There was something about Lina I just liked. She was small, tough, had black hair in a boyish cut. She always wore trousers and enormous thick lenses, like the bottoms of Coca-Cola bottles. She had a devilish sense of humor. But she was north Italian, and a lot of people from Rome and below Rome just didn’t understand her sense of humor. She’d say things with a perfectly straight face. Of course, I got them because it was like understated British humor. And so we began to have giggles together on the set.
We collaborated on that crazy film of Zeffirelli’s about Saint Francis. After I had translated some scripts for her and she was very pleased with my work, she invited me to come and join her at Zeffirelli’s house one day to talk about this project, a film of the life of the saint, but modern. A surrealist thing. Everything was building up to this eight hundredth anniversary of the birth of Saint Francis of Assisi. And we did this version, but Paramount, who loved the idea at first, decided it was too special, that it wouldn’t sell. Then we worked on something that Paramount was going to call
Holy, Holy Francis.
That’s when I said, “No film in America is going to get anybody in, not even for the popcorn, under the name
Holy, Holy Francis
.” So I said, “Why don’t we call it
Brother Sun, Sister Moon
?” So it was called that, and the film went on to be a great success all over the world.
I was not available to work on that second version, which was historic, although I wrote a bunch of songs for it that were never in the film. But Zeffirelli liked very much what I did for him, and that’s why I was called back to do a song for his
Romeo and Juliet.
He wanted an Elizabethan ballad, and he’d already said that he’d like for me to do it. But the Paramount people were going to get W. H. Auden, from Vienna, where he lived, to come down and write it. And it was Fellini who said to Paramount, “Why get Auden from Vienna? Eugene’s in Rome.” Nino Rota, who wrote all the music for all the Fellini films, had already done the music, so I wrote this ballad called “What Is a Youth?”
Nino Rota was charming, demented, and absentminded. Once we waited an hour to rehearse the song “Go Milk the Moon,” which I wrote for
Juliet of the Spirits,
though it was later cut from the final version. The pop group was there in the studio, waiting. Finally someone went searching for him and heard this little voice. He’d locked himself in the john and couldn’t get out. He’d put the key in his pocket. He’s dead now, poor darling.
Zeffirelli was much more impatient than Fellini and not as interested in all the extras and their stories. But he’s humorous, has a quick mind, and is a very nice person. He was always giving delightful parties.
There were a couple of pills I did translations for. Antonioni always sent assistants. I didn’t really deal with him. Usually, the greater the director, the more they would talk to me. I think he’s a big bore. Thirty minutes of Antonioni goes a very long way. I never understood that artistic film idea of hour-long close-ups of flowers unfolding and unnecessary mystifying of the viewer. Hour-long close-ups of Monica Vitti in
L’Avventura,
about this girl who vanishes from the beach in Sicily. Monica Vitti looks at the sun rising over the sea and bites her lip. I guess you were supposed to think she’s unhappy. Or maybe has a nervous tic. Or is hungry. But we don’t know anything about her. We have a close-up of her watching her sunrise on a deserted beach and biting her lip. Then she vanishes. It was a great hit with the intellectual critics and then thereby got international distribution. Since all Hollywood films go too fast, when Antonioni slowed everything down to a funeral pace, they said, “Oh, art. High art.” But it was just relief after the Hollywood zip, zip, zip, zip.
Fellini knows when to be quiet, but he moves quickly. It’s a movie. It moves. You don’t sit on the beach in Sicily for an hour wondering where that girl has gone. Did she drown or go to town? With Fellini you can start counting how many stimulating images there are in ten minutes. Compare Monica Vitti on the beach biting her lip with
Juliet of the Spirits,
where you enter a fantasy world; you enter the world of the whorehouse next door; you enter the convent school where the wife went. It’s a cross section of Italy. Fellini is movie. Antonioni is cinema.
Costa-Gavras was very complex but not pleasant, really. I translated a film for him, and
Variety
quoted me as saying something like “Highly interesting film. Difficult to choose a location where it will be filmed.” Every once in a while
Variety
would call and say, “What new projects are going on?” And I think I said, “One of the most fascinating projects at the moment in
Rome is Costa-Gavras’s new film.” I wasn’t saying anything special, but
Variety
had said I was working on the film. I wasn’t working on the film. The film wasn’t being made. I was working on the script. I had been called in by the backer to do this translation. But then Costa-Gavras sent right away a cablegram to
Variety
saying “Walter has absolutely no part in this film. He’s not part of the production.” I don’t know why he got his dander up. There was no reason. I just was saying what was going on in Rome and all that.
Of course, I stopped everything when the sun went down to have a dinner party or to go out to dinner. Because you can’t be a slave to anything. You have to switch buttons. Turn something off, turn something else on. And meanwhile, I was being called in for parts.
It Wasn’t Work; It Was My Natural Behavior
I went to Cairo to make this
Arabian Nights
film about Sinbad
the Sailor. All the people in the film were Italian or Egyptian, so the villain, of course, was blond in a film in that part of the world. In films for dark-skinned, dark-haired people, the villain is always blond. I was the blond eunuch. I got the costume designer to put a pair of gold scissors for jewels on my turban. I thought the scissors would make it clear for those who didn’t understand what a eunuch was: that the balls had been cut off. Nobody caught on. Anyway, I had this fabulous costume, this huge turban, all these ropes of pearls and rubies. And I did sail down the Nile in a galley with all these creatures rowing. I was sitting in this boat, fingering my pearls, you know, as I was rowed down the Nile. It’s the only way to travel.
Of course, it was a tiny little fishing boat on which they had built a façade of this galley. It was rather rickety, and I was very nervous as we went rowing down the Nile. I just fingered my pearls and rubies. I remembered as I was coming down the Nile my seventh-grade geography book, one of those Rand McNally geography books, and it had been through so many printings that the photographs in the book were quite gray. One of them said “The Nile at Cairo.” There were these palm trees, there were some guys with jugs on their shoulders, and there was a camel. In the distance was a Pyramid and the Sphinx. Well, as I came rocking down the Nile that morning, I looked over and what do you think I saw? I saw a field of cotton and a brick building exactly like Water Street in Mobile. And over the door it said “R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company.” America, the South, went right by me.
It was fun. I loved making that film. Who directed it? Nobody. Who produced it? Nobody. Who wrote it? Nobody. Who was in it? Nobody. But it gave me six weeks in Egypt and some time in the Sahara.
*
I got to go to Tunisia because of a film
Il Giovane Normale—A Normal Young Man.
It had been a best-selling novel in Italy. Dino Risi was the director of the film, and he had seen me in some awful things, but he liked what I did. So I was a female impersonator with this blond, mile-high wig you could not believe and these earrings to my knees. It’s about three Americans on vacation in Europe. They pick up this young Italian boy who’s hitchhiking, and they invite him to come along. He has a different relationship with each of them, a changing rapport with these three people as they go down Italy and cross the Sahara into the island of Djerba—it’s the Island of the Lotus Eaters in Homer. I played a writer who had left his wife and children, and he sees me as rather corrupt, as having designs on his virginity. So this hitchhiker has a dream in which he sees me in this low-dive café entertaining as a female impersonator. I was so tightly corseted in this costume, and I had a long cigarette holder. If you bit into that thing there, you could make it go z-z-z-z-z and extend. So when I see him in the crowd at the café, I go, “Oooh,” and bite into that long cigarette holder. The idea was that young men are changeable and that they do have different relationships with everybody. And are likely to try everything. A normal young man will try anything. That’s normal. It’s about that old dichotomy between natural and normal. Which gets so confused. It’s one of the great confusions of American civilization; they’ve confused natural and normal. I believe in the natural, not the normal.
This actor whom I hate, the famous young actor, the young leading man who was in
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,
was the star who played the hitchhiker, the normal young man. Lino Capolicchio was his name. He was an ass. He’s impossible to work with; he just mumbles the lines, and none of the other actors can get their cues. He said, “It has to be natural.” And I said, “Lino, I have worked with a great many actors in theater and on the screen. The more natural they look, the more you can be sure they’ve rehearsed.” He’s just one of those actors who’s living the part. There’s always some actor or actress like that, who’s living the part. Oh so sensitive, you know. They are the people who fall apart if anything goes wrong. I like people who rehearse and who are professional. It’s the professional who’ll rewrite the play if necessary, but they never let you down.
And Lino Capolicchio got so homesick for Rome that he wasn’t eating. He was suffering the heat and suffering the food. He wouldn’t eat anything. Even though a Roman, he was so provincial Italian. So used to his mother hovering over him and feeding him with a spoon. He wouldn’t eat the Tunisian food, and he was losing weight like mad. Poor Dino Risi was getting so cranky and saying, “He’s going to be a healthy young man in one scene and a ghost in another. What are we going to do? I’m almost ready to throw the whole thing up.” Lino’s hotel room was next to mine at one location shot, and I could hear him crying. Can you imagine someone twenty-nine years old, missing Mama and Mama’s cooking so much that he wasn’t eating, was turning pale green, and crying in his bed at night? I shouldn’t have told Dino, but Dino was a friend of mine apart from the film. His daughter married Ginny Becker’s son, and his brother was married to my Australian friend, Mitty Lee Brown, who was a painter. So I said, “Why don’t we get all the Italians who are good cooks into the hotel kitchen and make a couple of proper Italian meals?” I said,
“I
think it’s the food, the homesickness, and missing Mama.” So Dino, with Italian Machiavellian artistry, got the mama to call him. And there was one electrician on the set who was apparently a famous cook. Dino just took him off the film and put him in the kitchen in the hotel that day. They finally put that electrician onto just cooking.
Lino Capolicchio was the one that I killed at the end of a film called
The House with Laughing Windows,
in which I played a Brazilian lady who had come to Italy and disguised herself as a man, a country priest. I was the little parish priest who is really a Brazilian lady crook. We filmed it in the Adriatic, and I had one scene with Lino Capolicchio where we are in this tiny little boat on the Pontine marshes of the river Po that flow into the Adriatic. It’s where all the eels in every restaurant in Italy come from. There are like three million eels. And I had to catch an eel and get it off the hook and carry on this long conversation with Lino wearing these hot priestly robes out in the sunlight amidst all these eels. And flies. It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. I had to pull in the line, catch the eel, hold the line, get the eel off the hook, and go on speaking my lines in this tiny little boat amidst all these eels. Hot.
In the last shot of the film, Lino Capolicchio is wounded and I rip off my priest garment and here are these tits. And I start singing this Portuguese fado. And bring out this knife to kill him. That’s the end of the film. And I will never forget sitting in the church in this little country parish at six A.M., naked to the waist, and these three makeup artists gluing this wire-and-foam-rubber thing on me. It took about an hour because they really glued them on me.
In
The Girl in the Yellow Pajamas
I play this eccentric creature who had an apartment full of birdcages and birds flying around. It’s based on a real murder in Australia. The young hero who was charged with murder at one moment takes refuge with this crazy guy who has all these birds. That’s me. And that’s when I had a nude scene coming out of the bathtub with Ray Milland. He was clothed. I was nude, coming out of this bathtub, mooning for the camera. And I’m a pretty white potato, naked, you know. But I figured that everybody there either had something similar to what I have or had seen something similar, so it would be no surprise to anyone.
Another time I played this crooked cardinal who is dealing with real estate. There’s a scene where I get off this helicopter in this village in south Italy and all the mob is there throwing rotten vegetables at me. I remember those hot cardinal’s robes out in the country and the stink of that helicopter from all the rotten tomatoes. And we shot that scene over and over and over. When I got back to my apartment after filming and read my horoscope, it said “This will be a day of many ups and downs.” Lord, Lord. Well, everything for the sake of art.