Letter from James Ivory, New York, New York, to Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Delhi, India, 1971 March 12 : typescript manuscript.

Writing that he read Jhabvala's account of her dog's traumatic pregnancy and that it made him feel better about Shashi Kapoor wanting to cut parts of "Bombay Talkie"; speculating that Shashi's motivation for cutting some of the scenes is because they feature Jennifer (his wife) kissing Zia Mohyeddin; mentioning his efforts to cajole Shashi into sparing the film from being cut; continuing to talk about the day's mail, which includes a reply from Catherine Deneuve indicating her interest in acting for a Merchant Ivory film (potentially an adaptation of Henry James' "The American"); pivoting to a discussion of Jhabvala's daughter Renana's college applications; comparing her experience applying to Stanford with his own 25 years ago, which was unsuccessful; mentioning that he can speak with Cary Welch about Harvard and Catherine Atwater Galbraith about Radcliffe; suggesting other schools may be promising, especially those in the midwest; remarking on the coincidence that Jhabvala should have met Bruce Chatwin, as he had also just been introduced to Chatwin through Cary and Edith Welch; mentioning that his wife, Elizabeth, is Edith's cousin; describing Elizabeth as "the kind of upper class American girl which drives me up the wall--the kind the Metropolitan Museum is staffed with [...] holding her money over her husband's head like a whip"; mentioning that he only knows of the money dynamics between the Chatwins through Edith, and that Elizabeth seems somewhat "pathetically eager to be wanted by Bruce, actually"; responding to Jhabvala's points about Bruce Chatwin being snobbish and like a character from the 1930s; describing the rest of his encounter with Chatwin, which ended with the "vague plan that I should go [joining Chatwin] on the Greek Island too, after "Bombay Talkie", for a holiday"; asking for more information about Jhabvala's encounter with Chatwin.