Interview

Anjelica Huston came to New York City in 1969. She had already tried her hand at acting, having appeared in one of her father John Huston’s less successful films, A Walk With Love and Death (1969), at the age of 16. For her performance, she was roughly criticized—comparable only to the treatment of Sofia Coppola for her turn in her father’s film The Godfather: Part III (1990) long before she became a filmmaker herself (and a very good one). One only wonders what would have happened had Huston allowed that early experience to preclude a future career in acting. As it turned out, Huston waited more than a decade to return to the screen in a serious way. And when she finally did, in 1985’s Prizzi’s Honor, she won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Since then, Huston’s filmography has been a hit list of risky choices, and today serves as one of the few examples of survival in an industry that has never been kind to women over 40. Her endurance may very well be attributable to the fact that, for all the weight of the Huston family name, she’s an actress absolutely unlike any other that has come before or after. Huston has graced Interview’s cover four times. Here she talks about her days in and out of the Hollywood machine.

CHRISTOPHER BOLLEN: I just went through all of the different features that Interview has done with you over the years. You’ve been in the magazine eight times and appeared on the cover for four of them.

ANJELICA HUSTON: I think I was on one of the magazine’s first color covers. It was a photograph that I did with Berry Berenson. I’m speaking into a red telephone.

BOLLEN: Actually, I think you’re posing with a hand that is coming out of the left corner of the cover and holding a microphone and, strangely, also a cigarette. I love that the designer didn’t find that too distracting to delete from the image. But I guess that’s how it went back then: no separate photo shoot and interview. All the magic just happened at once.

HUSTON: Yes! As far as I can recall, it was just Berry and me in a room. I remember that interview in part because I basically said “groovy” every other word.

BOLLEN: You can’t blame yourself for that. That was in the lexicon of the time. Or were you a woman particularly susceptible to groovy?

HUSTON: [laughs] Well, obviously, it held a lot of attraction for me. I used it on such a consistent basis.

BOLLEN: Berry Berenson was a regular contributor to the magazine. And you probably know this, butshe first got to know Anthony Perkins while doing a feature interview of him—and then they fell in love and got married. Were you friends with Berry, or was that interview the first time you two met?

HUSTON: Oh, we were very, very good friends. I first met Berry and [her sister] Marisa when we were all about five or six. Our parents used to go to Klosters in Switzerland for winter holidays, and Berry and Marisa were the stars of the skating rink. They were a little older than I was, but they were the Berenson sisters—very beautiful even at that young age.

BOLLEN: Your second Interview cover came two years later, in 1974—which you shared with your thenboyfriend Jack Nicholson. I read the article they did on you. You two had just started dating, and I was struck by how honest and open you both were in the article. You don’t get that kind of candid look into celebrities’ lives anymore. I guess there wasn’t the same need for protection in those days.

HUSTON: Well, I think the difference is due to the fact that, as Joni Mitchell so succinctly put it, there’s “the starmaker machinery.” There are two levels of truth today. There’s the truth that goes on between people, and then there’s the realitytelevision truth. In those days, there was only one kind of truth—what you were and what you were trying to do in the world—as opposed to “presented truth.”

BOLLEN: It seems like celebrities can’t afford to put that truth out in the world now, so it’s all publicity smoke screen.

HUSTON: Well, you can, but it’s all extremes now—extremes of inhibition or total lack of inhibition. So now people don’t just cry in public, they roar. Or they don’t cry at all. I think it’s come down to a choice of showing nothing or showing everything. There doesn’t seem to be much middle ground for who you really are anymore.

BOLLEN: Do you remember those early years in New York before you moved to Hollywood fondly?

HUSTON: I do. I was with the photographer Bob Richardson for at least four of the years I was living in New York. That was, at times, a very difficult relationship, so it’s not a period that I look back on through rose-colored glasses. But there was a tremendous energy in New York back then, and I met people who changed my life. I had the incredible good fortune to work with Richard Avedon and Irving Penn and Giorgio Sant’Angelo and Halston and Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton—all the luminaries working in New York at the time. So I was in exalted company.

BOLLEN: Honestly, to me, that was the apogee of fashion photography.

HUSTON: Definitely! And there was Hiro, and Chris von Wangenheim, and Arthur Elgort, and Francesco Scavullo . . . That time was just brimming with talent. And then downtown there was The Factory, and every night people would go to Max’s Kansas City and Andy would come in. And also at night you’d go to Elaine’s, practically as regularly as you would go to church, and there would always be amazing people around and great writers . . . It was a heady time.

Photo: Anjelica Huston in Los Angeles, August 2009. All clothing: Giorgio Armani. Hat: Makins. Pocket square: Tom Ford. Jewelry: Huston’s own. Cuff links: Baade II. Shoes: Lanvin.