Edge of Midnight: The Life of John Schlesinger
by William J. Mann
Billboard Books. 628 pages, $27.95
AS RESEARCH for Edge of Midnight: The Life of John Schlesinger, author William J. Mann befriended the famed film director and became his documentarian during the last two years of Schlesinger’s life as a stroke patient in Palm Springs. As a result, there is a loose, conversational tone to the book that places it somewhere between biography and memoir. The effect makes for a pleasurable read—easy, chatty, and filled with incident. You feel you know John Schlesinger when this book is over.
Schlesinger grew up the son of a dentist in London. Amid middle-class respectability, he felt the twinge of being different that marks the childhood of so many gay boys. He never apologized for or sensationalized his homosexuality but courageously integrated it into his life and later into his films. He stood out at theatrical performances at Oxford, where he also discovered the pleasures of noncommittal sex and fast-burning affairs. He showed promise as a documentary filmmaker with the BBC, then joined the ranks of talented young Englishmen such as Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson, and Karl Reisz, making interesting movies on a shoestring. Their work in the early 60’s came to be known as the British New Wave, a rebellious genre filled with narrow row houses, industrial smokestacks, and working-class angst.
Mann, the author of two previous Hollywood histories, 1999’s Wisecracker: The Life and Times of William Haines and 2002’s Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969, charts Schlesinger’s rise among his compatriots, offering an assessment of their competitive ambitions. Schlesinger’s 1963 Billy Liar has become a minor classic, capturing the fantasy life of a peon living in a bleak world. Schlesinger invests the film with such dry-eyed warmth that it circumvents sentimentality to achieve a rare humanity. The merits of his breakthrough hit about swinging London, 1965’s Darling, will be debated for as long as there are movies. Mann appears ambivalent, highlighting the obviousness of Darling’s message and its flaws in technique while praising its writing, directing, and entertainment value, concluding that it’s “a fascinating document of a period.” Malcolm, a photographer played by Schlesinger’s friend Roland Curram, is the first well-adjusted homosexual in modern British cinema. The decadence of his situation looks quaint today, and Schlesinger grew to abhor the film, but Mann remains awestruck by Julie Christie’s mesmerizing performance.
Schlesinger never repeated himself, insuring that his dossier would become a patchwork of genres and media. He stumbled with his first color Hollywood picture, the languid idyll Far From the Madding Crowd. His next movie, 1969’s Midnight Cowboy, should by all logic age badly. Derelict street people are no longer a novelty in this post-Reaganomics world of ours, yet even now we feel Schlesinger’s quiet rage at what he saw of America’s dispossessed in New York City. The performances of Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman offer an electric jolt with each viewing: their love story is neither sexual nor platonic, but something more emotionally transcendent. It seems no coincidence that the making of Midnight Cowboy coincided with Schlesinger’s meeting of Michael Childers, the handsome and bright UCLA film student who would become his life partner.
Schlesinger’s reputation has suffered considerably since his career peak with Midnight Cowboy. There was Sunday, Bloody Sunday in 1971, which I believe Mann over-praises as Schlesinger’s masterpiece. This story of a gay man, a straight woman, and the bisexual man they both love caused quite the fuss at the time, and people are still talking about that close-up kiss between Peter Finch and Murray Head. Schlesinger maintained that the film was autobiographical, and Mann scored a coup in getting an interview with John Steiner, the elusive pre-Childers lover who inspired Head’s character. The next major film, 1975’s The Day of the Locust, is intermittently dazzling and drab, but always evocative of the underbelly of 1930’s Hollywood. Again, Schlesinger drew easy symbolic references to decay and spiritual emptiness, earning him the nickname “John Sledgehammer.” The overlong Yanks with Richard Gere and Vanessa Redgrave is frankly dull, and what was he thinking with Honky Tonk Freeway?
The generally downward spiral was interrupted with promising updrafts such as Marathon Man with Dustin Hoffman, The Falcon and the Snowman with Sean Penn, An Englishman Abroad, and the eccentric Cold Comfort Farm. But Schlesinger never regained his pre-eminent status among directors. He moved to television and opera with occasional success, highlighted by stagings of The Tales of Hoffmann with Placido Domingo, Der Rosenkavalier with Kiri Te Kanawa, and a startlingly good small-screen treatment of Separate Tables with his Far From the Madding Crowd stars Julie Christie and Alan Bates. Still, the slide continued from the Santeria inspired The Believers, to the Melanie Griffith (!) thriller Pacific Heights, to the exploitative Sally Field revenge drama Eye for an Eye. Schlesinger hit bottom at the end with The Next Best Thing. Even his loyalists had difficulty swallowing Rupert Everett as a gay man who drunkenly impregnates Madonna who then hooks up with Benjamin Bratt for a grotesque lavender hybrid of Jules and Jim and Kramer vs. Kramer!
Schlesinger loved to direct and guided several actresses to their best work. He counted many among his extended family, yet he frequently preferred exclusively homosocial gatherings. He didn’t just love men physically; he loved their minds, their humor, and the easy camaraderie of their company. If he had a capacity for misogyny, it did not reveal itself readily. Edge of Midnight is filled with one actress (and actor) after another offering paeans to Schlesinger’s talent, wit, and heart. “I just love him,” said Julie Christie between tears during one of their last meetings, “always have.” Eileen Atkins cherished their visit to a “transsexual boutique” in search of “huge wobbly tits.” Glenda Jackson was captivated by his insecurity.
Mann employs a neat framing device in Edge of Midnight. He begins the chapters with a relevant anecdote from the “present,” from his time with Childers, nurse Maureen Danson, and a frail Schlesinger. The bulk of each chapter then takes up wherever the last one left off. The choice is not disorienting but cinematic and personalizing. When Edge of Midnight is over, you may feel like you’ve passed some time under the Palm Springs sun, absorbing both its light and the remembrances of a singular man.
Matthew Kennedy’s most recent book is Edmund Goulding’s Dark Victory: Hollywood’s Genius Bad Boy (Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2004).
