Primo Levi geatly admired Huxley’s early work, and had written an appreciation of Huxley’s great dystopian novel Brave New World (1932) for a Turin newspaper shortly before his suicide in 1987. “I telephoned Primo to say how much I liked the article”, Laura recalled. “He thanked me, but we were unable to meet because he was in a deep depression (he said) and unable to leave the house.” Laura had known Levi as a child in Turin. He wore a sailor’s suit with a starched white collar.” She smiled. “In those days, all babies were well-dressed.”
A frail, small-boned woman, Laura sat before me with her legs crossed in the lotus position, her fine white hair fluffed round a doll’s face. Aldous had married her in 1956 for (he said) her darting, kingfisher mind. “You have the motor of a Thunderbird,” he told her, “in the body of a Topolino” (literally “Little Mouse” – the name of the smallest car in Italy). Huxley, with his lanky, elastic frame, seemed twice her height. Together they lived in a house below the first “O” in the fabled “HOLLYWOOD” sign. The garden was a profusion of triffid-like foliage and, in later years, Laura was often to be seen pruning the roses there in a gigantic straw hat. Even into her nineties, she had an impish wit and was strangely beautiful in the frail way of a pressed flower. “Sadly, my body gets more and more like a Topolino,” she told me.
She offered me a slice of pumpkin pie – pharmaceutically inactive – and gazed out dreamily at the desert chaparral and brushland of Hollywood-in-the-hills.
Laura Huxley was born Laura Archera in 1911. In her early teens, she was a prodigy on the violin and gave her first concert in Turin before Queen Marie-Jose of Italy. In Paris, Laura studied under the Romanian composer George Enescu; in Berlin throughout the Thirties, she was a pupil of the violinist Carl Flesch.
Before the outbreak of the Second World War, Laura went to the United States. Her father, Felice Archera, was put under Fascist investigation during Italy’s odious anti-Semitic racial laws of 1938 (he had a Jewish mother). Laura was about to board ship in New York to return to Italy when Felice wired to instruct his daughter not to cross the Atlantic. She later wrote in her poignant memoir, This Timeless Moment (1968): “My father feared that I might be blown up by a misdirected torpedo.”
Marooned in America, Laura Archera graduated to second violin in the Los Angeles Philharmonic. But the career of a virtuoso became “life-devouring”. In 1945, having befriended Virginia Pfeiffer, Ernest Hemingway’s sister-in-law, Laura gave up the violin and, with her new companion, began to make 16mm films. She met Charlie Chaplin, John Huston, Orson Welles and was later assistant editor on Gabriel Pascal’s Androcles and the Lion (1952).
Aldous Huxley had come to Hollywood with his first wife, Maria Nys, in 1937.
While in Hollywood, Huxley adapted Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (“Pee and Pee”) for the 1940 MGM classic with Laurence Olivier. Laura Archera met him in 1948. She wanted to make a documentary about the Palio, the horse race run every year in the Tuscan town of Siena; Huston had told her that Huxley would be just the man to write the script. “After all, Huxley loved Italy and spoke the language”, remembered Laura. Huxley was living with Maria in Wrightwood, a two-hour drive from Los Angeles. Laura put on her best clothes and hopped into a car which Virginia Pfeiffer had baptised the Laurissima. “Nobody had told me that Aldous Huxley had written a beautiful essay about the Palio some 20 years before”, said Laura. “I kept on lecturing him about my dream picture.”
“What were your first impressions?”
“I thought Huxley was unreasonably tall – though rather handsome.”, said Laura, adding: “He had a beautiful voice, soft and round as a ball of velvet.”
At Hollywood parties, Huxley was usually surrounded by adoring women. “He had a magnetism, an easy charm”, Laura agreed, adding: “So did Maria.” Like Aldous and his wife Maria, Laura had experimented with psycotheraphy, even with L Ron Hubbard’s dianetics quackery. Huxley himself was investigating Vedanta Hindusim with the novelist Christopher Isherwood: lotus blossom incense clung to his clothes like a perfume. “I felt an immediate kinship”, Laura recalled.