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.