A few days before the end of shooting I got a request from Playboy. They wanted me to do a big layout with all the actresses from the movie: “The Bluebeard Women.” It would have been fantastic, and Salkind was enthusiastic because he saw it as a big publicity vehicle. But I knew that Virna would never accept. Raquel, maybe. But never entirely naked. Plus, she would have expected a lot of money. In the end we only managed to get Nathalie Delon, Marilü Tolo, and two German girls playing minor roles. It was weird photographing nudes, and of course, Playboy wanted very explicit photos. I thought that playing with light and shadow would make images of a naked woman more interesting. Now you see it, now you don’t. You’d see one thing in some shots, a glimpse of lingerie in others. My style was a long way away from the magazine’s usual one, and I didn’t want to adapt myself to the model that the editor in chief kept asking for. I did what I felt was best. We had no particular agreement about the style of the photos. In the end, however, Playboy only published a few shots, with no vulgar or explicit nudes.
Once the movie was over, I returned to Paris. The Playboy experience had been so disappointing that I decided to test myself with something ambitious, more in tune with my style. I created a wonderfully beautiful layout with Virna Lisi as my model entitled “From Eve’s Days to Our Own.” I had Alberto De Rossi, the best makeup artist in the world, following my instructions. The best hairdresser, Alexandre de Paris. The best French stylists, Lanvin, Chanel, Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, Andre Courreges, Emanuel Ungaro, and Pierre Cardin, who all dressed her exactly as I wished. Virna flew from Rome to Paris, and we took the photos near Alexandre’s country house, the same place where four years earlier I’d got married. I took the whole layout to Diane Freeland, the Vogue editor, who said, “Gianni, I can’t publish these. What would I do next month?” She had a set standard, which she didn’t want to exceed. An example of how, as I said earlier, a photographer often has to repress his or her inner artist in order to satisfy the needs of a client or editor. This time I’d tried to push beyond myself, do something important, express my own vision in something that had nothing to do with either Elizabeth or Richard. But it didn’t work out.
I caught up with Elizabeth and Richard in Munich, where they were shooting a two-part television movie Divorce His, Divorce Hers. The story line examined the conflicting emotions felt by a couple whose eighteen-year marriage has frayed beyond repair, and I couldn’t help hearing Elizabeth and Richard’s own arguments in there somewhere. I never read the script, so I don’t know how much of the dialogue was coincidence, improvisation, or premonition. Personally, I rarely heard them arguing in real life, even though living in the same house made that inevitable at times. Elizabeth’s voice would become shrill and fast and she wouldn’t stop talking; Richard would slip a word in here or there whenever he could.
Like every couple the world over, they had their difficult times. But they were also great at making up and, of course, enjoyed some options that were quite unavailable to most couples. I remember, for instance, the day Richard called me urgently from the Grand Hotel in Rome, asking me to take him to the Bulgari jewelry store. “I must get Elizabeth to forgive me,” he explained. I found him already waiting outside when I got to the hotel on my motorbike. “Come on,” he said, jumping on the back. “Let’s go before she wakes up.” I can’t remember what the visit cost him, but it sure wasn’t nickels and dimes. At any rate, it won him a full pardon.
Elizabeth and Richard working on the 1973 TV movie Divorce His, Divorce Hers, a film, as chance would have it, shot shortly before their own dramatic divorce.
Jewels and jewelry were, of course, a famous part of Elizabeth and Richard’s life, which meant they became part of mine as well—sometimes too much so. We did a shoot in London’s Dorchester Hotel featuring Elizabeth and her amazing priceless collection, after which we were due to fly to Rome. But given the public exposure of such tantalizing loot, everyone was terrified at the possibility of robbery en route. So Richard came up with a solution: he and Elizabeth would take my cameras in their bags, and I’d take the jewels in mine, travel separately as an anonymous citizen, and land in Rome’s Fiumicino airport, leaving them to arrive to a full media fanfare in Ciampino, south of the city. Have you ever sat inconspicuously alone at some major airport, millions of dollars’ worth of someone else’s jewelry in your bag, watching the departure board scroll exotic alternative destinations: Rio de Janeiro, Tenerife, Johannesburg, Bangkok, Hong Kong? I did, musing on a string of gangland options. Then I caught my flight to Rome, landed, and was asked to open my case. The whole thing took forever, and eventually Richard had to come sort out the situation. But then we had to stage a full press conference. The jewels had become even more of a security risk. I had to stand up and lie, telling the whole world that actually the baubles were all copies. Damn jewels! Those customs guys were so pissed off by the whole affair that they stopped me every time for at least a year after that.
The most heated arguments between Elizabeth and Richard always broke out when one or the other wasn’t working, sparked by fear that their success or their relationship might become unbalanced. But it was increasingly Richard who sat watching Elizabeth from the sidelines. Which is why, at a certain point, Elizabeth started wanting to be known as Elizabeth Taylor-Burton, out of consideration for Richard. She knew he’d always been bothered by the idea of being desired only thanks to her, while she’d begun to resent the fact that she was no longer as much in demand as she had been after Cleopatra. Seeing the pair of them on-screen together was no longer a novelty. I realized all this from the drop in publication of my own photos of them together, compared to an unchanged interest in photos of Elizabeth alone. It was she who people wanted to see: in costume, wearing designer clothes, with her children. The public wanted Elizabeth. Requests for photos of both of them together, or Richard alone, began to drop off in the early seventies. Much of this could be attributed to the fact that the movies they were doing together were short on both artistic value and economic return. But Elizabeth was bigger than any box office. The success or otherwise of a movie didn’t even scratch her superstar status. Richard, on the other hand, didn’t enjoy such luxury.
Elizabeth and her jewels, a smoldering combination. I’m sure she and Richard must be reveling somewhere over the results of the December 2013 Christie’s auction in New York: her collection sold for ten times its estimated value, raking in a cool $116 million.
Richard and Elizabeth kiss in a scene from Divorce His, Divorce Hers.
He had never been so at ease in the limelight as Elizabeth. At heart, he was a simple man. He hated the way that celebrity had overshadowed his acting, which he took very seriously. But understanding Richard’s frustrations and insecurities didn’t help much when dealing with his drunken explosions of repressed rage. Or worse still, having to watch him damage himself when, barely able to stand, he’d open another bottle. The easiest way to provoke Richard’s rage was to call him Mr. Taylor, and a lot of people did just that, sometimes behind his back, sometimes from the safe distance of a newspaper article, and sometimes to his face, just to see his reaction. Elizabeth and Richard loved each other deeply, but somehow they couldn’t help being self-destructive.
Divorce His, Divorce Hers was a small, penniless production. Elizabeth and Richard had agreed to do it only because one of the producers was their friend John Heyman, a man still very much in the business who—among many other claims to fame—is now credited with having almost single-handedly created “structured financing” in the movie industry. But he didn’t have much financial backing that time. The production could afford so little publicity that I was only hired for two days. I spent the rest of my time working out of the Four Seasons, doing a string of fashion shoots.
Richard and Marcello Mastroianni with director George Pan Cosmatos shooting Massacre in Rome, a big hit in Italy but not abroad.
One day the Italian-Greek director George Pan Cosmatos came to show me a script of a movie he wante
d to do, originally entitled Retaliation in Italian and later released in English as Massacre in Rome. It was about the infamous Nazi massacre that took place in the Ardeatine caves outside Rome near the end of World War II when, after partisans killed 33 Germans, the Gestapo took a revenge multiplied by ten: 330 random victims were rounded up and slaughtered. To this day, whether the Vatican stood by and did nothing remains a controversial question. George was having trouble finding anyone to produce the project and thought that I, being Roman, might appreciate it better and bring Richard in on the project. Which is what happened. Richard didn’t know the story but became interested when I explained it, coming with me to see the memorial monument that now marks the site. He ended up playing the lead role of Gestapo chief Herbert Kappler, the man responsible for the killings, and costarring with Marcello Mastroianni. The movie packed theaters in Italy, but didn’t do well internationally.
Almost everything else in my life and career vanished from my mind when I came home one day and Claudye greeted me with fantastic news: she was pregnant. I felt my father smiling down on me. Even though he was no longer with us, I knew he was happy. I was so excited at the idea of becoming a father, so happy to finally give my mother a grandchild. It was one of those rare moments in my life that I truly felt was mine. Claudye and I left our house in Paris and moved to Rome in order to be close to my family. We rented a penthouse in Parioli—Rome’s most exclusive neighborhood—and, while I kept working, Claudye started preparing for our new family and our new life.
Chapter 11
Another Funeral
Shortly after we moved to Parioli, I turned twenty-nine and decided to throw a big party to celebrate all the marvelous things that Claudye and I were living through. As a gift, the Countess Giovanna Agusta—with whom I’d long since made up—hired the incredible and popular steel band, Los Paraguayos, to play at the party. Once everyone had arrived—Elizabeth, Richard, all our friends and relatives—we had two hundred people eating, drinking, and enjoying music on our enormous terrace overlooking Rome. A lot of prominent government officials and ambassadors lived in the same area, and I guess around midnight one must have grown tired of all the noise because someone called the police. A very arrogant officer appeared at the door, threatening to arrest everyone on the spot. I asked him to wait and went to call one of my guests, Nino Alagna, Rome’s deputy chief of police, who happened to be dancing at that moment with Elizabeth. He came straight down and told the officer to vanish. “What do you want? Get out of here!”
A little while later, two even more arrogant officers arrived, this time from the more serious Carabinieri force. They wanted me to stop the party and get everyone lined up with their identification. I was going to be arrested and fined. Again I asked them to wait a moment while I went to get Nino. They refused to even address him directly, insisting on knowing who he was. That was easy: “I’m merely the chief of Rome’s police headquarters,” he said, rising to his authority. “What do you want here? This is a private party. Get out and don’t let me see you again. Go! Go! Go!” And go they did. It helps having friends in high places. It definitely helps having them dancing in your house. I’m not sure quite when our party did finally wind down, but it was a great night.
Meanwhile, with Richard accepting the lead role in Massacre in Rome, the movie got the funding it needed. Once again, however, I got no credit. Cosmatos never said a word to producer Carlo Ponti about how I’d been the one to convince Richard to do the movie. And if that wasn’t enough to make me feel bad, he proceeded to tell me that the production couldn’t afford to hire me as special photographer. He said I cost too much.
So I refused to do any kind of set photo, but I went to the set anyway to visit Richard and his costar, my old friend Marcello Mastroianni. I enjoyed watching their contrasting acting styles. Between one take and the next, Richard would sit down with the script in hand, studying the next scene, rehearsing it, smoking a cigarette. “Marcello is incredible,” he’d say. “He finishes a scene, sits down, and goes to sleep. When the director calls him, he gets up and says, ‘What do you want me to do?’” Marcello was a fascinating man. He had class and a beautiful presence. Women went crazy for him. He never considered himself an actor. He was just himself.
Richard, on the other hand, came from the old school of English theater, the Old Vic. He always prepared. I don’t think he ever loved cinema as much as he loved theater. When he was with his old friends Rex Harrison and Peter O’Toole, all they ever talked about was theater. Playing a role in continuity for a stage production is totally different from doing cinema. Movies aren’t filmed scene by scene but shot by shot, and rarely in chronological order, often for budgetary reasons. Great as he was on-screen, Richard had an incredible stage presence. Over the years I heard him give many readings and speeches, and saw him act onstage in Equus. What a voice. He could project it anywhere. Whether you were sitting in the front or back row of a theater, you got the same performance from Richard. And it was hard for him to find a movie that utilized those theatrical gifts to the full. It’s probably no accident that all his best screen performances—Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Becket, Anne of the Thousand Days—were all adapted from plays written for the theater. Richard would often tell me that he earned too much from movies to be able to stop doing them. The houses, cars, staff, me—the last wheel on the cart, as we say in Italian—all cost money, a lot of it. “You have to work,” Richard would exclaim. And he always took his work very seriously.
I, on the other hand, wasn’t taking my work quite as seriously as I once had. Sure, I was pissed off at Cosmatos for having minimized my role in realizing Massacre in Rome, but not to the extent of complaining to Richard about it. He could have got me credited with a single phone call, or landed me the job of special photographer. But I didn’t ask because I didn’t really care, something I felt more and more frequently after my father died. That kind of work didn’t attract me as much as it once had. A couple years earlier, Brian Hutton had called to offer me work on Kelly’s Heroes. Any other photographer would have died to work with that cast: Clint Eastwood, Donald Sutherland, Carroll O’Connor, Telly Savalas, Don Rickles. I turned him down. I wasn’t interested. I got to the point where in order to really be able to commit myself, I had to feel I was absolutely indispensable; otherwise I just couldn’t give my best.
That mood had been there when I’d done a few days’ work on the set of The Assassination of Trotsky. I just couldn’t get excited. It was a minor production about a delicate issue and received little publicity. I’d met one of the costars, Alain Delon, in Paris, working on Jean-Pierre Melville’s The Red Circle, but I was totally uninterested in his on-off girlfriend, Romy Schneider, who was costarring alongside him. And it would have been a pleasure to avoid having anything to do with the director, my old friend Joseph Losey. However, since Richard was playing Trotsky, I felt obliged to go, putting my own professional dissatisfaction to one side.
Everyone was delighted to see me when I turned up on set—except the set photographer, Sergio Strizzi. When I arrived in a hot new car, well dressed and brandishing the best equipment on the market, I couldn’t help noticing a flash of envy in Sergio’s eyes, even though we were friends. But I was used to that by now, so I decided to play a joke on him. I was sitting next to Richard showing him my new light meter, a Lunasix, while waiting for my assistant, Albertino, to get back from the car, where I’d sent him to get more film. Sergio was watching us while Richard, who had also noticed how envious he was, happily played along with the joke. Holding my Lunasix in front of my mouth, I said into it, “Albertino! Get me two rolls of 35 mm. Did you get that?” Sergio couldn’t help intervening. “Knock it off!” he said. “That’s a Lunasix, not a phone.” Five seconds later, Albertino came back with exactly that film. Sergio was stunned. “Wow!” he exclaimed. “Can you even call home on that?” “Sure,” I said. “I’ll call my wife now. Let’s hope she’s free.” Pushing a button on the light meter, I pretended t
o wait for the call signal. “It’s engaged,” I said, after a suitable pause. “I’ll call back and let you know.” Okay, maybe it’s not quite so funny in the age of the iPhone, but it was hilarious back then.
Alain Delon playing Frank Jackson in Joseph Losey’s little-publicized 1972 movie The Assassination of Trotsky.
Richard ages to play the soon-to-be-assassinated Leon Trotsky.
For the shoot, the production had built a replica of Trotsky’s residence on a plot of land just outside Rome. One night locals from a nearby village slipped into the place to steal equipment and set props. The production promptly built a guardhouse and hired a night watchman. He was a short, fat man afflicted with gigantism, with an enormous head and hands. They enlarged the windows of the guardhouse and built a raised platform inside. Now, when anyone approached the set, they’d see this giant of a man looming over everything. The production then proceeded to parade him through the village to intimidate the population. They put him inside a huge car on a pile of cushions so high that he had to bend his neck or his head would touch the ceiling. Then they pulled up in front of the bar in the main square, where the fake giant announced over a loudspeaker, “From now on, anyone who comes close to the movie set will have to deal with me. Okay? Do I make myself clear?” Hearing all the noise, people started coming out into the street only to see this terrifying, menacing monster who could barely fit into the car. One of the crew then got out and addressed the gathering crowd: “We’ve had a few problems on the set. This rather dangerous man is now our night watchman.” Shouting from the car, the guard added, “Everyone had a good look, have you?” Silence fell over the crowd, and not a single theft ever occurred again in Trotsky’s house. The fake giant was actually a really nice guy. He wouldn’t have hurt a fly. Italian workers’ sense of irony and wit is without equal in the world.
My Life in Focus Page 20