‘Harvey Weinstein’s Hollywood hero tried to rape me’

There is an old adage that ‘like attracts like’. It came to mind last Saturday when I saw a photograph of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein in this newspaper.

He was being escorted into a police station in New York to be charged with rape. He was carrying three books. One of them was a biography of the Oscar-winning film director, Elia Kazan.

I was fascinated by this choice of reading material. Perhaps Weinstein admired Kazan — or might he even see a similarity to his own story?

Harvey Weinstein was being escorted into a police station in New York to be charged with rape. He was carrying three books. One of them was a biography of the Oscar-winning film director, Elia Kazan

Kazan died in 2003 but in his heyday he was one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. He won the Oscar for Best Director twice and was awarded a lifetime achievement Oscar in 1999. He made stars of James Dean, Warren Beatty and Marlon Brando, among others.

Like Weinstein, he was a force to be reckoned with. His films were both box office successes and critically acclaimed. Everybody wanted to work with him.

I was first introduced to Kazan in 1975. He was in his mid-60s — I was 26.

Sam Spiegel [whose previous films included Bridge Over The River Kwai and Lawrence Of Arabia] was producing a film adaptation of Scott Fitzgerald’s final novel, The Last Tycoon, an unfinished work about a Holly-wood producer. The screenplay was written by the playwright Harold Pinter.

Like many films, it had been through several incarnations: Mike Nichols was going to direct, Dustin Hoffman was to play the male lead (they had done The Graduate together), but both dropped out.

I met Spiegel in 1974 when I was invited by a London casting director to his offices to audition for the female lead.

Both Spiegel and Pinter were present and keen for me to be given the part, but nothing could be signed until the director was on board.

Some months later, I received a call at my London flat about three in the morning from Spiegel in Hollywood to tell me that Kazan had accepted the job.

Kazan was my hero. I was four years out of drama school. These names were like constellations from another planet. I was an innocent.

I was ambitious, but I was naive. I had yet to discover just how naive.

Kazan, whose nickname was ‘Gadge’, flew into London with Spiegel and I was summoned to meet them at the latter’s luxurious apartment in the Grosvenor House Hotel.

We, along with Pinter, sat in a room more capacious than my entire Kentish Town flat.

By this stage I had got to know both Spiegel and Pinter reasonably well because Sam had requested that Harold work with me on the script so that when Kazan got to town I would already be well-versed in the material. The role involved at least one long monologue.

It was a challenging part, but I was ideal for it and both Pinter and Spiegel wanted me. Even so, they said they would respect the decision of their director.

Kazan requested that he and I work together for a week on the script and then I was to be screen-tested, along with one other actress. By this stage, there were no other contenders.

As I remember it, and it is a long time ago, there was no one else at Spiegel’s Dover Street offices in Mayfair when I arrived bright and early on the Monday morning.

Kazan showed me through into a large room with desk and chairs. The windows faced the street. The curtains were drawn closed. I was nervous, of course.

This was my Big Break. My biggest movie role until then had been two lines as a nurse in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.

Hollywood was on the horizon. By this stage, Robert De Niro, the brightest star of the new boys on the Hollywood block, had been contracted for the principal male role. I was about to step into the cream of Hollywood Society, or so I had been led to believe.

However, Kazan had other ideas.

I stood in the centre of the room, gripping my much perused script.

‘You know the lines?’ Kazan barked at me.

I nodded. I knew them backwards.

What happened from hereon was repeated throughout the week.

Every day, I was called to that room. Every day I was alone for four to five hours with Kazan who bullied, threatened, harassed and attempted to have sex with me.

I was shoved up against the wall by Kazan who forced himself on me, kissing my neck, laying his hands over my body, shoving his erection hard against me while saying: ‘You want this role? You think you have the passion for it? Show me passion. I want passion. Come on, baby, give it to me.’

The first morning, I was lost, confused. This man and his films had won 21 Oscars.

He was famous for his ability to draw the truth out of the actors who filmed with him — using Method Acting [a technique in which actors aspire to complete emotional identification with a part] he learnt from the pioneer Lee Strasberg in New York.

I had studied for three years in London at Drama Centre, where the students were taught along very similar lines.

Was Kazan attempting to fire up my passion, my sexual energies, to draw a better performance out of me? Every day, going back into that room got harder.

Kazan died in 2003 but in his heyday he was one of the most powerful men in Hollywood

Kazan died in 2003 but in his heyday he was one of the most powerful men in Hollywood

Looking back, in the light of all I know now about the Casting Couch, the recent #MeToo movement and Harvey Weinstein’s alleged sexual misconduct, it seems unlikely that I could have been so naive.

But I was.

I spent that week attempting to rehearse with Kazan while he used his director’s position to bully and attempt to seduce me. The effect was I became closed, defensive, far less giving of myself.

I pushed him away, but did not fight with him because I remained uncertain about whether or not this was his working method. After those taxing rehearsals were over, we parted company to reconvene the following week at Pinewood Studios for the screen-test.

I received a message from Spiegel to say that as De Niro could not be in London, Harold Pinter would play the principal male role in the scenes we were to shoot for the screen-test. I was encouraged, having worked with him over the past months.

Alone in my dressing room, going over my lines, I was perched on a chaise longue when I heard a knock on the door.

It was Kazan. He came in and, before I could stand up, he literally threw himself on me, pinning me under him and attempted to pull off my clothes and have sex with me. I fought him off though he was strong and growing violent.

‘I’ll see you out there,’ he said when I had finally released myself from him. The test itself was one of the most humiliating experiences I have lived through.

There were four of us on set, Pinter, Kazan, the cameraman and myself. Otherwise, it was a huge empty space. I was shaking like a leaf both with nerves and shock. Kazan announced that we would begin with the long monologue — which surprised the other two men. In the morning, they had warmed up with shorter scenes.

Throughout the afternoon as Kazan directed me, he would step up close to me and whisper in my ear: ‘I want to f*** you. You know that, don’t you?’

His behaviour was so confusing — the others couldn’t hear these comments — that, to save the day, I decided I must confide in Pinter who had crossed the sound stage and was sitting in a corner on his own.

While the camera and lights were being set up for the next shot and Kazan was talking to the cameraman, I made my way towards Pinter.

Kazan saw me and bawled out: ‘Where the f*** do you think you are going? Get back on your spot and don’t move till I give you permission to.’ I obeyed.

The screen-test was an unmitigated disaster. The three men left without a goodbye. I sat crying in my dressing room waiting for a driver to take me home.

That night, Kazan rang my flat. He wanted me to spend the night with him at the Connaught Hotel where he was staying.

I put the phone down on him.

Obviously, I was not given the role, nor was the other actress who had tested for it. It went to a model living in New York, a friend of Kazan’s. Sam Spiegel returned to London a couple of weeks later, by which time everybody else was in Hollywood in pre-production. He took me to dinner.

What the hell happened, he asked. Spiegel had destroyed my screen-test because he said it would be damaging for my future.

I spilled the beans and begged another test. He shook his head. His response has lived with me all my life.

‘Kazan didn’t believe you have the “sang froid” for Hollywood and he said he’d prove it.’

My self-esteem was wrecked. Not only had I spent two emotionally fraught weeks fending off a man I did not want to have sex with but I was now learning that his goal was not to sleep with me but to show the powers that be in Hollywood that I was weak. That his own choice for the role would be so much better.

Some months later, I received a letter from Spiegel telling me that the leading actress was a disaster.

Despite an all-star line-up, the film was a flop. Kazan never made another picture.

He wrote later that he, Spiegel and Pinter met up one more time in London and they agreed they ‘should have given the role to the English girl’ — me.

A heart-breaking experience.

Over the years, I have asked myself whether, if I had slept with Kazan, he would have given me the part. I think not. But if he had, where would my life have taken me?

Over the years, I have asked myself whether, if I had slept with Kazan, he would have given me the part. I think not. But if he had, where would my life have taken me?

Over the years, I have asked myself whether, if I had slept with Kazan, he would have given me the part. I think not. But if he had, where would my life have taken me?

Who can say? A short while later, I was offered to play Helen Herriot, the wife of a Yorkshire vet, for TV in All Creatures Great And Small, which took my career in a different direction.

I kept the Kazan experience to myself for decades, buried it, making sense of it while trying to rebuild my self-worth. The shame, the pain, went very deep.

The sexual trespass is sufficiently humiliating but what is worse, in my opinion, is the soul-shrivelling, the blame laid at any young actress’s door that she is lacking an ingredient, some essential quality, without which she is not entitled to success if she refuses the desires of the mogul man. Two years ago, I decided it was time to bury this ghost once and for all. I wrote my latest novel, The Lost Girl, recently published in paperback. It is the story of two female strangers who meet and share their private lives.

One of the women, Marguerite, is an ageing actress who was raped in her youth by a Hollywood mogul.

Those chapters are a thinly-disguised telling of my own story, except that I wasn’t raped because I resisted vigorously.

Weeks after the hardback of The Lost Girl was published, the Weinstein scandal broke and the #MeToo movement was born.

I no longer felt a need to hide behind fiction.

I had named Kazan for what he was, a man of power who used his position to belittle women for his own gratification.

Weinstein’s lawyer is reported to have said: ‘Harvey did not invent the casting couch.’

He certainly didn’t, but his shame is that, if all that has been alleged is true, he has used his power to perpetuate it, to humiliate and traumatise women whose only crime was that they wanted to work, that they dreamed of being part of the world of cinema and film-making.

Both Kazan and Weinstein have made women pay for their dreams with their bodies and emotional lives.

In April, the American comedian Bill Cosby was found guilty of drugging and sexually assaulting a younger woman. The prosecution called several other victims to the stand to recount their experiences. The prosecution for the case against Harvey Weinstein is intending to use the same approach.

It will be gruelling for those brave women to stand in a public court and disclose all they have suffered, but if it succeeds in getting a guilty man charged, it is justified.

Writing those scenes in The Lost Girl, even after all these years, was very painful. I wept at my desk, typing. (I am weeping now.)

I have no doubt that the Kazan experience damaged my career. Fortunately, I have also found expression through writing and that has been a huge boost to my confidence.

Weinstein, if found guilty, deserves the disgrace and fall from power that has and will continue to betide him.

If Kazan were alive today and facing similar charges, I know that I would find the sang froid to speak out against him.

It’s time to call time on this insidious side of our industry.

Carol Drinkwater is an award-winning actress and author. The Lost Girl was published by Penguin.

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