Watch Me: A Memoir (34 page)

There was a dog wrangler on set whom I could not tolerate. I was to have a clutch of Irish wolfhounds in my scenes in Torre Astura, and I sometimes witnessed this man abusing the dogs, kicking and shouting at them. The abuse of animals is criminal, and to see this guy profiting from it made me furious. I got into squabbles with him a few times. One scene required that my bedroom be filled with hundreds of finches and budgerigars. As scripted, the wolfhounds were to
be seated in a corner. On “action,” the birds were released, and one inadvertently flew right into the open jaws of one of the wolfhounds. I would have felt worse, but it seemed like such a good moment in that dog’s unhappy life I couldn’t help but rejoice, even at the expense of the unfortunate bird.

Bob came to visit, and we traveled up to Ravello to film some scenes at Gore Vidal’s villa, La Rondinaia—the Swallow’s Nest—high above the Gulf of Salerno. Bill and I did a scene on a balcony overlooking the precipitous drop. I thought I’d pass out from vertigo. It was where Gore entertained throughout the sixties and seventies; there were faded photographs of Princess Grace and Noël Coward and Rudolf Nureyev on his walls looking like they were having the time of their lives. In our hotel room, Bob would answer the phone “Beyond the clouds,” and everywhere in the little hilltop town there were references to Dad’s film
Beat the Devil
, which he had made in Ravello in the early fifties with Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Gina Lollobrigida, Robert Morley, and Peter Lorre. Off the square was Dad’s old production office, commemorated with a plaque.

For me, traveling in Italy is always like going home. We visited the little village of San Pietro, where Dad made a documentary film about its liberation by the Americans in World War II. My mother’s parents, Grandpa Tony and Mama Angelica Soma, were from the north, near Lago Maggiore, but we didn’t get to go there on this trip.

Sofia Coppola was in Rome presenting her film
Lost in Translation
, with Bill Murray starring—a brilliant, deeply felt, extremely funny love story. I was very proud of her. Sofia had been unfairly criticized by the press when she had agreed to act in her father’s last film in the
Godfather
trilogy in 1990.
I felt sympathetic, because I had endured the same negative reception after
A Walk with Love and Death
, but I wonder if she would agree that in some way that experience had formed us.

In the last few weeks of the film, we shot in Naples, where there was a garbage strike and the best pizza I’ve ever eaten. The town was beautiful but rough, full of gypsies and sailors. Bob and I went to see the ruins at Pompeii and some marvelous Etruscan carvings at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale, which gave Bob the idea to do a series of bronze portraits of artists and actors and other people he was interested in. When we had last seen Wes in California, Bob had playfully asked him for a cameo in
The Life Aquatic.
Milena had gone to great lengths to outfit Bob beautifully as a mysterious South American dictator; he looked fabulous but unfortunately got only a few seconds of camera time, in a party scene at the harbor on
The Belafonte
.

Bud Cort, who was playing an accountant taken hostage by pirates, went to the canonization of Mother Teresa at the Vatican and brought me back a rosary. On the Day of the Immaculate Conception, Jaclyn and I happened to be standing atop the Spanish Steps watching as, way below, purring up Via Condotti, came the little Popemobile, with Pope John Paul II inside, giving a benediction under a warm yellow light. He was dressed all in white with a red sash, and people were packed on the sidewalks and reaching out to him from behind the barricades. I became very emotional watching him; he had a radiance, something vulnerable, that moved me to tears. I wished I believed in God enough to be Catholic.

CHAPTER 32

H
ercules came to L.A. for his annual cocktail party at the Bel Age in January 2004. One of Herky’s great talents was keeping track of all his friends, discovering and sharing what was best in other people’s cultures. Everyone showed up for Herky’s evening, people I hadn’t seen in a long time. It was always great to catch up. Bob and I didn’t stay long, because the rooms were crowded and we were going on to dinner. As I was getting into our car, a voice rang out. I recognized the owner and hardly dared to turn around. When I did, I was dismayed by Bert Schneider’s appearance. Where once he had been the handsomest of men—tall, slender, and elegant—now he was bent over, twisted, and misshapen. His face was gray and his eyes were bloodshot; he looked like a cadaver. I’d heard that he’d blown his mind on drugs. I did not know what to say to him.

Later that week, Bob and I had lunch at Orso with Hercules and Helmut and June Newton, on their annual visit to town. Bob and Helmut liked each other and were admirers of each other’s work. Bob had been a photographic subject of Helmut’s, as indeed had I, long before Bob and I had ever met. Bob and Helmut shared a passion for the female form and a dry sense of humor.

We talked about how June and Helmut had photographed
each other all their lives; they had even published a book called
Us and Them.
Helmut had been working with movie stars that morning at the Chateau Marmont, where he and June always stayed.

A few days later, there was a fashion show in the front lobby of the hotel. I was seated beside Helmut. One sad, slight model after the next weaved down the runway. Helmut turned to me. “The models are so ugly, you have to look at the dresses,” he said. Helmut always had a healthy disdain for fashion.

Two days later, I was driving on Robertson Boulevard when I got a call from Joan Buck. She had been staying at the Chateau on assignment for
Vogue.
“Have you got Mrs. Davis’s number?” she asked, referring to Barbara, Marvin Davis’s wife. “She’s on the board at Cedars. Helmut has had an accident.” She went on to say that his car had slammed into a wall opposite the garage at the Chateau Marmont. I made the call and drove over to the hospital.

The owner of the Chateau, André Balazs, was there, sitting with Joan and June in a children’s waiting room, which was decorated with decals of caterpillars, toadstools, and Alice down the rabbit hole.

“Helmut is gone,” said June stoically. “Go and see him.”

Helmut was on a gurney in a darkened room. He looked peaceful and unscathed. When I came out, June had gone back to the Chateau for her camera to take his final photograph.

*  *  *

On October 19, 2004, Laila asked if I’d read something of Hunter Thompson’s at the Taschen bookshop in Beverly Hills. She said that Benicio del Toro and Harry Dean Stanton would also be reading and that Hunter would really appreciate it. I decided to bring my nephew Jack, who was always fascinated
by Hunter lore. When we got to the bookstore, I could tell that the night had in place all the ingredients and promise of a rich gumbo; Hugh Hefner and three blondes were seated on a banquette on the second level, drinking pink champagne in a fog of paparazzi; the crowd was thickening; and Hunter, in spite of a very swollen leg from having undergone surgery a few weeks before, was self-anesthetizing with bourbon, modestly but cheerfully, with a caution unusual to him. It was strange for me to see him outside the confines of the Rockies.

Predictably, this mood was not to last for long. During the reading of his book, when someone suggested audibly that perhaps he should go outdoors to smoke, Hunter launched a lead-glass ashtray that hit the little makeshift stage where Harry Dean was standing and glanced off the edge, skimming across the floor toward one of Kelly Lynch’s open-toed sandals. It was merciful that it didn’t break, and the room heaved a collective sigh of relief.

The after-party was at the Chateau Marmont. Hunter ordered me a sugary drink and told me to sit on his lap. He took off his silver totem, the one he always wore, with the squash blossom and the peyote button, and placed it around my neck. I was feeling dizzy from the margarita and the champagne and asked Jack if he would take me home. Laila told me that later that night up in Hunter’s suite, he had rushed toward the balcony as if he might jump and turned back at the last minute. I woke up the next morning with Hunter’s medallion still around my neck. It seemed terribly wrong for him to be without it, so I sent Rafi to take it to him at the Chateau. I would never again see or be frightened by Hunter. He shot himself in the head on February 20, 2005.

*  *  *

Robert Roussel, an American author and filmmaker living in Mexico, suggested to Danny that the Huston family participate in a film festival to take place in Puerto Vallarta in our father’s name the following year. Danny and I flew out to Mexico and met with a group of business owners and local denizens who would be active in the creation of the program. The festival sounded like an interesting idea and one that, at the very least, would allow the extended family to spend some time together. We all cheerfully shook hands and agreed to make a go of it.

Danny and I went on vacation for a week in the Costalegre region, visiting Alix Goldsmith and Goffredo Marcaccini at their resort, Cuixmala, an extraordinarily beautiful and biodiverse estate full of exotic animals imported from Africa years before by Alix’s father, James Goldsmith. This proved to be a wonderful holiday, riding their horses through the wilderness alongside herds of zebra and impala and oryx, seeing crocodiles slide into the water from the riverbanks.

There was a hatchery on the beach where they incubated baby turtles and one day we sent several out to sea, their tiny bodies so soft and vulnerable one could only pray for their survival. Every night Goffredo would cook delicious pasta, and we went to sleep in cabanas under the stars to the songs of night frogs and cicadas.

In November 2004, according to plan, the Hustons descended in force on Puerto Vallarta. There were about fifteen of us, friends and family, including Danny, Katie, Allegra, Tony, Cisco, baby Rafa, my nephews Jack and Matt, Laila, and Kate O’Toole. But soon it became evident that the festival might not survive to enjoy a future as an annual event in Dad’s name. With all good intentions, the screenings were
mysteriously canceled or moved to different venues without notification.

Notwithstanding, it was lovely to be in Puerto Vallarta, just a stone’s throw from where Dad had spent his final years. Jack and Matt had never seen his place, and Allegra and Danny and I had such great memories of Dad in the midst of the jungle, with no walls between him and nature. I suggested that we hire a panga and a boatman and make a little pilgrimage to Las Caletas.

We sailed out from an unfamiliar mooring at Boca de Tomatlán. When I’d gone to visit Dad in the old days, the harbor was just a bay with a grass shack and a few rowboats tied up. We motored out to a channel between two rocky cliffs that rose from the ocean floor, and dove in to circle the rocks in masks and snorkels and watch schools of exotic fish and a white octopus dancing underwater.

Soon after we reboarded the boat and sailed on beside the coast, Las Caletas appeared in front of us all at once like a mirage. Dad had said he hoped that after his death, it might return to the jungle. Evidently, just the opposite had happened. From a distance, it looked like a termite hill or like cupcakes left on a windowsill covered in ants. Las Caletas was swarming with tourists; sailboats and Jet Skis lined the beach, and a sign for a gift shop and café bar halfway up the cliff read
JOHN HUSTON MARISCOS.
Scuba tours were being advertised, and Thai massage. Allegra’s eyes met mine. “Let’s not stop,” she said.

I said, “Let’s go to the Von Rohrs’. It’s just around the bend. Things will be better there.” Von Rohr had been Dad’s closest neighbor on the coast, the owner of a pristine stretch of white sand beach halfway to Xalapa.

As our panga turned a bend past an outcropping of black rocks, we saw a couple of people in the water, and on the beach a man in shorts and a straw hat was nailing something to a fence. Allegra and I climbed from the boat onto shore, wanting to introduce ourselves to whoever was in residence. As we walked toward the house, in a grove of palm trees, a voice called out to us. By now we had crossed the strand and reached the terrace, where a man in a Hawaiian shirt stood in the shadows. “Get out of here,” he said.

I was so shocked that somehow it didn’t register. “I don’t think you understand,” I said amiably. “My father was John Huston; he used to live next door.”

The man walked toward us menacingly. “I don’t give a damn who you are,” he said. “Get out of here. Now!”

As fast as we could make it, Allegra and I ran back to the boat, and as we pushed back out to sea, we related our story to the others. Allegra and I were both sobbing. Jack and Danny and Cisco wanted to go back to talk to the guy. We begged them not to. The whole experience felt too dangerous.

*  *  *

On April 2, 2006, I had my last cigarette. I had smoked since I was fifteen. In so many of my early photographs, I have a cigarette as my constant prop; I don’t think I ever did a photograph for Bob Richardson without one in my hand or clouds of smoke billowing around my face. Just recently, I checked to see if the old carton of American Spirits is still in the drawer in my office. For some reason, I like to keep it there, like a road sign I passed eight years ago.

Katie had told me that she and Danny were going to a seminar to quit. It was called “The Easy Way to Stop Smoking,” and I announced that I wanted to go, too. I was smoking
two packs a day and was sick and tired of my old habit. The cost of the session was six hundred dollars—enough money to make you pay attention. When I sat down in a hotel conference room with the ten other people, my expectations were quite low, particularly since our counselor encouraged us to leave the room every fifteen minutes or so for a smoke break.

We’d troop outside and light up, sucking on our cigarettes ever more urgently, as six hours dwindled down to one. Eventually, the counselor brought us all back together, and we joined in a prayer and dumped our cigarettes in a wastepaper basket. Having said goodbye to everyone, I went to the parking lot and opened my car door. This would have been the moment to settle behind the wheel and light up. Extraordinarily, that wasn’t my impulse. I drove home and repeated the same thought process in the kitchen. Whereas yesterday I would have walked into my house and paused for a smoke before going upstairs, now it was suddenly no longer part of my repertoire.