The seven deadly sins of Hollywood (1957)

THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS OF HOLLYWOOD cent of the £2,000,000 which Moulin Rouge made. There is the man who gave Marilyn Monroe her first film part. . . . And there is also the man who sits in his pyjamas at four in the afternoon, his face creasing into courteous smiles, talking laconically and sometimes self-deprecatingly about John Huston : ' { I've always knocked around the world since I was sixteen. I've been a boxer, and I was in the Mexican Army. I was married at twenty." (Huston's wives in chronological order: 1st, Dorothy Harvey; 2nd, Leslie Black; 3rd, Evelyn Keyes; 4th, Enrica Soma.) " I've often been flat bust — well, that comes from keeping a string of racehorses and having expensive habits. I've sold the horses now, but I've still got the expensive habits. If I didn't lead this sort of life I wouldn't be any good as a writer or director. It's necessary to my work." A few days before, in a town near the Pyrenees, he had met Ernest Hemingway to discuss a film of one of his books. "Papa was keen on the idea," said Huston. This is not surprising— for Huston is, of course, a child of Hemingway mythology, so charmed by the myth that he has determined to make it real by living it. The next time I met Huston was in Ireland, and on this occasion I managed to write something about him that infuriated the man who had assured me he didn't care a damn what people wrote about him. The strange thing about this incident is that I wrote my column in all innocence, never thinking for a moment that it contained anything which would annoy a man apparently so impervious to criticism, satire and gossip as he had made himself out to be. Huston had taken over the small town of Youghal in 76