For filmmaker James Ivory, his evolution as an artist and his acceptance of his own sexuality were always intertwined. In his new memoir, “Solid Ivory,” out next week, he recalls a Christmas party at his Catholic elementary school in southern Oregon in the 1930s, where children were asked what they wanted from Santa Claus. When he yelled “A doll’s house!” the hall “broke into shouts of laughter,” he writes.
Mr. Ivory would go on to create some of the most affirmative visions of gay love on the big screen. “No one wants stories about young people who are being made to live a lie,” he observes. With the late Ismail Merchant, his longtime romantic and professional partner, he directed “Maurice” , an adaptation of E.M. Forster’s novel that was groundbreaking for giving a male couple a happy ending. Thirty years later, Mr.
”Solid Ivory” unfurls in cinematic chapters that revisit vivid moments from Mr. Ivory’s past, which he began recording in the 1960s. If something or someone seemed extraordinary—such as a blowup with Raquel Welch on the set of “The Wild Party” , or a dinner party in Paris that ended with Susan Sontag snooping around his elegant apartment —he often took notes “for future use,” he says.
More “smart-alecky” than smart by his own reckoning, Mr. Ivory studied architecture at the University of Oregon with plans to become a set designer. He then enrolled in film school at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles in 1951, largely to avoid the draft during the Korean War.
I don’t get it I live in Oregon and it’s not that gay ? Damn Portland has it all
this is terrible news