The New Yorker Radio Hour - Merchant Ivory’s Gay Love Story, and a Visit with Noriega

Episode Date: June 9, 2017

James Ivory talks about E. M. Forster’s “Maurice,” a gay love story with a happy ending. Plus, Jon Lee Anderson talks about the rise and fall of Manuel Noriega. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

too soon. Wait till they're done. Don't clap too soon. Wait till they're done. You're listening to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm a grown man and I don't know when to clap. Great night. Glad we're doing this. And we get to do it four more times this year. Two tickets to five concerts plus parking. Don't think about it. Don't think about what you could have spent that money on. Like one of those three-wheeled motorcycles. Why'd that pop in my head? I don't want one of those. He was zoned out.

She noticed. No, she's pissed. I'll hold her hand. Smile. You think for what these tickets cost, the seats would at least be comfortable. Those box seats are probably pretty plush. I guess if you're about to be assassinated, you deserve to be comfortable. That guy looks like he could be an assassin.

He's got the assassin's hair. Why do I think an assassin is a assassin's? certain hair type. That's probably politically incorrect on some level. Just listen to the music. Listen to the music. Hmm. It's kind of relaxing. Is it relaxing or boring? It is relaxing. Except for the conductor flapping around like that. I know that technically orchestras need a conductor, but did they really? Like if all the musicians are really good at playing their instruments and they all have music in front of them, couldn't they just play it?

I bet it annoys them when he's all, play soft, play soft, look at my stick getting very low. Now play loud, look at my stick, way up here. You know, if I were in the orchestra, I'd probably roll my eyes, you know, subtly. You know, where the audience, they'd be like, oh my gosh, that guy, he gets it.

The good-looking guy. Are they done? Clap now? I mean, I knew there. A violin section seems to be where you find the more attractive women. But are they just orchestra attractive? If I were involved with one of the violinists, would I have to learn a lot of stuff about violin? Look if she asked, how did I play tonight? Would I have to be specific? Or could I just go, great? Or maybe, you should totally be first chair, babe. I know it's so political. Or maybe, Jesus, Debra. Your first chair.

Why are you still so insecure? All you can think about is some other orchestra, the one you're not in. No, I'm not saying you're not good enough to play with them. Look, I think you're an amazing violinist. Oh, right. Okay, I know nothing about violin because when we first started dating, I just used to say you played great. Well, you know what?

That was eight goddamn years ago, Deborah. I clap now, right? No one's... All right, I'm not going to clap. I'm going to wait for other people to clap. You know, I swear with one month of practice, I could play the big drum as well as that guy. Says in the program that is called the timpony.

Huh. That's the wrong name. Timpani, that sounds like something, like someone on the Upper East Side would name their daughter. Have you mad our timpani? Anyway, I could do the timpani. solo. Are there timpany solos? I guess 2001 a Space Odyssey sort of had one. Buhm, bha-bh-b-b-b-b-b-b... Wait, that's horns.

I feel like at lunch everyone ignores the harpist. If she lived in a walk-up, that would be brutal. Like, the cello person must be like, well, at least I don't have a harp. I'm talking about the big cello. You know, like, there's different sizes. You know what? My wife is right. Classical music is really opening up my mind. Oh, they're done. Okay, everyone act like they enjoyed it. I've got it's over. Oh, God, there's more.

Thoughts while attending the first symphony in the series my wife wanted to buy. That's a piece by Kirk J. Rudell from the New Yorker's Daily Shouts column. It was performed by the comedian Jim Gaffigan, whose new album, Cinco, is just out. And this is the New Yorker radio hour. I'm David Remnick. Recently, I had the chance to talk to some North Korean diplomats here in New York,

and I asked them, who in our country understands North Korea best? The person they pointed to was Robert Galucci. Galucci is a retired diplomat, a scholar. And he was America's chief negotiator during the last big crisis over North Korea's nuclear weapons program. That was in 1994, and Galucci's efforts then effectively froze their nuclear program for nearly a decade. I wanted to talk to Galucci right now, more than 20 years later, because the situation with North Korea is, to say the least, extremely concerning. Kim Jong-un's regime has launched a series of ballistic missile tests.

The Trump administration has responded with a successful anti-missile test of its own, and the rhetoric everywhere on Twitter and otherwise is out of control. What do we know and what do we not know about the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un? What does he want? What is the purpose of his not only testing ballistic missiles and making no secret of his nuclear program, but also publicizing it so widely, wanting to make it known? So the question of what the North Koreans want, what's their grand strategy? I think most analysts would say that North Koreans would like to reunify the Korean Peninsula under their regime, one Korea. But that they must recognize is not a near-term prospect.

Short of that, the defensive objective of North Korea has been the survival of their regime. And what North Koreans have told me flat out on more than one occasion, what they worry about most is an American attempt to change their regime. And they point to Iraq and to Libya as, recent cases of American decisions to change a regime they did not like. But this anxiety and this rhetoric and this bellicose behavior far precedes the Iraq War of 2003. Well, yes. But let's focus here a little on what we remember about 2003. And certainly one of the things we remember is that the administration was talking about the threat from Iraq being the use of a nuclear weapon.

Do you remember the phrase, do not let the smoking gun be a mushroom cloud over Washington? I sure do. And so, I suspect that you might. So if we keep these things in mind that we were attempting to characterize the situation

as one in which if we went to war against Baghdad, it would be a preemptive war. In other words, you were on the verge of being attacked and you must, for your own defense, attack. Now, at the time, many of us thought that was ludicrous, and it was demonstrably ludicrous.

Unfortunately, what we have right now is a case in which the administration could be arguing, and Secretary of Defense Mattis, who I don't think is likely to throw around words loosely said on the 28th of May just last month, that this situation of the North Korean capability is now present. We don't have to wait, he said explicitly, for them. to test that incontinental ballistic missile, this capability is evident. Well, that's beginning to sound like if we wish to protect ourselves, we may have to strike first. So this is not a time of stability, I would say, pretty much dabbling an understatement. Or consistent leadership. I think Vice President Dick Cheney, when he was, obviously in the Bush administration,

said, we don't negotiate with evil, we defeat it. And he was talking about. about North Korea there. Are we seeing then a return to that kind of philosophy in the Trump era, or is it just not consistent enough to locate? I'm sorry. I have tried very hard to figure out what it is the leadership in this administration thinks about the plausibility of negotiations as a way to resolve this crisis, reduce the tensions. And I can't tell if Secretary Tillerson or Secretary Mattis or the National Security Advisor, General McMaster, or even the president who has talked about willingness to negotiate directly with Kim Jong-un, and at other times seems much more bellicose than that.

So you might not want to fault the administration for not having a well-thought-out policy yet because it is relatively early. But you're saying it's incoherent. Incoherent is a tad more pejorative than I'm trying to be. What I would say is it's unclear and it's difficult to discern and it is not yet coherent. Fair enough. Is it a mistake to take deterrence off the table or sanctions? Well, deterrence and sanctions is a great deal of difference between them.

Let's do sanctions first. It's easier. The effectiveness of sanctions has a lot to do with how Beijing responds. So I'm not opposed to sanctions, but I'm not one that thinks they're likely to produce the outcome that we want and need. Let's talk about China for a second. When Trump talks about North Korea, he often says that the key to diffusing the tension lies with China. It's unique in its ability to put pressure on the regime, and yet China is often described as basically unwilling to exert that kind of leverage that Trump expects. So the Chinese want very much for the regime in Pyongyang to continue to exist.

They'd like it to be less provocative. They'd like for the North Koreans to come to the table and have a negotiated settlement with the United States and the rest of the national community. And they're willing to let some pressure be applied to the North, but not enough pressure such that leadership in the North will feel real pain. But I am persuaded that, in a sense, the president is right, that the Chinese do bear responsibility here. But I don't know that they're going to be the ultimate key to resolving this. I think when the average American who thinks about North Korea thinks about it all, they think of a kind of dark, a dark, comical stereotype vision.

How do you characterize North Korean society today in its leadership? We need to thicken our impression of what that country is all about. Yeah, I will, I'm going to try to give you some texture, but first, truth in advertising. I have never been to North Korea. I've been working on this issue since the early 90s, and for a variety of reasons, it was inappropriate for me to go when I was in the government working on the issue, and I've never thought it would be a terrific place to vacation, so I have not been there. All the people I've talked to in the last couple of years have talked about the changes

in Pyongyang. Now that's different than saying the changes in the DPRK. There is construction everywhere, everyone tells me. There are lots of automobiles on the street. There are lots of restaurants. There certainly is no feeling that I've gotten from talking to people who have visited that sanctions are depressing life in Pyongyang for the elites, and they, of course, are the ones who determine policy. One is struck in talking to even official North Koreans who have traveled by the extent to which they are comfortable with a cult of the Kims, the extent to which this is a totalitarian rather than just an authoritarian political system, the way in which they accept what is, by all reasonable accounts, a brutal regime's way of dealing with dissent. And all this

makes the idea of a normal relationship between North Korea and the United States harder to imagine. And that's a problem for negotiations. You mentioned Iraq before. Let me bring Libya into this. Have we taught countries like North Korea that it's worth it to have nuclear weapons? Libya got rid of its nuclear weapons, and the next thing you know, that was the end of Muammar Gaddafi. It's a very rough and crude depiction. but nevertheless, in Kim Jong-un's mind, that may well be the object lesson, though. It is, the description is rough, crude, and wrong.

I don't mean to be rude here. Go ahead. Go ahead and be rude. But Libya never had nuclear weapons. They had a nuclear weapons program. They had one for a very long time, and there was some reason to think that given enough time, even Libya, would eventually enrich uranium

and could go to nuclear weapons. But more important, the thrust of you, your question is when a United States of America changes a regime, it costs us in terms of our credibility and for countries with whom we are not getting on, and North Korea is certainly one, yes, it does motivate them to have a deterrent. When Donald Trump left the White House the first time after meeting with Barack Obama, they had one face-to-face meeting, the one thing that he did say was that it was made clear to him by the Obama administration, that the biggest threat that he would have to face was North Korea.

If you were advising Donald Trump, what would you tell him at this point? Well, the very first thing is something that's on my mind is that be cautious about your enthusiasm for the use of force to deal with the threat from ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons. That we relied on deterrence to deal with a country that had 30,000 nuclear weapons. 30,000 Soviet Union count 1983-ish. North Korea has maybe 12. We lived with a threat from the Soviet Union, had no ability to defend ourselves.

But we had this impression during the Cold War and even after that as dangerous as that was, and it was apocalypticly dangerous, there was some kind of logical enemy on the other side of the table. that there was a certain kind of logic at work in the Cold War, that there is an irrationalism at work with North Korea. What do you think about that?

Well, you've got to do a little more than irrationalism, I think, if you're going to decide to go to war, to prevent a war where there is no war coming unless you think once the capability exists, the North Koreans will just have no ability to resist attacking the United States of America, which sounds ludicrous to me. So, well, I'm not an enthusiast for doing nothing, trust me on that, nor do I think we should abandon efforts at real ballistic missile defense.

But the proposition that the North Koreans are, if you will, either suicidal, which is what we'd be talking about, or insane, unless that's your proposition, deterrence should work. Do you think that this is a situation that can be resolved without face-to-face meetings? No, I do not. I haven't seen really the effort at engagement. I was something of a critic of President Obama's North Korea policy. I thought the phrase strategic patience was an enormous mistake as a phrase as well as a policy. You felt he was just kicking the can down the road. Well, to use the older lingo, I thought he was prepared to accept containment as a way of dealing with the North Korean problem. But the North Korean problem was getting substantially worse as we were in the process of containing it. And so I think a more aggressive policy aimed at engaging the North would have been more appropriate. I think now a policy of engagement where we in fact don't have preconditions to have talks about talks. We don't look at talks as a reward for North Korean behavior, so they have to behave good for six months or something. I'm not, I don't think that's

the way to go. Mr. Galucci, thank you very much. Thank you very much. Robert Kalucci, he was the chief U.S. negotiator with North Korea during the 1994 nuclear crisis. He's now director of the John W. Kulugi Center at the Library of Congress. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour coming up, the New Yorker's John Lee Anderson on the life and death, and also the teddy bear collection of Manuel Noriega. That's all ahead, stick around. Panama's former dictator, the CIA spy and convicted cocaine trafficker Manuel Noriega, has died.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. When the news reports hit at the end of May that Manuel Noriega had died, you could be forgiven a little if your first thought was, Noriega's still alive? Panama's former strongman has been out of the public eye for a quarter century since his conviction on drug trafficking and other charges. But also, broadly speaking, our attention has shifted way away from Latin America in recent years, certainly since the war on terror began.

It seems like a lifetime ago that U.S. intervention in Panama and El Salvador and Nicaragua was constantly in the headlines. But staff writer John Lee Anderson thinks Noriega is a figure we shouldn't forget about so quickly. What Noriega represented and began to personify, which was this kind of merging of the backwash of the ideological world of the 60s and 70s and 80s in Latin America, with the drug culture and the world that we now know has consumed a lot of our neighbors to the South. Because to a large extent, we help make it happen. In 2015, Anderson interviewed Noriega, one of the few interviews he gave during his many years in prison.

Here's John Lee Anderson talking with the New Yorker's Dorothy Wickendon. So how did you find yourself in a... room with Manuel Noriega. Well, Panama is a country I go to, and I have been going to for 30 years. I had long since given up any hope of interviewing General Noriega. He'd been in prison for many years, decades. And I kind of forgot about it. And about a little over a year ago, I was in Panama having dinner with an old friend,

who was an old friend of Garcia-Marquez, and at one point worked for Noriega. and he invited me to dinner to a fish restaurant. In the middle of the dinner, he asked me if I'd like to meet the commandante, who by now was back in Panama in prison, and sentenced to many, many years. And of course, I said yes. So September before last, we quietly went out, and I spent a couple of hours with him in his prison. This was an icebreaker, and we were supposed to hit it off. And we kind of did hit it off.

Well, I want to pause right there because he was, when I read one of his obituaries, I think it was in the Washington Post, and Colin Powell, who was head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time of the invasion, described him as pure evil. Did he strike you as pure evil? No, no, he didn't. I mean, when he was in power, he was pretty thuggish. But, you know, I met a lot of other people, including people who worked for our interests, so to speak, in Latin America and elsewhere, who were pretty much people.

pure evil. But he existed in that nether world where, you know, strategic interests collide with the real world. You know, he was a double or perhaps triple agent. He was our man but wasn't our man. He was also Cuba's man, but wasn't their man. So let's back up just for a second. He played an enormous role in U.S. foreign policy in the 70s and 80s. Tell us briefly about his rise to power and then how he managed to hold on for so long. Right, exactly. Well, so Noriega rises through the ranks of the Panamanian military, the National Guard at the elbow of General Turiho. It was a charismatic, strongman who seized power in 1968, and had a relationship where he temporized with the Americans who, of course, controlled the Panama Canal Zone. We had military bases across the country.

Noriega was his useful aide-de-camp. He was the intelligence. chief in the country. He was a man of humble origins who rose through the ranks of the military. He didn't have the public persona or the charisma of Torrijos. He helped him put down a coup at one point. He became his go-between with various intelligence services. By the time Torichos died in a mysterious airplane crash in 1981, he took over the country. He became the de facto, leader of the country. I saw him once in those years, by the way. It was at an event commemorating Torichos' birthday, and it was on a lawn in the canal zone, and suddenly Noriega showed up, and he was at the height of his powers, and he and his people arrived, and it was like a

cold air just came through. And I'll never forget my hair stood on then, because I realized that Nodiga had this shark-like ability to look at you sideways. His eyes were very wide around his head, so he could look at someone, say, in profile to you, but appear to be looking at you as well, like a shark passing you in the water. Did you speak to him? We shook hands, but I remember it was very brief and peremptory. No. And I didn't want to.

I was frightened of him at the time. Noriega came out of the shadows in the 1980s, and at a time when the race was, you know, Reagan administration ramped up its national security doctrine in efforts to undermine Marxist-backed insurgency in the hemisphere, to undermine the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. And was this when the CIA recruited him? Well, the CIA apparently recruited him earlier. When we spoke, he denied being an agent as such, but apparently he did receive a salary for many, many years.

So you actually have that interview recorded, right? Yes, yes, I recorded it. Yeah. And have relation with the CIA the same way. How do you do? What is he saying there? I'm saying, how can you be? He says, he's from, I said, were you an anti-communist?

He says, no, I was on the left. I said, well, how can you be someone with revolutionary aspirations and have a relationship with the CIA? And he said, I wasn't an agent of the CIA. He said, Torijos, his boss, his late boss, had asked him to develop the relationship with the CIA, because Turichos believed the CIA wanted the CIA wanted to overthrow him. So he wanted Noriega, his man of trust and confidence, to basically be able to look them in the eye regularly and make sure that they were kept in bay.

You know, you don't want the CIA on the wrong side, so let's keep your enemy closer. That was how he claimed the relationship evolved. And did the CIA get anything in return? He was a so-called asset, but did that? Apparently, yes. Apparently, he was, at that whole period, remember Oliver North, Iran, Contra scandal. Noriega wasn't at the thick of it. You know, arms came and went from Panama to the various guerrilla fronts that the CIA wanted guns to get to.

We had- And Noriega, did he not, approached Ali North to see if he could. undercut the Sandinistas, the left-wing Sandinistas. Yeah, I mean, I take what Oliver North says with a grain of salt, of course. But there was a lot, you know, Noriega at that time, at the height of American involvement in El Salvador and Nicaragua, Noriega was a key agent. He was, you know, seen to have a relationship with our CIA chiefs, with, you know, the first President Bush, and everybody seemed very happy with him.

He discomfited a lot of people because he also developed a relationship, for instance, with Gaddafi in Libya. And he was a major drug trafficker at a time when the war on drugs was underway. That's right. What Noriega, I asked him directly if he had a relationship and he denied it. Now, we talk about the term of narcotrific and the other. So if that's something about trafficker. Never. Fist, you lucrater, did you do that with Pablo Escobarne?

No, never, I know what. So if that's something about Trafficante, tell me more. So I said, come on, they've accused you were convicted of being a narco-trafficker. What's the truth? Were you a narco-trafficker? Did you do a deal with Pablo Scabarney? He said, never.

And then we talked for a while. And eventually he said, but the Gringos, the Americans did ask me, to let the narcos launder their money in Panama's banks so that they could follow the money and I let them do that. Wow, that's amazing. They want to be able to find out.

John, what's... Yeah, so Noriega is basically saying what the Americans asked him. They're saying we want to be able to follow, follow the money, find out who the people are, where the money's going, how they're doing it. And they didn't have any way of following it at the time.

So he arranged it. And now, I mean, by the time I spoke to him, was this an alibi? Was it the truth? I kind of felt that it was a half-truth. That, yes, they probably did ask him that. And he probably did arrange for the money to be laundered. You know, I was hearing, as a young reporter running around Central America, about him and drugs several years before the Americans turned on him. So let's talk a little bit about what led up to him being busted.

There was that grisly murder of Hugo Spadaforei, whom you had just spoken to right before he was killed. I knew Hugo Spadafore. That's right. In Costa Rica, I met Hugo Spadafore. He sought me out. He had been, he was a very interesting character. He was a very romantic character, kind of a Che-like figure. He was dashingly handsome.

He fought, you know, the good fight against Somosa. in the 70s with the Sandinistas. But then he turned on the Sandinistas, and he had just been fighting against them, and now he had emerged from the jungle. And we met in this hotel in Costa Rica. And I remember we spent five hours together, and he was on his way back home to Panama

where he said that's where the battle has to be fought because Noriega was a killer, a drug trafficker. He was double dealing with the Americans. He was all things evil, much as Colin Powell later said. and he, Hugo Spada Fora, planned to move against him. And, you know, it was not long afterwards that Spada Foda was disappeared and his headless body was found in northern Panama. As he tried to return to Panama on a bus to national guardsmen or a number of national guardsmen removed him from the bus.

And apparently they sawed his head off while he was alive. and the brutality of the murder, the gruesomeness of the murder, it was so unusual for the region, especially for Panama. And it seemed so obviously to have been directed by Noriega. What did Noriega say? You must have asked him about this in your interview. Well, at the time he denied it. He said he was on a trip.

Let's hear what he has to say. How was that of the case of Padafona? It was a gente's who yeah, who made her, I asked if maybe some of his guys had done it as a favor to him. And he answers, well, it wasn't so romantic as all that. What he repeated to me was what he had said at the time was that I couldn't have done it. I was in London. And, you know, I just thought, I can't believe you just said that to me.

And that was the one time in our interview, our conversation. really, that I felt that he was just lying through his teeth. Was this the end as far as the administration was concerned? No. No, it wasn't. So that was happening in 1985, and it wasn't, of course, until the end of 1989 that the Americans moved against Nodhiga. No, he was still Washington's man, and he was for a few more years.

But, you know, it was only in the sense that it began to roil the waters in Panama. He began to have a domestic opposition that was vocal. which for a while he managed to control because it initially, and I remember seeing those demonstrations, it was on the lunch hour in the financial district in Panama. Everybody would come out in their white clothes like Calvin Klein's, the middle class men and women would leave their banking jobs and go around the streets honking horns in their cars for two hours. And then eventually, as this carried on, a Noriega started fielding his own sort of mobs, who were coming from the barrios, you know, the out, the periphery,

and they were darker skinned and they were carrying machetes and sticks. And he called them the dignity battalions. And the more this went on, the more it became a kind of class war. And he began to channel his inner leftist, I guess. Toward the end, he really went rogue, and it was 1989, and he essentially dared the Americans to take him on. Didn't he wave a machete over his head? Yeah, he did.

Yeah, yeah. It's kind of a gentler, sweeter time when people actually thought they could do that and get away with it. Tensions ramped up severely between the Americans who were, of course, military and in the zone and his own military. When the end finally came for him, was after an incident where some of his people

stopped a group of American soldiers who were driving through Panama City, and whatever happened happened, one of those Americans died. Within four days, the invasion had happened. This was the first major military action by the United States since Vietnam. What's he saying?

I said, you know, you paid a high price for your emotionalism and you took on the empire and he said, yeah. I said, so would you do it differently? He said, yeah. I said, what would you do differently? He said, oh, time has taught me to negotiate. This was a major U.S. foreign policy embarrassment, this entire episode, which took place over well.

over a decade. Did we learn anything from this? Well, I'm not sure we did. It was interesting because, you know, within a year and a half of each other, right at the time the Soviet Union was falling apart, you had George Herbert Walker Bush as president inheriting from Reagan during his first two years in office. He ordered major police actions, wars, really, against two allies who'd gone rogue, Saddam Hussein and Noriega. Saddam Hussein, the first Gulf War came a year later. And that's why taking out Nodiga and the Panama invasion was quickly forgotten about. You know, it was dealt with, then came the collapse of the Soviet Union and the, you know, the first Gulf War all at the same time.

And what had happened in Central America just became a footnote to history. What was the very last question you asked him? Well, I asked him about teddy bears. You're all those peluche uniformed. Quintemel the story of the origin of that. You hear his laugh, right? There were these teddy bears tacked to the wall in the room,

and it was the most bizarre thing. Here was Manuel Noriega, the evil guy, and there were these teddy bears, the strong man, and there were these teddy bears on the wall, and I asked him about him, and he explained that they were part of

an old, you know, paratroopers' tradition of every time you get a jump. America, U.S. The U.S., of course, then they had formed him. He was a creature of the U.S., you know, military training and their rituals, and he liked it. You know, he told me he wasn't really resentful of the Americans. He kind of said, you know, everybody did their job. They did what they had to do.

Staff writer John Lee Anderson speaking with the New Yorker's Dorothy Wickeden. John Lee interviewed Manuel Noriega in 2015 when Noriega was in prison and panel. He died last month. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The director James Ivory made films set in England,

in Italy, France, and India. So it comes as something of a surprise to hear that Ivory is a son of small-town America. Really small-town called Klamath Falls. And the main industries there was it was either lumber or ranching. I bet I know more about sawmills than any other American director, certainly. That's a tall claim.

That's James Ivory talking with the New Yorker's Sarah Larson. Ivory left Oregon for film school and eventually made his way to India and then teamed up with Ismail Merchant. The two of them, Merchant and Ivory, became life partners and also a filmmaking team, directing and producing dozens of movies together, some of the most literary we know in modern times. That partnership, unique as it was, lasted for decades until Merchant's death in 2005. For much of that time, they had a third partner in screenwriter Ruth Prower Jubvilla,

who wrote more than half their movies. Movigowers came to know a Merchant Ivory film as a particular kind of thing. Call it a period film that's beautifully made, but one that instead of being stuffy and proper, is kind of sexy. The 1987 film Morris has just been re-released in its in select theaters. Morris came out just after the big hit A Room with a View, and the movies are kind of twins. Both are love stories based on novels by E.M. Forster.

It does seem hard that you should have a view. No, you must have a view, too. What took me to a Room with a View, Anne Forster, was the fact I think that I wanted to go back to Italy, where I really kind of started out, and I always loved Italy. And for something like 20 years, I never ever went to Italy because I was always in India.

Yeah. The love of Italy really comes through in a room with a view. I'm glad. There's a great and funny contrast in the novel and the movie between the people who are innocent to Florence and don't know anything about it and the people who are proud of how much they know that they're experts. Well, you see that today.

That has never gone away. It is only by going off the track that you get to know the country. See the little towns Gubio, Settignano Galuzzo San Gemeniano Monteregione Our real guide was

Forcer himself who had set many of the most important scenes in very particular places. Some of the locations were there to be used like Santa Croce I mean the big, enormous church which I don't know how in the world we were able to light it but we did

And then there was the whole business of the famous view, the view that Charlotte and Lucy didn't have from their window. They hoped they'd have. By the time we made the film, that view had had a motorway along it. So we had to do a whole other thing. We had to reverse the view, but there was no building high enough.

So we had to build a room on a terrace. So that's fake walls, fake wallpaper, window, everything is all built on a terrace. But it worked. That movie really changed things for you. It was such a critical success and it was such a commercial success. Can you talk about how things changed for you after that? Well, I think it was that we had made this film, which was a big box office success for very, very little money.

And when you do that, and people in Hollywood are interested to know your secret. And they're interested in getting to know you. and they did get to know us. Part of your ability to make movies on what would be considered a shoestring budget I think had to do with merchant and his producing abilities. He seemed to have this magical ability

to make things happen that were kind of impossible. Well, that's absolutely true. There are so many impossible things that he made happen. We got up on the roof of Versailles, which they had just repaired, and they didn't really want us up on the roof. roof. And I don't know what he...

What movie was that? Jefferson, Paris. Oh, right. I don't know what he told the curator of Versailles, but he learned that she was a great enthusiast of Indian spirituality and Indian religions and Hinduism, and he organized for her to come and have lunch with him. He was a devout Muslim, mind you. And then we did get up on the roof with all the crew and were able to shoot.

So after you made a room with a view, you kind of could have done anything you wanted to. And the movie you chose to make was Morris, which just was restored also in a new print. Let's just describe the plot of Morris a little bit. It's about a young man named Morris. And he goes to Cambridge and he has kind of a platonic love affair with a man. He was passionately in love with Clive. Yeah. But then Clive didn't want to go forward, and he didn't want it to go into the area of the physical, which was terribly frustrating for Morris.

I thought it was the worst crime in the calendar. Durham, I love you in your very own way. Rubbish, as you so rightly said, I'm thankful that it was under your hands I fell. Most men would have reported me to the dean or the police. This, in a way, is the other side of the coin of a room with a view. and a young person gets muddled and lives and thinks dishonestly about themselves and who they are and what they are and all the rest of it. And chooses to live within a kind of a hypocrisy, a social hypocrisy of one kind or another, which would have an enormous effect on their later lives. So I gave the book to his bound to read.

Ruth had already read it. She was not enthusiastic at all. but we... Why was that? She felt that... She thought it was not a successful book as a work of fiction, which was actually the attitude

of Forster's Estate at King's College in Cambridge. We'd already asked for a room with a view and been allowed to do it. When we asked for Morris, they were doubtful, and it really wasn't about the fact that it's basically a homosexual story.

They thought, they felt, they felt that perhaps, you know, the general idea about Forcer's fiction might go down a notch or two if we made Morris. But it really wasn't a sexual fears or things like it truly wasn't. I'm convinced. You cast James Willby as Morris. Right. Rupert Graves as Scudder, the under gamekeeper.

And Hugh Grant as the very in love and then very uptight Clive. I've thought about this solidly for the last month and a half. We've got to change, you and I. Can the leopard change his spots? Clive, you're in a muddle. What is it you're afraid to tell me? You can't trust anyone else. Even our outlaws.

All this will be taken away from us if people knew. Precisely. By continuing like this, you and I are risking everything we have. Our careers, our families, our names. Bores. I don't give a damn about name. What sort of a life would I have without you? You're the only happiness there is for me. There are other ways to be happy, you know. We could explore those a little. I just think how easy life is for people who don't have to go through all this.

There's secrecy, never being able to talk about the person you're in love with to anybody. Always being asked when you're going to get married. when you're going to get married and having every bloody girl paraded in front of it because your family is so desperate. You want to get married? Is that it? You're in love with some girl? Who is it? No one. But don't you think it would be wonderful if there were someone who I could care about in the same way that I do about you? He made a wonderful Clive. He said he was a great Clive. Do you know how he started out? He was a stand-up comic.

Hugh Grant? Hugh Grant. You want to know who some others were? Yes. Maggie Smith. What? Yeah. Emma.

Emma Thompson? Yes. What? She was. They were all stand-up comics. I can't believe this. And that helped. This is mind-blowing.

I mean, there's no funnier woman than Maggie Smith. That I can imagine. Morris has an unusual history because Forrester, who was gay himself, wrote it in 1913 and 1914. But it wasn't published. until after his death? Well, he couldn't. He would have been punished by the obscenity laws

in England at that time. It was not just about publishing obscene works, and that would have been considered obscene simply because of, well, not only the general subject matter and the scenes in it, but the fact that it had a happy ending,

he was determined to write that novel to have a happy ending. But homosexuality really was a crime at that point. I mean, Clive Mary, and he doesn't see Morris for a while, but Clive and Morris become friends again, and Morris is invited down to Clive's estate.

While Morris is there, Clive's under Gamekeeper, who's a very sexy young man, he goes after Morris. And this is where I think a lot of people have a problem with the book. Why? People are, where happy endings are concerned,

they think of it. as this a kind of a tact-on thing. But that was a very, very important to, deeply, deeply important to forster that, in fact, this story have a happy ending. And that these two, Morris and the under gamekeeper, in fact, plan a life together. If you go to see various films about gay romances, even a film like Brokeback Mountain, sooner or later the people suffer. The kind of moral punishment or a punishment from on high.

I really love that Forster wanted to wait to publish it until it was possible to have the happy ending that he wanted. And then, you know, it was also a very fraught moment culturally when Morris was made and released. It was 1987. It was the height of the AIDS crisis. Right. Which is why I think it was accepted in this country anyway. It was less accepted in England. But that didn't happen in this country.

It had an audience, a receptive audience. and sympathetic audience from the very first days, perhaps people didn't dare attack it. Because at just that particular moment and what was happening, they didn't dare, people might have attacked it, but they didn't want to appear too hard-hearted

and take up any sort of attitude which might be seen as punishing and so on just then. Right. I saw an interview with Rupert Graves where he said he'd gotten many letters, and heard many things over the years from people thanking him for that movie and for his role in that movie.

Yes, there are many, many people who come up to me over the years and very often teenagers and thanked me. And once I had this going along the street and a bus came along and a guy jumped off the bus and ran up to me and grabbed me and said he wanted to thank me

and I had changed his life and all the sort of thing because of Morris. Wow. Yeah. Who was that man? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Then he went away. Did people do that for, say, Howard's End or? Room with a View was kind of a life changer for a lot of girls, it seems. That's a good point. That's a very good point.

And I hope a lot of people go and see Morris now, because there's still a lot of mixed-up 17-year-olds who may get something from the movie. That has never changed, you know. That was one of the reasons I made Morris. I mean, I felt those problems and situations and the dishonesties and so forth, it's just as true today as it ever was then. Well, James Ibray, thank you so much for talking to us. You're welcome. It was enjoyable.

Director James Ivory, his 1987 film Morris made with Ismail Merchant is in limited release. He spoke with the New Yorker, Sarah Larson. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We have one more story for you this. hour. In the last few months, we've been asking writers, fiction writers and poets who have published their work in the New Yorker, to take us to their favorite places. Ian Lee drove us to a historic cemetery. Jonathan Franzen took us to a fragrant cow pasture to watch birds. When we asked the poet Rita

Dove to take us to her favorite place, she barely had to leave the house. So here we are on a beautiful spring day in Charlottesville, Virginia. Just outside of the city, and yet you can, it feels like we're in the middle of the country. Off to our right is really, really a beautiful view. It's a rolling hill that goes down toward a lake. And there are trees on either side of the lake, and yet there's still a sense of openness. And I will walk from the house across this open deck and walk over to the dance space. In the dance space, it never fails to just put me at peace.

The dance space is, it's a large space. It's about 2,000 square feet, so that's quite a big space. But you need that kind of space if you're going to do some of the sweeping dances like fox trots or waltz. The story of the space begins in 1998. Lightning struck our house. and it burned down. Now, in the ensuing weeks, we were actually, I thought, recovering quite nicely until we had to go get clothes, because we had no clothes.

And so the first day I walked into a store and realized I had to start from the absolute ground up. I burst into tears and left. I couldn't do it. And but the neighbors kind of banded together and decided that we need a distraction. And so they bought us tickets to a deal. dinner dance that was happening that weekend, about seven days after the dam fire. And it was a semi-formal affair, so they said, you have to buy a semi-formal dress. So the very first conscious thing that I bought was actually an evening gown.

It seems kind of bizarre, but it actually helped me get over that hump. And off we went to this dance. And when we went to the dance, we saw people doing ballroom, and waltzing. by and I said, I always wanted to do that. And one of our neighbors said, well, why not? Let's do it. And so she signed up of four other couples from the neighborhood for a free introductory lesson to a ballroom course. We were the only ones who really stuck with it, and we've stuck with it ever since. That was actually the beginning of this space, because as we danced more and more, we realized we didn't have any space to do it in.

Our house was being rebuilt. We were bouncing around in a rental house. We would practice in the basement, and we didn't have enough room. And I think that we were still, both of us, but we were viewed with that sense of, do it now. Who knows what will happen. And we realized that we wanted to build a dance space. This is the poem, the very first poem I wrote after the fire.

Fox Trot Fridays. Thank the stars there's a day each week to tuck in the grief, lift your pearls, and stride, brush stride, quick, quick with a heel ball toad. Smooth as Nat King Cole's slow satin smile, easy as taking one day at a time, one man and one woman, rib-to-rib, with no heartbreak in sight. Just the sweep of paradise. and the space of a song to count all the wonders in it. My husband and I are night people.

We do work at night. I write at night. I write from like midnight to six if given my, you know, brothers. So that at midnight or 11 o'clock or so I would start writing and working, and by 3 a.m., I needed a break. It's like lunchtime. So we would come out and practice and do something and dance, for about an hour, and then we would have dinner,

which sounds bizarre to have dinner at 5 a.m., but hey. Rita Dove, in the dance space, she built at her home in Charlottesville. That's it for today. I'm David Remnick. Thanks a lot for listening. I hope you enjoy the show, and I hope you'll tune in next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garvis of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Turina Endowment Fund.