John Huston, born 100 years ago today, was one of the most colourful extroverts to bestride the film industry, a truly larger than life character. Michael Dwyer recalls the great director
In Billy Wilder's 1950 classic Sunset Boulevard, Gloria Swanson's character is addressed with the lines: "You're Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big." To which she replies: "I am big. It's the pictures that got small." John Huston made pictures that were big and small, and some of his greatest were the smallest in terms of scale and budget, but he was bigger than all of them, truly larger than life.
One of the most colourful extroverts to bestride the film industry, Huston led such an eventful life that it could make for a fascinating film. The only problem, and it's insurmountable, would be deciding what to leave out and how to compress what remains into two or three hours of screen time. Maybe a 10-part TV mini-series could do justice to Huston as the subject of a biopic. Maybe.
A man of famously fiery temperament, Huston never suffered fools gladly, on or off the film set. "My life is composed of random, tangential, disparate episodes," he wrote in the preface to his lively autobiography, An Open Book. "Five wives; many liaisons, some more memorable than the marriages. The hunting. The betting. The thoroughbreds. Painting, collecting, boxing. Writing, directing and acting in more than 60 pictures.
"I fail to see any consistency in my work from picture to picture - what's remarkable is how different the pictures are, one from another. Nor can I find a thread of consistency in my marriages. No one of my wives has been remotely like any of the others - and certainly none of them was like my mother. They were a mixed bag: a schoolgirl; a gentlewoman; a motion-picture actress; a ballerina; and a crocodile."
I never did get around to asking Huston about the crocodile when, as a fledgling writer, I interviewed him for In Dublin magazine in 1981, at the end of a world tour promoting his autobiography. There were many other subjects I didn't get to raise because it was hard to get a word in edgeways. Most people would be talked out after the itinerary he had undertaken, but not Huston, a marvellous raconteur, especially when the subject was his own life and times.
He was 74 at the time and cut an imposing figure as he eased his six-foot-two frame into an armchair at the Shelbourne Hotel, polishing off one large tumbler of whiskey after another. He was dressed like a country gentleman in an impeccably cut green tweed jacket. The bags under his eyes appeared to be deeper set than they ever looked in photographs or on the screen, but as he points out in his autobiography, "I was born with circles under my eyes."
JOHN HUSTON WAS born 100 years ago today in Missouri. His book tells how the family doctor became so alarmed by those dark circles under his eyes that he ordered a complete medical examination, which diagnosed various maladies and confined his young patient to bed and a rigorous diet for over a year. A few years later, when he was 15, young Huston's recovery was so complete that he quit high school in Los Angeles to become a boxer. Later, having paid the price of a broken nose, he became the amateur lightweight champion of California.
His father, Walter Huston, had given up engineering in favour of his passion for acting, which he passed on to his son, and John was just three when he made his stage debut, wearing an Uncle Sam suit and popping out of a band box to recite 48 verses of Yankee Doodle Dandy. His mother, Rhea Gore, was a sports reporter, and his parents divorced when he was six.
Just as John later would foster the creative ambitions of his own children, his father helped him to get a foot in the Hollywood door as a screenwriter, after the young Huston had returned from his adventures as a cavalry officer in Mexico and as a struggling street singer and painter in London and Paris.
In 1941 Huston received the first of his 15 Oscar nominations - eight as a writer, five as a director, one as a producer and one as an actor - for the screenplay of Dr Ehrlich's Magic Bullet, on which he shared the credit with two other writers.
The following year Huston received two Oscar nominations, for the screenplays of Sergeant York and The Maltese Falcon, the stylish Dashiell Hammett adaptation that marked his auspicious directing debut. Huston was back in the Oscars arena again in 1949, when his work on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre won him the Academy Awards for best director and best screenplay, and he rewarded his father with the best role of his screen career in that film, earning Walter Huston the Oscar for best supporting actor.
John Huston cut a strong screen presence as an actor in his own right, most memorably in his Oscar-nominated performance as Cardinal Glennon in Otto Preminger's The Cardinal (1963) and as the sinister and powerful Noah Cross in Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974). In the late 1960s he had the distinction of appearing in three consecutive movies that were banned in Ireland, where he had become a citizen - Candy, De Sade and Myra Breckinridge.
He holds the unique distinction of directing his father and his daughter in Oscar-winning performances. In 1986, and 37 years after Walter Huston won his Academy Award, Anjelica Huston received hers for Prizzi's Honor. John Huston's son, Tony, also received an Oscar nomination in 1988 for his father's haunting swansong, The Dead, adapted from the James Joyce story in Dubliners.
JOHN HUSTON'S CAREER as a director ended as it began, with a literary adaptation, and one of the persistent criticisms of his career was that he played safe in his choices of material, opting for stories already proven in another form. There is merit in that argument.
The worst film Huston directed was based on the best-known book in the world, The Bible, a dull and ponderous treatment that attracted attention for daring to show Adam and Eve naked, albeit coyly naked, back in conservative 1966. Huston hammed it up as Noah in the movie, and he got to realise the ambition of many a film director - to play God, even if it was only on the soundtrack of the movie.
Not much better was one of the most expensive films Huston made, his 1982 screen treatment of the insufferably twee stage musical, Annie, although it's hard to imagine any director shaping such source material into a tolerable movie.
Then again, there was certainly no question of playing safe with some of the books he chose to bring to screen, particularly towards the end of his career when he tackled such difficult stories as Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood, Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano and Joyce's The Dead. And it's a mark of Huston's adventurous nature that, when he was preparing Freud, which starred Montgomery Clift, he commissioned Jean-Paul Sartre to write the screenplay.
Huston had directed Sartre's play, No Exit, on the New York stage in 1946, and had met Sartre when he was shooting Moulin Rouge in Paris a few years later. Sartre agreed to write Freud for $25,000, but the script he delivered (in French) was so long that the movie would have run for over five hours, and it was anti-Freud in almost every respect.
In January 1960 Sartre spent a fortnight at Huston's house, St Clerans, in Co Galway, as they attempted to reduce the screenplay to a manageable length. The ever-loquacious Huston finally met his match in Sartre, whom de described as "a little barrel of a man, and as ugly as a human being can be."
There was no such thing as a conversation with Sartre, Huston recalls in An Open Book. "He talked incessantly, and there was no interrupting him. You'd wait for him to catch his breath, and he wouldn't. The words came out in an absolute torrent. You might be able to catch him off guard and get in a point, but if he answered you at all - which was seldom - he would resume his monologue immediately."
HUSTON FIRST CAME to Ireland in 1951, shortly before starting work on The African Queen. An avid foxhunter, he was invited to a hunt ball at the Gresham Hotel in Dublin. He was a guest of the Guinness family, and he spent the weekend at their Lugalla home in Co Wicklow. Next to Huston's bed in a guest room was a copy of journalist Claude Cockburn's book, Beat the Devil, which Huston later realised, had been strategically placed there to catch his attention. Cockburn's ploy worked, and Huston filmed the book two years later.
On one of his many return visits to Ireland over the next few years, Huston was attending the Galway races with his second wife, Ricki Soma, when they discovered St Clerans, a Georgian manor house between Loughrea and Craughwell in Co Galway. "We purchased it at an auction," he says in his book. "It cost very little to buy, but a small fortune and the best part of two years to restore." It was "a wonderful haven", he says. "When I came back from a trip abroad and entered that atmosphere, it was a world apart." St Clerans is now an elegant hotel, festooned with Huston memorabilia.
One of Huston's great disappointments was that he was unable to return to Ireland and shoot The Dead in Dublin, where it is set. In 1986, when he was preparing that film, Huston was so ill with emphysema that he relied on oxygen tanks to help him breathe. He was regarded as uninsurable, and the producers, who included his son Tony, had to insure another director willing to take over if necessary.
There was no question of Huston travelling to Dublin, and the movie was shot in Los Angeles, with a second unit shooting footage of Dublin exteriors that were added in the editing process. The quality of this beautifully achieved melancholic film belied Huston's seriously deteriorating health, and he was admirably served by a cast in which his daughter, Anjelica, was joined by Donal McCann, Donal Donnelly, Dan O'Herlihy, Rachel Dowling, Ingrid Craigie, Cathleen Delany, Helena Carroll and tenor Frank Patterson.
The film, which earned Huston some of the best reviews of his long career, was released posthumously.
In the summer of 1987 he went to Rhode Island to play a role in Mr North, which he had helped adapt from the novel, Thornton Wilder, and which was the first film directed by his son, Danny. On August 29th, a few weeks after his 81st birthday, John Huston died in the house he had rented in Middletown, Rhode Island.