AMERICANS ABROAD FOR BBC ‘TENDER IS THE NIGHT’

They were filming a classic American novel for television, with American stars. But there was a British tone to the production, a quiet professionalism, the director speaking softly, the producer nonchalantly scanning a book in a corner. The unit did not even have a publicist on hand to drum up excitement for a visiting American journalist.

The classic was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night,” a novel that a celebrated Hollywood director, Henry King, turned into a movie in 1961, starring Jennifer Jones and Jason Robards Jr. as Nicole and Dick Diver. The American production is generally regarded as a failure, and its failure may be one reason director Robert Knights and the British Broadcasting Corp. production team here, renowned for its sure hand at translating literature into literate television drama, felt no qualms about tackling so American a novelist as Fitzgerald.

There were other reasons as well.

“At a time when Proust is being directed by a German, with an Englishman and an Italian in the starring roles,” Knights said, recalling Volker Schlondorff’s “Swann in Love,” with Jeremy Irons and Ornella Muti, “I think we should have a go at your early 20th-Century classics. Furthermore, I haven’t cast an Englishman and an Italian as Americans. I have American actors. In any event, the novel is set in Europe, not in the United States.”

Arthur Mizener, Fitzgerald’s biographer, has described “Tender Is the Night” as the “most profoundly moving of all Fitzgerald’s novels . . . his most brilliant book.”

Published in 1934, it was also Fitzgerald’s last complete novel. He died in 1940, leaving the half-completed manuscript of “The Last Tycoon.”

The BBC is producing the film jointly with Showtime, the American cable television channel, but Showtime’s role appears to be mainly financial.

“Showtime allows us to have American actors like Mary Steenburgen and Peter Strauss for six months,” Knights said.

Location shooting in France and Switzerland began last August and ended in early February, a time frame comparable to that of a major Hollywood film. The BBC plans to show the film in six segments of one hour each in September. Showtime will televise it in the United States in October.

Steenburgen, in a television role for the first time, did not know the novel until a year before production started. She had taken an armful of books--the kind you know you should read but never have--to Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, where her husband, British actor Malcolm McDowall, was making a film. She read “Tender Is the Night” first.

“I had no idea of ever doing it,” she said. “I never thought of myself as Nicole.”

Later, when her agent called about the role of Nicole in the BBC production, she was doubtful. “I didn’t think a good film could be made,” she said. “It’s such an epic novel.”

But she changed her mind after reading the script by Dennis Potter, realizing that it would last six hours on television.

“Perhaps that’s why the other film failed,” she said. “It didn’t have enough time.”

She cannot be sure, since she has not seen the original. “I had a chance to see it before we came here,” she said. “But I deliberately decided not to.”

Despite her early doubts about herself as Nicole, Steenburgen--angular, beautiful, her cheeks flush, wearing a blue middy blouse and white sailor slacks--seemed to fit Fitzgerald’s image of his heroine perfectly.

Knights was filming the final scenes, in which Nicole feels the return of her mental health, leaves her psychiatrist husband and runs off with Tommy Barban. Between takes, Steenburgen tried to explain the difference between discovering Nicole as a reader and studying her as an actress.

“What I read objectively,” she said, “became personal. Her terrors and pains began to become part of my own self.”

She paused, concerned that the image might exaggerate the situation, then went on:

“I don’t mean that I walk around with all that off the set. I’m not that kind of an actress.”

A basic tenet of faith prevailed on the set, that the King movie was terrible and that much of its difficulty came from King’s failure to mirror Fitzgerald’s “Jazz Age” accurately. The settings resembled the 1960s, not the late 1920s and early 1930s. The movie, according to the prevailing view here, was filled with anachronisms.

Knights appeared determined not to make the same mistake.

“Unless you are careful,” he said, “you end up making a film about the period in which you make it. The original film told me more about American film making in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s than it did about Americans in Europe during Fitzgerald’s time.”

A salon at the 75-year-old Hotel Trianon Palace in Versailles, with its gilded boiserie and enormous glass chandelier, was fitted out to resemble the novel’s dining room at Gausse’s Hotel des Etrangers, five miles from Cannes on the Riviera. A mustached singer in a tuxedo, his black hair slicked down and parted in the middle, sang the same song of the era that Fitzgerald had repeated in the novel:

Thank your father,

Thank your mother,

Thank them both for meeting up with one another,

Thank the horse that pulled the buggy that night,

Thank them both for being just a bit tight. . . .

Thank goodness for the marriage,

Thank goodness for the baby carriage,

Or I’d have no one to love.

The extras in the dining room appear to have come straight out of the period and place. Waiters set down tray after tray of cold lobster. The men wear buckskin shoes or black-and-white shoes or blue-and-white shoes. The women wear little felt bonnets and seamed stockings. A little curl, twirled like a snail shell, is pasted to the forehead of one young woman.

The quest for reality took the crew on six months of travel and work on the French Riviera, in Switzerland and Paris, the three main locales of the novel. There were some reasonable substitutions--Lausanne for Zurich in Switzerland, the interior of the luxurious hotel in Versailles for the interior of Gausse’s on the Riviera.

Knights, however, did not want to exaggerate the importance of the background detail. He said that Fitzgerald, in describing the lives of Americans who could afford to live outside the United States in the period between World War I and the great Wall Street crash, was describing “a mood of the times.” But, he said, “all of that is background action; it remains in the background; Fitzgerald never used history in the foreground.”

“Like most people,” Knights went on, “I read Fitzgerald in my late teens. The book works as a very good read. You have to go back to it 20 years later to see that the book is a portrait of his marriage.”

As Fitzgerald labored on the novel, his attention turned more and more to describing his troubled and now famous marriage to Zelda.

“There is one big difference, though,” Knights said. “Where Zelda crashes, Nicole rises.”

Potter’s script makes one major change in the structure of the novel. Fitzgerald opened the novel on the Riviera, showing Nicole and Dick through the eyes of Rosemary Hoyt, an American actress. Then Fitzgerald flashed back to the Zurich sanitarium where Dick Diver, the young psychiatrist, fell in love with his young schizophrenic patient, Nicole Warren. The six-hour television movie will start in Zurich and move forward chronologically until the marriage breaks up.

Steenburgen said the change was a logical one.

“It was something that Fitzgerald debated,” she said. “Should he or shouldn’t he? It was not foreign to him.”

Knights said: “The book wandered. Fitzgerald began writing it in 1925 and did not finish it until 1934. He was becoming increasingly alcoholic. We have gone for order.”