Free Watch Me: A Memoir by Anjelica Huston

straight on the dining room table.
    In my memory of Ryan, I see a golden specimen, always in motion, an Apollo. His red-brown skin was darker than his mane of yellow-blond hair. He was an athlete, a runner, a boxer, and a bully. He loved to play Frisbee on the beach. He was a gorgeous California native, born and bred in the Palisades, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, a peaceful name for a tumultuous sea.
    When Jack returned from New York a few days later, I told him the news: I was in love and I was leaving him for Ryan O’Neal. Jack’s reaction was not to criticize or attack me. He was by turns confident and horrified; this event was sudden and surprising to him. For me, too. It came totally out of left field. I had no idea such a thing might occur. In truth, I found it quite ridiculous. How could this have happened? After Cuckoo’s Nest premiered on November 19, to great acclaim, Jack left for Aspen. There was never a confrontation between him and Ryan.
    Although at first I stayed on at Mulholland Drive, I beganto go out to Ryan’s house in Malibu on the weekends. Lou’s girlfriend, Phyllis Somer, was my confidante. A California blonde with a great smile and a beautiful tanned body, she was living at Lou’s house in Malibu, close to Ryan’s on Broad Beach, and she gave me a song recorded by Mary MacGregor called “Torn Between Two Lovers.” I said to Lou, “I know that after a couple of weeks, I’ll be dragging home to Jack with a Frisbee around my neck.”
    I spent New Year’s Eve with Apollonia, Ara, Lou, and John Phillips and his daughter, Mackenzie. Ryan was not with us. He and I had fought, as was to become our habit. He was demanding my attention by trying to hurt me. After the parties, we ran out onto the beach from Lou’s house; the sunrise was luminescent, like the glass in his collection of Gallé lamps. We were all in evening dress. Lou said, “I’ve always wanted to walk down a beach in a tuxedo.” He and John played football and made wonderful passes and catches, and on the way back to his house, Lou put his arm around me. I was grateful to him for that; I had always respected his friendship with Jack and had not meant to compromise his position. In a way, I was embarrassed, too, because I’d always found Ryan too eager socially. He had a rueful, self-deprecating charm. There was a molten quality to him, as if his engine ran too hot.
    Ryan was very concerned with his daughter, Tatum, then about twelve, with whom he had filmed Paper Moon , with Peter Bogdanovich directing, and he brought her everywhere. Tatum was the youngest person ever to win a competitive Oscar, and I did not realize at first that they were almost a couple unto themselves; he seemed to have few boundaries with her. They were often photographed at restaurantsand parties and clubs. She was included in many of the finer details and decisions regarding his life.
    Ryan had amassed a list of gorgeous conquests, from his wives—Joanna Moore, the mother of Tatum and her brother, Griffin; and his second wife, Leigh Taylor-Young—to his girlfriends, who included Barbra Streisand, Bianca Jagger, Diana Ross, Nathalie Delon, Ursula Andress, and Anouk Aimée, with many broken hearts in between.
    The truth was that there were two Ryans. He could be fun and gregarious, including Allegra on weekends and taking us shopping and for haircuts (I cut mine off to half an inch and Tatum followed), or energetically running Tatum, Allegra, his Belgian Shepherd, Jada, and me up and down the sand at Malibu, throwing Frisbees as we leaped and dove into the surf to catch them. Or putting on a pale blue Hawaiian shirt that matched his eyes and driving us up to Moonshadows or Hal’s or Giorgio Baldi’s in Santa Monica for dinner. But then there was a dark side. He could be critical, pugnacious, jealous, demanding, and deceptive.
    On Fridays, we’d drive out to the beach house and sometimes I’d cook spaghetti and meatballs. Griffin was pretty much living