Anjelica Huston and Jack Nicholson were together for an incredible 17 years. The two never married or had children together, though Anjelica's desire for both appears to be what eventually ended their dramatic and often tempestuous relationship.
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Anjelica detailed what that relationship was really like in her 2014 memoir Watch Me. After admitting that a 12-year-old Gwyneth Paltrow said she was scared of Jack when she first met him, Anjelica adds that she told the little girl: "With good reason. He scares me, too."
Anjelica Huston and Jack Nicholson met when the former was invited to a party at the latter's home in 1973. The two hit it off, with Anjelica staying the night. They made plans to meet up again a few days later but Jack canceled, explaining he had a previous obligation that he had forgotten about.
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But Anjelica found out that Jack's "obligation" was his ex-girlfriend, Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas. She explains that this would be a pattern in their life together, as Jack would continue to step out with other women throughout their 17 years.
While Anjelica also describes tender moments the two shared, her emphasis is more on sources of tension. She shares that she eventually found out that both old and new "friends" alike were threats to her relationship, as Jack often visited with women he had known for a long time as well as women he had just met.
Somehow, Anjelica still believed that she and Jack would get married … right up until the moment when he popped that bubble, too. When she brought up the prospect of the two getting married, Jack replied, "Marry you? Are you kidding?"
Anjelica writes that she cried for three days after that moment.
She often found evidence of his relationships with other women, noting, "Occasionally, I’d find a piece of female apparel — once a jacket of mine turned up on a girl in the street — or I’d find some hand cream, or a trinket might get left behind in the soap dish. Sometimes I’d take to wearing the jewelry to see if anybody would come up and claim it, but that never happened."
In 1990, she and Jack were having dinner with he told Anjelica that he was expecting a baby with another woman. Anjelica did not take the news well, and a few days later she drove to the Paramount Pictures lot where Jack was filming at the time.
She then physically attacked him, writing, "He was coming out of the bathroom when I attacked him. I don’t think I kicked him, but I beat him savagely about the head and shoulders. He was ducking and bending, and I was going at him like a prizefighter, raining a vast array of direct punches."
Jack called her a few days later, claiming she had left bruises all over his body. Anjelica writes that surprisingly, the two were able to laugh about what happened.
The two eventually met years later when they were cast in the same film, and Jack reportedly compared their relationship to that of the one in Love in the Time of Cholera. As Anjelica writes, "that is one of my favorite books, by one of my favorite authors, about one of my favorite subjects — hopeless, enduring love."
