When the stories about Harvey Weinstein’s abusive behaviour began to pour out of the Hollywood closet, they stirred up painful memories for actor turned novelist Carol Drinkwater – so painful it has taken her four decades to speak out about them.
In an emotional Facebook post last week she wrote about being “very badly damaged in my 20s by a director as famous as HW, more so. It took me years to get over it ... I lost a mighty role because I would not play along, would not sleep with the director in question.”
It was the first time Drinkwater had mentioned the assault in public, and she stopped short of naming her abuser – “even though he is dead, I still do not say his name”. But the clues are there in her latest novel, The Lost Girl, in which wannabe starlet Marguerite is raped by a famous director with a Greek-sounding surname.
The damage to Marguerite is devastating and permanent. Looking back in her old age, she remarks: “Today, if he behaved towards a budding young actress with such disrespect, she would bloody well take him to court.” But the Weinstein revelations have shown that Marguerite is wrong, believes Drinkwater: shame and secrecy are still rife in the film industry, and that is why she has finally decided the time has come to tell her full story.
She was not long out of drama school, with one minor film role to her name, as a nurse in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, when she was invited to take a screen test for a major Hollywood movie.
It was an adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel The Last Tycoon, produced by Sam Spiegel, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter. But most exciting of all was the prospect of working with one of her biggest heroes, the Greek-American director Elia Kazan. By then in his 60s, Kazan was a pioneer of method acting who had made stars of Marlon Brando and James Dean through classics such as A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront and East of Eden.
Drinkwater, the convent-educated daughter of Anglo-Irish parents, was also method-trained, as a graduate of north London’s Drama Centre. So confident were Spiegel and Pinter that she was a shoo-in for the part of Kathleen, the troubled Englishwoman with whom studio chief Monroe Stahr becomes obsessed, that they involved her for months in the development of the character.
Her first encounter with Kazan was in Spiegel’s apartment, after which she was asked to go for a more formal meeting at his production office the following week. “I went on a Monday and was put in a private room. We started to do a little bit of the script and in no time he pushed me up against the wall. He pinned me there with his hands on either side of me, and pressed himself up against me hard, kissing my neck. I was completely freaked and didn’t know what was going on. My first thought was, is this method directing? It’s not Birmingham Rep. I tried to wriggle away from him and he said, ‘If you don’t show me passion, you can’t play this role’. We spent the morning with him pushing and pulling at me. He said, ‘OK, come in tomorrow’ and this went on for a week. Because I didn’t realise what was going on, I turned up like a good girl.”
The screen test itself was scheduled for the following week. “When I arrived, the studio was completely empty – a huge big black space.” She was waiting in the dressing room when there was a knock on the door. “He came in, threw me back on the sofa and started pulling at my clothes, forcibly trying to have sex with me.” She managed to shake him off by insisting she needed to concentrate on her lines, but went into the screen test “completely shaken”, only for the abuse to start again with the camera rolling. He whispered obscenities in her ear, she says, pushing her about in a way that couldn’t be seen by anyone else, however hard she tried to get their attention.
“I froze. I was like a wooden spoon. The cameraman must have been wondering where the hell they had found this girl because I could not act any more. At some point they said cut, finish. The lights went out and nobody said a word to me.” In the evening, Kazan phoned her at her flat and invited her to join him at the Connaught hotel. “I said, ‘I haven’t got the part, have I?’”
The next day Spiegel rang to console her about the screen test, which he said was the worst he had ever seen, and assured her he was going to destroy the film for the good of her career. Weeks later, he took her out to dinner and asked what had gone wrong. “I mentioned what had happened and I suppose he’d seen it more than a million times.” Almost most hurtful of all was Spiegel’s revelation that, before the screen test, Kazan had told him: “’She hasn’t got the sang-froid for Hollywood. I’ll prove it to you.’ It wasn’t just that this man had humiliated and abused me, it was that the whole thing was some kind of a set-up of Kazan’s own making.”
Though her own experience stopped short of rape, it chimed in important ways with the Weinstein revelations. Part of the purpose of her Facebook post was to defend Matt Damon for his assertion that he had had no inkling of the producer’s behaviour. “I think it is perfectly possible to not be aware of what is going on,” she wrote. “These moments happen behind closed doors.”
The Lost Girl distances the episode by moving it to the south of France and shifting it back three decades to the 1940s. We first meet Marguerite in Paris in 2015, where she is spending a lonely retirement in a second-floor apartment with only her dog for company. The intervening years might have given her the stardom she so badly wanted, but they have not enabled her to overcome her fear of intimacy.
Drinkwater, too, has gone on to have a successful career, though she never did get to Hollywood. A couple of years after her casting-couch misadventure, she landed the role of James Herriot’s wife in the long-running TV serial All Creatures Great and Small, since when she has had numerous film and TV roles.
Her second career as a writer has produced a stream of popular fiction and nonfiction, beginning in 1985 with a children’s novel, The Haunted School, which was made into a film and an award-winning TV mini-series, with Drinkwater herself playing a young 19th-century schoolteacher struggling to set up a school in the Australian outback.
She and her TV producer husband Michel Noll now live in France, dividing their time between Paris and an olive farm in Provence, where The Lost Girl is partly set. Telling Marguerite’s story, she says, is one of the hardest things she has ever done: “I would weep and weep when I was writing it.” The only other challenge that has proved anywhere near as painful was writing about miscarrying a baby and discovering she was unable to carry a child to term, in the second of a series of memoirs, The Olive Season, published in 2003.
She is wary about being seen as jumping on the Weinstein bandwagon, and is visibly distressed as she recounts the events of 40 years ago, saying it took years to get over the “shame, pain, guilt about my body causing such a reaction in a man, about being described as ‘voluptuous’ as though I was responsible for it and used it in some way I did not understand. I believed I had failed, let myself down, ruined my career.”
The former model Ingrid Boulting went on to land the part of Kathleen in The Last Tycoon opposite Robert De Niro, and the film was a flop. In his autobiography, published in the 1980s, Kazan recalled discussing it with Pinter nine years later. “I … told him that the problem with our film had been the love story – in other words, his script. He disagreed, absolutely; he said the film had only one flaw, Ingrid Boulting. That night, Sam agreed.”
For Drinkwater, the anecdote resurrected yet again the spectre of what happened and what might have been. Only now does she reluctantly feel ready to face her demons, “because it’s important that people realise this has been going on for a long time. This story goes very deep.”