'Chéri': the strange saga of Jessica Lange

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/ellin_stein/blog/2009/05/13/chri_the_strange_saga_of_jessica_lange

Colette's Chéri, now made into a film reuniting the Dangerous Liaisons trinity of Stephen Frears, Christopher Hampton, and Michelle Pfeiffer, is the story of a woman whose ability to makes her living in her profession (high-class courtesan) depends on her beauty and sexual allure, and when those are gone it's time to retire. The story behind the film is truly a case of life imitating art.

Some 15 years ago I sent the book to the head of Zoetrope, where I'd previously worked, suggesting that the leading role of Léa would be perfect for Jessica Lange, then 45. The character, at the start of the story, is 49. She is described as an extremely beautiful blue-eyed, long-legged blonde with a glowing "open-air" complexion who radiates calm serenity and level-headedness. I felt it could have been written for Jessica. His response was, "well, Ellin, it’s a terrific story and a part an actress would kill for" and if Jessica was interested, he’d be interested.

I then sent the book to Jessica and, after a decent interval, called her production company to see what was up. "Oh, we’re already developing that," a cheery young person told me. This came as something of a surprise as I had been in touch with the lawyer for the Colette estate, who had assured me the rights to the book were still available.

Jessica at the time had a deal with a production company called Propaganda Films, which meant that she could bring material she wanted to work on to them, and Propaganda had evidently begun developing the project under the mistaken impression that Chéri was in the public domain. Whether they began this process before or after I sent the book to her we will never know.

In any case, I wrote to Propaganda suggesting that rather than get into a bidding war with Zoetrope that would drive up the price, we join forces. I had been told by the Colette estate’s lawyer that the reason there had been so few films made from her large body of work was because her heirs had fraught relationships and could never agree on a deal, so it was clear a long struggle to get the rights lay ahead.

Propaganda offered to bring me on as Associate Producer, with the promise of an exciting amount of money on first day of principal photography, a day which often never comes in the film business. An Associate Producer credit does not exactly inspire awe in the industry (the joke is it’s what producers give their assistants instead of a raise), but considering I didn’t have any significant leverage, I was thrilled.

I realized I was being paid mostly to go away and not make trouble, and that no one had any interest in my creative input (brilliant though it may have been.) As well, being in the UK I was well out of the loop, with only an occasional snippet of information coming my way. One thing I learned was that, to their credit, the producers wanted to bring on a female director and/or writer. Unfortunately, they had in mind someone whose wildly romantic and rather woolly sensibility was a million miles from Colette’s gimlet-eyed, completely pragmatic take on life. Colette offers sensuality and a non-judgmental understanding of human nature, but no soppy stuff.

As for casting Chéri, the beautiful and sulky son of an old frenemy Léa becomes passionately involved with, had anyone asked I would have suggested the gorgeous and pouting Jonathan Rhys-Myers (actually, if we’re playing fantasy casting, my first choice would have been the young Alain Delon, but he was 60 by then.) But no one did, and instead the producers were talking to an actor with a far inferior bone structure.

However, there was one decision that I felt was really misguided. There are actually two books, Chéri and a sequel, The Last of Chéri, which the Colette estate had wisely insisted be bundled together as one rights package (you couldn’t buy one without the other.) Chéri recounts the story of Léa and Chéri’s May-September romance during the last years of the belle époque, complicated when Chéri’s mother, another wealthy retired grande horizontale, decides to marry him off to the demure young daughter of yet another courtesan. He refuses to give Léa up until one day he sees her without make-up in the morning light and the horrible truth dawns. Having dismissed him as just an amusing diversion, Léa realizes too late he is the love of her life. The first book ends with her watching him leave looking “like a man escaping from prison.”

The Last of Chéri, however, provides an altogether more Colette-like ironic twist in the tale. It takes place in the early 1920s, after Chéri has returned from fighting in the Great War and is unsuccessfully trying to adjust to a brash new world of nightclubs, drugs and fast cars. With no need to earn a living, Chéri drifts aimlessly into a life of nocturnal dissolution that he doesn’t particularly enjoy. His deferential wife, meanwhile, has become far more assertive and regards him as an ornamental waste of space, especially in comparison to the dynamic, self-important doctor she has met while working in a hospital during the war.

Chéri realizes he was happiest with Léa, but when he visits her he finds she has let her hair go grey, cut it short, and put on lots of weight. She is “no longer concerned to be a woman” and has “acquired a kind of sexless dignity.” Her days are filled with playing cards and managing her investments, and, cheerful and at peace, she does not miss the hurly-burly of the chaise lounge. Chéri has lost her forever, not to another man but to time. He takes refuge in smoking opium and gazing at portraits of Léa in her prime, ultimately feeling he has nothing left to live for.

The producers had decided to use the end of the first book as the end of the film. I felt this would make it just the same old same old: mature woman loses young man to younger woman and gives up. I can understand why the producers were reluctant to incorporate The Last of Chéri – from their point of view this would require more sets, more period costumes, more period cars and thus a bigger budget. But concluding the film with the end of the second book – successful businesswoman lives contentedly in retirement looking back fondly but not wistfully on her lost love while he’s the one who falls apart – would result in something altogether more modern and interesting.

Still, all was chugging along. Then disaster struck. Polygram, the studio financing the film, went down the tubes. Despite frantic efforts to find the project a new home, no other financier was willing to step in and, in 2002, the rights reverted back to the Colette estate. This meant my contract was null and void. So farewell then, big payday.

However, never underestimate the determination of an actress who has gotten her hands on a good part. In 2003, Bill Kenwright, the theatrical impressario who had cast Jessica in two of Tennessee Williams’s greatest roles for actresses (Blanche duBois and Amanda Wingfield), bought the rights to the books to develop them as a film starring his friend and collaborator, with everything starting from scratch.

Since I was no longer officially connected to the production, I was even further out of the loop, getting infrequent bits of news much as you would occasionally hear from an old friend who lives on another continent. I was delighted to hear that Christopher Hampton had been signed to write the script. With a deep background in French literature in general and Colette in particular, he was working from the original French edition because he wasn’t entirely happy with the book’s English translation and tracking down any of the author’s letters that might offer some insight. Best of all, apparently he intended to include The Last of Chéri.

I heard nothing further until 2008, when I read in a trade paper that the film was shooting with Frears – good, one of my favorites – and Michelle Pfei…what? What happened to Jessica? I had been feeling a bit bad for myself but I felt ten times worse for Jessica. It was only due to her ongoing involvement and commitment that the project had been developed at all and she had stuck with it for more than ten years. Pfeiffer is a wonderful actress and a world-class beauty, but she hardly fits Colette’s description of Léa as a woman with “big beautiful shoulders” and an “opulent bust”. Now, it’s not required that a film adaptation conform to the literary source in every particular, but, more to the point, a delicate, bird-like Léa would not have been the turn-of-the-century equivalent of a supermodel (they probably would have packed her off to a sanitarium, fearing consumption.) The Edwardian ideal was a well-upholstered beauty with an hourglass figure.

However, Jessica was by now in her late 50s and I suppose it was thought she could no longer pull off being convincing as a lust object. Never mind that Harrison, Clint, Woody, et.al. are desired on-screen by co-stars half their age, and will continue to be so as long as the men who run the conglomerates that own the studios want to believe it is their looks, charm, and raw sexual power that have attracted their much-younger partners (i.e., forever); actresses age in dog years. I don’t know whether there was a painful conversation in which she was gently pushed or if it was her decision to jump. I do know that a group of Lange fans started an internet petition to insist that she be kept on a film “everyone knows has been a passion project of hers for years” (that’s the internet for you – everyone’s an insider).

Admittedly, there is a distinct physical difference between a woman of 50 and a woman of 58, a difference that may begin with an “m”. Colette was only too aware of this, writing of “the degrading listlessness of women past their prime, who abandon first their stays, then their hair-dye, and who finally no longer bother about the quality of their underclothes.” Ah, the joys of finally letting oneself go! It’s true that if you want to fight the good fight you can now be nipped, plumped, pumped, and peeled to a near-perfect simulacrum of youth, but while this may work on the screen, where you need only project the appearance of youth, in real life, without the pheromones to back it up, it’s a Potemkin village version of youthful desirability.

In many ways, the film has done an admirable job of adapting the book. Frears conveys the sensuality of the prose with images of fur rugs, abundant roses, and satin sheets, Hampton captures the tension between the characters’ brittle public façades and the human passions underneath, and the whole thing looks beautiful. But, while elements of The Last Of Chéri have been incorporated (though Chéri declines to smoke opium, which seems rather debauchery-lite), the filmmakers have decided to end with a shot of Pfeiffer, looking like a beautiful 35-year-old who’s had a rough night, watching Rupert Friend take his excellent cheekbones out of her life, leaving her on the shelf presumably till death. Was the prospect of showing your leading lady looking close to 60 and not that upset about it really so inconceivable? Frears may be having second thoughts, telling the Telegraph on April 29 “we should have done an old and fat scene.”

It is no accident that Mamma Mia – a film that, whatever its (numerous) flaws, depicts older women looking their age but not being consumed by despair and actually having fun – has attracted a huge groundswell of support from an underserved audience who never see themselves represented on screen except as miserable, sexless, dying or some combination thereof. I can’t help feeling that if the filmmakers had had the courage to go with the second book’s ending – and surely it wouldn’t have been that difficult to make Jessica look 49 for the love affair part of the story – Chéri too would have been seen as inspiring instead of a bit creaky. I leave the last word on ageing, appearance and romance to Colette, who wrote “I look at my wrinkles and I remember the men who put them there.”