Quick Take
- Narration: David Drummond handles the epic scope of this biography with controlled authority, over 37 hours he maintains the right register for what is essentially a portrait of American film royalty told at full scale.
- Themes: Hollywood dynasty, artistic ambition and personal excess, three generations of creative legacy
- Mood: Sprawling and immersive, with the texture of a great character study
- Verdict: The definitive account of the Huston family, a biography that earns its extraordinary length because the subject genuinely requires it.
There are audiobooks you pick up for a commute and audiobooks you commit to. The Hustons, at just under thirty-eight hours, is emphatically the second kind. I came to it after watching The Dead, John Huston’s last film, made when he was on oxygen and still directing with absolute control, and found myself wanting to understand the whole arc: Walter and the vaudeville circuit, John’s meteoric rise and the decades of films that followed, Anjelica’s emergence and the particular weight of growing up Huston. Lawrence Grobel’s biography had been on my list for years. The audio version, narrated by David Drummond, turned out to be the right way in.
Grobel conducted over 200 interviews for this book, including more than 100 hours with John Huston himself before his death in 1987. The access is extraordinary, four of John’s children, three of his five wives, many mistresses, producers, writers, technicians, and the kind of celebrities who rarely grant interviews. The result is the kind of biography that can only be written when the central figure, however reluctant in other respects, has decided that his story is worth telling fully. John Huston was not modest. He was also not dishonest, which makes the material more interesting than hagiography would be.
Walter, Vaudeville, and What Hollywood Inherited
The book begins with Walter Huston, and Grobel is right to give Walter the space he deserves. Walter was the foundation, the vaudeville performer who became a Broadway star who became an Oscar-winning actor in his son’s film, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The portrait of Walter is one of the biography’s most compelling sections, partly because it’s the section where Grobel is most reliant on period sources and secondhand accounts rather than living memory, and the historical reconstruction required is visible and well-executed.
Understanding Walter is essential to understanding John. The ambition, the restlessness, the appetite for life that bordered on recklessness, these run through both men, though they express differently. Walter’s career arc, from vaudeville stages to a genuine late-career film greatness, prefigures John’s own trajectory in ways the book makes explicit without overstating. The three-generation structure of the biography, Walter, John, Anjelica, is not just a convenient organizing frame. It’s an argument about how talent and disorder pass through families, and how each generation processes the previous one’s excesses.
John at the Center of Everything
The biography’s core is John, and Grobel had the material to do him justice. The Maltese Falcon, The African Queen, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Prizzi’s Honor, The Dead, the career is staggering in its range and its willingness to refuse repetition. Grobel traces the films with enough detail that each one becomes part of the portrait of the man who made it, but he never lets the filmography displace the person. The accounts of John’s personal life, the marriages, the mistresses, the relationships with his children that were frequently inadequate and occasionally catastrophic, are treated with the same directness as the professional achievements.
Frederick Raphael’s blurb calling him “a sly, sadistic scoundrel who was equaled only by Byron in the sentimental cynicism and fecund carelessness with which he played the world’s game” is an extravagant characterization, but Grobel’s account makes it feel earned rather than hyperbolic. John Huston was genuinely extraordinary and genuinely difficult in ways that coexisted without resolving. The biography doesn’t try to reconcile them. It presents both and lets the reader live inside the tension, which is the right approach for a subject of this complexity.
Anjelica and the Weight of the Name
The final third of the biography, covering Anjelica’s emergence as a significant actress in her own right, is where the project becomes most emotionally complex. Growing up Huston meant a father who was often absent, frequently spectacular when present, and constitutionally unable to provide the ordinary stability his children needed. Anjelica’s path to her Oscar for Prizzi’s Honor, directed by John, is the kind of story that contains everything the rest of the book has been building toward, a daughter proving herself to a father on his own terms, in his own medium, in the last years of his life.
Grobel covers this ground with the full access his interview archive provides, and Drummond’s narration, which has maintained its measured authority through thirty-seven hours at this point, handles the emotional register of these final chapters appropriately. The biography ends with John’s death at 81, still directing, still unresolved in the ways he had always been unresolved, and the absence that follows is genuinely felt.
The Length Argument and Who This Is For
Thirty-eight hours is a genuine commitment. A reviewer described the book as “exhaustive,” which is accurate and not necessarily a criticism, the subject requires it. A shorter version of this biography would have to choose between the films and the life, between Walter and Anjelica, between the professional account and the personal one. Grobel chose to do all of it, and the choices compound. This is for readers who want the complete portrait, who are willing to spend weeks with a subject before putting it down. For a general reader who wants an introduction to John Huston, a shorter biography would serve better. For anyone who is already committed to the material, The Hustons is what a definitive biography looks like.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to have seen the Huston films to appreciate this biography?
Familiarity helps significantly. Grobel uses the films as windows into John’s character, and the chapters on The Maltese Falcon, The African Queen, and The Dead are richer if you know the works. That said, Grobel provides enough context that an uninitiated reader can follow the professional arc, you’d just be missing the experiential reference points.
How does Grobel handle John Huston’s complicated personal behavior toward his children and partners?
Directly and without apology. The biography draws on interviews with multiple former partners, his children, and people who worked with him over decades. The portrait that emerges is of a man of genuine greatness and genuine failure in the personal domain, and Grobel doesn’t try to reconcile those two things into a more comfortable assessment.
Is The Hustons primarily a film history or a family biography?
Both, woven together. Grobel uses the films as primary evidence for the man who made them, but the family dynamics, Walter’s influence on John, John’s complex relationship with all four of his children, and Anjelica’s particular arc, receive equal weight. The three-generation structure is as important as the filmography.
At nearly 38 hours, how does David Drummond sustain the narration, does the performance flag over such a long runtime?
Drummond is one of the more capable narrators for long-form biography, with a controlled authority that he maintains consistently. A reviewer noted the book’s exhaustive scope favorably, and the narration serves that scope well. There are no significant performance inconsistencies over the run time that would interrupt the listening experience.
