There are many train journeys in my novel The White Hotel, from a turbulently erotic ride in the Austrian Alps to a journey of slaughtered Jews to Palestine or Purgatory, and I wrote it during a year of train journeys. 1979 was a time of transition for me. The pleasant rural-English college where I had taught for 15 years had been closed; I'd been granted a year's sabbatical back in my alma mater, New College, Oxford. I spent half of each week in a bare postgraduate cell behind New College garden, the other half in my Hereford home. In two homes in Hereford, really, since my personal life was complicated. The idea for the novel sprang at me one morning in my cell. I wrote it on two typewriters - in Hereford and Oxford. All year I felt dreamy and spaced-out in my divided world. So did my closest friend and former colleague, also in Oxford, who ended his year's grace by committing suicide.
Deciding to try my luck as a full-time writer, I settled into unaccustomed and unwelcome writerly solitude, completing The White Hotel and starting another novel, Ararat. When the former appeared, in Britain and the US, it proved a surprising - and controversial - success. I had chosen to encompass the extremes of pleasure and pain, Eros and Thanatos. A young opera singer, Lisa, is analysed by Freud in Vienna, and writes for him what he calls an "inundation" of violent sexual fantasy. The centrepiece of the novel is his analysis of her. Naturally he traces her hysterical illness back to her childhood; later, it appears that, being half-Jewish, her illness stems from a premonition of the "real hysteria" of the Holocaust. Some readers hated the sex; others, the violence. But a French woman, a journalist, told me my book appealed to "les foux, les femmes and les juifs". Of course not all madmen, and certainly not all women and Jews; but enough to gain a great number of readers.
I have heard a perhaps apocryphal tale of how my novel first came to be optioned as a film. Someone at a Hollywood party urged Barbra Streisand to take on a more serious role, and suggested my book. She went straight to the producer Keith Barish (of Endless Love ) and said: "Keith, you owe me a favour; I want you to buy The White Hotel." Mark Rydell, who had just made On Golden Pond, was to direct. I had a short, uneasy meeting with him in his New York apartment. His mind seemed to be on other things. He didn't last. Maybe Streisand's interest waned too when another, more postmodern director, asked how he would deal with the sex, told her of his idea of inserting glass fibre optics into the heroine's vagina. She is said to have changed the subject at that point, saying: "Let me show you my mansion" and never mentioned the film again. "Soon to be a major movie", on the 1982 Penguin paperback, seemed a shade optimistic.
Just as Barish and Streisand were dropping out, a stranger with a Texan drawl phoned me: "My name is Bobby Geisler. Are the movie rights to The White Hotel available? If so, my partner John Roberdeau and I would like to buy them. We're ready to jump on a plane right away, to meet you anywhere." I was flattered and impressed by the way his gentle voice caressed the words "The White Hotel": a lover's caress. I happened to be planning a quick visit to London, so offered an hour of my time. My agent Andrew Hewson and I met Geisler and Roberdeau in the Great Western Hotel at Paddington.
The ebullient Americans filled us in on their background and achievements. Aged around 30, they looked too young to have produced Robert Altman's 1983 film Streamers, as well as a Broadway revival of O'Neill's Strange Interlude . Bobby Geisler was stout, with a round, soft face that looked at me quizzically and respect fully through small metal-framed glasses. In his sales pitch for the film rights he was shining-eyed, idealistic, rapturous about their determination to do the novel justice. John Roberdeau was neat, trim, quieter, more businesslike, but equally enthusiastic and with an infectious chortle.
I can still see and hear Bobby, stroking his red braces, projecting his vision of the opening of the film. "Lisa in the train compartment, turning the pages of her score... The opening chords of Mozart's Don Giovanni, and the first lines of the poem! ...Can you imagine it, Don?" I could. And I recognised in his joyous eyes an obsession matching mine as I wrote the book. Andrew, a calm, dignified Scot, was a little more cautious, but agreed with me that they deserved a chance. They wanted me to write the screenplay, and dreamed of luring their idol, Terrence Malick, out of seclusion to direct. We sealed the deal in the hotel. They took a plane straight back to New York; I, the Adlestrop-peaceful trainride back to Hereford, with the opening chords of the Don Giovanni overture resounding in my head.
I lived in a small 1930s semi, writing in a one-room extension my wife and I had had built on. It wasn't so long since I'd been writing poems on a card-table in our bedroom. A friend had told her friend that I was a poet and worked in the bedroom. She'd said: "Oh, that's awful! How dreadful for his wife!" She had misheard poet as pervert. I was a poet/pervert, used to selling verse collections in the hundreds of copies. Now I was anticipating "a major movie"... the big time.
The upfront money from Geisler/ Roberdeau (Briarpatch Film Corporation, as they called themselves) didn't quite come through when it should have. Just a problem of moving it around between accounts, they assured us. We could see they were raw adventurers, riding on the seat of their pants; but that was part of their charm. Equally raw at writing screenplays, I did my best. They wrote encouragingly of my first draft - "What a great image, Don!... We love this scene... Could you maybe...?" and so on.
Coincidentally they were to be in Paris at the same time as I was to be there running a writing workshop. We met for a dinner in an expensive restaurant, where they introduced me to Joe, a friend. A big fan of my book, the guy said, pumping my hand. Half way through the meal, slightly fuddled by wine, I started to realise their agreeable friend was trashing my screenplay. Geisler and Roberdeau sat in embarrassed and complicit silence. It was no surprise to be told, soon after, that they were hiring someone else, the historian Charles ("Chuck") Mee. They had decided to chuck me for Chuck Mee. With Chuck they went around Europe hunting for locations and standing at his shoulder as he typed away.
Terrence Malick having resisted their charms, they had turned to Bernardo Bertolucci. They thought his Last Tango in Paris wonderful. Bernardo, it seemed, loved my book. Geisler and Roberdeau brought us both, with spendthrift generosity, by Concorde to New York, simply to take a look at some new ultra-realistic film technology called Showscan. Bernardo and I both felt nauseous after watching a Big Dipper sequence. We could imagine how the opening erotic fantasy might be even more spectacular shot in Showscan. I heard nothing more about it. It seemed to vanish instantly from Geisler and Roberdeau's restless vision.
What was unceasingly impressive, though, was their energy and enthusiasm. Partners in life as well as work, they had a telepathic connectedness. I would listen entranced to their operatic duets - that seems the appropriate term - in which they constantly interrupted and completed what the other wished to say. And that was never anything bitchy about competitors, but expressions of admira tion for fellow professionals (cameramen, dancers, designers) who had agreed to be in their team for the great movie of - that stroking of a lover's skin by Bobby - The White Hotel. They were hot for it, the team was ready to go!
It no longer included Chuck Mee. I have lost count of the various writers who at one time or other have produced screenplays of my novel. If, for me, there was a certain Schadenfreude in seeing Chuck chucked, there was no pleasure in seeing Bertolucci dismissed - just as he was about to win an Oscar for The Last Emperor. They told me he'd wanted to concentrate too much on just one aspect of my novel, Freud and psychoanalysis. But perhaps Bertolucci dismissed himself; how could I know? Anyway, he was out. And David Lynch was in.
My foreign trips for movie meetings, or to help launch a foreign publication, were rare interruptions in a life spent mostly in solitude, huddled before - by now - a computer. I'd plunged into a sequence of "Russian" novels - each one less commercially successful than the last. But the writing, for me, was all; I love the blank screen, the nape-prickle of tentative creation. I can't pretend, though, that I didn't welcome the occasional generous invitation to New York, for yet more discussions of the movie. On one visit, I shared an ascending hotel elevator with an attractive woman wearing sunglasses. When she stepped out I thought: "Jesus, that was Meryl Streep!" Dizzily I went up and down the elevator three times, hoping somehow to find her again, and by miracle I did, since she almost at once came down again. I ran after her in the lobby. Still at heart a working-class boy from Cornwall, for whom "the pictures" spelt magic, I was in awe. Knowing she was being considered for the role of Lisa, I introduced myself. She said: "Oh my! I have your book by my bed!" I later wrote her a card saying if she had time to meet for a drink... She didn't acknowledge it. But I treasure her radiant smile as, at cocktail hour, she swept in a dazzling gown through the hotel lounge towards the exit and recognised me. People all around looked at me, thinking - I hoped - "Gosh, he knows Meryl Streep!"
I don't know if she liked, or even finished, my novel. It didn't matter: with David Lynch on the verge of signing, his girlfriend Isabella Rossellini was to star. Lynch insisted on it. Well, she was beautiful and intelligent too. We were, of course, endlessly discussing actors and actresses. There is scarcely a star of either sex in Hollywood or elsewhere who has not appeared in the imagined movie. Boy-actors, once considered to play Lisa's step-son Kolya, are now too old for any part.
There was now also an impressive new screenwriter - Dennis Potter. I wrote to him saying how pleased I was. We had so much in common: working-class boys from isolated mining communities; going in the same year to the same Oxford college. In fact, I have a vivid memory of seeing him acting, redhaired and charismatic, in a Pirandello play performed in New College garden - the very place where my novel had been born. It all seemed perfect synchronicity. To cap it all, he was living just 20 miles from Hereford, in his native Forest of Dean. I proposed we should meet midway for a drink. Potter replied with a brief refusal, saying that he believed meetings should happen by chance.
Maybe he was so committed to his task that he was loath to let a conversation with the book's author get in the way of his vision for the screenplay. There was no doubting his commitment, to judge by reports of his first meeting with Lynch, in the fall of 1990. A day of Biblical rain in New York... a winey dinner... On parting, Potter's face streamed with tears as his crippled, arthritic hands grasped Lynch's lapels. If they didn't screw it up, he said, if they saw it through to the end, this would be the work they would both be remembered by. "This movie will be the Madame Bovary of our time."
When I was sent Potter's screenplay, I was dismayed to find Freud and Vienna deleted, and my operatic heroine now a high-wire act in a Berlin circus. Don Giovanni and Eugene Onegin had given way to jaunty Potteresque tunes from the 30s. Geisler and Roberdeau explained that Lynch didn't feel he could deal with European high art. He liked the lively Potter screenplay, and so, with reservations, did they. Their dream - though certainly not mine, with that screenplay - was about to be fulfilled; they were to be in Paris on New Year's Eve, 1990, and Lynch was to fly from LA to join them and - sign!
As they were getting ready to pop the champagne cork at the Ritz, a maitre d' handed Bobby Geisler a phone. It was Lynch, still in LA. He and Isabella had parted, and he could not make the film without her. Sorry. Happy New Year.
"The boys", as I sometimes called them now - with a slight edge of cynicism but mostly affection - found it hard to recover from that New Year catastrophe. Vaguely, later, I heard that Hector Babenco, director of Kiss of the Spider Woman , was in the frame; but he fell out of it. They commissioned a treatment from Joan Juliet Buck - one which, when I read it years later, struck me as faithful and intelligent - but this too went the way of all White Hotel screenplays.
There were too many changes going on in my life for this to seem any more than a disappointment on the edge of things. My first wife, Maureen, left me, for a much more attentive second husband; I suffered illness and depression. For a year I couldn't read, let alone write; almost my sole, pallid enjoyment each day was playing the musical highlights of South Pacific. Now with my second wife, Denise, and our son Ross, I was hell to live with. Imagine having to listen to South Pacific every day for a year... But we moved to my childhood land, Cornwall, in 1987 and I gradually cheered up. And wrote a novel about another obsession of mine, JFK's assassination ( Flying in to Love ). I heard nothing from "the boys" for a few years, but it didn't seem to matter much.
Then, after Dennis Potter died of cancer in 1994, they invited me for a reading performance of his screenplay at the Lincoln Center. It was a touching tribute to a man they had come to regard as a friend. It was also lavishly extravagant: staged by Anne Bogart, sound score by Hans Peter Kuhn; actors including Rebecca De Mornay, Brian Cox and Len Cariou; Lauren Flanigan singing and the Hudson Shad re-creating the period music. After this feast, dinner al fresco for 300 guests and, in my case, disgracefully drinking Rebecca's last bottle of good wine in her suite, while she yawned and waited for me to go. It was a splendid evening, but with unfortunate consequences for Geisler and Roberdeau. A caterer's claim that he wasn't paid in due time led to Geisler's being charged with grand larceny and marched in handcuffs down to the notorious "tombs" beneath the district court. He spent most of his night in the cells using his phone for the benefit of fellow prisoners, calling their dealers, girlfriends and lawyers, usually in that order.
Months later the charge against him was dismissed. But all was not well with them financially. Sometime later I found they had had to give up their Greenwich Village home and move permanently into a hotel: certainly not a white one.
For another long period I had no real contact with them. Each Christmas a sprig of holly would be Fedexed to my home. They never failed in such endearing gestures. Then at last I received an elated message: Emir Kusturica, a dynamic Serbian director, was going to make the movie! Not only that, they had found a perfect lake by which to create the perfect white hotel, and had been promised the use of the Yugoslavian army for extras. I would love Emir, Bobby said; he was a macho dynamo of energy and ideas. Dusan Kovacevic, a collaborator with Emir, was going to do some work on Potter's screenplay. Freud could come back, they thought, though probably not the opera.
Wining and dining me in 1998, while I was in New York for the launch of my biography of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, they were in exuberant mood. It had been a long hard road but... we were close to our goal at last! Emir was on the verge of signing. They were trying to persuade him to have Juliette Binoche as the lead. He was a little doubtful, wondering if she was too sexually frigid, but they were working on him. Though Nicole Kidman was also keen to play the role. And for Freud, well, maybe Anthony Hopkins...
Then Nato attacked Serbia.
Emir's son almost died when a bomb fell just 40 yards from him in Belgrade. Enraged, Kusturica refused to make a film for American producers. He did, though, somewhat ironically, come west to make a movie with Juliette Binoche. As for Bobby and John, they crawled like hurt animals into a corner. Yet they revived to struggle on towards their dream, contacting director after director. More than 50 were approached in all. Including, bizarrely but imaginatively, Woody Allen. The boys did have one break, persuading Malick to direct The Thin Red Line. Completed well over budget and not without major discord, it won seven Academy nominations.
My contract with Briarpatch Films contained a standard clause reverting all rights to me if no film had been begun 10 years after exercise of option. That date was July 10 2001. None of us had anticipated the clause being activated, but the crucial date was now approaching. Andrew and I kept reminding them of this in letters and emails, but heard nothing from them until the spring of 2001. Then they invited us to Paris for a weekend: me, Andrew, and his vivacious wife and partner Margaret. Bobby and John, greeting us warmly as ever, appeared unchanged from when we'd first met them. They introduced us to a tough-looking attorney, Sam Myers, an American in Paris. I gathered he was now the "boss"; he was keeping a close eye on how much champagne they ordered. Bobby still caressed the words "The White Hotel" like silk. They were going to make that movie if it killed them! They were talking to a new director, Pedro Almodóvar...
They had made some mistakes, John admitted during a confessional session. Over-committed themselves. A promised investment in 1993 hadn't come through. Foolishly, needing instant cash, they had borrowed, from one Monty Montgomery, $200,000 against the security of the film rights. The loan was foreclosed by Montgomery, and the rights to The White Hotel passed to him for the sum of one dollar. Well, yes, I thought, that was pretty foolish, that was a pretty small sum; and wouldn't it have been kind of polite to have told me? Anyway, Sam Myers had swiftly ridden in on a white charger to buy the rights back from Montgomery. Myers's rights, of course, would end on July 10. They wanted now to discuss a three-year option agreement with Myers's new company, Night Hawk, based in Gibraltar. Myers would employ Geisler and Roberdeau as producers, assuming I would grant Night Hawk option rights after the July reversion.
I didn't understand all of John's embarrassed spiel during the confessional outpouring. Bankruptcy, irate investors, stupid judges... this wasn't my scene; I loathe going to a lawyer, or solicitor, would rather visit the dentist. The main point John stressed was that there was nothing in the legal sphere to prevent a new option agreement. I was glad when the talk switched back to making the film. Bobby and John were flying off to talk to Pedro in Madrid. I would really like Pedro...
The rights duly reverted to me on July 10. The new option agreement with Night Hawk took effect. 9/11 happened in their sight, and I expressed my sympathy. They sent me videos of Almodóvar's films. I watched them, then stuffed them in the overflowing cupboard of directors' films they had sent me over the past 15 years.
In January 2002 - as Almodóvar was wondering if he could tackle such a big theme, and starting to back off - a huge package was delivered to me. I found it was a writ, against Geisler, Roberdeau, Briarpatch Film Corporation, and me. One Gerard F Rubin, through his attorney Barry Goldin, was asking the Supreme Court of New York to hand the film rights to him. He, Rubin, was now Briarpatch Ltd, and claimed that he owned the Geisler/Roberdeau movie projects. The writ demanded of me that I should not claim the film rights had reverted.
The assault was frivolous, Bobby and John assured me. A former investor with a grudge. He'd had one or two minor victories in the courts, in front of a judge who'd later been suspended. The next decent judge would see him off. I was not to worry.
My instinct was simply to write to the court, stating the obvious. As a British writer of modest means, living in a small Cornish town, I could not afford to hire an expensive New York attorney to argue against a writ I considered outrageous. At worst, I thought, my nice homely local solicitor, Heather Hosking, who'd arranged a mortgage for me, could write to the court quoting the reversion clause, and end this nonsense straightaway.
Geisler and Roberdeau soon disabused me of that idea: of course I needed an attorney! How touchingly innocent! Indeed, they had already appointed one on my behalf... Night Hawk would cover the cost. But naturally my attorney would have to work very closely with the legal team defending them. He who pays the piper... They sacked my first, painstaking attorney for overcharging. Or he asked to be allowed to withdraw because he had not been paid. The truth became increasingly elusive and ambiguous.
This was almost three years ago. Attorneys for me appeared and disappeared, just like film directors. The White Hotel has become Bleak House, Jarndyce & Jarndyce: an investor who felt defrauded of millions, and two determined men with a dream, fighting over my book. Pushkin wrote that, for inspiration, calm was more important to a writer than ecstasy. I felt angry that calm had been taken away from me.
One day two summers ago the affair turned deadly. My writing was interrupted by a phonecall from Bobby, his voice almost unrecognisable, a griefstricken wail: "Don, John is dead! He's dead!" Roberdeau, 48 and a picture of health, had suddenly dropped dead of a heart attack in the lobby of the hotel where they lived. He had just been preparing packages to send to some 50 directors, urging them to reconsider taking on The White Hotel. I felt it was especially poignant that he had died in a hotel lobby.
John Roberdeau's death was only part of a tragic sequence. In 1998 my wife Denise died of cancer aged 53. We had often fought, but - or rather and - she had been my irreplaceable muse for more than 30 years. The White Hotel, with its extremes of pleasure and pain, was drenched in her presence. At a similar young age, my agent's wife Margaret was diagnosed with a rapidly terminal cancer. It was all too much like the onrush of disasters in the first part of The White Hotel. It caused me to view the increasingly vicious legal battle in New York with a sense of unreality. As Lisa writes in her fantasy: "For nothing in the white hotel but love / Is offered at a price we can afford."
Prostrate with grief, Bobby Geisler felt like abandoning their dream. But then, in 2003, came a rare stroke of luck: David Cronenberg told him he would like to direct The White Hotel. He promised he wouldn't let Bobby down as he knew other directors had done. Not long after I was sent a fax of Cronenberg's signature on the contract. Finally it was going to happen! David was keen to start filming and already working on his own screenplay.
Before I could fully savour the moment I had a phonecall from Bobby. In a flat voice he said: "Two hours ago David Cronenberg signed to direct The White Hotel..." I was about to interrupt, saying: "Yes, I got your fax, isn't it great?"; but he continued " ...and I've just had a call from his lawyer withdrawing it." Goldin/Rubin had sent Cronenberg one of their huge tomes, heavy as the chains weighing down Marley's ghost, and not surprisingly it had frightened him off.
I was now being sued for $4.2m. The specific sum - almost $4.2m more than I possess - intrigued me no less than what I could have done to deserve it. But at least Bernardo Bertolucci was interested again... "It looks like we're making a deal for Bernardo to direct The White Hotel ," Bobby emailed. "I think we still have a long road to walk, but we're headed in the right direction."
The road ran out. Bertolucci pulled out of negotiations. Geisler sacked his attorney for alleged incompetence, then re-installed him. I did not hear from Geisler, or Myers, or Night Hawk, for several months, and wasn't even sure who was representing me in New York, despite repeated requests for information. I pleaded in vain for news from the western front. Both sides seemed bogged down in the mud, and the field phone-lines had been cut.
Yet, after all, this is not the Somme. I've produced a new collection of verse, Dear Shadows , my first for more than a decade; and my first play, Hell Fire Corner, has been premiered. The blank computer screen continues to be a source of joy as well as anguish. One thing is certain: the imagined film is wonderful. It's fully worthy of the combined, unified, unegotistical genius of its directors Bernardo Bertolucci, David Lynch, Hector Babenco, Emir Kusturica, Pedro Almodóvar and David Cronenberg; employing the world's greatest cameramen and designers; the writing talent of Charles Mee, Dennis Potter, Joan Juliet Buck, Dusan Kovacevic, and even myself; the acting skills of Meryl Streep, Isabella Rossellini, Juliette Binoche, Nicole Kidman, Lena Olin, Emily Watson, Anthony Hopkins, Dustin Hoffman, Ralph Fiennes and many other brilliant actors; making us thrill at astonishing virtual reality effects, Showscan landscapes and glass fibre optics - but never cheaply or meretriciously, rather always serving the truth of my novel. I am hugely grateful for it. I never tire of seeing Lisa in the train, a blue lake outside, and hearing the first crashing chords of Don Giovanni... Or perhaps clowns tumbling in a circus ring, with Nazi officers gazing up at Lisa, swinging through the air.
© 2004 DM Thomas DM Thomas's new verse collection, Dear Shadows, is available from www.falpublications.co.uk
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