by Gore Vidal
The Princess of Monaco: having second thoughts about makeup call?
Grace and I chatted about distant romantic Hollywood, not that she pined for her days of glory. I did ask her once, why, at the peak of her career, she had quit to become, in effect, the doyenne of an amusement park. Her answer was to the point. “You know about the studio’s makeup call?” I did. The actresses who were to work on any given day were staggered so that the makeup department would not be overcrowded as famous stars would be meticulously turned into reasonably accurate replicas of their best selves. “Well, my makeup call was still pretty late because I was still very young. But I have a tendency to put on weight. When I do, my call is earlier. On my last picture, it was…” she frowned at the thought of the dawn’s early light which one day she would have to face as had Loretta Young and Joan Crawford and a host of stars of yesteryear some of whom were obliged to report to makeup before sunrise. “It was the sudden change in my makeup call that decided me it was time to go before I absolutely had to.” There was no talk of romance, only the snuffing out of a career based upon the fading of her uncommon beauty. Nevertheless, there were those who were puzzled that after so much hard work to become the biggest movie star of her time Grace would quit to become Princess of Monaco. A worldly lady of my acquaintance purred the answer: “Never forget that she is from Philadelphia.”
The last week or so in November 1963 Howard and I drove out to the beach at Ostia with Rudi and Consuelo. The beach was deserted but the day was perfect. We had lunch and swam and then drove back to Rome where Howard and I went to the theater that showed American movies undubbed. Midway through David and Lisa, an American actor named Jerome Courtland came up the aisle and said, “Kennedy’s been shot.” This is not possible was my first reaction. Someone had mixed up the reels and we’d been given the wrong ending. The first of several as I shall note in due course.
Our first Roman years, in the Via Giulia and later on the Largo Argentina, movie production was at its peak and, for a few years, many movies were made at Cinecittà the principal Roman studio. During the late fifties I had worked on the script of Ben-Hur in an office next to that of the producer Sam Zimbalist. Farther down the corridor from my office, Federico Fellini was preparing what would become La Dolce Vita. He was fascinated by our huge Hollywood production. Several times we had lunch together in the commissary. Soon he was calling me Gorino and I was calling him Fred. Neither Willy Wyler nor Sam wanted to meet him because both were aware of a bad Italian habit which was to take over the expensive sets of a completed American film and then use them to make a new film. I think that this had happened with Quo Vadis. To prevent the theft of Ben-Hur’s sets, guards were prowling the back lot long after production had been shut down. But before that, I had sneaked Fred onto the set of first-century Jerusalem. He was ecstatic.
Over the years we saw each other, from time to time; usually, when he wanted something. Fred disliked scripts even though his best film, 81⁄2, was written by Italy’s finest playwright-essayist Flaiano. When they eventually fell out, Fred simply stopped telling stories for the screen. He also disliked professional actors so when he had to people a set he would call on an endless supply of headwaiters and cooks from his favorite restaurants to “act” in his films. Since there was seldom a script he would ask his cast to count on camera. Finally, when he got the look he wanted, he’d say “Twenty-eight” to the “actor.” “Do twenty-eight again.” The results were often surprisingly successful, yet he complained about his films’ lack of success at the box office. I said his refusal to film with direct sound was certainly a factor. As with so many Italian directors of the first postwar generation, his actors were shot as in a silent movie; then a voice, seldom their own, was later dubbed in. “Why are you people so crazy about direct sound?” he’d ask when once again a request for money from a studio was rejected because he would not swear an oath to make the film with a script in English that would be approved and then used. I tried to explain that all the great stars of the thirties and forties whom he admired were famous for their voices but Fred had never heard those voices because most of the American films that he had admired in youth had been dubbed into Italian.
He rang me one day. “We must meet immediately.” He came to Largo Argentina, all smiles of a guileless childlike nature. “Gorino is problem.”
“Casanova?” I made a guess.
“How you know?” Eyes wide with alarm as if I were a master of dark arts. Of course his inability to finance a film about Casanova had been for some time on the front pages of the Italian press. I gazed thoughtfully into an imaginary crystal ball. “Yes,” he said, “is Casanova. I need one million dollars to begin. Paramount will give it on condition—”
“That you shoot in direct sound from a script in English.”
He nearly made the sign to ward off the evil eye. “You know all this?” Eyes narrowed at my superior cunning. “Ah, of course they tell you, don’t they?” I assured him I was simply psychic. He looked relieved. We talked about the story. His Casanova would not be the brilliant man known to history, the friend of Voltaire. “No, the real Casanova is silly. Is always sex with him.” Fred’s sex life was a much discussed enigma in Rome. He was happily married to the actress Giulietta Masina. Fred’s passion, at least visually, for huge-breasted women was known to everyone who ever saw one of his films but what did he do? I suspected nothing. During the days of lead when the Red Brigades were loose in Rome he feared being kidnapped. “I am too large,” he’d say, close to tears, “to fit into the boot of a car.”
Once, I mildly complained that he had borrowed from my novel The Judgment of Paris the character of a hermaphrodite who is the center of a religious cult. No, he’d not, of course, read the book but Eugene Walter, an American writer in Rome, had and a version of my character appears in Satyricon which Walter worked on. Fred denied any need to borrow such a character. “Why should I? When I…I am a hermaphrodite! Is well known, Gorino.” Then he gave me a short treatment of the scenes he wanted for Casanova. “I know you will hurry,” he said. I hurried. The script was accepted by Paramount. He got his million, a start date, and a star, Donald Sutherland, an intelligent actor. But a newspaper photo of Sutherland arriving in Rome to play Casanova suggested that there might be a difference of opinion between star and director. As if by magic, Fred appeared in Largo Argentina. He looked worried. He asked me if I knew Sutherland. “Yes, he’d acted in a play of mine for the BBC.”
“I am thinking about getting Mastroianni.”
“What’s wrong with Sutherland?”
“He doesn’t look right.” This was fatal. When Fred was casting he’d have a couple of dozen photographs of possible characters and he’d stare at them by the hour until he found the one he wanted. Appearance was all.
I couldn’t figure out why Sutherland, whose appearance Fred knew in advance from films, had not measured up.
“You know Casanova. You write Casanova,” he began to shift blame. “Is very stupid man. No?”
“Actors can usually play stupidity…” I was reassuring.
“Must look stupid. See? I have made silhouette of him.” Fred was a fine caricaturist. He showed me a drawing in black ink of Sutherland. “See? He looks just like prick.”
I said I recognized the likeness. Fred looked again at his drawing, already feeling better. “I want to make empty place between two front teeth. Looks more stupid, no?”
I had now grasped, as it were, the point to Fred’s image of the world’s most famous lover as nothing but a blind soulless erection. I thought of the newspaper photo of Sutherland in a broad-brimmed hat and a flowing cloak, the spirit of romance: they were at odds. “You think he has caps on front teeth?”
“How would I know? Many actors do.” I tried to imagine Fred with his drill hacking away at poor Sutherland’s teeth. Although Fred was hardly a hermaphrodite he was certainly a phallophobe in a culture rooted in phallophilia. He had even done a book of caricatures of phalluses,
with such labels as “the happy cock,” “the snobbish cock,”“the angry cock.” He entertained ladies with these drawings.
Fred vanished. The film was eventually made not in direct sound but dubbed. Fred was entering his final phase which produced only one fine film, Amarcord, reminiscent of his great phase in which I had once worked for him as an actor.
Since I have always wanted to know how interesting things actually work, I had signed a contract as a writer for MGM because I knew that the great studios were going to break up—this was in the mid-fifties—and I was curious to see what it was like to work at the greatest studio of them all: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
It was amazing to realize that everything necessary to the making of a film was right there on the so-called lot at Culver City, including the Thalberg Building where, on the top floor, L. B. Mayer had his office and access to an executive dining room. The powerful producers had their offices at the corners of each of several floors below; while smaller offices, containing writers, were placed alongside their masters, the producers.
From the beginning I worked with Sam Zimbalist who had made a number of successful films, often with Clark Gable and the director Victor Fleming who was to replace George Cukor, at Clark Gable’s request, on Gone with the Wind. According to Cukor the young Gable had been a male hustler and George was one of his johns. In Actors Studio circles, where I had spent much time, it was agreed that Gable must have been more of a Stanislavski actor than anyone had suspected if he felt that Cukor’s presence on the set might undo his impersonation of Rhett Butler. My mother had had a long off-and-on affair with Gable going back to the film Test Pilot where the flying was done by what would eventually be her third and final husband the Army Air Corps general Robert Olds who was then aide to the chief of the Army Air Corps Billy Mitchell. Gable was an amiable man who often visited my mother at the Beverly Hills Hotel where I was an occasional visitor during my convalescence from hypothermia at Birmingham General Hospital. Gable even taught my very young half brother, Tommy, how to swim in the hotel pool; he was a most professional teacher but the lessons ended when Tommy, clinging to Gable’s back and imitating his arm gestures, relieved himself comfortably on his back. That was the end.
At MGM I wrote The Catered Affair for Sam as well as I Accuse! about the Dreyfus case directed by José Ferrer who also played Dreyfus. Halfway through the editing Eddie Mannix, speaking for the front office, asked Ferrer to cut any references to Jews. This was not easy to do in a film about anti-Semitism. Finally, the picture was not too bad but it is still mysteriously banned in France. When MGM bought the Elstree Studios in London I wrote The Scapegoat starring Alec Guinness and directed by the brilliant Robert Hamer who had written and directed Kind Hearts and Coronets. Unfortunately Robert had also taken seriously to drink; otherwise I would have withdrawn and fought for him to write as well as direct the script, a Daphne Du Maurier romance. By then my curiosity about the studio system had waned as had the studios themselves. But I was still curious about film acting.
When I was on leave from the army hospital, I was offered a screen test at RKO to play one of Rosalind Russell’s sons. Since I was writing my first novel in the hospital, I said no. But for someone brought up in the Golden Age of movies I sometimes wondered what if…?
TWENTY-SIX
Suddenly, there was Fred. “I make film about Roma. I want you and Sordi and Magnani and Mastroianni.” I asked why? This was Fred’s least favorite word. He was a droll and inventive liar and his verbal arabesques were for the most part entirely wasted on flatfooted showbiz interviewers. He blinked his eyes as if in thought: Why? We were in the restaurant of the Grand Hotel where he would establish himself at a special table set in what looked to be an opera box. “Because,” he said, “you all live in Rome and you are all from outside.” I laughed: “Magnani is Rome.” He realized his mistake. He waved his hands. “She is from everywhere. Like the sun. The moon. The…I have one question I will ask each of you who can live anywhere: Why you live in Roma?”
My scene was shot in a small square off Via dei Coronari…It was a freezing February night but we were all dressed in summer clothes, pretending it was the August Trastevere festival of Noi Antri. Tables and benches were scattered around the square. Huge plastic fish were on display in tubs. Howard and I sat at a table with three or four American friends. I was fascinated to find that Fred worked much the way Picasso did in the documentary where he paints on a sheet of glass while the camera shoots from under the table so that we can see what he is painting, as he erases, transforms, restructures. Plates of food kept arriving. Wine bottles. More plastic fish. Some tourists sit at a table opposite us. Fred directed his cameraman as he kept filling in the background with people, food, decorations. When Fellini’s Roma was released in 1972 (Fred’s name was part of the title), he was also ready by then to tell the world why he had picked his four stars. “I pick Mastroianni because he is so lazy, so typical. Alberto Sordi because he is so cruel.” An odd characterization: Sordi was a superb comic actor whom one did not associate with cruelty but then, at the core of comedy, there is indeed a level of sharp observation that the ones observed might easily regard as cruel. “I chose Anna Magnani because she is Anna and this is Roma. Vidal because he is typical of a certain Anglo who comes to Roma and goes native.” As I never spoke Italian properly, much less Roman dialect, and my days were spent in a library researching the fourth century AD, I was about as little “gone native” as it was possible to be but Fred clung to his first images of people. He wanted us all to improvise our dialogue on why we were living in Rome. I like improvising and since Fred never listened, particularly to English, that part was easy. I said something about a world dying of overpopulation and the poisoning of the environment, two new concepts for most Italians that year (one journalist even wrote how ridiculous I was to speak of these matters when he had never seen so much food in the shops). Then Fred and I had a row. I insisted on dubbing my own voice in English, French, and Italian (yes, there was, yet again, no direct sound). Fred was hurt. “Gorino, you no trust me?” I said, no, I did not: he was quite capable of inventing anything he wanted for me to say in three languages and I’d be duly quoted forever. Finally, he agreed. As I went into a fourth or fifth version of a speech that ended with “What better place to observe the end of the world than in a city that calls itself eternal?,” at that moment what sounded like an atomic bomb went off behind me. I turned to see four magnificent white horses drawing a large wooden wagon. The clatter of their hooves filled the square. Like Picasso, Fred had found his background a bit empty; hence, the horses and the wagon.
It is 1973 and I am playing myself in Fellini’s Roma. Between takes Fred, as I called him (he called me Gorino), would sit beside me at an outdoor table on a freezing cold Roman night, which we were pretending was a hot evening in August during the Trastevere festival of Noi Antri. I wear light August clothes; Fred is bundled up in overcoat and hat, with a heater just back of his chair. I shivered through the scene, actually shot in the Via dei Coronari.
It was a long night. In the end I survived and the horses ended on the cutting-room floor. Some months later I was summoned to a studio to dub my voice. On a large screen there was my scene. Fred looked contented. Since he had lost the soundtrack of the original scene, nothing but odd noises could be heard on the screen. I asked, “Don’t you have a transcript of what was said?” Fred winked. “No, Gorino. We just make up something else.” For two hours I sat trying to match words to my own lips on the screen. Fred was quietly triumphant at this victory in his war against direct sound. Finally I cobbled together three sets of words in English, French, and Italian. Then we started to record. There was a white ball that bounced along the top of the screen and when it stopped you stopped speaking, your dialogue presumably in place. I got through the French and the English easily, but Italian is longer than English and after the ball had stopped I was still speaking—outside the scene. Fred was gazing beatifically out the window as
I struggled to keep up with the ball. After the third ruined take, I said, “You are considered the greatest living film director, so give me some direction. How do I end this speech with the bouncing ball?”
“Oh, is there trouble?” His eyes were wide with innocent concern. “Oh, is so easy. Before you talk, you take deep breath.” I did and the shot was perfect, concluding my career as a screen actor in Italy.
The logo of the novel Myra Breckinridge was a giant statue of a Las Vegas showgirl, which twirled in front of the Chateau Marmont hotel on Sunset Boulevard. Jim Moran, a publicist who once hid a needle in a haystack, drove the statue across America presenting it to a dozen governors who each saw fit not to accept.
A researcher notes that I began writing Myra Breckinridge in June 1965. I didn’t remember the date but I recall the day vividly. Howard and I had pretty much finished fixing up our Rome flat. I had a pile of lined yellow legal pads on my writing table which was opposite my bed. Across from the table a French door opened onto the terrace that overlooked the Largo Argentina—a great square with several Roman temples beneath the pavement’s level as well as a large colony of cats that flourished until the Rome city government complained that they were sick and spreading disease. The fact that they spread diseases that only they were subject to cut no ice with the city fathers and so, to the rage of a number of old Roman ladies who regularly fed the cats, they would be carted away. I did state, publicly, that as the cat was sacred to the goddess Isis whose temple had been here, to harm them was sacrilege. Of course, in time another cat generation settled into the ruins. Meanwhile, the grateful Isis smiled upon me. The day I started Myra Breckinridge there was a new silver moon just risen over the Vatican to the west of the apartment, a sign for me of good luck; the moon not the Vatican. Curiously, when I finished the first longhand draft, there was again a new moon. One month had passed. Also, as I was writing just now about the cats of Isis, I got a call from Italy that our thirteen-year-old cat has just died of a liver problem; only his tortoiseshell kid brother survives of all those dogs and cats that for half a century accompanied Howard and me down the years. R.I.P.