My Life in Focus

by Gianni Bozzacchi,Joey Tayler

  I would never have agreed to go to Africa just to touch up someone else’s photos, and Pierluigi had known that. Every last doubt as to why he’d sent me to the set of The Comedians, every glimmer of hope that maybe he really had wanted to give me experience on a true Hollywood set, evaporated on the spot. That was Pierluigi’s way of putting me in my place, reminding me who was boss.

  I was furious. But Franco and I had no choice, doomed to hang around on set, twiddling our thumbs, waiting until Penn handed us a roll to develop, print, and retouch. So I buckled down, set to work as one of Pierluigi’s employees, and started taking a few photos of my own—of Richard, Alec, Peter and, yes, Elizabeth. With or without permission, I’d acquire the experience Pierluigi had promised me. Besides, I got the impression that Jean wasn’t all that worried about what some twenty-two-year-old kid was up to, whatever his qualifications. My presence was so irrelevant that no one bothered to complain about my shooting to Pierluigi either. Elizabeth had the last word on every single photo, and it was clear that no photos other than Penn’s would ever see the light of day. However, since I wasn’t there to work as a photographer, I wasn’t obligated to shoot pictures that corresponded to the framing that the director and cameraman set up for every scene. In one sense, by lying to me, Pierluigi had given me the freedom to photograph the way I wanted to: spontaneously, without my subjects knowing they were being shot, in natural situations, from whatever angle I preferred.

  Whenever I wasn’t wandering around snapping photos, I spent my time with the rest of the crew. On set everyone spoke two languages, English with the cast and French with the crew. I couldn’t speak either. The most I could do was flirt with the girls on set, retreating behind my camera whenever the language barrier became insurmountable. The only person I was able to communicate with reasonably was a splendid Corsican girl named Claudye, Elizabeth’s hairdresser. She’d trained under Alexandre de Paris, possibly the most famous hairdresser in history, the man who’d been there when Elizabeth got sick during the filming of Cleopatra and is said to have flown to her bedside, creating her famous “artichoke cut” while three nurses held her steady. The first time I met Claudye I was trying to start a Solex, a French electric bicycle with an engine mounted on the rear wheel. I’d never seen one before, and Claudye offered to show me how to use it. She was blonde, with big, very sexy chestnut eyes. Claudye thought she spoke Italian, but actually she spoke a Corsican dialect, and I knew no more than a dozen words of French. We made all kinds of mistakes but eventually understood each other. Pretty soon, whenever Claudye wasn’t busy with Elizabeth, she’d take me for a spin on her Solex. This flirtation with Elizabeth’s hairdresser made my presence even more irritating to the cast and crew.

  A family atmosphere develops on every movie set, especially among the people behind the scenes, the people who do the heavy work and make life easy for the stars. When work for the day ended, everyone usually went to some club or bar. One evening, Richard Burton sat down beside me and ordered a drink. He introduced himself and asked me who I was and what I was doing in Dahomey. He’d never noticed me on set. I tried to reply with my nonexistent English, but all he understood was “MGM.” He excused himself politely and left. That was my first conversation with Richard.

  On those nights in Cotonou clubs I heard African music for the first time. I loved it, as did a number of others on the crew. For me it was a new rhythm that got right under my skin. However, going back to the hotel after leaving those clubs could get scary. It was usually very late at night. The town was so dark you felt you were in deep jungle. I’ll never forget the avenue that led from the street to our hotel entrance, walled in with thick ferns and other exotic plants. You felt as if you were forging through virgin jungle toward the distant light of civilization. The sensation turned dramatically acute one time around 3 a.m. when I had just started up the avenue. I suddenly heard rustling in the bushes. “Who’s there?” I demanded in Italian. No reply. “Hello?” Still no reply. But I knew for sure someone was lurking back there, so I grabbed my gun and cocked it loudly, determined to make sure that whoever was in those bushes heard it too. Pointing the pistol straight ahead of me, I began moving backward. “I’m armed,” I stuttered. “Come out slowly or I’ll start shooting!” In truth, I was terrified. Marlon Brando came stumbling out of the bushes, followed by Christian Marquand. Both were drunk. They’d wandered off together into the shadows. Everyone in cinema already knew that Brando and Marquand were lovers—except me. It was stunning news to me. I felt like I’d done something wrong just by being there and seeing what I’d seen. I thrust my pistol back into its holster and hurried toward the hotel entrance. Just think about it. If I’d been a tad jumpier that night, or if my finger had slipped . . . No Godfather, no Last Tango in Paris, no Apocalypse Now.

  Brando’s unexpected arrival in Dahomey was classic jet-set behavior. It seems he’d been staying in Elizabeth and Richard’s house in Switzerland when news came that Elizabeth had won the New York Film Critics award for her role in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Elizabeth had called asking him if he could collect it for her, which he did, and then Brando just popped down to Africa to deliver it in person. “If you please,” as Richard would comment in his diary.

  A couple of days later Brando appeared on set, snuck up behind her, brushed Elizabeth’s shoulder while she was getting made up, and grabbed her ass with both hands. Elizabeth turned, smiled, and exclaimed, “Marlon!” Richard wasn’t nearly so amused. He ran over and pulled Marlon away. They argued and started punching each other. I immediately started snapping photos, imagining them published in some top magazine. I barely got a glimpse of my fantasy before Jean Osbourne grabbed my camera and tore out the roll.

  The only other occasion when anyone paid attention to me was during a difficult exterior road scene. Alec Guinness was dressed as a woman in the role of an ambassador trying to flee, and Richard Burton was chasing him. The car was supposed to skid around a bend and go into a spin. But the stunt men couldn’t make the car perform the way the director wanted. Shot after shot, the car wouldn’t spin. Frustration mounted. At a certain point I went over to them, introduced myself, and said, “I know how to do it.” The director and stunt coordinators ignored me. But Richard, tired of repeating the scene, told them to let me try. I crawled under the car and unhooked the rear brake, then took my place in the driver’s seat. At my first attempt, I skidded so violently the car spun twice. Too much. At the second attempt, I took the bend exactly how they wanted. Marvelous, but that was it. As so often happens, the scene was later excluded from the final cut, and my moment of glory expired in the jungle.

  I never spoke with either Elizabeth or Alec Guinness while in Africa. But Peter Ustinov was very friendly. The first time I saw him on set I’d no idea who he was. All I thought was, there’s Nero (from the movie Quo Vadis). But one evening we were talking—as far as that was possible with me—and the conversation turned to cars. Peter immediately launched into a wild imitation of a Formula One race, complete with roaring engines and commentators shouting in every language under the sun. Everyone watching just collapsed laughing.

  When shooting ended in Africa, I returned to Rome, where I developed and printed my photos, made a few small touch-ups, and handed them over to Pierluigi. Without telling me—and maybe by mistake—he had all of them sent on to the production company along with Bob Penn’s official photos. Elizabeth immediately noticed that a number of unfamiliar shots had been taken and wanted to know who’d done them. When she found out, she asked the producers to have me sent up to Nice, in southern France, where new sets had been built at the Victorine Studios to continue interior shooting on The Comedians. Pierluigi tried to send another photographer in my place, but Elizabeth vetoed the idea. She wanted me and all my equipment in Nice immediately, just like in Cotonou.

  I was delighted but kept asking myself, “Why me?” Was it because she liked the photos I’d taken without permission? Or because my images were better than
those of the set photographer? Why me? It was a question I would ask myself often throughout my career. It’s a question rooted in insecurity, my lack of a proper education, and what I used to feel was my lack of class. It was the question at the heart of my long argument with my father.

  I’d enjoyed freedoms that a twenty-two-year-old rarely has on the set of a movie featuring two of the biggest stars in the world. Not being the official photographer was a blessing. He or she is obliged to stay close to the camera and take photos that correspond to individual scenes, with no freedom to choose any other angle than whatever the director wants. Actors know they are being photographed while they work and inevitably pose, even if unconsciously. Which is why any “spontaneous” photo of a star at work isn’t spontaneous at all. Those were the kinds of photos that Elizabeth had expected to see.

  When I was on set, my technique had been to not be seen. If you don’t see me, you don’t think that someone is photographing you. You feel freer, more relaxed. A lot of people are intimidated by a camera. They block, consciously or unconsciously, concerned about how they look. But in my case, since no one cared what I did and didn’t realize that I was taking professional photos, I didn’t have that problem. I was able to photograph Elizabeth and Richard being natural without worrying about their poses.

  My long experience with printing had taught me the best system for photographing a woman. I learned from observing how light bounces off a subject through the lens and is then imprinted on film. The negative. The aperture of the stop is inversely proportionate to the contrast obtained in the final photo. Thus, at the retouching stage, you realize that some of the defects could have been avoided with a different stop aperture. Skin and color tonality are merely a question of light, and thus of contrast. In Africa, the light was very strong, so I knew I had to close down the stop and use film with a low ASA. To get better photos, I exposed a small quantity of light (stop closed) over a longer time lapse (shutter).

  All these considerations contributed to me getting unique photos. But I don’t believe that that was what made them special, nor why Elizabeth appreciated them so much. Stops and exposure times mean nothing when you’re dealing with a woman as beautiful as that. If you took a Polaroid shot of her neck she’d still have looked like a star. She was the most famous and photographed woman in the world. The world had literally watched her grow up through movies and photographs. Ever since she shot to stardom in Clarence Brown’s 1944 classic National Velvet at just eleven, Elizabeth had been shot from every conceivable angle and in every imaginable circumstances, often alongside crowned heads and superstars. How can you take an interesting photo of a woman like her? What more can a photographer come up with?

  In the end, while shooting dozens of photos of her in Africa, I realized where the real challenge lay in photographing Elizabeth: how to make people looking at my photos feel as I’d felt, as if they were seeing Elizabeth—the world’s most photographed and famous woman—for the very first time. I’d spend the next twelve years trying to solve that problem. My photos were not of a movie star but of a woman and her husband behaving normally, unaware of my lens. And those were the kind of photos I’d keep trying to take throughout my career.

  But back then, on my way to Nice, my career was the last thing on my mind. What career? I still didn’t have one. All I kept thinking was, “Why me? Is she bringing me all the way to France just to chew me out for taking unauthorized photos? Does she really like my work? Is my father right, even though I still can’t see what he sees? Does Elizabeth see it? And why is Pierluigi always so angry with me?”

  Franco and I got to Nice and went straight to our hotel. But before we even had time to unpack, Elizabeth’s people came to get us and set us up in an apartment behind the famous Hotel Negresco. Elizabeth’s driver then picked me up and took me to her yacht, where she was waiting for me. The second I stepped onto the yacht I could tell she was annoyed with me.

  “You’re good,” she said. “But you’re an asshole for taking these without my consent.”

  Despite this opening, she offered me a drink. Then, with Claudye helping translate, I explained the false promises that Pierluigi had used to persuade me to go to Africa, adding that I’d merely done the job I’d been sent to do. Elizabeth already knew about Pierluigi’s methods, and this helped ease the tension between us. Richard, on the other hand, was not very friendly. When I saw him, I stuttered, “Hi, Mr. Barton,” and he immediately corrected my mispronunciation. I felt so embarrassed that I didn’t dare try to say his name again—and spent the rest of my time in Nice practicing my English vowels.

  When we weren’t developing and retouching the set photos, Franco and I lived like kings in that apartment. In addition to The Comedians, the same studios were shooting an Italian movie, Arriva Dorellik, with Johnny Dorelli in his first lead role. And Nice had a lot of women’s colleges, where the nascent feminist movement was making itself heard, which inevitably led to a constant flow of girls through our apartment. We even had our own darkroom, which of course we didn’t use only for developing film. We were having the time of our lives while Pierluigi, back in Rome, was struggling to work out what the heck we were doing and where we were living. When he eventually learned from Franco that Elizabeth had moved us into a luxury apartment and that I spent most of my time with her and Richard, he sent another of his photographers, Roberto Biciocchi, to spy on us. But Roberto promptly moved into our apartment and joined in the good life. Pierluigi went nuts, consumed with jealousy.

  There was a lot of competition between the French and Italians working on the two movies, especially when it came to women. The most sought-after girl was Elizabeth’s stand-in, a beautiful girl whose job was to take Elizabeth’s position on set so that technicians could adjust the lighting while Elizabeth was dressing. Every single man on both sets, French and Italian, tried to go out with her. But she turned down every invitation. One of the assistants was the super-rich heir to a cosmetics empire, the son of Madame Rochas. He’d cruise around in a Mustang convertible. She turned him down too. The Italians insisted I give her a try. And the truth is, I didn’t even like her that much. From time to time I’d joke with her on set, but that was it. In the end I gave in and invited her out. And she accepted.

  It turned into an embarrassing night. She was in a bad mood, didn’t want to do this, didn’t want to do that. In the end I said, “Let’s drop all this and go to my place.” She agreed. I found a phone and rang the apartment, asking Franco and Roberto if they could clear out for a bit. They congratulated me and made themselves scarce. Back in the apartment, we stretched out on my bed half dressed and started making out. But then she stopped me, saying she didn’t want to. Did that “no” mean “yes,” or was it a real “no”? I didn’t bother to find out; I just took her word for it and fell asleep. When Franco and Roberto got back they found me asleep and the girl fully dressed, offended and angry. She asked them to take her home immediately, which they did. When they came back they let me have it: “You’ll ruin our reputation!” they shouted, and even rang Pierluigi to tell him I’d bombed with the girl. They went on and on about it, insisting I repair the “damage.” So, even though I still didn’t like the girl, we went out again. This time, the “no” of that first night turned out to mean “yes.” I don’t intend to boast about being some kind of playboy. I was just a kid, and it was the sixties. This is the way it was.

  After a while I began spending time at Claudye’s apartment, picking up the thread of what we’d started in Africa. We spent a weekend in Saint-Tropez with other members of the crew, and when we got back I taught her to drive my Fiat Giannini. I knew she liked me and the attraction was mutual. We went out together on numerous occasions and I’d spend the night. But commitment took time. I still wasn’t ready for a serious relationship, and there were a lot of nights when I told Claudye I was too busy, when actually I was out with other girls. But all I thought about was her, and Claudye was very patient with me as well as persistent. She�
��d always come to find me on set.

  One night I was in a bar with two girls. A woman came over, said she liked my eyes, that I had a beautiful profile, and that she wanted to kiss me. I didn’t stop her. Then suddenly this guy appeared, shoved her off her stool, and pulled out a knife. I tried to dodge it, but he cut me. Out on the street, I ran into Claudye. I was still bleeding. She took me to her apartment and bandaged my wound. In that moment I realized that Claudye truly cared for me, and I cared for her. We got a lot closer after that night.

  When shooting ended on The Comedians, Elizabeth invited me to spend a weekend with her and Richard on their yacht, which was actually rented at the time. They wanted to get to know me better. She also liked the idea of me and Claudye together and wanted to give our romance a little nudge.

  Our first stop was San Remo. Elizabeth, Richard, Claudye, and I got off the boat to go to a restaurant. We’d barely set foot on shore when we were assaulted by paparazzi flashbulbs. Richard was walking behind Elizabeth and me, alongside Claudye, and for who knows what reason, Elizabeth grabbed my arm. Paparazzi followed us all the way to the restaurant. The next day, photos of Elizabeth on my arm were all over the place. Overnight I’d become Elizabeth’s new personal photographer. Seeing my face in newspapers and magazines made a big impression on me.

  I was still news when we got to Monte Carlo for the Monaco Grand Prix. But the real story turned out to be the tragic death of top Italian driver Lorenzo Bandini. He lost control of his Ferrari when his left rear wheel hit a guardrail. The car went into a wild skid, hit a straw-bale barrier, and burst into flames, rolling over with Bandini trapped beneath it. He died of his injuries three days later. Richard and Elizabeth’s yacht was moored only yards from where the crash took place. We were so close we could hear Bandini’s screams as he desperately tried to escape the wreck. To witness such a tragedy firsthand was a revelatory experience. The universe seemed to be showing me how my own life could have ended . . . in the precise moment that a new life was opening up.