In a sea of Santa Monica whites and tans, it was hard not to stare at the formidably chic woman with the dancer’s posture dressed in head-to-toe black.
Anjelica Huston was scanning the lobby of the Shutters hotel, and I needed to get her eyes on me. “Witchturla!” I shouted, a bit too enthusiastically. It worked. Her black eyes lit up in recognition as she made her way through the lobby’s soignée boulevardiers.
It was her secret word, although the secret was out when her evocative memoir of growing up expat Hollywood royalty in Ireland, “A Story Lately Told,” was released last week. She says she invented the word to torment her childhood friend Joan (who grew up to be Joan Juliet Buck, the editor of French Vogue; everyone in Ms. Huston’s sphere grew up to be somebody) when she was ignoring her for another playmate. She kept using it, and refused to tell Ms. Buck what it meant. “It means nothing, but doesn’t it sound really, really filthy?” Ms. Huston said, eyes sparkling. Somehow this seems to me to be pure Huston, this calculation to quietly keep our attention with the promise of something just a little scandalous.
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