My face was in all the papers alongside Elizabeth’s and Richard’s. Photos that I’d taken on a Hollywood set appeared with my name. I had a beautiful new girlfriend. My head was spinning. Instead of going back to work after the weekend, I called in sick. I went straight to my parents’ house, where my father said Pierluigi had been phoning at all hours. He wanted to make sure I knew that I’d been fired.
Fired? Why? According to Pierluigi, I’d cut a deal with those paparazzi to make newspapers talk about a new photographer in the Taylor-Burton entourage. He refused to believe that I’d merely accepted an invitation to dinner and taken a stroll with my future wife and another couple. The truth is, Pierluigi was crazy with jealousy. For the first time ever, one of his photographers had done something extraordinary, something over which he had no control and for which he could claim no credit. From the moment that photos of Elizabeth and me, arm in arm, had appeared on the front page of every newspaper and magazine, Pierluigi’s phone hadn’t stopped ringing. But no one was calling to book Mr. Praturlon. The man everyone wanted to talk to was Elizabeth Taylor’s new photographer. Me.
I called the office, and a friend told me that Pierluigi wanted to fire everyone. He was going nuts because he’d seen my photo on the cover of Eva Express. I didn’t even know the magazine he was talking about. Outclassing Pierluigi was the last thing on my mind. I was still his employee and I thought I owed him something. Without him I would never have gone to Africa. I wanted to talk to him in person, tell him it was all a misunderstanding. I didn’t want to be fired, especially because I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong. When we finally met, Pierluigi didn’t even give me time to open my mouth.
“You’re fired. I created you and I can destroy you. Get out of here.”
At the time, I felt as if Pierluigi really had destroyed me. I wasn’t Elizabeth Taylor’s personal photographer. I was just a kid caught in paparazzi crossfire at the wrong moment. And now I was just another unemployed photographer. I didn’t even tell Claudye that I’d been fired, let alone Elizabeth or Richard. I feared that if I lost my association with an established professional photographer, they wouldn’t want anything more to do with me.
Claudye came to find me in Rome. We spent a couple of weeks by the sea before she went back to Elizabeth and Richard’s home in Switzerland to talk about their next movie. When Elizabeth and Richard left for Sardinia, Claudye phoned to tell me she’d just had a wonderful scopata—which in Italian means “fuck.” Hurt, I asked her with who. She said she’d done it on her own. I insisted. Had she started a relationship with someone new? But she just went on about some famous chef, Henri Belin Close-Jouve. Turned out she actually meant scoperta, a discovery. She’d found these amazing recipes and wanted to know if I’d like to come up and stay for a few days—if I had nothing else to do, that is. Something else to do? I’d just been fired. So I said yes, of course, and jotted down the name of the town she was in the way I heard her say it: Stet. I asked her how long it would take to drive there, and she said I’d arrive in time for dinner.
Once I crossed into Switzerland, I studied the map, found this place called Stetten, and set out across country, arriving around 10 p.m., when I stopped a man in the street and asked him where I might find Elizabeth Taylor’s chalet. The guy burst into laughter. “That’s not Stetten,” he said, “it’s Gstaad,” and proceeded to give me directions, way over on the other side of the country. When I finally arrived at Elizabeth’s place it was 3:30 in the morning.
The thousand-mile trip had melted my car’s muffler. Unable to find a replacement, Claudye rang Elizabeth and asked if we could use one of their cars. Richard told her to give me their Mini Cooper S and bring it to them in Sardinia. It was a perfect plan, since he and Elizabeth wanted me on the set of the movie they were preparing in Capocaccia, Joseph Losey’s Boom! They wanted me not as Pierluigi’s employee nor even as a photographer—they wanted just me for who I was. The one drawback was that this time I couldn’t take any photos, not one. Bob Penn’s contract with Elizabeth was still in force, and he’d been very embarrassed by all the attention Elizabeth had given me on account of my photos from the set of The Comedians. All I’d do was retouch Penn’s images. It wasn’t exactly the job I wanted, but it was a job, and I needed one. It was also a chance to spend more time with Claudye. We loaded the Mini Cooper and set out from Stet . . . I mean, Gstaad.
The production company in Sardinia had built an exotic house on rocks jutting out from a beach, where Elizabeth’s character was supposed to live with a whole menagerie of animals: cats, dogs, parakeets, monkeys. They hadn’t even started shooting yet when one morning we got to the set and the house was gone. It had fallen clean off the rocks and simply vanished into the sea. All that was left were a bunch of African monkeys and parrots.
Ten years later, researchers would flock to Sardinia to study the strange phenomenon of monkeys all over the island. But because the movie took place in an imaginary world—not Sardinia—no one connected the monkeys to that accident on set. Had they asked me, I could have saved them time and trouble. But I wasn’t in the movie’s credits, so no one would have believed me anyway. Those original house-wreck survivors had spread out over the island and multiplied.
The set had to be entirely rebuilt, which left us with a lot of free time on our hands: Elizabeth and Richard on their yacht, Claudye and I in our hotel. One day the man insuring the movie, Prince Spada, brought his niece to look at the new house they were building by the sea. As she wandered around the rocks, she suddenly slipped, banged her head, and fell into the sea. Everyone stood frozen in shock. I’m a useless swimmer, but for some reason I impulsively dived in and pulled her to shore. After that I was like a god around the set.
Then one day I went to Alghero, and while I was strolling around town a local jeweler stopped me. He worked with coral, gold, and diamonds to produce objects of great beauty. When I told Elizabeth about his work, she said she wanted to see it and asked me to drive her to Alghero myself. I asked whether we should take her bodyguard. There’d been a rash of kidnappings in Sardinia and even though nothing sinister had happened on set, security was tighter than usual.
“No,” she said. “Let’s go on our own.”
So off we went. Suddenly, rounding a sharp bend, I found both lanes up ahead blocked by a car parked in the middle of the road and flanked by two men armed with hunting rifles. I yanked the handbrake. The car spun around. Men with machine guns appeared out of nowhere, and I sped back the way we’d come as fast as possible. All that newspaper delivery work hadn’t gone entirely to waste.
Elizabeth shopping during a break in shooting Joseph Losey’s Boom! (1968).
After this episode, Elizabeth was surrounded by security guards for the rest of the shoot—Italian police, FBI, Scotland Yard. We never did discover what those guys were up to, whether it really had been an attempted kidnapping, a robbery, or even worse. Either way, I was now a hero twice over. Or I was at least as far as the Italian police were concerned, who treated me wonderfully. But the FBI, Scotland Yard, and the production were all mad at me for taking Elizabeth from the set without informing anyone. I even got the impression I was under suspicion myself. However, from that day on something changed in my relationship with Elizabeth.
Boom! is a cult movie today, both for the outlandish tone of every aspect of the movie and especially for Elizabeth’s performance. Watching the shooting, I realized it would be a strange movie, which was appropriate because the director, Joseph Losey, was a strange guy. His mother was a Native American from the Winnebago tribe, and he’d spent most of his childhood in Wisconsin. He was one of those American directors considered a communist, one of the undesirables, registered on the blacklist. No one managed to communicate with him much, on or off the set. He wasn’t friendly and was very focused on himself. Elizabeth respected him and did what he said, but I don’t think she appreciated his directing much. More than once, at the end of a scene, I heard Losey call, “Cut! Good.” But
Elizabeth would then say that she could have done better, and an argument would follow. Richard never intervened. But Elizabeth always won anyway. Mostly because it was thanks to her that the production had the funding it needed in the first place.
Strange things kept happening, almost as if the production was taking its cues from Losey’s odd personality. First the house collapsed. Then there was the presumed kidnapping attempt. Then Michael Dunn’s wife, Joan Talbot, a fabulous dancer from Las Vegas, dumped him out of the blue. She simply vanished. No one knew where she’d gone, and a few months later they divorced. One night, drunk out of his mind in a bar, Dunn clambered onto the counter and shouted, “Do you want to know why my wife stayed with me?” Then he pulled out his willy. Dunn may have been a dwarf, but naked it looked like he had three legs.
As if all this wasn’t enough, Richard discovered that the captain of their yacht had been stealing and fired him. By way of revenge, the man stole Elizabeth’s dog, Georgia. Elizabeth was devastated, so I offered to get her back. I’d made friends with the captain before he got fired, so I told Elizabeth I’d handle it. I flew to Nice in her private plane; then a limousine took me to the captain’s house in Beau Soleil, a village just outside Monte Carlo. When I knocked, no one answered. I started calling his name, and a voice yelled back, “Fuck off!” So I kicked the door down and burst in. The captain grabbed a knife, held it to the dog’s throat, and yelled: “One more step and I’ll cut him to bits.” I lunged forward, fists clenched, ready to flatten the guy. At which point he simply dropped the knife and handed me the dog. What a coward.
My future wife Claudye (top right) fixes Elizabeth’s dress while director Joseph Losey cheers and Richard glares into the sun (or maybe at me—I still wasn’t sure).
I took the poor thing straight back to Sardinia. Elizabeth was delighted. When I told her the whole story, she laughed and said, “Gianni, you’re a real gangster!” As an Italian I felt offended and shot back, “I’m just a kid who grew up on the streets. Maybe you don’t know what that means.” I don’t think Elizabeth understood just how sensitive Italians can be to Mafia stereotypes, and I still didn’t know her sense of humor very well. But when she kept calling me “gangster,” I eventually tried to fight back by quipping, “Okay, have it your way, Baby Boobs.” It was a common gangster expression at the time referring to buxom women like Elizabeth. From then on we always used those nicknames with each other. As for Georgia, eventually she got handed off to me because she didn’t get along with Elizabeth’s other Pekingese, O’fie (Shakespearean English for “get away”).
Elizabeth adored dogs. They’d respond to her calls and commands, yet seemed to ignore Richard’s. This bugged him, since he liked dogs too. Then one day he showed up with a Pekingese named E’en So (Shakespearean English for “even so”). The dog was blind in one eye, and Richard claimed he’d rescued it. Strangely, Elizabeth had trouble communicating with the dog, although it seemed to pay rapt attention to Richard, leaving Elizabeth wondering what she was doing wrong. Only much later did Richard confess that he’d bought the dog already trained—but only to commands spoken in Welsh, which he spoke fluently.
Claudye and I were together all the time. We visited nearby Corsica, where I met her family. Corsicans can be very rough and ready, just like Romans, so we got along wonderfully. Elizabeth was thrilled. A true romantic at heart, she found the love story between her retoucher and her hairdresser just perfect.
Work on Boom! was going to finish in the Dino De Laurentis Studios just outside Rome. So we all flew out of Sardinia on Elizabeth and Richard’s private plane. During the flight I asked if I could take a photo of the three of us together. When they agreed, I set my camera on automatic and plonked myself down beside them, wearing the biggest smile I could possibly manage. Journalists swarmed all over us when we landed, everyone asking who I was and what I was doing in Elizabeth and Richard’s entourage. Elizabeth introduced me as her private photographer, which wasn’t true. But what else could she say? That I was the guy who retouched her photos to make her look more beautiful? No way. The journalists took their photos, asked more questions, and off we went. In a flash, word spread around Rome that Elizabeth Taylor had taken some Italian guy into her entourage.
One day, during a break in shooting, I stepped outside the studio for a cigarette and bumped into a beautiful American girl also smoking. She was dressed in this weird, space-age bikini, so I took her for an extra and told her—in Italian—that she was bella, beautiful. She quipped right back, with a foreign accent, “You’re not so bad yourself.” Then a man came up and asked her, in French, if I was bothering her. No, she replied, and they left. Later I figured out the guy was director Roger Vadim and the girl his wife, Jane Fonda. They were shooting Barbarella—a movie later renowned for its opening scene featuring Fonda undressing in zero gravity. Sadly, since I didn’t know who they were at the time, I don’t have any photos.
By the time shooting on Boom! came to an end, I’d become an official member of the Taylor-Burton entourage. Elizabeth liked having me around, partly for my talent and partly because I was with Claudye. But if Claudye had earned her full-time job and standing, I was still just an unemployed photographer with little idea what to do about it. Nevertheless, off set and far from Bob Penn’s ill will, I snapped a bunch of spontaneous photos of Elizabeth, Richard, and their kids. I showed Elizabeth every shot I developed, and she allowed me to sell some of them. She’d never had a personal photographer who’d take those kinds of shots of her and her family. But she responded immediately to mine and trusted me. She appreciated my eye.
At this point, Elizabeth and Richard had a few weeks’ break before beginning their next movie, and Richard was due to give an important speech at his alma mater, Oxford. Elizabeth wanted to take her hairdresser friend with her, so I was invited along too, but forbidden to take any photos of the event. The university had granted exclusive rights to some English newspaper in exchange for it covering all the costs. We arrived at the outdoor site where the university had organized the event. A couple of thousand students were already there waiting—strangely, in dead silence. The rector introduced Richard with a brief biography, whereupon Richard sprang to his feet, stepped up to the dais, took the microphone and said: “My name is Richard Walter Jenkins . . .” There was a long pause, which was greeted in silence, before he continued, “. . . in art, Richard Burton.”
Thunderous applause followed, lasting some minutes. I didn’t have a clue what was going on. It was only later that night that someone explained to me how Richard, a miner’s son from south Wales, had been unofficially adopted by his schoolmaster, Philip Burton, a well-known BBC personality and famous as the man who had tutored Richard all the way through Oxford.
That evening, after his speech, Richard told Elizabeth to go home with Claudye and the others. He and I were going on a pub crawl. Elizabeth agreed and they left. Richard put his arm around my shoulders, and off we went. I think we went into every pub in Oxford, with Richard putting one beer after another in front of me. I had never drunk beer before. I was stunned by how much we had to go pee! At one of countless urinals, Richard told me that I wouldn’t have the same problem in America. “The beer there is all water. You’ll see,” he said, though the comment didn’t really mean anything to me at the time. I was too busy peeing.
After a couple of hours knocking back endless beers, me struggling just to keep up, Richard moved on to vodka. I don’t mean a vodka cocktail or a martini. Just vodka, straight, with a cube of ice. He ordered one for me too. When he turned away for a moment, I managed to tell the barman to slip me water in an identical glass. Richard swigged his shot down straight before I had time to take more than a sip of mine. He scolded me for being slow, grabbed my glass, and took a slug from it. Then he studied it pensively for a moment and said, “I must be drunk. This vodka tastes like water.”
Being drunk didn’t stop Richard from continuing to drink, not even when his hands shook so much he couldn’t ho
ld his glass steady anymore. Since this was a recurring problem, he’d even developed a system for dealing with it. He’d take his belt off and tie it to his wrist. Then he’d pass the belt around his neck, grasp his glass with the hand tied to the belt, and pull the other end of the belt with his free hand, creating a pulley that raised the glass to his lips. He’d happily do this sitting in front of everyone in a packed pub, without giving a damn what it looked like. If anyone commented, he’d just sway back and forth by way of answer. I knew very little about Richard’s past in those days. I had no idea that his natural father had been a heavy drinker himself, a “twelve-pints man” as they say, and that Richard had started drinking at age twelve. All that kind of stuff was new to a Roman street kid like myself.
Pretty soon I found myself begging to go home, but no sooner did I drag him out of one pub than he’d suggest “just one more pub”—and then just one more. The next day, shortly after dawn—I have no idea how or why we were up so early—I met Richard in the kitchen and he invited me to share breakfast with him: a fat sandwich of white supermarket bread spread thickly with hot mustard and filled with a generous helping of French fries. “Eat,” he said, “it’ll make you feel young.”
My Life in Focus Page 8