Review: Allegra Huston: Love Child - a Memoir of Family Lost and Found

Love Child - A Memoir of Family Lost and Found is a collection of the candid memories of Allegra Huston. The book was developed after she penned a well-received article for Harper's Bazaar U.K. entitled "Daddies' Girl".

Before you dash off an e-mail to the editor complaining about my grammatical skills, let me assure you - the apostrophe is NOT misplaced.

Huston's "Dad" was the Oscar-winning John Huston, who had directed such cinematic masterpieces as The Maltese Falcon, The African Queen, and Prizzi's Honor. Her "Father" was John Julius Cooper, the Viscount Norwich, a British historian and travel writer and descendent of King William IV.

Both would hold substantial, if uniquely different and independent, paternal positions in Allegra's life.

Born in 1964 to the ballerina Ricki Soma, Allegra initially, technically, had no father. She carried her mother's maiden name, and a hyphen filled the space on her birth certificate intended for a father's designation. At the time of Allegra's birth, Soma, Huston's fourth wife, had been estranged from the husband 23 years her senior.

In 1969, Soma was killed in a car accident in Italy, and the 4-year old embarked on a decades-long odyssey that I doubt even Homer could have imagined.

Allegra's vivid recollections carry her, and a monogrammed blue suitcase, between multiple destinations on two continents before she exits her teens. But even that ever-present satchel withheld a secret from her.

A scorecard would be helpful in following her shuttlings between caretakers that included her nurse (nanny), her maternal grandparents, Huston, Huston's fifth wife CiCi and sister Anjelica. All of whom love her in very special and distinctive ways.

And entwined amongst it all are slivers of tender memories and newly found revelations of a mother lost far too soon.

Allegra exposes a myriad of tantalizing tidbits, including: learning to roll joints with Anjelica (though use of any oft-available illicit drugs seems never to have enticed the younger Huston), attending the Oscars with Jack Nicholson, life at a beach house with Ryan O'Neal, and meeting, and playing chess, with Marlon Brando (though she failed to agree with her sister that he had violet eyes).

But my favorite chapter is the 20^th, the last. Jumping from John Huston's death in 1987 at the end of chapter 19, she wraps up a few loose ends and moves to the 2003 christening of her son with Rio Grande whitewater rafter Cisco Guevara.

Rafa's "big party" also celebrates the convergence of family and friends. And, in Huston's adulthood, relationships based on blood or created by choice, have now become blissfully indistinguishable.

My one point of contention: Huston describes herself, against the backdrop of more flamboyant family members, as "bog-ordinary."

Readers will find Allegra Huston is a woman of many dimensions - none of them, in any conceivable fashion, "bog-ordinary".

Love Child, A Memoir of Family Lost and Found
By Allegra Huston
Illustrated. 289 pages. Simon & Schuster. $26.95.