Oh, I’ve lived. You can’t say I haven’t lived. I’ve been a eunuch floating down the Nile, a female impersonator, a crooked cardinal getting pelted by rotten vegetables; I’ve been stuck in the eels in the Pontine marshes. You can’t say I haven’t lived.
I don’t think I played any really straight parts. They were always character parts. Mother superiors and cardinals and sexy priests. After I played mother superior for Fellini, then everybody wanted me for a mother superior. And after I played a sheriff for somebody, everybody else wanted me for a sheriff. When they realized I could fall, I had a lot of falling-down roles. I had studied ballet as a child and been in the Children’s Theater, you know. I knew how to fall. I could just fall. You let go of everything and fall. Italians don’t know how to fall. They are so self-conscious and stand with a certain pride and all that. And they love their own bodies. The Latin male ego is something that somebody needs to write a seventeen-volume study about. It’s not as simple as we like to think in the Anglo-Saxon countries. It’s much more complex. So they do not fall. The actors do not fall. If somebody is going to be shot and fall down, they’ll do the shot several times and get in an acrobat or stuntman to fall down. When they realized I could fall, I found myself playing bank presidents and getaway robbers who were shot. Because I could fall. So I was a falling actor.
In one of my great falling roles I was an industrialist who gets shot by terrorists. I had a scene where I had all these people lined up at this table for a board of directors meeting, and the terrorists burst in and shot me. I was hired for my fall. In another film I was laser-gunned by a Martian and got to fall in this eighteenth-century villa in Adava. Another falling part I had was with Alberto Sordi. He was the lead, and I had the second male part. I’ve forgotten the name of it; precocious senility has set in. But it was Giulietta Masina and Anita Ekberg and two other great sirens of Italian films, and Alberto Sordi in the lead. I played the manservant from Liverpool of somebody who had died and come back but was invisible to me. I had to look right into his face and not see him and look right past him and all that. And I had to fall on the marble pavement.
My best falling-down role was in Lina Wertmüller’s
Ballad of Belle Starr.
I was the safecracker Velvet Fingers in this spaghetti western. I didn’t really have time to do the part, but she was in litigation with the producer and was having trouble getting the film made. He wanted it to be much more an American western; she wanted to make it intelligent. It’s neither, actually, but it has a cult following now in Italy. I was paid eight years after I did it, but I love her, and I respect and admire her very much. I did all my own high-wire stuff for that, falling off of roofs and swinging on wires. I enjoyed doing that because it was hot summer and it was cool out there at Cinecittà, and they would bring the food and wine up to us on the roof. They said, “Now we’ve got these acrobats who will double for you.” And I said, “No. I have never fallen off a roof before. I’ve never put an umbrella in my mouth and gone hand over hand on that wire before. I’ll do it.” It was hot. Those whiskers were hot. But it was fun. It’s not hard to fall off a roof. You just relax. There was a whole pile of empty cardboard boxes on the floor, and I am upholstered, you know. There’s a first time for everything. As I learned from Miss Mattie T. Graham, you just close your mind and fall.
I also did a lot of commercials, because television commercials in Italy are totally unlike those in America. All the great directors, all kinds of extraordinary actors and actresses, do all these short sketches, and you don’t know what they are advertising until the end. The whole idea is to be witty and amusing and then at the end say, “Use such and such scouring powder.” There was one where I played a grandfather. I’m in this white suit and all my grandchildren are milling about me in this garden. And they are saying, “Oh, Gramps, do you want us to do a dance? Do you want us to sing something?” “No, no, I know what I want.” Then at the end I hold up a bottle of strawberry jam and say, “This is what I want.”
There was one charming one I did set on the roof of this Rome apartment house. It’s a hot day, and this guy comes out on his roof and he’s got all kinds of creams and oils and one of those little reflecting things to put around the face for suntans. He has this towel, and he has this blanket he puts out. It turns out that he’s too broke to go to the beach for his vacation. So he stayed at home and didn’t answer the telephone and goes up on the roof to get a suntan so he can go back to the office with a tan. Now you would think that’s an advertisement for some kind of suntan lotion. It’s for prepackaged fried chicken. At the end, he opens a basket and eats some fried chicken. I guess there’s a relation. You fry in the sun; the chicken fries in the fat.
After I started, I never stopped working in films. I always got a lot of bits and pieces, more than I can remember. I worked as a coach in certain cases for the English language. As assistant director. As translator of everything. As subtitler. Dubbing dialogue. Or acting. And it was fun. I loved it.
I never saw half the films I made. Take the money and run, you know. I just went and signed the contracts. A week later or a month later they would ring and say, “Well, you are called for tomorrow. The car is coming at six.” I’d say, “Sure.” I’d work maybe a week, six every morning, and I’d be back home by five or six. Since it was so exhilarating for me to see all those crazy people doing all those crazy things, I was never tired. I was just ready to have cocktails and go to a good restaurant at night. I worked in about a hundred films. I loved it all. How else would I have floated down the Nile? How would I have gone to the island of Djerba? It wasn’t work. I tell you there was nothing worklike about it. I guess what I consider work is not what other people consider work. And what I consider fun is not what other people consider fun. It’s many a night I stayed up painting scenery or dyeing cloth for something in the theater or writing something for a magazine. But that’s fun. I don’t think that’s work. The only time I almost died was in that bookshop on Fifth Avenue with those tough, awful people. Some people would say, you know, that swinging on a rope three floors above the pavement with an umbrella in your mouth while you’re cracking a safe was work. But you see, for me it was my natural behavior.
One of the Great For-Reals
I was working in films and I’d just finished
8½
when I was looking for a place for Leontyne Price, who came to record in Rome every summer for RCA. I had first met her in Paris when she was still a student at Juilliard. She sang in a production of the Virgil Thomson-Gertrude Stein
Four Saints in Three Acts
at a summer festival in Paris which was cast almost entirely from Juilliard. I was with Alice B. Toklas, and she said, “I’m going backstage. Who do you want to meet?” There were no famous names in the cast at all. It was just young people of Juilliard, mostly black. I said, “I want to meet the lady who sang the Santa Cecilia, and that boy who danced the Archangel Gabriel.” And if I do say so, that encouraged me to think I might be a serious critic, because the Archangel was Arthur Mitchell, the man who founded the Harlem Ballet, and Santa Cecilia was Mary Leontyne Price. I also saw her backstage when she did
Porgy
in Paris.
Then when she came to Rome much later, she looked me up. She said she was looking for an apartment and asked if I’d help her find one. She said, “Please, I am sick of hotels. I spend my life in hotels. If I am going to spend three months recording in Rome in the summer, I would like an apartment. Find me an apartment.” So I’d taken her seriously and was looking. And I found, in this palazzo, one block away from Palazzo Caetani, on the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, an apartment for me on the top and one for her on the floor below. On the top floor was this huge apartment with a terrace half a block long in the front of it. It had a formal dining room that gave onto this terrace overlooking Corso Vittorio. I had just started translating, and I could see that with any luck, I could really make a living. So I could afford this apartment. Later I took another apartment as well which was half a flight higher on the back of the palazzo. I just cut a little door and there was a little stairway that you went up and went through into another apartment. There were four baths, two kitchens, a great deal of space. I filled every bit of it with paintings, books, papers, and cats. I had three different terraces. The one on the street had a great number of iris. I had about a hundred varieties of iris. I even had a child’s wading pool so I could have aquatic iris. I had sand pear trees, all in pots, that had pears, and all kinds of greens and herbs and roses like mad.
Leontyne loved her apartment because it was facing east onto this courtyard overlooking a fountain. When she went back to New York after a summer in Rome, in order to sleep in her Greenwich Village apartment, she had to leave her bathtub running all night. The sound of a fountain. She wanted to be on a quiet courtyard so she could sleep late without any traffic sounds. She had a little dining room, and under the window I had painted a wicker basket of oranges. I had painted almost invisible lines of gilt into the wicker, so that when the sun shone at ten in the morning, which would be the time she would be having coffee, it would reflect the light so that the basket suddenly came to life. There was an old, polished honey brown floor, and on the wall I painted little standard trees in urns. I had an oval table that had come from a garden in the suburbs of Rome from a family that owned Corsica in the eighteenth century and a funny little sideboard that I found. Leontyne loved it all. We had an intercom phone, a little private connecting telephone from her bedside to mine, and saw a lot of each other. We had some marvelous times. It had nothing to do with Leontyne being an opera singer or my working with Italian films. When you got her away from the Music Corporation of America people, and some rather dreary assistants and some dancing boys, she was still Mary Leontyne Price from Laurel, Mississippi. So it was just two Southerners. Whenever I cooked or whenever she cooked, we just did Southern. Leontyne was one of those who cooked fried chicken in a way that you thought it flew in, dropped its feathers outside the window, and jumped into the grease. Because there was no grease. Crunch and succulent, crunch and succulent, crunch and succulent. And Leontyne knew what to do with a bunch of turnip greens. Oh, she was a heavenly creature. She was for real. She was one of the great for-reals.
I tried to take her to a lot of offbeat, small restaurants on one of those little side streets near the Palazzo Barberini that didn’t have tourists. She liked some of the places in Trastevere, and I took her to the museum at Ostia Antica.
One year Leontyne was singing
Aida
in this production designed by the artist that I just flipped for at La Scala in Milano. Leontyne has a wild and wonderful sense of humor, and she invited me, saying, “Oh, I’ll get you tickets, now don’t you worry. I’ll get the tickets.” I arrived in Milano. She had said just to come on to the theater. “I’m going to be there raising hell all day until that costume is right.” They had designed a white dress for Leontyne to wear in the tomb scene, I think. And Leontyne had taken one look and said she would have blue or nothing. She said she would never wear a white costume onstage. She didn’t say it, but of course a white costume will make dark skin look darker. So anyway, I went to the theater and sheepishly went up to this ferocious-looking doorman who had a pistol inside his jacket because the student leftist groups had done all kinds of terrorist things in Italy, especially throwing bombs in theaters. He said, “Who are you?” And I said, “Eugenio Walter. Miss Price invited me to come to the show this evening.” He said something like “Why are you here so early?” “Because I’m having lunch with Miss Price and the president of La Scala at the restaurant around the corner.” “Oh,” he said, and picked up a piece of paper. He let me in, and there was Leontyne indeed surrounded by ladies with pins in their mouths and tape measures in front of the mirror, being fitted into a very pretty blue costume. And she said, “Oh, hello, Eugene. Go and sit down out there.” She had this anteroom with a chaise longue and a little icebox of her own. So I sat down and waited, and she said, “Oh, your tickets are here somewhere. We’ll find them.” And then she opened a somewhat battered envelope on the table and said, “Here they are.” I didn’t look at them, just put them in my pocket.
That night I came to the theater early because I wanted to look around and see who arrived. And when they saw my tickets, they sent this little boy in uniform with me all the way to show me to my seat. In the very middle of the major circle at La Scala is a royal box with two thrones. And that’s what Leontyne had gotten for me to sit in. We went up these steps and I thought, Oh, how nice, I like to be up always. Then he parted these curtains and we were in this little antechamber with these little gold chairs. Then he opened some other doors and here were these two thrones on platforms in this velvet box. I said, “There must be some mistake.” He said, “No, it was on the tickets.”
So I thought, Oh, my God. What about the other ticket? I have two tickets. I want to give somebody a thrill. It was early still. I took a quick gander at the chandelier and rushed out to stand next to the box office. There were some grand Milanese ladies with their pearls and their minks off their shoulders. “What do you mean, sold out?” This was not opening night, but it was a Saturday night the opening week of the production. I stood there and watched several of these ladies saying, “What do you mean? I’m Mrs. So-and-so.” “I’m the contessa. There must be a seat for me.” “Sorry.” Then there was a very snotty journalist from England saying, “I’ve never had difficulties getting a seat for La Scala. I am the correspondent for So-and-so. And she said, “Well, I’m terribly sorry, but it is sold out completely.” She said, “We had several tour buses and we’ve had students from the Swiss school. Every seat is taken. Standing room only.” And he said, “I’m not about to stand to see an opera.” She said, “I’m terribly sorry, but if you had called us a week ago…” He went off huffy. Then there were some American tourists saying, “Oh, Jesus, all the way to Milan and we can’t see
Aida.”
They went off. Then suddenly here was this little man with graying hair and a gray suit, rather pale. Obviously not Italian. In heavily accented Italian which I knew right away had to be Norse of some kind, he said, “Oh, I’ve come all the way”—from wherever he’d come from—”to see this. I’ve never heard Leontyne Price, and I’ve always wanted to see
Aida
and La Scala.” And I said, “Here’s your ticket.” He said, “Hunh? What?” I said, “Here’s your ticket. Come with me. You’ve been designated by the Willoughby Institute to receive a ticket to tonight’s show.” He looked startled. I didn’t look especially important or rich, but I did have the ticket. So he went with me.