It goes without saying that I felt frustrated. My first experience with professional photography only seemed to reinforce my conviction that this wasn’t the career for me. But what else could I do?
One day a friend convinced me to go to a casting call in a Via Margutta studio, the one that featured Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday, near Piazza di Spagna. A new director was preparing his first movie, and they were doing open casting. I had nothing else to do, so I figured, why not?
After pre-casting, they sent me to the Arco Film offices, where I met the producer, Alfredo Bini, and the director, Pier Paolo Pasolini, in a room full of mirrors. Pasolini was wearing a weird painter’s jacket, dark pants, and zipped boots. I was wearing a custom-tailored outfit: beige pants and a bolero-style jacket. I didn’t look Roman. I didn’t even look Italian. Pasolini studied my red hair, cupid face, and wide blue eyes and said, “So who painted you?” Then, turning to the actress Laura Bettie: “What do you think? He’s unusual, almost American. Looks like he came straight out of Rebel without a Cause.” He took my hand and added, “Let’s give him a screen test.”
While Laura was shooting the test, Pasolini kept moving around me, caressing me every time he came close. The moment the test was over I ran out of there. I’d no idea what he was doing. But whatever it was, I definitely knew I didn’t want it.
Pasolini was already a leading figure in the emerging Roman cinema. He’s remembered today as one of the major intellectuals of the entire twentieth century, not to mention celebrated as a gay icon. Back then, however, I’m afraid he had to do his groundbreaking movie—Accattone—without me.
Me, age seventeen, screen-testing for Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Accattone. Unfortunately, the great director found me far too attractive for comfort, and I fled. Ten years later I managed to get this copy from photographer Alfredo Bini.
A few days later, ever fascinated with cinema, a friend and I rode our bicycles to Via Veneto to watch Federico Fellini shooting La Dolce Vita. And who should I see in front of the camera but the accountant I used to shoot pool with, Marcello Mastroianni? That was the first time I fully realized he really was a famous actor. More, in fact—he was a star. At one point Fellini and Mastroianni moved away from the set to discuss something in private and passed close by. Marcello saw me, gave me a hug, and introduced me to Fellini. The only clear memory I have of that moment is that I blushed.
I went to see the movie when it came out and didn’t understand a thing. Which is rather ironic given that, like Marcello’s character in the film, I didn’t have any clear objectives myself either. I was dreaming of money and beautiful girls, and trying to make some sense of my life.
Meanwhile, Cinecittà was enjoying a wave of glory. Besides Italian movies, the Roman studios were welcoming a growing number of international productions, attracted by low costs and the expertise of artisans who were building the best sets and creating the best costumes in the world. Scores of producers, directors, and actors, eager to enjoy a slice of our “dolce vita,” were shifting their shooting schedules to Rome, the most fashionable place to be at the time. And, since stars never travel alone, a swarm of friends and relatives trailed in their wake. Suddenly the world’s top stars were adopting Rome as their second home.
Then word spread that production of Cleopatra would be completed at Cinecittà. Shooting in England had been suspended. Elizabeth Taylor had fallen ill and undergone an emergency tracheotomy. Her doctors said she would recover quicker in a warm climate, so the entire production moved to Rome. While Elizabeth was convalescing, they rebuilt all the sets and shot new scenes with minor actors. If something similar were to happen today, Hollywood wouldn’t think twice about replacing the star, no matter how famous. Which gives you some idea of Elizabeth’s greatness, of just how important it was to have her name on the poster of such a colossal production. Throughout the shooting of Cleopatra, the movie dominated conversation in Rome. Elizabeth was on the front cover of every magazine and pretty soon another face joined hers: Richard Burton’s.
History’s legendary love story between Cleopatra and Mark Antony stepped right out of the big screen into real life. Both Elizabeth and Richard were married to others at the time, and people of the older generation were scandalized at the mere hint of adultery. Those of the younger generation, on the other hand, were glued to the unfolding soap opera. In no time, the tale of the glittering Hollywood superstar who fell in love with the brooding Welsh actor became even bigger than the biggest movie ever made. Print editors eagerly rode the explosion of interest in celebrities and gossip and, before you knew it, scandal sheets were outnumbering every other publication for sale.
Television lost no time in following their example. Photos of Elizabeth and Richard, whether alone or together, sold for rafts of money. For the first time, you could really make a living as a photographer. All it took were a few spicy photos. Federico Fellini created the word paparazzo and made it famous in La Dolce Vita. But it was the feeding frenzy around Elizabeth and Richard that really gave birth to this new business, and to this new breed of photographer.
Everyone in Rome wanted to be involved in the shooting of Cleopatra firsthand and to come into contact with Elizabeth and Richard. It was a gigantic production, and lots of Romans found work on the set. There was a constant demand for extras to fill the enormous crowd scenes. I was still looking for work and went to the set to try out for the role of an archer. I knew I was too thin, so I’d submitted doctored photos, with my head stuck onto the much stockier body of my friend Massimo. It must have been the one time I botched a touch-up job, because I didn’t get the part.
An enormous open space behind the Cinecittà Studios was packed with thousands of extras, all in costume. I spotted Elizabeth in the distance. A golf cart was taking her from her dressing room to the set. Only people who were actually part of the movie and authorized to be near the star could go any closer. Everything was organized in an almost maniacal fashion.
Years later I became friends with Alberto De Rossi, the makeup artist on Cleopatra. We talked about the movie on a couple of occasions. He told me how one day the director, Joseph Mankiewicz, pointed at a crowd of thousands of Italian and English extras, their faces all darkened to look Egyptian, and shouted, “Alberto! What’s wrong with you? The third man from the left is not made up!”
To which Alberto replied: “Go fuck yourself.”
Alberto would get up at 2 in the morning to do all the makeup. Elizabeth was accustomed to having hers redone during the shooting. But Alberto was a perfectionist: he’d dedicate an hour and a half to her face and ten minutes to the rest of her body, and having to redo a perfect job made him angry. “My makeup has no need of retouching!” he’d shout. However, since he didn’t speak any English, he had a hard time speaking directly to Elizabeth. In the end he got so fed up he threw a wet sponge in her face and left.
My friend Massimo (left) and me, age sixteen, holding aloft my great friend Tano. I took this shot on auto-remote with my very first camera, a Bakeliteencased Agfa Pioneer.
The camera that started it all. (Photo by Kristy Tayler.)
I kept having one disappointment after another. My career as an actor was over before it began. Nevertheless, since I didn’t consider myself a real photographer, I never even dreamed of looking for work with my camera. But I didn’t want to go back to developing. I was terrified of ending up like my father, grinding his life away in a darkroom.
The only way of avoiding that fate was money. But I didn’t have any. Then I became friends with Giacomo, the son of a newspaper distributor. He was only one year older than me, but he already drove a convertible and happily squandered money left and right. I decided to join him and his job, delivering newspapers—which didn’t mean just going round the neighborhood on a bicycle. It was quite another operation altogether. We handled a lot of leading publications: Tuttosport, La Gazzetta Dello Sport, Il Resto del Carlino, Lo Stadio, La Nazione. But they were all printed in the north of Italy. Gett
ing copies to Rome’s 530 newsstands on time was a problem. In those days planes weren’t allowed to take off or land after midnight in coastal cities, which ruled out airfreight. Yet trains were unreliable and too often arrived late. And when that happened, sales plunged below the threshold of costs covered by advertising. There was only one solution: deliver by car. So, to guarantee a dawn delivery, we began driving back and forth between Milan and Rome, well over six hundred miles a night.
The papers would come off the presses around 1:15 a.m. By 5:00 we had to be in Rome. We went fast, dangerously fast, especially given our poor brakes and heavy loads. But the risk to our lives was worth it—the plan worked. We’d make 15,000 liras a night (around $300 today), and at some point people began talking about the crazy newspaper deliverers and their mad dash from Milan to Rome. We became famous on the semiprofessional racing circuits, in part thanks to a few exaggerated anecdotes. We were lucky, it’s true. But we were also very good.
Nevertheless, none of us involved seemed to realize the dangers involved in racing six hundred miles by night at full speed through snow, rain, fog . . . and all just to stay in business. This new passion became a kind of vocation in itself. Without trying, we set a new speed record for the drive between Milan and Rome. And when money began coming in, we acquired faster cars with appropriately modified engines that could race to 125 miles per hour, an exhilarating speed at a time when even the latest Ferraris were topping out at 140 mph. Whenever anyone asked me what line of work I was in, I’d say, “Journalism.”
One night, in bad weather, I was driving the two-lane Autostrada del Sole highway across the Apennine Mountains. Right after the Bologna viaduct there was a long downhill stretch. I hadn’t anticipated how the newspaper load that had previously slowed my car would now act as an accelerator on the downhill run. I hit a bend at top speed and found myself slap in front of two trucks coming the other way, one in the process of passing the other. Braking would have been pointless, so I swerved into the emergency lane, only to find that blocked by a parked car. As if someone had put it there on purpose. My last hope was to rack the handbrake and slam the steering wheel, which sent me into a spin. The front wheels skidded and the back of my car smacked into the rear of the outside truck. My Opel Kapitan split in two. When what remained of the wreck came to a halt, I crawled out on all fours, sure I’d broken every bone in my body. But I didn’t feel any pain. Newspapers filled the air, fluttering down like ghosts in the headlights of other oncoming cars, which luckily all managed to stop in time. Someone asked me if I was still alive. I said, “Yes,” and then fainted.
I had other, even more dangerous accidents, but driving gave me my first taste of fame. Minor fame, for sure, but fame all the same. I soon became a regular visitor to the semiprofessional racecourses. Fans noticed me, and the Fiat Giannini team offered me a tryout. People bet on me across Italy—illegally making far more money than I ever earned winning the races.
My father wasn’t at all happy about my new career. He thought I was wasting my time and talent, and kept asking me, “Don’t you know you’ve got a gift?” which only made me angry. “What gift?” I’d reply every time. “I’m a failure! I’ve got nothing and know nothing!”
My photography was instinctive. It came easy to me. I didn’t realize this could constitute a gift, a talent. My father had shown me all the essential technical aspects: how to use a stop, a shutter, calculate ASA grades, frame a subject properly in order to get a printable result. But photographing documents for restoration purposes is not the same as photographing a person. No one had ever taught me how to position a face so as to have the light strike it in the right way and then reflect into the camera, creating a beautiful image. There are a lot of rules about how to obtain a good photo. One simple example: if someone is short, they should be shot from below, so as not to emphasize their lack of height. And you don’t use the same lens to photograph someone with a long face as opposed to a round one.
However, since I’d never formally studied photography, I didn’t know all this stuff. All I knew was how to obtain the image I wanted. My father, on the other hand, knew all the rules and saw in me the same special something that Anna Magnani had noticed. He recognized the artistic quality in my photos and knew that professionals and critics would react in a way that I wasn’t able to understand at that point in my life. Only years later, well after I’d retired from the profession, was I able to look back at my work with a critical eye and see what he had seen. And only now do I fully appreciate the technical decisions I made. Because, back then, and throughout the first part of my career, I didn’t even realize I was making them.
My sports car racing widened the gap between my father and me. We argued a lot. Once he even slapped me. I felt so humiliated I didn’t go home for two days. On another occasion, I heard my parents arguing about a book my brother needed for school. My father said he didn’t have the money and my brother was crying. So I just dumped a fistful of crumpled banknotes onto the table, far more than the sum required. The gesture offended my father. He threw my “dirty money” onto the floor and began pulling 1,000-lira banknotes out of his wallet, each one looking as if it had just been starched and ironed. I left my cash where it lay and stormed out of the house. My mother cleared it up and used it later. But I didn’t care what my father thought about my money, nor how I’d earned it. The gift he saw in my photography, I saw in my skill at the wheel. And even if part of it was sheer luck—more than I realized—I was earning enough to aspire to a life beyond our basement, maybe somewhere along the brightly lit streets around Via Veneto.
Then, on September 20, 1962, my luck ran out. Doing well over 140 mph in an Alfa Romeo GTA, I hit a wet patch on the road. The car flipped into the air, slammed back onto the asphalt like a rock, and began spinning out of control. A moment later my life stopped. I heard a doctor say there was little they could do. I fought in silence, sensing the presence of someone watching over my involuntary sleep. After weeks of slipping in and out of a coma, I came back to the light. The first thing I saw was the figure I’d sensed beside my bed all that time. My father, so emotional that he had tears in his eyes as he caressed my face, was sitting in the light that I’d been following all those weeks, the light that was now leading me back to life. All my brothers and sisters came to visit me, though I don’t remember it. I was still in another world. One day my girlfriend Patrizia came too. I remember her, but not my sister Paola, who’d accompanied her to the hospital.
A nun, Sister Elena, looked after me. Dressed all in white, she looked radiantly beautiful to me, like an angel, and I was so shy. I said she looked like Simonetta Vespucci, Botticelli’s famous model, and that she was sexy. She blushed easily. I’d make fun of her, teasing her with sexy pranks, like sticking my fingers up beneath the sheets, at which she’d flee the room.
When I finally returned home I had no strength. A friend suggested exercises I could do to re-form my muscles and resynchronize my reflexes. I spent hours lying flat on my back moving my legs and arms in various ways, struggling to restore communication between my brain and my limbs. As soon as I was well enough to drive I went back to visit Sister Elena, to thank her with a little gift but also to see her again. At first I didn’t even recognize her. Not only was she not the beauty I’d printed in my mind, she was actually rather ugly. Saying good-bye, I instinctively tried to give her a hug. That was the last time I saw her flee a room.
I knew my racing career was over—assuming it had ever actually begun. My injuries would eventually heal completely, and there’d be no physical obstacle to me going back to racing with the Giannini team, nor to resuming the Milan-Rome newspaper delivery business. But I would never recapture the mental attitude—courage combined with lightheartedness. The moment you start asking yourself if you can take a bend at a certain speed, instead of just doing it, the race is over. Worse still, you become dangerous to yourself and to others. Even if I did try to return to racing, I knew I’d never again feel that in
ner rush, my mind one with the roar of the engine. What I’d hear instead would be the voice of that young man in a coma, confined to a hospital bed, begging me to brake when I needed to accelerate, hesitating at every bend and every straight. I’d feel fear. So I quit racing.
There would be other moments: gunning a “Bullitt” Mustang through the streets of southern France, or the time I took a Ferrari from Milwaukee to Chicago in forty-five minutes, no kids or wife on board to worry about. But even back then, at just nineteen years old, my body and mind still recovering, I realized that I’d always felt fear, that fear had been what attracted me to racing in the first place. But now that same fear would become a demon rather than a lure.
Nevertheless, photography to me was still that terrible government job my father did in a darkroom. Even when I was convalescing at home, I rarely saw him. He’d leave at 7 in the morning, come home for a quick lunch, and then go back to work until 8 at night. That was his life. And if that was my “gift,” I didn’t want it. I’d tried to convince myself and others that I was a race car driver in order to flee that prison, that miserable salary, and those long hours.
My beloved Pentax Asahi, with its 28 mm lens. (Photo by M&S Materiale fotografico.)
Back in our basement apartment there was a little alcove at the end of the corridor covered with a curtain. We all used it as a kind of closet. Before the accident, I’d bought a brand-new Pentax with two lenses and had hidden it back in there, where my father wouldn’t see it. One morning, convalescing at home, my mother at the market and my father at work, I got it out, still in its original packaging, took it into the bathroom, and opened it up.
My Life in Focus Page 4