Jack Nicholson and Angelica Huston, photographed at Nicholson’s home on Mulholland Drive, Los Angeles for a 1974 issue of Stern magazine. The photos were taken by Julian Wasser.
“Whether shooting the beautiful people or social documentary my intent as a photographer never changed: to be where things were happening, to meet the people who were responsible for the world we live in, and through my pictures, to evoke in viewers what I saw and felt at the instant I tripped the shutters.”
In April of 1973, Huston attended Nicholson’s birthday party at his home on Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles. As described by Huston in her memoir Watch Me, she and Nicholson danced for hours, and she proceeded to spend the night with the actor. They moved in together shortly after, while Nicholson was filming Chinatown. But after years spent best known as “Jack Nicholson’s girlfriend” or “John Huston’s daughter,” Huston decided to make a name for herself separate from that of the men in her life.
After a serious car accident in 1980, Huston moved out of Nicholson’s home, bought her own house, and enrolled in acting classes. “I had a good life living with Jack,” she told the New York Times in 1985, “but it was necessary to remove myself from the entourage a career like his engenders. I had never lived alone. I didn’t even know what color I liked my coffee in the morning.”
Huston was also frustrated by arbitrary restrictions enforced by Nicholson. She was told, through third parties, not to draw on the telephone pads in their home. “Why can’t I draw on the telephone pads in my own house!” she said to The Guardian. “Those are the things that crop up when you move in with a man of a certain notoriety or fame. They’ve got people around to do stuff for them, so it’s not even as though I could fit into the role of housewife, or even flower arranger. There was no role, except to be on his arm.”
She still kept a room in Nicholson’s home and the two would reportedly speak on the phone “constantly” when they were apart. Six years after making the move, though, Huston won her first Oscar — and yes, it was for Prizzi’s Honor, a film that was directed by her father and starring her boyfriend, but she was the only one among them to secure the Academy’s highest honor. Later that year, Nicholson told Rolling Stone he’d “never had a greater moment” than watching Huston win the award.
The topic of marriage was broached often in their 17 years together, but Nicholson told People they just didn’t “get around to it,” explaining, “I ask her to get married all the time. Sometimes she turns me down, sometimes she says yes.” As Huston recalled, the idea was presented to her “at various times” by Nicholson’s business manager and lawyer, “possibly because they saw this as a way to save Jack a lot of money in taxes,” which she found “strictly unromantic.”
Still, the pair tried to have children. “That was a certain moment where I was trying to get pregnant, which didn’t really work out,” Huston told Vulture in 2019. “But the truth is, I could never imagine [being a mother]. I can imagine lots of things, but I could never imagine carrying a baby.”
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