Free Watch Me: A Memoir by Anjelica Huston Page B

mitts that seemed ready to punch or stroke—I was beginning tomistrust everything about him. Soon he was telling me about unfinished business with Ursula Andress and confessing to phone calls with Bianca Jagger. Things were getting ugly; I was holding on longer than I should have, and I decided to return to Jack.

CHAPTER 7
    T he Last Tycoon , based on the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, follows the story of Monroe Stahr, the young head of one of the biggest movie studios in the Golden Age of Hollywood, during a time of industry turmoil due to the creation of the Writers Guild of America. The character of Monroe was inspired by the life of Irving Thalberg, the onetime boy-wonder production chief of MGM. It was evident that Sam Spiegel and Elia Kazan very much wanted Jack for this role. Maybe that was why they agreed to let me read for the female lead.
    I had gone to Mr. Kazan’s address on Beverly Drive, below Wilshire, to read with an actor called Cliff DeYoung. Sam Spiegel and Kazan stood up when I walked into the office. Sam called Kazan “Gadge.” I had met him when he came over to Jack’s house for dinner and had liked him immediately; he had been forthright and inquisitive and had asked me a good many questions about myself. Now he suggested that I read through a couple of scenes with Cliff, but afterward there was no sense that I’d gained any ground. There was no direction from Kazan. As I prepared to leave, he abruptly said, “I’ll walk you downstairs.”
    We stepped out into the fierce midday sunlight. Kazan motioned to a bench by a bus stop. “Come,” he said, “sit down with me a minute.” An older woman was seated on thebench. “Excuse me,” said Kazan, turning to her. “May I ask you a question?”
    “Okay,” the woman said.
    He indicated me and asked, “Do you think she’s beautiful?”
    I blushed.
    The woman appraised me. “No,” she said. “Interesting, perhaps, but not beautiful.”
    I watched the part disappear forever in the ether.
    “What do you think our relationship is?” asked Kazan, pushing it further.
    She threw him a dirty look. “Don’t be disgusting,” she said, and got up to take the bus.
    Soon I learned that Ingrid Boulting had been cast as the female lead, the “right” girl, Kathleen Moore, in The Last Tycoon. Jack had agreed to play Brimmer, a supporting role in the film, with Bobby De Niro starring as Monroe Stahr. Graciously, Sam Speigel and Elia Kazan offered me the part of Edna, the “wrong” girl, who shows up for a date with the hero only to have him reject her.
    We were rehearsing at Paramount, and in the center lot a great pond had been created to contain an enormous bobbing fiber-glass head of the goddess Shiva, from which Ingrid and I were to dismount in an early scene in the movie.
    Early that morning, Kazan had come by the bungalow I was using as a dressing room on the lot. He wanted Ingrid and me to do an improvisation. He set up the scene, explaining that my character needed something to wear under a transparent blouse for a hot date that night, and that Ingrid’s character might have something for me to borrow. He told me to take a few minutes to get into character, then to come to another bungalow a few streets down on the lot.
    As I made my way past the backdrops and facades, I found the house that he had indicated and knocked on a door. I had worked a few times with Ingrid when we were models in our previous life in New York. She was a very beautiful girl, with even features and huge eyes in a gentle moon face. I had always thought of her as self-contained, remote, and very British. But when she opened the door, what I saw was quite different. Ingrid was choking back tears, with black mascara pouring down her cheeks, hardly able to contain herself. It was utterly shocking. Until that moment I had been living in my own head. I had not even considered the other character’s state of mind. It was a great lesson in drama, as given by Kazan. Sadly,