Fifty Shades of Grey, the best selling novel by EL James that's poised for big-screen success, is not the first erotic thriller to aim for blockbuster glory. Nine and a Half Weeks was, like Fifty Shades, written by a woman who hid behind a pseudonym, and it, too, was a big success with female readers. Its film adaptation also drew in a newly successful director and sparked a buzzed-about search for the perfect leading lady. But unlike the exhaustively chronicled, internet-age story of Fifty Shades, 91/2 Weeks is still shrouded in secrecy.
Its author was no internet fan-fiction writer but a professional journalist hiding a dark past. While Fifty Shades has had a considerate female director (Sam Taylor-Johnson) who protected and consulted her cast, 91/2 Weeks was made by a director who put his leading lady through hell to portray a sado-masochistic affair.
The book Nine And A Half Weeks, published in 1978, purported to be a memoir by its protagonist, Elizabeth McNeill (renamed McGraw for the film). But it was in fact written by a journalist and author, Ingeborg Day.
Day was born in Graz, Austria, in 1940, the daughter of a policeman who served in the SS during the war. Sheltered from her father's work, she was sent to live with grandparents in the countryside, but remained haunted by the guilt of his association with the Nazis long into adult life. She moved to the US and married a pastor called Dennis Day in 1960, working as a teacher before the birth of her daughter, Ursula, in 1963. A sickly boy, Mark, was born soon after, but he died, aged seven.
The marriage fell apart after this tragedy, and Day made a complete break from her previous life. She took her daughter to New York, where she became an editor on the feminist magazine Ms and something of a style icon for her strictly monochrome wardrobe (entirely black in winter, entirely white in summer).
While at the magazine she began the affair that inspired her novel. Like Day, her heroine Elizabeth has a high-powered job, but each night cedes all responsibility for her own life to a man she calls John. Much of her time with her lover is spent tied up or handcuffed, and she gets her pleasure in surrendering to his control. As Elizabeth describes it in the opening line of the book, "The first time we were in bed together he held my hands pinned down above my head. I liked it. I liked him."
She spends months recovering from the emotional storm of the affair. Writing the memoir is presented to the reader as a part of that process - although the book offers no excuses and little explanation for her actions.
Day used the pseudonym to avoid a scandal that might affect her daughter if the real-life affair were made public, and never wrote anything similar again. Inevitably, Nine And A Half Weeks provoked controversy, especially with its scenes of dominance appearing so soon after the Seventies heyday of women's lib.
Still, this bestseller was not an obvious candidate for the big screen. American filmmaking is notoriously prudish about sex, and had never seen a hit that involved sadomasochistic behaviour outside the arthouse or porn cinema.
That's where Zalman King came in. This former character actor had, by the early Eighties, become a producer and writer. 91/2 Weeks was only his second writing job, but the erotic thriller shaped the rest of his career.
King adapted the book with his wife, Patricia Knop, and their collaboration was key to making films that were marked by an emphasis on female desire and fantasy. He described his method in 2006: "I'm very interested in journeys that especially women take in terms of their sexual awakening. It's usually embracing romance and then rejecting it."
The director would be Adrian Lyne. The Brit was fresh from the success of Flashdance, which also treated potentially risque material with so much style that it had become a hit. He tried to turn the 91/2 Weeks script into a more conventional love story, explaining at the time: "Rather than saying, 'Here are two strange people doing perverted stuff in a posh New York apartment', I wanted it to be a movie couples might see and argue about."
Most of the arguing, however, took place behind the camera. Lyne and King quickly zeroed in on rising bad-boy star Mickey Rourke as their leading man.
"Nobody wanted Mickey because he was a struggle," said King. "Everyone thought he was a thug. But Mickey, to me, was always beautiful, always dangerous, and always charming. He also is not frightened of women, and women can sense that."
The female lead was a tougher battle, with the likes of Kathleen Turner, Isabella Rossellini and Teri Garr all in the running. But it was relative newcomer Kim Basinger who landed the role, despite finding the screen test so tough she ran out of Lyne's office in tears, saying she never wanted to see him again.
Basinger reconsidered following a bouquet of roses from her director and co-star, but soon had cause to regret giving in.
The film was shot over 10 weeks, in sequential order to reflect the affair at its heart. Lyne decided on vastly differing treatments for his two leads that would reflect their characters' fates.
Rourke was ordered to lose weight before shooting, but once on set he was treated like a prince.
Basinger was another story. Lyne had instructed his two stars not to communicate off the set, so that a real-life friendship would not impinge on the onscreen tension. But he went further, isolating Basinger from decisions and whispering secret instructions to Rourke ahead of each shot. He would shout and rage at her if he needed her to be upset, or instruct Rourke to be friendly if a scene needed to be softened. "I was like an exposed nerve throughout the filming," said Basinger.
One scene in particular proved traumatic. In it, John invents a sadistic game, a phony lovers' suicide pact where he convinces Elizabeth to swallow pills with him. They are harmless sugar pills - but Elizabeth believes they are killing her. It is the last straw in their game-playing, and forces her to step back from the brink.
"We were shooting the scene, and this woman was supposed to be devastated at this point," Lyne recalled. "But Kim looked dewy and lovely. I called Mickey aside. I told him that the scene wasn't working, that Kim needed to be broken down." On Lyne's say-so, Rourke grabbed Basinger's arm tightly, making her cry and strike him. Rourke slapped her face, and Lyne immediately began shooting again.
That scene was eventually cut from the film because, said Lyne, it made Rourke's John too unlikeable.
Test screenings were equally painful: in one thousand-seat screening, all but 40 people walked out, and 35 of those filled in their response cards to say that they hated the film. When it was released in 1986, the reviews were similarly hostile: The Sunday Telegraph called it "monotonous and adolescent".
The film flopped in the US but was a hit internationally, taking over $100 million around the world.
Lyne went on to more success with Fatal Attraction, having said he took to heart criticisms that 91/2 Weeks put style over substance. King continued to explore women's fantasies to great success, through films and cable TV shows. As for Ingeborg Day, she remarried, largely retired from writing and was "outed" as the author in 1983. But there was no EL James-style publicity tour; in fact, she did not comment on her book publicly at all.
Day committed suicide in 2011, shortly after the death of her infirm husband, leaving "Elizabeth McNeill" to speak for her. As her alter-ego writes towards the end of the book: "That it was me who lived through this period seems, in retrospect, unthinkable."