In Angelica Huston’s new memoir Watch Me, which is a sequel to last year’s A Story Lately Told, she recounts her tumultuous 17-year on-and-off relationship with Jack Nicholson. While Nicholson was often a cad, nothing he did quite tops her brief affair with Ryan O’Neal.
Anjelica says she knew she was in for trouble when Ryan approached her at a party, but decided to go for it anyway. The first red flag was Ryan’s relationship with his then 12-year-old daughter Tatum. She describes them, creepily, as “almost a couple unto themselves; he seemed to have few boundaries with her. They were often photographed at restaurants and parties and clubs.”
She says she sensed something “distinctly perverse about the O’Neal household.” He copped to seeing other women, but the worse thing was when they got into a fight at a party in Beverly Hills. “He turned on me, grabbed me by the hair, and hit me in the forehead with the top of his skull,” she writes. “I saw stars and reeled back. Half blind, I ran away from him, upstairs to a bathroom.”
He then attacked her again ,“batting me around the head with open hands.” When she returned home later because she didn’t have anywhere else to go, she found Ryan “sitting up in bed with an ice pack on his forehead, chuckling ruefully, ‘I’ve got quite a headache.’”
On the Today Show this morning, Anjelica said writing about this abuse was “cathartic.” She also thinks it was an important thing for her to do. “It’s my feeling that any man who lifts a hand against a woman deserves to be outed,” Huston said. “So I’ll sort of leave it at that.”
This opinion does seem to contradict sentiments she’s expressed about Roman Polanski’s sexual assault of a 13-year-old girl. “Whatever happened is his business, and I wasn’t there for any untoward behaviors, and I can say that with some happiness,” she writes. She didn’t see anything, but she was at boyfriend Jack Nicholson’s house on the night that the assault happened. She noticed that the girl was very tall and young, and Polanski told her they had been taking pictures. The next day, Anjelica got arrested with Polanski when the police came to arrest him for rape and found marijuana and a gram of coke at the house.
