Born of Hollywood royalty, the Smash star, now 61, has found a new inner confidence. Illustration by John Jay Cabuay.

When Anjelica Huston enters a room, she commands your attention just as she does on screen. She’s an imposing presence, even a little intimidating—she’s just so tall!—until she breaks into that charming, mischievous grin. It’s quickly obvious that the actress is nothing like the scheming, tough-as-nails producer, Eileen Rand, whom she plays on the NBC series, Smash.

As Huston speaks, revealing a self-deprecating sense of humor that’s thoroughly endearing, it’s hard to separate the drama in her life from the memorable characters she’s brought to life, from the mob wife in Prizzi’s Honor to Morticia in The Addams Family.

Huston was born into Hollywood royalty. Her dad was legendary director John Huston. Her mother, John’s fourth wife, was Italian ballerina, Enrica “Ricki” Soma. Houseguests ranged from Marlon Brando to John Paul Sartre and John Steinbeck. She began acting in small roles, mainly in her father’s films. Then, just as she was coming into her own, her mother was killed in a car accident. That changed the direction of her life.

She moved to New York, and as a young woman, her grace, stature, and angular good looks led her to modeling. Richard Avedon photographed her for Vogue. The big change in her life came when her father cast her in Prizzi’s Honor, a part that earned her an Oscar and made her a star. She co-starred with her longtime love Jack Nicholson. They were together for 16 years, but once she got famous there was a lot more interest in them as a couple—always talk about the ups and downs of that relationship.

Finally, they split—another big life-changer.

When she and Nicholson parted company, Hollywood watched to see if she’d ever find her Mr. Right. The answer came when she walked down the aisle with celebrated sculptor Robert Graham–known for works like the Olympic Gateway at the Los Angeles Coliseum, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in D.C., and the Duke Ellington Monument in New York’s Central Park. The handsome artist and the beautiful actress were a standout couple in the arenas of entertainment and art.

Graham also loved to draw beautiful women and their bodies. There was one star-studded showing of his work where people teased him about nude drawings that looked an awful lot like Anjelica. She casually deflected the questions by talking about “my fantastic husband” and playing up his many other accomplishments. The two were inseparable, so his sudden death from a heart attack four years ago left her shattered. Her many friends within and without Hollywood rallied around her, but she credits Smash—her first venture into series television—with coming at a “vital time” and finally filling a void in her life.

Question: I have known you for years. I listen to the laugh in your voice and you’ve got the greatest smile. Why do they keep casting you as these stern women like Eileen in Smash?
Anjelica Huston: [Laughing] Well, Eileen does have a good sense of humor. But it’s true, they like me to be these slightly sinister characters. It’s good to play against type, I guess.

“Sometimes I’m a wimp, and other days I think I can conquer the world.” Photo courtesy NBC Universal.

Q: And what would you say your type is?
AH: I really don’t match any stereotype. I never felt like I “fit in.” That’s probably what makes me a great observer.

Q: But doesn’t your character’s feistiness reflect you maybe just a little?
AH: I would like to be as scrappy as Eileen. I can certainly wrap my brain around her scrappiness. But sometimes I’m a wimp, and other days I think I can conquer the world. I wish I could plan it out a bit better.

Q: You get some steamy romantic scenes on the show. Do you get a kick out of that?
AH: It all depends on who with. But it certainly livens things up—particularly at my age. I remember at the very outset, two years ago, I said to the producers, ‘Please, give me a love interest.’ I think it’s important to see strong women who also have a very vulnerable side and who are allowed to have a sexy side.

Q: As the years pass, what has changed for you?
AH: The older I get, the more I look for a good time. I remember when I was in my 20s and 30s, I was always in some fight with a boyfriend or involved in some drama, something to feel bad about. I feel so the opposite of that now. I just like to have a good time, smile, and be with my friends. You know, tell a story, have a drink. I’m certainly not looking for angst.

Smash Star Anjelica Huston The Saturday Evening Post

Illustration by Jody Hewgill

Shirley MacLaine has lived a lot in her 78 years. She also famously insists that she’s lived centuries more in past lives.

Outrageously outspoken with a rapier wit, the Academy Award-winning actress, singer, and dancer is a Hollywood powerhouse. As a best-selling author, she’s fascinated us with her mystical preoccupation in everything from reincarnation to psychics and spirit guides. Even skeptics agree that her exploration of the far-out is an entertaining ride. Whether guesting on a talk show or walking the red carpet she always manages to get a gasp along with the laughs at her no-holds-barred one-liners.

MacLaine hasn’t given a thought to retiring or even slowing down—why should she? Her deliciously nasty turn as an old woman a small town loves to hate in Bernie, opposite Jack Black, earned rave reviews. Her latest book of witty observations, I’m Over All That: And Other Confessions, shows how she winks at looking back and looking forward.

And now she’s got a juicy co-starring role in the hugely popular Emmy-winning Masterpiece series Downton Abbey, as Lady Cora’s mother Martha Levinson, who arrives from New York to upset the household. That, of course, pits her against another icon of the big screen, Dame Maggie Smith, who plays the fearsome Dowager Countess Violet Crawley.

As we move forward in the new year, who better than MacLaine to give us a little perspective in her own irresistibly humorous and thought-provoking style?

Shirley MacLaine The Saturday Evening Post

The former American actress and late Princess of Monaco has been dead for almost 28 years — a long time for a celebrity to hold the media’s interest.

What has brought her back to America’s magazine covers is an exhibit of her royal wardrobe at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. The couture will be interesting, but the real attraction is the style of Grace Kelly, which becomes increasingly rare in a Madonna and Lady Gaga world.

Kelly didn’t just dress well and expensively. She was also an innovator and a successful proponent of high style. Her tastes were exceptional but, more important, she had the face, figure, and carriage that made good clothing look extraordinary.

Behind her style and her looks, though, was Kelly’s iconic power: her ability to exude elegance, charm, and poise, like those other classic archetypes: Jacqueline Kennedy and Audrey Hepburn.

Grace Kelly (left and right). "She's a lady and she expects to be treated like a lady," says Jimmy Stewart.Photograph by Gene Lester

It was also her fantastically successful life. In less than ten years, she became a well-paid model, an Oscar-winning actress, and a princess. For girls of a romantic nature, this is the Trifecta of daydreams. Grace had accomplished it all, and took her amazed fans along for the ride.

In 1954, the Post editors were intrigued by the meteoric rise of this young (well, 25-year-old) model and actress who, two years after playing a minor role in a minor movie, was starring in romantic roles with Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Bing Crosby, William Holden, and Jimmy Stewart.

The Post’s celebrity interviewer, Peter Martin, was aware of Kelly’s reputation before they met. She was, according to Hollywood sources, extremely cool, reserved, even haughty — a woman with “stainless steel guts.”

“When we sat down to talk, her face was expressionless. I saw only the surface of her eyes, not into them. She was poised, cool, collected, and wary. She said nothing — unless I asked her a question first. Once or twice, even when I put a direct query to her, she smiled and didn’t answer. However, little by little, she began to come out from behind her private Iron Curtain.”

She eventually relaxed just enough to joke about a story that had circulated in the tabloids.

“It had to do with her knitting a pair of sock for Clark Gable and hanging them on his tent, on Christmas morning, while they were on location for Mogambo. The way it had actually happened was different from the printed version — as such things have a way of being. She had tried to knit a pair of socks for Gable, but, like many another knitter with good intentions, she hadn’t finished them in time. ‘When I realized that I wasn’t going to make it, we were out in Tanganyika, in the middle of nowhere,” she told me, “and I couldn’t buy anything for him. So I stole a pair of his own socks. Each day I stole something else from him. On Christmas Eve I filled one of his sock with his own things and hung it up. It was a silly gesture, but he liked it. I am very fond of Clark.”

Gable received a telegraph asking him if there was any romance between himself and Kelly. Pete Martin followed up on the story that Gable told her, “This is the greatest complement I’ve ever had. I’m old enough to be your father.”

“I’m not too good at the sly remark and the personal probe, but I tried anyhow. ‘I should think he would have been able to overcome that feeling,’ I said.

“Once more she smiled and didn’t say anything.”

Five years later, they met again, only this time Martin was interviewing Princess Grace of Monaco, wife of Prince Rainier III. It was a role for which she seemed ideally suited. Few actresses were better at portraying reserve and gracious nobility. She graciously answered his questions, at one point making an off-handed estimate about the size of her housekeeping staff.

“How many servants do you have in the palace?” I asked.

“‘I don’t know exactly,’ she replied. ‘There are so many different categories. We have servants attached directly to our household, and there are other servants in the place who take care of other people. But to answer your question, approximately two hundred fifty people work here in the palace. That includes carpenters, electricians and the like.’

“‘Does that include the [palace guards]?’

“‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘There are sixty to sixty-five of them.’”

“‘I’m curious why anyone would expect you to drop all you have here, which is so lovely and so idyllic,”‘ I said, ‘and go back to the rigors of movie making. It must be wishful thinking.’

"I do miss acting in a way," says Princess Grace, " but it is no real loss, because being married and having children is far important to me." Here she is with Princess Caroline, aged three, and Prince Albert, twenty-two months.Photograph by Philippe Halsman

“She did it again. She looked at me, smiled sweetly, and said nothing. I found myself hurrying along to my next questions.”

No one could ever accuse Grace Kelly of changing after she became a member of the nobility.

She was a woman of large ambition, willing to work hard to get ahead. She believed she had earned her success in Hollywood. But even she must have thought that becoming a princess was almost laughably implausible. But then, as Mark Twain once noted, “Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.”

Post script:

The story of European nobles marrying rich American women is an old one. An item in the Post of 1874 noted:

“How the foreigners seem to admire our American girls, or is it their fortunes that prove so attractive?  They come here and make their selections and are only too gladly accepted as a general thing.

“Mrs. Gen. Griffin has become the Countess Esterhazy; little blue-eyed Camille Webb is now the Baroness Von Havre; Miss Williams, of Georgetown, became the bride of Count Bodisco, and another Georgetown girl has given her affection to an Italian count, who has left her here, expecting his tardy return, which looks too prolonged to promise any realization… I wonder if the Turkish and new French ministers will secure American wives and fortunes?”

Marriages into nobility often raise the question of whether Americans can hold foreign titles. Federal laws permit dual citizenship, and even allow American citizens to retain titles from foreign countries. However, such titles have no legal significance; royal privileges in a foreign land only get a nod of diplomatic recognition in this country.

The stern republicans that founded the United States were always suspicious of nobility. They warned of the aristocratic habit of grabbing up privileges and precedent, and they wanted no such inequalities in the new country.

Yet Americans yearn for its own aristocracy: people who are distinguished by their learning, virtue, and public spirit — equal but superior. These would be “natural aristocrats,” as Jefferson described them in a letter to John Adams.

“I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents… The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature, for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society. And indeed, it would have been inconsistent in creation to have formed man for the social state, and not to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of the society… May we not even say, that that form of government is the best, which provides the most effectually for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government?”

When Grace Kelly returned to the United States, Americans were happy to call her “Princess” and “Your Grace” — partly for the novelty of speaking these words, but also because she had, in their eyes, earned the deference by her “virtue and talents.”

Read “The Luckiest Girl in Hollywood” [PDF].

Read “I Call on Princess Grace” [PDF].

[The Post sends out a special thanks for background information from fashion-and-culture writer P.J. Holmes.]

The Royal Role of Grace Kelly The Saturday Evening Post

It’s 40 days until the Cub’s April 13 home opener against the Rockies. Bonnie Hunt has been counting down for months. A die-hard Cubs fan, she hasn’t missed an opening day at Wrigley Field since 1977.

And Hunt is not going to start now, even though she’s busy producing and hosting The Bonnie Hunt Show in Culver City, California.

“When I took this job, I told them we had to work the job around opening day,” she laughs. “Wrigley Field is a just a smaller, condensed version of what Chicago is all about. Everybody talks to each other, drinks beer, eats a hot dog, and hangs out. It’s just a romantic, great place.”

The Chicago native loves the tradition so much that she has her crew pass out hot dogs and root beer to members of her talk show audience. Ushers on the set wear Cubs jerseys and hats or warm-up jackets to fend off the cold studio air. When talking about her favorite place, Hunt’s voice rings with excitement.

“If I could, I would live in Chicago,” says the 47-year-old who grew up the sixth of seven children in a large Catholic family, “I just love it so much.”

In high school, Hunt worked part-time as a nurse’s aide, later earning a nursing degree and working as an oncology and emergency room nurse at Northwestern University Hospital in the 1980s. It was in the Windy City that Hunt co-founded an improvisational comedy troupe, An Impulsive Thing, and performed at the famed Second City. While still working as a nurse, Hunt auditioned on her lunch break, winning the role of waitress Sally Dibbs in the award-winning film Rain Man. The part launched her acting career that includes roles in box office hits such as Jerry Maguire, Cheaper by the Dozen, and The Green Mile. The two-time Golden Globe- and Emmy Award-nominated actress also has directed movies—the romantic comedy Return to Me, starring David Duchovny and Minnie Driver—and voiced animated movies including A Bug’s Life, Monsters, Inc., and Cars, which she helped write.

Hunt is a passionate fund-raiser who, through ventures such as her show’s “Bonnie’s Basement,” has raised money for The Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University and the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation for spinal cord injury research.

The Post caught up with daytime television’s most down-to-earth and approachable host.

SEP: Why are you so passionate about your hometown?

Hunt: Chicago is a big part of who I am. Being in the city helps you to develop lifelong skills. (Laughing) The weather alone in Chicago teaches you teamwork. Everybody has to shovel their cars out to get back on the road or you wait for the buses. You earn spring. When it turns 40 degrees in Chicago, everyone has shorts on. Out here in L.A., it hits 40 degrees and everyone has a parka on. Chicago has always felt like a giant Mayberry to me. It’s all about remembering where you came from and the strength that it gives you. Sometimes life gets cloudy, and remembering your roots keeps everything in perspective, especially when you are trying to survive in a self-obsessed industry.

SEP: Were you always a Cubs fan, and what’s it like to go to games now?

Hunt: I grew up with scrapbooks of the Cubs. It was part of the family tradition. When I moved out of my parents’ house, I had to get reception to Chicago’s radio station WGN. Just having the sound of a ball game in the background is calming. It’s the soundtrack of our lives.

My brother Tom and the guys we grew up with from the old neighborhood always go. Tommy gets the tickets, and we usually sit behind third base. I always end up looking like Neapolitan ice cream—one arm tan, the other white, and I’m mostly bright red. Going to the ball game is just fun. I was born into a team—the sixth of seven children. As a nurse at the hospital, it was all about teamwork. Even at Second City, making an audience laugh and participate is about teamwork. At the end of the day, working together is what life is all about.

SEP: You are so approachable and candid. Is there something people might not know about you?

Hunt: (Laughs) Most people know just about everything about me. I do love gardening —it’s one of my favorite pastimes. I have an herb garden, but I also plant a traditional spring garden, like I’m in Chicago, even though everything grows year-round here in L.A. I plant irises, hyacinths, and lots of tulips. It’s like an orchestra when they bloom a couple of weeks apart from each other.

SEP: You have your own personal style as a TV host, but did others influence you?

Hunt: I learned a lot from Johnny [Carson], from how to welcome a guest to a show to respecting who they are and their story. He always did that. There was nothing desperate or anxious about him. That is sometimes a lost art in television. David [Letterman] has always been so supportive and encouraging to me. He’s had me on his show and has been a business partner. He’s a friend —someone I call if I need advice or to bounce an idea off someone. Johnny and David knew and understood me. We are all from the Midwest. With that comes a certain sensibility and humor. We are all grateful for the opportunities, and it’s been a great honor to work with both of them.

SEP: Why did you decide to bring your mom, Alice, on your show for the “Ask Alice” segment?

Hunt: I’ve talked about my mom, like David Letterman has, for so many years. Everyone can relate to a mom. I’m lucky to still have my mom in my life. I just want to share her with everybody. She is still very much the same mom I had when I was 7 years old. She genuinely loves and cares about people and is very funny, which is why I have quite a sense of humor.

SEP: How did you make the transition from nursing to acting?

Hunt: It was a hobby. Growing up in my neighborhood, I didn’t really think it would be possible to act, but my dad always told us to go for our dreams. I was really lucky to be a nurse first, because it’s given me the gift of perspective. One of my patients told me, “When are you going to go out to L.A.?” I said, “I’m not going to because then I’d fail and have to come back and explain myself.” He told me, “Bonnie, facing the end of my own life and one of my biggest regrets is not going out and failing a few times.” So he made me promise I would. And I’ve failed many times, but I’ve learned from them. You always learn more from your failures than successes.

Teaming Up with Bonnie Hunt The Saturday Evening Post

In August of 2001, she appeared at the Rhode Island Film Festival in Providence. I found her to be beautiful, charming, and gracious. I had a picture taken with her, side by side, and she autographed my copy of The Saturday Evening Post from January 1980, in which she appeared on the cover for the movie 10.

I treasure that copy of the Post, which I had bought and saved all those years back. Julie Andrews was meant to sign it! I thank her for all the joy she has brought to me and all her other admirers through the years!

Michael

Cranston, Rhode Island

Julie Andrews The Saturday Evening Post