Sunil Sethi: He was mad about making movies

AL FRESCO

One of the more remarkable characteristics of film producer Ismail Merchant, who died in London on May 25, was his uncanny ability to track you down, wherever you were.

Long before he became famous for the media to seek him out, Merchant was perfect at the art of keeping the wires humming.

In the mid-1970s, when I first met him, he could often be found, when in India, treating a corner of the coffee shop of the Oberoi in Delhi or the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai, as his private office""he wasn't, as yet, rich enough to check in.

You could hear his high-spirited voice (it came with a built-in bubble) and his exuberant presence (the laughter, like the rage, was infectious) fill the room as he retailed the latest exploit of Merchant-Ivory Films.

The film at that moment, I recall, was a TV feature ridiculously titled Hullaballo over Bonnie and Georgie's Pictures, from a script that Ismail had persuaded London Weekend Television to finance.

But even on a shoe-string budget he had managed to rope in a star cast that included Peggy Ashcroft, Michael York, and Aparna Sen. That, together with the fact that he had talked the young Maharaja of Jodhpur into lending his palace (not then a famous hotel) was enough to generate yards of copy.

As the irrepressible public face of a trio that included the shy director James Ivory and the invisible novelist-turned-screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (they made it to the Guinness Book of Records as the longest partnership in film history) Ismail Merchant excelled in making the impossible happen.

He could squeeze money out of stone. He coaxed Volkswagen in America, of all people, to fund Autobiography of a Princess and chatted up the PR at Garrard, the Bond Street jeweller, to lend a diamond and emerald necklace worth a million pounds to grace Madhur Jaffrey's neck.

(The necklace came with an armed escort who followed the actress to the toilet every single time. "What does he think I'm going to do? Flush it down?" she complained in exasperation.)

But perhaps the most audacious of Ismail's attempts to raise money was on the sets of Heat and Dust, the screen adaptation of Jhabvala's Booker Prize-winning novel.

Having assembled a first-class cast and crew in Hyderabad, the money ran out mid-way and the production was stalled. Among those angry at the hold-up was Shashi Kapoor, who had already lost a lot of money backing some of Ismail's mad ventures, and now stood to lose more on account of delaying other productions.

Moreover, knowing Ismail's notorious tightfistedness with actors, he had sworn that he would walk out without guaranteed advances. Fearing the loss of a big star and flare-ups all round, Ismail stepped in where others would fear to tread.

He beseeched Shashi's wife Jennifer, who adored Ismail, to secretly lend her money to pay her husband!

As it turned out, Heat and Dust was Merchant-Ivory's first major international hit, catapulting the company into the big Hollywood league.

The high points of Merchant-Ivory's vast oeuvre, spread over more than 40 years, that will be remembered are the early Indian films, elegant miniatures in black and white, and the stylish large-scale period pieces adapted from works by Henry James, E M Forster, and Kazuo Ishiguro.

But in recent years their kind of cinema seemed to have gone out of fashion. Some critics scorned it as a school of interior decorating rather than film-making.

Ismail Merchant's own attempts at directing films were clumsy (In Custody was passable but Cotton Mary was unwatchable) and, in my humble opinion, his reputation as a famous cook was overrated (in went a tablespoon of Dijon mustard into every dal and curry).

Nothing daunted, he pushed on, bringing out his autobiography a couple of years ago and announcing several projects.

He was overseeing the completion of The White Countess, a period piece set in Shanghai, in London when he was taken to hospital for what seemed like a minor complaint of a severe stomach ache.

Abdominal ulcers were detected but the doctors at St Mary's Paddington appeared confident that he would be able to go home in a few days.

Three days later he was dead. Ismail Merchant was the film-crazy Bombay boy who left an indelible impression on world cinema. As Philip French touchingly remarked in The Observer, "he led people to believe that chutzpah was a Hindi or Urdu word".