My Life in Pieces (41 page)

Water, one way and another, had dominated our lives; so it was witty of Ismail to hire a pleasure boat for our end-of-film ‘wrap’ party. It was a Dionysian affair – I speak for myself. Fabia Drake may have a different tale to tell. But near the end of it, Jim, in his soft voice and with his sharp brains, said, ‘I’m so glad you played Mr Beebe for us. It could have been so fuddy-duddy and… boring… and well… it isn’t.’ That’s as handsome a compliment as I ever expect to receive.

It was on
A Room with a View
that I first met Denholm Elliott; I became
deeply fond of him, though he could be very peppery. Once, filming in
Kent, Jim had said to him, ‘Could you do a little… less, Denholm?’ and I,
perhaps presuming too much on our fairly new friendship, had said, ‘What
does that word “less” mean, Denholm?’, intending to implicate myself in
the sin of overacting too. ‘Fuck off,’ he roared at me. ‘Fuck off! Who do
you think you are? Only your second film and you’re teaching me how to
act.’ We repaired the rift soon enough, and thereafter spent hours talk
ing – about sex and acting, mostly. He was very dismissive of his own
acting: ‘If you look very carefully you’ll see that all my work is based on
the Muppets.’ This concealed a deep and romantic love of acting. His only
criterion for accepting a part, he once said to me, was whether it made
him cry or not. This is a review from the
Mail on Sunday
of his wife
Susan’s biography of him,
The Quest for Love
(1994), published shortly
after his absurdly early death from AIDS.

There are actors who seem to change with each performance. They take their cue from the author’s style, from the period in which the play or the film is set, from clues in the writing. Others remain more or less the same from role to role. The best of these actors bring something to the part, something mysterious of their own, filling it with a depth of experience hard to analyse. Denholm Elliott was one of the greatest of these; once he had found himself as an actor (in early middle age) he brought to everything he did, regardless of the quality of the writing, a richness, complexity, depth and meaning quite out of the ordinary.

Where did this inner life come from? Susan Elliott’s book answers the question. Denholm was a quite unusual human being, an oddball, both reckless and driven – but not by ambition or a desire for glory. His goals
were equally out of the ordinary; they are very well summed up in the book’s title:
The Quest for Love
. He wasn’t interested in technique or interpretation – he just did it; or rather, he just was it. He brought all the pain, confusion, doubt and occasional beauty of his life to his work; life and art met up there on the stage or the screen with remarkable intensity.

The first part of Susan Elliott’s book gives the back ground: the shy and virginal schoolboy, the drama-school reject, thrust into the war barely out of his teens, first as a member of a bomber air crew, then as a prisoner of war for three long, lean years in STALAG VIII B, an experience which seems to have taught him what’s real and what’s not, what matters and what doesn’t, and gave him his sense that life was too short to waste on anything less than absolute fulfilment. This fulfilment was a long time coming; the second part of the book records his early success, and then sudden failure, the eventual triumph of his career, the marriage, the children, and increasingly, the secret love life. He wanted it all; but it was never enough.

I did not know Denholm well (did anyone?) but over the years we had a number of sharp, passionate conversations in which – as in his performances – he laid his life bare. He told me once that his children had given him a birthday present, for which he had thanked them, but that he knew there was something more that they wanted. ‘They wanted me to tell them how much I loved them – but I can’t – I haven’t got enough love for myself.’ He fought desperately hard to escape the shell of reserve, of inhibition; the unequal struggle brought unique intensity and pressure to his work. In the end it brought him death.

There can be no one who does not know that Denholm died of AIDS, a casualty of the increasing promiscuity which did not end until he was diagnosed HIV-positive in his late sixties. Susan knew when she married him that Denholm was bisexual; as the years went on he became increasingly interested only in sex with men, literally roaming the globe in search of ever more intense experiences with them. This was not the outcome of an excess of hormones, nor even a desire for mere sensual indulgence. It was, in its own curious way, highly romantic, a quest, indeed, for love, but one doomed to failure because in the end Denholm could never believe that the love he got could be enough. He received a great deal of it – in every shape and form, from men, women and his own children – but, as Susan Elliott says in an acute perception, one of many: ‘Denholm’s constant need for bolstering was ill-matched with his
inability to give much in return.’ It is a very common predicament of English men, which is why he was so wonderfully good at portraying us. Susan Elliott’s compulsively readable book lovingly and forgivingly records the life and work of one of our most remarkable actors.

Ismail Merchant, the producer of
A Room with a View
, was like no one
else in the film industry, or anywhere else, come to that. It recently
occurred to me that the historical personage whom he most resembled was
the great Russian impresario, Sergei Diaghilev, a similarly outsize charac
ter, also motivated by great passion for his native land and its art,
similarly given to apocalyptic rages, equally gifted at bringing together
extraordinary people, every bit as imaginative in his financial arrange
ments. Both died far too young; both wrought their wonders by sheer force
of personality. I acted in six films for Ismail and Jim, and mad though the
process of making each and every one of them was, they were deeply
exhilarating. Diaghilev’s friend and collaborator Alexandre Benois said of
him: ‘he had a gift for creating a romantic working climate, and with him
all work had the charm of a risky escapade’, which was exactly true of
Ismail, whose
modus operandi
is perfectly encapsulated by another
phrase of Benois’s: ‘the psychology of the hectic’. I wrote this piece for the
Daily Mail
after Ismail’s death in 2005; when he died, I was in India,
which he had always promised to show me one day.

Ismail Merchant, the producer who brought the world such delicious films as
Heat and Dust
,
The Bostonians
,
A Room with a View
,
Howards
End
and
The Remains of the Day
, is dead. Impossible to believe that I’ll never find myself on another movie location with the director James Ivory calmly pursuing his objectives while Ismail passes through like a tornado, hassling, jostling, exhorting, soothing, denouncing, and above all feeding, his troops. A sudden image of him comes to me from the
Jef
ferson in Paris
shoot in 1994. He was doing his usual thing, ablaze with impatience and urgent advice, only this time he was dressed as a Maharajah, a role he had somewhat absent-mindedly agreed to play, without realising that he would be encumbered by turbans and false whiskers and pantaloons and confined to one place. Restricted for the purposes of a particular shot to his Royal Circle box in the reconstructed theatre, and looking like a malicious caricature of himself – the Maharajah of All the
Rushes – he hurled instructions at functionaries on ground level like some crazed potentate. Or impotentate, in this case: nothing seemed to happen. Jim was obliviously involved in the lace on someone’s costume, while Ismail, raging like an ogre from
The Arabian Nights
, stood up to scream at the top of his voice, ‘Shoot, Jim, SHOOT!’ It was just another day in the life of Merchant Ivory.

This man was larger than life, to put it mildly. He swept one up. He swept me up the moment I met him twenty-five years ago, after a performance of
Amadeus
at the National Theatre. His old friend Felicity Kendal, star of that early Merchant Ivory masterpiece
Shakespeare Wallah
(1965), introduced us, and there and then I became, unquestioningly and unconditionally, part of Ismail’s extended family. From that moment on it was a round of suppers, teas, lunches, and the immediate offer of a part in
Heat and Dust
, which they were about to make. I had never acted in a film, and was thrilled at the prospect. In the event I couldn’t do it, stuck in a West End run; I clearly was family, however, because one day Ismail phoned me and said, ‘How is your mother?’ He had never met her, but after I had reassured him about the state of her health, he said, ‘Would she like to come to India to be in a film? I need some very elegant older ladies to visit the harem.’ She was family too, it appeared.

A few months later he called me again, this time to tell me I would be playing the lead in
A Room with a View
, a film, he said, that they were making especially for me. I marvelled at their imagination and generosity in casting me as the romantic lead, George, and immediately planned to lose weight, visit the gymnasium, start a running regime (in the novel there was, after all, a rather famous nude scene in a pond). Only when my agent told me that the part they had in mind was the role of the portly fifty-year-old vicar, the Reverend Arthur Beebe, did I wake from my dream, and, feeling very foolish at my self-delusion, immediately told my agent to say no. But ‘no’ was to Ismail only the opening gambit in a long game, and blandishments followed on a daily basis, with Ismail always calmly ending the conversation by saying that they wouldn’t make the film unless I played the Rev in it. Finally, he threw a large party with many distinguished guests, at the climax of which he introduced me as ‘Simon Callow, who is playing the Reverend Beebe for us’. I said, ‘Oh no he isn’t,’ but I knew the game was up, and settled down, to general congratulations from the other guests, to one of those sumptuous banquets of Indian food that Ismail used to rustle up apparently out of nowhere and
in minutes. And of course, it was one of the most enjoyable parts I have ever played. The day before I left for the airport to go to Florence, there was another, slightly more sheepish, call asking if I wouldn’t mind accepting half the agreed wage: some faint-hearted investor had pulled out. And naturally I, like everyone else on the film, said yes. That was what you did with Ismail.

He was the most generous of men in every way, a wonderful host and an utterly supportive friend, but when he had his producer’s turban on, it was a different matter. Then the negotiations were horrible, nightmarish, and it was touch and go whether you would ever get what was finally agreed on. He would do anything for the film, to realise it exactly as they had envisaged, and that generally meant getting everybody to work for as close to nothing as possible. His and Jim’s tempestuous relationship was predicated on an absolute loyalty to the film, which must be realised to perfection in every detail exactly as they had conceived it. In the end, they didn’t really care whether anyone else liked it, as long as they did. What they offered those of us who worked for them was a chance to participate in an undiluted vision.

Ismail liked to surround himself in myth. A Muslim, he was, he used to claim, conceived in a Hindu temple on the banks of the Ganges, and was born – he
said
– on Christmas Day in Mumbai in 1936. His businessman father sent him to New York to study business administration, but his passion was always for film: he was Oscar-nominated for his first short,
The
Creation of a Woman
, but he discovered his real destiny as a film-maker when he met James Ivory, another aspiring director, in 1962.

They were wildly different as individuals, but instantly formed the potent personal and creative relationship that lasted over forty years. Their early films were made in India; when they started making films in America, their first hit was
The Europeans
(1979). It was a slow journey to success, but they were both absolutely certain about the sort of films that they wanted to make: literate, visually ravishing, exquisitely acted. Jim, in particular, had a fascination with the minutiae of social behaviour; Ismail had had an opportunity to study the Raj and its manners at close quarters. In some ways, they found their perfect subject in the Edwardian English middle classes, in Ishiguro’s
Remains of the Day
, of course, but above all in the novels of E. M. Forster, whose concern with connecting decency and order with true passion was what Merchant Ivory were all about.

And they took extraordinary risks. I had never expressed to Ismail or anyone the slightest desire to direct a film. But he had decided that it was time that
The Ballad of the Sad Café
should be shot, and that I, as one of his extended family, was the man for the job. And so, eighteen months or so later, Ismail and I found ourselves standing in front of a screen in Berlin after the first showing of the film. We were being booed. Now, there is no booing quite like German booing; it’s so thorough. But Ismail beamed broadly, as if he were receiving a standing ovation, and went off in triumph to supper, where he expressed nothing but optimism for the film’s success. As it happens, it was never really liked, a strange film from a strange book, about the love of a giantess for a dwarf, but to the end Ismail expressed genuine and admiring affection for it, as he did for all Merchant Ivory films, by definition.

Glamorous, immensely handsome (as a young man he was voted among the five most handsome men in India), exquisite in his manners and passionate in his enthusiasms, he longed all his life to connect all the things and all the people he loved. My final memory of him is of a golden, dusty twilight in Austin, Texas, on the set of
The Ballad of the Sad Café
. He had somehow brought to that dry, isolated place a consort of superb Indian musicians, who sat on the verandah of Miss Amelia’s broken-down café, joyously improvising their glittering ragas, and Ismail, seated in the front row, turned round to beam at the little audience of actors – Vanessa Redgrave and Rod Steiger and Keith Carradine – of extras and crew and designers and me, all of us woven together in perfect happiness, any thought of financial injustice or temperamental harassment banished. That was Ismail’s genius, bringing together cultures and individuals, different worlds and philosophies, the British and the Indian; the English and the Italian; the American and the European; the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes; the dwarf and the giantess; himself and Jim: always connecting.