I did the shots that the production had asked for in a couple of days and then left. I’d never felt so unsatisfied with myself or my work. Something was blocked, and that something was me. I had no one to measure myself against anymore. Year after year I was getting voted “Best Photographer of the Year,” author of the best photo, the most widely published photo. I had more money than my father had ever seen in his life. I earned more in a day than he had in a month. I’d photographed sovereigns and movie stars, heads of state and top models. Two of the most famous people in the world were my friends. Scores of photographers would have killed to enjoy my success, as I’d had a chance to notice on the Trotsky set. And yet I felt lost. What else could I achieve as a photographer? What else did I want to achieve? In reality, I’d barely debuted in show business, yet I felt I’d already made it. I had to decide whether to sit back on my laurels or keep accepting my father’s challenge and push myself further.
I was increasingly interested in cinema from the production point of view. I still felt very insecure and ill at ease among those people. But I’d had fun getting Richard and my friends together on Bluebeard, talking about the cast with the director and producer, even smoothing over ridiculous squabbles between French and Italian members of the crew. People kept passing me scripts under the table, hoping I could interest Elizabeth and Richard. It gave me a chance to study their structure and appreciate what made a script attractive to a movie star. As a photographer, my job was to bring the best out in my subjects. Would I be capable of doing the same on a much broader scale, in the context of an entire movie and not just a single photo? While I reflected on what direction my future might take, I made myself concentrate on my work, accepting a string of fashion layouts and studio shoots whenever I wasn’t busy on Elizabeth and Richard’s various sets.
Federico Fellini was one frequent visitor to my studio. He’d sit on the balcony and watch me photograph actresses and models. He complained that the women I photographed were too thin. In those days he was writing Amarcord—a movie that would win him an Oscar for Best Foreign Language film—and he kept trying to convince me to act in one of his movies. “Gianni!” he’d say, with that thin, nasal voice of his, which I can still hear in my mind. “You shouldn’t be a photographer. You should be an actor!” One day I sent him a message to say I’d be photographing a beautiful voluptuous woman, Andrea Ferreol. She was the actress who would star alongside Marcello Mastroianni in The Grande Bouffe, a French-Italian movie about four friends who gather in a villa for a weekend for the express purpose of eating themselves to death. Fellini dropped everything and got to the studio in a flash. Andrea was his ideal kind of woman—shapely, voluptuous, very sensual. Fellini installed himself on the balcony as usual, and during a break, I went to talk with him. “Why don’t you try to get her to uncover herself a little more?” he asked. Andrea wasn’t shy and posed with her breast more visible. I photographed her under Fellini’s secret but attentive gaze. “There!” he said, when I went to check on him during the next break. “There’s a real woman for you. I’ll leave and come back in ten minutes. Then you can introduce me.”
Shortly afterward, I agreed to work with Brian Hutton on the set of Night Watch, starring Elizabeth and Laurence Harvey. It was a small production, shot in London on a very tight schedule. Elizabeth had suggested Brian to the producer, Martin Poll. She liked him as a director and found she worked well with him. During shooting, I noticed that Brian always wore exactly the same jersey, the same shirt, the same pants, and the same orthopedic shoes, every day. He must have had dozens of each. Elizabeth’s son, Christopher Wilding, was on set in those days and asked Brian if he ever took his shoes off. “Only when I wash my feet,” he said. Chris grimaced, and Brian went on, “Sure, once a month. The socks are hard to peel off because they get stuck to my feet.” He had a weird sense of humor and Elizabeth loved him for it.
The strange quirks of life! Two cronies I never photographed together, Marcello Mastroianni and Federico Fellini on the set of Intervista. (Photo by my friend and mentor Emilio Lari, a great photographer of cinema whose book about the Beatles has just been published in the United States.)
The general public usually sees only finished, authorized photos of a star. Here’s a string of never-published photos of Elizabeth trying out costumes during the filming of Night Watch.
I realized almost immediately that there was very little I could do on that movie as a photographer. Laurence Harvey was a nice guy, very generous, a great partygoer who loved good wine and good food. But he wasn’t very interesting. He was flat in real life, just as he was in his movies. This was supposed to be a horror movie. But it wasn’t. I tried to do my best, and I think I succeeded with this lovely shot of Elizabeth looking out the window while rain runs down the glass outside.
Elizabeth with director Brian Hutton on the set of his 1973 thriller Night Watch.
Ever the romantic, Elizabeth loved this shot I took of her gazing out a rain-drenched window.
Welsh to his roots, Richard takes us to visit an ancient menhir near his hometown in Wales.
Elizabeth wasn’t in very good health, and Laurence got seriously sick and had to spend some weeks in the hospital. While he was recovering, the movie’s insurance kept paying Claudye and me because we were under contract. Effectively that meant we enjoyed a wonderful holiday in Saint-Tropez for free.
Before doing Night Watch, Elizabeth and I had gone to work with Richard on a movie version of the great Dylan Thomas’s radio drama Under Milk Wood, a production he was gifting to Oxford University. Everyone worked for free—Richard, Elizabeth, Peter O’Toole, and the rest of the cast and crew, me included. With shooting under way, we took a train from London to Richard’s country house in Wales. I took Elizabeth’s son, Michael, along with me as an assistant. The whole place felt very sad to me. We didn’t get a glimpse of sunlight. The weather was gray, damp, and strange, even more depressing than London. But I met Richard’s brothers and sisters, and we had some wonderful times down the pub. I never saw Richard so relaxed.
Peter O’Toole was a really nice guy. He’d look at me, say some word in Italian, and then smile. A while later, he’d look at me again, say another word in Italian, and smile. I began wondering whether he really was Italian. He adored joking around on set, even though he was possibly the only person who understood his jokes. His relaxing presence may have been an influence. Or the fact that the project was private and small scale. Whatever the reason, in that movie, Elizabeth appeared more sensual than in any other.
Elizabeth and others rehearse for Under Milk Wood, the 1972 film version of the famous Dylan Thomas work that Richard gave as a gift to his alma mater, Oxford University.
Elizabeth loved working on that movie. It was Richard’s independent project. He’d known Dylan Thomas personally. So there was no production office, no distributor to satisfy, no outside pressures. Just a movie they wanted to do. In my opinion, Elizabeth felt truly free to act and think of nothing else. It was also the only set where I saw Richard get truly jealous. There was a scene where Elizabeth and Peter were in bed together, laughing, joking, and having fun. Peter may have been one of his best friends, but Richard didn’t take his eye off him for a moment—and in the end he even climbed into the bed himself.
Being with old friends in his favorite bars unfortunately brought out the worst in Richard. One night he disappeared for hours. Around 3 in the morning, Elizabeth began to worry. She figured he was probably still in the King’s Pub—way after closing time, of course—and asked if I could possibly go and bring him back to the hotel. I found Richard with Laurence Harvey, Rex Harrison, and Peter O’Toole, all of them drunk. Richard stared at me and said, “What do you want? An autograph?” He was so drunk he couldn’t recognize me. I dragged him to the car and took him, Laurence, and Peter home. Rex stayed behind with someone else. Richard never once apologized or thanked me for going out to find him. And the following morning, when he hauled himself out of bed, he behav
ed as if nothing had happened. I don’t know whether or not he had any memory of the previous night’s events.
A wildly jealous Richard improvises a threesome with Elizabeth and Peter O’Toole during the shooting of Under Milk Wood, principally to make sure Peter keeps his hands under control.
Richard’s dark side usually came out elsewhere, far from Elizabeth, when he was on his own with his problems and tried to drown them in alcohol. When Richard decided to go on a binge, trying to stop him only made him angrier. I did what I could to keep him out of serious trouble, and I kept him company if he wanted to talk. I was the guy who was supposed to stay sober and get him back safe and sound to his hotel or the Kalizma when he could no longer drag himself to the next pub or bar. I was his active listener during those demon-tormented nights. Richard’s friendship was so important to me that I rarely refused when he asked me to go out with him. Unlike Elizabeth, who knew how to make everyone feel at ease, Richard was more detached. I always hoped that on these occasions we’d finally have a chance to talk and get to know each other better. But watching him get drunk every other night was definitely not the best way to make me feel close to him. He’d invariably drag me off to bar after bar, where I’d sit and watch him torture himself for long, painful hours before at last I helped him crawl into a taxi.
Those nights with Richard made me realize that people are just people—deep down, no one is better or worse than anyone else. Seeing Richard that way made him more accessible to me, more human. In Wales he quoted to me a famous passage from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, which over the years I often asked him to repeat:
There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
As a photographer, I was always trying to capture people’s most genuinely human aspects, those moments that reveal one’s true nature, whether it was Richard, Elizabeth, or any of my other subjects. First as people, and then as celebrities. With Richard and Elizabeth, fame and fortune were true distractions, a costume they wore in public. If I’d never seen Richard hit rock bottom, or Elizabeth be so tender and loving with her children, I’d never have learned to look beyond the glamour of their lives and tell the truth about them with my photos. I’d have become exactly what my father didn’t want me to become: the latest in a line of paparazzi jumping out of the bushes to steal photos for gossip-hungry glossy magazines. A fascinating actress can see herself on the front cover of magazines around the world. But when she gets home and looks in a mirror, all she sees is a woman, a wife, a mother. On the other hand, a famous male actor is always and only a man. And he wants to tell the whole world when things don’t go the way he wants them to.
One day Elizabeth came out with a comment that I’ll never forget: “There’s no better deodorant than success.” I’m not sure if I’ll ever quite know whether that’s true or not. Who knows what odor the sweat of success has? All I can say is that I’ve witnessed Elizabeth and Richard producing so much all by themselves, and with their own sweat and labor creating a living for so many families and, as a result, almost a whole economy of their own.
Leaving his private life to one side, Richard was always a total professional on set. He rarely had to repeat a scene twice; he was convinced that repetition introduced a damaging mechanical aspect to the spontaneity of his performance. I was always struck by the intensity and energy of his acting. The idea that on-screen genius and a dark character somehow inevitably go together is an awful Hollywood cliche. Worse still is the tendency to idealize the self-destructive spirit that I saw in Richard, as if drinking that way was somehow praiseworthy. Almost every great actor and actress I’ve met has had problems. But the best, the ones that manage a long and stable career, all find some kind of balance, a certain peace. Sadly, I believe Richard never found that. And despite what anyone may say or think, drinking made him worse, not better.
Shortly before Christmas 1972, the director Larry Peerce and producer Dominick Dunne went to Rome to talk to Elizabeth about their next project, Ash Wednesday. Yet another movie—how many was that in just one year? Eight. It seems Elizabeth and Richard would say yes to pretty much any movie they were offered.
Anyway, Larry and Dominick threw a big dinner party in the Grand Hotel, with a lovely atmosphere, good food, and fun all round. The main topic of conversation was the challenge that the movie’s makeup presented. Elizabeth was supposed to play an older woman whose husband was falling out of love with her. So she decides, in secret, to undergo major plastic surgery. What they needed was some way to make Elizabeth look old and ugly and then shoot a convincing scene of the plastic surgery operation.
At one point, Larry asked me to change seats and come and sit by him. “Gianni,” he said, “don’t take this personally, but I don’t want you as photographer on this movie. I’m trying to find out who the new photographer is who recently did a shoot on plastic surgery. It’ll be really useful for the filming.” I thought he was pulling my leg at first. Then I realized he was serious. I’d done the shoot he was talking about. Dr. Rudolph Trouques, who’d cured my “cancer,” was also a plastic surgeon who’d developed a way to perform breast lifts with just a simple incision under the patient’s arm. In those days you’d see women on the beach with huge scars on enormous fake breasts. Face-lifts and other plastic surgery operations were becoming fashionable, and I was interested to see how they were done. I photographed a number of operations, including a full face-lift performed on Alexandre, from beginning to end. Trouques pulled his face up so high that, for the rest of his life, Alexandre had to shave behind his ears. On another occasion, Trouques asked me to photograph a reconstruction, which he did for free. He’d met a guy at a gas station with seriously burned hands, a former race car mechanic. Trouques took nerve tissue from other parts of the man’s body and used it to reconstruct his hands. When he finally removed the bandages and stitches, the man couldn’t open his hands. Trouques just slapped him and shouted, “Open those damn hands!” And he did. It was an incredible scene. Trouques later fixed my brother Renato’s crooked nose. But I kept well away from that one. I couldn’t bear the idea of seeing my own brother’s nose being whacked with a hammer. It would feel like taking the blow myself.
Anyway, Larry clearly had no idea that I’d been the author of that shoot, so I told him to come to my studio the next day. “Give me a chance to prove I’m the right guy for your movie,” I said. And I did just that. When he saw all my plastic surgery photos he was delighted. He’d finally found the photographer he’d been looking for and was fascinated by every detail of the operations. “Okay!” he said. “This is the sequence for the credits: your photos!” I suggested he try filming a real operation. I called Rudolph and we found a woman who looked sufficiently like Elizabeth who, in exchange for getting it free, authorized us to film her undergoing a full face-lift. I went to Paris to film the operation myself. They used my footage as the credits sequence, so I got my first experience as a director in the bargain.
Making Elizabeth look old, ugly, and wrinkled was proving much harder than expected. They tried different techniques and a string of makeup artists, including Richard’s own faithful Ronnie Berkeley. But to no avail. I, with my photos, kept condemning every attempt. Elizabeth understood immediately where I was heading. “Don’t even mention that name!” she shouted. So I didn’t. After all, I was only the photographer. But when yet another makeup test didn’t work, she finally shouted, “All right, then, if you insist! But you call him, not me!” At that point, Larry gave me permission to call Alberto De Rossi. Elizabeth hadn’t spoken a word to him since he threw that sponge in her face on the Cleopatra set. “You must be crazy!” said Alberto when I called. “That woman hates me!” “No, Alberto,” I replied, “I assure you, she adores you. And everyone knows you’re the only one in the world who can do this.” Eventually I persuaded him. When he got to the set he
was terrified to meet Elizabeth. Alberto was a huge guy, but on our way to Elizabeth’s dressing room he kept trying to hide behind me. We stepped inside. Elizabeth stood up and exclaimed, “Alberto!” He replied, “Elizabeth!” And the pair of them hugged like old friends, everything forgiven.
Elizabeth with Henry Fonda in the 1972 Larry Peerce movie Ash Wednesday. I photographed real-life plastic surgery operations before Elizabeth took the part.
Alberto asked me to go with him to meet Dominick, the producer. When we got to his office, he thanked Alberto for having come at such short notice and said, “Listen, I know this is Paramount, but we’ve got a big problem. We’ve spent so much on makeup trials that I don’t know what I’ll be able to pay you for your work.” I translated and Alberto replied, “Tell him he can give me what he wants.” I reminded him that we were talking about Paramount here. But he insisted, so I passed on his reply to Dominick, who stood up enthusiastically, shook his hand, and thanked him. Then Alberto added, “Tell him I’ll do the makeup in the morning and then I’ll go home.” I translated and Dominick replied, “Alberto, that’s impossible. You have to stay with Elizabeth all day.” I again translated, and Alberto got serious: “Tell this son of a bitch that if I have to stay here, I can’t eat. Because if I eat, I have to take a nap. And if I can’t eat and can’t take a nap, then this asshole had better fucking pay me!” I gave a rough translation, and Dominick promptly conceded to Alberto the fee he deserved.
My Life in Focus Page 21