My Life in Pieces

by Simon Callow

  When this piece came out – on the day of the British premiere of the film – I was loitering in the cinema foyer when Milos, with thunder on his brow, came over to me. ‘I rrread your piece in the Gwaaaaaarrrrdian,’ he said. ‘I’m happy to have it. I just rrrran out of toilet paper.’ But he was amused. Later, he asked me to share his cab on the way to the reception, and I told him that I was directing a play by his old friend Milan Kundera in Los Angeles. ‘Very good. I will come to see it. And I will review it for the GWARRRRRRRRRRDIAN.’ If Amadeus was a gruelling film to make, my next film, A Room with a View, directed by James Ivory and produced by Ismail Merchant, was pure balm, from beginning to end. This account of it was written for the Sunday Telegraph magazine in 1986, and it charts the beginning of my fascination with the world of film-making.

  Last May in Florence broke all records for rain. The sky was black, the grass was wet. For two days we could do nothing. On the third day a glint of sunlight made shooting possible, though not perfect. Eventually we had to shoot what we could regardless (Time is Money). If the light is good, it’s surprising how much rain you can have without it showing on the film. Mud is a different matter, however, and the first day’s shooting chiefly concentrated on the progress of two carriages through the Fiesole countryside. Denholm Elliott, Judi Dench and I shared a carriage. Our horse, Giacomo, had an unfortunate inclination to collapse from time to time. There was, moreover, the matter of the falling tree.

  This marvel of mechanical engineering was designed to smash across our path, frightening the ladies and giving the men a chance to take command of the situation. It had to fall late enough to look menacing but early enough to avoid the horses. Every time it fell wrongly, we had to ascend the little hill again, walking through the mud to give the horses a break, clutching our skirts or gaiters. So there we are in our carriage, chattering away, and finally the tree is right. A good take at last. But we need another to be safe. Suddenly Maggie Smith, seconded by Judi Dench, protests. The Florence Fire Brigade has been in the bushes, simulating a sudden downpour that’s needed for the scene. The water has been bearing down on the horses’ heads. They’ve been shying away in fear. For the last take, then, the water, is, as they say, cheated to fall yards ahead of them. The effect is almost identical.

  All this has taken over eight hours to shoot – we were on location at seven – and will result in under a minute of film. A brilliant minute, as it happens. About ten minutes out of those eight hours was spent in front of the cameras.

  And so it goes for every day. Encamped in our villa at Fiesole, which is playing the role of Forster’s pension in the film, we are squeezed into our costumes, and gummed into our hairpieces, and our blemishes are painted out by the make-up artists. My motorcycling scar is a much-loved challenge. After five minutes’ assiduous application, it’s invisible. Then, like souls in hell, we wait to be called. Unending supplies of coffee and biscuits and sandwiches appear at regular intervals and then lunch and tea and eventually supper. The Edwardian costumes have a way of making everyone look cross or at the very least severe, uptight, in corsets and waistcoats. Reading is difficult, writing impossible. All you can do is talk, smoke and eat. The talk becomes more and more abstract. Starting with theatrical anecdotes, by the end of a shoot you’re on to Zen Buddhism and the meaning of life. The most intimate and terrible secrets have been vouchsafed and friendships have been born, flowered, declined and died. As in Buñuel’s Exterminating Angel, or the plays of Chekhov, we are stranded together, cut off from the world, pawns of a capricious and inscrutable destiny: the director, the weather, the cameraman.

  Life becomes real again when you work. Best of all is unremitting hard work, a thirteen-hour slog. Not only is it good to be at it, but you feel your existence is justified. You’re part of things, and of course from a solipsistic angle, you become the focus of the whole enterprise.

  No one on the set looks more worried than Jim. It is as if we were filming a documentary on Hiroshima instead of an Edwardian comedy. He shouts ‘Cut.’ ‘Was that all right for you?’ he asks the cameraman. ‘I was a little worried about the shadow on X’s face, but if it didn’t worry you, it doesn’t worry me’. ‘How about the acting?’ one of us asks. ‘It was all right.’ ‘All right?’ I demand. ‘By which I mean sublime, of course,’ says Jim.

  On the stage, you project. In film, it’s different: instead of offering yourself, you admit the camera into your aura. This is a little like being X-rayed. More like dreaming. At the end of a long session, you can feel absolutely transparent, as if the camera had passed through your veins and organs. Very exhilarating.

  Denholm Elliott puts it another way. ‘I mean –’ he does the look he describes as his angry caterpillar look. ‘It’s only dressing up for Mummy and Daddy, after all.’ But he’s swallowed the camera lock, stock and barrel, if anyone ever has.

  At the far corner of the set, concentrating harder than anyone, is Ismail. He’s willing the scene to be good, for reasons both financial and artistic; but he’s also wondering whether he can’t have another party soon. His therapy is culinary. The fatigue, fraughtness and fragility of filming has one remedy: food. He will commandeer any unlikely space to throw a party. Up to a point, this is because cooking is therapeutic for him; but also it’s a very personal and charming hand-holding with all of us. And such is the excellence of his cooking that everybody’s good nature is restored. The phrase ‘to curry favour’ might have been invented for Ismail.

  Louche dives are a necessary diversion from film acting. Somewhere to blow out steam, fall down, jump about. The work is concentrated and not usually very sustained. It is, in fact, not unlike very bad sex; it’s all over in thirty seconds, and it’s an hour before you can do it again.

  So some sort of antidote is called for. In the case of Florence, and for the few hardy spirits who could brave it, it was a club magnificently called Chez Rudy GoGo, a transvestite discotheque much frequented by gay German dwarfs and immensely tall, five o’clock-shadowed, bulging-calved Italian men in natty little off-the-shoulder numbers. The feeling of the place was as of a tepid tribute to Weimar Berlin; but it was a relief from Edward Morgan Forster and the dog collar. Very friendly, everyone was, with no pressure of any kind. Julian Sands and I would weave a drunken path back to the Excelsior through the moonlit statues and arcades of Florence, after which I would retire to translate a few pages of a French play. This was another lifeline to sanity; something to show for one’s time.

  It’s as well to have done something else by the end of filming. Judi Dench does embroidery, very beautifully. It was, I suppose, tactless of me to enquire if the reason it was called petit point was because there’s so little point to it; tactless – and wrong. She was making first-night presents for her next show.

  We transferred to Kent after a month in Tuscany, and were plagued by the wettest summer that county had ever known. These climatic vagaries apart, the film continued on the even keel Jim and Ismail skilfully maintain; but the atmosphere is quite different when you’re within twenty minutes of London; it becomes more like an ordinary job. But there was a spectacular finale; the scene in the ‘Sacred Lake’, in which Mr Beebe and the two young men of the story, George and Lucy’s brother, take an impulsive dip, only to be surprised by the ladies. By now it was July. A pool had been dug and at the very least lukewarm water was promised. At the very most, as it happened. For three days we stood disconsolately around, the lads flexing their pectorals, I morbidly gazing at my Michelin Man contours, waiting at a moment’s notice and with the hint of the tiniest sunbeam to plunge into the arctic waters of Sevenoaks.

  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 talking – 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 character, 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 arrangements. 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 Jefferson 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 i
magination 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.