[COPY] Weinstein Syndrome

What was particularly interesting about the voices telling us about Harvey Weinstein was that they were all personal. Each woman had her own experience and her own way of dealing with it.

It was only by each one speaking personally that any patterns emerged and generalisations could begin to be made.

It was jarring, then, when a voice spoke out that did not come from personal experience but from the usual judgemental attitudes that have been trotted out over the centuries in order to keep women in their place.

This was a woman’s voice and it spoke as if it had authority. I don’t know who she was but this is what she said:  

The reason that all those starlets had kept quiet over so many years was that they had benefitted from their association with Weinstein. She didn’t quite say that they had asked for it but implied that when they got it, they didn’t complain.

Slept their way to the top, she might have said in the old parlance when it was a given that any wannabe actress had first to earn her breakthrough on the director’s couch.

But what about girls like me who had no interest in becoming film stars but who still found themselves prey to powerful men in the film industry? Why would we keep quiet about sexual abuse as if it were our own dirty secret when we had not benefitted in any way?

As it happens, I had been looking through old diaries when the Weinstein case broke and had come across an entry from 1989 when I had been visiting a film shoot in Berlin and had found myself sitting next to Anthony Hopkins:  

He was so utterly professional, going through the speech again and again. It was something about how having a secret gives a man power…

I was reminded of how boring film sets are. You wait around for hours doing nothing and then a bit of filming happens. At last! Action! But no. Not even a single line can be spoken before the whole thing has to start again. Cut…retake. Cut…retake.

I was invited to Isabella’s (Rossellini) caravan where she would be changing for the afternoon shoot but I only had one day and I wanted to see Berlin. 

I went to the Pergamon Museum to see the Ishtar Gate, then suddenly recalled my first ever visit to a film studio. It was 1967. Cinecitta. No wonder I was finding the whole thing unsettling. It wasn’t just the boredom.

This mention of my experience at Cinecitta, the major film studios in Rome, is the only time I referred to it either on paper or vocally between that time in 1967 and my visit to the Berlin studios over twenty years later. I have never referred to it since then either and it is only now, in the wake of the Weinstein revelations, that I feel able to bring it to consciousness and write about it without simply glossing over it as I did in that diary extract.

I was hitchhiking around Europe with a friend. The friend had turned out to be an unreliable companion, disappearing with any new male acquaintance she found, leaving me to fend for myself in unknown places with no money and no contacts and more or less at the mercy of anyone who cared to befriend me.

I was meandering around Rome somewhere near the Coliseum (the only place I had heard of) when a shiny red convertible sports car raced up and pulled up alongside me. Kerb-crawling. The driver, blond, good-looking, wearing a cravat and with perfect English, leaned across and introduced himself as a casting director at Cinecitta. He wanted to book me in for a screen test.

This may have been a dream for any number of young girls but not for me. If there was one thing that I knew I could never be in life it was an actress. Even being photographed on a family holiday was an ordeal and I always came out squinting or snarling or both. I laughed at the suggestion and said, no, I really didn’t want a screen test.

He laughed too and we chatted a little and I told him I was at art school and thinking of specialising in set design and then, pushing open the car door, he said, why didn’t I hop in and he would show me round some studios in a nearby palace where a shoot was underway.

With the roof down on the sports car on a sunny day in the middle of a capital city, any potential danger seemed minimal compared with what I had already experienced hitching through Europe.

I got in and he took me to the set, which might really have been a palace and where filming probably really was happening - though not at that moment. And then he said he would take me to Cinecitta and show me the magnificent sets there.

Cinecitta at that time was best known for the spaghetti westerns which were shot just outside Rome in barren landscape resembling Arizona. We had coffee in the cramped canteen jostled by cowboys in stetsons and Indians in full-feathered headdresses and then he insisted on taking me to meet the receptionist so she could make me an appointment for the screen test I was still telling him I didn’t want.

The receptionist obviously knew my companion well. He sat on the edge of her desk and they chatted intimately in Italian. When he told her what he wanted, she sighed deeply, shook her head and tut-tutted as if she had done this many times before. Then she picked up her pen and booked me in for the next day.

The sports car owner said he would drive me back to where I was staying but when we were on the road, he remembered something he had to do in his apartment. He stopped outside a modern block of flats and got out of the car, then came back and said why didn’t I come up for a drink while I waited.

He was obviously a proficient actor himself but I was too stupid and too naïve to know it. I went up to the flat and sat on the edge of the bed, the only place to sit, while he fixed a drink in the little kitchen.

I have no idea what it was or what he had put in it but I don’t think I even finished it. I had no awareness of feeling drowsy or of falling asleep and I don’t know how long I was unconscious.

I woke up as suddenly as I had fallen asleep. The light had changed; it was late afternoon. I was lying on the bed fully dressed and without any sense of having been touched. And yet it was clear that I had been deliberately drugged.

Whatever had happened while I was unconscious, it would remain a secret. I suspect it had something to do with photography or film.

I didn’t challenge him. I just left the apartment, refusing a lift and finding my own way back across the city.

Needless to say, I did not attend the screen test.

I kept just as quiet, and perhaps even more so, as all those starlets who had allegedly benefitted from seduction or rape or abuse by those with the power to make or break careers.

I’m not sure what it was that caused me never to tell this story to anyone, not to my husband, nor to my analyst. It was so taboo that the thought of referring to it never even crossed my mind. 

Was it that I felt guilty? Was it that I was ashamed? Was it that I felt humiliated and a fool? These are the feelings that are sometimes said to lie behind the self-censorship of silence.

Probably I have felt all of them but was never conscious enough to know it.

That experience took its place with all the countless others that made up my life at the time. I hitched round Europe three summers in a row and hitched everywhere I went in England too. Even my journey to and from art school in Winchester was hitched since there were no buses to my village. With every lift, I took my life in my hands and accepted what came – mainly generosity, kindness and politeness but with a certain amount of weirdness and a few dangerous threats. (Hitch hiking became a lot more dangerous once central locking systems were introduced and you could no longer open the door and leap out.)

I never went to the police about any of the incidents I encountered and it never occurred to me that I could.