At first, she assumed I was a toy, an affection of the merest moment. But as the days devolved into weeks, the weeks to months, and I was more in evidence than ever, Mafalda began to stare at me when she thought I wasn’t noticing, as though wondering if she really had miscalculated and must now take me far more seriously—as seriously say, as his secretary Valentina, known as La Bernakovka, or his producer, known to all as the Pig, or as his friend and screenwriter, Jiri Bernakovka, one of the most persistently masochistic humans alive.
These three were to be found inside the Hassler suite at any time, day or night, whether Djanko was present or not. At first, I would be surprised to step out of the shower in the middle of the afternoon to encounter Jiri asleep on the bedroom chair, or come home from lunch with Djanko at Cinecitta to find the Pig on the phone in the office. After a while I became accustomed to them. Valentina, of course, had a key, and was, after all, working there, but Jiri especially seemed to be underfoot at the oddest times. On a late Sunday morning while Mafalda was off to Mass with her sister’s family, Djanko and I would fuck and eat breakfast in bed and fuck again, then hear a timid scratching at the bedroom door, and in would creep Jiri with newspapers, wine and a smug look on his face. I’d be upset. Later on I would say to Djanko, “But he was out there all the while! All the while!” and Djanko would shush me and say, “Be kind to Jiri. He’s a tragedy.” But how could I be kind when I saw his pale blue eye through a crack of bedroom door as Djanko sucked me, or when I came home from shopping to find Jiri on the master bath floor, his head in our hamper, sniffing our underwear?
Djanko and Jiri had met about a decade before when they were film students in Budapest, studying under the great Russian director Kozintsev, on loan from Mosfilm. The two youths’ shared interest in American popular movies had brought them together. In fact, of the two of them, it was Jiri and his deftly witty slices of Communist life on sixteen millimeter which had the greater success; Jiri who’d held the more promise. It was because of one such film that the two friends had gone to the Bratislava Film Festival, where Jiri had met Valentina who soon became his wife, and where his film won an honorable mention.
That day had been the apex of Jiri’s life. While he’d been accepting homages, Djanko had been busily getting drunk with an Italian film distributor who’d promised to make him rich and famous. The man’s promise turned out to be good. Less than a year later, Djanko was in Rome, assistant director to an aging Italian has-been. And Jiri, who was still in ’Pest making fifteen-minute fragile wonders, was now saddled with La Bernakovka’s considerable clothing bills.
As soon as he was able to, Djanko sent for Jiri. The Bernakovkas arrived in Rome just as the Italian Film Rennaissance was getting going. Jiri dreamed of making his own Cabiria, his own Rocco and His Brothers. Instead, he went onto Djanko’s growing payroll, helping to write and direct films with names like Theseus and the Cyclops, Messalina’s Last Gladiator, Invasion from the Red Star and Bad Afternoon at the Broken Corral, where his knowledge of the idiom of American films added to Djanko’s already encyclopedic background, resulting in a chain of spectacularly recreated, often quite bad, movies.
La Bernakovka instantly assessed the situation and left Jiri’s bed for Djanko’s; then when it was clear he was only being friendly, and not a meal ticket, she leapt into the flabby arms of the Pig. By this time Jiri’s incipient Peeping Tomism had fully developed—for if he couldn’t possess his wife, it was just as well that his buddy was doing so. Yet when Valentina moved out, Jiri remained. Unable to watch his wife, he now peeped on his friend.
In vain did I attempt to convince them that all Djanko’s lovers—myself included—were obviously mere props for their own unfulfilled affair. Jiri protested. Djanko’s nose wrinkled in polite distaste, and he pointed out that Jiri was flaccid, pale, ugly, and balding, whereas I, I was a golden tan, firmly molded, trim, and “pretty as that young tailor in Battista Moroni’s portrait.”
If Jiri was so much fouler and more perverted than his inoffensive mien suggested, the gross Pig turned out to be a great deal healthier and nicer all around. His name was Bruno Tratano, and as a boy, he’d worked in film in every conceivable job—grip, gaffer, gofer—until his breakthrough making a documentary for Mussolini about the war against Haile Selassie. To his credit, the film was both good and useful as political propaganda. But the sight of pasta-chewing soldiers with machine guns leisurely mowing down hordes of spear-throwing natives had turned Tratano’s stomach. As soon as the film was successfully screened, he left for Paris, then London, and finally to Brooklyn where he worked in the Navy Yard during the entire Second World War. Either despite of or because of his superb ethics, he was reinstated in the film business in his native land following the American occupation and was instrumental in getting some of the classic films of the time produced.
After I’d gotten over my own initial fear, repugnance and distrust of Tratano we talked one long afternoon on the set and afterward he called me “The Manhattan Kid” and would sometimes make me sit on his fat knee and would feed me sweets, talking in a garble of Bensonhurst and Calabrese that I more or less understood.
Despite all this largesse, I was soon bored and wanted to work. I’d seen enough aging courtesans of all genders in Rome by then to know I didn’t want to be one of them. So, after weeks of nudging Djanko, I was allowed to translate scripts into English, with the considerable aid of a vast Mondadori Italian-English dictionary: the work I’d ostensibly been interviewed for months before, the job which the Pig claimed I’d been doing all the while to get me a temporary work permit.
Watching British and American actors lip-synch my words onto audio tape as the film started and stopped every minute was both thrilling and profoundly embarrassing to me. While half of the films made by Tratano were dubbed into English to be sold overseas, few of them were ever shown in the United States. Instead, Hong Kong, Singapore, Bombay, Capetown and Sydney were all larger markets for Creatures from Rigel IV and Silver Spurs than were L.A. or New York. I had to find some sort of recognizable transliteration of the Italian dialogue (which itself had often been lifted directly—purportedly in homage—from John Ford’s and Raoul Walsh’s films) into an English which a Parsi or Aussie or Balinese might easily comprehend. Westerns were unstoppably the most problematic given the formulaic dialogue—“Get em up pardner”—but Sci Fi films and costume epics were often more malleable, especially the latter. I brought in all of my years of reading and gave these less than paper-thick film characters new words and phrases to speak which their historical counterparts wouldn’t have gagged on. “Unusually literate,” reported the film critic of a large Melbourne daily of my work, “One might almost call the language dubbed-in Marlovian.” One might well call it Jonsonian, Shakespearian, Beaumontian and Fletcherian too: as I rifled English Lit. for rhythms and meters.
It was thankless work, but the Pig read (or more likely had Valentina read to him) reviews of the films as well as box-office takes, and he told Djanko that he believed I was now ready for on-screen work. This meant spending long, coffee-drenched afternoons before shooting began with Djanko and Jiri and the Pig going over endless revisions of screenplays they’d put together.
At first I was shy, but soon I began to ask questions no one had considered before: If common water really did kill the seventy-five foot rhubarb-like Beta Centaurans, then wouldn’t they have all melted in the first substantial sun shower, rather than having to be spectacularly spray hosed by our hero? The others would stare at me in horror and disgust, then the Pig would laugh—“You’ve ruined us!” And we’d start all over again. I called out the word consistency so often in these meetings, that Jiri mutteringly called me that, addressing me as Signor Consistency.
All this naturally swelled my young head a bit and led me to believe that I was more than a useful, I was a needed, part of their team. I now know this was what I’ve come to call A MAJOR AVOIDABLE MISTAKE. I didn’t then, and it all fell down around my head with a f
ilm project that Djanko had been planning for years.
One Greek myth that Travernicke Senior had told and retold his son back in Croatia was that of Jason and the Argonauts. A later reading of Apollonius of Rhodes’s second century b.c. Argonautica in college had confirmed Djanko’s belief that this tale would make a great adventure film. Why, I’m not certain. It was loose, episodic; its love interest was spotty (Medea, but she came and went) and none of the adventures were terribly unique— perhaps Hercules’ labors the most exciting and those were a longish digression in the epic anyway. Still, the idea of a group of heroes—including Castor and Pollux and Hercules—out in a boat cruising around struck some idealized Communist chord in young Djanko. He was determined to see it in full color, lavishly produced, with the best special effects that the studio’s money could buy.
Because I soon knew of its background, and because the project seemed “in development” so long after Djanko and I had met and become lovers, I assumed it would never require my attentions. However, about eight months into our affair, as we lolled upon a sunstruck terrazzo at Ravenna, the Pig suddenly pulled out a script I didn’t recognize (they were coded by jacket color for easy identification) and asked were we ready for a script session.
Jiri and Djanko were; they’d been at the script for years. I said, sure let’s go, I would read it later.
“No,” Tratano declared. “You’ll read it now. We’ll have a session tomorrow.”
“What’s wrong with the script?” Djanko asked.
“Who said there’s anything wrong? There are four of us. All of us should know it.”
“For consistency,” Jiri said.
“That’s right,” the Pig agreed, “for consistency.”
As soon as I could, I got away from them, drove Djanko’s little Maserati roadster to a restaurant sul’ Mare overlooking the particolored Adriatic, and for two hours drank wine and read the script.
It was a beautiful screenplay. It was full of Mediterranean light and nobility, the sweetness of Herodotus and the legendary quality of Homer, filled with the brisk spanking of an Aegean wind and the mysterious monstrousness of Thracian mountain clefts. These Argonauts weren’t a pack of idiot teenage boys on a fishing trip; they were demigods driven to know their world in all its terror and wonder, to seek love and enmity, no matter the consequences—to seek knowledge for its own sake. The script was almost perfectly Hellenic and quite filmic.
That night with Djanko, as the floor-length lightweight muslin curtains fluttered a sea breeze into our bedroom, I told him how marvelous I thought the script was. I quoted Ulysses’ lines about his final, fatal, ’til then unrecorded voyage from Dante’s Inferno.
That convinced Djanko that I understood what he’d been aiming at in the script. But I’d also found a few small inconsistencies and typos, and we carefully corrected each copy of the script we could find.
“Ah! You see!” the Pig said triumphantly the following day in our first work session on the script. “Already we have more consistency.” He’d spotted the revisions instantly.
In the next two months, the script was cut apart and put back together again. Jason became Jason //then Jason IV and Jason X. Meanwhile, preproduction began in earnest—sets were designed and built, costumes designed and stitched, locations sighted and checked, story boards laid out and relaid out to accommodate script changes. All in perfect order.
Angel and the girls now arrived to rehearse. He as Hercules, Cicely as a statuesque blond Aphrodite, with Tina and Donna (one line apiece—my doing) as two of her accompanying Graces.
It was an unusually springlike early April day when principal shooting began on Jason. The first day’s scenes were easy and fast and went down well. That night we all celebrated with champagne.
I’m still not sure what fatal impulse led me to pick up a copy of the script—Jason XV by this point—to reread it. Ennui perhaps, or a desire to be moved as I’d been when I’d first read it. But lift the script I did, and read it through. It was tighter of course, less episodic, the love story spread throughout most of the film now, and all of it less lavish of settings, costumes and special effects. But it was still quite grand. I had almost reached the end, when I came upon a short new scene which I didn’t remember seeing in the last version—Jason II? Jason IV?—I’d read.
In this scene, the goddess Aphrodite, offended by the kidnapping of her favorite priestess Medea (now completely enthralled by Jason), not to mention the theft of the Golden Fleece from her temple in Colchis, demands a sacrifice from the ships’ crew before allowing the Argonauts to arrive safely home. Aphrodite gets her wish from the council of the Gods and in the next scene set in her grotto on Cyprus, she spins herself into a tornado. Cut to a long shot of the Argo sailing along a still, moonlit sea, all of the crew sleeping on deck: with Hercules and Pylades, Castor and Pollux, and of course Jason and Medea entwined in each other’s arms. Only the helmsman, Turnus, is awake. Suddenly the little silver tornado approaches the deck, spins around Turnus, gagging him into silence, and lifts him off deck. We see him drowning, then cut back to the Argo, where all are sleeping as before and where invisible hands now guide the ship. A final cut to Aphrodite’s grotto: The tornado enters, slows down to become the goddess, who—satisfied—smiles.
I was appalled. The scene had been directly lifted from The Aeneid. Granted it was plagiarism, wasn’t the entire story stolen from Apollonius and Hesiod in the first place? What bothered me was that the scene derived from a completely different sensibility altogether, too modern for this rather primitive tale. In Vergil, Tumus had become an exemplar of destiny, and of its absurdity: a sad grace note that a Roman stoic could appreciate for what it said about his turbulent age. In my mind, the tiny scene grew and grew, threatening to capsize the entire project.
Getting Djanko alone was impossible and when we went to bed that night he was so homy—as he always became when freshly into a new film project—that I was tickled into passion and kissed into forgetfulness. Indeed, I might have forgotten the scene completely. But at the next general business luncheon, held in the afternoon after morning filming had already taken place, Jiri spoke up.
“So, Signor Consistency,” he began with unaccustomed effrontery, “we haven’t heard any criticism of illogic from you in a while.”
“Jiri,” La Bernakovka warned. She looked ravishing as an Amazon that day and expected the obedience beauty ought to call forth.
“No, wait, Cara Valentina,” the Pig spoke around a slab of bread soaked in olive oil he’d pushed into his mouth. “This is important. Have you read the final shooting script?”
All eyes were on me.
“I saw him reading it last night,” Jiri said.
“I read it,” I admitted.
“And it’s perfect. E vero?” Jiri asked.
“Of course it’s good.” I turned to Djanko, “I really think it will be your best film.”
He accepted that and went on reading the copy of Corriere he hadn’t gotten to yet.
“Partly,” Jiri said, “thanks to you. Your friend makes a splendid Aphrodite. You’ve noticed how much we’re using her? We’ve even written a new scene especially for her,” he went on, clearly baiting me. Two beats passed, then, he added, “You read all of it?”
“I said I read it.”
“All of it?” he insisted. By now La Bernakovka had stopped fooling around with the spaghettini straps on her sundress, and the Pig was done swallowing. Both were surprised by the ordinarily obsequious Jiri’s insistence. I felt I had to say something.
“Are you referring to the scene you stole from Vergil?”
Djanko looked up from the paper.
“Vergil, Caro?”
“The new little scene with Aphrodite and Turnus.” To Jiri I said, “You might at least have changed his name so the plagiarism wasn’t so obvious.” Plagiarism is nothing new in film scripts, so the others weren’t yet alerted that something was happening. But Jiri’s face glowed as though I’d actually
and not merely verbally slapped him.
“Still,” he said, “it’s a beautiful scene.”
I knew I was out of my mind to be making a fuss over such a small point, one that I really didn’t care about. But the fact that Jiri had misguidedly chosen to make a power play riled the hell out of me. Since the battleground was selected, I’d stand and fight there.
“It’s fine.” I said. “It’s plagiarism. It’s Vergil. It has no place in the script.”
Jiri leaned over the table, savoring each sentence, avid for more punishment.
“And, since you absolutely must know, Jiri, it’s totally inconsistent!”
Jiri could have undergone orgasm under the table for the sudden relief he showed at those words. He sat back, pleased and humiliated.
“It’s not from Vergil, Caro,” Djanko said, less gently than before. “We wrote it ourselves, Jiri and I. It was an inspiration, something to give an edge, a flavor of tristesse to their homecoming.”
“It works exactly as you planned it,” I admitted. “But I’m sorry, it’s from Vergil’s Aeneid.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. One of the middle cantos. I haven’t read it often enough to know exactly which canto and lines.”
“So you could be wrong?”
“I’m not wrong. Look, let’s drop it, huh?”
Djanko was up at the library bookshelves, searching. Now both La Bernakovka and I said, “Djanko, sit down. Forget it. It’s not important.”
But no, he continued searching, bellowed out for Mafalda, berated her for moving his books around (she’d arranged them by the color of their spines), then asked where his Vergil was. She shrugged and walked back to the kitchen.
“Help me look,” Djanko pleaded. None of us would.
Finally the Pig said, “Djanko, don’t doubt our ouaglio. We know he’s always right on this sort of detail.”
Djanko flung a look at Jiri—by now shrunken to the metaphorical size of a mouse in his chair with shamefaced secret glee—then Djanko glared at me.
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