Part one of Huston's planned two-part autobiography delivers nearly everything one could hope for in an old-school Hollywood memoir. Not that there is much Hollywood, since the early part of Huston's life was spent at the family estate in Ireland, with pedigreed dogs and horses rather than swimming pools and convertibles, but the other ingredients supply plenty of glamor, with famous visitors and stories of tragedy, romance, and beauty. While Huston reveals much that could be considered difficult (suicide attempts, an abusive relationship), she does so with a certain steeliness and lack of self-pity, lingering only where it seems to please her, clearly taking great joy in remembering her beloved parents and the pleasures of her early years with them. In certain places, this restraint serves to heighten the emotion of the book, while in others it may increase the distance between the reader and the author, as with her sudden, almost taken for granted success in the world of modeling. Huston reads, and her rich voice, elegant accent, and occasionally quirky pronunciation make the audio version particularly delightful. Verdict Unusually well written for a celebrity memoir, this should delight those with an interest in Huston or Hollywood, as well as fans of memoir in general. ["Recommended for fans of the Hustons...as well as those who enjoy Vanity Fair-type showbiz profiles," read the review of the Scribner hc, LJ 11/1/13.]-Heather -Malcolm, Bow, WA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

With her high cheekbones and piercing dark eyes, Huston was fated for success as a fashion model. As the daughter and granddaughter of film and stage royalty, she was also assured a career as an actress. How she fulfilled those dual destinies is the subject of the first in a planned two-volume memoir in which Huston delves into her past in stunning detail. Growing up on a sprawling Irish estate, Huston was in thrall to her famous director father John Huston's larger-than-life escapades and demands. As a teenager coming of age in London in the late 1960s, Huston fell under the spell of her passionately artistic prima-ballerina mother, Enrica Soma, who died just as Huston was coming into her own. Following that tragedy, the peripatetic Huston moved to New York where she captured the eye and captivated the attention of the day's leading fashion photographers, including the famously mercurial Bob Richardson. As a multitalented contributor to her family's theatrical legacy, Huston candidly reveals the heady and heartbreaking realities of life in that misconceived stratosphere.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2010 Booklist

This first installment of a planned two-part memoir by actress and former model Huston focuses on her childhood as the daughter of film director John Huston and his fourth wife, a young ballerina. Most of the author's early years were spent abroad, particularly in the west country of Ireland, so here listeners are occasionally treated to a hint of brogue. Huston reads her memoir in a quiet voice, betraying little emotion but showing flashes of affection for her father (who, in one memorable scene, gambled the last of their household money for a Monet) and her mother (who was tragically killed when Huston was just 17). Huston's low, rich voice adds a certain darkness to this audio performance, even when she's recounting lighter tales, and her wry humor is evident when she describes the hijinks that ensued at the many house parties her parents hosted. A Scribner hardcover. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

before most American celebrity- watchers became aware of her as Jack Nicholson's notably elegant girlfriend, in the mid-1970s - and before her acting career took off in 1985, when she was 34 (an Oscar award for "Prizzi's Honor" and nominations for "Enemies: A Love Story" and "The Grifters") - Anjelica Huston had a magical, if sometimes star-crossed, life in Ireland, England and New York. She was the daughter of the larger-than-life director John Huston ("The Treasure of Sierra Madre," "The Maltese Falcon," "The African Queen"), a man of great appetites and macho endeavor with whom "not only women but men of all ages fell in love... with that strange loyalty and forbearance men reserve for each other," his daughter writes. Huston's mother, Ricki Soma, a ballerina and the daughter of an Italian- restaurant owner in New York, was John Huston's fourth wife. They eloped when she was 18 and he was in his mid-40s. Huston was their second child and - with her mother now transformed into the beautiful couture-clad "translucent and remote" mistress of a vast West Ireland estate - she was raised amid multiple servants, visiting film-world eminences and colorful locals in the kind of world that has disappeared, other than, say, in movies starring Keira Knightley. Out of this elegy for a vanished world, the memoir becomes a seductive social history of the 1960s - and the story of her fractious separation from an indomitable father and grief for the loss of the mother who was the ballast of her life. When Huston was about 10, her parents separated and Ricki moved the children to London. Mother and daughter, always close, grew closer still ("I loved our alliance, our sweet conspiracy"), and when Huston visited her father, she appropriated his house manager as a mother stand-in, as if to buffer herself from this "dominant, proud and egotistical" man, who was baffled by his "emotional and stubborn" daughter. She had her Waterloo with him at 14, when, having heard she'd been dancing suggestively at a discothèque, he called her into his room and hit her "hard in the face, backward and forward." Later, when he seemed to acknowledge the outburst by acting "sheepishly," she says, "I didn't want to be near him." She was afraid, but it was a steely, not a cowering, fear. London in the early and mid-60s was ground zero of that transformative era, and Huston lived at its center. She lists the women "on the scene" (Jean Shrimpton, Pattie Boyd, Jane Birkin, Susannah York), and the bands (Traffic, Cream, the Yardbirds, the Kinks) - as well as the scents of the time ("lavender, sandalwood, ... unwashed hair, ... patchouli") and fashions (she wore that same "embroidered Afghan jacket that smelled strongly of goat" that so many of us proudly waltzed around in) - with a kind of impatience, as if the moment was too frenetic to be conventionally described. Huston is blunt about the opportunities her access afforded her. "It was remarkable how things came so easily to me," she writes. She fell into acting (acting in her father's films and understudying for Marianne Faithfull in "Hamlet") and modeling (for David Bailey and Richard Avedon) : "In every generation a flock of pretty girls was released into society, with the help of their mothers, via the pages of the glamour magazines. ... Often they were the progeny of good bloodlines - rich, clever, famous fathers and the beautiful women who married them. I was no exception to this fortunate rule." This is a caveat: If overcoming serious obstacles is what you want in a memoir, go no further; you won't find it here. But if you're seeking a look at high echelons, continue on, reader. I will give it to you as if straight from my diary. Huston and her mother were both dating - it was a time when early married women, now divorced, seized second chances at youth - and this caused wordless friction between them. One night, after her mother broached the subject ("You know, Anjel, we need to talk"), Huston burst into tears at the prospect of clearing the air. Then Ricki left hurriedly on a road trip with her musician beau, taking the tapes - Dylan, Miles Davis, the Stones, Vivaldi - her daughter selected. She died in a car crash in 1969. Losing the mother she deeply loved felt like "an abduction." Huston moved to New York, sharing an apartment with her longtime (and abiding) best friend, the writer Joan Juliet Buck: The depth of that friendship twines through this book, suggesting that, for the actress, women were a counterpoint to the one overwhelming man. Her portrait of the city's centers of hipness - Max's Kansas City (all "angst and irony," indeed) and the Chelsea Hotel - and impossible chic (the high-fashion precincts of Polly Mellon, Diana Vreeland, Avedon, Eileen Ford) is crystalline. Her love affair with an older, dangerous "wounded soul" from a rough background - the fashion photographer Bob Richardson - will be familiar to anyone who had such an affair in that darkness-worshiping season and city of "Midnight Cowboy." Her father directs her, opposite Moshe Dayan's son, in the movie "A Walk With Love and Death," and she gets back at him by being difficult during the filming and garnering bad reviews. She becomes a high-fashion model, staying with the tormented Richardson (he has frightening mood swings and a drug habit) for four years, living as internationally in adulthood as she had in childhood, the dropped names (not that we mind them) updated: Ali MacGraw and Warren Beatty and Zandra Rhodes. It is a heady life. Still, it has its universals : Richardson tells her real women have babies - she must produce one for him. She declines. He rails at her that she loves her father more than she loved her mother - why doesn't she admit it? She won't. She may be the indulged daughter of an irresistible "swashbuckler," but she maintains a backbone. It is when she sees Richardson through her father's eyes that she knows she must leave him. She moves to Los Angeles, where the next chapter of her life is about to open as this book closes. (She is completing a second memoir to be published next fall.) Though her life did not hold the challenges familiar to the 99 percent, it took strength to stay sensible amid temptations that felled others - and not to let her self-esteem be destroyed by a manipulative father. Anjelica Huston has long seemed a person of integrity and wistfulness; she brought those qualities to the role of the Broadway producer (who was, come to think of it, separating with difficulty from an overpowering man) in the recently canceled TV series "Smash," of which she was, arguably, the best part. This book - not profound but quite delicious - shows how those qualities grew in both hospitable and inhospitable soil. Huston was afraid of her father, but it was a steely, not a cowering, fear. SHEILA WELLER is the author of "Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon - and the Journey of a Generation."

An Oscar-winning actress from a celebrated entertainment family recalls her peripatetic childhood and adolescence, her various awakenings and epiphanies. The granddaughter of Oscar winner Walter Huston (1949, for The Treasure of Sierra Madre) and daughter of Oscar-winning actor and director John Huston (1949, The Treasure of Sierra Madre, for directing and screenwriting) writes that she "was a lonely child." However, so many personalities and celebrities swirl through the story that we begin to wonder about loneliness in a crowd. Born in 1951, she soon became a part of her father's world, though he was often absent, off filming. She adored her mother (John's fourth wife) but would soon learn that her father's carnal needs were immense. He would marry a fifth time but also carry on multiple affairs with--it seems--just about any woman who would yield. The earliest sections of Huston's memoir are the strongest: poignant details about her childhood affections, the men and women who worked on the Irish estate purchased with her father's film profits (his habitual gambling ever endangered all), the quotidian routines of girlhood. But as time progresses, the memoir sags. Soon, her selection principle seems to be "I remember this, so I'm including it," and a phone book of names assails readers, challenging both memory and interest. However, there are some amusing anecdotes--e.g., a plane ride with the Monkees, an appearance with an oddly detached Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show. The death of her mother (car crash) was obviously traumatizing, as was a longtime affair with photographer Bob Richardson, an affair that veered toward abusive before its end. This first installment--to be followed next year with the second volume--concludes as the author heads to Los Angeles. Banality clutches the text tightly, too rarely releasing its wings.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.