Alan Rickman

by Maureen Paton

  ‘I was very suspicious of the way the Riverside accounts were presented – inaccurately, I suspected. There were terrible problems with the whole finances. I spoke to the London Arts Board about this.

  ‘WPT has a freehold building in Islington, and we had money in the bank at the time, too. So I thought we could come to some kind of arrangement to solve the Riverside financial crisis.

  ‘I talked to my WPT Board about it and then resigned from the Riverside Board. I wrote a draft proposal in note form for my Board, which was what ended up being published in the Evening Standard.

  ‘I sent the proposal to Riverside; and I and WPT’s accountant, Mark Riese of H. W. Fisher & Co, were interviewed by the Riverside Board, the representative from the Hammersmith & Fulham Council and a representative from the London Arts Board. There was no enthusiasm for my proposal in principle from the other side. But by the end of what I thought was a courtesy meeting, we felt they had shifted ground. They subsequently decided to proceed with further discussions between the two charitable trusts.

  ‘I have never understood why the Rickman bid was late. I understood that it was delivered after all the interviews, after the Board meeting at which they had made their decision. Nevertheless, I understand it was seriously reviewed by the Board.

  ‘The next thing I knew was that I got a call from a woman on Time Out who said I had been offered the Riverside directorship. I said “Oh no, I haven’t.” She said “The entire artistic community of London says you have.”

  ‘There was just this one draft document to our WPT Board. It was faxed to all those members who had a fax, and a letter was sent to one member who was in New York. Then suddenly it appears in the Evening Standard. I still wonder from whom they got it. We can only speculate on this. All I can say is that I know for a fact that none of my Board members or staff was involved.

  ‘In retrospect, I feel I was incredibly attacked in a concerted effort to discredit me; I was Australian and seen as an outsider. On Sunday the Observer followed the Time Out and Standard pieces. The lawyers told me not to talk to anyone. The coverage appeared to imply that I had fixed myself a job. I was never offered a job!’ explained Jules. ‘It was simply two meetings between two charitable trusts. Our accountants were instructed to carry out a due diligence examination of the Riverside accounts, which went nowhere. Riverside’s finances were in a pretty parlous state.

  ‘I never saw a final job description. And I couldn’t believe that William Hunter would write a letter to the Standard without ringing us up and talking about it: it was impossible to pursue discussions properly thereafter.

  ‘I felt abused,’ she says. ‘I didn’t think Alan was doing this . . . but I dithered about phoning him. Then the extraordinary thing was that I got phone calls from seven actors, saying that Alan had been spotted giving out photocopies of the letter from the critics to the Standard in the returns queue at the Almeida Theatre. This was the evening of 6 August; the critics’ letter had been published in the Standard that day.

  ‘I still think people thought that Riverside was a passport to public money. In actual fact it was one godalmighty headache; I knew it was a financial disaster area because I had been on the Riverside Board.

  ‘So then I went to the solicitors and said “I can’t stomach this.” Citygate are Press troubleshooters in the City; they came and monitored my calls.

  ‘I have never spoken to William Hunter since. I had met him only three times at board meetings. As for his so-called admiration for me, I was incisive and thoughtful in those three board meetings – maybe William was impressed by that.

  ‘One thing I think the solicitors were right about was that you have got to retain your dignity. I think the whole thing did Alan a lot of damage – but not Thelma, funnily enough.

  ‘I was so wounded by everything. It was reported to me that one theatre director held a dinner party with an exceedingly well-known actor there, and they spent the entire evening slagging me off.

  ‘I have known this director a long time. You never ever discredit or accuse someone without asking “What is the story?” I still can’t understand why they didn’t contact me directly instead of having all this stuff in the papers. I had launched a rescue bid, not a bid for a job. And I resigned from the Riverside Board long before we opened negotiations for an alliance between Riverside and WPT.

  ‘Time Out started it all, and we served legal proceedings on them on 28 September.

  ‘In actual fact,’ adds Jules, ‘I don’t think the Charities Commission would have worn us linking with Riverside. As a registered charity, WPT is not allowed to risk its money.

  ‘The Commission would have thought it too big a financial risk: it would have been hell on earth.

  ‘From the moment that Jonathan resigned, there were rumours that Alan and Thelma were planning to put a bid together. My first meeting with Thelma was one of the great theatrical images of my life. It was after the dissolution of the Roundhouse.

  ‘Thelma walked across one of the biggest spaces I can ever remember entering, and she looked so devastated and sad. It was the end of her dream after the liquidation. They dispensed the money to other charitable trusts, and we had asked for money for our inaugural production, The Lucky Chance.

  ‘I think the Rickman bid would have been taken very seriously; they would have been a formidable team to interview. Alan and Thelma are very articulate, talented people. But if you feel that passionately about your cause, speak about it yourself. Why use an intermediary?

  ‘William Hunter’s letter in the Standard about their bid being unconvincing really upset Alan. But he behaved with dignity. I suspect,’ concludes Jules, ‘that it got out of hand for all of them.

  ‘Nevertheless, I do hope to work with Alan again; I have done availability checks on him from time to time. The reason there is now this silence is that everybody now knows they got it horribly wrong. As far as I’m concerned, the whole thing has been consigned to the dustbin of history.’

  Jules felt particularly upset at what she saw as a personal attack by Nicholas de Jongh in the London Evening Standard. She did, however, feel comforted by the support of Ilona Sekacz, the composer of both The Lucky Chance and also Les Liaisons Dangereuses.

  ‘What you must be going through!’ wrote Ilona to Jules on 13 August 1993. ‘I just want you to know that I’m thinking of you, and ready to lend a hand in whatever way I can. I’ve written to the Evening Standard to register my protest at the way you’re being treated.’

  That letter, which was not published by the Standard, read as follows:

  ‘I was distressed to read your theatre critic Nicholas de Jongh’s articles about the recent appointment at the Riverside Studios. He places a lot of emphasis on the applications submitted by Alan Rickman’s consortium and Jules Wright.

  ‘When a panel meets to consider giving jobs or grants, the first thing it notices is the huge diversity in the manner and content of the written applications. But even the most detailed and beautifully presented papers are not necessarily the best. It is whether an applicant can prove that he or she is capable of fulfilling the brief that counts.

  ‘Jules Wright runs the Women’s Playhouse Trust impeccably. She commissions and produces a huge volume of new work on a tight budget, and her past record shows she is capable of turning a debt into a profit. She is a tireless and committed worker for women in the theatre, and one of the few people currently fulfilling the taxing dual role of director/manager.

  ‘I know Alan Rickman, Juliet Stevenson and Christopher Hampton, and love and respect their work, but their application to the board of Riverside Studios is not supported by evidence of their managerial skills.

  ‘Jules Wright may be running the WPT single-handed, but this is because the funding the WPT receives is spent on commissions for new work . . . She has always maintained a low profile in the press, preferring to devote her energies to the daily running of a successful company, rather than fighting her battles for funding an
d recognition in public.

  ‘I know nothing of the rights and wrongs of the Riverside Board’s behaviour, but I think it is wrong of your theatre critic to give a false impression of one of our most charismatic and talented theatre directors.’

  Thelma Holt’s last words on the subject are these: ‘I don’t think any blame of any kind should be laid at the door of Jules Wright, who was merely after the building like we were. The position of the others involved, though, was, to say the least, a little quaint. In spite of all the criteria we were given to understand were required of us, we were not even considered. There are many opinions as to why this was so, but they are all speculations.

  ‘I’m as confused now as I was then about the rather cavalier, if not uncivil, manner in which Alan, and indeed his colleagues including myself, were treated. Print that if you want to: it is what I feel.’

  With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear that Rivergate was a public-relations disaster for the Riverside Trust as well as a major disappointment for the hopes of Alan, Thelma and Catherine. If the nub of the problem was money, why did the trustees not make that clear?

  Instead of which, William Hunter’s sneering letter in the Evening Standard had claimed that the Rickman consortium’s application was unconvincing ‘administratively, artistically and financially’.

  The first two were demonstrably not true; so it was an insulting remark to make. And that was what made the affair so acrimonious. ‘You may think William Hunter is a pompous ass,’ says one of the people involved. ‘I couldn’t possibly comment.’

  Yet it’s likely that Alan would never have spent enough time at Riverside to be a consistent box-office draw, given a rapidly developing film career that took him all over the world. Rima had found the year a tough one, too. After standing as the Labour Party’s parliamentary candidate in the safest Tory seat in the country, she had found that even a power-dressing course hadn’t helped for reselection.

  Rima plodded on, but Alan had moved on to another movie. Anton Mesmer, the man who invented the concept of animal magnetism, was the subject of a Dennis Potter script about to go into production.

  In one of those stories that are the much-embellished stuff of Hollywood legend, Alan was handed the script by one of the producers in the back of an LA cab. At last this was to be the first film of his career in which his character was absolutely central. It would capitalise on Rickman’s growing reputation as a leading screen actor; and also his astonishing, unorthodox sex appeal. With Anton Mesmer inducing multiple orgasms in society ladies, it couldn’t fail.

  11. ANIMAL MAGNETISM

  ONCE UPON A time there was a fez. Magic acts, however, have come a long way since the days of the homely British comedian Tommy Cooper. This is the age of paranormal TV.

  Given the vogue for such glamorous showmen as the Heathcliffian (not to say werewolfian) magician David Copperfield and the slick, sharp-suited hypnotist Paul McKenna, a feature film about the father of modern hypnotism would appear to have a ready-made audience.

  Friedrich Anton (otherwise known as Franz) Mesmer, the German physician who invented mesmerism, was born at Iznang, Baden, on 23 May 1733. He graduated in medicine in Vienna, and later dabbled in the use of astrology and electricity in medical treatment. After finding he could obtain results by treating nervous disorders with the aid of a magnet, he developed the notion that an occult magnetic fluid – which exerted a force he called ‘animal’ magnetism – pervaded the universe and that he alone had a mysterious control over this force. He believed that disease was the result of obstacles in the magnetic fluid’s flow through the body, and that they could be overcome by trance states often ending in delirium or convulsions.

  In 1766, he published his first work (in Latin) on the influence of the planets upon the human body.

  A portrait shows a fat-faced, bland-looking individual. Despite this unprepossessing appearance, he does appear to have achieved a close rapport with his patients and to have alleviated various nervous illnesses. He cured many people by auto-suggestion; but he used much mumbo-jumbo and was pronounced an impostor by his fellow physicians. Expelled from Austria for his unorthodoxy, he became a favourite at Louis XVI’s court in pre-revolutionary Paris. Exactly contemporary with the Vicomte de Valmont . . . But in 1784, the French Academy of Medicine and Sciences, whose members included such eminent individuals as Dr Joseph Guillotin and Benjamin Franklin, recognised only that Mesmer’s fashionable seances exercised a suggestive influence on his patients and denounced him as a charlatan. In effect, he practised an early form of psychotherapy. Eventually he withdrew from Paris and died in obscurity at Meersbury on 5 March 1815, a man so far ahead of his time that he has almost disappeared into the name he coined.

  The early attempts at producing a trance-like state or sleep were a combination of trickery and charlatanism, but the modern scientific study of the process of mesmerism has become better known under the name of hypnotism. Mesmer’s consulting-rooms were always dimly lit, hung with mirrors and filled with the scent of burning chemicals. He dressed in the long flowing robes of a magus or necromancer. His methods were inevitably copied by all kinds of swindlers and tricksters, with the result that mesmerism fell into disrepute until it became the subject of scientific study towards the end of the nineteenth century. Hypnotism is an artificially induced state that aims to help people to help themselves, but its effects are notoriously uncertain and even harmful to impressionable people. There’s an old canard that says women are more easily hypnotised than men; certainly Mesmer had a preponderance of female patients. His hands-on methods involved bringing them to a delirious state similar to orgasm.

  With the right script to flesh out the story, this faith-healer, miracle man, visionary or Svengali (take your pick) is a natural subject for drama; and Rickman had the right footlights appeal. Mesmer’s makers, Mayfair Entertainment International, hoped to capitalise on the paradox of such an attractively ugly man. Once again, it was also a period role for which Rickman is peculiarly suited. On this occasion, he elected to stay true to the eighteenth-century fashion for being clean-shaven in order to put as great a distance between Mesmer and Valmont as possible. The project generated enormous interest, especially when David Bowie became an investor. In May 1993, Alan was interviewed about the role at the Cannes Film Festival for Barry Norman’s Film 93 slot on BBC Television. Rickman was banging the drum for Mesmer at a Mayfair Films lunch in his honour; yet he was deliberately dressed down in a blue denim jacket and white vest, as if he were trying to look like a roadie.

  ‘Nobody asked me to make movies until a few years ago,’ he admitted cheerfully with a face-splitting grin, looking as if he’d spent his day humping equipment and checking sound-levels.

  ‘I said yes to Mesmer because of the script. The writers are the least respected people around; they are a service industry. Dennis Potter is an artist: it’s irresistible. You are very glad and lucky to be involved.

  ‘I’m staying on someone’s yacht. A driver said, “You come with me, we go to David Bowie’s yacht.”’ Alan grinned again and thanked David Bowie.

  It was easy to see why Dennis Potter had been attracted to the theme of one man’s sexual power, transmitted by thought-processes alone, over women. Just the kind of thing over which the crippled Dennis had been fantasising throughout his career. His Christabel serial excepted, Dennis did not write substantial roles for women: he saw them as sex objects.

  The director Roger Spottiswoode admits the screenplay had been around for quite a time: ‘We all came to the project separately; the script was about seven years old.’

  Filming took place in Hungary, near the Austrian border. ‘The first thing that hit me when I read the script was the erotic charge of it. It’s on every page,’ Rickman told Michael Owen in a London Evening Standard piece in October 1993.

  ‘He has a relationship with a blind girl which certainly goes beyond the usual doctor-patient relationship.

  ‘He touched his patients
intimately, we see treatment which borders on love-making, but anyone expecting any romping around on a bed will be disappointed. Not my style, I’m afraid.’ (His tune changed for An Awfully Big Adventure.)

  ‘Mesmer was a man of moral courage, which always creates a certain aura,’ added Rickman somewhat stuffily, clearly psyching himself up to be a serious sexpot. ‘He could be selfish and egotistical, but also had great innocence and didn’t mind making a fool of himself. I find that quite attractive. He was also close to being an actor. He was very theatrical in his work, used lots of music.’

  The minimalist Michael Nyman composed the music, which worked rather better than the film itself. For somewhere along the line, the movie that was to have given Alan Rickman his greatest starring role went so disastrously wrong that it ended up mired in litigation.

  Even Rickman was heard complaining to his American agent in a Late Show special on his career in November 1994 that his non-naturalistic bits had been cut out of the film, that someone had pointed out you never get to know the enigmatic Mesmer. Director Roger Spottiswoode was probably the only person happy with the finished product in the end as slanging matches broke out everywhere.

  This was the second project within eighteen months on which Rickman, the ultimate control freak, had lost control. A Mail On Sunday feature by Paul Nathanson on 12 February 1995 was the first to scent blood, sniff out the scandal and tell part of the story, blaming Alan Rickman for being too prissy and politically correct to play the kind of intellectual sex-machine that Potter had in mind. In other words, it seemed to be accusing Rickman of censorship and bowdlerisation.

  Nathanson’s piece alleged a behind-the-scenes dispute involving 57 unauthorised and ‘substantial’ changes that Rickman and Spottiswoode made to Potter’s original script.