The Story of James Jones: From Here to His Family

PARIS —  Gathered around the dinner table in their well-appointed Parisian apartment, the Willis family is a study in domestic tranquillity. Over the soup course, teenage daughter Channe soon shatters the peace as she blithely drops the bombshell she’s been waiting all evening to ask: Can her weird male classmate sleep over?

Where is he going to sleep? asks her mother.

How about Billy’s room? she chirps back questioningly.

“What are you, nuts?” explodes Billy, her adopted French brother, in mid-slurp.

Roaring with laughter, Kris Kristofferson, as the famous writer Bill Willis (in reality, author James Jones), tilts back dangerously in his precious antique chair. Shooting her husband a murderous look, Marcella Willis, played by Barbara Hershey, barks out sharply: “Watch out for my Louis Treize chair, Bill! We still haven’t paid for the repairs on the one your drunken jerk of a friend broke.”

“Perfect. The more you tip it the better; that’ll really get her angry,” says director James Ivory with barely repressed relish. “But, Billy, you sound too much like an American teenager. Maybe something more deadpan would work better.”

Once again, those connoisseurs of culture clash, Ivory and his producer-partner Ismail Merchant, are tracking one of their most complex and rewarding quarries, rambunctious Americans in Paris. Instead of Thomas Jefferson dazzling the court of Louis XVI, this time around the filmmakers are capturing the all-night poker games and boisterous family life of novelist James Jones during the ‘60s and ‘70s for the film “A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries,” which opens today.

During nearly two decades in Paris, Gloria and James Jones, the author of “From Here to Eternity” and “The Thin Red Line,” became the self-ordained keepers of the hell-raising artistic flame lighted by Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway and other diners at the movable feast. Writers and painters, poets, film stars and the inevitable poseurs tumbled through the apartment on the Ile St. Louis behind Notre Dame cathedral in a stream as free-flowing as the alcohol that lubricated the fabled soires.

In the film, the picture of James Jones is a revelation. Says Kristofferson: “I always had the image of Jones as a Hemingway wannabe, a very gruff, manly man. But where Hemingway thumped on his chest a lot, this guy was just the opposite. He was very compassionate, very fair, and something that Hemingway never became, which was a good father.”

If the film is the portrait of the artist as a family man, the fact that Jones/Willis is a renowned author and friend of the literati is almost incidental. Very little of the Joneses’ glamorous side appears in the film and still less, mercifully, of the Famous Writer laboring earnestly, and less than cinematically, over his trusty Underwood. Here the story stays clearly focused on family dynamics, particularly the close relationship Willis enjoys with his daughter Channe, played as a teenager by Leelee Sobieski.

In one hilarious scene, the parents take Channe out to dinner in a fancy restaurant, order champagne to toast the arrival of her first menstrual period, then launch into a frank discussion about sex and whether she should wear a bra, to the intense embarrassment of brother Billy, played by Jesse Radford.

A couple of years later, back in the States, Willis matter of factly questions his daughter and her high school boyfriend about whether they’re sleeping together yet. When Channe says that they are, Dad responds, “I don’t want you kids doing it in cars. Especially not my car. I’d rather have you sleeping together under my own roof.”

“He was a very nonjudgmental guy,” says Kristofferson, with a bemused grin.

Compared to the bitter battles Merchant and Ivory had with the artist’s heirs over “Surviving Picasso” and the controversy surrounding Jefferson’s slave mistress in “Jefferson in Paris,” the genesis of “A Soldier’s Daughter” was as smooth as James Jones’ favorite bourbon. Kaylie Jones, the author’s daughter who wrote the autobiographical novel the film is based on, worked closely on a script co-written by Ivory and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, a partner on previous Merchant Ivory productions.

Gloria Jones, now in her 70s and living on Long Island, volunteered a vivid portrait of her husband. “What stood out was his inextinguishable joie de vivre,” Kristofferson recalls. “When Gloria treated him to his first oyster in Paris, he ate 40.”

Casting proved more problematic, with Nick Nolte, who played Jefferson in “Jefferson in Paris,” pulling out of the Willis part, ironically enough, to film James Jones’ novel “The Thin Red Line,” directed by Terrence Malick. After a hasty round of actor interviews and rows over money that led Merchant to complain indignantly that “agents and managers are terrorists,” the filmmakers offered Kristofferson the author’s role.

If Merchant and Ivory were forced to jump hoops for the cast they wanted, they led a charmed life with locations. When the owners of a photogenic brasserie on the Ile St. Louis refused permission to film there, Merchant put into gear his formidable talent for persuasion, one that leaves no arm untwisted. What if, in addition to a fee, we were to offer you a holiday in India at our expense, he asked the reluctant proprietors. After a day mulling over this extraordinary offer, they accepted.

Young Whirlwinds ‘Just Act Normally’

For the makers of “Howards End,” “The Remains of the Day” and other genteel costume dramas, the new film marks a plunge into uncharted territory of comedy and children. Not that Merchant and Ivory are making “The Cosbys Go to Paris,” but “A Soldier’s Daughter” mines its share of the awkward lies, relentless teasing, forgiven betrayals and parent-child firestorms of family life.

With preteen children in key roles, Ivory faced a novel challenge: harnessing the young whirlwind he’d reaped for his cast.

“Everyone warned me that this was going to be the hardest movie I’ve ever made,” acknowledges the director, the din of screaming kids set loose at lunchtime still echoing in his ears. “It has been hard, but it’s been such fun, hellish as they are sometimes. For two minutes they love each other and the next two minutes, they’re beating each other up or making faces while the others are trying to act--no different in fact from some adult actors I’ve known,” Ivory quips.

“What’s strange is to see kids who act cute and adorable because that’s the way they think children act. ‘You don’t need to act like a child,’ I tell them. ‘You are a child. Just act normally.’ ”

Part of the film’s appeal was the opportunity for the director to revive memories of staying in Paris in the ‘60s with close American friends and their children. Ultimately, his friends, like the Willis family, moved back to the States.

“These are worlds I’ve lived in and have many memories from and friendships within. They’re not worlds I’ve known only through books.”

Ivory also saw himself reflected in Francis, hands-down the funniest, most iconoclastic character in the story. An effeminate and thoroughly endearing oddball who befriends Channe in their privileged, bilingual school, Francis acts out operas, hauls her off to see “Salom” with his divorced, existentialist mom, serenades the class with an aria and scorns teachers and grades on principle.

“He’s the adolescent misfit who’s really cleverer than people think,” Ivory says. “I was like that, though I may not have been all that clever.”

French, as it occasionally pops up in the film’s subtitled dialogue, becomes a secret language, binding young Channe closer to Billy and to Candida, the maid and surrogate mother. Hopeless in French, Bill and Marcella are excluded. Not that they fret much.

Playing pinball in a workingman’s brasserie like a couple of American teenagers, Bill tells Channe he doesn’t want his kids to grow up to be “Eurotrash brats who don’t know who the hell they are” as he gamely tries to justify the move home. Back in the States, however, home is no place like home. Instead of finding their way, Channe and Billy become high school pariahs, treated more as foreigners than they ever were in Paris.

His wife matches him drink for drink, fight for fight and cuss word for cuss word.

When Marcella learns that the drill sergeant of a French elementary school teacher has been locking her son in the classroom closet for his mistakes, she races down to the school at recess, hurls sand in the teacher’s face and storms out trailing her children behind her.

“Marcella’s a kid herself,” Hershey observes. “Throwing sand in the teacher’s face is not exactly an adult illustration of how to behave. When we shot it, we all squealed and ran away like scared kids.”

Asked how Ivory helped flesh out her performance, Hershey rolls her eyes and declines with a coy smile. “The best examples are unprintable,” she says, allowing however that they drew on Gloria Jones’ well-honed flair for foul language. In one legendary incident, Gloria once treated a Time magazine critic to a hurricane-force tongue-lashing for an objectionable article, then topped him off with a roundhouse punch.

If Hershey sees Marcella as a jealously protective hell-cat, she certainly dresses the feral part in the film, dolled up in bohemian glamour in her leopard prints, snakeskin purse and wraparound shades. Yet in one scene, where Billy’s birth mother signs her son over to the Willises for adoption, Marcella appears drastically transformed, stiff and proper in sober brown dress and dainty pearl necklace, though with enough scarlet lipstick to stop a train.

“It’s the kind of dress that says I’m not really a drinking, smoking, poker-playing, rumba-dancing wild woman, I’m a responsible parent,” Hershey jokes.