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Details about Lavinia Currier (very long but fascinating!!)

68.104.2.103

Posted by Doomsday Machine on January 16, 2003 at 11:57:13

In Reply to: My second date with Passion in the Desert... or Eat your Heart Out Patrick! posted by Victor Khomenko on January 16, 2003 at 07:03:24:

Victor, Found info regarding Ms. Currier, this should answer all of your questions. This explains her history (she is worth approx. $500 million), the incredible unfortunate twists of fate in her life, how she made the film, etc., etc. I know it is extremely long, but WHAT A LIFE STORY !!! This was written in 1998 just prior to the release of the film. Her life story would make a great movie.

World Tibet Network News Monday, July 13, 1998

Virginian Lavinia Currier Inherited Vast Wealth. She Spends It Making
Movies About Deep Loss.

By Lloyd Grove Washington Post Staff Writer

THE PLAINS, Va. - At her magnificent estate here in Fauquier
County, a spread worthy of an heiress, Lavinia Currier sits in the wet
grass cradling a motherless fawn. The day before, her young son had
been hiking through a forest on the 1,000-acre property, came upon the
marooned infant and scooped it up.

"I think he was born three days ago," Currier says as she coaxes the
nipple of a baby bottle filled with warm milk into the animal's mouth.
The fawn repays her by soiling her shirt and slacks -- an insult
Currier bears serenely. "I'm worried about him because he shouldn't be
having this diarrhea, and I did call the vet this morning. Actually,
had my son not picked him up, I think the mother would have come back.
But once he was picked up, she probably passed the place and was gone.
She either lost him or forgot about him or whatever."

It is tempting to conflate this poignant episode, along with the
41-year-old Currier's work as a filmmaker (her idiosyncratic first
feature about a French soldier and a leopard, "Passion in the Desert,"
opens in Washington Friday) with her own haunting personal history.
Her fabulously wealthy parents -- philanthropist Stephen Currier, the
36-year-old scion of a banking fortune who became a civil rights
activist, and Audrey Bruce Currier, the 33-year-old granddaughter of
Andrew W. Mellon -- vanished without a trace in a chartered plane when
Lavinia was 9.

Her charmed little orb -- and that of her sister Andrea, then 10 years
old, and brother Michael, then 5 -- immediately spun off its axis and
wobbled into the chaos of an indifferent universe (which was never
indifferent to their money, however). Eventually, with the ballast of
a massive bank account, their world recovered its equilibrium.
Currier's siblings have managed to live quietly, if grandly -- away,
for the most part, from prying eyes.

Not Lavinia, however. In one of her more outlandish acts -- but
certainly not the only one -- she hacked off her blond hair with a
penknife on the banks of the Nile after catching a river fever, and
then wandered the Sahara alone in this afflicted condition -- "feeling
quite sick in an otherworldly kind of way," she says -- until she
arrived months later, barefoot and in rags, at the Tunisian palace of
her scandalized great aunt, the Baroness D'Erlanger.

In other words, Currier has sought out the sort of adventures that are
usually to be found in romance novels and television miniseries -- or,
for that matter, epic movies.

Defining Moment

"We were brought up in the typical way of the period, where there were
a lot of people around -- a lot of nannies and whatnots -- so in a
sense, we weren't close to our parents, because they were traveling a
lot," Currier says, reluctantly discussing the defining moment of her
childhood in a pinched, guarded voice. "I was in school in New York.
My sister was, too. My brother was in the Caribbean, waiting for
them."

The Curriers had eloped in 1955 -- sufficient rebellion against the
old order to be dropped from the Social Register. Audrey -- the
daughter of diplomat David Bruce and Ailsa Mellon Bruce, the legendary
capitalist's daughter -- was a diffident woman who loved horses and
long walks in the country. Stephen, from a slightly lower rank of the
upper crust, was an extravagant personality -- both a conspicuous
consumer of the good life and an impassioned liberal idealist.

"He liked being rich," recalls Leslie Dunbar, who was executive
director of the Southern Regional Council, one of the civil rights
groups that benefited from the largess of Currier's Taconic
Foundation. "He was a very reserved man, but on occasion he could drop
that reserve in the most stunning way. He did not suffer fools
gladly."

Dunbar recalls an episode at the White House in 1963. "Stephen picked
me up at the airport in his chauffeur-driven car -- a Rolls-Royce, I
think -- to attend a meeting of civil rights leaders with President
Kennedy. He was seated directly opposite the president at that long
table in the Cabinet Room, and when it came time for him to say
something, Stephen talked about how the civil rights people needed
money from the government. And then, staring straight across the table
at Kennedy, he added: 'And they need money from the private sector,
too!' I believe he was upset that old Joe Kennedy had promised to give
money to the cause and then never did. It was one rich man talking to
another."

It was the night of Jan. 17, 1967, when the Curriers took off for St.
Thomas from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to meet Michael for a 10-day cruise
aboard their sailing yacht Sandoval. About 30 minutes into the flight,
the pilot radioed for permission to fly over the island of Culebra,
then a Navy installation, but was instructed to go around it. No one
ever heard from the plane again. No bodies or wreckage were recovered
-- it was as though the aircraft and its passengers had simply
vaporized.

Lavinia and her siblings -- the beneficiaries of a fortune estimated
31 years ago at $700 million and at multiples of that sum today --
were placed in the care of virtual strangers, a Yale Law School
professor and his wife. Why this happened is not clear. Their
grandfather David Bruce, by that time married to the former Evangeline
Bell, had no interest in children, Currier says. Nobody else among the
Mellons, Bruces or Curriers seemed prepared to jump into the breach.
But even today, Currier is at a loss to explain why no blood relatives
took them in.

"It's a good question. I ask myself that same question," she says.

John and Claire Simon, designated in the wills as the legal guardians,
had been close friends of Stephen and Audrey. But they were
ill-equipped to console and raise three bereaved children they barely
knew.

"We tried to be as present and parental as we could, and keep as many
continuities as we could," says Simon, who essentially assumed the
Curriers' lifestyle, moving his wife, son and the Currier kids into
Stephen and Audrey's luxurious duplex on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue
while an even more spectacular apartment was being renovated several
blocks south. There was also the burden of running Kinloch, the
Curriers' breathtaking 2,000-acre Virginia estate, with dozens of
employees to supervise and animals to feed.

Lavinia and her siblings were closely watched. "We had to be concerned
about publicity and the possibility of kidnapping," Simon says. "We
hired some bodyguards. We had to have certain kinds of protection."

This was, by all accounts, a bleak period in Currier's life, and she
doesn't dwell on it. "I don't mean to minimize it," she offers
tersely, "but I feel like life goes on." With her elusive blue eyes,
she projects a shyness and modesty that are wildly at odds with the
stupendous dimensions of her everyday life: the personal staff to ease
her way, the 15,000-acre spread in Hawaii, another 17,000 acres in
Colorado -- not the stuff of a stunted ego. In the same vein, she
tries to be matter-of-fact about her golden roots.

"I don't mean to be disingenuous about it, but I just feel like it's
one's family history," she says. "My ancestors were Irish immigrants.
And I guess the Bruces were more sort of Scottish clan chieftains, but
you don't have to go very far back in America to find the potato
farmer." (Or, for that matter, the embarrassing relation. Richard
Mellon Scaife, the famed right-wing foundation baron and Pittsburgh
press lord, is a distant relative whom she has never met. "He's really
a crazy person," she says.)

Currier continues: "There are so many so very wealthy people around
now that I think we're really not that distinguished. But maybe the
distinction is coming from a family that's been wealthy for several
generations and has had a prominence at a time when that kind of
wealth meant power. Andrew Mellon could have bought out the U.S.
budget in 1926. Whereas even a Bill Gates, I guess he could buy a few
B-52s."

Fabulous wealth "is a responsibility," she says. "It's an opportunity
obviously. I guess from the legacy of my parents, we've always been
taught to be philanthropically minded. And in my case, it's expressed
itself through conservation and environmental causes."

Currier's childhood experiences inspired her to write and direct a
52-minute movie, "Heart of the Garden," a dark fairy tale of "paradise
lost," as she describes it, that was filmed at Kinloch, across the
road from Roland and Netherlands, the adjoining farms where she lives
with her son, daughter and husband, former Democratic political
consultant Joel McCleary. The film was shown on the Arts &
Entertainment cable channel in 1984.

"It was a fable about children who live on a farm, and their parents
die, and they essentially live with people who farm the land and take
care of them," Currier says. "It was set in a kind of fairy tale way,
so there was sort of a wicked woman who comes in and disturbs this
paradise. She's a vagrant, and she upsets the whole world."

The movie, unabashedly autobiographical in a way that "Passion in the
Desert" is not, contains countless direct references to the tragedy,
and makes use of farmhands, professional actors, cellist Yo-Yo Ma (a
Harvard chum of Currier's who contributes some dirgelike Kreisler
passages) and even a cameo by her younger brother, Michael. In one
Dickensian scene, two black-suited, gray-haired men spout
incomprehensible legalisms at a tomboyish rich girl and her little
brother. "Children, this is Mr. Seymour. I am Mr. Witless from the
bank," one of the pompous old birds introduces himself.

"The film was really an exorcism of all that history," Currier says.
"In a sense, you take the power out of the story by telling it."

But her 42-year-old sister, Andrea -- a preservation and environmental
activist who today runs Kinloch and owns much of the surrounding land
as well as a good deal of The Plains -- found the movie wrenching.
"After all, there are actors in it portraying our parents," she says.
"It was sort of putting the camera back on the past. I'm interested in
the present and the future. I would not want to see it again."

"It's interesting how children absorb things and don't talk about
them," Lavinia Currier says. "Children process things in a very
interesting way, not always rationally and logically. I've been
surprised by my own children -- how something that I think is very
terrible and dramatic, and they'll go, 'Oh. He died?' They sort of
gloss it over, they're almost humorous about it. And then later you
see how it affects them."

So how did Currier's childhood affect her?

"It made me self-reliant and maybe a little stubborn," she replies.
"It gave me a feeling for questions of existential or religious
significance. And maybe the fact that I am an artist comes from that
experience."

Staggering Risk

It seems also to have granted her the visionary zeal, iron temperament
and sheer hubris necessary to attempt something that most Hollywood
professionals would have considered insane: taking $5 million of her
own money and seven years of her life, dozens of cast and crew members
and three adult leopards -- the most lethal movie stars imaginable --
into the Jordanian desert in 1995 to endure weeks of blinding snow or
120-degree heat, depending on the season, plus exotic illnesses and
bad food (usually hummus and cheese on pita bread, garnished with
desert sand) -- all to make a peculiar film based on a little-known
Honore de Balzac novella.

When no movie bonding company would go near the project because of its
staggering risk, Currier paid a premium for liability insurance from
Lloyd's. She hired the well-regarded Russian cinematographer Alexei
Rodionov to work the camera, and persuaded a marquee name -- French
movie star Michel Piccoli, the Gallic Sean Connery -- to portray an
artist sent by Napoleon to memorialize Egypt's wonders. And she found
Englishman Ben Daniels to play the central human role of a young
French captain, a rare actor willing to work closely with large
predatory cats known for being perilously unpredictable.

"I never met anyone like Lavinia," Daniels says. "We went through some
serious [expletive] in the film. Sometimes it just wasn't happening --
even the ramifications of getting the crew into the desert and making
lunch and having the leopards there, which might or might not attack
you, but she always kept her head."

"When she decides that she wants to do something, she has a
determination that's unparalleled," says leopard trainer Rick Glassey,
who supervised the animals in Petra, Jordan, and later for some scenes
in Moab, Utah. "One time Lavinia and I were arguing, really having an
passionate discussion about a scene. I couldn't tell, but I guess she
wasn't feeling all that well. Because after we both left, I found her
passed out in the hallway on the way to her hotel room."

All this -- with no guarantee that a single paying moviegoer would
ever see the result.

But Currier's extraordinary background has also given her
extraordinary contacts: everyone from the Dalai Lama, who since the
early 1980s has personally guided her study of Tibetan Buddhism, to
Hollywood icon Paul Newman, a longtime friend of the family.

"I knew her grandparents, the Warburgs -- our next-door neighbors in
Westport," says Newman, referring to Stephen Currier's mother, Mary,
who divorced Richard Currier, Stephen's father, and married financier
Eddie Warburg in the 1940s. "When Lavinia asked me to see the movie
last year, I did it as a courtesy.

"I must say, I was familiar with the Balzac story, and I didn't see
how anybody could make a film of it," Newman continues. The unsettling
tale, set during Napoleon's 1798 Egyptian campaign, concerns a soldier
who is captured by nomads, makes his escape, loses himself in the
desert and is saved by a female leopard with which he then develops an
erotic and ill-starred intimacy.

"It's an impossible premise," Newman says. "So I didn't expect very
much when I went to the screening. And then I just had my socks blown
off. You have to be a visionary to make a movie like that. You really
have to have cojones to even try it. And she accomplished it and
expanded on it in a way that only a true storyteller can do."

Newman became a one-man sales force for "Passion." He talked up the
movie to anyone who might help find a commercial distributor, and laid
on screenings for industry leaders, including his agent, Sam Cohn of
the entertainment powerhouse International Creative Management, who
promptly signed on as Currier's agent, too, and director Robert
Altman, another Cohn client.

"I was just knocked out by it," Altman says about the movie. "I
personally wouldn't undertake a thing like this. I don't know another
filmmaker alive today who would -- with all of us overpriced and
overrated filmmakers who are really just dallying in pissant
commercialism. I am quite sure her film will get overlooked."

Nevertheless, Altman and Cohn devised a strategy for the movie: first
create a buzz by showing it at a prestigious film festival -- last
fall's Telluride Film Festival, where it received encouraging notices
in the trade press -- and then try to drum up business among art film
distributors. But in September, before Telluride, it was Newman who
closed the deal. At a Manhattan dinner party, Newman approached
Michael Lynne, the president of New Line Cinema.

"Paul pulled me aside and said: 'I want to tell you about the most
remarkable film I've ever seen. It doesn't have a distributor. Do you
think it's something you want to see?' " Lynne recalls. "On that
recommendation, I said, 'Absolutely!' And literally the next day, Paul
arranged a screening for me, and I agreed with everything he had told
me about the movie."

Lynne acquired the world rights for Fine Line Features, an arty
division of New Line, and agreed to cover Currier's production costs
(dirt cheap by Hollywood standards). The 93-minute film opened a few
weeks ago in New York, Los Angeles and Denver to mostly respectful and
positive reviews (though one critic called it "silly"), and will begin
a limited release this month in about 50 theaters nationwide.

Currier sees a thematic bond between her first and second movies.
"They both talk about a sense of paradise lost. In 'Passion in the
Desert,' the protagonist kind of falls into this paradise which at
first is a hostile world to him. And then, because of his human nature
and his inability to totally change that nature, he loses it. And he
goes back to the suffering of being a soldier in the desert."

Needlessly, she adds: "It's not an easy kind of a film. It's not
structured like the kind of film that gives you a setup in the first
10 minutes, and then in under 90 minutes delivers the climax. It
demands something of you."

The Passion

Currier has always been drawn to movies (especially of Fellini and
Kubrick) and the natural wild -- and "Passion" is perhaps the ultimate
synergy of those twin fascinations. She's an accomplished horsewoman
who has taken part in the occasional fox hunt. As a teenager she used
a Super-8 camera to make a short film about cockfighting. And at
Harvard, where she was a member of the Class of 1979, she kept a pet
raccoon.

When the academic authorities disapproved her idea for a senior thesis
-- which was to mix two disparate disciplines, religion and
environmental studies -- she declined to choose another topic. She
simply left without a degree.

She headed for Paris to start a theater company with her close friend
Maura Moynihan, the daughter of Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.).
With several other college friends, they took over a decrepit mansion
on the Rue de Seine that had once been owned by Isadora Duncan's
brother. The house contained an auditorium in which they staged weekly
talent shows.

"Sometimes people have extraordinary lives and they don't match up to
it, or don't want to match up to it," Moynihan says. "But Lavinia has
had an extraordinary life and she is also an extraordinary person."

After Paris, Currier decamped to New York to study theater at the
Neighborhood Playhouse with acting guru Sanford Meisner, who died last
year. "And discovered after less than a year that I was really no good
as an actress," Currier says. "I'm just not. I think I'm just too
reticent. But I really became sure that I wanted to direct." She
directed plays at, among other venues, New York's Cathedral of St.
John the Divine, and learned the ropes of cinema working on several
productions of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory.

Directing appealed to, among other things, her desire to control her
surroundings. "Every director's a control freak in a sense, and you
try to manipulate your world for whatever reason. . . . I think
sometimes I have to stop myself when I'm with my family and realize
that I don't have to direct everything. That you have to kind of drop
that persona."

Picking up on the philanthropic impulse of her parents, Currier in the
1980s started the Sacharuna Foundation, a $10 million fund that
dispenses grants to organizations that safeguard natural resources.
She has also been one of the Dalai Lama's key financial backers -- and
a member of his inner circle -- and has committed millions of dollars
to support Tibetan refugees. It was, in fact, His Holiness who steered
Currier toward her future husband, Joel McCleary, another activist in
the Tibetan cause. During the 1989 celebration of his Nobel Peace
Prize in Oslo, the Tibetan monk took Currier's hand and placed it in
McCleary's.

But she sees her main identity as that of a filmmaker, and has been
writing her next movie -- a "caper-comedy" -- with Moynihan.

And will that film, too, deal with the concept of loss?

"Maybe I'll move to other themes and maybe that will be transmuted
through the films of the future," Currier says. "But I think people
definitely keep basic themes going in their art as they grow older.
Hopefully, they become more refined and reflective."

Meanwhile, a few weeks after the abandoned fawn was plucked out of the
forest, Currier says he's doing just fine.

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