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TWENTY-FIVE

Although I have never enjoyed large parties, when Howard arrived in Rome we went to quite a few, largely to see the interiors of a number of palaces. Rudi and Consuelo Crespi were at the center of the city’s social life which was like Rome itself—a bit on the sleepy side but the settings were splendid. Consuelo Crespi was a beautiful American with that very American urge to bring different sorts of people together. This works just about everywhere but not in Rome during the sixties. Everyone she asked to their flat in Palazzo Taverna gladly came but the various groups stayed together like floral arrangements, each rooted to its own Aubusson rug. One group would consist of the so-called black nobles, created by the Popes. Then the whites, ennobled by the kings. Literary figures like Moravia and Bassani stood apart in the corners, while movie people swarmed. A few years later I arrived at a Roman reception to find the current prime minister holding court. The hostess apologized: “They aren’t making films at Cinecittà anymore so now all we get to see on television are politicians so everyone is starting to invite them. Odd, isn’t it?” Although Consuelo and Rudi were most diplomatic there was no way that members of one group were going to commingle with members of another. By and large, the intellectuals who had a lot to say spoke no English while the aristos, thanks to childhood nannys, spoke perfect English but had little to say. So, one ended up learning a great deal about how to heat a five-hundred-room palace and nothing at all about The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. The only time I saw the Romans close ranks was against the Prince and Princess of Monaco. The Romans executed a sort of graceful military maneuver, leaving Rainier and Grace Kelly alone at the center of the room, radiating serenity. Since Grace and I had been under contract to MGM at the same time, I paid my respects. She was unchanged. We always talked about her uncle the playwright George Kelly whom we both admired; unfortunately, he was as right wing as Grace who, invariably, with flushed cheeks, would explain how FDR and the New Deal had stopped him from writing plays. I would slip quietly away. Across the room Howard was discussing the Oceanographic Museum at Monte Carlo, a subject dear to Prince Rainier who was interested in saving the Mediterranean over, to hear him tell it, the dead bodies of every Italian politician.

The Princess of Monaco: having second thoughts about makeup call?

Grace and I chatted about distant romantic Hollywood, not that she pined for her days of glory. I did ask her once, why, at the peak of her career, she had quit to become, in effect, the doyenne of an amusement park. Her answer was to the point. “You know about the studio’s makeup call?” I did. The actresses who were to work on any given day were staggered so that the makeup department would not be overcrowded as famous stars would be meticulously turned into reasonably accurate replicas of their best selves. “Well, my makeup call was still pretty late because I was still very young. But I have a tendency to put on weight. When I do, my call is earlier. On my last picture, it was…” she frowned at the thought of the dawn’s early light which one day she would have to face as had Loretta Young and Joan Crawford and a host of stars of yesteryear some of whom were obliged to report to makeup before sunrise. “It was the sudden change in my makeup call that decided me it was time to go before I absolutely had to.” There was no talk of romance, only the snuffing out of a career based upon the fading of her uncommon beauty. Nevertheless, there were those who were puzzled that after so much hard work to become the biggest movie star of her time Grace would quit to become Princess of Monaco. A worldly lady of my acquaintance purred the answer: “Never forget that she is from Philadelphia.”

The last week or so in November 1963 Howard and I drove out to the beach at Ostia with Rudi and Consuelo. The beach was deserted but the day was perfect. We had lunch and swam and then drove back to Rome where Howard and I went to the theater that showed American movies undubbed. Midway through David and Lisa, an American actor named Jerome Courtland came up the aisle and said, “Kennedy’s been shot.” This is not possible was my first reaction. Someone had mixed up the reels and we’d been given the wrong ending. The first of several as I shall note in due course.

Our first Roman years, in the Via Giulia and later on the Largo Argentina, movie production was at its peak and, for a few years, many movies were made at Cinecittà the principal Roman studio. During the late fifties I had worked on the script of Ben-Hur in an office next to that of the producer Sam Zimbalist. Farther down the corridor from my office, Federico Fellini was preparing what would become La Dolce Vita. He was fascinated by our huge Hollywood production. Several times we had lunch together in the commissary. Soon he was calling me Gorino and I was calling him Fred. Neither Willy Wyler nor Sam wanted to meet him because both were aware of a bad Italian habit which was to take over the expensive sets of a completed American film and then use them to make a new film. I think that this had happened with Quo Vadis. To prevent the theft of Ben-Hur’s sets, guards were prowling the back lot long after production had been shut down. But before that, I had sneaked Fred onto the set of first-century Jerusalem. He was ecstatic.

Over the years we saw each other, from time to time; usually, when he wanted something. Fred disliked scripts even though his best film, 8¹⁄², was written by Italy’s finest playwright-essayist Flaiano. When they eventually fell out, Fred simply stopped telling stories for the screen. He also disliked professional actors so when he had to people a set he would call on an endless supply of headwaiters and cooks from his favorite restaurants to “act” in his films. Since there was seldom a script he would ask his cast to count on camera. Finally, when he got the look he wanted, he’d say “Twenty-eight” to the “actor.” “Do twenty-eight again.” The results were often surprisingly successful, yet he complained about his films’ lack of success at the box office. I said his refusal to film with direct sound was certainly a factor. As with so many Italian directors of the first postwar generation, his actors were shot as in a silent movie; then a voice, seldom their own, was later dubbed in. “Why are you people so crazy about direct sound?” he’d ask when once again a request for money from a studio was rejected because he would not swear an oath to make the film with a script in English that would be approved and then used. I tried to explain that all the great stars of the thirties and forties whom he admired were famous for their voices but Fred had never heard those voices because most of the American films that he had admired in youth had been dubbed into Italian.

He rang me one day. “We must meet immediately.” He came to Largo Argentina, all smiles of a guileless childlike nature. “Gorino is problem.”

“Casanova?” I made a guess.

“How you know?” Eyes wide with alarm as if I were a master of dark arts. Of course his inability to finance a film about Casanova had been for some time on the front pages of the Italian press. I gazed thoughtfully into an imaginary crystal ball. “Yes,” he said, “is Casanova. I need one million dollars to begin. Paramount will give it on condition—”

“That you shoot in direct sound from a script in English.”

He nearly made the sign to ward off the evil eye. “You know all this?” Eyes narrowed at my superior cunning. “Ah, of course they tell you, don’t they?” I assured him I was simply psychic. He looked relieved. We talked about the story. His Casanova would not be the brilliant man known to history, the friend of Voltaire. “No, the real Casanova is silly. Is always sex with him.” Fred’s sex life was a much discussed enigma in Rome. He was happily married to the actress Giulietta Masina. Fred’s passion, at least visually, for huge-breasted women was known to everyone who ever saw one of his films but what did he do? I suspected nothing. During the days of lead when the Red Brigades were loose in Rome he feared being kidnapped. “I am too large,” he’d say, close to tears, “to fit into the boot of a car.”

Once, I mildly complained that he had borrowed from my novel The Judgment of Paris the character of a hermaphrodite who is the center of a religious cult. No, he’d not, of course, read the book but Eugene Walter, an American writer in Rome, had and a version of my character appears in Satyricon which Walter worked on. Fred denied any need to borrow such a character. “Why should I? When I…I am a hermaphrodite! Is well known, Gorino.” Then he gave me a short treatment of the scenes he wanted for Casanova. “I know you will hurry,” he said. I hurried. The script was accepted by Paramount. He got his million, a start date, and a star, Donald Sutherland, an intelligent actor. But a newspaper photo of Sutherland arriving in Rome to play Casanova suggested that there might be a difference of opinion between star and director. As if by magic, Fred appeared in Largo Argentina. He looked worried. He asked me if I knew Sutherland. “Yes, he’d acted in a play of mine for the BBC.”

“I am thinking about getting Mastroianni.”

“What’s wrong with Sutherland?”

“He doesn’t look right.” This was fatal. When Fred was casting he’d have a couple of dozen photographs of possible characters and he’d stare at them by the hour until he found the one he wanted. Appearance was all.

I couldn’t figure out why Sutherland, whose appearance Fred knew in advance from films, had not measured up.

“You know Casanova. You write Casanova,” he began to shift blame. “Is very stupid man. No?”

“Actors can usually play stupidity…” I was reassuring.

“Must look stupid. See? I have made silhouette of him.” Fred was a fine caricaturist. He showed me a drawing in black ink of Sutherland. “See? He looks just like prick.”

I said I recognized the likeness. Fred looked again at his drawing, already feeling better. “I want to make empty place between two front teeth. Looks more stupid, no?”

I had now grasped, as it were, the point to Fred’s image of the world’s most famous lover as nothing but a blind soulless erection. I thought of the newspaper photo of Sutherland in a broad-brimmed hat and a flowing cloak, the spirit of romance: they were at odds. “You think he has caps on front teeth?”

“How would I know? Many actors do.” I tried to imagine Fred with his drill hacking away at poor Sutherland’s teeth. Although Fred was hardly a hermaphrodite he was certainly a phallophobe in a culture rooted in phallophilia. He had even done a book of caricatures of phalluses, with such labels as “the happy cock,” “the snobbish cock,”“the angry cock.” He entertained ladies with these drawings.

Fred vanished. The film was eventually made not in direct sound but dubbed. Fred was entering his final phase which produced only one fine film, Amarcord, reminiscent of his great phase in which I had once worked for him as an actor.

Since I have always wanted to know how interesting things actually work, I had signed a contract as a writer for MGM because I knew that the great studios were going to break up—this was in the mid-fifties—and I was curious to see what it was like to work at the greatest studio of them all: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

It was amazing to realize that everything necessary to the making of a film was right there on the so-called lot at Culver City, including the Thalberg Building where, on the top floor, L. B. Mayer had his office and access to an executive dining room. The powerful producers had their offices at the corners of each of several floors below; while smaller offices, containing writers, were placed alongside their masters, the producers.

From the beginning I worked with Sam Zimbalist who had made a number of successful films, often with Clark Gable and the director Victor Fleming who was to replace George Cukor, at Clark Gable’s request, on Gone with the Wind. According to Cukor the young Gable had been a male hustler and George was one of his johns. In Actors Studio circles, where I had spent much time, it was agreed that Gable must have been more of a Stanislavski actor than anyone had suspected if he felt that Cukor’s presence on the set might undo his impersonation of Rhett Butler. My mother had had a long off-and-on affair with Gable going back to the film Test Pilot where the flying was done by what would eventually be her third and final husband the Army Air Corps general Robert Olds who was then aide to the chief of the Army Air Corps Billy Mitchell. Gable was an amiable man who often visited my mother at the Beverly Hills Hotel where I was an occasional visitor during my convalescence from hypothermia at Birmingham General Hospital. Gable even taught my very young half brother, Tommy, how to swim in the hotel pool; he was a most professional teacher but the lessons ended when Tommy, clinging to Gable’s back and imitating his arm gestures, relieved himself comfortably on his back. That was the end.

At MGM I wrote The Catered Affair for Sam as well as I Accuse! about the Dreyfus case directed by José Ferrer who also played Dreyfus. Halfway through the editing Eddie Mannix, speaking for the front office, asked Ferrer to cut any references to Jews. This was not easy to do in a film about anti-Semitism. Finally, the picture was not too bad but it is still mysteriously banned in France. When MGM bought the Elstree Studios in London I wrote The Scapegoat starring Alec Guinness and directed by the brilliant Robert Hamer who had written and directed Kind Hearts and Coronets. Unfortunately Robert had also taken seriously to drink; otherwise I would have withdrawn and fought for him to write as well as direct the script, a Daphne Du Maurier romance. By then my curiosity about the studio system had waned as had the studios themselves. But I was still curious about film acting.

When I was on leave from the army hospital, I was offered a screen test at RKO to play one of Rosalind Russell’s sons. Since I was writing my first novel in the hospital, I said no. But for someone brought up in the Golden Age of movies I sometimes wondered what if…?