The memorial service which followed in a dingy apartment in Poona was simply another in a series of bizarre encounters for authors Collins and Dominique Lapierre in their passage through India to write Freedom at Midnight. Published this month by Simon & Schuster (it is already a best-seller in France), the book vividly recreates the end of the 200-year-old British raj (or reign) in 1947. The severing of India from the Empire of course resulted in the subsequent partition of the subcontinent into two warring nations, Hindu India and Moslem Pakistan. In writing the book, Collins and Lapierre spent four years and $300,000, interviewed 2,500 people, traveled 200,000 miles, consulted 400 books and 10,000 pages of documents and recorded 800 hours of conversation ("Enough research for 15 books," says Lapierre, "not just one"). Their tapes include 30 hours of reminiscences by Lord Mountbatten of Burma, cousin of King George VI and last Viceroy of India. Given the unwelcome task of overseeing the most epochal step in the dissolution of the British Empire, Mountbatten emerges as the principal and most surprising hero of the book.
Freedom at Midnight is the fourth collaboration of Collins, a 46-year-old native of West Hartford, Conn. and Lapierre, 44, a Parisian. It is crafted with the same dramatic flair that sold eight million copies of their first three—Is Paris Burning? (1965), Or I'll Dress You In Mourning (1968) and O Jerusalem (1972). With an easy narrative and a profusion of details, the book brings to life such extraordinary figures as Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, first Prime Minister of the world's largest democracy, and illuminates a tangled story. For American readers the book will be enormously helpful in understanding the bloody history that followed the formation of India and Pakistan.
In this and the other books, says Lapierre, "We unite two viewpoints which are normally separated by barriers of language, distance and experience." Collins explains, "We find a subject that interests us and then have the enormous luxury of being able to cultivate it intensively and live all the adventures that go along with it."
Their Franco-American alliance began in 1955. That year Collins, a U.S. Army corporal, Yale man and lawyer's son met the Sorbonne-educated Lapierre, scion of a French diplomatic family and a French army subaltern, when both were assigned to SHAPE'S headquarters outside Paris.
They bid each other farewell at the end of Collins's hitch, but it was only au revoir. Collins, acting on a long-suppressed urge to write, returned to Paris as a UPI correspondent after about a year with Procter & Gamble (he was brand manager for Jif peanut butter). Lapierre, by then an editor with Paris-Match, and Collins, who rose to become Newsweek's Paris bureau chief, talked vaguely about writing a book together. Then German documents were found indicating Hitler had ordered his generals to put the torch to Paris as they retreated in 1944. Is Paris Burning? recreated the French capital's liberation and became an international triumph.
Royalties have bought Collins and Lapierre splendid adjacent hilltop villas in St.-Tropez, ornamented with such souvenirs of their travels as Persian tiles and a pavement from Palestine. Collins lives with his Egyptian wife Nadia and sons Laurence, 8, and Michael, 6. After the research on a book is done, each man retreats to his study to write a section in longhand in his native language. Then they meet in the library in Lapierre's house—he is divorced—to thrash out mutually satisfactory revisions and the translation. Disputes are settled by a friendly game of tennis on the court between their villas.
During their Indian journeys for Freedom at Midnight, Lapierre and Collins were reminded again and again of the timelessness of their subject. Former soldiers of the British raj still snapped to attention at the sight of Lapierre's gleaming Rolls-Royce. Back in Paris, at an autographing session, an old woman told Collins she was buying the book about the land where civil liberties are currently suspended solely because of its title. "Freedom," she said, "is the most beautiful word in the language." "What could I say?" asked Collins. "It is."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
