LOS ANGELES — For years, Allegra Huston was encouraged to write her memoirs. But the magazine journalist and screenwriter turned a deaf ear to all requests.
“I was not interested in ‘poor me,’” said Huston, 44, relaxing in the living room of a friend’s coastal home. Resting on a table nearby are copies of her recently published autobiography, “Love Child.”
Huston did have a sad early life. When she was 4, her mother, ballerina Ricki Soma, died in a car accident. The 39-year-old estranged wife of director John Huston, Soma was the mother of Tony and Anjelica Huston. The identity of Allegra’s father, though, was shrouded in mystery.
After Soma’s death, Allegra was adopted by John Huston and spent the next 11 years living with him and various relatives. She was 12 when she was introduced to her birth father, the British historian John Julius Norwich, who was married with two children. As an adult, she realized how special her circumstances were.
“One morning I woke up and decided to write this magazine piece about my two fathers and how lucky I felt to have them both,” she said.
The article, which appeared in the British edition of Harper’s Bazaar, inspired her to rethink writing a memoir about her nomadic, singular life.
“I had something to say — a story with a happy ending,” she said. “I wouldn’t have written it if it didn’t have a happy ending.”
Huston lives in Taos, N.M., with her boyfriend, white-water rafter Cisco Guevara, whom she refers to as her husband, and their 6-year-old son, Rafael.
The Hustons and the Norwiches did come together for her son’s christening. “We had this extraordinary, very silly and very serious event on the banks of the Rio Grande,” she recalled. “We had this magical three or four days.”
And she had her happy ending.
Even though she shuttled among her actor-director father’s residence in Ireland, her maternal grandparents’ home in Long Island, N.Y., and the Los Angeles home of her father’s fifth wife, Cici, Huston said she always felt loved.
“Nobody was horrible to me,” she said. “I felt that I was a problem from a practical point of view — where is Allegra going to live and who is going to look after her?”
John Huston wasn’t a teddy bear of a father. But he didn’t “ride” her or her brother Danny, who was his son with girlfriend Zoe Sallis, as hard as he did Tony and Anjelica.
As for her older sister, Huston said, “I virtually met her for the first time when I was 8. I didn’t have memories of her when I was little in London.”
Once she settled into Los Angeles in the 1970s, however, she and Anjelica were thick as thieves.
Huston has only a few fleeting memories of her mother, who died 40 years ago.
“She was this unicorn, this perfect, mythical creature of extraordinary beauty and perfection who was adored by everyone. But that’s not very human.”
She felt more of a connection to her mother while preparing for the book by reading correspondence. And she was knocked “sideways” when she discovered that Soma lost her own mother when she also was 4.
“Finding those connections between the two of us, I don’t feel like I know her any differently, but I feel much stronger threads of connections,” Huston said.
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