Holidaying in the US ski resort of Aspen in the early ’80s, Angelica Huston and her mercurial boyfriend Jack Nicholson were persuaded to add their star power to a fundraising party for a Democratic presidential contender.
They were well established as Hollywood’s coolest couple, but not everyone wanted to meet them. Gwyneth Paltrow, then 11, was there with her film industry parents. She sat next to Huston, looking “nervously” at Nicholson.
“That man scares me,” she said.
“Don’t worry,” Huston replied, “he scares me, too.”
Huston’s stormy relationship with one of Hollywood’s baddest boys lasted 17 years, from 1973 to 1990, and left her emotionally scarred. He humiliated her with his womanising, yet she returned to his unreliable arms again and again.
Nicholson was charismatic and possessed a wolfish smile that few women could resist. He never hit her, like other boyfriends did, but the emotional torture left its mark.
Nicholson has a puckish reputation that has made him a difficult man to dislike. But the 77-year-old emerges with little credit in Huston’s exposure of their life together in her biography, Watch Me.
Daughter of film director John Huston, Angelica is intelligent and has carved out a career playing intimidating women, such as Morticia Addams in The Addams Family and the Grand High Witch in The Witches. Yet she was putty in the hands of Nicholson – blinded by love to his serial infidelity.
Raised in London, Huston, 63, recalls how she first fell in love with Nicholson when she went to see him in Easy Rider in a local cinema.
She was just 21 when she met him in the flesh. Having moved to LA after her mother died when Angelica was 17, she accompanied her step-mother to a party at Nicholson’s home. She was instantly smitten.
She and Nicholson danced together for hours and she accepted his invitation to stay the night. The next day, he unchivalrously sent her home in a taxi, explaining that he had to go to a basketball match.
He soon asked her out again, only to cancel. Huston later discovered this was a euphemism for an assignation with his ex-girlfriend.
Nicholson loved nothing better than to watch sport on TV and eat hotdogs with his male friends, says Huston. His simple tastes, though, also included women by the score.
The more macho his behaviour, the more he attracted the young model whose own parents had cheated shamelessly on each other. One night, tired of watching him flirt with a German model at a restaurant, she stood up to leave.
Nicholson grabbed her wrist and pulled her back into her seat, telling her never to do that again. Yet even this aggressive sign of possessiveness was welcome to her.
In th early ’70s, Huston would regularly fly off on modelling assignments, often for British Vogue.
Before she left for London one night, Nicholson held her in his arms and told her he loved her. She later discovered a fellow model and supposed friend, Apollonia van Ravenstein, had slept with him that same night.
When she confronted the actor on the phone, he told her it had simply been a “mercy f***”. It was the first time, Huston notes drily, that she had heard copulation “described as an act of compassion”. She accepted that he had never vowed to be faithful to her, but his belief that his answer was acceptable stunned her.
Nicholson was generous with his presents. He needed to be. He once bought her a Mercedes Benz. She crashed it on the first drive.
Commitment was the one thing she craved – and which he refused to give. One night, they were watching TV when a show called The Newlywed Game came on. Nicholson couldn’t hide his contempt for the state of matrimony.
When Huston told him that if he “had any balls” he would marry her, he was shocked. He thought she was joking and couldn’t understand the upset he had caused. She says she cried for three days.
Some may fail to see Nicholson’s magnetic sexual attraction, but Huston says that even when they were a couple, women would try to steal him right in front of her eyes.
At the 1974 Cannes Film Festival, attractive French women would roar up on motorbikes and ask Jack to take a ride with them. And he would oblige, leaving Huston standing on the pavement.
Huston writes that being the daughter of another inveterate womaniser may have made her tolerant of the vice in other men.
She wasn’t entirely blameless, however, and was unfaithful in her turn. She says she had “a short but most pleasant affair” with British fashion photographer David Bailey.
Huston’s dalliances were to have far more serious consequences when she got involved with Ryan O’Neal.
At a Hollywood party in 1975, which she attended sans Nicholson, O’Neal whispered to her ear that he needed to talk to her. She was too full of herself to realise that she was “playing with fire”, and got in touch with him the next day.
They smoked a joint, went to watch a basketball game and then kissed for “six hours straight” on his dining room table. Nicholson was more shocked than upset when she told him she was leaving him.
The star of Love Story may have had the blond good looks of a Greek god, but it hid a Jekyll and Hyde personality. Aggressive, deceitful and jealous, his mood could turn ugly in seconds.
There was also “something distinctly perverse” about his family set-up, Huston recalls. O’Neal had an intense relationship with his daughter Tatum, then 12, and they behaved almost like a couple.
Huston soon discovered that O’Neal was cheating on her, telling her he was in touch with both Ursula Andress and Bianca Jagger.
With O’Neal, there were worse problems than infidelity. They were living together in the 1970s when he attacked her at a party. Seeing him looking agitated, she followed him as he abruptly left without her.
He turned on her, grabbed her by the hair and head-butted her. She “saw stars and reeled back”, running half blinded to a bathroom where she locked herself inside.
O’Neal managed to talk his way inside where he continued the assault, batting her about the head with an open hand before leaving.
She returned to his house to find him in bed, nursing an icepack to his forehead, chuckling as he complained about his headache. She decided their year-and-a-half relationship was over.
O’Neal has yet to comment on her allegations about the vicious attack that prompted her decision. This week, Huston publicly defended mentioning it in her book.
“It’s my feeling that any man who lifts a hand against a woman deserves to be outed, so I’ll leave it at that,” she said on American TV.
She returned, inevitably, irresistibly, to Nicholson, but this time insisted on having her own home.
She says it only dawned on her gradually that Jack was a “world- class philanderer” – but she admits she was “tragically gullible”.
As prolific as he was in his womanising, Nicholson was adept at covering his tracks. Occasionally, though, Huston would find a piece of woman’s clothing, or a trinket lying in a soap dish.
And there was no point accusing anyone as there were simply too many potential suspects.
Huston left Nicholson a string of times but always returned, clinging to the hope that if they had children, it might bring them together and stop him straying. But doctors found she was infertile.
It was the issue of children that finally ended their relationship.
By the late 1980s, they were seeing less of each other as Angelica became a successful actress in films such as Prizzi’s Honour, A Handful of Dust and Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanours.
She was rehearsing for her role in the 1990 film The Grifters when Nicholson invited her over for dinner and broke the news that he was to become a father. The mother was Rebecca Broussard, an actress who was 12 years younger than her.
Huston writes that she hugged him and replied: “There’s only room for one of us women in this picture, and I am going to retire from it.”
It wasn’t quite the end. Huston felt humiliated when Nicholson’s lawyer and manager asked for a meeting and warned her not to try to get too much money out of him. It hadn’t even occurred to her to ask him for any, she says.
When an article appeared in Playboy in which a young woman claimed Nicholson had spanked her with a table tennis bat as one of their sex games, Huston finally exploded.
Rushing to his LA office, she caught him as he emerged from the lavatory, and went at him “like a prizefighter”, raining savage blows on his head and shoulders as he tried in vain to duck them. She stopped, exhausted, and they both sat down. Then she attacked him again, feeling strangely thankful, she recalls, that he was allowing her to beat him up.
He rang her a few days later to say he was covered in bruises.
“I said: ‘You’re welcome, Jack, you deserved it’. And we laughed. It was tragic, really.”
That Christmas, she received a final present from him – a pearl and diamond necklace that Frank Sinatra had once given to his wife Ava Gardner.
“These pearls from your swine,” Nicholson had written in the card.
One can imagine him flashing that devilish grin as he wrote it.
Daily Mail
* Watch Me by Anjelica Huston is published by Simon & Schuster.