John Huston
A Biography
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 death’s door in 1977 while he was preparing Love and Bullets, Charlie. That film—like 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 director’s 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 No—a stabbing stare. “The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean was an extravagant concoction—not 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. I’m not rich. I’ve spent it as I’ve gone along. I have to work. But I’ve 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 hasn’t been able to cut out the smoking. As for alcohol, he says he didn’t ask the doctors and they didn’t 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, O’Neillesque. But the role didn’t coincide with their ideas about Ahab.”
His father died in the Beverly Hills Hotel. John’s chance, his big chance, he says when the Jack Daniel’s 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 mother’s 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 didn’t manage to give his own children. Anjelica remembers a childhood between a young mother whose talents were not acknowledged and a father who wasn’t there much. To get his daughter’s forgiveness, John gave her A Walk with Love and Death as a seventeenth-birthday gift. It didn’t occur to him to ask her first if she wanted to be a movie star.
Darryl Zanuck has said he doesn’t envy John his talent or his success but his friends. Huston collects people—bums, 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 attention—until 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 Bogey’s 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 Hollywood’s actors. When John called and said, “Hey, kid, let’s 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 man’s man.
Women think differently. Marilyn Monroe said she couldn’t 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 can’t write by himself but must have someone with him. “When I put pencil to paper, I find myself sketching,” he says. “I can’t write alone—I 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 Freud script without realizing John didn’t understand Freud; by the time Ray Bradbury was through with Moby Dick, he had written twelve hundred pages of outlines and screenplay; Leonard Gardner cried each time John added anything to Fat City; John Milius’ revenge for the way the Judge Roy Bean script finally looked on the screen was to cast Huston in one of his own pictures. The humiliations of writing the final version of The African Queen drove Peter Viertel to publish a novel starring a thinly disguised Huston as a macho director who becomes a crazed big-game hunter and wrecks the preparations for a picture in Africa.
Not that John cannot stand in awe of others, “Let me tell you about Tennessee Williams on The Night of the Iguana. Tony Veiller and I had a pretty good scene written where Burton is alone in his room in a fever and in a drunk, and all these things are going on inside him. Sue Lyon comes in and tries to seduce him and he is doing everything in his power to keep away from the girl. Well, we gave the scene to Tennessee to see what he’d think of it. The only change he wrote was the thing that made the scene. When the girl opens the door suddenly, a glass falls onto the floor leaving broken bits of glass scattered around the room. When the scene is played both of them are barefoot. Burton walks on it and doesn’t even feel his feet being shredded. The girl sees this and joins him walking barefoot across the glass. That was the difference between a pedestrian scene and an extraordinary one.”
Huston has a gift for taking notoriously high-strung individuals on tense, emotional rollercoaster trips, to con and cajole, to flatter and to overpower actors and other collaborators to come along on his investigations of forlorn hopes, criminal conspiracies, tensions of betrayals, and the inner geometries of modern sensibilities. “I wouldn’t mind if he would only sweat once in a while,” Richard Burton has said. “At least it would show he is human.”
Film crews like him because of his habit of referring all technical questions to them and of agreeing to whatever they ask. Producers have felt he spends too much time amusing them with practical jokes and catering to their whims, but the crews love him and will work themselves half to death whenever he asks them to do so. Literally. The African Queen was finished in Uganda with Katharine Hepburn desperately sick with dysentery and crew members carrying equipment around while shaking with malaria. One man died of malaria in Chad on The Roots of Heaven, where the company doctor logged nearly one thousand sick calls. Eddie Albert became delirious, and Errol Flynn shortened his last months with booze and drugs. Clark Gable’s response to John’s goading on The Misfits contributed to the heart attack that killed him two weeks after the wrap.
John himself is immune to the dangers. Excepting his wartime moviemaking, which saw him fly camera runs against Japanese positions in the Arctic and run ahead of his cameramen toward German lines in Italy, his closest call came on Moby Dick when a dummy whale he was on broke its towline in mid-Atlantic.
He is a very good shot, a superb horseman, and an inveterate gambler. He is still working partly because he has lost fortunes since as a twenty-one-year-old he blew his first publisher’s advance in casinos at Saratoga. The eight hundred-plus acre ranch he owned in Encino in the 1940s and 1950s would, in the inflated Southern California real estate market of today, make him a multimillionaire, but it went the way of the $5,000-a-week salaries he had studios pay him in cash on Friday and never seemed to hang onto beyond Saturday. Making a killing on the thoroughbreds he bought or on the crap tables he couldn’t resist has never been enough for him. Wives, friends, associates, and bookmakers have pleaded with him, but he has never listened. Viertel’s novel has a chapter where the fictionalized Huston says how a thoroughbred he pushed too hard made him realize his own limits—the worst realization anyone can make. The horse was a nice two-year-old filly, but cleaning up at six-furlong races was not enough for him and he entered her in a mile race against really good colts. “Well, for six furlongs she beat them all and then at the three-quarter post she stopped as if someone had shot her through the chest with a six-inch gun and the field went by her and she lost. It broke her heart and she never won again and I went home and lay down on my bed and saw my life absolutely clearly, for what it was worth. I was that filly, Pete. A seven-thousand-dollar claiming race, that’s what you can win, I told myself, and my career stopped dead for two years after that race.” The Irish citizenship in 1964 was one way of escaping the income attachments of the Internal Revenue Service.
Because of his desperate need for money, his career includes assignments accepted without hope, and he has jumped, fallen, or been pushed from a number of other deadbeat projects. Of late, he has prospered as a craggy character actor in films less distinguished than most of his own. When these pictures are filmed in the United States his parts are scheduled down to the last day. For complicated reasons that have to do with the IRS he, like his friend Orson Welles, can only work a limited number of days in his native country.
He has been accused of becoming bored and leaving the final stages of his films in other people’s hands, where they have been changed, sometimes ruined. His answer is a benign smile and a “that’s show business” shrug. He has directed most of the legendary screen idols, often with a sporting irreverence for their projected images. His actual setside directing relies on a certain studied passivity and on carrying the film in the making in his own head. Actors accustomed to overdirection are uneasy the first time they work with him. When Claire Trevor asked for a few pointers at the start of Key Largo, he told her, “You’re the kind of drunken dame whose elbows are always a little too big, your voice a little too loud. You’re very sad, very resigned. Like this.” He leaned against the bar with a peculiarly heavy sadness. It was the leaning she caught onto and, without further instruction, developed into an Oscar-winning performance. David Niven says John likes to keep the actor’s first tentative approach and, through rehearsals, build it up, then have the cameraman watch a run-through and, while technicians light the scene, retire to his canvas chair with a box of panatelas and a good book.
His open secret is spending more time on casting than telling actors to move from camera-left to camera-right. “When I cast a picture, I do most of my directing right there in finding the right person. I use actors with strong personalities, ones who are like the characters they play and then I try to guide them through the picture as discreetly as possible. Acting is part intuitive and part technique. The English train their actors to be superb technicians, to take on any shape, and it’s marvelous. Americans tend to rely on charisma and they are better at expressing conflict in nonverbal ways. Some actors like to talk about what they’re going to do and I’ve discovered over the years it’s not really to get information, or your opinion, but just to talk their way into it. Others do almost no talking. On Reflections in a Golden Eye I suppose I addressed myself to Brando no more than a dozen times during the making of the picture. Just stood back and watched this phenomenon.”
A prodigious reader, he regrets that he can only get through three or four books in a week. In the words of Henry Blanke, the Warner Brothers house producer who gave him his first chance to direct, Huston has “an amazing capacity for falling for, and losing himself in, relatively mediocre fiction,” but John considers himself fortunate to have worked on a number of stories by W. R. Burnett and Dashiell Hammett, authors he thinks vastly underrated. His acknowledged influences are Rudyard Kipling, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and Eugene O’Neill. He pored over Kipling as a boy and found adventure, high honor, and distant, shimmering horizons. Walter’s breakthrough on Broadway came in Desire Under the Elms and it was as an eighteen-year-old that John sat watching his father go through rehearsals with the playwright. “I think I learned more about films from O’Neill than anyone—what a scene consists of, and so forth.” Joyce was language and a filmization of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was an advanced project at one time. Hemingway was a feel for the times, grace under pressure. Huston wrote the script for The Killers, the only screen adaptation of any of his work that Hemingway liked. With Evelyn, John visited Papa and Mary at La Finca in Havana and still doesn’t despair of making a film out of Across the River and into the Trees.
He has been a California expatriate for half his adult life and lives mostly in Mexico now. Like Hemingway, he has made Europe his movable feast. Between pictures in Rome and in Vienna, he bivouacks at The Dorchester and the George V and goes gallery crawling in South Kensington and St. Germain des Prés. There was no conscious withdrawal from America in the beginning. He was just a little ahead of the pack in the 1950s and ’60s when Hollywood went multinational.
He is a good drinker and used to say he got a little cockeyed before dinner but always went to bed sober. Now, he drinks less and talks about his battered body with awe. At his Mexican hideaway, built on rented Indian land at the edge of the jungle, he likes the sound of long drinks swishing in glasses to the accompaniment of the waves almost lapping his porch. He also likes to have people and animals around, and friends and cronies find their way to the small bay south of Puerto Vallarta to talk and drink, or just to sit silently with him and watch the sun sink into the Pacific. He loves art more than anything and likes to think his movies include moments of reserve when things aren’t so much spelled out as artfully suggested.
The mature Hemingway, he feels, had this capacity for moving you by what he left out. Bogart had it too, a capacity for expressing not so much lack of feeling as why feelings aren’t there. Great paintings, Huston says, can give the void a meaning. In a secular world, great art bestows if not immortality, at least timelessness and, perhaps, a sense of meaning. He loves pre-Columbian and Etruscan art because, like good modern art, it is direct—angles, form, and space rather than rendition of flesh tones, lacy trees, and sugary clouds. It is silly to confuse art with its objects.
He has enjoyed neither cult following nor track-record box office superstardom. His detractors—and they are many—say he is coasting on a reputation of a wronged individualist, with an excuse for every bad movie. His defenders say he is one of the few filmmakers who knows that poetry needs to be tough-minded. They call his charm the charm of American movies at their best—directness, generosity and a belief that things can be improved—and they applaud him for not playing it safe, even on big, expensive pictures and even if his daring hasn’t always paid off. He claims he is not conscious of themes, yet a Hustonian hero does exist, most of the time someone who looks life in the teeth and then has the drive to go on kidding himself.
“After The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the Europeans said my message was that the end didn’t matter, that it was the means, the undertaking rather than the achievement that mattered. Well, that sounds pretty good.” When pressed he will go a little further and say that although he doesn’t set out to tell one story, his choice of stories is not accidental but something so deep in him he doesn’t think about it.
When asked to sum himself up, he had this to say: “My greatest defect is misplaced faith in certain horses. I suppose my greatest virtue is that, in filming a scene, I refuse to compromise with anything but the best or, at least, the best as I see it.
“What defeats most men in life? Probably the fact that they make false gods for themselves and strive to attain things that don’t have an enduring value for them. I’ve never had any goal except the immediate one, whatever that might be.”
The movies have always lived as if there were no tomorrow, and no yesterday and Huston’s wish is that the cinema remains in the mainstream, a mirror of popular demands for insights and ecstasy. To be all things to all men films must not confine themselves to expressions of distress, anguish, and anger but must be able to be elevating, cheerful and romantic. Authorship has given directors dignity, but it has also led to private works, obscurantism, pretentiousness, and unwieldy experimentalism. He likes packed moviehouses and feels grandiose, superlative advertising is insulting in deserted cinemas. The essence of movies is packed, entranced audiences, a multitude of livid, expectant faces hanging on the screen.
His most memorable films have celebrated singular men shaking their fists at destiny and going after dreams that often exceed their grasp. In the Hustonian world social success is an exercise, not an end to itself. Adventure, including amorous adventure, is there so we can refine ourselves and learn not so much to conquer each other as to master our own lives. Alienation doesn’t lead us out of society but deeper into its maze, forcing us to learn about the evil we want to escape. As innocent bystanders, as moviegoers, we are changed by what we perceive.
Chapter 2
Youth
The beginning was the stuff legends are made of.
John Marcellus Huston was born in Nevada, a town in western Missouri that his grandfather, an engineer and professional gambler, had, by the most ambitious version of the family legend, acquired in a poker game. John’s father, Walter, was born in Toronto, the son of a Scottish mother, Elizabeth McGibbon, and the gambler Robert Houghston, whose father had come to America from Ireland in 1840. John’s mother, Rhea (née Gore), descended from a Richardson family in Ohio. Her grandfather was a Colonel William P. Richardson who on April 23, 1863, received a silver-sheathed sword for his valor in fighting the Civil War in the 25th Regiment, Ohio Voluntary Infantry. The sword was still in the family.
Walter was to have taken up engineering but had become stage-struck in school. He liked to say that a hellfire and brimstone preacher turned him to acting. At eighteen he ran away from home and joined a traveling stock company. When a Canadian sheriff closed it down, he set out to take Broadway by storm. It was an expedition that was underfinanced, to put it mildly. Walter arrived in Manhattan clinging to the rods of a freight train. Semistarvation was broken, however, when he obtained a three-line part in a Richard Mansfield play. It was his “big chance,” but stage fright gripped him. He fumbled his lines and Mansfield personally escorted Walter to the stage door, with the stem admonition to stay away from the theater, except as a paying member of the audience.
He refused to heed the advice, tramped from agent to producer to agent and landed in a play called Convict’s Stripes, written by Hal Reid. When the show closed, hunger forced Huston to join a road company presenting The Sign of the Cross. By 1905, Walter reached the decision that the stage was not for him and, to earn a living he beat his way back to engineering. The retreat coincided with his meeting Rhea Gore, a St. Louis girl with two passions—travel and horses. When he proposed, she said yes—if he would stay away from the theater. Walter was twenty-one and easily exchanged the stage for marital bliss. The newlyweds moved to Nevada, Missouri, ostensibly owned by grandfather Houghston. Soon Walter was gainfully employed at the local water and power company, learning civil engineering via a correspondence course. John was born August 5, 1906.
One night a year later, the town caught fire and the firemen kept telling engineer Huston to give them more water pressure. He obliged and overstrained the system. At daybreak, the young couple found it prudent to put a certain distance between themselves and the citizens of Nevada and, with their baby, they hopped on a train to Weatherford, Texas, another of grandfather Houghston’s jackpots.
In 1950, when Life ran a twelve-page profile on “the most inventive director of his generation,” Ken Postlethwaite, editor of the Nevada Daily Mail, sent the magazine a wire saying he could find no local record of Huston’s birth but that he was certain the town had not been won by grandfather Houghston in a poker game. The telegram continued, LOCAL FILES SHOW TWO FIRES IN YEAR AFTER HUSTON BORN. WATER PRESSURE GOOD AT BOTH CONFLAGRATIONS. NO RECORD OF RUINED MACHINERY AT WATER PLANT. TOWN DIDN’T BURN DOWN. NO RECORD OF HUSTONS FLEEING COMMUNITY. When Life asked John to comment, he wrote “That is as it was told to me by my father, mother and grandmother and it is absolutely true. Perhaps Mr. Postlethwaite is confused.”
Recorded evidence exists that Walter next worked for the Union Electric Light and Power Company in St. Louis, that he won an engineer’s license and worked up to managership at the Charles Street plant. Walter, Rhea, and their baby boy lived three years in St. Louis. Rhea took up journalism and Walter earned the respect of his boss, who told him to keep it up. There was a great future in electrical engineering. “Everybody thought I’d be a good engineer,” Walter would say later. “I even looked like one.” John was an only child, curly-haired and with big ears. He was precocious and had a way of knitting his brow that made Walter think he could be an actor and that father and son could form a smart vaudeville act. Rhea would hear nothing of it.
Walter didn’t see much of his family. His two sisters were taking opposite roads. The elder, Nan, was as much a bore as the younger, Margaret, was fascinating. Margaret was an opera singer. She had married W. T. Carrington, one of the founders of U. S. Steel, a man much older than she. An avid horseman, Carrington had fallen off a horse in New York’s Central Park and left his young widow a millionaire. She kept the townhouse on Park Avenue but instead of returning to the lyrical theater, she became a patron of the arts, a speech therapist who gave private elocution lessons to actors she found worthy of her attention. Nan had remained a spinster.
When John was three, his parents split up, Walter to return to the theater, Rhea continuing her newspapering, first in St. Louis and later in Los Angeles. For most of his childhood, John shuttled between the gambling, horse-loving Rhea, who taught him that all horses in a race but one are losers, and the three-shows-a-day-and-catch-the-sleeper-to-Cleveland vaudeville life of Walter, growing up in many parts of the United States but actually spending most of his adolescence with his mother in Los Angeles.
“I traveled a great deal with each of my parents,” he recalls. “From overnight fleabags with Dad to spacious hotels with Mother. She hated France but loved Turkey. She was crazy about playing the ponies and I remember she was broke once, down to ten dollars. We were out at the track and she put the money on a hundred-to-one longshot that came in. She taught me that money is for spending.”
Rhea was brutally realistic. She had no patience for fairy tales and burst her son’s Easter morning fantasy when he was five, telling him, “Listen I dyed those lousy eggs and hid them myself. There is no Easter Bunny.”
Peter Viertel’s 1953 novel White Hunter Black Heart contains a passage where the fictitious Huston remembers himself as a fifteen-year-old living with his widowed mother. “She’s a woman in her late thirties, still kind of beautiful, with a great manner. Their life is drab, colorless. They have only one thing to make them happy and that’s their love for horses. They save on food all week long, just to be able to go to the livery stable on Sunday and hire a couple of hacks and go riding for an hour. Every Sunday they do that. They each have their favorite horse. That’s what they live for, this one hour of happiness a week, when they can ride out into the country together. Well, a guy comes into their life, a kind of flashy guy, who’s passing through the town, a salesman. He’s there on a business deal that will keep him in town for a couple of months and so he goes on the make for the widow. Of course she has to work all week long and she doesn’t get a chance to go out with the guy on any day except Sunday. At first she fights it, and goes riding with the boy anyway. But she’s been lonely too many years. Nobody has made love to her. And so finally she gives in and makes a date with this guy who’s been after her. And the kid goes out alone. Well, it happens once and then the next week again, and then their whole life together collapses. The kid doesn’t complain. He’s too proud to. He just goes out by himself every Sunday morning on his horse, and when he gets way out in the country he gets off, and sits down and cries. The horse stands there and waits for him to finish, and then he gets on again.”
When John was fifteen, Rhea married a vice-president of the Northern Pacific Railway. John was stuck in one school or another now and then, but mostly he was on the road with his father and his father’s vaudeville partner and mistress.
Her name was Bayonne Whipple. For twelve years, the vaudeville act of Whipple and Huston was a headliner, and in 1915, Walter made Bayonne his second wife.
There was one skit Walter did for his son alone. “I was six when I first saw Dad do this act,” John would say in his special tone of wonderment. “Dad played a house painter, come to paint this lady’s house. There was a picture of her husband inside the front door. The husband’s face would begin to make faces, and then this big head would shove through the door with electric lights for eyes. And I’d roar. And Dad would sing, ‘I Haven’t Got the Do-Re-Mi.’”
Walter called the skit “Spooks.” By the 1920s, Whipple and Huston were a headliner act on the Keith and Orpheum circuits. Deciding they weren’t really getting anywhere, Huston started building a new act, investing $5,000 in equipment and a cast. The Keith people liked the act but weren’t willing to pay more than $1,250 a week for it. Walter held out for another $1,500 and the Schuberts, launching an abortive foray into vaudeville, offered $1,750 a week.
When John was twelve, he was pronounced mortally ill with a heart murmur and put in a sanatorium where every bite he ate and every breath he drew could be professionally analyzed. As a result, he became virtually paralyzed with timidity and fear. “I haven’t the slightest doubt that if things had gone on like that I’d have died inside a few months,” he told James Agee when the author-critic interviewed him for the Life profile. His only weapon was a blind desperation of instinct. Late at night when the medical sages were asleep, he sneaked out and slid down a nearby rocky moss-covered waterfall to frolic in icy water. “The first few times, it scared the hell out of me, but I realized—instinctively anyhow, it was exactly fear that I had to overcome.”
When they caught him at this primordial self-therapy, the doctors were aghast. On second thought, they decided he might live.
Sent to a boarding school in Los Angeles in 1918, John was growing up to be a six-foot-two beanstalk carrying himself in a perpetual gangling, graceful slouch. School didn’t interest him but he had a vast appetite for knowledge and a prodding mind. By his late teens, he was opinionated and streetwise. He spent 1923–24 at Los Angeles’ Lincoln High School. There was a high school right around the corner from his house but he preferred Lincoln High because Fidel La Barba and Jackie Fields, two future boxing champions, went to Lincoln.
“After school we boxed,” he remembers, “at the Los Angeles Athletic Club and the Hollywood Athletic Club. We were amateurs but there was a kind of secret payoff. The winner would get a watch which he would hand back to its owner for ten or fifteen dollars’ kitty we all kicked in to. We had to make some money. Not I, my family was all right, but there were guys who needed money to survive.”
What appealed to John was that as a boxer he wouldn’t have to stay in one place but could travel up and down California. He ended his amateur status with a broken nose and the Amateur Lightweight Championship of California, then became a pro. As he would say in 1972 when he made Fat City about small-time boxing in California, “I wasn’t bad, I wasn’t bad at all.”
“It was little towns like Monrovia, Bakersfield, Stockton. They paid you fifteen or twenty dollars. And there was the Springfree Athletic Club in L.A., a marvelous place which belonged to black fighters, a kind of huge shed derisively called Madison Square Garden West. Sure. They set up bouts with names and weights they invented. You went there and they nodded in your direction and said, ‘You, you fight with this guy.’ I fought twice, under two different names. The whole thing was a joke. I was seventeen and passed welterweight.”
Walter was rather proud of his fighter son—or so he told him, but to enlarge the boy’s horizon he invited him to New York for the summer of his eighteenth birthday.
At forty, Walter was making his breakthrough—sans Bayonne, although he stayed married to her for another seven years. And the theater world he and his sister Margaret evolved in was exciting enough to impress an impressionable young man.
After fifteen years of song-and-dance routines and road stock company acting, Walter had appeared on Broadway in the title role of Zona Gale’s Mr. Pitt, a sentimental play about small-town America. He had been so convincing as Pitt—a meek, pathetic figure—and in a similar part in The Easy Mark, that he was almost typecast.
But in October 1924, his new brother-in-law, Robert Edmond Jones, suggested him to Eugene O’Neill for Desire Under the Elms. Jones—Bobby to everybody—was a striking-looking New Englander whose long pale face and large gray eyes were set off by a beard and unruly shocks of reddish-brown hair. Born and brought up in New Hampshire, he was, as Brooks Atkinson would write, “of the Emersonian faith and a believer in the oversoul.” Like O’Neill he was haunted by an unhappy rural childhood and the gothic images of his family background would help O’Neill’s thinking when he wrote Mourning Becomes Electra.
Bobby was younger than Margaret, who continued to call herself Mrs. Carrington. Since he was a homosexual, she sent him to Vienna to see Sigmund Freud and later claimed the father of psychoanalysis had cured her husband. They were a strange couple—she with her millions, her speech coaching, Park Avenue townhouse, and, on the West Coast, a baronial home in Santa Barbara; he as a director and scenic designer who imparted an exaltation to every production he was associated with. Bobby and Mrs. Carrington were to remain devoted to each other to the end of their lives. When they were old and cancer-stricken, they would always get up to sit and watch dawn together.
As man and wife, their first theatrical triumph had come in 1920. Together with his new wife, Blanche, John Barrymore had spent some time at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, where he had recited Richard III in the woods as a child. Soon he knew the whole play by heart again, but he found his voice had a high nasal tone which bothered him. He wanted to stage Richard III and Blanche knew Mrs. Carrington as the person who knew more about voice training than anyone else. For three months, Barrymore studied with Margaret, six hours a day, while Bobby went to England to assemble costumes and to study scenery. The opening night of Richard III was Barrymore’s greatest triumph, with the final curtain going down at one thirty in the morning. In 1921, Mrs. Carrington coached him for his no less memorable Hamlet.
As John came to New York to spend the summer with his father, Bobby was both the director and the stage designer of Desire Under the Elms. When he suggested his brother-in-law to O’Neill, the playwright was skeptical. In Mr. Pitt and The Easy Mark, Huston had projected characters who were the exact opposite of the harsh, tough old farmer. O’Neill agreed to let Walter read for the part and was immediately impressed.
John was captivated by all this. He attended every rehearsal, met O’Neill, already a bitter alcoholic, and thought he would rather be a writer than a boxer. Walter was perfect in Desire Under the Elms. “There have only been three actors in my plays who managed to realize the characters as I originally saw them,” O’Neill would say toward the end of his life, naming Charles Gilpin in The Emperor Jones, Louis Wolheim in The Hairy Ape and Walter Huston in Desire Under the Elms.
Walter, who loved his only son and showed his affection with pride and confidence, did better than introducing John to famous theater people. He got him a part in the Greenwich Village dramatization of Sherwood Anderson’s The Triumph of the Egg. The comedy was double-billed with O’Neill’s Diff’rent at the Provincetown Playhouse. The New York Times reviewed the plays and gave John a glowing paragraph: “John Huston, son of the Walter Huston who is playing in O’Neill’s ‘Desire Under the Elms,’ made his first Provincetown appearance as Father in the Anderson play. His work was gorgeous. Young Mr. Huston, beyond a doubt, is an actor who should be kept on display in New York theaters.”
It was a great summer. John didn’t live with his father and stepmother but had his own small apartment on Macdougal Street, above one occupied by an aspiring actor named Sam Jaffe. Walter was there for the eighteenth birthday party. Jaffe had asked John what he wanted as a present and he had said a horse. “Well,” Huston says, “Sam, the kindest, most retiring guy in the world, had gone out and bought the oldest, saddest, most worn-out gray mare. It was all wonderful. The best birthday I ever had.”
In October, John was back in Los Angeles for an unhappy year with his mother and railroading stepfather. The following summer, he was in New York again and the next year, he was in Los Angeles—and married.
Not much is known about Dorothy Jeanne Harvey, who in the subsequent divorce proceedings was described as an actress. Agee would pass off the union as “a high-school marriage [which] lasted only briefly,” but John was twenty when he married Dorothy and when he sued for divorce in 1933, they had been married over six years. There is a poignant paragraph in White Hunter Black Heart where the middle-aged director remembers his first wife: “I knew I had lost the best dame I was ever likely to meet, and I’d lost her because I’d acted like a horse’s ass. And it turned out that way. I’d done something wrong and I had to pay for it, and so every time I fell in love again after that, I knew the disenchantment would ultimately turn up. And it did. Never failed. Because you get one chance at everything in life, and that’s all.” Walter would make a revealing comment on his son’s first marriage to Evelyn Keyes when her marriage to John was in ruins in 1950. “I’m sorry,” Walter told Evelyn when she tried to explain. “And I understand. John has always been a bit of a free soul. I’ll tell you something, for what it’s worth. When he married the first time, he was twenty and broke, and I gave him five hundred dollars to set up housekeeping. That was a lot of money then. He spent the entire amount on a chandelier.” After a pause, Walter added, “I haven’t worried about him too much since then.”
A free soul. Without Dorothy, John took off for Mexico. The year was 1927 and, he would say, “I was looking for adventure.”
Mexico would become a lifelong love. “It was an extraordinary country and I had friends who were just as extraordinary—generals, politicos, and pistoleros!” he would fondly remember late in life. “They were all driving in Pierce-Arrows. They never let their chauffeurs drive. The chauffeur sat in the back seat, breaking out the champagne and handing the bottles forward. They drove like crazy!”
John’s meeting with the first general—a cavalry officer married to a German lady who owned a riding school—was tame enough. Always trying to improve his riding skills, John decided to take lessons from Hattie Weldon. One day, the general asked if John really had enough money to continue the riding lessons. “Because if you don’t we can give you an honorary rank and you can ride in competitions.”
John said, Si, señor,—and for the next six months he rode in cavalry shows. He became a top jumping rider and performed with the Mexican Army horse show at Madison Square Garden.
But the real fun was not visiting the States. It was in small Mexican towns with his fellow officers. “We’d make the rounds, starting with a poker game in some big hacienda in the morning. We’d take the game to a brothel, then finally to somebody’s hotel room where we’d play a kind of Mexican roulette. When some guy won a big pot we’d turn out the lights, cock a loaded pistol, and throw it into the air. The pistol would go off when it hit the ceiling. Then we’d turn the lights back on to see who was dead. If the winner survived he could keep the dough. If not, we all split even.”
After the Madison Square Garden horse show, John resigned his commission. But he was barely back in California before he longed for Mexico again. When Walter sent him some money, he booked passage on a coastal steamer and sailed down the Pacific Coast to Acapulco. The boat stopped at several sleepy fishing villages, including Puerto Vallarta which, nearly forty years later, he would put on the tourist map with The Night of the Iguana.
“There was no road from Acapulco to Mexico City in those days,” he remembers. “You had to do it on the back of a mule. It took seventeen days.”
In the spring of 1928 he was back in California. Author Patrick Mahony was a sixteen-year-old schoolboy and aspiring actor who was to remember John that year at Mrs. Carrington’s Villa Aposa in Santa Barbara. “John was a very slim, nice-looking and pompous twenty-one-year-old. He was an awful nice hanger-on. He put on terrific airs and his aunt called him a conceited ass. Of course he didn’t pay much attention to me or to my mother who had met Mrs. Carrington on an Atlantic crossing. Mrs. Carrington didn’t really trust her nephew but she knew he was smarter and more ruthless than anyone in the family. She was no longer young and to see her in a bathing suit was awkward, but she was someone who had an odd charm, even for a sixteen-year-old. Something always happened when she was around.”
John was a conceited ass, Mahony would tell Huston when he visited him in Ireland in 1963.
When John had enough of cadging from his aunt, he went to New York to visit with his father—and his mother, who was now a reporter on the New York Graphic. In Mexico he had written a book of sorts, a retelling of the many “Frankie and Johnny” ballads of his St. Louis childhood. He called his adaptation “a kind of musical play for puppets,” and showed it to his father, who gave it to the Albert and Charles Boni publishers who, to everybody’s astonishment, paid the young author a five-hundred-dollar advance. That decided it for John. Why, he was going to be a writer.
Chapter 3
Hanging out
The five hundred dollars went fast enough. With the Boni advance in his pocket, the twenty-one-year-old neophyte author took the train to Saratoga Springs and headed directly for the casino crap tables. By the most ambitious version of the disposal of the money, he ran it up to $11,000 in one evening before losing it all. It is a matter of faith in early Hustoniana whether one believes he actually reached that figure,* but he did lose it all and to recoup, took a friendly interest in writing.
Frankie and Johnny is an astonishingly mature work, a funny, hard satire in the Brechtian vein on the 1899 shooting by Frankie Baker of Allen Britt which had inspired a number of “Frankie and Johnny” and “Frankie” ballads about the cakewalker and her lover “who done her wrong.” Dedicated to Dorothy, Huston’s Frankie and Johnny has Frankie on the scaffold with the noose around her neck when the curtain opens. “Has the condemned anything to say afore we take in the slack?” the sheriff asks with his hands on the hangman’s rope. Before she is hanged, Frankie tells her story, “How I loved an’ done wrong” working for Johnny Halcomb in his mother’s cathouse, how she saved money in her stocking, how he discovered her roll of bills, refused to believe it was all for him, how he went up to Nelly and how Frankie shot him for his faithlessness, and now the sheriff can pull the cord since she will join her man in the grave. Boni published the slim volume with lovely cubist illustrations by Miguel Covarrubias, a Mexican caricaturist famous for his Vogue drawings of the Revue Nègre. The volume included twenty versions of the “Frankie and Johnny” songs and the St. Louis Dispatch news story of the actual 1899 shooting.
John didn’t really like the solitary métier of writing, even if it paid hard cash. He needed to bounce off things, needed fresh ideas coming to him, instead of formulating them in solitude. When he faced the white page, he had a tendency to doodle and sketch. He wrote a short story, however, which his father showed to his friend Ring Lardner, who showed it to his friend H. L. Mencken, who published it in the March 1929 issue of American Mercury. “Fools” was a first-person vignette of a pair of school chums who become small-time boxers hanging around arenas in Los Angeles suburbs. Harry, the narrator, is a tall, gangling kid who can win because of his long arms; his buddy is a compact Italian knot of nerves and muscles called Victor. One night when another boxer doesn’t show, they are matched. They agree to fake it, but in the ring Harry can’t help hitting Victor although he knows Victor can knock him cold anytime. Victor lets Harry bloody his nose and win the decision although the black fans boo the fight they clearly see is rigged. On the way home in a streetcar, Victor says, “Listen, I believe that Christ and Judas were in cahoots. I believe it was all laid out between.”
Next, John sent Mencken another short story called “Figures of Fighting Men”; it was also bought and published.
Rhea had no high opinion of her son. Never had, apparently. During the making of The Red Badge of Courage when she had been dead for twelve years, John said, “Nothing I ever did pleased my mother,” but in 1929 she got him a job on the Graphic. The journalistic experience was a disaster. “I was the world’s lousiest reporter,” John would admit. “I’m sure that I was fired more times than any reporter in the paper’s history. The city editor on nights hated my guts and he’d sack me at regular intervals, but the managing editor on days, a real nice fellow named Plummer, kept hiring me back.”
The night editor got his revenge one night when John was out on assignment and a singer’s pearl necklace had disappeared. Gallantly, reporter Huston offered to play private detective. “I figured I could get a great story out of it. When I went to meet the gal at her club the cops were there, and I had to admit I was a reporter for the Graphic. But they didn’t believe me. So I told them to call the city editor. Well, this was the guy who kept firing me. They asked him if a reporter named Huston worked for the paper. ‘Nope,’ he said, ‘I never heard of the sonofabitch.’” John’s facts-be-damned approach to journalism caught up with him when he was sent over to New Jersey to cover a trial and he switched the names of the victim and the accused. This time his discharge was permanent.
Walter was making his first picture and John headed West. Gentlemen of the Press was a Paramount picture directed by Millard Webb, a fast newspaper melodrama with Walter as a boozy, big-time reporter. Walter didn’t like Hollywood and would go back to New York on every possible occasion. “I was on the stage twenty-five years before I went to Hollywood and made all that money,” he would say in 1935. “If it hadn’t been for Broadway, the pictures never would have wanted me. I owe it to Broadway—and to myself, to come back.”
All that money. The movies had learned to talk, and although the United States was headed into the Great Depression, Hollywood was embarking on its dizziest decade. Its combination of unlimited capital and professional expertise set it out on a prodigal, wasteful, and ruthless pursuit of excellence that made movies the world’s most popular entertainment and the thirties the classic age of American cinema.
Abraham LincolnBeast of the CityDesire Under the ElmsA House Divided