Julian Fellowes

Julian Fellowes began his career as an actor who was writing on the side. His passion for storytelling has paid off critically and commercially. He won an Academy Award for best original screenplay for Gosford Park in 2002 and continued to pen more movies, in addition to plays, novels and TV series. He created, wrote and executive produced Downton Abbey, which depicts the relationships, trials and tribulations of the aristocratic British Crawley family and its loyal servants at the beginning of the 20th century. In HBO’s The Gilded Age, Fellowes turns his attention to the super-wealthy of New York City in the 1880s, as established “old money” families look disdainfully upon the ostentatious “new money” of the robber barons.

WS: What did you want to explore in The Gilded Age?
FELLOWES: I read a book about Alva Vanderbilt and her daughter, Consuelo, who was one of the more famous of the “dollar princesses.” I started to read about this period, and I realized, as always with history, that I had been walking past the houses of these people ever since I first went to America a half-century ago and never really taken them in. I sort of knew about the Gilded Age, this period of extraordinary consumerism after the Civil War and these enormous amounts of money before inheritance tax, before income tax, before practically any tax. It wasn’t just that some people were richer than you could imagine; it was that there was an almost whole tier of society that was richer than most of us could imagine. I started to read about the Goulds and Carnegies and Fricks and the double side of the Gilded Age, the ruthless robber barons and their palaces. And then I got interested in the Vanderbilt family. For a time, I toyed with the idea of doing a series about them. I half sold it to Bob Greenblatt when he was at Showtime. I forget now, but I think I wrote a pilot script. I found my difficulty was that when dealing with real people, I have an obligation to write about what really happened and make them say things they really would have said. This is quite limiting. Some people don’t see it as limiting because they don’t pay any attention to it, and they write what they like. But that doesn’t work for me. So I gradually came to think that if we were going to do a television series about the Gilded Age, we would do better with fictional families living through very possibly truthful events. And also reference events and news [of the time]. The principal characters, however, would be fictional. The only two I have half-broken that rule on are Mrs. Astor and, I suppose, Ward McAllister. I don’t think you can do the Gilded Age without Mrs. Astor and Ward McAllister. They fashioned and shaped it and made this uniquely American society. That’s what appealed to me.

WS: This world was uniquely American.
FELLOWES: This is a piece of history that could only happen in America. The Americans in the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s were moving on from imitating the Europeans, as they’d done largely before the war. They were making a way of life that suited them and wasn’t a pastiche of Europe. Their resorts in Newport, these enormous palaces only 20 feet away from the other, with no land, no park, no garden, just enough to get out and walk the dogs and that was it! Because [land] just didn’t interest them. I loved all of that! One of the big plusses of making the show was Newport. I had read about Newport and seen lots of pictures of the cottages, but the insanity of the place is so extraordinary when you are there! Of course, I rather lamented the number of houses that have been pulled down. But I thank the Lord for the Preservation Society there because they saved The Elms [which belonged to Edward Julius Berwind], my favorite of the cottages. It had six weeks to go before the demolition ball arrived. It was saved just in time. All of them were, including [William K. Vanderbilt’s] Marble House.

America, as you know, doesn’t look back much. It’s always looking forward. What’s the next big thing? What are we all going to be doing next year? The idea of preserving the way people spent their holidays 80 years before just didn’t occur to them. They hoped their holidays were enjoyable, but that was then, and this is now! Until the 1970s, preserving houses in New York didn’t get much of a hearing. If it was a piece of valuable property on Fifth Avenue or on one of the cross streets between that and Park Avenue, who cares that this palace was designed by so and so and built in 1881? Get it down, and let’s put up a block of flats! I saw America become more aware of its own history in my own time there. [My interest in the Gilded Age] grew from there, and I thought I would explore it. I hoped we could find an American audience for it, that we could get them interested in their own history instead of being interested in ours. I’m rather pleased that the show seems to be doing well.

WS: What view of class differences in the U.S. does The Gilded Age present, and how do these differences compare to the class differences in the U.K.? I think we Americans own the word “ostentatious”!
FELLOWES: [Laughs] Well, of course, a lot of it in America has always been about money, but quite a lot in Europe has been about money. The poor aristocrat has been a figure of fun for quite a long time, so I don’t want to make barriers that don’t exist. Of course, the American aristocracy from before the Civil War was very aware of birth. They were often younger sons of gentry families who had come to America—not the sons of dukes but landowners. They came because they were the younger sons, so nothing [of the family inheritance] was headed their way. If they came to America, they could get a reasonable estate. They were continuing the traditions of land ownership they had brought with them. You see that, not all over America, but on the East Coast. Then you have this unique situation that after the war, these fortunes started to arrive of such a magnitude that they really couldn’t be ignored. And the old aristocracy of New York, living in their rather modest houses in Washington Square, sitting in circles to make decent conversation, regarded these newcomers who were building the Petit Trianon [a neoclassical style château on the grounds of the Palace of Versailles] at 45th Street as very suspicious! But Mrs. Astor—whom I think must have been a cleverer woman than she has left evidence for—must have had an understanding of the nature of what she was dealing with. She saw that if these new people were left out and excluded entirely, they would just form a society of their own. It was necessary to find a compromise. She would examine these new people who came to town and make her decision on whether to let them in or not. The society that Mrs. Astor forged was an extraordinary mixture.

WS: You mentioned earlier the “dollar princesses.”
FELLOWES: Yes, then you have the “dollar princesses.” [They were the beneficiaries] of this extraordinary tradition that was quite different from Europe, where a rich American man made all his children rich. To get an heiress in Europe, all her siblings had to be dead! If one brother survives, she gets nothing. The great philosophy of Europe in those days was that once you started to divide a fortune, you began its end. No fortune could survive more than, at most, three generations.

The British and French couldn’t understand this system whereby Anna Gould could arrive with millions and become the Duchesse de Talleyrand [even though she had] perfectly healthy brothers. Consuelo Vanderbilt had two perfectly healthy brothers, who were both very rich by the time their father, Willie K., had popped his clogs. The British, though, my God! Normally in a season, there might be two heiresses if you were lucky, and everyone concentrated on who was going to get them. Whereas suddenly, these American girls were arriving by the dozen, and all of them could save a noble house from obliteration. So, they were pounced on. I don’t think it was only that. They were also taught very differently socially. They were encouraged to join in the conversation, have political opinions and weigh in on some historical argument. Whereas [in Britain], a married woman was expected to have a salon if she wanted one to entertain and bring on the arts. But not a young girl. She was supposed to sit there, more or less staring at her feet, until someone asked her to dance. She didn’t jump into a conversation or disagree. And yet, an American girl, sitting next to some minister, says, Oh, I don’t agree with that at all! Of course, they were amazed by this! And the most amazed one was the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII. People were a little shy at first, introducing him to these American girls as they arrived. But they soon got over that because once he’d met a couple, and they questioned him and made him laugh and told him jokes, he thought they were great. And so the American girls started to be in the court balls. They became a real crowd within a crowd in society. And by the end, something like 600 of these heiresses married into British families.

It wasn’t all the money. Of course, the money was great, and it gave that society one more generation than it probably would have had in the normal way of things. It was also that they were free and fun. They were so unfussed about [everything] that the English girls had been brought up to fuss about.

WS: I find the character of Peggy Scott in The Gilded Age fascinating for several reasons. Why was it important to include her and her family?
FELLOWES: To start, I wanted the series to feel very not English. There wasn’t a big Black community [in England]—although there were people in the ports—because there wasn’t a specific part of the economy that connected with them. That didn’t change until the end of the 1940s when they came in to supply gaps in the labor market. The building trade became very much dependent on this immigrant community. That wasn’t true in the 1880s. I felt that having a Black story would stamp the series as American in a way. But also, I didn’t feel 15 years after the end of the Civil War that we could have a whole drama without some reference to all that. I was puzzled as to how I would do it. Then I read Black Gotham by Carla L. Peterson. She was describing her own family, writing about her ancestors at the end of the second half of the 19th century and about this Brooklyn community, which I hadn’t known anything about. I was the same as everyone else, thinking of this oppressed minority. The discovery that there was this perfectly established middle class. They weren’t aristocrats, but they were perfectly prosperous. Peterson’s family had had a chain of drug stores, which is why Arthur Scott [Peggy’s father in The Gilded Age] has a chain of drug stores. I felt the combination of having an established position and a perfectly respectable life, but at the same time, those elements of racism crept in, in what was a fundamentally very racist society. These things seemed to me to be an interesting addition to life on 61st Street. I didn’t see how to bind it all together [if I had focused on] the struggling, recently released slave trying to get manual labor. Whereas with the Scott family, I could see how to bind it all together. Then it gave me the opportunity [to include] the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia, which is entirely truthful. That was the principal school for privileged Black children. I think a lot of people don’t know anything about all those elements of life at that time. I hope it’s interesting for them to discover that whole side of things. I feel that having found this one community—and, of course, there were similar communities in other cities, but we’re in New York for this drama—answered a lot of questions as to how to make it work.

WS: What can you reveal about Downton Abbey: A New Era?
FELLOWES: I’m not allowed to reveal all that much! But I can reveal that there are essentially two principal stories and lots of little stories in the Downton movie. One principal story is that a group of them go to the south of France to this wonderful villa. The other story is of a film being made at Downton, toward the end of the silent era. The servants and Mary are more involved in the film, but a lot of the other family members are involved in the south of France.

WS: Do you have a process when you write?
FELLOWES: I started writing when I was still acting. That was quite a plus for me because when you are acting, you go where the work is. You get on a train; you get on a plane. You sit in your trailer or dressing room or hotel room. I couldn’t afford to say, Oh, I can only write in my study in Dorset. I’ve always been quite happy to write wherever I am. I have to get on with it. I try to get started at least by about 10 o’clock. Then I break for lunch and bang on after lunch. Of course, you’re always fitting it around things. I comfort myself with the fact that Anthony Trollope said no one should write for more than three hours a day. So, I use this as my excuse when I feel I’ve been rather lapsed! If it worked for him, who am I to quarrel with that?