As Huston detailed in her 2013 memoir, A Story Lately Told, she was born in Los Angeles but spent most of her childhood at St. Clerans, her family’s 110-acre Irish estate. Despite its remote location, the 18th-century Georgian home was a stopover for a procession of nobles, actors, and writers, like Peter O’Toole, John Steinbeck, Marlon Brando, and Montgomery Clift. The leonine Huston men, however, remained mostly absent from her early life—Huston’s grandfather had died shortly before her birth, while her father spent large periods of the year traveling and working on films from The Barbarian and the Geisha to The Misfits. This left the young Huston in the company of her Italian mother, a free-spirited and fashionable former ballerina in the Ballet Theatre (later the American Ballet Theatre), as well as an older brother, nurses, servants, tutors, and numerous animals.

Like the dignified setting of Christie’s Towards Zero, Huston described St. Clerans as a “male-driven atmosphere” that was nonetheless “totally reliant on the women, who were always very strong and very necessary.” Among these women were Dorothy Jeakins, Iris Tree, Pauline de Rothschild, and the golden Guinness Girls, Irish socialites from the 1920s whom her father called beautiful witches. Huston remembers them all as tough, very present, and “very beautiful, but in unusual ways.”

She also recalls a visit from Carson McCullers, one of the 20th century’s most precocious female authors, then in the depths of chronic illness. McCullers was delivered to the doors of St. Clerans in an ambulance and spent the entirety of her visit in bed. “One would be hard-pressed to call her a classical beauty,” Huston recalls, “but she was very impressive. She was all eyes and nose on this little tiny neck. She was more like a child than a woman… very fragile. So it was an odd combination—she and my father.” McCullers died only months after her departure.

Between this cavalcade of visitors, Huston describes long periods of domestic solitude, where she indulged her fantasies of Gothic horror and folk tales. She obsessed over the cartoons of Charles Addams, particularly the figure of Morticia; the photographs of gored Spanish bullfighter Manolete; and Grimms’ Fairy Tales. “They were the stories that stirred me,” she says. “I remember the element of fear. Fear and beauty—that mixture. It was almost operatic: beautiful but not without dread.” During this time, she also made her acting debut with an abortive drawing-room performance as one of Macbeth’s witches.