A Story Lately Told (24 page)

Later that summer, some six months after Mum’s death, Allegra and Nurse came to Ireland. My little brother, Danny,
was there with Zoë, his mother, so Danny and Allegra developed an early closeness. From St. Clerans I wrote to Joan in New York:

Generally it feels like an ex-orgy. Danny is fat and Italian and not too pretty, and I don’t understand anything he says. Nevertheless, he appears quite likable, as he holds Allegra’s hand and smiles a lot. Nurse is mixing and rapping with Mrs. Creagh, and happy as hell. It’s beautiful to see them both here.

Allegra was staying in my old bedroom at the Little House but didn’t realize that everything there once was mine: the toys, the Japanese dolls, the music box, the books.

Dad was also due to come home. I was dreading the meeting that would take place between Bob and my father, and I did not invite Bob to come to Ireland. My instinct was that Dad would loathe him. It seemed inevitable. Bob had demanded that I meet up with him in London or we would “never see each other again.” I booked the flight, but later that evening a telegram came,
Flight to London canceled, arrive in Paris Tuesday, your friend Bob Richardson.
Is he my
friend,
too? I wondered.

I wrote to Joan:

The Richardson tells me that he has seen much of you. He has also just about closed his little space-capsule about himself. First, I was leaving, getting into the big black limousine off to Ireland and it’s all “I love you,” and happily heartbreaking, and I am gone. And while I am gone, mysterious change. The conversations on the telephone start off “I love you,” repeat, “I miss you,” repeat. Then suddenly, the mood changes in front of my ears—

“You’ve got to make up your mind.”

“What do you want?”

“You’re trying to do me in.”

I was worried about meeting Bob in Paris, because if things did not work out between us, I didn’t dare think of the consequences. I had mistaken Bob’s need for dominance and control as love. Nevertheless, I joined him at the Hotel Raphael in Paris, and we went on vacation to Marrakech. He bought me an exquisite white silk wedding hammock and a heavy black djellaba that made me look like a female Rasputin.

•  •  •

A Walk with Love and Death
had opened poorly that fall, and I personally received some breathtakingly negative reviews. The film critic John Simon said, “There is a perfectly blank, supremely inept performance by Huston’s daughter, Anjelica, who has the face of an exhausted gnu, the voice of an unstrung tennis racket, and a figure of no discernible shape.”

I was not particularly thrilled to hear that Dad’s publicist, Ernie Anderson, was organizing a schedule of appearances and talk shows to promote the film for Fox. There was a visit to an army barracks in Cleveland built into the schedule. I vaguely remember watching the K9s attacking a man in burlap. There were some stopovers in Boston and Chicago. My co-star, Assaf Dayan, was in from Tel Aviv, and we were booked to stay at the Plaza Hotel for the end of the junket. Bob had insisted that when I returned to New York, I should stay with him at the Gramercy Park, his hotel of choice. I did not want to disappoint Bob, so I explained the importance of switching hotels to Ernie, who kindly accommodated my request.

I was at the hotel having a bath when Bob walked in. We were so happy to see each other. We smoked some pot, ordered
up a slice of pecan pie and another of cheesecake, made love, and went to sleep. I had a wake-up call for early in the morning, as I was to appear for a taping of the
Tonight
show. When the phone rang, Bob did not stir. It was still dark when I tiptoed out, careful not to wake him. I had not yet unpacked but had pulled out of my suitcase the white satin shirt and python maxi skirt and vest I’d had made up at Carnaby Street in London, after my return from the
Walk with Love and Death
set in Austria. The
Tonight
show, one of the first on-air interviews I’d ever done, was unremarkable except for Johnny Carson’s evident boredom. As I was answering a question, he’d invariably check his notebook for the next one. It was an odd style, quite unbalancing.

I was looking forward to getting back to the hotel room to see Bob. I turned the key quietly in the lock. By now it was midmorning. When I opened the door, a single ray of light seeped through the join in the curtains, and I beheld a strange sight. Naked, like a martyr fallen from his cross, an arm flung across his eyes, his limbs so scattered as to look broken, Bob lay on a couch across the room. For a second, I wondered if he’d been attacked or mugged, but this was evidently not so. My torn dresses and broken jewelry littered the floor. Some garments clung to the window ledge, while others had made the journey through the open window to the pavement below, never to be recovered.

“What have I done?” I cried, casting off my stiff python suit and standing before him half naked. “Tell me, what have I done?” I cried again. I think this was an attempt to prove to him that I was unarmed, that I was not a threat. I stayed for hours with Bob in the darkened room, pleading with him to forgive me for leaving my suitcases unpacked. That had been my offense. In that short time, I had become the enemy.

I felt responsible for having hurt his feelings and was addled and shaken by his behavior. Even though I couldn’t understand the train of thought that brought him to this state of confusion and despair, it was evident that he really cared a lot about me. Bob had a magic knack of knowing with great precision what was to be my breaking point, when he would become human and loving again. He said that because I had not unpacked my bags, it had made him feel temporary, unimportant, and insecure—this reaction should show me how much he loved me.

In the weeks that followed, there were other interviews, appearances, and obligations to the movie. By now Ernie had apprised Dad of my decision to stay in an alternative hotel with a boyfriend, and I had received a stern call from Dad saying that he did not like the sound of this arrangement and would be coming to New York imminently to check it out. I had nightmares of his showing up in the slightly shabby confines of the Gramercy Park Hotel lobby, ready to haul me off in chains to a nunnery. I burrowed down with Bob. Ernie Anderson called to tell me I was booked on
The David Frost Show.
The night before I was due to go on, I wept, telling Bob how much I missed Mum. “I’m scared of Dad,” I told him. “He frightens me.”

Bob exploded. “What are you saying? He’s your father! He’s the one you really love, the one you love the most! You know you love your father more than you ever loved your mother!”

He told me to apologize to my father on television for having been insensitive and difficult to work with, and for having disappointed him when he had done so much to help me. In fear and shock, I went out like a robot and did
The David Frost Show.
I said word for word what Bob had told me to say. After I got off the show, Ernie said, “Well, that should bring them in, if nothing else does!” David Frost named me as one of his most
interesting interviews that year. I guess he hadn’t interviewed Richard Nixon yet.

The truth was that I was confused and out of my depth while hopelessly attempting to make Bob happy. I was unaware of the extent and seriousness of his condition. I did not know that he was clinically sick, and I felt responsible for his pain. Anything, even the smallest thing, could threaten him or put him in a tailspin. It took several days for Bob to recover from these episodes, sometimes longer. He never told me that he used to hear voices and hallucinate badly. That he once destroyed his studio and was sent to a private clinic, where they placed him in a padded cell and put him in a straitjacket. Or that he had a brother who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. In time I learned that Bob was bipolar, schizophrenic, and bisexual. He had attempted suicide at twenty-two and at least four times in the years that followed, the evidence of which crisscrossed his veins in razor scars, from the wrists to the upper arms. I thought of Bob as a wounded soul and believed it was my mission to save him. When he would turn his head away from the wall and back to me, it was cause for celebration. We’d go around the corner to Luchow’s and make up over a bottle of Lancer’s rosé, and everything would look brighter.

•  •  •

Norma was now living in Woodstock with their four-year-old son, Terry, so on weekends Bob and I would often take the bus to Woodstock from the Port Authority on Forty-second Street, a derelict and ugly place, and watch out the window as the shabbiness of midtown Manhattan gave way to the green of the country. I loved Woodstock, with its rivers warm enough to wallow in during the summer. There was always something going on. Because it was a frontier town in music, they were all
living there, from Richie Havens to Robbie Robertson and the Band to Bob Dylan. But if you wanted, you could just be quiet and cook and hang out, which was what I loved to do, and it gave Bob a chance to visit Terry.

Sometimes we would stay in a sort of open-house arrangement with a music-producer friend of Bob’s, Ron Merian, and his wife, Valma. There was a story going around at the time about a very young, very pretty model of the moment who, one day, while tripping on LSD, jumped off a tree, thinking she could fly. She hit the ground and died. Although drugs were ubiquitous and always available, especially in a town like Woodstock, I was not tempted to try anything stronger than grass. The word “acid” scared me, and still does. When Bob and I heard that thousands of hippies were headed to Woodstock on August 15, 1969, we decided to stay in New York City, thereby missing out on a huge chunk of history.

T
hough the photographs from my trip to Ireland with Dick Avedon had not yet run in
Vogue,
I had gained confidence from the experience and had made up my mind that I wanted to be a fashion model. I had always doubted my own physical appeal but, oddly, I felt powerful in front of the camera.

When I told Bob that I wanted to be a model, he didn’t laugh at me. He asked why I didn’t want to act anymore. I told him that it was too painful, that the criticism was unbearable, and that I had lost my nerve. Bob said it was obvious that I needed to join an agency. He called Eileen Ford and asked if she would see me as a favor to him. I walked into Ford Models some few days later and was shown into Eileen’s private suite. When I entered the room, a pert, freckled woman in her forties with a reddish bob and a girlish headband looked me smartly up and down. “Let’s see your legs,” she said.

I told her my ambition was to be photographed by Guy Bourdin, and she replied nastily, “What do you want, dearie? A plane ticket to Paris?” I ran home to Bob. Kindly, he consoled me. “We’ll show her,” he said. “She’s just a pain in the ass.” He assured me that Eileen had nothing against me, even though she was friends with his wife, Norma. Despite her testiness, she did take me on as a Ford model.

I was very shy and I loathed go-sees—walking through the streets of New York brandishing my two-foot-square modeling book full of photographs like a weapon, riding up in strange elevators to photography studios, mostly on the Lower East Side or downtown on Broadway, to be looked over like horseflesh. You never knew what might come out of the shadows. On one of my first meetings, a photographer leafed through the book and suggested we do some test shots. When I raised my arms in a pose, he exclaimed, “Don’t fly away!” I ran to his desk and grabbed the book before darting down the emergency exit stairs in tears.

Again I confided in Bob. “Watch me,” he said. He went to the record player and chose a song. “This is important. Always carry your own music.” Hypnotic and compelling, Bob showed me
poses to seduce the camera. Then he sat me down and showed me books with pictures from his favorite photographers, the ones who inspired him—from Alfred Stieglitz, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Bill Brandt, Robert Doisneau, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, and George Brassaï to the fashion photographers Horst, Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon, and Irving Penn. He gave me a list of photographers I should work with, starting with Helmut Newton and ending with Guy Bourdin. “Stick with me,” he said. “We’ll show them.”

For four years I went in and out of the light with Bob. He was crazy and troubled and fierce, but he was an amazing teacher. In times of unity, we had a strong collaboration. He taught me about timing, movement, what the camera sees. If it was there to steal your soul, well, he aimed to do just that—the conversation was seductive and the lens was a catalyst. But in order for us to live together, I had to believe that it was him and me against the world.

•  •  •

We had very little money. One option that we hadn’t explored in New York was the infamous Chelsea Hotel, through the years a refuge of sorts for artists and drifters. It smelled of bad luck. It was the place where Dylan Thomas was staying when he died of pneumonia on November 9, 1953, and where, later, Nancy Spungen, the girlfriend of Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, was found stabbed to death on October 12, 1978. I don’t mean to denigrate it as just a graveyard; living at the Chelsea Hotel was a rite of passage. From the moment you walked through the double doors into the lobby, you were on your way down the rabbit hole. “Red,” the doorman and night porter, an older black man with orange hair and freckled skin, showed you to your room with an air of uncertainty and a rattling of keys. One felt lucky
if it was unoccupied; half the time it seemed like the management didn’t know. But in effect they had a point, as when the moment one entered, a thousand cockroaches revealed themselves, frozen in the sudden glare of the electric light. I hated them with a passion—their transparent bodies, their feelers testing the atmosphere, hiding in the dark cracks of the room, waiting for the darkness to manifest so they could reemerge to creep onto your pillow as you slept.