Solid Ivory by James Ivory
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Solid Ivory: Memoirs
By James Ivory
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021
That James Ivory loves a good story should come as no surprise. In the 30-some films he directed over 46 years, he often turned to literary fiction as springboards—novels by E.M. Forster, Henry James, Jean Rhys, Kazuo Ishiguro, Diane Johnson, Evan S. Connell—with occasional nods to Shakespeare, Austen (and Tama Janowitz.). The novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala began a rich film career when invited to join Ivory’s team in 1963 to adapt her book, The Householder. And his most recent success, bringing André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name to the screen, won him a 2017 Academy Award for a screenplay adaptation—making him at 89 the oldest person to win a competitive Oscar.
And in this elegant, finely detailed—but often frustrating—book, he offers a life filled with incident, accomplishment, memorable friends, few regrets—and lots of sex, described with admirable directness. He was libidinous from an early age, starting with youthful experiments with fellatio, and he chronicles a veritable parade of lengthy affairs and brief encounters.
He celebrates his sexual experiences with candor and tenderness, untortured by the guilt and shame endemic to many of his era(s).
But it is his 44-year romantic and professional relationship with producer Ismail Merchant that dominated his personal life, despite each of their extramarital affairs (and the occasional threesome). Ivory compares himself to a French matriarch whose husband has mistresses, yet knows that she is nonetheless the center of his world. It was a pairing both immutable and empowering: “We were together, united in a purpose, and that purpose was to make films together. . . . I came to feel as the years passed, and as success came, then went, then came again, a strengthening of our devotion to each other, and to our work. I came to feel that two gay men, united in their commitment to each other, single-mindedly pursuing a common goal, could end up ruling the world.”
James Ivory, Ismail Merchant and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
In telling his story, Ivory opts to hop and skip through incidents, locations, and films, creating a loose structure that often challenges coherence. There are some chapters that are head scratchers in their irrelevance. You wonder how much of the book was compiled from journal entries, diaries, and conversations, a speculation given weight by the unusual editorship credited to the estimable novelist Peter Cameron (author of The City Of Your Final Destination, adapted into a film by Merchant Ivory) on the dust jacket and title page. According to the Acknowledgements, several short portions first appeared in various publications beginning in 1967; from an interview published elsewhere we learn that some portions were never intended for publication. Did Cameron cobble together these disparate parts? Hard to say, with no explanation offered.
But jerry-rigged or not, the book offers an irresistible voice narrating travels to far-flung destinations and encounters with a merry cavalcade of unlikely folk: Susan Sontag, J.D. Salinger, Prince Charles, David Sedaris, Kenneth Clark, Stephen Tennant, Lillian Ross, sketched in profiles from the purely acidic (Raquel Welch as a major diva) to the painfully sad (an aged George Cukor). Best supporting role must go to the deeply inscrutable Bruce Chatwin, whose ongoing sexual relationship with the author is described with typical Ivory matter-of-factness: “He was a handsome young man, he wanted to sleep with me, and once he had, he wanted to again. Who asks for more?” (Readers who want for more detail here will get it in spades.)
Ivory grew up in Klamath Falls, Oregon. He was adopted as a baby by loving parents; his father’s co-ownership of a lumber company allowed for a comfortable affluence that kept the family housed and fed in the Depression (and, as the family fortune increased, financed some of his son’s early films). Ivory’s education by nuns cultivated his visual artistic impulses just as his proximity to young men satisfied his erotic yearnings. Some of the book’s most touching sequences are relationships he describes with loving specificity as intimate, romantic—but stopping short of sexual.
Film studies at USC and an active wanderlust led to his creation of well-regarded documentaries that whet his appetite for narrative features and honed his visual acuity. Meeting nascent producer Ismail Merchant casually in the late ‘50s was the beginning of their decades-long relationship of body and soul launched professionally with The Householder in 1962, adapted by Jhabvala from her novel. She first resisted the job, claiming she had never written a screenplay, to which Merchant replied, “Well, I’ve never produced a movie, and Jim has never directed one.”
Many “art house” films (read: indies) followed, with varying degrees of success. But the trio hit their stride, critically and financially, with their take on great novels: Henry James’ The Europeans (1979) and The Bostonians (1984) were well-received and were followed in the next decade by three adaptations that won critical raves and Oscar glory: A Room With A View (1985), Howards End (1992), and Remains of the Day (1993).
(Maurice, their take on Forster’s posthumous “coming out” novel, was released in 1987 and has generally been excluded from that pantheon, for all of its many virtues. Jhabvala considered it “sub-Forster” and “sub-Ivory,” and he never forgave her for declining to write it.)
Faithful to their sources, exquisitely appointed, stunningly photographed, and peopled with casts made up of superlative actors: Vanessa Redgrave, Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins, Hugh Grant, Maggie Smith, Daniel Day-Lewis, Judi Dench, Simon Callow. But they were not beloved by all. Pauline Kael sneered at Ivory’s style as “phlegmatic” and “limp”; the term “coffee table films” became a favorite insult. “Too literary” was another thrust. His riposte: “Impossible.”
In the chapter named “Making Movies,” Ivory honors Satyajit Ray and Jean Renoir as major influences and advisers, and he offers his own common-sense philosophies regarding directing a film: respect your actors, don’t humiliate them, don’t demand multiple takes—actors hate them and their performances are likely to get worse. Trust your designers and cinematographer, and be prepared for the editing room to turn the first screening, “a vast shapeless monster,” into the finished film. And although he doesn’t say as much, he may not take the charge that (Kael again) “he’s a director who assembles the actors, arranges the bric-a-brac, and calls for the camera” as the intended insult it was.
Now 93, Ivory may well have completed his contributions to film history, but he has done so with glory by winning an Oscar after several nominations. When first approached to adapt Call Me By Your Name (which he says he liked “well enough”—ouch), he was also slated to codirect with Luca Guadanigno, but was peremptorily dropped: “I was never told why.” He adds that his version would have included more explicit sex and frontal nudity (Go, James!). However, in the last-laugh department, Ivory won his statuette, Guadanigno as sole director did not.
Ivory ends the story of his rich, enviable life with an anecdote from his high school years that embraces his love of movies, an obsession with an obscure MGM musical actress, and his own thirst for applause. In doing so he illuminates his book’s title. Suddenly, what seemed to me a perplexing choice—unimaginative and ordinary—now was just right, perfect in fact, and well worth readers taking the journey to find out for themselves.
Michael Adams is a writer and editor living in New York City. He holds a PhD from Northwestern University in Performance Studies.