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 alclass="underline" 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.