Outlaw Marriages (29 page)

Reviews of the period piece overflowed with praise. The
New York Times
described it as “exquisite” and “spellbinding,” the
Washington Post
called it “yet another jewel in the James Ivory and Ismail Merchant crown,” and the
Boston Globe
gushed that it was “impeccably crafted” and “one of the decade's most moving films.” The movie gave Ivory his third Oscar nomination for
best director and Merchant his third for best picture, although it ultimately didn't receive any Academy Awards.
50

After making
The Remains of the Day
, the couple decided they'd become too comfortable adapting literary works. So they set out to make other types of films. Among the projects they took on during the next several years were
Le Divorce
, a frothy comedy, and
Surviving Picasso
, a biography of the famous painter's mistress.
51

It was while creating another movie during this period,
The Proprietor
, that Merchant reminded the world how far he'd go to make a film his partner wanted to make. Ivory had his heart set on shooting part of the movie inside the Trianon Palace hotel in Versailles, France, but the owners had a firm policy against allowing cameras on the premises. So Merchant dressed up in robes and a turban to pass himself off as the Maharaja of Jodhpur. The camera crew masqueraded as his entourage and, once inside, filmed the scenes Ivory wanted for the movie.
52

In the spring of 2005, Ivory and Merchant were in London working on a project titled
The White Countess
, a love story set in 1930s Shanghai, when the producer began suffering severe pains in his abdomen. He underwent surgery for bleeding ulcers, and a day later he died, at the age of sixty-eight.
53

Major newspapers around the country published obituaries summarizing Merchant's life and work, many of them acknowledging the contributions that he and Ivory had made to American filmmaking. The
San Francisco Chronicle
, for example, wrote, “Merchant Ivory came to symbolize scenes of rich décor and period atmosphere, castles and country houses of Europe, and lavish dinners and drawing room intrigue.”
54

Several of the obituaries spoke in broader terms about Ivory and Merchant's impact on the movie industry writ large. The
Chicago Tribune
stated, “Their hits—especially E. M. Forster's adaptations of ‘A Room with a View' and ‘Howards End'—helped revive the public's taste for well-made, emotionally literate period dramas,” while the
Los Angeles Times
said, “They helped teach modern American audiences they need not fear period dramas.”
55

The
Times
was also among the news organizations that paid tribute to Ivory and Merchant's lengthy outlaw marriage. “In a business where professional marriages last hardly any longer than personal ones,” the paper wrote, “the producer's association with Ivory, who was also Merchant's life partner, spanned more than 40 years.”
56

After Merchant died, Ivory sold the Hudson Valley house where the couple had lived and moved to an apartment in New York City. The director continued to make films, but they didn't compare in quality to the ones that he and Merchant had created together. In 2008, for example, Ivory's
The City of Your Final Destination
told the story of a doctoral student struggling to write a biography of a Latin American writer. Reviews were mixed, with the
New York Times
dismissing the film as “trivial.”
57

Raising a Voice for Women of Color

…

Audre Lorde was a widely acclaimed writer who focused on a range of issues. Racism, sexism, and homophobia were the major themes in her early work. Like Martin Luther King Jr., Lorde insisted that issues of class and race be confronted in all movements for social change—including the women's liberation movement. Two of her seventeen books chronicled her experiences with cancer. Lorde received enormous praise as an effective voice both for women of color and for women who love women.

Lorde began her writing career in high school, when
Seventeen
magazine published the sixteen-year-old's first poem. It wasn't until she was in her mid-thirties, however, that Lorde published her first poetry collection. Before that point, she juggled several lives as wife, mother, librarian, and educator. Although she wrote every day during these years, she credited her same-sex partner of two decades, Frances Clayton, with making her life as an author and an activist possible.

Frances Louise Clayton was born in Elizabethtown, Illinois, in 1926. She was the youngest of seven children in a family headed by a Methodist minister who moved to a series of small churches throughout the Midwest. The blond-haired, blue-eyed Frances was shy and made few friends, partly because the family never stayed in one town for very long.
1

A brilliant student, she received a scholarship to attend Indiana University and study behavioral psychologist in the program developed by the leader in the field, B. F. Skinner. After graduation, Clayton won fellowships to attend Brown University, where she earned her master's, and then the University of Minnesota, where she earned her PhD.
2

Clayton joined the psychology faculty at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She soon distinguished herself in the academic world because of her groundbreaking research on animal behavior, becoming the first woman in her department to achieve tenure.
3

On a personal level, Clayton felt comfortable living alone and having serial relationships with women. Her teaching and laboratory work were highly satisfying to her, as was a sabbatical fellowship that took her to Cambridge University. By the late 1960s, and after having lived alone for a dozen years, however, she was open to new adventures.
4

Audrey Geraldine Lorde was born in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in 1934, the daughter of immigrants who'd left their native West Indies a decade earlier. When her father had first arrived in the United States, he'd peddled apples. But he later obtained a real estate license, and, after World War II, he owned an apartment building, which his wife helped him manage.
5

A sense of the young Audrey's willfulness is captured by the fact that she dropped the “y” from her first name while she was still in elementary school. She didn't like the letter because it extended below the base line created by the other letters. Audre excelled academically but received low grades in conduct.
6

By the age of twelve, she'd already fallen in love with poetry, memorizing any number of her favorite works. During her teens, Lorde began writing poems of her own, sharing them with a group of literary-minded friends.
7

After graduating from Hunter College High School, Lorde worked as a nurse's aide to pay her living expenses while she attended then tuition-free Hunter College, a public institution in Manhattan. She earned her degree in English literature in 1959 and entered Columbia University's graduate program in library science, while continuing to create poems that she kept in her personal journal.
8

Lorde's life wasn't limited to studying and writing, as she spent many nights drinking and dancing in Greenwich Village's various lesbian bars. She
was often the only dark-skinned woman in the crowd.
9

In 1962, Lorde shocked many of her friends by marrying a legal aid attorney named Ed Rollins. Two factors made the pairing unusual. First, Lorde was black and Rollins was white. Second, Lorde was a lesbian and Rollins was a gay man—they both knew about the other's sexual orientation when they walked down the aisle.
10

Lorde and Rollins were close and loving friends who both wanted children. They opted to marry each other—both for companionship and for “cover” in a world that didn't embrace gay or lesbian parents.
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By the time they married, Lorde had finished her master's and was working at a public library. Within three months after the wedding, she became pregnant and quit her job to devote all her time to preparing for the birth and then caring for Elizabeth Lorde-Rollins.
12

The roles of wife and mother dominated Lorde's life during this period, while her writing was limited to jotting down an occasional phrase on a scrap of paper she shoved into her purse or diaper bag. The birth of a second child, Jonathan, in 1964 meant that the mother of two had even less time or energy to create poetry.
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Circumstances in the household changed when Ed Rollins lost his job. Lorde then returned to the workforce, becoming a librarian at an elementary school.
14

In 1967, she received a phone call from a high school friend, poet Diane di Prima, who now headed a small publishing house and wanted to release a book containing some of the works Lorde had written in the 1950s.
15

A few months after putting together that manuscript, Lorde received a second unexpected phone call. This one was from the National Endowment for the Arts, informing her that she'd been awarded a grant, based on a recommendation from di Prima, to serve as a poet-in-residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi.
16

When Lorde went to Mississippi for six weeks in early 1968, she was hoping to get a sense of what it would be like to teach full time. That aspect of her experience ultimately was eclipsed by another one she hadn't seen coming: she met the woman who changed her life.
17

Frances Clayton also had come to Tougaloo College as a visiting professor, and she and Lorde were instantly attracted to each other. Clayton had been a committed anti-racism activist for many years when she accepted the position at Tougaloo. And so, in addition to chemistry, the two women shared
values in working for racial justice and integration. One night when they were together, they experienced night riders terrorizing the campus. Lorde also admired Clayton's courage, as she was one of only six white professors on the Tougaloo faculty at the time.
18

When Lorde returned to New York, she reinvented her life along the lines that Clayton envisioned for her. She left her job as a librarian and landed a job on the English faculty at the City University of New York. Lorde also told her husband she wanted a divorce.
19

The changes that took place in Frances Clayton's life after she left Mississippi were significant as well. She'd previously been a focused and ambitious woman who'd succeeded at the highest level of the academic world, but now she reconsidered how much she was willing to sacrifice in order to spend her life with the woman she loved.
20

In 1970, Lorde separated from Ed Rollins so she could live with Clayton. A major factor influencing the location of the couple's shared home was a stipulation in Lorde's separation agreement, inserted by Rollins, that she couldn't move the children out of New York state. This detail propelled Clayton to resign from her tenured position and move to a house on Staten Island with Lorde and her children. Clayton said, many years later, “My top priority at that point was to live with Audre. The only way I could do that was to leave Brown, so that's what I did.”
21

Clayton had a tough time finding a new job in academe. Her credentials as a teacher and researcher were exemplary, but potential employers were suspicious about why she'd given up tenure at an Ivy League institution. When asked to explain her decision, Clayton wasn't willing to say she'd moved to New York to be with her lesbian lover—neither Clayton nor Lorde was yet willing to be publicly identified as gay. After several awkward interviews, she ended up teaching introductory psychology courses at Queens College, an institution that didn't support the cutting-edge research she'd been doing for the previous two decades.
22

Lorde and Clayton's personal life during this period was very satisfying. Clayton focused on making it possible for Lorde to spend as much time as she could on her writing. Specific steps Clayton took included setting aside a room in the Staten Island house to be Lorde's study—it was strictly off limits to Elizabeth and Jonathan—and assuming the majority of the domestic chores for the family, such as the cooking and cleaning.
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