch her lilies from a bog.
Durga Chew-Bose described the mystery of star quality in an essay in 2015 as “usually a matter of height, clothes, gloss, grooming, there is, too, that quality movie stars possess: their very own aspect ratio. Luster sourced from some place secret. An exclusive deal with the elements.”5 It is difficult to imagine two stars better acquainted with these elements than Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston.
“The front door of a modest two-story ranch-style house opened, and there was that smile,” she writes of her first encounter with Nicholson at his home in the Hollywood Hills. “Diana Vreeland was to christen it, ‘The Killer Smile.’ But at the time I thought, ‘Ah! Yes. Now, there’s a man you could fall for.’”6 With the knowledge of hindsight, I could see the heartbreak coming from a mile away but was ready to recklessly devour their love story as something as enduring as the stars. His legendary hedonism and devilish charm were always too universal to peg him as having an attraction to any particular type of woman, but she still seemed an unlikely candidate for the love of his life. Her handsome angles and elegant swagger have always been something straight men don’t quite know what to do with. Hers was the kind of cool that only the most notorious and charismatic womanizer in cinema history could understand and whose most logical response to that understanding was to fall madly in love. When asked by People what he saw in Anjelica when they first met, he replied, “Cla-a-a-ss.”7 And class she had, in abundance.
Following the opulent traditions of her youth, the two of them took their affair around the globe with their famous friends. Anjelica had her own modeling schedule but mostly trailed Nicholson’s film set from London and Paris to remote cities in Spain. There is informality in the way she weaves famous names into her narratives. In London, she hears of how Britt Ekland gave birth “and demanded champagne and caviar upon delivery. Lou, Annie, Jack, and I were all a bit unruly in the waiting room, and the matron almost got nasty.” I have nothing but respect for a woman giving birth and making wild demands, but the apparent sourness she has toward the matron dealing with movie stars drunkenly gallivanting in the maternity ward signals some obliviousness.
On a shoot in Corsica, she meets up with photographer David Bailey and legendary Vogue editor Grace Coddington and meets designer Manolo Blahnik, who is instantly smitten with her because of course he was. She recalls playing adult dress-up with fashion icons as a typical afternoon: “Grace joined us in another picture, putting on a cloak and a black beret with her red hair flying in the wind, and Manolo dressed like Picasso in a striped shirt and espadrilles. Manolo and I toasted the sunset with champagne, and Bailey took the photograph, which later got to be on the cover of a magazine.”8 Because of course it did. But amid all the glamour of those halcyon days is a romance that you don’t need Corsican villas to understand.
Even though One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was nominated for six Golden Globes, Jack decided to skip the ceremony, a move that sent Michael Douglas pounding on his door demanding Jack come to the awards. Jack and Anjelica hid in the TV room giggling while Douglas grew frustrated and left, but not before ordering a limo driver to stay parked outside. When Cuckoo’s Nest won all six awards, Jack turned to her and said, “Well, Toots, it looks like we’ll be going to the Oscars.” It reads as a tender moment between two goofballs more than a Hollywood fairy tale. On her birthday, years later, he’d write her an undeniably charming poem declaring it “Tootie’s day” and playfully positing the possibility of gifts of “a Bigger Fairy dress” or “a jool to flaunt” before concluding:
You know, my dear, this doggerel here
Is written all in fun
’Cause in my heart, and every part
You’re simply called “The One”9