In her letter she says: ‘I tried to phone you, but I believe you were in the USA boring the pants off the Americans with your pornography … Worst of all, the film was offensive to your father’s distinguished family. Uncle was portrayed in a very bad light, drunk in bed with his brand of vodka, and uncut toenails … this was totally uncalled for and mischievous. It only brings to light your complete lack of loyalty, integrity and compassion … We didn’t know you were a “poofter”. We do hope you’re aware of AIDS and its dangers, if not, then a medical leaflet can be sent to you. Why oh why do you have to promote the widely held view of the British that all evil stems from Pakistani immigrants? Thank goodness for top quality films like Gandhi.’
I think of something Thackeray wrote in Vanity Fair: ‘If a man has committed wrong in life, I don’t know any moralist more anxious to point his errors out to the world than his own relations.’
I decide to name the Asian lesbian in Sammy and Rosie after her.
Earlier this year I ran into Philip Roth at a party and told him about the hostility I’d received from this aunt and other Pakistanis complaining about their portrayal in Laundrette and other things I’d written. Roth said the same thing happened to him after Portnoy’s Complaint. Indeed he writes about this in The Ghost Writer.
In that novel, Nathan, a young Jewish novelist ‘looking for admiration and praise’, writes a story about an old family feud. He shows it to his father. The father is shattered by the public betrayal. ‘You didn’t leave anything out,’ he moans. Except the achievements, the hard work, the decency. He adds sadly: ‘I wonder if you fully understand just how little love there is in this world for Jewish people.’
When Nathan protests that they are in Newark, not Germany, the father seeks a second opinion, that of Judge Leopold Wapter. Wapter immediately applies the literary acid test which he believes every Jewish book must endure: will the story warm the heart of Joseph Goebbels? The result is … positive. So why, why, screams Wapter, in a story with a Jewish background, must there be adultery, incessant fighting within a family over money and warped human behaviour in general?
What Wapter’s Complaint demands is ‘positive images’. It requires useful lies and cheering fictions: the writer as public relations officer, as hired liar.
Like Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie is quite a personal story, autobiographical, not in its facts, but emotionally. The woman involved (I’ll call her Sarah) asked to read the script. I said no, because the character will change as the film goes through several drafts; the actress playing the part will also change it, as will Frears when he starts to work on it. It’s also difficult to write accurately about real people in fiction — however much you might want to — because the demands of the idea are usually such that you have to transform the original person to fit the constraints of the story. All the same, I’m nervous about what Sarah will think of it. I know that in certain passages I’ve been spiteful.
On the phone Frears talks about Art Malik for the part of Sammy. He’s an attractive actor, but we both wonder if he’s fly enough for the role.
20 JUNE 1986
Meeting at Channel 4 with Karin Bamborough and David Rose to discuss the film. Together they’ve been the architects of a remarkable number of low-budget independent films which are mostly (or partly) funded by TV money for theatrical release. This series of films has ensured a revival in British film-making (they’re almost the only people making films in Britain today) and has given encouragement to women and black film-makers, first-time directors and writers, working on material that wouldn’t be acceptable to the mainstream commercial world.
Their success has partly been due to their initiative in approaching writers from other forms — novelists, playwrights, short-story writers and journalists — to write films. They know that usually the best screenplays are not written by people who call themselves screenwriters, but by good writers, writers who excel in other forms. After all, the ‘rules’ of screenwriting can be learned in an hour. But the substance of a decent screenplay, character, story, mood, pace, can only come from a cultivated imagination. Although it’s virtually impossible to make a good film without a good screenplay, screenwriting itself is such a bastardised, ignoble profession (director Joseph Mankiewicz said ‘the screenwriter is the highest-paid secretary in the world’) that writers who wish to survive have to avoid it, turning only to the movies as a well-paid sideline, regrettably not regarding it as a serious medium.
Karin tells me that the characters in the first draft aren’t strong enough yet. I’ll have to do two or three more drafts. David Rose says he regrets it all being set in London since he feels too many C4 films have been set there. Can’t I set it in Birmingham, he says.
21 JUNE 1986
The contract arrives from C4 offering a commission for Sammy and Rosie. They’re offering a pathetic amount of money.
6 JULY 1986
My agent rings me in New York to say the idea now is to form a three-way company to make the film: Frears, Bevan and Sarah Radclyffe, and I. This way we’ll be able to control everything about the film.
9 JULY 1986
I speak to Frears who is about to start filming Prick Up Your Ears. He says he wants to prepare Sammy and Rosie after he’s finished his Indian film. This means we’ll shoot it in the autumn of 1987. It’s a long time to wait: I feel let down, life goes slack once more. But it’ll force me to write something else in the meantime.
9 AUGUST 1986
Lunch at ‘192’ in Notting Hill with Bevan and Radclyffe, and Frears. Shashi arrives with his secretary after everyone else. He has on a loose brown costume, with a dark red and chocolate scarf flung over his shoulder. He is so regal and dignified, stylish and exotic, that a shiver goes through the restaurant.
I mention that though this is the first time we’ve met, I saw him on the balcony at the Lord’s Test. He says he wore the same clothes then and had trouble getting into the pavilion, so conventional and uptight are the MCC. So he told them he’d just had lunch with Mrs Thatcher and if his national dress was good enough for the Prime Minister surely it would be acceptable to the MCC.
In the charm department he has real class and yet he is genuinely modest. I feel a little embarrassed at asking him to be in this film, small and fairly sordid as it is. But Shashi says he thinks the script is better than that for Laundrette. He adds that he’s available at our convenience.
It’s a sunny day and when Shashi leaves we stroll back to Frear’s house, pleased with Shashi’s enthusiasm. We talk a bit about the other parts: Claire Bloom as Alice, with Miranda Richardson or Judy Davis as Rosie perhaps.
Frears talks about the part of Anna, the American photographer, saying she isn’t sympathetic enough: I’ve parodied her. He’s right about this and I lack grip on the character. The process of writing is so much one of seeking ideas in one’s unconscious, whatever they are, and then later justifying them, filling them out and finding what the hell they mean, if anything. The entire script will have to be subject to this scrutiny.
14 AUGUST 1986
At last I give the script to Sarah to read. Sarah and I met at university and lived together for six years. Since she moved out, we’ve continued to see a lot of each other.