JOAN JULIET BUCK IN-CONVERSATION WITH WHIT STILLMAN

I suspected that Whit Stillman and Joan Juliet Buck would get along, so I brought them together for this Buffalo Zine cover story – in an issue dedicated to the art of copying, the cover itself was an homage to The Gentlewoman.

An hour before I’m due to meet the director WHIT STILLMAN to Skype the writer JOAN JULIET BUCK, my phone lights up with news of Karl Lagerfeld’s death. Strange to be in Paris today; stranger still to be about to call one of his inner circle,
the writer and editor whose wedding dress (‘a riding habit of antique mauve ottoman silk’, as Buck recalls in her memoir, The Price of Illusion) was personally designed by Lagerfeld in 1973. Still, she takes Stillman’s call; he who is a fellow ‘American in Paris’, but not one who has been exiled. At least, not recently.

As a public figure, Buck’s reputation is anchored around her controversial appointment as the first American editor-in-chief of Paris Vogue in 1994, a tenure that led to unprecedented sales before ending, seven years later, when was sent to rehab by Condé Nast for a drug addiction she didn’t actually have. Crafted from her current home of Rhinebeck, NY, Buck’s 2017 memoir told her own story as well as the stories of the privileged cast of characters of her life, from the starry orbit of her parents, to her later encounters with figures like Lagerfeld, Donald Sutherland and Eric Rothschild, none of whom would be out of place in a Whit Stillman film.

Stillman’s distinctly understated body of work – including ’90s classics Metropolitan, Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco – offers a brilliant, through-the-keyhole look at a hopelessly erudite generation and their confusion about their futures. But it was 2016’s Love & Friendship, a fast- talking Jane Austen adaptation, that saw Stillman triumphantly return to box office success. The film reunited Kate Beckinsale and Chloë Sevigny for the first time since Disco, and was the result of a painstaking process: both staying true to his source material, while adding enough of his own flair to make the world distinctly Stillmanian (as he puts it on his Twitter, the 18th century really does just keep getting better & better).

Both Buck and Stillman are at once true originals, and experts in the art of adaptation. Through their lifetimes of writing and constantly moving countries, they have the quality of insiders and outsiders: able to record and mirror the environments they’ve been brought up in, as well as adapt to whole new ones time after time. After all, they are both known for their hiatuses as well as their creations, having been somewhat shunned from their industries for a time (Buck’s 2011 profile of Alma al-Assad at Anna Wintour’s behest had her put under the Condé Nast ‘guillotine’ for good; when Disco didn’t make much money, Stillman says he was put in ‘director’s prison’). But more than anything, they’ve honed their voice in close-readings of interactions among their articulate peers: Buck has jotted down how those around her speak since a young age, while Stillman’s style of dialogue hums with the witty repartees and existential crises of a true Harvard man. As a neighbour wryly observes of Buck in The Price of Illusion, these are writers who ‘know how rich people talk’.

For Buck, who evidently holds a lot of affection for Stillman’s films, the anxieties they reveal in America’s young elite ring close to home. ‘I know those bitches!’, she exclaims of the character Kate Beckinsale plays in Disco, an outburst that confirms, as I suspected, that she was always the quiet, considered Chloë in own disco-dancing days. Even the first night Stillman and Buck met – and it would surprise no-one that their paths have crossed more than once over the decades – sounds like a scene in that film. When the Skype connects, they get straight to it: on disco dancing, country-hopping, and making material from your own life when that life is nowhere close to most people’s reality.

WHIT STILLMAN: I was threatening Claire to begin by talking to you about our first meeting so far as I know, which was my ascent into glamorous territory – the highest, the deepest into glamour I’ve ever been – and was thanks to Chloë Sevigny, actually. We were living in Paris then, on Quai de Béthune. I had made The Last Days of Disco with Chloë, and Anthony Haden-Guest was doing a book on celebrity and he wanted Chloë to be one of the subjects. So he was in Paris and he was going to come and talk to me, to ask me questions about Chloë, and then he said, ‘well can I bring my friend Joan Buck?’ And I said, ‘yes, delightful’. And then he said, ‘can Joan bring Diana Ross?’ And I said, ‘yes, absolutely bring Diana Ross!’ To have the three of you visit our apartment was a high point and it’s one of the two autographs I’ve ever gotten. I got Diana Ross’s autograph...

JOAN JULIET BUCK: But you didn’t get mine!

WHIT: I didn’t get yours then, but you know I’ll do that in the future, now that I’ve been reading your books.

JOAN: I remember that night very well. When you edit Vogue Paris all these people sort of think they know you better than they do, and Diana Ross had called from Norway because she was in some – not distress, but she was wanting to talk to a girlfriend and she was coming to Paris, and I kept thinking, but I don’t really know her, which is why I brought her to your dinner.

WHIT: Yes, then we went out to a restaurant nearby that Pierre le Tan told me was run by the former manager of the disco Le Palace. Did you ever know that disco?

JOAN: When I lived in London and I was married to John [Heilpern], we went to Paris once a week to go to parties at Le Palace, which was so much more democratic than Studio 54 because heterosexuals were allowed to have fun as well.

WHIT: Didn’t it have a restaurant also? Wasn’t it that one level was a restaurant and one level was…

JOAN: There was a thing they opened in 1981 called Le Privilège that had murals by Gérard Garouste. Karl [Lagerfeld] gave a Venetian party at Le Palace, and when Paloma Picasso got married the party was there. That whole gang was always there. Studio 54 always felt like a meat market for boys and if you were a girl, you felt very out of place and in the way, whereas Le Palace was just glorious. Do you dance a lot Whit? Because watching The Last Days of Disco, you’re really good at the whole thing about dancing.

WHIT: Well I like going out and dancing, but I don’t find the places... I’m not a member of Castel’s. Castel’s still goes on and I’m writing scenes for a mini- series, and I wrote a Castel’s scene which pleased a lot. I haven’t been lately, but I wrote a scene set there.

JOAN: When dad was making all these movies in Paris, they were always at Castel’s. I would come over with mum on a Friday night and we would go dancing on Friday and Saturday nights at Castel’s. And they would all get blind drunk. I would be in that awful little phone booth trying to call cabs at about two in the morning, because my father wouldn’t keep a chauffeur waiting. Yeah, I’d have to get everyone into the cabs.

WHIT: That’s a big change in Paris. It’s no longer a taxi desert.

JOAN: Ah, because of Uber?

WHIT: Well I was just looking at the pilot for The Cosmopolitans which we did in 2014. It ends with them, you know, dreading finding a cab after 2am on a Saturday night. And I realised that’s now completely out of date because of Uber.

JOAN: Also remember in Bitter Moon, the whole thing where they come out of Les Bains Douches and he gets run over. Do you remember that? The Polanski film. Claire, it’s an English publication so we can mention Polanski, right? [Claire laughs nervously]. Whit, I envy you living in Paris. How long have you been there? 20 years now?

WHIT: No, I haven’t. I was put into exile for about seven years. I was back in the States for seven years. And I used to cross paths with you occasionally, at Peggy Siegal’s dos. I think you sent a great New Year’s card, didn’t you?

JOAN: When I worked on my big desktop Mac, I had Adobe and would spend about a week making these splendid cards.

WHIT: They were fantastic.

JOAN: I wasted a lot of time with that, but I was good at it. And now on a Mac Air it’s just useless, I’m not going to spend a week putting together little images.

WHIT: And I think your memoir is the first time I’ve read about someone being thrilled on a movie set, because I only hear how bored everyone is and how tiresome it all is. But it seems that the Disney film you shot as a child [Greyfriars Bobby] was kind of a happy experience.

JOAN: It was the happiest experience of my life of course, I was eleven and my co-star was a dog... Wait, wait, aren’t your actors happy on your sets? What are you saying? [laughs]

WHIT: I don’t know, when you read about people shooting, they say how slow it is, and they prefer the theatre and all that kind of stuff.

JOAN: Oh, well, let’s just say I’ve always gotten the wrong end of the stick and that’s my charm.

WHIT: And also reading your book sort of confirmed a thesis I already have. People are always talking about the history of film in terms of the history of the studios, but if you delve into it, it’s always individuals. There’s always some individual, a group of individuals that are making things happen. And now I understand why there were all those Peter O’Toole films of a certain nature in the 1960s when I was going out to see these films. It was your father, Jules Buck, and Peter O’Toole.

JOAN: Making sure they had bad directors, yes.

WHIT: And some of them were always a little disappointing – they sounded like they were gonna be really good, but they were always a little bit disappointing.

JOAN: Exactly!

WHIT: They weren’t bad, but they just weren’t quite where they should be.

JOAN: No, what a beautiful insight.

WHIT: And your spelling, there’s a name in this memoir and it’s Peter Aut-oul... what was that about? Was that just your phonetical idea of how his name was spelt?

JOAN: After my parents left Hollywood because of Joseph McCarthy, we lived in Paris and whoever was taking care of me would take me to see American movies that were usually dubbed into French. So for me, Henry Fonda was Henri Fonda [‘Enree Fonda]. And I desperately missed Paris when we moved to London. I just hoped that I would meet French people. So when dad brings this guy home called Peter O’Toole, I got really excited because his surname sounded French, phonetically. I was nine years old. I’m still looking for French people. I don’t even like them that much, but I’m always looking for them.

WHIT: Oh, come on. I mean maybe in your world there were nasty ones, but there are a lot of really sweet ones.

JOAN: Listen, my closest friends are French, or English. It’s weird, I don’t quite understand Americans, so I have to watch your movies to understand how Americans think, because it’s alien.

WHIT: It’s odd because I’m the total Yank, the American rube, who is totally not adapted in any way to always living abroad, and I’m living over here! But you, who really grew up in a sensational expat milieu in France, Ireland, and London, you’re in New York. Although New York, they say, is the compromise between the continents.

JOAN: That’s exactly what I thought. But I’m not even in New York, because I’m in Rhinecliff.

WHIT: Oh, that’s great. How nice. Isn’t there an Amtrak stop in Rhinecliff?

JOAN: That is exactly why I’m here. I always dreamt of being in a village with a train station that would take me to a big city where I didn’t really want to live. And I’ve got it! One hour and 40 minutes away there’s New York, but I’m here. It’s utterly beautiful and because I’m always trying to write I can be a hermit.

WHIT: That was always my plan. To find a nice place with a train stop that can take you to the metropolis.

JOAN: I finally figured it out. I was happiest in my life in the garden of the little house in Ireland. Rhinecliff doesn’t really look like Ireland, but it certainly doesn’t look like New York. What did you mean before when you said you were an exile?

WHIT: Well, I was sort of kicked out of a relationship, so I moved back to the States.

JOAN: Wow, you took that very seriously.

WHIT: Yeah, but I was taken back. So I’m back.

JOAN: Oh, good. Same relationship?

WHIT: Yes.

JOAN: Fantastic!

WHIT: I was thinking that, while reading your book, you break up a lot. And I break up never. So we’re sort of opposites that way. I find it very hard to change whatever the arrangement is.

JOAN: I really admire consistency in others. I mean, there’s things I can’t do. I can’t be consistent. I can’t sing. And those are great gifts.

WHIT: But you’ve kept your friends. I mean, you go way back with...

JOAN: Oh, yeah, yeah, I spent this Christmas with Anjelica [Huston]. After almost 60 years, we finally figured out how to deal with each other.

WHIT: So within the French fashion world, were there people you particularly liked and enjoyed being with?

JOAN: I’m getting so sad about Karl.

WHIT: Yes, he made your wedding dress, right?

JOAN: Karl had been a really good friend and I used to stay with him. And because I’m a writer and not a fashion person, plus my last incarnation before Vogue Paris was a movie critic, a lot of people who were my friends couldn’t understand why I’d been given this job, and their shock and horror at this appointment coloured their relationships with me. And I was incredibly defensive. I wish I’d been a little looser, and maybe actually had a drink or a drug habit, because then I would have been more relaxed about the whole thing. I was wildly tense. And I felt – Karl, you may have given me my wedding dress, but I don’t want your photos in my magazine. And it made everything very, very tense. You know, the one person I met then who really, really impressed me was this young photographer, Taryn Simon, who was 24 years old when she started doing portraits for Vogue, and she hated working for Vogue. That’s probably why I liked her so much!

WHIT: So you have that unique experience, because you were normal, a very successful writer, and then you get the seat of absolute power, of important jurisdiction. Most of us don’t ever get to be on the total power side. I guess nothing is ever total power, but it seemed like you had enormous power as the editor of Vogue Paris. And what was that experience like? It seemed like you were doing great things and on top of the world.

JOAN: Well, look, you have absolute power on set. That’s got to be really fun. When you get to decide on every single thing you’re looking at.

WHIT: I don’t think you get that kind of easy power until you’re in an editing room, with an editor you really get along with.

JOAN: Well, good point, because true power is... I mean, I’m so happy when I’m writing and then rewriting and rewriting again, I’m making and then I’m changing and improving the thing I’ve done. There’s a reason I like living in the country. I am an only child, I’m not really very good at manipulating people. So when there are large groups of people working under me who need to be flattered, or cosseted, or encouraged, I’m kind of autistic about it. I was really not good at that. The business lunches were one thing, but the ordeals were the society dinners, where the French hostesses were very good at placing me between relatives of people I had fired. I was really scared to leave the house, morning and evening.

WHIT: And I think there’s this thing of feeling that, because we didn’t have an experience other people had, that maybe we have some deficiency. I’m not sure if that’s really true, in the sense that I had siblings – but I don’t think that made me very expert in dealing with people. Because the essential job of a child is to manipulate the parents, and you did have parents.

JOAN: [laughs] True, that’s true.

WHIT: I was also wondering since you were a film critic and also kind of a film powerhouse, because you were selecting for the New York Film Festival, if you coincided with a period when I had films. So should I go on the internet to find out if Joan panned my early films?

JOAN: Did I reject you for the New York Film Festival? Which films?

WHIT: It would probably have been Metropolitan, I guess.

JOAN: No, Metropolitan I loved, I absolutely adored that. And it was before I was on the committee. When was Barcelona?

WHIT: That was 1994.

JOAN: By then, I was in Paris. There was a marvellous moment at the Cannes Film Festival right after I’d been named at Vogue, when I went down to have a transition through something that I would recognise, and there was Atom Egoyan, who knew me from the New York Film Festival committee, and he comes over to me with big open arms, and says, ‘Joan, how are you?’ I said, ‘I’ve just been named editor-in-chief of Vogue Paris!’ And Atom just turns away – no interest now that I’m not on the selection committee. [laughs] I probably shouldn’t name him, I should just say an Armenian movie director.

WHIT: No, name him! That sounds so fashion industry.

JOAN: But you know, this is something that I’ve loved about your movies since Metropolitan. There are very few people who are trying to lay out the force lines in the more civil, more fantasy surroundings of privileged people. It’s not fights to the death about survival, but it is about survival. I mean the stuff that poor Chloë Sevigny goes through in The Last Days of Disco. Nobody really goes there – maybe Edith Wharton – but your territory of the glossy life, and the cruelties and outrages inside those lives. A drama that’s subtle and cruel and also universal. – my God those characters Kate Beckinsale plays in your movies – I know those bitches!

WHIT: I can imagine so. So you went from this position of influence and power at Vogue Paris to being out of it, and you didn’t take another big magazine job as far as I know, you went back to writing and theatre. Did you notice all the friends – all the people who were very friendly when you had influence – suddenly not calling, suddenly not wanting to have lunch and all that?

JOAN: We all idealise authenticity, I don’t know. Do you idealise authenticity?

WHIT: I think we do.

JOAN: I certainly did, particularly after Vogue, after being force-fed fashion shows for almost seven years. I longed for the real, the true, the simple. I went to New Mexico instead of going to New York and making a fortune in being a consultant, because I had to figure out who I was to write again. I wanted authenticity, but I was a weak Condé Nast person. So when Anna Wintour asked me to write after 9/11 – she said, ‘you had a lot of grief this year, you lost your job and your father died, so can you write about grief for everyone?’ So I did, and then I got pulled back into Vogue. Having been the movie critic, I would now become the TV critic, because in New Mexico I lived with a guy who really liked watching television. The pilots would arrive and he would ask, ‘what’s that one about?’ and I’d say, ‘I have no idea, it’s a pilot’. So I basically got pulled back into the fold. I should have known. In my book, I write about when they sent me to rehab even though I’m not an addict, where I bond with real addicts, and through them I have this revelation that Vogue was my drug. This wonderful old jazz musician says, ‘okay, you’ve had a revelation but watch the relapse because the relapse is what kills you’. So what happened to me? I became Vogue’s TV critic, I wrote endless new pieces for them, it was so comfortable to be back where I felt I belonged, and that’s when the guillotine descended, far worse than leaving Vogue Paris. Do you have that, as a writer and as a filmmaker, do you look for moments of fate in your life to teach you lessons?

WHIT: Yes. I mean I had a real problem for a while because I’d done Metropolitan based on a dramatic incident, a dramatic situation I knew about. So I looked to do the same sort of thing as far as I could, and I found another one in Barcelona, and another one for Last Days of Disco. That was okay doing those three films, but then I really felt that I’d done the three subjects of any possible interest to anyone else that I can make a film about – that would look like something, rather than just people talking in a room – and so I had to change. I had to find material. I remember reading about the struggles of F. Scott Fitzgerald, feeling that he burned up all his material on short stories with nothing left for novels, and I always thought, that’s impossible, you just write something new, you just think of something else, and actually it's a real problem.

JOAN: That’s one of the things about writing a memoir – I mean, I really love that thing and I wrote the hell out of it. Everything was in there. Before I took 600 pages out of it, it read like a deposition. Once you’ve done that, the last thing I’m interested in is writing another memoir. I feel I’ve done it, I’ve been there, I’ve looked at everything, so what do I do? Those inhibitions are exactly what I am dealing with right now, to do with having been around people who had famous names, so all you had to say was the name, you didn’t have to describe the character – ‘charismatic drunken Irish actor with smelly feet’ – to separate the public identity of famous people from their actual character and behaviour. Because fame gets ironed onto people like a stick-on patch, they are sealed into being one thing, they have no leeway to change, and you don’t take them in as anything other than what you already know about them before you met them. You do have more freedom with fiction, for instance, in Love & Friendship, you really go all out on the plot, the velocity of the plot, the characters, because you’re not limited by anything biographical. Correct?

WHIT: Well, I mean, it’s very good Jane Austen material, and then I could add new things that might have been revelatory, but it’s disguised as being just a Jane Austen piece.

JOAN: What I used to find writing my novels, was I’d try to write stuff that was accessible, as in, ‘let’s make this sound more normal’. But after I’d written The Price Of Illusion, I didn’t have to make things sound normal anymore. I’d established my worldview, which is that things are berserk and there’s nothing to do but have some fun with that.

WHIT: So you’re brought up in various places in the world and there’s the microbe of what is your true nationality; there are very few people who are really multinational even though they grow up all over, and it was extraordinary to see with my two daughters who were mostly raised abroad, how totally American they are. They want to be in the United States and they are in the United States and they don’t really think about coming back to France or Spain very much. They’re Americans and I don’t quite understand why. Do you feel American or do you feel that sort of mix?

JOAN: I have no idea, and wrote the memoir to figure that out as well. I bounced very happily between the English and the French sections at the London Lycée, and when I went to New York, I absolutely didn’t understand America. It smelled of paper napkins and people were violent in the street.

WHIT: Can you modify your accent? Do you change your accent when you go between the countries?

JOAN: Well, oddly in Paris I speak French. Oh, in England do I sound British? No.

WHIT: When you grew up did you have an accent?

JOAN: No, because I was at the Lycée. I spoke French all day long.

WHIT: Do you sing? Are you musical?

JOAN: I’m so not musical, you?

WHIT: Because that’s what people say in casting, like whether someone can easily get an accent, it depends on their musical ear and whether they sing. Well, no, I can’t.

JOAN: I’m pretty good at accents.

WHIT: Joan we’re coming up to the deadline unfortunately, I have a long-standing doctor’s appointment.

JOAN: I wish I could see you in person because I love that we have the same territory. So what’s your next movie?

WHIT: I hope to do this miniseries set in Europe called The Cosmopolitans. I need to revive your email, I’ll send you the link to the pilot of The Cosmopolitans and when I’m in New York, let’s get together.

JOAN: Absolutely. Remember, I’m only an hour and 40 minutes away.

“The Art of Adaptation”, Taken from Buffalo Zine No. 9, which you can buy here.