When a 12-year-old Gwyneth Paltrow said of Jack Nicholson, “That man scares me,” Anjelica Huston did not offer a soothing denial. Instead, the woman who was then Nicholson’s partner replied with two words: “He scares me, too. ”
Huston has now, at 74, put the full arc of that relationship on the record in her memoir, *Watch Me*. The book does not dwell on the glamour of award ceremonies or red-carpet photographs.
It describes what 17 years inside that relationship actually looked like. Born in Santa Monica in 1951, Huston grew up in the orbit of her father, John Huston, one of the most celebrated directors in American cinema. He directed classics like *The Maltese Falcon* and *The Treasure of the Sierra Madre*. He was also a man who lived by his own rules, with multiple marriages, affairs, and children in different countries.
His attitude toward fidelity, she has said, was that it applied to other people. That background informed what came next. In 1973, at age 21, Huston attended a party at Nicholson’s house. He was 36, at the peak of his powers after *Five Easy Pieces* and during production of *Chinatown*.
He was magnetic, and he was also, by his own account, someone who had never organized his romantic life around fidelity. Huston was aware of both facts. She stayed the night anyway. Their first date was cancelled so Nicholson could meet his ex-girlfriend, Michelle Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas.
Huston learned of this afterward and filed it away. It became the first iteration of a pattern that repeated for nearly two decades: he would do something revealing who he was, she would feel the pain, and she would stay. In the memoir, Huston describes the architecture of the relationship. He balanced his hurtful, promiscuous behavior with acts of kindness.
The gifts were spectacular: a Mercedes, which she crashed the same day he gave it to her, antique oil paintings, and fine jewelry. His generosity was frequent because there was often something to compensate for. The infidelities were not hidden, which was perhaps the most disorienting part. A model friend confessed early on that she had slept with Nicholson just one week before Huston did.
At Cannes in 1974, she watched French girls ride up on motorbikes and offer him rides. He accepted. “Well, why not? That’s great.
Bye, Tootses,” he said, and left her behind. She described having to develop “more of a sense of humor” about it over time, though the tears came first. There was a concert where another woman sat between his legs for the entire performance. When Huston reacted, Nicholson rolled his eyes and said, “Come on.
She’s just an old friend. ” Huston learned it was his new friends she had to worry about. She found women’s belongings around his house—jewelry, a jacket. She sometimes wore the jewelry “to see if anybody would come up and claim it.
Nobody ever did. ” Once, she passed a woman on the street wearing her own jacket. She said nothing. One incident stands out in the memoir for its honesty.
Nicholson flirted openly with a waitress in front of her. Huston stood to leave, and he grabbed her arm, telling her never to walk out on him like that. She admitted she enjoyed that brief flash of possessiveness, not because being grabbed was acceptable, but because in that moment, his attention was finally on her alone. She held on to the hope of marriage.
She wanted children and a life with structure. Nicholson telegraphed his resistance repeatedly. Watching *The Newlywed Game* together, he mocked it with contempt. Once, frustrated, she pushed: “If you had balls, you’d marry me.
” His response was immediate: “Marry you? Are you kidding? ” She cried for three days, and then she stayed. In 1985, her father cast her in *Prizzi’s Honor* as a scorned mafia daughter, with Nicholson as the hitman at the center.
The film, made by father, daughter, and lover, was about loyalty and betrayal. Huston won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Her father cried watching her accept it. Nicholson was in the audience, as she had been for him nine years earlier.
John Huston died in 1987. Two years after giving his daughter the role that won her the Oscar, he was gone. Around the same period, Huston also ended a relationship with actor Ryan O’Neal after he physically assaulted her. She was unequivocal later: “Any man who lifts a hand against a woman is a coward in my book.
”
In 1990, Nicholson invited her to dinner. She thought he might have something important to say. He did. “Someone is going to have a baby,” he told her.
It was not her. The woman was Rebecca Broussard, a model 12 years younger. Huston recalled thinking, “There’s only room for one of us women in the picture, and I am going to retire from it. ”
A few days later, a *Playboy* article appeared quoting a woman about a sexual encounter with Nicholson.
He claimed it was an old reprint. It did not matter. The accumulated weight of 17 years landed at once. Huston drove to the Paramount lot where he was filming and attacked him.
“I beat him savagely about the head and shoulders,” she wrote. He ducked and bent but did not resist. He told her later he was bruised all over. She told him he deserved it.
Then they laughed. “It was tragic, really,” she wrote. He sent her a pearl and diamond bracelet afterward with a note: “These pearls from your swine. ” It was the last gift.
They did not see each other again until 1995, when Sean Penn cast them together in *The Crossing Guard* as an ex-married couple. They were awkward at first, then had lunch on the last day of shooting. Nicholson offered what she called one of her favorite comparisons: “You and me, Tootses, we’re like *Love in the Time of Cholera*. ” She appreciated the framing: hopeless, enduring love.
He also told her she was the love of his life. She believed him, while understanding that being the love of his life and being his life were entirely different things. In 1992, Huston married sculptor Robert Graham. He was steady where Nicholson had been volatile, faithful where Nicholson had not been.
They were married for 16 years, until his death in 2008 after a long illness. Huston sat with him through it. She continued working. In 2001, Wes Anderson cast her as Etheline Tenenbaum in *The Royal Tenenbaums*, the composed mother at the center of a family of brilliant, damaged people.
She played that woman with the authority of someone who knows what sustained composure costs. She did not return to Nicholson, but she did not cut him loose either. When her first memoir was published in 2013, Nicholson attended the party. She said publicly that Jack was somebody she wanted in her life.
Then came the Los Angeles wildfires in January 2025. Huston was in a car with three dogs, two cats, and her housekeeper, watching the sky turn orange. Her phone rang. It was Jack, asking if she was all right, asking if she had somewhere to stay.
Her home survived; the fire stopped two streets away. “That’s the bottom line with he and I,” she told *The Guardian*. “When the chips are down, he’s there. ”
Looking back, Huston is unsentimental.
“I can’t say I enjoyed him all that much. I spent a lot of time in tears, a lot of time feeling slighted, not getting enough attention,” she said. “I think maybe in a few cases I took those infidelities more seriously than he did. ” She loved him, she said.
He was extraordinary, charismatic. She had not wanted to tame his wildness. She had wanted his obsession, to be as consumed by her as she was by him. That never happened.
At 74, Huston holds an Oscar, having made Morticia Addams and the Grand High Witch unforgettable. She has worked with Woody Allen, Wes Anderson, Francis Ford Coppola, and her own father. She has been married and widowed and survived a relationship that would have undone most people in a fraction of the time. She has arrived at a kind of honesty that does not flinch.
Not about Nicholson, not about herself, and not about the specific form of love that keeps you in a parking lot at Cannes watching the man you love ride away. Not because you are stupid or weak, but because you are human. And humans do not stop loving people just because the loving hurts.
