Why John Huston wrote his buddy out of his life

Jules Buck, the Hollywood producer, died in Paris around the middle of July. He was 83, and there were decent obituaries on both sides of the Atlantic. But there's a little more to be said, I think, and it begins with the way Buck was never mentioned in John Huston's grand, confident yet sometimes tricky autobiography, An Open Book.

To grasp the significance of that omission, you have to go back to 1942. Huston then was 36, and he had just had a smash hit with his first directing job, The Maltese Falcon. The son of a great actor, Walter Huston, John was also famous as a boxer, a horseman, an adventurer, a gambler and a ladies' man. But as war reached America, he joined the Signal Corps, where he met this young lieutenant, Jules Buck, 25, and desperately keen to impress Huston.

So it worked out. As Huston took on war documentaries, so Buck became his cameraman, his drinking buddy, a go-between in secret liaisons with women, and a surrogate son happy to listen to Huston's stories. But then Buck himself became part of the legend as he and Huston made Report from the Aleutians and The Battle of San Pietro. The latter was a record of fighting in Italy in which Huston's film unit (including the novelist Eric Ambler) came under heavy fire. In other accounts, it is said that only Buck's courage got them out of some tight corners where Huston came close to what sounded like panic. But in An Open Book, you only hear of Huston and Ambler.

After the war, Buck looked for work as a producer. He has a nice credit, as assistant to the producer (Mark Hellinger) on the wonderful noir The Killing (which Huston helped write), and he was associate producer on two important pictures by Jules Dassin – Brute Force and The Naked City (the last two films made by Hellinger before his premature death).

The friendship grew as Jules Buck went to work for Horizon, a new company formed by Huston and Sam Spiegel, and Buck worked on their first picture, We Were Strangers, set in Cuba, and starring John Garfield and Jennifer Jones. After that, Buck sought a little independence, and he joined 20th Century Fox, where he was producer on Sam Fuller's Fixed Bayonets, on a minor Marilyn Monroe picture, Love Nest, and on a Cornel Wilde costume adventure epic, Treasure of the Golden Condor.

By 1952, Buck elected to live in Europe. He was disenchanted with American politics, and drawn towards a hell-raising coterie of Americans working in Europe – it included Huston and Orson Welles. Apparently, Buck became a kind of agent helping to sell the films of Jacques Tati in America. And he was a regular visitor at Huston's Irish estate, in Galway. Huston's daughter, Anjelica, would be best friends with Buck's daughter, Joan Juliet, who grew up to be a novelist and the editor of French Vogue.

In 1958, in London, Buck saw a performance of Willis Hall's The Long and the Short and the Tall at the Royal Court. One of its stars, Albert Finney, had fallen sick, so his understudy, Peter O'Toole, played. It was the start of a friendship as Buck hired O'Toole to act in his first film, The Day They Robbed the Bank of England. That was the job that led to O'Toole being cast in Lawrence of Arabia.

The two men formed Keep Films, which helped produce most of O'Toole's work in the Sixties. Buck was now the older partner, though O'Toole was a famous handful – Buck spoke of trusting to his friend's Yorkshire side, while fearing the Irish. And it was in the mid-Sixties that Buck sought to bring all things together on what would be his big picture – Will Adams, the story of a 17th-century Westerner in Japan, a man who became adviser to shoguns because of his skill at ship-building and navigation. O'Toole was to play Adams. Huston was director. Buck was producer. Paramount put up a lot of money.

Such things are always complicated, and I don't know exactly what happened. But the project collapsed after Huston had taken development money. There were terrible recriminations and the two men never spoke again. When Larry Grobel wrote The Hustons, in 1989, Buck would only say that Huston was "an unmitigated shit of the highest order". In turn, Huston called Buck "a sonofabitch. A born sycophant."

Anjelica Huston and Joan Buck stayed friends. Some said Buck had erred in seeking equality. Others argued that sooner or later you got the nasty side of Huston. Or was it just that movie money tends to undo friendship? It's maybe better if the gold blows away in the wind, the way it does at the close of Huston's Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

d.thomson@independent.co.uk