Julian Sands Tragically Sought a Hike with a View

Last January, L.A. radio stations announced that English actor Julian Sands had gone missing. A seasoned hiker, the sixty-five-year-old Sands had set out for a solo excursion near Mt. Baldy, the highest peak in the San Gabriel Mountains. In a year marked by massive amounts of snow in Southern California, the search for Sands was repeatedly delayed. But eventually scores of volunteers hit the trail, looking for any trace of the missing actor. It was not until June that his remains were discovered and identified.

 The sad news of Sands’ demise led me to return to his breakthrough role, as handsome young George Emerson in 1985’s A Room with a View. This screen adaptation of a work by E.M. Forster set the standard for the cinematic transformations of major novels, through the collaboration of James Ivory (director), Ismail Merchant (producer), and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (writer). This longstanding team, specializing in sumptuous, intelligent costume dramas, was once a powerful force in the movie industry, particularly in the last two decades of the 20^th century. As Merchant put it, “It is a strange marriage we have at Merchant Ivory . . . I am an Indian Muslim, Ruth is a German Jew, and Jim is a Protestant American. Someone once described us as a three-headed god. Maybe they should have called us a three-headed monster!”

 A Room with a View captures  the elegant yet repressive mores of Edwardian England, circa 1908. Its opening scenes are set in Florence, Italy, where a group of well-endowed  English travelers gather over dinner at a local pensione. The youngest of them, newcomer Lucy Honeychurch (Helen Bonham Carter), laments that her room lacks the promised view of the River Arno. Whimsical Mr. Emerson (Denholm Elliott) volunteers that he and his son will gladly swap rooms, but Lucy’s stuffy guardian, cousin Charlotte (Maggie Smith), is reluctant to do anything unseemly.

 Throughout the film, Lucy is torn between the wish to obey social norms and a youthful eagerness to experience life in the raw. Her chance to elude her chaperone’s supervision comes when she visits the basilica of Santa Croce, only to find herself steps away from a violent stabbing. She faints, but is rescued by Mr. Emerson’s strapping blond son (Sands), a young man nearly bursting with a strongly romantic temperament. From this point forward, George Emerson finds moments to express his ardor for Lucy. This upends her Florentine sojourn: Charlotte whisks her back to her family’s country estate, where she tries hard to resume the life of a demure young English lady.

 Quickly there’s an engagement to Cecil Vyse, a supercilious English intellectual (Daniel Day-Lewis), who looks with disdain on anything that might smack of impropriety. (He haughtily scorns a delightful scene of Lucy’s brother and others cavorting in the buff in a neighborhood pond.) But inevitably Lucy will discover the need to rethink her choice of a husband. The film’s ecstatically happy ending provides love, rapturous kisses, and of course a room with a view.

 Sands’ character is presented on-screen as something of a conundrum, even to his loving father. Saved by family wealth from the need to choose a profession, he seems to live to revel in beauty in all its forms. His lust for life is distinctive, especially when he’s placed among his more prosaic countrymen. Obviously, a man is more than the sum of the characters he plays on screen. Still, it’s easy to imagine George Emerson’s life being suddenly snuffed out on a solo hike into the wilderness. I hope that Sands enjoyed a wonderful view before he died.

 

 

 

 

 

Mary Tyler Moore: She Turned the World On With Her Smile (but she wasn’t always smiling)

The pandemic re-introduced me to the simple joys of TV’s long-running Mary Tyler Moore Show. From 1970 through 1977,  the nation watched Mary Richards (a smart and attractive single gal with a megawatt smile) at home in Minneapolis, where she toiled in a local TV station’s newsroom while also hanging out with pals and occasionally dating someone who never turned out to be Mr. Right. The description hardly sounds like much, but the show’s writing and its casting were so smart that viewers turned in week after week. At the time, Moore was remembered by sitcom fans as the wife of Dick Van Dyke on his long-running series. The show that bears HER name introduced us to Ed Asner (who went on to play his curmudgeonly Lou Grant character on a fine dramatic series set at an urban newspaper), Ted Knight (as doofus newscaster Ted Baxter). Valerie Harper (as Mary’s lovelorn buddy, Rhoda Morgenstern), Cloris Leachman (as Mary’s ditsy landlady), and the inimitable Betty White (as the station’s s man-hungry “Happy Homemaker”). Tying it all together was plucky Mary: a female maneuvering in a man’s world while trying not to let her natural femininity get quashed.

 Mary Tyler Moore, originally an aspiring dancer, moved from TV commercials to sitcoms with ease. She seemed to have it all, despite a background that was more wine than roses. As made clear in a recent documentary, Being Mary Tyler Moore, alcoholism ran deep in her family. So did early deaths: her sister died of painkillers and alcohol at age 21; her brother succumbed to kidney cancer at 47; her only son died of an accidental gunshot wound at 24. She herself struggled with diabetes while also managing to surmount years of alcoholism.

 One of the painful ironies of her son’s death was that it came a mere three weeks after the release of her all-time major film role, that of a bereaved mother in Robert Redford’s directorial debut, Ordinary People (1980). The film, based on a novel by Judith Guest, zeroes in on an affluent suburban family rocked by the death of its eldest son in a boating accident. Tyler Moore played a woman whose considerable social charm masks a rigidity that makes her unable to show compassion toward the younger son (Timothy Hutton) whose guilt for his part in the accident is destroying his life. The film was named Best Picture by the Academy, and Hutton’s youthful performance (he was 20) won him a Supporting Actor Oscar. Tyler Moore was nominated too, in the Lead Actress category, though she lost out to Sissy Spacek for Coal Miner’s Daughter. But the role of Beth Jarrett showed the world she could do far more than be perky.

 There were to be many disappointments in her life, like the last-minute cancellation of a musical version  of Breakfast at Tiffany’s in which she was set to star on Broadway. Her first marriage, at age 18, dissolved quickly. Her second, to TV executive Grant Tinker, with whom she founded the highly successful MTM Enterprises, also ended in divorce. Unexpectedly, she fell for a 29-year-old cardiologist, Dr. Robert Levine, when she was in her late forties. To everyone’s surprise, they remained married for 34 years until her death in 2017. He continues to be devoted to her memory,  and was deeply involved with the making of the documentary film. The doc contains frank interviews with Mary, showing her to be far more thoughtful about her personal lapses than one might guess. It also chronicles her passion for animals and for ever-changing hair-dos.

 

 

 

And Here’s to YOU, Larry Turman

 

The passing of Hollywood producer Lawrence Turman at age 96 has, I’m glad to say, not gone unnoticed. Turman produced 42 films, directed two, and spent the last three decades of his life teaching his trade to graduate students as the head of  the Peter Stark Producing Program at USC. I got to know him while researching Seduced by Mrs. Robinson, my 2017 book on the long-term impact of Turman’s best-known film, The Graduate. Released in 1967, The Graduate was a worldwide smash that briefly catapulted the then-41-year-old Turman into the top ranks of Hollywood players.  He enjoyed the notoriety, but hardly let it go to his head. The man I first met at his USC office in 2007 was both cordial and feisty. Above all, I quickly recognized him as a straight-shooter.

 This became clear  when our chat turned to the topic of Larry’s directorial debut. His goal was to bring to the screen another racy comedy by the original author of The Graduate, Charles Webb. But The Marriage of a Young Stockbroker (1971) turned out to be a disappointment, one for which he now blames himself.  Comparing Dustin Hoffman, whose career was launched with The Graduate,  to the young actor he cast in Stockbroker, Larry admitted, “There’s a reason Dustin Hoffman is a movie star and Richard Benjamin is not. Dustin is vulnerable and likable; Richard Benjamin, wonderful guy and a wonderful actor, he comes across on screen as brittle, cold, distant.” He now admits to having made, among many other errors, an unfortunate casting choice.

 While exploring the papers on the making of The Graduate in Larry Turman’s archives,  I was surprised to come across glossy photos of what looked to be a stag party. The men in the film’s cast and crew, perched on folding chairs, were being cozily entertained by two cuties wearing high heels, bikini bottoms, and nothing else. When I asked Larry about the circumstances, he sniffed, “If they had that party, they didn’t invite me, the producer.” That’s when I pulled out a photo, and he expressed surprise, “That’s me on Mike Nichols’ left.” An audition? I strongly doubt it.

 Larry’s 2005 book, So You Want to be a Producer, lays out in clear-cut terms what it takes to succeed in his field. But he cautions aspirants against being overly ego-driven. Case in point: some years back he saw an announcement of a Motion Picture Academy screening of The Graduate, with director Mike Nichols as the evening’s honored guest. Wrote Larry, “No mention of me whatsoever. If you’ve read this far, you know I think the world of Mike, but The Graduate exists as a film only because of me. So you want to be a producer?”

 Fortunately for me, I’d rather be a writer than a producer. And Larry was enormously helpful to me in clarifying why and how The Graduate was made. We did some jockeying over interpretations: I refused to accept that Katharine Ross’s character, the lovely Elaine Robinson, remains passive throughout. (After all, she comes to Ben’s Berkeley rooming house at midnight demanding to be kissed.) On the other hand, I learned something important: that although The Graduate seemed remarkably timely to college students in 1967, the thinking throughout the production was that the story took place circa 1963. (Hence, no Vietnam reference at all.)

When my book came out, I invited Larry to lunch as a thank-you, and afterwards received an email I cherish: “Lunch was very enjoyable and even enlightening.  Thank you again for initiating it.  You’re formidable.”

 So were you, Larry. So were you.