Solid Ivory by James Ivory

Author:James Ivory
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The Maestro

Early in our friendship with Satyajit Ray, Ruth and Cyrus Jhabvala began calling him “the Maestro.” This was in 1963 when he helped me recut our first feature, The Householder. We were conscious of our inability to pronounce his name properly in Bengali, which would have come out something like “Shoto-jeet Rye.” He made several short visits to New York from Calcutta and sometimes his American distributor, Ed Harrison, would put him up modestly in a Manhattan hotel. It should never be forgotten that in those days—the sixties and seventies—India’s greatest artist was often not given any foreign exchange by his government when he traveled to the West.2

One summer we put him up ourselves in our one-bedroom apartment. Another time we put him in the Hilton Hotel on Sixth Avenue, which he hated because of its noisy, crowded lobby and slapdash, impersonal service. We’d thought he might like being up in a New York skyscraper, but the Midtown view from his window did not compensate for the general tumult of that commercial hotel chain. When he stayed with us, I have a memory of him lying on the bed next to mine covered by a sheet, his large, dark feet sticking out at the end (Ismail slept on the floor in the living room). On another occasion, this time properly funded by some host—perhaps Columbia Pictures, with whom he was developing his science-fiction film The Alien—he stayed in the Barbizon Plaza Hotel on Central Park South. I went to see him and he invited me up to his room overlooking Central Park. While I was there a large chocolate cake was delivered in a box from some fancy Manhattan cake shop. It had been sent by Richard Avedon, who was hoping to photograph Ray for his series of illustrious film directors, most of them pretty old. “I’ll never agree to that,” said the Maestro, opening the cake box. “He’ll make me look like a senile old man” (Ray was fifty then). He’d seen the portrait Avedon had made of Ray’s beloved friend and mentor, Jean Renoir. He then began to cut the cake and we ate it.

Pauline Kael

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