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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504008587 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Distribution |
| Publication date: | 03/17/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 268 |
| Sales rank: | 728,030 |
| File size: | 550 KB |
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Read an Excerpt
John Huston
A Biography
By Axel Madsen
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1978 Axel MadsenAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0858-7
CHAPTER 1
John Huston
John Huston is a tall, vigorous man whose voice has the quality of melted caramel. The red-brown eyes, set in the face of an ancient tortoise, glow like sapphires above enormous puffy bags. As he sits on a rock in the Beverly Hills palm garden, his hands dangle from the steep angle of his bony knees.
Huston is a movie director who has always dressed the part, always flown to remote locations with hundreds of kilos of excess wardrobe baggage. At the Beverly Hills Hotel, which is linked to various episodes of his life, he is in a ginger suit and tweedy deerstalker. Unusual clouds race across the California sky. Huston has had a wonderful time making a lot of wonderful movies and the circumstances of their making are often more memorable than the movies themselves.
He is living slightly more cautiously since aneurism of the aorta had him at death's door in 1977 while he was preparing Love and Bullets, Charlie. That film—like Saud, which he started less than six months after he left the hospital was a modern production, "packaged" in a way that was inconceivable ten or fifteen years earlier. Huston has stayed relevant in the new math of moviemaking. In a world of stars obeying their own arithmetic, of deal memos, arbitrations, amendments and of financiers who in addition to box office certainty need tax shelters, he is very much in command, even if his director's chair is a self-effacing distance from his actors' emoting. John has always been good at keeping the risk-reward adrenalin flowing.
He gets up from his stone and gives the sky a long, wrinkled squint. He carries himself in a stiff slouch as he crosses the cramped lawn toward the main building and heads for the deep shadow of the Polo Lounge. The springy lope has slowed to a graceful gait, but in his seventies he looks ten years younger than he is, with his close-cropped white hair and beard framing the corrugated mosaic of his handsome, lived-in face. His voice and his way of leaning in and wrapping velvet resonances around you add a rustle of promise and mood to his expressions of enthusiasm, surprise, and ennui. His vocabulary ranges from words of eight syllables to four letters, but there are no showbiz italics. His body English is round and rich and conveys literacy and dignity. Some years ago he was, after his friend Orson Welles, the most sought-after narrator. In The Bible, the voice of God was, appropriately, his.
Some have said he is out of touch with real human emotions, that he is a laughing sadist who will jab at your soul with an icepick. Others have said he is a shy, tender idealist, still others that he is really a very forlorn, lonely man whose public style is an impenetrable bluff of rude theatrical charm. When interviewed too closely, he is glib and puckish, parrying questions rather than answering them. His ready laugh can give way to a non-verbal No—a stabbing stare. "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean was an extravagant concoction—not in money but in ideas." Stare. End of discussion. As another phrase crosses his mind he smiles. "Perhaps my greatest contribution has been that of keeping certain films from being out-and-out disgraces, of turning them into mediocrities instead. Take The Mackintosh Man. We all needed money, Paul Newman, John Foreman, and I. I'm not rich. I've spent it as I've gone along. I have to work. But I've had a helluva good time."
In the Polo Lounge, he finds an unobtrusive table and orders a discreet drink. Since the illness he is supposed to watch his health but he hasn't been able to cut out the smoking. As for alcohol, he says he didn't ask the doctors and they didn't mention it. "So, I still enjoy a drink." His last feature shot entirely in the United States was Fat City, another of his works to have found vindication in history rather than the box office. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was only a modest moneymaker in its first release. The Asphalt Jungle never earned its cost back, nor did Beat the Devil. "And people very often say to me that The Misfits is their favorite among my works. Well, it is to me too. But it got mixed reviews at the time and was not a success, to my disappointment and also to my surprise."
At other times Moby Dick is his favorite. Puffing cautiously on a Don Diego, he will frown and say critics never recognized the idea of Moby Dick. "And that is that the whole thing is a blasphemy. Melville hated God! I never saw Ahab as a ranting madman and Peck furnished a kind of nobility, a heroic stature, O'Neillesque. But the role didn't coincide with their ideas about Ahab."
His father died in the Beverly Hills Hotel. John's chance, his big chance, he says when the Jack Daniel's and water arrives, was being the son of Walter Huston and of Rhea Gore, a newspaperwoman. It was his father who kept him from skidding totally out of control in his youth. After John tried out as an itinerant prize-fighter and between stabs at being a short-story writer, a journalist on his mother's paper, and a sidewalk artist in Paris, Walter Huston had him hired as a writer on the pictures he starred in. Walter and John had a rare, loving father-son relationship that John didn't manage to give his own children. Anjelica remembers a childhood between a young mother whose talents were not acknowledged and a father who wasn't there much. To get his daughter's forgiveness, John gave her A Walk with Love and Death as a seventeenth-birthday gift. It didn't occur to him to ask her first if she wanted to be a movie star.
Darryl Zanuck has said he doesn't envy John his talent or his success but his friends. Huston collects people—bums, moochers, philosophical drunks, talkative tarts; and his various homes have always been half full of people in need of getting back on their feet. But he easily gets bored and needs new people to feed on. "When you are with him you have his undivided attention—until he feels the need to move on," Lauren Bacall says, "then there you are with egg on your face." Humphrey Bogart loved him like a brother and affectionately called him The Monster and Double Ugly. John was Bogey's kind of snake charmer, a natural-born antiauthoritarian, a guy with panache and style. Bogey thought John had more color than 90 per cent of Hollywood's actors. When John called and said, "Hey, kid, let's make this picture," Bogey knew he was being conned but he also knew he would have a great time. John has always called grown men, "Kid," and men say he is "all guy," a man's man.
Women think differently. Marilyn Monroe said she couldn't see how a woman could be around John without falling in love with him. His secretaries always do, because of the caramel voice and because they become victims of his torture. He made one of them his fifth wife. Olivia de Havilland, who almost became the third Mrs. Huston, says he is capable of "tremendous love of a very tense order." Evelyn Keyes, who did become No. 3, says that when married he continues to conduct himself as a bachelor, meaning that at parties he takes lady-friends into the next room and closes the door on wife and guests. She remembers tender togetherness and moments when she thought the marriage might actually work, even if now and then he was still flying apart. When he divorced her, in a hurry in Mexico, he had nineteen-year-old Enrica Soma seven months pregnant. Ricki was the wife who lasted the longest.
No matter what experience people have gone through with him, he leaves them a little dazed. He is unpredictable to work with, inconsistent and volatile and, like a prosecuting attorney, he has a way of taking people apart. He can't write by himself but must have someone with him. "When I put pencil to paper, I find myself sketching," he says. "I can't write alone—I get too lonely." In his moments of inspiration, his script collaborators have stood in awe. At other times they have found the experience degrading and needed months to find themselves again. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote an unfilmable eight-hundred-page Freud script without realizing John didn't understand Freud; by the time Ray Bradbury was through with Moby Dick, he had written twelve hundred pages of outlines and screenplay; Leonard Gardner cried each time John added anything to Fat City; John Milius' revenge for the way the Judge Roy Bean script finally looked on the screen was to cast Huston in one of his own pictures. The humiliations of writing the final version of The African Queen drove Peter Viertel to publish a novel starring a thinly disguised Huston as a macho director who becomes a crazed big-game hunter and wrecks the preparations for a picture in Africa.
Not that John cannot stand in awe of others, "Let me tell you about Tennessee Williams on The Night of the Iguana. Tony Veiller and I had a pretty good scene written where Burton is alone in his room in a fever and in a drunk, and all these things are going on inside him. Sue Lyon comes in and tries to seduce him and he is doing everything in his power to keep away from the girl. Well, we gave the scene to Tennessee to see what he'd think of it. The only change he wrote was the thing that made the scene. When the girl opens the door suddenly, a glass falls onto the floor leaving broken bits of glass scattered around the room. When the scene is played both of them are barefoot. Burton walks on it and doesn't even feel his feet being shredded. The girl sees this and joins him walking barefoot across the glass. That was the difference between a pedestrian scene and an extraordinary one."
Huston has a gift for taking notoriously high-strung individuals on tense, emotional rollercoaster trips, to con and cajole, to flatter and to overpower actors and other collaborators to come along on his investigations of forlorn hopes, criminal conspiracies, tensions of betrayals, and the inner geometries of modern sensibilities. "I wouldn't mind if he would only sweat once in a while," Richard Burton has said. "At least it would show he is human."
Film crews like him because of his habit of referring all technical questions to them and of agreeing to whatever they ask. Producers have felt he spends too much time amusing them with practical jokes and catering to their whims, but the crews love him and will work themselves half to death whenever he asks them to do so. Literally. The African Queen was finished in Uganda with Katharine Hepburn desperately sick with dysentery and crew members carrying equipment around while shaking with malaria. One man died of malaria in Chad on The Roots of Heaven, where the company doctor logged nearly one thousand sick calls. Eddie Albert became delirious, and Errol Flynn shortened his last months with booze and drugs. Clark Gable's response to John's goading on The Misfits contributed to the heart attack that killed him two weeks after the wrap.
John himself is immune to the dangers. Excepting his wartime moviemaking, which saw him fly camera runs against Japanese positions in the Arctic and run ahead of his cameramen toward German lines in Italy, his closest call came on Moby Dick when a dummy whale he was on broke its towline in mid-Atlantic.
He is a very good shot, a superb horseman, and an inveterate gambler. He is still working partly because he has lost fortunes since as a twenty-one-year-old he blew his first publisher's advance in casinos at Saratoga. The eight hundred-plus acre ranch he owned in Encino in the 1940s and 1950s would, in the inflated Southern California real estate market of today, make him a multimillionaire, but it went the way of the $5,000-a-week salaries he had studios pay him in cash on Friday and never seemed to hang onto beyond Saturday. Making a killing on the thoroughbreds he bought or on the crap tables he couldn't resist has never been enough for him. Wives, friends, associates, and bookmakers have pleaded with him, but he has never listened. Viertel's novel has a chapter where the fictionalized Huston says how a thoroughbred he pushed too hard made him realize his own limits—the worst realization anyone can make. The horse was a nice two-year-old filly, but cleaning up at six-furlong races was not enough for him and he entered her in a mile race against really good colts. "Well, for six furlongs she beat them all and then at the three-quarter post she stopped as if someone had shot her through the chest with a six-inch gun and the field went by her and she lost. It broke her heart and she never won again and I went home and lay down on my bed and saw my life absolutely clearly, for what it was worth. I was that filly, Pete. A seven-thousand-dollar claiming race, that's what you can win, I told myself, and my career stopped dead for two years after that race." The Irish citizenship in 1964 was one way of escaping the income attachments of the Internal Revenue Service.
Because of his desperate need for money, his career includes assignments accepted without hope, and he has jumped, fallen, or been pushed from a number of other deadbeat projects. Of late, he has prospered as a craggy character actor in films less distinguished than most of his own. When these pictures are filmed in the United States his parts are scheduled down to the last day. For complicated reasons that have to do with the IRS he, like his friend Orson Welles, can only work a limited number of days in his native country.
He has been accused of becoming bored and leaving the final stages of his films in other people's hands, where they have been changed, sometimes ruined. His answer is a benign smile and a "that's show business" shrug. He has directed most of the legendary screen idols, often with a sporting irreverence for their projected images. His actual setside directing relies on a certain studied passivity and on carrying the film in the making in his own head. Actors accustomed to overdirection are uneasy the first time they work with him. When Claire Trevor asked for a few pointers at the start of Key Largo, he told her, "You're the kind of drunken dame whose elbows are always a little too big, your voice a little too loud. You're very sad, very resigned. Like this." He leaned against the bar with a peculiarly heavy sadness. It was the leaning she caught onto and, without further instruction, developed into an Oscar-winning performance. David Niven says John likes to keep the actor's first tentative approach and, through rehearsals, build it up, then have the cameraman watch a run-through and, while technicians light the scene, retire to his canvas chair with a box of panatelas and a good book.
His open secret is spending more time on casting than telling actors to move from camera-left to camera-right. "When I cast a picture, I do most of my directing right there in finding the right person. I use actors with strong personalities, ones who are like the characters they play and then I try to guide them through the picture as discreetly as possible. Acting is part intuitive and part technique. The English train their actors to be superb technicians, to take on any shape, and it's marvelous. Americans tend to rely on charisma and they are better at expressing conflict in nonverbal ways. Some actors like to talk about what they're going to do and I've discovered over the years it's not really to get information, or your opinion, but just to talk their way into it. Others do almost no talking. On Reflections in a Golden Eye I suppose I addressed myself to Brando no more than a dozen times during the making of the picture. Just stood back and watched this phenomenon."
A prodigious reader, he regrets that he can only get through three or four books in a week. In the words of Henry Blanke, the Warner Brothers house producer who gave him his first chance to direct, Huston has "an amazing capacity for falling for, and losing himself in, relatively mediocre fiction," but John considers himself fortunate to have worked on a number of stories by W. R. Burnett and Dashiell Hammett, authors he thinks vastly underrated. His acknowledged influences are Rudyard Kipling, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and Eugene O'Neill. He pored over Kipling as a boy and found adventure, high honor, and distant, shimmering horizons. Walter's breakthrough on Broadway came in Desire Under the Elms and it was as an eighteen-year-old that John sat watching his father go through rehearsals with the playwright. "I think I learned more about films from O'Neill than anyone—what a scene consists of, and so forth." Joyce was language and a filmization of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was an advanced project at one time. Hemingway was a feel for the times, grace under pressure. Huston wrote the script for The Killers, the only screen adaptation of any of his work that Hemingway liked. With Evelyn, John visited Papa and Mary at La Finca in Havana and still doesn't despair of making a film out of Across the River and into the Trees.
He has been a California expatriate for half his adult life and lives mostly in Mexico now. Like Hemingway, he has made Europe his movable feast. Between pictures in Rome and in Vienna, he bivouacks at The Dorchester and the George V and goes gallery crawling in South Kensington and St. Germain des Prés. There was no conscious withdrawal from America in the beginning. He was just a little ahead of the pack in the 1950s and '60s when Hollywood went multinational.
He is a good drinker and used to say he got a little cockeyed before dinner but always went to bed sober. Now, he drinks less and talks about his battered body with awe. At his Mexican hideaway, built on rented Indian land at the edge of the jungle, he likes the sound of long drinks swishing in glasses to the accompaniment of the waves almost lapping his porch. He also likes to have people and animals around, and friends and cronies find their way to the small bay south of Puerto Vallarta to talk and drink, or just to sit silently with him and watch the sun sink into the Pacific. He loves art more than anything and likes to think his movies include moments of reserve when things aren't so much spelled out as artfully suggested.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from John Huston by Axel Madsen. Copyright © 1978 Axel Madsen. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
PART I,1. John Huston,
2. Youth,
3. Hanging out,
4. Paris and Warner's,
5. Taking off,
6. Warring,
7. Happy days,
8. Horizon and witch hunt,
9. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer,
10. Sons and fathers,
11. Zaire and The Queen,
12. Paris '52,
PART II,
13. Ireland and The Devil,
14. The Whale,
15. Our hero at fifty,
16. Wobbling,
17. The Misfits,
18. Freud and the inner self,
19. Night of the Iguana,
20. Noah's Ark and Carson McCullers,
21. Family picture,
22. Fat City and Cece,
23. Keeping truckin',
24. Fading into legend,
Filmography,
Bibliography,
Index,