The only time I was ever involved in a strike was with the original
Pink Panther.
I played Peter Sellers’s majordomo in this Italian villa. There was a big scene of a masquerade party, and all of the people had to be there at six in the morning for costume, makeup. Blake Edwards, the director, didn’t turn up until one. He looked as if he had been drugging it up the night before. He was a mess. We didn’t start shooting until about four. A lot of those Italians were furious, and I joined them in a protest.
I never met Blake Edwards. The assistant director said, “That’s Walter. He’s playing Fabrizio, the majordomo.” Edwards said, “Okay, Fabrizio, let’s try it from the stair to there.” So you see, I never met him. Whereas Fellini talks to every extra. He asks them what they do, where do they live, what are their favorite films. He’s amazing in his kindness toward a cast of two hundred, for example. I’ve always found that the greater the artist, the more humane. He’ll look around a set of two hundred extras and say, “Well, Madeleine can go. Alberto can go. Pasquetta can go.” Knowing he’s not going to use them again that day. He’ll look at some of the old people in their costumes, and he’ll say, “Well, I’m not going to need you this afternoon, so you can have lunch and go. The children, no, the children I’ll need for one more shot. They can leave at three.” And he knows everybody’s name. Amazing.
Fellini chooses each and every extra. And talks to each and every extra. He’s always grabbing a waitress or grabbing a little girl who’s filling cars at a filling station. Just grabbing them up—people from shops and shoeshine boys—because he sees something in people. That’s why there is no such thing as an extra, really. If you look at the people in the mob scenes, they are all faces. There is not a blank there. They’re not part of the scenery. Each one is an individual face. Which is why his films are so interesting.
I remember once being with Fellini in his car. We were going from someplace to some office he had in a studio. We were rushing. But then he said to his chauffeur, “Stop the car. Oh, stop the car.” This was in the middle of traffic on the street that goes from the Piazza di Spagna to the railroad station. And he ran out to this old man who was walking along and was shouting after him, “Stop! Stop! You in the blue coat! Stop!” The man didn’t stop. Fellini finally got to him and was carrying on. Turned out the man was stone deaf. So Fellini wrote something on a piece of paper, and the man said, you know, “Fellini, ahh.” He became one of the cardinals in
Juliet.
I don’t think in Hollywood today anybody would stop somebody on the street and say, “Oh, I like your face. Come tomorrow. We give fifty dollars a day.”
He can see in women who don’t know how to do makeup, don’t know how to do their hair, some movement or some expression or some smile or some look. Who have an air. And he can see right away what a good wig-maker, a good costumer, a good makeup artist, could do. I’ve seen nice girls turned into ladies of mystery or the tartiest of tarts. The first time he saw Sandra Milo, he got her into a blond wig right away. She was brunette, almost black, if not real Mediterranean black. And she was a lady who had never dyed her hair, would never have thought of dying her lustrous hair. But the minute she saw herself in a blond wig, she began to see different parts. A lot of actresses who had played stupid roles under Fellini’s tutelage began to be taken seriously as actresses. A lot of actresses who were soul and drama smiled for the first time in roles Fellini put them in. Claudia Cardinale was just an ingenue until he created her, and she became something else.
And Edra Gale: now that’s a Fellini story. She was this immense, terribly shy blonde and a brilliant singer. She graduated from God knows what with high honors. Her mother was something vaguely central European Slavic, the father was Anglo-American, and she was from California. Immensely shy, but her voice was sensational. It was a big voice, as you would expect. She could cause the chandeliers to fall with one high note. Somehow one of her professors had got her off to Italy, and she sang with the Bolognese opera or the Florentine opera. Well, someone who owned the principal circus in Italy saw her and said, “My God, what a fabulous figure.” And he hired her at an enormous price to ride an elephant and sing an aria from
Aida.
It was one of the sensations of the age, because Italians love elephants, they love opera, and they love fat women. And Fellini, who is absolutely demented for the circus, saw her and said, “I don’t know what role you’re going to do, but I’ve got to have you sign this contract right away.”
Edra Gale had this great sense of humor. I mean, to be that fat you have to have a sense of humor to survive the world. Otherwise you become a recluse. But she was very shy and also a very modest creature. She more often had sleeves down to her wrists and things that were never too open. Her skirt came to below her knees. Well, Fellini thought about it a long time. Finally one day: “Ah, the whore who lives on the beach.”
He said, “I want her to look Italian. She needs a black wig, and give her a dark base,” you know. “And a very short dress, something that’s open big in the front.” At first she wore this négligée that she would take off only for the scene. But all of the crew adored her so. They were always bringing her a flower or bringing her a Coca-Cola. Or their mama had made up their lunch for the day and they would offer it to her. So finally she started leaving off the négligée and just marching around in that short dress—it was like a rag—she wore. But it took about a whole day for Fellini to get her the way he wanted her. He said, “It’s not right. Put another wig on top of that one.” So they put another wig. And he said, “Different eye makeup. Let some hair come down on the forehead a little more. Let’s just do a test of this.” So he did a test and he looked at it and he looked at her. He changed the eye makeup again. Finally he said, “Put a third wig on top of those two.” Then he said, “That’s it. We shall have all this black hair up here and straggly in every direction.” That was it. That’s the Saraghina. She became part of folklore. At first she was just the prostitute. The young boy and his friends spy on this prostitute who takes guys into this dugout of an old gun emplacement on the beach. Then Fellini decided to have her be Mother Earth. In every mythology, she exists. And this shy, modest thing from California was not so shy and modest afterwards. Fellini wanted something that would bring her out, and not just for the role. He was always watching everybody on the set, and he would seize upon one little gesture or one repeated laugh and question them closely about their history, their lives. And then he would use something of them and make them aware of it, make them aware of themselves and somehow different. Oh, what a film you could make about the making of any Fellini film.
Then, of course, there are the great jokes. There are private jokes in every one of Fellini’s films. For example, he would have a famous lesbian doing a wild love scene with an Italian sailor. Or he’d have an absolute crook, a jailbird, playing a very devoted priest. In
Juliet of the Spirits,
at the end of the film when the husband is gone, all the furniture is gone out of the house. Fellini told me, “A lot of people won’t even notice it, but it’s my joke.” One of his jokes in
8½
was, all the people who work in the luxury hotel are names out of the
Almanack de Gotha.
The elevator boys are of the Medici family. The desk clerk is Alfresco Baldi. The concierge is Prince Volkonsky. The lady violinist in the open-air café is the princess of Sanseverina. Somebody else is Albertini. Those are the bellboys, the housekeepers, the maids in the hotel. All the guests are from the old folks’ home and were allowed to keep their costumes afterwards. The men, their dress suits, and the ladies, their evening dresses, so they could go on playing luxury hotel in the old folks’ home. That was just a private joke. Nothing to do with the film, but just his subtle Lewis Carroll sense of humor, of a topsy-turvy world. Turn the world upside down. And of course, there was a sort of disgruntled thing on the part of those titled people playing servants, and there was giddiness on the part of the old folks’ home people playing the aristocrats, which were exactly the attitudes Fellini wanted to have come across. So many American films have such a beautiful veneer and a strange lack of content. They don’t suggest anything under the surface. With Fellini, there’s always a little something more you don’t quite understand.
*
In
Juliet of the Spirits
I had the part of a journalist, a mad journalistic photographer. My scenes were with Sandra Milo. The tart. She lives next door to Juliet, and Juliet finally wanders over to one of her parties. Well, the party opens and I’m explaining the sexual parts of flowers in these botanical photographs. I had this rose-colored shirt and sequined vest, and I’m flitting about saying, you know, “Notice how the large vulva seems to contact the pistil of the other flower,” and all the whores are clapping. Boy, I loved doing it. But that whole sequence was cut.
Then there was a scene in a bordello. The idea was that Juliet’s husband went to the bordello not for sex. He went for the foolishness of the girls. The giggly aspect. The bordello madam had started this program to educate her girls, and this poet was to lecture them on poetry. Federico said, “Will you do that?” and I said, “Sure.” I said, “Where’s my script?” And he said, “Oh, improvise.” He loved to get people to improvise, to get them free and just see what happened. He was amused when I started improvising, so I went on and on and he went right on filming for two hours. He had miles of footage. But that scene was cut. The film was like five hours long and had to be edited down. And Giulietta herself—the actress, his wife—was irritated. What she thought were some of her best scenes had been just cut out of the film.
Then the connecting links were cut to make it American length. For example, you are in the beach house, and then suddenly you are in a tree-house. Well, you saw them strolling from the beach house to the tree house in the original version. A dozen little connecting links have been snipped for the New York distributors. They said it can’t be two hours and twenty minutes. We can have two hours, but you can’t have two hours and twenty minutes. That was back when they still were fitting three showings into an afternoon and night. Someday we’ll have the whole thing.
In the movie, there’s a flashback to Juliet’s education in a convent school. He wanted me to play the mother superior. I don’t have a single line; I’m just there. I remember we waited hours until the costumer found the shoes he wanted. I can’t remember whether you see them in the film or not. But he wanted a kind of shoe that is laced up to a certain point and then buttoned. It’s the kind of shoe that mother superiors wore. He had to have that. Just had to have it. But my real role as mother superior was having my own dressing room and listening to the conversations of all those girls.
There were all these girls who applied to him in casting practically naked. And girls who would drop naked out of trees onto his car and by his gate when his car stopped to go into his beach house gate. “Oh, Mr. Fellini.” They wouldn’t let him alone. And he would say, “Well, casting is on such and such a day.” So he hired them all but made them all nuns. He gave them nuns’ costumes that covered every bit of them, even their hands. That’s another one of the thousand jokes that are in every Fellini film. He told the costumer, “Cover every inch.” Only their fingertips show. Because he was so put off by these dozens of beautiful girls appearing scantily clad at his gate.
So one day he called and said, “I want you to do something.” And I said,
“What’s that, Federico?” He said, “All these girls, you know, that have pestered me and pestered me, I’ve cast them all as nuns. Now I want you to be a nun. I want you to report to me all the conversations that go on in that dressing room.” I said, “Oh, Federico, what are you asking me to do? You are throwing me in with sixteen bathing beauties.” He said, “Yeah. You go to makeup first and then run in with your head down and get into that nun costume. I’ll tell the wardrobe lady to get her assistants over there and get you dressed first of all. You can sit in the corner.” And that’s what happened.
Each nun had a tiny alcove. I had my little tiny alcove, and I was supposed to sit there and listen carefully. And I sat there, and I couldn’t believe some of the things I heard. I mean, it was a sex education. A whole world of feminine mythology. It was a lot of like “Well, his face looks like a dog turd, but did you see the cute way he moves those buttocks?” I couldn’t believe it. And then they said about Fellini: “Look how small his hands are. I bet his thing is small, too.” Ever since then, I’ve been looking at men’s hands. Anyway, it was amazing.
And then one day some stupid third assistant director came running in and said, “Signor Walter, Signor Walter, Signor Walter,” and I made myself small in the corner. But he knew me because of the special shoes Fellini had gotten for my big feet. So the guy went looking for my shoes and said, “Signor Walter, Federico wants to see you right away.” The expressions of those girls as they froze, I’ll never forget. There was this hissing as I left. I went out and I said, “Our cover is blown. I ain’t going back in that room. I won’t get out alive.”
He had wanted to know what women talk about with other women. It was just one of his things. The director’s curiosity. I told him almost everything. I told about the dog turd face and the cute buttocks, but I didn’t tell him what they had said about the size of his hands.
But finally Fellini just couldn’t get the girls to do what he wanted them to do as nuns. They would pipe up in their sweet voices, and they wouldn’t stay covered. So he went and got a lot of boys from the beach at Ostia. He’d say, “Come along with me. You’re working in a film today.” Then he put these boys into the nuns’ costumes. He felt they could do that scene where the nuns are huddled together and sort of running about and all that, and they did. They came out looking more like nuns than the girls had.