A not-very-good joke;

A Collie, a Shih Tzu, and an Irish Wolfhound walk into a bar. The bartender says, “How can you be friends? You’re different sizes and have totally different jobs!”

The Collie says, “We herd.”
The Shih Tzu says, “We charm.
”The Wolfhound says, “We hunt.”

And then they all answer in unison: “John Huston.”

Publicity photo of John Huston, playing role of Noah Cross in the Roman Polanski film, Chinatown, photo is in the public domain as it was published in the US without a copyright notice

Some jokes just aren’t funny, and this one sure isn’t, but it got us to this point, and ‘this point’ is John Huston.

Some of our readers will immediately recognize the name of this Hollywood icon, but others may wonder, “Who?”

Over a career spanning nearly half a century, Huston directed, wrote, or acted in some of the most iconic American films: They included The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African Queen (Basenji owners know this!), The Asphalt Jungle, and The Man Who Would Be King among them. His daring and restless curiosity was often illustrated in the themes he tackled: Moral ambiguity, human failure, and the uneasy tension between courage and corruption directed with unflinching honesty.

As interesting people go, he was surely one of the world’s most fascinating. He was a raconteur, a painter, a boxer, a war documentarian, and a good friend to larger-than-life people like Ernest Hemingway, Peter O’Toole, Humphrey Bogart,  Katharine Hepburn, and Orson Welles. His daughter, Anjelica Huston, carried on his legacy, winning an Oscar under her father’s direction in Prizzi’s Honor which helped make John Huston make history: He became the only director to guide both his father Walter Huston (whom he directed in the move, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre)  and his daughter, Anjelica, to Oscar-winning performances.

Off screen, his eclectic tastes were reflected in his canine companions. His fondness for his animals—including his Collie, Shih Tzu, and Irish Wolfhound—were companions as varied and vivid as the characters he created. Maddeningly, details about these dog are thin.  We know through a LIFE magazine photo series by Loomis Dean that Huston owned an Irish Wolfhound when he was at St. Clerans, his Galway estate. Believed to be named Seamus, additional information shows up in Anjelica Huston’s 2013 memoir, A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London, and New York,” which painted a vivid picture of her dad’s “pack” that roamed the grounds. In one Instagram post, she said, “Seamus was the king of the pack, a noble hound with a wheat-colored coat,” which placed the dog in the early‑ to mid‑1960s. Additionally, a 2018 Country Life article referenced Huston as a notable owner of a Wolfhound.

Mentioned alongside Seamus in Anjelica Huston’s memoir and photos from the same period was her father’s small companion dog, a Shih Tzu named “Shu‑shu.” We came across a photo (that we can’t share) of the trio of Huston’s dogs including Shu Shu. The photo appears in the book, Men & Dogs: A Personal History from Bogart to Bowie“  by Judith Watt and Peter Dyer) and was taken at his Irish estate, St. Clerans (in County Galway.  We found no further details (besides the aforementioned photo) of Huston’s Collie, but sources write that the dog appears in later photographs and recollections of Huston’s Mexico years.

We assume that you, like us, find it interesting to learn what breeds famous and/or interesting people choose to live with, and John Huston’s choices certainly covered the range: A herder, a charmer, and a hunter!

Image of a “damp” Irish Wolfhound by Natalia Gusakova/Unsplash