Classic Anjelica : Out from the shadow of two Hollywood legends, she finds her own pace and roles in four films this year

On the floor in her bedroom in Benedict Canyon, Anjelica Huston was posing for a still camera. It was the kind of thing movie stars did routinely in the ‘50s--one thinks of Kim Novak or Natalie Wood. But Huston, who prefers not to meet the press at home, was really giving herself to the lens. Huston’s legs are longer than your legs, no matter how tall you are. She was surrounded, in this bedroom, by irony. The drive past the gate to the house is steep beyond imagining--and then there is no view atop the canyon. If anybody should have a view of Hollywood right now, it’s Anjelica Huston. “I hate views,” the actress said provocatively. “The real estate people can’t believe that you don’t want a view. It took me two years to find this house.”

As someone entered the bedroom, she craned her neck away from the camera and said, “Last week, I killed two people.” The photographer stopped for a moment, and the words hovered in the air.

It’s the kind of throwaway line Maerose Prizzi would have dropped--or Anjelica Huston. People (and critics) say she’s doing her best Garbo in Paul Mazursky’s “Enemies, A Love Story” and her best hysteric in Woody Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors.” For the Mazursky picture she won the National Society of Film Critics best supporting actress award and was runner-up to “My Left Foot’s” Brenda Fricker in the same category with the L.A. critics. At 38, she has arrived--an industry star on the brink of bankability. Finally.

Having emerged from the shadows of two powerful men--her father, John Huston, and her longtime lover, Jack Nicholson--Anjelica casts a pretty long shadow herself. And it’s not all legs. Huston, who made her screen debut at 16 but did not bloom on the screen until well after 30, has exercised her fresh new status by taking on a series of off-beat roles for some of film’s most interesting directors. Four movies in a year, including the just-completed “Grifters,” with Britain’s Stephen Frears.

“On the last day of (shooting), I killed two people,” Huston repeated, as she and the photographer went back to work. “I play a con person who does numbers at the race track. One person I murdered, and one was in self-defense.” Her mind seems to be moving as fast as her career, one thought veering into another. “That night I went to the wrap party and danced wildly until 5 o’clock in the morning. Then I went to my ranch, up north, and cooked chickens and turkeys for Christmas. Then on Boxing Day, I collapsed.” She picked herself up off the floor and moved to her king-size bed, which she occupied like an old-fashioned movie goddess.

“Isn’t she more like an updated Dietrich than Garbo?” asked Broadway casting director Andy Zerman. “I mean Dietrich without the musical numbers. Certainly, there’s mystique.” And attention. As the neurotic stewardess in “Crimes and Misdemeanors” she has masochists everywhere identifying like crazy. As Dolores, the lonely mistress who “smokes alone and drinks alone and understands pills and can’t stand it anymore,” she struck a nerve.

“We all have that grain of obsession, if we let the ribbon out. We all want to hang up on somebody at one time or another,” she said knowingly, lighting the first in a long line of cigarettes. She’s a Huston all right--but she’s not a Dolores, she says.

Still, she last year suffered what she calls a “public humiliation” when Jack Nicholson’s name was linked to a woman who modeled for Playboy and revealed indiscreet details of the actor’s sexual appetites. It was embarrassing. Huston and Nicholson--”Jack and Anjelica”--were an icon couple of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Were they or weren’t they--everyone wanted to know--just lovers or just friends? When you say the name Nicholson now, you get a long pause and then a fragment of an answer. “After 16 years,” she said, “there isn’t an aspect of my life he hasn’t affected.”

On another occasion, at dinner at the Beverly Wilshire, she said only: “I was involved with an older man once.” She tends to drop these lines. Like on the subject of relationships: “Many people in Hollywood are looking for themselves in other people. They want mirrors.”

She doesn’t--anymore. “In shadow” is a Jungian term for that dark part of a personality that hasn’t been fully integrated. For almost 20 years, she was on close terms with the notion of shadow . Her father tried desperately to make her a star, when she was 16, in “A Walk With Love and Death.” But even John Huston lacked the power to put her over. Wrong timing.

She’s smart enough to know--if only from her years with Nicholson--the advantage of being discovered later, when you are ready. For one thing, as Nicholson once put it, “it lasts longer.” And who would know better? Nicholson, after all, worked in “B” biker movies for 11 years until “Easy Rider” made him an “overnight sensation.” He’s the least neurotic of male stars about stardom itself--he wanted it and he enjoys it. And from the moment he could, he called his shots and chose his directors, from Michelangelo Antonioni to Mike Nichols.

And that’s what Huston is doing, using maturity to exploit the moment. So many movies, so close together: Mazursky’s “Enemies,” the Lower East Side love story in which she played a Holocaust survivor; the Woody Allen picture; Nicolas Roeg’s “Witches,” to come later this year; and Frear’s “The Grifters” in which she plays out--to incest--the role of a mother in love with her son (John Cusack). In three of these movies she smokes. As she picked up a cigarette in her bedroom she said, “Why am I doing this? It’s because I think a cigarette will help me concentrate. It won’t.”

There are contradictions galore. The career is roaring, yet she talks about “walking from the bedroom to the kitchen without looking at the dining-room table to avoid looking at a script.” At home like this, in silk pants and top, she reveals a true thoroughbred beauty--her mother was on the cover of Life as an unknown ballerina, and was discovered by David O. Selznick. (The framed original Phillipe Halsman photo of her mother is hanging in her den.) So there’s an allure on both sides of the family. When she stands up to make tea, she is a towering presence, but not necessarily overpowering. People see the paradoxes and feel the attraction and try to figure her out.

Director Stephan Frears, now editing “Grifters” in London, says, “She’s not like other people. It’s that odd crossing of America and Europe in her background.” Jim Robinson, the chairman of Morgan Creek, the company that financed Mazursky’s dream movie “Enemies,” says, “If you think about her lineage, you’re not surprised with what she delivers. She’s bringing all kinds of cultural references to a part.”

Frears admits his movie was “built around Melanie Griffith. When she dropped out, we built it around Anjelica. Melainie has more of a childlike quality than Anjelica. This is a woman who gets to kill her son--very tough. But Anjelica is a tough woman, honest and sly. She’s not so strong that it’s a weakness, as with some actresses. She has a stoicism.”

The actress was unquestionably hurt by the failure of Francis Coppola’s “Gardens of Stone,” her first shot at leading ladyhood, and her father’s last movie “The Dead” didn’t make lots of money. But the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. “While working with her,” said Frears, “I was stimulated to run some of her father’s pictures, starting with ‘Asphalt Jungle.’ Because with Anjelica you’re always aware of his presence.”

When her father attempted to launch her as a 16-year-old ingenue, his good intentions earned both of them their worst reviews and put a stain on her credibility that a decade couldn’t fade. She remembers being told by her father when she was 26 that she was “too old, honey.” “Twenty-six and too old!” So she worked as an extra, as an asylum patient, in “Frances.” (“It was like day work,” she said later.) She did some “Laverne & Shirleys” because of her friend Penny Marshall, instead of taking junk work in horror movies for money. After she moved out of Nicholson’s house in 1983, Huston began to remake herself from the girlfriend--”the adjunct,” as she put it--into a movie star.

“I was going to show them,” she said. “I now think I was always good, I just lacked confidence. I was a lady of leisure who one day in the early ‘80s gave herself three months to make it. The hardest part of a career is just getting the job.”

There were “little impetii,” as she calls her motivations, along the way to stardom. She eavesdropped on a telephone conversation between her agent and “a money man” before casting was complete on “Prizzi’s Honor,” the 1985 film for which she won the best supporting actress Oscar. “This money man didn’t want to pay me any more than he had to. Because who was I?” said Huston, lighting another cigarette. “That spurred me.”

“Two days after I won the Academy Award,” she said dryly, “I did a reading for ‘The Witches of Eastwick.’ It was a terrible reading. It was the part Cher did, but this was pre-Cher. So an Academy Award doesn’t mean you don’t have to go in for readings. No matter who you are.”

“My one really major regret in life,” John Huston told a reporter six weeks before his death, “was spending money before I made it.” But if Huston didn’t leave his daughter a fortune in real estate, he left her the ultimate gift--the opportunity to succeed, which she did. When the father finally launched the daughter as Maerose in “Prizzi’s Honor,” she was so ready she strode eagerly out of the shadows.

“I keep close tabs on myself,” she said. “I think you should be the first person to know what you’re creating. But for so many years they look at you sideways--when you are just the daughter or the girlfriend--that you can’t believe it when things change.”

Here there is some brittleness in her voice. And she clearly is taking her time accepting her new status. “If you are lucky, you get your 15 minutes of fame,” Huston says now. “And then if you are really lucky, you get another 15 minutes.” But fame has less size to it these days. Her father was too big for the houses in Beverly Hills, so he moved to St. Clerans, his great manor house in Ireland, where Anjelica lived as a child. John Huston was famous when it meant something. The daughter suggests that the media culture has rather ruined being famous. “Now, to be famous,” she said late on a recent evening, “you are supposed to be the subject of scandal. Or you are supposed to pass these tests so righteous or moral--nobody could pass.”

This Huston, of course, is the more private Huston. The Jack and Anjelica years are over in any public or showy way. She lives in a gated, perfect-for-one-person pied-a-terre that has a sauna and a black-tiled bedside swimming pool. This is where she recharges. She is very uncontrolling in person, an actress who would seem to prefer not becoming a personality-star. She wants only to do the work. She’s lived enough with attention. “I don’t want to read one more book by a movie star for a very, very long time,” she says and closes that subject.

At dinner at the hotel, Huston wears a black silk shirt and leopard straight skirt and leopard high-high heels. But even she knows the time has about passed in Hollywood when an entrance makes a difference. “All social life is now charity,” she complained. “People don’t give dinner parties anymore. People in the ‘80s were not willing to spend their own money on dinner parties. I get 15 or 20 letters a day for everything from Yugoslavian dog illnesses to marathon diseases. It numbs you. That tells you a little bit how I feel about my mail these days. So you write off a check for $20 to a charity to absolve yourself of guilt. It’s convent school guilt.”

She doesn’t have time for it. She’s alone and on her own. There is no production company with her name on it for an ego boost. “I had a development deal for a while,” she said offhandedly. “But an actress is really looking for parts for herself. She isn’t looking at the whole movie. So I’m skeptical about development deals.” She is more concerned with simply maintaining her status as actress for hire, and maintaining herself. “Finally you feel you can’t really depend on anyone permanently. It’s just you doing you.”

Which leads you to ask her about the very dependent Dolores in “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” one of Woody Allen’s most vivid characters ever. How much was Woody and how much was Anjelica? “It’s all me,” she said, running her hands through her Cleopatra-cut black mane and laughing. “I hope to God I haven’t taken things to the levels Dolores did. I’ve never blackmailed or threatened, but under rejection people do very crazy things.”

Indeed, in moments the actress seems terribly fragile. “We all know about the waiting around for them to call and when they do call--attacking them. We had no character discussion at all. It was all there in the writing . . . . I had no interest in going out while we did that movie. I liked going home and talking to my dog.”

Yet she’s the kind of classic beauty who’s meant to be seen, and not just on screen. Or in magazine layouts of fall collections. She says that like her father, her looks “depend on mood and happiness.” But what about beauty? “I bought it when I was told beauty came from inside. When you become older, it’s an act of faith to believe beauty is inside. Do I like my looks? Sometimes . . . I’d say I’m one of those people who’s handsome rather than beautiful. I have the same duality my father had. He could look wrinkled or child-like within hours. Feature-wise I’m more like him than (my mother). I think I’m like a tall Englishwoman.”

Huston suddenly remembered modeling agent Eileen Ford telling her early on to have her nose done. She laughed softly, self-consciously. “If I’d done the nose, then something else would have been wrong. I would have needed bee-stung lips.” She knows this is a very unforgiving town in terms of looks. “I never want to be one of those women with old-looking hands and pulled-in faces. It’s like silicone for breast enlargements. So they look sexier with silicone, but it lessens sensitivity. By deadening nerves, it’s a breast with parts cut off.”

At that point this Huston sat up straight, startled at her realization. “So they’re bigger, but you feel less. You don’t get the full follow-up. Isn’t that an odd dichotomy?”