In Conversation: Anjelica Huston On growing up in Hollywood, the cost of beating Oprah at the Oscars, and why Jack Nicholson doesn’t act anymore. Andrew Goldman. Vulture, May 1 2019. https://www.vulture.com/2019/05/anjelica-huston-in-conversation.html
You were actually arrested for cocaine possession at Jack’s house in 1977. What did your father say?
Not a thing. He was a prince. Never mentioned it. It was like, “You need my help, honey?” Princely.
Was the arrest embarrassing to you?
Oh, awful. So embarrassing, humiliating. I was really ashamed.
You were arrested because you happened to be in Jack’s house when Roman Polanski raped 13-year-old Samantha Geimer. How did you feel about that?
Well, see, it’s a story that could’ve happened ten years before in England or France or Italy or Spain or Portugal, and no one would’ve heard anything about it. And that’s how these guys enjoy their time. It was a whole playboy movement in France when I was a young girl, 15, 16 years old, doing my first collections. You would go to Régine or Castel in Paris, and the older guys would all hit on you. Any club you cared to mention in Europe. It was de rigueur for most of those guys like Roman who had grown up with the European sensibility.
Among a lot of Hollywood men, it was acceptable at that time to treat women as though they were disposable.
I think they’re still doing it. I was at the hairdresser’s yesterday, and I heard tales of such horror from women. There was one other client and two girls who were working in this rather small hairdressing shop. And one of the girls had been passed a Mickey Finn in a bar and had woken up on a couch with a guy ejaculating wildly all over her face. And as she was telling the story, another girl who worked in the salon came in and said, “The weirdest thing happened to my friend last night. She was found at four in the morning in the Wilshire district, coatless, shoeless, with scratches and bruises all over her body. She doesn’t know whether she was raped. So, I’m trying to stop her from having a bath because we need to get her to the police.”
So you don’t think anything has changed?
No, I don’t. And frankly, I think there’s a whole element of guys who will get up to what they want to get up to. I didn’t think Brett Kavanaugh was all that believable. And yet this whole thing continues to be whitewashed and whitewashed and whitewashed. On the other hand, there is a thing called a male imperative, and it is maybe stronger than any #MeToo movement, because it happens at birth. I have a great 3-year-old nephew who made his way over to my umbrella rack the other day and pulled an Irish walking stick out and said, “I am the leader of the universe.” Girls don’t do that.
Did you have what would have qualified as #MeToo experiences?
Yeah, yeah.
What happened?
You’d have to ask me that on a daily basis, practically. That’s how often it happens, that you’re objectified, or misread, or put down. I think men do it a lot, and I don’t really think half the time they know what they’re doing. That’s how inured they are.
You were certainly objectified. Elia Kazan wasn’t great to you when he was casting The Last Tycoon.
He said, to a random woman waiting at a bus stop, “Do you think she’s beautiful?” She said, “I wouldn’t say ‘beautiful.’ Interesting, maybe.” I watched the part fly out the door. It was the “right girl” in The Last Tycoon,the part Ingrid Boulting got. I got the “wrong girl” part. But that was mild, compared to some shit that goes down.
You were in two Woody Allen films, Crimes and Misdemeanors, alongside Mia Farrow, and then Manhattan Murder Mystery. Woody Allen is basically unable to make films now because of the outcry about the molestation allegations.
I think that’s after two states investigated him, and neither of them prosecuted him.
Well, the industry seems to be treating him as though he’s guilty. Would you work with him again?
Yeah, in a second.
Jeffrey Tambor, whose girlfriend you played on seasons two and three of Transparent, was accused by his former assistant and an actress on the show of behaving inappropriately toward them. Did you know the two women?
I’ve met them both. At least insofar as I was concerned, nobody did or said anything inappropriate. I do think in this work we have to feel freedom. We have to feel as though we can say and do things that are not necessarily judged, particularly by the other people in the cast or crew.
So you think what happens on the set should stay on the set, and there are processes that make the rules of behavior a little different from what you might find at a corporate job?
That’s absolutely what I’m saying.
So would it be fair to say this is a defense of things that Jeffrey might have said that were possibly misinterpreted?
Yes, that is fair. He certainly never said or did anything inappropriate with me.
How did you come down on Polanski when people were signing petitions to have him readmitted to the U.S.?
My opinion is: He’s paid his price, and at the time that it happened, it was kind of unprecedented. This was not an unusual situation. You know that movie An Education with Carey Mulligan? That happened to me. It’s about a schoolgirl in England who falls in love with an older dude, Peter Sarsgaard. My first serious boyfriend I met when he was 42 and I was 18.
The photographer Bob Richardson. It wasn’t illegal though.
He was way older than me. I mean, old enough to know better. But these things happen, that’s what I’m saying. These things weren’t judged on the same basis that they’re judged on now. So you can’t compare them.
He was abusive, correct?
Yeah. In modern terms. We wouldn’t have known what to call it then. I don’t think he set out to be abusive, but he was manic-depressive. He was schizophrenic.Richardson, whose schizophrenia was diagnosed in the ’60s and exacerbated by drug and alcohol abuse, was periodically homeless, and often living on Southern California beaches. His son, the photographer Terry Richardson, got him off the streets in 1984. He died in Manhattan in 2005 at 77. So you can’t really say that schizophrenic is abusive, although to live with a schizophrenic is about as difficult.
You wrote that you once made him a steak and he threw it against the wall because it took too long.
At first I said, “What have I done?” And then at a certain point, I just had to get away. My mother had just died, so I think I was looking for someone to take care of me. And not take care of me at the same time. It was very dramatic. He also was extremely controlling, so he hated when I worked with other photographers.
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