BEGINNINGS
James Clavell was born in Sydney, Australia, on Oct. 10, 1924, the son of Sir Richard Charles and Eileen (Lady Ross) Clavell. He is a direct descendant of Walterus de Claville, a Norman adventurer who landed at Hastings, England with William the Conqueror in 1066. Clavell’s father was a Captain in the Royal Navy whose duty carried his family to a succession of Commonwealth port cities (among them, Hong Kong). After an education at secondary schools in England, he joined the Royal Artillery regiment in 1941. He was captured by the Japanese in Java in 1942 and spent the next three years on prisoner-of-war camps (chiefly at Changi, outside Singapore) where conditions were so harsh that only 10,000 of the 150,000 prisoners survived. He had decided on a military career when he returned to England as a captain in 1945, but a motorcycle accident, which left him lame in one leg, resulted in a disability discharge.
A NEW CAREER
In 1946-47 Clavell attended the University of Birmingham, preparing for a career in law or engineering, but after meeting his future wife, April Stride, an actress, he decided to become a film director. During the next few years he worked as a film distributer and made television pilots. In 1952 Clavell married April Stride (by whom he has two daughters, Michaela and Holly), and the couple immigrated to the United States in 1953 (becoming naturalized citizens in 1963). After some film production experience in New York City, Clavell went to Hollywood where he wrote and produced his first screenplay, The Fly (20th Century-Fox, 1958), a science fiction thriller. Following the success of the film (it made $4,000,000), other writing assignments came in rapid succession. He wrote Watusi (MGM, 1959), a remarkable remake of King Solomon’s Mines, and received a Screen Writers award for his collaboration on the screenplay for The Great Escape (United Artists, 1963), an account of Allied prisoners from a German POW camp during World War II. He was also coauthor of screenplays for 633 Squadron (United Artists, 1968), a World War II thriller, and The Satan Bug (United Artists, 1965), a science fiction film. From the beginning, however, Clavell aimed at the triple role of writer, director, and producer because he knew that “if you’re only a director or writer you have to explain things to the producer rather than say, ‘Do it.’” His first accomplishment in this role was Five Gates To Hell (Twentieth Century-Fox, 1959), a low-budget, high-box office melodrama about beleaguered medics in the French phase of the war in Indochina. In that instance , as Howard Thompson observed in the New York Times (July 2, 1959), Clavell made himself “a man to watch” by his moving treatment of material “that could easily have been outright trash.”
ONWARD AND UPWARD
As writer-director-producer, Clavell next made Walk Like A Dragon (Paramount, 1960), an offbeat Western; Where’s Jack (Paramount, 1966), about the career of an eighteenth-century highwayman (Jack Sheppard); and To Sir With Love (Columbia, 1967), based on the E. R. Brainwaite’s autobiographical novel about a teacher from British Guiana (Sidney Poitier) who wins the hearts of his problem students in a tough secondary school in London’s East End. Clavell and Poitier gambeled on the financial success of the film, contracting for percentages of the profits instead of large salaries. Their gamble paid off when the film (made for $625,000) returned $15,000,000 — an unusual gross for “a positive story,” as Clavell described the film. After the huge success of To Sir With Love, he hit another home run with The Last Valley (ABC Films, 1971), a film dealing with the Thirty Years War in Europe.
JOSS
Two chance factors had turned Clavell to novel writing. One was a Hollywood screenwriters’ strike that left him with some free time in 1960. Another was a sudden, inexplicable impulse to talk about his Chingi experience, previously “bottled up” inside him. At his wife’s urging, he began writing a novel about the struggle for power and survival in Changi, using himself as the model for one of the principle characters, British Flight Lieutenant Peter Marlowe, who has been educated to think that “trade” is reprehensible. The other (the title character) is Marlowe’s moral opposite, a pragmatic American Corporal who is able and willing to wheel and deal. The unusual friendship that develops between the two men and the repercussions of that friendship constitute the core of the story. When the novel, King Rat (Little, Brown Publishers, 1962), was published, reviewers took note of its power, sharp writing edge, tension of plot, fascinating narrative detail, and provocative analysis of right and wrong. He sold the screen rights and King Rat (Columbia, 1965) was made into a movie.
THE WRITER
In 1963, Clavell lived with his family in Hong Kong while he began writing his second novel Tai-Pan (Atheneum Publishers, 1966) which takes place in Hong King immediately after the ceding of the island to the British in 1841 (a period of opium dealing, trade rivalries, and the forging of a commercial empire). A highly plotted novel involving typhoons and piracy, action and sex, Tai-Pan, proved an enormously popular work, selling more than two million copies. The novel’s principle character, Dirk Struan, the first of the tai-pans (supreme leader) of the Noble House, the oldest and most important trading house in Hong Kong. Undaunted by obtuse and apathetic politicians back in England and by multiple enemies in Hong Kong, in China, and on the high seas, Struan builds the Noble House on barren Hong Kong as a future base for power in the Far East. Critics applauded the novels “energy and scope;” Time Magazine (June 17, 1966) referred to Tai-Pan as “a belly-gutting, godrotting typhoon of a book” (referencing the dreadful language of the time-period).
Clavell’s next novel, Shogun (Atheneumm Publishers, 1975), came from a sentence he spotted in his nine-year-old daughter’s history text: “In 1600 an Englishman named Will Adams went to Japan and became a samurai.” That tiny suggestion triggered a year’s research in the British Museum, visits to Japan, an three years in re-creating on paper a Japanese feudal culture encompassing all stratta of society as well as such extraneous elements as British colonials, Portuguese traders, Jesuit missionaries, and competing Japanese warlords. In the novel, the hero, John Blackthorn, is transformed from a lowly Christian “barbarian” captive into a true samurai (by Japanese standards, a man of strength, honor, and courage). As in Tai-Pan, the story is told through numerous fast-moving plots, violent action, romance (between Blackthorne and Lady Mariko, his appointed tutor), and assorted hair-raising disasters. The critical response of this ambitious undertaking is mirrored by the New Youk Times review (June 22, 1975): “Clavell has a gift. It may be something that can’t be taught or earned. He breathes narrative…Yet (Shogun is) not only something that you read–you live it. The imagination is possessed by Blackthorne, Toranoga, and medieval Japan…” The novel was a publishing phenomenon, with sales exceeding seven million. In September 1980, NBC presented it’s five-part, twelve-hour television adaptation (starring Richard Chamberlain) to a mini-series audience of 130 million (second only to that which saw Roots in 1977).
In 1981, Clavell published Noble House (Delacorte, 1981), the massive sequel to Tai-Pan. Of this work, the Chicago Tribune (April 12, 1981) said: “What isn’t in this novel, about which only terms like colossal, gigantic, titantic, incredible, unbelievable, gargantuan, are probably descriptive?” With it’s thirteen criss-crossing plots, teeming cast of characters, wealth of cultural details, and catalog of adventures and catastrophes, Noble House takes place in the short space of ten days in August 1963. It’s hero, Ian Struan Dunross, the twelfth tai-pan in a direct line from Dirk Struan, battles to save the company, now threatened with financial collapse by the machinations of Quillan Gornt (descendant of Tyler Brock) and by two American big-business manipulators. Intertwined with that warp of international finance is a story of worldwide political espionage. The Washington Post (May 5, 1981) wrote: “…storytelling done with dase and panache and as a rousing read it looms above most of the commercial pap published today.” In 1988, Noble House aired on NBC as a four-part, eight-hour mini-series starring Pierce Brosnan as Ian Dunross and John Rhys-Davies as Quillan Gornt.
Another work Clavell published that same year was The Children’s Story (Delacorte/Eleanor Friede, 1981) as “a gift to my adopted land.” The story originated almost twenty years previously, out of a conversation with his daughter, Michaela, who was then six, in which it became clear that she did not understand the meaning of the Pledge of Allegiance she recited at school. Set in an America that has been conquered by authoritarian enemy, it tells of a new teacher taking over a classroom and seducing the students from their allegiance to the flag, religion, and parents. When it first appeared, as an article in Ladies Home Journal, “The Children’s Story” drew a barrage of angry letters from readers who misconstrued it to be propaganda against God and country. Delacorte Press announced the publication of the story in book form with a publicity campaign calculated to avert a repitition of misunderstanding. In one stage of the campaign, James and April had dinner at the White House with President and Mrs. Ronald Reagan and presented them with a copy of the book.
Whirlwind (William Morrow & Company, 1986) was Clavell’s fifth novel in the “Asian Saga.” Set in Iran during the 24 days immediately following the fall of the Shah in 1979, it is the story of a British Helicopter company, secretly controlled by the Noble House in Hong Kong. The civil war that has resulted from the life-and-death struggle of rival Arab factions leaves a vast unanswered question: Who is friend and who is foe? The one thing known by all is the fanatical hatred of foreigners (especially Americans and British) that exists on all sides. For Andrew Gavallan, owner of S-G Helicopters, to leave Iran will result in financial ruin and forever end any chance of once again gaining control of the Noble House (which has been corrupted by the new tai-pan, Linbar Struan, who assumed power under questionable circumstances after the mysterious “accidental” death of David MacStruan — cousin to Ian Dunross and appointed by him to succeed him as tai-pan). Throughout this epic tale of war and peace, is a multi-plotted story involving assassins, spies, Khans, commandos, the KGB, bazaaris, Kash’kai tribesmen, mullahs, and the political and religious fanatics who relentlessly encroach upon the lives of the American, British, French, German, and Finnish pilots who find their lives caught in an uncertain balance of power and religious fanaticism. Sir Ian Dunross makes a cameo appearance as well.
Clavell’s last work, Gai-Jin (Delacourte, 1993), takes us back to Japan. It is 1862 and Malcolm Struan, grandson of the “green-eyed devil” himself, has become the tai-pan of the Noble House after the death of his father, Culum. The Japans are newly opened to foreigners (gai-jin) who are in constant conflict with each other as well as a nation that is on the verge of civil war. The struggle for power within and without the Noble House continues with the emergence of the fabled “Hag” Struan and the constant plotting of Struan’s archrival Tyler Brock. Of this epic, The New York Times (date unknown): “A grand historical perspective that makes us feel we’re understanding how today’s Japan came into being…absorbing…full of rich characters and complicated action.”
EPITAPH
James Clavell died on Sept. 6, 1994 in Vevey, Switzerland. In life he was a large man, over six feet tall, solidly built, with a thick chest and broad shoulders, ruddy complexion, soft eyes, and a healthy mane of grey hair. Interviewers have described him variously as exuding self-control and an almost “wheeler-dealer” self-assurance and as a gentle-voiced and deferential, with “a warm, friendly face that lights up when he smiles, which is often.” Jean Bernkoph, his editor at Delacorte on Noble House said he “was a dream to work with.” Clavell regularly wrote five pages a day on a manual portable typewriter. He never finished a day’s work without “knowing what’s going to happen tomorrow,” leaving himself at least a half page for that purpose. He never forgot his adoring fans, ever aware that it was they (us) who made him what he was: A GREAT WRITER and more. The dedication in his last published work, Gai-Jin, read:
“This novel is for you, whoever you are, with deep appreciation — for without you, the writer part of me would not exist…”
I’ve been a fan of Saturday Night Live since the first episodes aired in the fall of 1975. NBC has recently released the first season on DVD and I can’t wait to get my hands on them. Last year the local NBC affiliate in Albuquerque started airing the early episodes on Sunday in the wee-morning hours. I watched them and the memories surround me with a Baskerville-like thickness. The original “Not Ready For Primetime Players” had reentered my life like long lost friends. Who can forget Chase’s prat-falls; Belushi’s Beethoven-Ray Charles skits; Curtain’s “Joan Face” interviewing Akroyd’s “Irwin Mainway;” Murray’s lovable, lounge singer, Nick Winters; Newman’s “Rosalyn Carter;” Radner’s “Roseanne Roseannadanna;” Morris’ convict singing “I’m gonna grab me a shotgun and kill all the whities I see”…and the others, Don Pardo, Father Guido Sarducci, Paul Schafer, Al Frankin, Henson’s Muppets and Mr. Bill! I miss those Saturday nights hanging out with friends and watching SNL–a ritual in those days. 1975-1979 was truly SNL’s golden age! Although I still enjoy the show after three decades, it will never occupy the space in my heart that it did in those early years. Thanks guys!
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