Born in Missouri in 1906, Huston had an unhappy and somewhat nomadic childhood. His father, Walter Huston, was a struggling actor who was mostly absent from his life, and his mother, Rhea, was, in his own words, “dominating, demeaning, hysterical, overbearing, proud, protective.” Eventually, his father became notably successful both on Broadway and in Hollywood, and father and son became very close as adults, but first John had to survive a misdiagnosis of “an enlarged heart and chronic nephritis,” which led his mother to confine him for two years, leading him as an adult to ensure “that the loneliness and boredom he’d suffered as an invalid would never recur.” He “kept constantly busy, often moved around from place to place, and surrounded himself with a wide circle of colleagues and friends, lovers and wives.”

He had five wives and uncountable lovers. He was tall and lean, with an arresting voice – “rich, gentle and cultivated; somber, hypnotic and seductive; soothing, melodic and mannered” — a combination that women found irresistible. He had affairs with some of his leading ladies, including Mary Astor and Olivia de Havilland, the latter “an exceptional relationship that lasted, with many sharp peaks and deep depressions, for [a] decade.” Sex “was part of the Huston repertoire, a pastime as compulsive as drinking, gambling, hunting, writing and filmmaking. . . . He enjoyed seduction and liked to exercise his charm and power, but he was easily bored, hated to be tied down and soon lost interest. He was well aware of his own faults: his selfishness, infidelity and occasional cruelty; his indifference to women’s emotional needs and physical illness, to his wives’ alcoholism and mental decline. But like a relay runner handing over the baton, another woman was always ready to take him over.”

His indifference extended to his children, two of whom — Angelica and Tony — he had with his third wife, Enrica Soma – and a third, Danny, in an extramarital relationship with Zoe Sallis. Soma also had a daughter, Allegra, by the writer John Julius Norwich, whom Huston treated as his own after Soma’s death. Though he paid little attention to his children when they were small, he took considerably more interest in them as adults, trying to help with their careers and, in Angelica’s case, directing her to superb effect in “Prizzi’s Honor” (1985) and “The Dead.”

His personal shortcomings were more than balanced out, in the minds of many who knew him, by his great strengths. Though he may never have genuinely and deeply loved anyone, he was an immensely loyal friend and colleague, generous, fun-loving, attentive. Directing brought out the lover in him, as an actress who played a minor part in “The Maltese Falcon” nicely summarized it: “You felt you were working in an atmosphere of love. You were with a director who loved every one of you and wanted everyone to be good in his own way. He made everything very intimate to you. What he had to say to you was very quiet, in your ear. He could illuminate just what he wanted with a few words. He made you feel somehow that you were so important to the picture. And it only led to good performances.”

That movie was, as mentioned above, an adaptation of a novel. Until reading Meyers’s biography, I had not fully realized just how infatuated with literature Huston was or how essential it was to his art: