A Ticket to the Circus (26 page)

“That couldn’t have happened. Maybe you just thought you saw a man being shot. Maybe it was a movie. Maybe he tripped and fell.”

“But I heard shots! I saw blood coming out of him! He didn’t move!”

“It could have been a car backfiring. It could have been sound from a television. Maybe something in his pocket broke. I’m sure if it was a murder we’ll hear about it on TV. You’re letting this Pasolini murder get to you.” Pier Paolo Pasolini, a famous film director, had been killed a few days earlier, on November 2, in a bizarre way. He was run over several times by his own car. Nobody was sure who did it, but there were rumors of a gay lover and maybe that Pasolini had staged it himself, although you’d think a person committing suicide would find an easier way to do it. It was all pretty sordid. It was everywhere in the news, and while I was certainly not unaffected by it, I wasn’t so overcome that I was seeing murders everywhere.

I watched the news for the next few nights, but there was no mention of any murders, no men getting shot in shadowy small side streets in Rome. Norman probably just didn’t want me to be frightened and worried, but I began to think maybe I
was
crazy and actually hadn’t seen it at all. The whole thing was a scene out of
Gaslight.
But I had no choice. I had to just let it go. I don’t know to this day what happened. It was just another one of life’s little mysteries.

Norman wasn’t happy in our modern hotel in Eur, either. It was too far from the center of Rome, where Norman’s oldest friend, Mickey Knox, lived. When Norman and Mickey met,
The Naked and the Dead
had just come out and Norman and his first wife, Bea, were in Hollywood while Norman tried to write movie scripts. Susan was born while they were out there in 1949. Mickey had been an up-and-coming young actor who’d been blacklisted during the McCarthy era a few years after he and Norman had met, and consequently had moved to Rome. He’d made a good living there ever since, doing dubbing, translating, and acting. He and Norman had even been brothers-in-law at one time, as Mickey had married Joan, the younger sister of Norman’s second wife, Adele. Joanie was a famous fashion model for Oleg Cassini. They’d had two daughters, wild little Italian beauties named Valentina and Melissa. He and Joanie were divorced, but we saw Mickey and his girlfriend Carol, an English teacher, almost every night for dinner.

It was great fun, although Norman became disgruntled with the lack of variety in the food, and once, after we’d been there a couple or
three weeks, when Mickey said he was taking us to a great fish place, Norman grumpily said, “Mickey, the Italians don’t know
what
they’re doing with fish! There’s no such thing as a great fish place.” (I do admit that after a month of wonderful Italian restaurants, I, too, was happy to get back home and have a hamburger.)

Traveling back and forth to the city every night from Eur was a chore, especially if I also wanted to go to the city in the daytime, so Norman asked to be moved and they put us up in the Hotel Splendide at the top of the Spanish Steps on the Via Sistina. Our room had a small balcony that overlooked the city. Outside the door were the Spanish Steps, where artists and young people hung out all day. I had my portrait done on the steps by a sketch artist like I used to be myself in summers at the Ozark Folk Center. I liked the Conté crayon the artist was using and asked him where I could get one. He didn’t understand English, so people kept coming over and trying to help out until quite a crowd had gathered. Finally, someone spoke enough English to tell me where the art shop was, and everyone clapped and cheered. I went there and bought the crayon and a pad and did some drawing myself, back in the room. (I later used that crayon to draw Henry Miller’s portrait which was used on the cover of
Genius and Lust.
)

Norman had to ride in to the office in Eur every day, but at least I didn’t have to deal with cabs and trying to find my way in and out of the city. I spent my days walking the streets (avoiding small empty backstreets), loving the big piazzas with fountains everywhere and pigeons cheekily hopping around, blanketing the ground. There were other kinds of cheeky animals, too, called easy boys, handsome young men who would come up to you and begin speaking in English. If you didn’t answer, they started in French, then Spanish, and finally German. They knew a smattering of everything, and their aim was to pick up young (or not so young, but rich) women tourists and get what they could from them. I was pretty adept at sloughing them off, but once a rather young one I had just rejected reached out and grabbed my breast. I had a flashback to the time I was raped and was so outraged that as he turned to leave, I gave him a hard kick in the pants. It was a stupid thing to do. He could have turned and attacked me, but instead he ran away, and that made me feel good, like I wasn’t just a helpless woman.

Another time, a handsome older (probably thirty-five) man struck
up a conversation with me, and was highly insulted when I said I wasn’t interested in easy boys, that I was there with my boyfriend. He said “I am no easy boy. I own a boutique. Come, I’ll show you.” And he grabbed my hand and started walking fast down the street. I was a little frightened, not sure what he was up to, but the streets were full of people, and a couple of blocks down, he turned into a delightful little boutique where he was greeted as the owner. I spent a nice hour trying on clothes and bought a couple of dresses. Come to think of it, even though I didn’t go out to dinner with him, he accomplished the same thing as if he had been an easy boy, didn’t he? He made some money off me.

Right beside the hotel at the top of the Spanish Steps was a beauty shop called the Femme Sistina. I passed the window every day, and one day I saw a lipstick in the display that I liked and went in to buy it. The shop was owned by a charming woman named Lisette Linzi Terracina, who asked me if I had ever done any modeling. I said no, but that I really wanted to, and was in fact going to try to do that when I got back to New York.

“Would you like to do some pictures for us?” she asked. “It would be in an Italian magazine for salons. You have wonderful hair.” I was so flattered that of course I said yes, and the next day I went to a studio with Lisette and posed for a whole afternoon while the stylist did several different hairdos on me. The pictures were good, and Norman, proud of me, took them to show to Sergio. Leone laid them out on his desk in a row and studied them for a while. Then he grunted, shuffled them into a stack, and put them into his desk drawer. Norman was horrified.

“Wait a minute, Sergio. I can’t let you have those,” he said. “Barbara needs those to show to Wilhelmina when she gets back to New York. They are for her work.” Leone either pretended he didn’t understand or he really didn’t, but either way, he wasn’t giving back the pictures. Norman went and got the translator, who finally got across to Leone that the pictures were not meant as a gift to him. He gave them back with ill grace. Norman said that at that moment, he felt something shift in the relationship.

Norman had been working steadily on the screenplay, which had turned into two movies, the original one and the sequel. Then, ugly
items started appearing in the press. Someone reported that Norman Mailer had brought an eighteen-year-old girl (!) to Rome and was holed up with her in his room, ordering in room service and writing the script on toilet paper. It was laughable, but people took it seriously. His friend Mickey Knox was incensed. He and Norman’s secretary were prepared to testify that Norman worked at the studio every day, everyone knew that. What could this all be about?

Modeling for the Femme Sistina.

Soon Norman got word that Leone was unhappy with the script, and he was canceling the deal. The script hadn’t been translated, so there was no way Leone could have even read it, but it must have been the producer who didn’t like it, and they were not going to pay. Mickey said that Leone did movies for children, and he didn’t know how to handle a sophisticated script in well-written, full-bodied English like this one. There was hardly any dialogue at all in Leone’s westerns, so I could see the problem. Our month in Rome, so wonderful in so many ways, turned into a nightmare.

Norman’s contract clearly stated that he would get paid for the script whether or not it was made into a movie, but Leone was determined not to pay him at all. He said the script was useless. We came back to New York and sent it to Peter Bogdanovich and Billy Friedkin, two top directors at the time, both of whom liked it. In fact, Friedkin wanted to make the movie, and tried to buy the script, but Leone wouldn’t sell. Nor would he make the movie, and he wouldn’t pay. Norman sued for his money, about seventy-five thousand dollars. Leone called Mickey and tried to get him to testify against Norman, and Mickey went crazy. He told Leone in no uncertain terms that he would never lie about his best friend, and that Sergio should pay Norman what he owed him.

The lawsuit dragged on for a few years, and finally Leone was ordered to pay, but by then the money had been mostly eaten up in lawyers’ fees, so the only thing we got was the professional satisfaction that Norman had, indeed, written a good script. Leone went on to get another screenwriter—several other writers, actually—and made the movie using the same title,
Once Upon a Time in America
, with Robert De Niro. We never did know exactly why Leone had such a drastic change of heart. I can’t believe it was because he couldn’t have my hairdo pictures, but Norman was always convinced that was the turning point. He said there was something in his eyes as he handed back the pictures that said, “You’ll be sorry.”

W
e got back to New York just before Thanksgiving, and true to his word to Carol, Norman spent it in Stockbridge and I went to Lady Jeanne Campbell’s for dinner. She cooked a lovely, if not exactly traditional, dinner of turkey and little rubber dumplings called spaetzle. Jeannie was famous for not being much of a cook, but she did everything with such panache that you didn’t care how it tasted. She had indeed invited several single men, but none of them offered Norman any competition, and the people at the dinner who were the most interesting to me were her daughters, Kate and Cusi.

They had a nanny who used to be a homeless person. She’d taken up residence on the steps outside Jeannie’s door on Seventy-second Street, and every time Jeanne went in or out, the woman said, “Good morning, Lady Jeanne,” or “Good evening, Lady Jeanne.” One day Jeanne noticed the woman had numbers tattooed on her arm, obviously from a concentration camp. Jeannie couldn’t help herself, she invited her in and somehow she stayed. The poor woman resided in fantasyland part of the time, but she loved the girls and for the most part was harmless, if rather ineffectual. Jeannie was like that, always trying to help someone.

After Thanksgiving, Norman came back from Stockbridge, and Christmas suddenly exploded everywhere. The windows of New York’s fanciest department stores were a fairyland of inventive displays, one more clever than the last. Ropes were set up outside Lord & Taylor, Bloomingdale’s, and Saks to keep the lookers in line. I went into FAO Schwarz and vowed that the first thing I would do when Matthew got up here was take him there and let him get any toy he wanted. He was going to love New York so much! I couldn’t wait to bring him up here, which we were planning to do before Christmas.

I called Amy and showed her the pictures. She said that with those Milton had taken, I had enough good ones, and she called Wilhelmina. Amy said Willie could tell from these that I was model material, and she was pretty sure she would take me on. I wasn’t so sure. The letter I
had gotten from Eileen Ford all those years before, in 1968, the one that said I should pursue another career, still haunted me. I hadn’t told anyone back home at the time that I had even written to Eileen Ford, and it was a good thing. It would have been pretty embarrassing if they knew I had been turned down flat. Larry would have been upset because it had been a last-ditch attempt to have a life other than marriage and living in Atkins, and I thought I had blown it forever, but here I was, at twenty-six, trying again.

Wilhelmina was a beauty from the Netherlands and had an exotic accent that had been cured in years of cigarette smoke until her voice was textured like suede. She had deep brown eyes and chestnut hair, was wearing a black turtleneck and black slacks, and had a pair of little half-moon glasses on her forehead when I walked in. I handed her my envelope of pictures and stood waiting while she positioned her glasses onto her nose and looked at them.

“How tall are you?” she said, looking up from the pictures.

“Five feet ten.”

“No. You can’t be. Step closer to the desk.” I did. “Well, if you’re not, you’re close.” What an eye! I wasn’t really five ten. I was five nine and three-quarters, but I’d always rounded it up for good measure.

“How old are you?” This was the part I dreaded. They didn’t take girls older than twenty-three, and I would have to lie.

“I’m twenty-three.” I had the look of guilt on my face, and was ready to walk out if she asked to see my driver’s license, but she only nodded, studying the photos.