Globe and Mail reviewers are not to review books by friends. The book scene is a small world. No rule governs books about people we know/knew. As long as the biographer is not a friend, the biographee may be.
This is my situation in regard to Jeffrey Meyers’s John Huston. Huston was an important and influential figure in my life, I also knew, or knew a lot about, most of those featured in Myers’s biography. Indeed, John Huston was the most significant figure of my teens and early twenties; the first to function in loco parentis.
Meyers celebrates Huston as one of the great filmmakers. Among the work he labels masterpieces are The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (which allowed him to reciprocate years of belief and support by his actor-father Walter), The African Queen and Huston’s final film, The Dead (1987). Meyers is a great admirer of Hemingway (as was Huston), and, except for The Dead and The African Queen (because Katharine Hepburn’s incandescent performance commands equal weight), the films are old-school male. Meyers cites another universal feature of Hustonia: Men pursue prizes, real or metaphoric, and are usually defeated in their quest.
The book’s subtitle is Courage and Art, with examples of both throughout. It should probably be called Courage, Art and Many, Many Women. John Huston married five times, with concomitant relationships during every marriage. Meyers notes that that “Huston … wanted intelligent women who were good companions as well as lovers. He treated them well, kept up with most and usually remained friends with them.”
Meyers presents many Huston women with a measure of dismissal. This frequently occurs in biographies filled with beautiful, adoring women. Sexually opulent lives can seem privileged and unfairly distributed. Huston was a discerning, compulsive collector – of art, of experiences, of women. His drive was, in my opinion, less to conquer than to acquire. Of the acquired, the art objects brought the most lasting pleasure, the dangerous experiences the greatest triumph over childhood frailty, illness and/or fear (he once said, “Bravery is just the other side of fear’s face”).
Then came the women, some were certainly loved (e.g. socialite Marietta Tree, French actress Suzanne Flon). As with the risky experiences and the objets d’art, none was required. Women were; no single woman was.
With the exception of Gladys Hill. Meyers, and others interviewed, acknowledge Hill as for many years indispensable to Huston. An ex-wife of pre-Columbian art dealer Ed Primus, she was largely responsible for Huston’s lifelong love of this art form. She was also almost unfailingly gracious and helpful to the procession of women passing through film sets, locations and St. Clerans, Huston’s Galway Irish mansion (now an upmarket tourist hotel).
John and “Glades,” as the child Anjelica Huston named her, worked on everything together, from scripts to schedules. Meyers says they’d been lovers. I knew her well and yet was unaware of this, though it does make sense. Hill was a physically unprepossessing, bespectacled West Virginian, well-spoken, with a wonderful laugh. Meyers observes that glamorous men frequently bed such women once or very occasionally. This binds them in loyalty and a measure of wistful hope – tempered in Hill’s case by good sense. Erotically, she had him less, but in most other ways, she had more of him, including devotion, for longer than almost anyone.
John thrived among macho men. Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum and director William Wyler were particular pals. Huston gambled, smoked and played cards. He hunted foxes and elephants, yet had enormous affection for horses, and for his wonderful Irish wolfhound, Seamus.
