Watch Me: A Memoir (25 page)

Back on dry land at the farm, Bob said that he wanted to learn to ride a horse, so I put him up on my best and eldest mare, Kahlua. She was reliable and safe. When he rode her in the dressage ring, I could tell he was a natural. A few days later, I took him to a ranch next door to my property, and we made a long ride up through cattle pastures toward the top of a mountain overlooking the valley. At one point, the dirt road became steep, and the land beside the mountain trail fell away to a sheer drop on either side. Bob had an attack of vertigo and insisted on dismounting. The terrain was rugged and rocky. I could tell that he was unhappy, although he was very quiet. And so, with little space to turn around, I dismounted with him and we headed back down the mountain, the horses’ feet clip-clopping on the dry shale behind us.

After that misjudgment on my part, Bob was reluctant to ride again. He said that what he wanted was a two-year-old,
so they could learn at the same time. We went to a local horse farm in Woodlake, and he picked out a beautiful bay filly he christened Isis.

Bob never rode her, but I did, and I loved her. I could take her anywhere—she was always willing. I used to sing a song in her ear when we were out together, “Isis is nicest,” and I knew she understood. Isis was the smartest, fastest, and prettiest of my horses.

That Thanksgiving Bob presented me with a delightful pet, a “miniature” black potbellied pig we christened Giorgio. He arrived in a little cage and was, quite astonishingly, house-trained. His breeders had told Bob that Giorgio had a fondness for grapes. Within the first couple of weeks, he had doubled his original size and was soon growing tusks. Laila gave him pedicures and rubbed him with body cream, but it soon became evident that he was not a city pig. Giorgio went up to stay with Yolanda at the farm, where he went on to lead a fine life, strolling the grounds, eating acorns, and sleeping under the moon in great piles of oak leaves.

*  *  *

It was around this time that Toni Howard called one morning to say that Scott Rudin and the director Barry Sonnenfeld wanted to meet with me to discuss the possibility of my playing Morticia in
The Addams Family
, which, like the 1960s TV series, was based on Charles Addams’s
New Yorker
cartoons. I had been obsessed with Morticia since I was a child. “What do you think?” I asked Toni. “Why haven’t they asked Cher?”

I met Scott and Barry seated at a round table in the bar at the Beverly Hills Hotel. As I remember, I asked them the same question. I was delighted and incredulous when they offered me the part.

I was looking for a template on which to base Morticia Addams, a key to giving this potentially cartoon character some humanity. I decided on my friend Jerry Hall, the beautiful Texan model, feeling that her kind and gentle disposition and utter devotion to her children might lend some warmth to Morticia’s chilly, unflappable nature.

Before long, I was in costume fittings. There were to be several variations on Morticia’s ubiquitous black dress, some with subtle additions of lace and beading. Ruth Myers was the costume designer, and she was a zealot when it came to foundation garments. In keeping with my theory that a witch is a witch because all witches are in torture, the corset was so tight that for the first few days of filming, until the boning broke in to some degree and became more pliable, I literally could not sit down and had to be transported to set from my dressing room recumbent in the back of a station wagon. Fern Buchner contrived to make my eyes slant by gluing tabs of fabric to my temples and securing them firmly behind my head with a sturdy elastic band. The only problem with this was that in the screen test, the lower part of my face appeared to be sagging, so she attached two more tabs behind my jawline.

We agreed that the look worked, but it was like being in traction. I was in constant discomfort, unable to turn my head without resistance, so unless I released the tension at lunchtime, I had intense headaches in the afternoon, and my neck began to blister. To cap this off, there was the question of the wig. The hair and makeup took almost as long to remove as to apply in the first place, and if one of the tabs snapped, the wig would have to come off in order to reattach the elastic bands, then be replaced on my head.

After I broke all the acrylic fingernails that had been laboriously
applied, by painfully snapping them off while trying to hold open an elevator door, I resorted to wearing blood-red stick-on nails. Thereafter, I left a trail of sticky nails wherever I went—in pockets, in cars, on the street, in the carpet. Once I found one glued to Minnie’s bottom.

The days on
The Addams Family
were long and arduous, because I couldn’t move. Every time I turned my head and the hair split or the tabs snapped, Scott and Barry would call, “Cut!” Finally it occurred to me just to turn my body from the feet up.

There were several cast members who had a worse time of it than I, including Judith Malina, a wonderfully eccentric actress and one of the founders of the Living Theatre, who was playing Granny, and whose solution to the discomfort of being embedded in latex for over twelve hours a day was to smoke an endless series of joints in her trailer throughout filming. At least she was in a perennially good mood.

Christopher Lloyd, as Fester Addams, was likewise encased in prosthetics but also managed to stay upbeat. I don’t think we ever really had a conversational exchange—he was monosyllabic, which I put down to his being a really good character actor.

The children, Pugsley and Wednesday, were as different as night and day. Jimmy Workman was a contented, plump little soul but not what I would call a deep searcher in life. Christina Ricci was just the opposite. At eleven years old, she had a haunting dark-eyed gaze, level and unblinking; one withering look could render you speechless. Her line readings for Wednesday were deadpan, always impeccably delivered.

I had been a smoker since the age of sixteen, and Jimmy and Christina liked to visit my motor home at lunchtime
and lecture me on why cigarettes were bad for you. One day Christina showed up alone at my trailer and asked if she could come in. “I’d like to try a cigarette,” she said, eyeing me coolly. “Can you give me one?” I resisted, although she was very persuasive.

Raúl Juliá—who played Gomez, the patriarch of the family—was the heart and soul of
The Addams Family
; he held us together with his sweet nature and ebullient joie de vivre. He was kind to everyone, sang opera, and played with the children all day long. Bob and he got along very well and shared interests in Latin music and Cuban cigars.

Nothing seemed to faze Raúl. One morning he walked on set with an extremely bloodshot eye.

“What’s that?” I asked him. “How did that happen?”

“My eye just fell out,” he replied.

He went on to tell a very unusual story of how he’d been at the bar of the Sunset Marquis the night before, having a chat with a friend—I believe it was the singer and musician Robert Palmer—when, alarmingly, he realized that his eye had come loose from its socket. “It was dangling in front of me!” he said.

“What did you do?” I asked, horrified.

“I just grabbed it and put it right back in,” said Raúl. “Then I went to the emergency room at Cedars. The doctor said it was the right thing to do.”

That afternoon I phoned a joke shop and ordered dozens of those glasses with the drop eyeballs on springs, and the next morning the entire crew wore them for Raúl’s arrival on set. We all made light of what had happened, but he must have been scared beyond belief.

CHAPTER 24

F
rom the time we first met, I wanted to take Bob to Ireland. I was convinced that he would love it almost as much as I do. We flew to London on the Concorde. In the hot, crowded cabin, as the flight attendants served breakfast, Bob got an entire serving platter of smoked salmon and scrambled eggs dumped on his head. It dripped off his hair and onto the shoulders of his maroon cashmere jacket. By the time we arrived, and despite our best efforts to rinse him off, Bob smelled rank, and even after sending it to the dry cleaner when we got to the hotel, the jacket had to be disposed of. Bob was cold but refused to buy another. Later in the week, we flew into Dublin with Sabrina Guinness, whom I had met originally when Jack was making
The Shining
in London. My plan with Bob was to stay a few days in Dublin and then drive down to the West Country, where I grew up.

No sooner had we installed ourselves at the Shelbourne Hotel than our suite was filled with a host of welcoming friends, excited that their prodigal daughter had returned. Some friends had brought others along with them, and most were displaying great interest in the minibar. At one point Bob took me aside with his eyes wide and asked who the hell were all these people. Soon the party crawled downstairs to the Horseshoe bar, where the Guinness runs on tap.

That night we went to dinner at a restaurant with my old friend Garech Browne and a countryman who sang songs in ancient Gaelic with his eyes closed, holding your hand and moving your arm to his rhythms. The following morning we went out to the Cliffs above Howth, where William Butler Yeats and Maud Gonne had roamed together in their youth. The wind was so high, it almost blew us off the mountainside. Bob assured me that he loved Ireland but said that he was not used to the temperature.

On our way down west, we stopped off in Killarney and walked through the ruins of a twelfth-century fort at Dingle. Eventually, we came to the Burren, where Sabrina’s sister Miranda lived out on a sea of limestone rocks with barely another cottage in sight. From there we split off temporarily from Sabrina, with Bob and I continuing our road trip on to Galway.

By the time we reached Oranmore Castle that evening, Bob had come down with a bad case of the flu. I ate fattened sheep on a spit at the fireplace downstairs in the baronial hall at a party thrown in our honor by my childhood friend Leonie King, now married to the musician Alec Finn of the group De Dannan, whom I had met years before at Tony and Margot’s wedding.

Bob lay shivering under an enormous pile of blankets upstairs in the tower, where the wind and sea foam blew in through the open fortress windows with the cries of the cormorants. When I joined him after dinner, he declared quite seriously through chattering teeth that he thought he might die from the cold.

I think Bob was ultimately shocked back to health by the volatility of his surroundings. I was determined to show him
the places where I had grown up, and decided to take him to St. Clerans just a few days later, on a Sunday morning, when I presumed everyone would be at mass.

I had a memory of Mrs. Cole, from whom my father bought the estate and who used to come to visit the old castle on the grounds, and how we as children had thought of her as an oddity, a displaced outsider. Now I was in her position. When our car drew up on the driveway outside the Little House, we climbed out to peer through some tall black cast-iron gates at the entrance to the courtyard. There had been gateposts but never gates when we were growing up. A young man, maybe seventeen years old, came walking toward us across the gravel. As he opened the gate, he stared long and deep into my eyes. “I always dreamed of the day Anjelica Huston would come home to St. Clerans,” he said simply.

He welcomed us into the courtyard, and we followed him to the front door of the Little House. I looked up in the eaves as we passed the back door; there was always a nest there in the spring when Tony and I were growing up. The boy explained that the name of the family in residence was Corbett.

A couple, whom I assumed to be the parents of the boy, kindly asked us to come in. They offered us Irish coffee and biscuits. But I was crying and couldn’t stop. I asked if Bob and I could wander through the garden. My mother’s garden. Although the ancient crawling boughs of the old yew tree still yielded their invitation to climb, the place was very different. No tall delphiniums or snapdragons here, no hydrangeas fed with copper sulfate to stain them blue, no wall of sweet peas begging to be picked, no pious fuchsia in skirts of papal violet and blood red. Just as the rooks on the property seemed to have crowded out the songbirds, so had the perennials fought
for their place among the weeds resting against the high rock walls, the annuals of my mother’s day all but forgotten.

At the top edge of the vegetable garden was Betty O’Kelly’s forlorn tennis court, now mossy and gray. After a full walkabout of the grounds, we arrived at the tack room, and Mr. Corbett reached up and gently brought a photograph down from the wall. The image was of an African-American jockey, very dark-skinned, astride a racehorse. Mr. Corbett pointed to the jockey. “Isn’t that John Huston?” he asked eagerly. I agreed that the jockey looked very much like Dad, although perhaps of a different ethnic background. We left soon after without going up to the Big House. I didn’t have the heart for it.

That night we were booked to stay at Dromoland Castle before returning to Dublin on our way home. When we reached the hotel, I walked with Bob on the golf course and told him the stories of when Tony and I were kids and loved to chase around the corridors of Dromoland while Dad’s assistant Gladys and the owner, Mr. McDonough, held hands on the front lawn on a rare visit. And how the suits of armor were all imported from Scotland and England by rich entrepreneurs like Mr. McDonough, wishing to rewrite Irish history, of which there was little known since the burning of the national archives during the Irish civil war.

We were shown to our room upstairs; our suite had a full Jacuzzi bathtub, no doubt a blessed relief for all those cold golfers at the end of a day on the links. When I got out, pink and covered with bubbles, Bob handed me a glass of champagne, went down on one knee, and proposed marriage. He tossed two small boxes on the bed. One contained a ring with a rare turquoise-blue stone, a Paraíba, and the other a ceremonial
ring with the enameled heads of two spotted dogs, inlaid with emeralds, their mouths open with little teeth bared, as if barking at each other.