Upstate, he drives a car in the city, he rides the subway. Ivory, the son of a sawmill owner, grew up Catholic in Klamath Falls, Oregon. Merchant grew up Muslim in Bombay and went to grad school at New York University. I lived openly with him for forty-five years, in New York and wherever else we were”-Manhattan, London, Paris.
“From the beginning right on down to his final day. “He was my life’s partner,” Ivory told me, when I visited him on a recent Friday at the house in Claverack. “When I first introduced them to each other, I knew that the chemistry was there, and it has remained all through these years.” “It’s chemistry,” their friend Saeed Jaffrey says in the video. “My eyes always focus on the right things.” “No, I didn’t look around!” Merchant says. I remember very well.” They debate Ivory smiles. “You were in the screening room,” Merchant says. It was in 1961, at the Indian Consulate in Manhattan, at a screening of Ivory’s short documentary about Indian miniature paintings, “The Sword and the Flute.” Ivory says that they met on the steps. In an interview for the 2004 Criterion Collection DVD of the first film by Merchant Ivory Productions, “The Householder” (1963), James Ivory and Ismail Merchant, gray-haired and wearing similar oxford shirts, sit together in a muralled room in their 1805 Federal-style house in Claverack, New York, and companionably bicker about how they met.
