I. The Girl in the Mirror

There was a shrine in my mother’s bedroom when I was growing up. The built-in wardrobe had a mirror on the interior of both doors and a bureau inside, higher than I was, with an array of perfume bottles and small objects on the surface and a wall of burlap stretched above it. Pinned to the burlap was a collage of things she’d collected: pictures she’d torn out of magazines, poems, pomander balls, a fox’s tail tied with a red ribbon, a brooch I’d bought her from Woolworth’s that spelled “Mother” in malachite, a photograph of Siobhán McKenna as St. Joan. Standing between the doors, I loved to look at her possessions, the mirrors reflecting me into infinity.

I was a lonely child. My brother Tony and I were never very close, neither as children nor as adults, but I was tightly bound to him. We were forced to be together because we were really quite alone. We were in the middle of the Irish countryside, in County Galway, in the West of Ireland, and we didn’t see many other kids. We were tutored. Our father was mostly away.

I spent quite a lot of time in front of the bathroom mirror. Nearby there was a stack of books. My favorites were The Death of Manolete and the cartoons of Charles Addams. I would pretend to be Morticia Addams. I was drawn to her. I used to pull my eyes back and see how I’d look with slanted eyelids. I liked Sophia Loren. I’d seen pictures of her, and she was my ideal of female beauty at the time. Then I would pore over the photographs of the great bullfighter Manolete, dressed in his suit of lights, praying to the Madonna for her protection, taking the cape under his arm, preparing to enter the bullring. The solemnity, the ritual of the occasion, was tangible in the pictures. Then the terrible aftermath—Manolete gored in the groin, the blood black on the sand. There were also photographs illustrating the subsequent slaughter of the bull, which mystified me, since he had obviously won the fight. I felt it was a gross injustice, and my heart wept for both the bull and Manolete.

I found that I could make myself cry. Very easily. The question started to come up from Tony as to whether I was using this ability to my advantage. I think he had a point. But, for me, it was always about feeling. People often think that looking in the mirror is about narcissism. Children look at their reflection to see who they are. And they want to see what they can do with it, how plastic they can be, if they can touch their nose with their tongue, or what it looks like when they cross their eyes. There are a lot of things to do in the mirror apart from just feasting on a sense of one’s physical beauty.

II. “For God’s Sakes, John . . . ”

I was born at 6:29 P.M. on July 8, 1951, at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, in Los Angeles. The news of my arrival was cabled promptly to the post office in the township of Butiaba, in western Uganda. Two days later, a barefoot runner bearing a telegram finally arrived at Murchison Falls, a waterfall on the Nile, deep in the heart of the Belgian Congo, where The African Queen was being filmed.

My father, John Marcellus Huston, was a director renowned for his adventurous style and audacious nature. Even though it was considered foolhardy, he had persuaded not only Katharine Hepburn, an actress in her prime, but also Humphrey Bogart, who brought along his famously beautiful wife, the movie star Lauren Bacall, to share the hazardous journey. My mother, heavily pregnant, had stayed behind in Los Angeles with my one-year-old brother.

When the messenger handed the telegram to my father, he glanced at it, then put it in his pocket. Hepburn exclaimed, “For God’s sakes, John, what does it say?” and Dad replied, “It’s a girl. Her name is Anjelica.”

Dad was six feet two and long-legged, taller and stronger and with a more beautiful voice than anybody. His hair was salt-and-pepper; he had the broken nose of a boxer and a dramatic air about him. I don’t remember ever seeing him run; rather, he ambled, or took long, fast strides. He walked loose-limbed and swaybacked, like an American, but dressed like an English gentleman: corduroy trousers, crisp shirts, knotted silk ties, jackets with suede elbows, tweed caps, fine custom-made leather shoes, and pajamas from Sulka with his initials on the pocket. He smelled of fresh tobacco and Guerlain’s lime cologne. An omnipresent cigarette dangled from his fingers; it was almost an extension of his body.

Over the years, I’ve heard my father described as a Lothario, a drinker, a gambler, a man’s man, more interested in killing big game than in making movies. It is true that he was extravagant and opinionated. But Dad was complicated, self-educated for the most part, inquisitive, and well read. Not only women but men of all ages fell in love with my father, with that strange loyalty and forbearance men reserve for one another. They were drawn to his wisdom, his humor, his magnanimous power; they considered him a lion, a leader, the pirate they wished they had the audacity to be. Although there were few who commanded his attention, Dad liked to admire other men, and he had a firm regard for artists, athletes, the titled, the very rich, and the very talented. Most of all, he loved characters, people who made him laugh and wonder about life.

Dad always said he wanted to be a painter but was never going to be great at it, which was why he became a director. He was born in Nevada, Missouri, on August 5, 1906, the only child of Rhea Gore and Walter Huston. Rhea’s mother, Adelia, had married a prospector, John Gore, who started up several newspapers from Kansas to New York. A cowboy, a settler, a saloon owner, a judge, a professional gambler, and a confirmed alcoholic, he once won the town of Nevada in a poker game. Dad’s father was, of course, an actor, and in 1947, Dad directed Walter in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, for which they both won Academy Awards.

My mother, Enrica Georgia Soma, had been a ballet dancer before Tony and I were born. She was five feet eight and finely made. She had translucent skin, dark hair to her shoulders parted in the middle, and the expression of a Renaissance Madonna, a look both wise and naïve. She had a small waist, full hips and strong legs, graceful arms, delicate wrists, and beautiful hands with long, tapering fingers. To this day, my mother’s face is the loveliest in my memory—her high cheekbones and wide forehead; the arc of her eyebrows over her eyes, gray blue as slate; her mouth in repose, the lips curving in a half-smile. To her friends, she was Ricki.

She was the daughter of a self-proclaimed yogi, Tony Soma, who owned an Italian restaurant called Tony’s Wife, on West 52nd Street, in New York. Ricki’s mother, Angelica Fantoni, who had been an opera singer in Milan, died of pneumonia when my mother was four. That broke Grandpa’s heart. But he took a second wife, Dorothy Fraser, whom we called Nana, a pleasant, no-nonsense woman who raised my mother under a strict regime. Grandpa was dictatorial and prone to aphorisms such as “There’s no intelligence without the tongue!” and “Through the knowledge of me, I wish to share my happiness with you!”

Occasionally, Grandpa would have Ricki come downstairs to greet the guests, some of whom were likely to be show people—Tony’s Wife had become a speakeasy for a time and had remained a favorite stopover among the Broadway and Hollywood set ever since. One evening, my father walked in and was met by a beautiful 14-year-old girl. She told him that she wanted to be the world’s finest ballerina and described how she wore out her ballet shoes, making her toes bleed. When he asked her if she went to the ballet often, she said, “Well, no,” unfortunately, she couldn’t. It was difficult, she explained, because she was expected to write a four-page essay for her father every time she went. So Dad said, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll take you to the ballet, and you won’t have to write an essay. How about that?”

But Dad was called away to the war. As he later told the story, quite romantically, he’d intended to hire a carriage, buy Ricki a corsage, and make it an event. Four years later, sitting at a dinner table at the producer David Selznick’s house in Los Angeles, he found himself placed beside a beautiful young woman. He turned to her and introduced himself: “We haven’t met. My name is John Huston.” And she replied, “Oh, but we have. You stood me up once.” Having studied under George Balanchine and danced on Broadway for Jerome Robbins, Mum had been the youngest member to join the best dance company in the nation, Ballet Theatre, which later became American Ballet Theatre. Now, at 18, she was under contract to Selznick, and her photograph had been published on the June 9, 1947, cover of Life magazine. In the photo spread inside the magazine, she was likened to the Mona Lisa—they shared that secret smile.

III. Breakfast at the Big House

My earliest memories are of Ireland. Dad moved the family there in 1953. His first visit had been two years earlier, in 1951, before I was born. He’d been invited by Oonagh, Lady Oranmore and Browne, to stay at her house, Luggala, and attend a hunt ball in Dublin at the Gresham Hotel. Dad had watched as the young members of the legendary Galway Blazers played a game of follow-the-leader that involved angry waiters swinging champagne buckets, and men leaping off a balcony onto the dining tables, as the music played on into the night and the whiskey flowed. Dad said that he had expected someone would be killed before the ball was over. In the days following, he fell in love with the scenic beauty of the country.

I remember being in bed at Courtown House—a tall stone Victorian manor that Mum and Dad were renting, in County Kildare. Mum came into my room, wrapped me in a blanket, and carried me downstairs. The house was dark and silent. Outside on the front steps in the frosted night, Dad held Tony in his arms. The sky was raining meteors. I remember Mum saying, “If you make a wish, it will come true,” and, together, the four of us watched the mysterious passage of dying stars fading through the firmament.

The famous combat photographer Robert Capa came to Courtown and was one of the first to take pictures of Tony and me as toddlers, crawling on a polished wood floor, wide-eyed, like two little birds that had fallen out of their nest. Tony and I would sit on the landing at the top of the long quadrangle staircase of Courtown House and watch Dad at work from above as he stalked slowly back and forth on the black-and-white inlaid marble squares that paved the hallway. This was a serious process. His secretary, Lorrie Sherwood, told us he was writing and never to interrupt.

I was five when we moved from Courtown House to St. Clerans, a 110-acre estate in County Galway. Three miles outside the town of Craughwell, down a shadowy green avenue of high elms and chestnut trees, a stone gateway led to a generous courtyard with a two-story limestone cottage on the left, known as the Little House. This is where we lived. The 17-room Big House was a few hundred yards away, across a bridge over a trout stream with a little island and a gentle waterfall, where a great gray heron pecked hatchlings from the shallows on one leg. The Big House was in disrepair. For the next four years, my mother worked on restoring the estate. Mum and Dad were united in this endeavor.

Although later Tony and I would spend more time up at the Big House, for the most part it was reserved for Dad’s appearances over the Christmas holidays and the few other visits he might make throughout the year. Then, like a sleeping beauty awakened, the house would come alive, glowing from the inside, turf fires burning in every room.

When Dad was in residence, Tony and I would go up to his room for breakfast. The maids would carry the heavy wicker trays from the kitchen, with the spaces on either side for The Irish Times and the Herald Tribune. Dad liked to read the Trib column written by his friend Art Buchwald. Sitting on the floor, I would top off my customary boiled egg, and dip fingers of toasted bread into the deep-orange yolk. The tea was hot and brown in the cup, like sweet bog water.

Dad would be idly sketching on a drawing pad. “What news?” he would ask. It was generally a good idea to have an anecdote at hand, even though it was often hard to come up with one, given that we were all living in the same compound and had seen him at dinner the night before. If one didn’t have an item of interest to report, more likely than not, a lecture would begin.

At some point, he would toss the sketchpad aside and make his way slowly out of bed, casting off his pajamas and standing fully naked before us. We watched, mesmerized. I was fascinated by his body—his wide shoulders, high ribs, and long arms, his potbelly and legs as thin as toothpicks. He was extremely well-endowed, but I tried not to stare or betray any interest in what I was observing.

Eventually he would wander into the sanctuary of his bathroom, locking the door behind him, and sometime later would reappear, showered and shaved and smelling of fresh lime. Creagh, the butler, would come upstairs to help him dress, and the ritual would begin. He had a gleaming mahogany dressing room full of kimonos and cowboy boots and Navajo Indian belts, robes from India, Morocco, and Afghanistan. Dad would ask my advice on which necktie to wear, take it into consideration, and arrive at his own decision. Then, dressed and ready for the day, he would proceed down to the study.

My mother was out of her element in the rough West Country, trying to do everything beautifully. She was an exotic fish out of water, even though she made a good effort. She’d organized a hunt ball early on at St. Clerans. It was the dead of winter. The temperature was subzero. She put up a marquee in the Little House yard—Guinness and champagne were to be served. And oysters brought up from Paddy Burkes pub, in Clarinbridge. And a band. She was wearing a white taffeta strapless evening dress. It was twinkling with hoarfrost inside the marquee, so cold that no one could bear to go out that night. I remember my mother, her eyes shining, hovering alone at the entrance as the band packed up their instruments early to go home. She was as beautiful, as translucent and remote, as one of the photographs I’d seen in the ballet books she had given to me, like Pavlova or the Queen of the Wilis in Giselle.

Mum and Nora Fitzgerald, a good friend of my parents’, and Dublin’s premier wine merchant, would occasionally go out into the countryside by night and saw down billboards that they thought were a blight on the landscape. Mum and Nora had another big joke between them, “the Merkin Society,” and any stray sheep’s wool affixed to a line of barbed wire was fertile ground for hilarity. Although I had no idea that the source of this joke was the rather specialized information that a merkin was in fact a pubic wig, I sought to join their evident enjoyment by procuring some animal stickers at Woolworth’s and affixing them to the doors of the Little House with handwritten messages that went, “Start the day the merkin way” and “A merkin a day keeps the doctor away.” Evidently I had struck the right note, as this seemed to vastly amuse them.

Dad was a storyteller. His stories usually started with a long, deep pause, as if he were reckoning with the narrative, his head thrown back, his brown eyes searching to visualize the memory, taking time to measure and reflect. There were a lot of “um”s and drawings on his cigar. Then the tale would begin.

He talked about the war. At the Battle of San Pietro, during a documentary assignment for the War Department, the 143rd Regiment needed 1,100 new troops to come in after the initial battle. Steel cable had been stretched across the Rapido River to allow the troops to cross at night to the other side. But the Germans had struck and the soldiers had taken a terrible hit. On the opposite side of the river, a major stood waist-deep in the water, his hand blasted off, and saluted each soldier as he crossed. Dad said, “I never gave a sloppy salute again.”

Dad’s stories were quite like his movies—triumph and/or disaster in the face of adversity; the themes were manly. The stories often took place in exotic locales, with an emphasis on wildlife. We begged to hear our favorite ones from The African Queen: the marching red ants that ate everything they came across, and how the crew had to dig trenches, fill them with gasoline, and set them on fire because it was the only way to stop the ants from devouring everything in their path. There was the story of the missing villager whose pinkie finger turned up in the stew. And the one where the whole crew was suffering from dysentery, which was holding up the shoot, until a deadly, poisonous black mamba was discovered wrapped around the latrine. Dad would laugh. “Suddenly, no one had to go to the bathroom anymore!”

IV. “It’s the Monkey or Me!”

I can’t remember being formally told, in 1961, that Tony and I would be leaving Ireland to go to school in England, but it was a time of few explanations. I didn’t ask questions, because I was afraid of the answers. Mum and Dad never told Tony and me that they were separating. And so I was confused when we first went to London. Suddenly, Mum, Nurse, Tony, and I were living in a white semi-detached house that my mother was renting on Addison Road, in Kensington, walking distance to the French Lycée. My Irish tutors and the Sisters of Mercy had not prepared me for the expectations of my new school. I was miserable there. For the next eight years, Tony and I went back and forth between London and St. Clerans on our holidays.

Christmas at St. Clerans continued to be a grand affair. On our first Christmas Eve without Mum, Tony and I decorated the tree with Betty O’Kelly, a family friend and now the estate manager, up at the Big House. It rose, shining with colored lights, from the stairwell of the inner hall to the floor above, the star on top kissing the crystal globe of the Waterford chandelier. Tommy Holland, a local farmer, was generally the designated Santa. But one year our houseguest, the writer John Steinbeck, was recruited and proved an admirable choice. He claimed to have swallowed copious amounts of cotton wool whenever he inhaled, but visually, he was perfect. I loved Steinbeck. He was kind and generous and treated me as an equal. One morning, he took me aside to the drawing room and removed a gold medal on a chain from around his neck and placed it around mine. He explained that it had been given to him years before, when he was a young man visiting Mexico City. It was the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and the name of the girl who had given it to him was “Trampoline.” John wrote to me often and signed his letters with the stamp of a winged pig, “Pigasus,” combining the sacred and profane to great effect.

The holidays were always peppered with Dad’s ex-girlfriends and ex-wives. It wasn’t long before I realized that my father was making love to many of the women who I thought were my friends at St. Clerans. By now, I had a fair idea of what this meant, having witnessed the furious mating of a stallion and mare in the back courtyard below the windows in Dad’s loft, an event that had rendered me wide-eyed and literally speechless. I didn’t know when I was little that he’d been married three times before Mum. I only really became aware of that later on, when there was talk of his first wife, Dorothy Harvey, who I’d heard became an alcoholic.

And I knew about the actress Evelyn Keyes, his third wife, because there was a story that he told about a monkey he’d owned when they were married and how the monkey objected to its cage. He allowed the monkey to spend the night in the bedroom. When the curtains were drawn in the morning, the room was destroyed. Evelyn’s clothes were in shreds, and the monkey had defecated all over her underwear. It was the end of the line for poor Evelyn, who cried, “John, it’s the monkey or me!” To which Dad replied, “I’m sorry, honey, I just can’t bear to be parted from the monkey.” Evelyn came to St. Clerans in 1960. She appeared to me totally mad, bounding around in velour jumpsuits.

There was a girlfriend called Lady Davina, who had a very upper-class British accent. I used to imitate her, much to Dad’s amusement. There was a pretty brunette American conquest who sent recordings of her love songs. There was Min Hogg, who was young and arty, had long dark hair, and wore black most of the time. Min let me wear her fishnet stockings and high-heeled shoes, so I could practice walking like a fashion model, up and down the driveway.

I remember Tony taking me up to Dad’s bathroom and opening a small Japanese wooden box inlaid with mother-of-pearl. He pulled out some pictures of a blonde, naked to the waist, with a handwritten caption, “Looking forward to seeing you, John.” I felt a drumroll in my heart. I wasn’t prepared for it. Later I came to recognize her as an actress he was seeing during the making of Freud, when I went to visit him on that set.

There was Afdera Fonda, Henry Fonda’s fourth wife. She wore Hermès scarves and Pucci silk blouses. And Valeria Alberti, an Italian countess. Very cool, a little boyish. She had piercing brown eyes, acne scars, and a good suntan. She looked as if she’d been out on a beach all her life. She didn’t speak any English, but she laughed at everything Dad had to say.

My father’s girlfriends were very diverse. Some of them desperately wanted to get up on the horses to impress him; they’d assure Dad that they were great riders. They’d be mounted on the calmest of the rather hefty Thoroughbreds in the stable, and invariably there’d be some drama, and it would become blatantly evident that they had no experience whatsoever. Dad would find this vastly amusing. And one couldn’t help but agree with him, because they were so earnest. “Oh, yes, John, I ride!”

V. The Painter

There was a measure of challenge to Dad’s morning inquisitions: How high had we jumped our ponies? How was our French coming along? How many fish had Tony caught?

“The worst thing,” he opined one morning, behind a curl of smoke from a brown cigarillo, “is to be a dilettante.”

“What’s a dilettante, Dad?” I asked in some trepidation. I was unfamiliar with the word. It sounded French.

“It means a dabbler, an amateur, someone who simply skims the surface of life without commitment,” he replied.

I hadn’t considered the dangers of the condition. From his lips, it sounded like a sin, worse than lying or stealing or cowardice.

Now and again, I sensed intrigue and mystery among the grown-ups, with their raised eyebrows and whispering in the halls of St. Clerans. Magouche Phillips, who had in a previous decade been married to the painter Arshile Gorky, caught kissing Dad’s co-producer behind the stone pillars on the front porch. Or Rin Kaga, a samurai warrior whom Dad had encountered during the making of The Barbarian and the Geisha, descending from the Napoleon Room, so-called because of its lavish Empire bed, in full kimono, with tabis on his feet. He spoke not a word of English but had shed a few joyous tears at breakfast when he was re-united with Dad. Dad explained that a samurai was allowed to cry only a few times in his entire life. For me, who until recently had cried an average of three or four times a day, this was an extraordinary idea to ponder.

Tony and I would climb the mahogany ladder in the study and take down art books from Dad’s extensive collection. Seated on the green corduroy sofa at the coffee table in front of the turf fire, framed by a veined Connemara-marble mantelpiece and Mexican finials, Dad sketched on white notepads in pencil and Magic Marker, his back to the great wealth of achievement on the bookshelves, which inspired and interested him. A high level of accomplishment was like fuel. He’d ask a question to command my attention, scanning me as his hand began to trace my likeness.

I would try not to appear too self-conscious or overly self-critical when I saw the sketch. He spoke about painting as if he’d missed his true calling. I’m sure that he could have been a great painter if he had pursued it as a vocation and committed himself to that discipline. But painting is isolating, and Dad was a social creature.

Beginning in 1963, when I was 12 and living in London with Mum, Lizzie Spender, the daughter of the poet Stephen Spender and his wife, Natasha Litvin, came to St. Clerans three times a year, every year, over the school holidays. A year older than I, strong and tall, Lizzie had skin like peaches and cream, thick corn-yellow hair, blue eyes, and Slavic cheekbones, and she shared my love for horses and dogs. Like me, she had a poodle. Mine was called Mindy; hers was Topsy. We had met one weekend when her parents took Mum and me to Bruern Abbey, the beautiful Oxfordshire estate of Michael Astor. Lizzie and I were in the pantry giving Mindy a clip, and it was taking forever to trim her fur. Upstairs the adults were having a dinner party. Mum and Natasha came to tell us it was time for bed, but we resisted. Lizzie said, “How would you feel going to bed wearing half a mustache?” That was the night Mum met John Julius Norwich, the historian and travel writer, who would figure prominently in her life.

Often, when we were up at the Big House for lunch, Dad would beam when Lizzie Spender walked into the dining room. “Isn’t Lizzie beautiful!” he would exclaim. And Lizzie would blush. After lunch, Dad might recruit someone to pose for him up at the loft. One holiday he asked Lizzie if he could paint her portrait, but later, down at the Little House, I begged her to say no. I did not want Dad to focus any more attention on her. The following morning I took her over to his studio and showed her his paintings. Along with several still lifes and a portrait of Tony, there was a scattering of pictures of Dad’s girlfriends, from Min Hogg to Valeria Alberti, and a playful nude of Betty O’Kelly eating an apple. “I understand,” Lizzie said. “I won’t do it.”

We were all in the study late one summer afternoon. Dad was drawing; the light was dim and soft. One of the maids, Margaret, came into the room to lay the turf for the fire, then moved to turn on the lamps. Dad held up his hand as if to stop time. “Hold on, honey, for a few moments,” he said. Our features softened as the color deserted the room, and outside the sun set beyond the riverbanks.

VI. The Garden of Eden

On his way to Rome to film The Bible, in 1963, Dad stopped off in London and came over to the house. He told Tony and me that he would be having a meeting with Maria Callas, whom he was interviewing for the part of Sarah, and asked if we had any advice.

“Don’t get drunk,” said Tony.

“Don’t sing,” said I.

Later, when they met, Dad recounted our observations to Ms. Callas. “Do you sing?” she asked Dad.

“Only when I’m drunk,” he replied.

Filming The Bible was without doubt an immense task for a director. Dad worked on it for close to three years. I received a letter about it from him, memorable in that it was one of the very few he ever wrote to me. It was in pencil, and he had drawn illustrations of himself in character as Noah, bringing animals onto the ark, a pair of giraffes observing the scene. It seemed as if the letter had been written by someone other than the stern patriarch who cast a cold eye on Tony and me during our school holidays.

Darling daughter: I’m delighted at your wonderful school report. You must be very set up. All but math … I’m inclined to think simple arithmetic will pretty well serve you through life. But then you might become an architect, so you’d better stay with it, I guess.

I do wish you were here right now to become acquainted with all the animals. I really know them now and they me: elephants, bears, giraffe, ostriches, pelicans, ravens. In a way I hate to see this part of the picture come to an end—and have them go out of my life, back to their circuses and zoos. . . .

Spring has come on, all at once. The Italian campo is strewn with fields of margaritas and the almond trees are flowering. The white blossoms always seem to come first. We’ve had a solid week of sunshine, the pouring golden kind that you can feel through your coat. But of course now we want rainy dark skies. I mean the picture does herald the flood. No, you can’t win them all. In Egypt where we went to get brassy skies it rained for the first time in January in 38 years. Do you remember—I’d hoped to be finished shooting by last December—and I won’t be home for Easter. Meanwhile though I have my animals—if not my kids.

I like your drawings of arms, by the way, and ballet legs. Do tell me what’s made such a hit with you about your new art teacher, herself, her own drawing, her remarks on the foot that she recognizes your talent? …

The ark sequences should be finished in about a fortnight. After that I’ll have about a month of polishing up to do—so I’ll have been more than a year at actually shooting—a long time. My beard is now down to—well not quite to my navel, but almost.

Give Joan and Lizzie my love—some of it—but keep a bigger helping for yourself.

As ever, Daddy

Over school holiday, I went to Rome to visit Dad. He took me to Dino De Laurentiis’s Dinocittà Studios, where an entire lot had been transformed to simulate the Garden of Eden, with fake oranges and mysterious plastic fruits hanging from the trees. A small stream of water trickled through a trench lined with transparent PVC. Grips and technicians ran in all directions, babbling in Italian and smoking cigarettes while Dad introduced me to the young woman playing Eve. She was very pretty but not what I expected, which would have been someone more ethnic, someone along the lines of Sophia Loren. Eve’s real name was Ulla Bergryd; she had freckles and fair skin and was wearing a strawberry-red wig down to her waist, which I immediately coveted, with a white bathrobe and slippers. I thought it brave of her to volunteer to be naked in the film. I actually received the wig at Christmas later that year, but everyone agreed it didn’t suit me at all.

The last trip Mum made to St. Clerans was during Easter holiday 1964. I’d come back from school and found her crying in her room. On her bedside table was a bottle of Perrier and a glass, a jade horse’s head, a notepad, a fountain pen, a stack of books: Memories, Dreams, Reflections, by Carl Jung, and always something by Colette—she had given me Chéri to read when I turned 13. Mum had been advised by her therapist to write down all her dreams. I didn’t really want to know why she was crying, or dare to ask. I knew I would not like the answer.

The school year was coming to an end when Mum said, “Anjelica, can’t you make things easier on me? Can’t you see I’m almost seven months pregnant?” I remember walking down by the canal with Lizzie, asking, “How? How could Mum be pregnant?”

There is a story that when she was in her third month and already showing an expanding waistline, Mum took a plane to Shannon and arrived at St. Clerans in time for afternoon drinks with the local priest. “I haven’t seen my wife in a year,” said Dad as she entered the room, to which she responded by flinging off her cloak in front of the assorted guests. I heard later that she and Dad had a terrible fight.

Divorces weren’t nearly as acceptable then and were still practically unheard of in Ireland. Both my parents strayed during the marriage, and I think there was a sense, certainly on my father’s part, that he was simply doing what came naturally to him. Probably with my mother, there was a bit of You want to do that? I can do that, too. Hoping, in a way, to get his attention. She was in her early 30s and having affairs with quite a few men. There was a rumor about the brother of Aly Kahn. There was an adventurer and a scholar of Greek history, Paddy Leigh Fermor, who at 18 had walked the length of Europe from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople; Paddy was, I think, an important love in her life. I heard about her intervening between Paddy and another man at a party that turned into a big Irish brawl, both men drunk and about ready to kill each other, and Mum, in a white Dior gown, covered in blood.

I couldn’t acknowledge the fact that my mother had lovers. Because, to me, how could you even compare them with Dad? My father was a different cut. A swashbuckler, manful, greathearted, and larger-than-life. He was intelligent and ironic, with a warm voice like whiskey and tobacco. I believe that, without Dad to give shape to her existence, my mother didn’t really know what to do or who to be.

The father of my mother’s child was John Julius Norwich. He was titled (second Viscount Norwich) and had fine silvery hair and wore oval glasses. John Julius was pleasant to me, but I felt that he was cold and intellectual, and I was upset by the idea that this was the new love of my mother’s life. I didn’t know that he already had a wife, Anne. I desperately wanted my parents to be together. Evidently, now this would never happen. I had asked Mum, “How can you call other men ‘darling’ but never Dad?” And she told me that, sometimes, when people grew up they also grew apart. The details of our parents’ separation went largely unexplained, but Tony and I knew how loaded it was. When John Julius didn’t get a divorce and marry Mum, and it became obvious that she was going to have the baby by herself, I think her heart was broken. And, as I understand it, my mother wasn’t John Julius’s only port of call.

Mum told me that when she was pregnant with Allegra, John Julius’s mother, Lady Diana Cooper, had come by the house with a bunch of violets. Mum was ambivalent about the gesture, feeling there was something condescending about it, particularly in Diana’s choice of flowers, like a bouquet a grand person might present to a poor relation, she said.

On August 26, 1964, Allegra was born. And on the third day home from the hospital, when I looked at this perfect infant with her rosebud mouth, asleep in her crib in Mum’s room, I leaned down and kissed her and instantly fell in love.

VII. Scents of London

At school in London my best friend was Emily Young. Her father was Wayland Hilton Young, second Baron Kennet, a British writer and politician who served as chief whip of the Social Democratic Party in the House of Lords. He was the first parliamentarian to propose environmental laws and had written the famous and daring book Eros Denied, a manifesto of the sexual revolution, which was causing something of a social stir among the older set.

Emily and I began a steady pattern of playing hooky. On Fridays, when Mum came home from the bank with cash for the week, she would put the white envelope inside a top drawer in her dresser. I would slip into her bedroom when she was out, or downstairs, and deftly swipe a couple of £5 notes. I used the money to taxi back and forth to school. Once I’d arrive, I would walk into assembly, sign the register, then stroll out of the school gates with Emily to ponder the rest of the day.

We went to some great concerts together—the Four Tops, Steve Winwood and Jim Capaldi in Traffic, Cream, the Yardbirds, the Kinks, Jeff Beck, John Mayall, and Eric Burdon singing “House of the Rising Sun.” We favored the Rolling Stones, especially Mick and Keith. There were live clubs all over London, and you could go out to Chalk Farm or Eel Pie Island to hear new groups. And in the coffeehouses, Bert Jansch or Nina Simone would be playing.

At the Royal Albert Hall, in summertime, they would hold the proms, and as a student you could get in to watch beautiful concerts for free, up near the dome, “in the Gods.” A new type of tape recorder had just come out in America: you could sling it over your shoulder and have music wherever you went. All of a sudden, music was everywhere. A soundtrack for your life.

We would go to Powis Terrace and listen to Pink Floyd rehearse in the church hall, and to Earls Court to see Jimi Hendrix make love to his guitar onstage, plucking the strings with his teeth as she wailed for him. These were the days of Room at the Top, Darling, Antonioni’s Blow-Up, Georgy Girl, The Servant, Girl with the Green Eyes, Privilege, and the nouvelle vague filmmakers—Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Louis Malle, Claude Chabrol. Jules et Jim, Alphaville, Les Enfants du Paradis, La Belle et la Bête—I went to all these movies with my mother. The soundtrack of A Man and a Woman was always on the record player. I loved Anouk Aimée, because she wore her hair parted on the side over one eye in the movie and looked a lot like Mum.

The women of this time were singular beauties, at parties, clubs, walking down the Kings Road, wearing crochet caps, mink from the 20s, and see-through chiffon. There was a medley of breathtaking English roses—girls like Jill Kennington, Sue Murray, Celia Hammond, the indelibly beautiful Jean Shrimpton, and Patti Boyd, who later married George Harrison. Jane Birkin, a rock ’n’ roll virgin with a gap between her teeth, who ran off with Serge Gainsbourg and sang the breathy “Je T’Aime … Moi Non Plus.” There were fantastic actresses breaking out on the scene, like Maggie Smith, Sarah Miles, Susannah York, Vanessa Redgrave, and her sister, Lynn. The French beauties—Delphine Seyrig, Catherine Deneuve, Anna Karina. And the ingénues—Judy Geeson, Hayley Mills, Jane Asher, Rita Tushingham. Jane Fonda as Barbarella. Marsha Hunt, with her crowning Afro. The singers—the great Dusty Springfield, Cilla Black, the barefoot Sandie Shaw, the cool, tall Françoise Hardy, and the bleached-blonde Sylvie Vartan. The rock goddess Julie Driscoll, whose interview with British Vogue began, “When I wake up in the morning my breath smells like a gorilla’s armpit,” was memorably descriptive. I remember thinking this woman was not out to impress the opposite sex.

The scents of London in the 60s: Vetiver, Brut, and Old Spice for the boys, lavender, sandalwood, and Fracas for the girls; unwashed hair; cigarettes. Up and down the Kings Road, the beauties in rumpled silk and denim would be out in force on Saturday afternoons. Playful exotics blooming all around in 18th-century frock coats—girls with faces like cameos. The blonde temptresses Elke Sommer and Brigitte Bardot paving the way for Marianne Faithfull’s soulful beauty and Keith Richards’s dangerous German, Anita Pallenberg. The press called them Dolly Birds, but they were predatory—the sirens of modern sin. I found a drummer boy’s jacket in red felt with gold braid that looked like something out of Sgt. Pepper’s, and wore it with tea gowns from the 30s and pale straw hats with wide brims beaded and feathered, a ring on every finger, earrings hanging to my collarbone.

The great fashion photographer Richard Avedon was a friend of my parents’. I don’t know if it was his or Mum’s idea that he should photograph me. I posed for him at a studio off the Fulham Road in Chelsea. I was very shy, and, true to form, I applied a lot of makeup. Avedon had always had a soft spot for me. He was legendary for making women look beautiful, and he had photographed the most beautiful women in the world—from Dovima at the circus, among the elephants in Dior couture, to Suzy Parker, running from the paparazzi at the Place Vendôme, in Paris, to Veruschka, Jean Shrimpton, and Lauren Hutton, leaping like exotic birds in midflight across the pages of Vogue.

When I think of Dick, most often he is standing alert beside his tripod-mounted Hasselblad camera, his face close to the lens, a line to the shutter between his thumb and index finger. He wears a crisp white shirt, Levi’s, and moccasins. His black-framed glasses travel from the bridge of his nose up to his forehead. As he focuses, he sweeps back a forelock of thick gray hair when it falls across his eyes. His gaze is keen and critical. He understands glamour like no other photographer. Dick’s studio exuded an atmosphere of luxury and taste, a place where art and industry dovetailed harmoniously. Although I considered him a friend first, I rarely saw him socially. He was one of the grown-ups.