I once asked actor Jay Karnes (FX’s The Shield, among others) if he had any designs on directing. He looked at me sarcastically, only to say he would much prefer to have a life. Karnes would continue to act, thank you very much. And he has.
His response came to mind while reading director and producer James Ivory’s (Shakespeare Wallah, Remains of the Day, Howard’s End, A Room With a View, and many more) very interesting new memoir, Solid Ivory. Ivory has directed multiple films that were much beloved, and in his collection of memories he notes that the director “has to deal with hundreds of things going on horizontally and he must deal with all of these things confidently,” while likely not being able to deal with them in depth. While a director “can’t remember every fine nuance of every single take,” the “editor has an incredible memory for that and knows exactly where any shot goes out of focus or where an actor stumbles on a line.” Editors, actors, cinematographers, grips, and other film employees are specialists, while directors are generalists.
Ivory articulated all this well, and in a way that vivified Karnes’s memorable response. Directors are the CEOs, which is why they’re so revered. It’s also why they’re so well-paid in much the same way that CEOs and quarterbacks are. The production revolves around them, and if they’re not good at coordinating multiple situations at once, they fail. Reading all this, I found myself thinking it would be interesting to watch Ivory watch Joel and Ethan Coen co-direct a film. That’s the case because Ivory almost did just that with Italian director Luca Guadagnino on a film (Call Me By Your Name) that Ivory wrote the screenplay for, and ultimately won an Oscar (Best Screenplay) for. Ivory wasn’t treated particularly well on a lot of levels in the making of the film, including having his co-director perch rescinded, but he’s wise and seasoned enough to acknowledge how challenging it would have been to be co-CEO of sorts with Guadagnino. In particular, they had different views about how an intimate scene between Armie Hammer and Timothee Chalamet should have been shot, so how could this and other inevitable disagreements have been handled in front of cast and crew? Along these lines, how interesting to watch directors watch the Coen brothers make films. What is it that makes it possible for them to collaborate in a way that other directors almost uniformly cannot?
Of course, not all of Ivory’s collection of memories is about directing. This isn’t a Hollywood tell-all; rather it’s a collection of remembrances that help Ivory fans understand where he came from, and what he became. It’s a life story. If you’re looking for Ivory’s thoughts on Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, or Anthony Hopkins, this is not your book. Still, it’s a very good read.
Ivory is the adopted son of a prosperous lumber mill owner from upstate New York and mother who came up in Bogalusa, LA. Pat Ivory and Hallie De Loney met in the summer of 1916 when Pat had a job at the Great Southern Lumber Company in Bogalusa.
The mill work ultimately took the Ivory family to Klamath Falls, Oregon, which is where James grew up. It was in Klamath that Ivory saw his first movie in 1933.
It’s interesting to consider Ivory’s life in the context of him being a teen in the 1940s in a small Oregon town. It’s apparent Ivory knew he was gay, he writes of all manner of unspoken and unrequited crushes at a time in life when these urges were plainly kept quiet, but there’s no expressed evidence of misery or scars. Ivory is clear that he ran with the “in crowd,” that he was one of the stars of the “high school’s social scene.” This included having the “pick of the cutest girls,” even though Ivory didn’t partake. There was no faking on his part, which says so much.
What’s encouraging about all this is that in looking back Ivory isn’t bitter, he doesn’t cast himself as a victim, or anything of the sort. He had a good life and he knew it. What’s instead left is wonder. Did Ted Reeves (brother of identical twin Fred) have the yearnings for Ivory that Ivory had for Ted? These feelings weren’t expressed back then. Again, no bitterness from the memoirist. Except that the story doesn’t end there.
As evidenced by his professional track record, Ivory is obviously a great storyteller and writer. About the Reeves brothers, over time the wildly popular (in high school) duo “had slipped into the anonymity that awaits most small-town people.” They were both married only for Ted to lose his job (and marriage) as a window decorator at a San Francisco men’s store due to some kind of homosexual scandal. This rates mention because while Ivory’s longings for Ted withered, they eventually connected in ways they couldn’t in the 1940s. But the main reason all of this is covered in the review is as an expression of how very different life was for men like Ivory in the 1940s and well beyond. What makes it yet again impressive and uplifting is that there’s no expressed anger. This was life, and Ivory is telling us about his life.
His father as previously mentioned was a well-to-do mill owner. The Ivorys ate, and ate well, even in the 1930s. Better yet, their house was one frequently visited by those who didn’t have much to eat. Interesting there is Ivory’s assessment of those who showed up. In a book that’s happily not political, Ivory observes about the “hobos who rarely worked” that some had perhaps “chosen the vagrant life and liked it.” This has been said over the years by members of the Right, and memory says (particularly during the Reagan years) that they were pilloried for saying things similar; that life in a rich country like the U.S. (our Great Depression was a boom time by global standards) is about choices (good and bad) more than people want to admit. Ivory’s candor about many things well beyond hobos is welcome, though there’s in theory a downside to it. Or a double standard? More on that in a bit.
It wasn’t just Ivory’s mother who was such a willing cook for the downtrodden. Ivory’s father treated the employees at his lumber mills well. The “cookhouse” was groaning with abundant and good food. Ivory learned from it. His father’s cookhouse taught him how to treat people on his film sets, “to feed hungry men as if they were stars and never skimp there.” Some will respond that members of film crews are different than the men of old in lumber mills, but Ivory rather interestingly rejects that notion. As he puts it, even on film sets the workers in an “age of affluence and dieting and food pickers” happen on the food “ravenously.” More broadly, it’s a reminder of a truth that the Left would rather not embrace: the best CEOs are often the best precisely because they overpay, over-benefit, and over-feed. The popular notion about “wage stagnation” in the world’s richest country vandalizes simple reason.
Ivory’s taste in food plainly evolved over time, but it’s good to see that he doesn’t shy from his love of the roast beef and mashed potato basics that happily defined the 1930s for him. Notable about eating is how costs have changed. By the sixth or seventh grade, Ivory “was considered old enough to leave the school precincts and find my own lunch in town.” He was given .25 cents for this daily endeavor, and the latter could be exchanged for a hamburger at the Woolworth’s counter, with money to spare. All my book reviews have an economic angle to them, and in this case it’s sad to read about how much the U.S. Treasury has devalued the dollar since Ivory’s childhood. How many hard working people saw their savings eviscerated as a consequence of the horrifyingly obtuse view inside the economics and political professions that debased money is economically stimulative? No it isn’t. The people are the economy. People earn dollars and cents. It harms them immeasurably to have the fruits of their labor taken from them.
Ivory went to the University of Oregon for college. It’s difficult to assess what it meant to him. He spends a fair amount of time on the fraternity rush process that ultimately didn’t work out. This comes up in the review mainly because it would be so interesting to have an interviewer ask Ivory to expand on his time in Eugene. Well-to-do and stylish, Ivory indicates that the stylish part didn’t elevate a male at a school where “slob” style was the thing. Ivory is very candid about embarrassing rush experiences, including stage fright at a urinal, and it would be interesting to ask him if age has allowed him to be candid about what didn’t work out long ago. Put another way, would Ivory have been as honest about his rush experiences if writing memoirs in the 1950s?
Also interesting about Ivory’s time in Eugene is that for his junior year (his second stab at rush) he showed up “in a new, yellow Pontiac convertible.” He perhaps rightly thought the car would enhance the rush process, but it’s mentioned here given his recollection that it “was unusual in those days to have a new car like mine, because it was so soon after the war.” Ivory explains the latter with “American motor companies hadn’t gotten back into full swing” after altering their production for the war effort. This is useful in consideration of what’s happening today. Politicians around the world cruelly locked down economic activity as a virus-mitigation strategy (historians will marvel at the shocking stupidity that brought them to the conclusion that economic desperation would aid the fight against a virus), only for them to gradually “give” back the freedoms they took. Naturally the lockdowns crippled decades-long economic cooperation achieved by producers around the world, and naturally the degradation was going to result in stunted production of all manner of inputs, goods and services once the world returned to some semblance of how things were before the mindless lockdowns. The point of all this is that higher prices in the aftermath of what was done were a logical consequence of the imposition of command-and-control, not a monetary phenomenon of inflation as so many economic types are now foolishly contending. Inflation is a devaluation of the currency. Period. See the Woolworth’s example above to understand better what is simple. We’re suffering the bitter fruits of lockdowns now that include higher prices, not the ravages of inflation. There's a difference between the two.
From Oregon, Ivory then moved south to Los Angeles. One challenging aspect of Solid Ivory is that the stories bounce around in terms of time. And they don’t really connect. That’s a long or short way of saying that it’s not immediately obvious what followed Oregon, or led to USC. The main thing is that his parents were by the USC years very prosperous Los Angelenos. In Ivory’s case, he had an artistic bent, and USC’s film school is at least now unrivaled. Was it then? The guess here is yes. It sounds like Ivory was a good student, he spent Sundays running up his father’s bill at the Jonathan Beach Club, plus he made a documentary film about Venice (Italy) “in lieu of writing a master’s thesis” at Southern Cal. Some people just know. And in Ivory’s case he seemingly knew he would be a filmmaker.
One of the more interesting stretches in the book about Ivory’s filmmaking concerns Afghanistan. Ivory was there in the 1960s. It was a more liberalized country then for sure in that it was expected then that women would “hold jobs, go to university, and move about in public without fear of censure.” Yet even then Afghanistan was a nation of contrasts. One day while lunching at Kabul’s International Club (where he lived for a time), Ivory “discovered a fat black slug” in his salad, then alerted the manager. The manager “barked at the waiter, who removed the offending dish,” only for “loud howls and groans” to subsequently be heard from outside. Ivory was told “that’s our waiter being beaten.” Oddly, the country was known for having great hairdressers such that the well-to-do would come over from Pakistan for cuts. Who knew?
Ivory was in Afghanistan to make a documentary. He doesn’t sugarcoat things. He’s clear that that the country satisfied no craving of his in the way that India plainly did. It was in India where Ivory seemingly learned to make movies. He learned from well-regarded Indian director Satyajit Ray. Funny and sad about Ray is that “India’s greatest artist was often not given any foreign exchange by his government when he traveled to the West.” This is funny because it speaks to the hopeless stupidity of those who were running India in the 1960s, but sad because of what it meant for actual people. In fairness to the policy-inept who were in control in India, these same “capital controls” were foisted on the citizenry by other nations, including England. This happened right up to the 1970s, and still probably happens in some countries. Politicians are so dense. If they knew better, they’d know that scarce foreign currency or hard currency is an effect of policies that limit the economic activity that is the norm where people are free. Good money is rarely found where barriers to production are high, and they certainly were in India. Worse, “money” that cannot “exit” a country rarely “enters” same. Think about it. The simple truth is that the doltish socialists who took over in India post-partition were the cause of limited foreign exchange in India, not mean bankers.
Ultimately Ivory teamed up with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and Ismail Merchant on the way to a very fruitful filmmaking career. Not too much time will be spent here mainly because anyone reading this review or Solid Ivory itself is likely familiar with the grand results of this great collaboration. Of possible interest, Ivory writes that Jhabvala “never lifted a finger, except to typewriter.” It’s also notable that she’d rejected the entreaties of filmmakers for years, only for Ivory and Merchant to convince her to take the plunge. Thank goodness they did.
Merchant reads as very remarkable. He and Ivory met at the Indian consulate in New York in 1961, and rapidly became much more than business partners. In Ivory’s words they were “two gay men, united in their commitment to each other, single-mindedly pursuing a common goal.” What a combination. Ivory was (and remains) a great filmmaker, while the late Merchant possessed “legendary abilities to raise money” and also get the films in the right places. About the latter, Ivory writes that Merchant “made it his business to know the heads of all the major film festivals” on the way to their productions being seen by those who would launch them into theaters.
Were there quibbles with the book? Not many. It was a very enjoyable read. Still, there’s always something. The book as mentioned jumped around a lot in terms of time. This made it sometimes difficult to follow.
It also felt like things weren’t always explained. Ivory’s father reads as distant in parts of the book, but by the time James was at USC his father was extraordinarily generous as the Jonathan Club example attests, not to mention that his mother picked him up in a limousine from basic training at Fort Ord. It was quite simply hard to develop a read of Ivory vis-à-vis his father. What did his father or parents say when they found out he was gay? Did they find out?
And then it was kind of hoped that Ivory would in fact spend more time on the actors and actresses whom he directed, not to mention his two main collaborators. Instead, Ivory and his editor Peter Cameron seemingly put in Solid Ivory the content they wanted. This meant that this reader learned more about author Bruce Chatwin (a very interesting person for sure) than Jhabvala and Merchant, and more about Vanessa Redgrave than Emma Thompson and Hugh Grant.
But the main quibble has to do with Ivory’s memories of the prurient kind. They were graphic in description. Reading these passages, it was hard not to conclude the existence of a double standard. Seemingly because Ivory is gay, he can talk in detail about seducing and being seduced. Yet imagine if a heterosexual director or actor were to pen memoirs describing various assignations in detail. Wouldn’t this person be cancelled in a world increasingly defined by what the great George Will describes as “presentism”?
All of which raises a question: does Ivory recognize the double standard? If so, how interesting and important if someone like Ivory were to make a bigger, and more public point about how “cancel culture” has gone way too far. Just as it was necessary for a hard liner like Richard Nixon to “go to China,” it’s probably going to have to be a gay, culturally advanced individual who will end the tragic ruination of people who are having their lives wrecked as their pasts are judged by present standards. Ivory is old. 93 years old. It wouldn’t hurt if he lent his voice to a movement to end the “cancel” madness.
For now, he’s put together a very interesting memoir of an important, well-lived life. Readers will be glad they read Solid Ivory.
