Leading Men

by Christopher Castellani

  Anja didn’t hesitate to allow Tenn to pay for her dresses. She never promised, One day I’ll pay you back for your many kindnesses. She took everything they offered her—the bed in their apartment, the morning coffee and cornetti Frank had brought back from the bakery down the block, Ahmed’s rapidly dwindling kif—with the uncomplicated joy of feeling as though she deserved them. For this, Frank envied her. He kept a running tally in his mind of every penny Tenn had spent on him, every Key West utility bill paid out of the account he rarely checked, all the shirts and ties and cuff links purchased for parties on three continents. He accepted these only because he had the sincere intention to earn back the thousands of dollars they cost.

  For her visit to the Senso set, which, on this day, was the blocked-off Vicolo del Cedro in Trastevere, Anja wore a simple butter-yellow shift dress. The three of them watched from the sidewalk, afraid to disturb the great Visconti, even though he was expecting them and had agreed, eagerly, to give Anja the once-over. Visconti had no part for her in this already bloated production, he said over the phone, not even a small one, he was up to his neck in Austrians as it was, but there was always the next film, whatever it might be, or the film after that. Alida Valli was proving satisfactory as Livia, but Ingrid Bergman had been his first choice, and Alida Valli was no Ingrid Bergman. Though born a baronessa, Valli had a bohemian beauty ill suited to the lavishness and decadence—“the wantonness!”—that Visconti wanted for Senso, and that he could have gotten out of Bergman if she’d given him a chance. Tenn had held the phone up so Frank could hear the man rant. “It is easier to find love than it is to find a muse!” Visconti had shouted, and then he shouted at someone else in the room, forgot his conversation with Tenn altogether, and the line went dead.

  Visconti sat in a folding chair in the middle of the alley, barking directions at Valli and a pack of no-name actors in uniform. Valli’s character, Countess Livia Serpieri, had betrayed her Austrian lover, Lieutenant Franz Mahler, which caused his death by firing squad, and now she was roaming the streets of Verona undone by remorse and grief. The Italian soldiers were on hand to harass and molest her, thus adding a deserved degradation to her shocking downfall.

  It was a fairly simple depiction of dissolution on an ancient cobblestone street, but nothing was simple with Visconti. Couldn’t Alida stagger a bit more wildly? “Livia Serpieri is not human anymore!” Visconti called to her in his furious Italian. “She has turned animal! She is a heart torn out by her own hands, flopping like a fish on the ground!” And so Valli, in her heavy black coat and tangled veil, staggered and fell and got back onto her feet and then staggered and fell again, dragging herself over the rough stones. Her lips trembled as if she were freezing, but her face was glistening with sweat from the humid August afternoon. An old woman ran out with a can of hair spray and a handful of cotton pads to blot her cheeks and forehead and touch up the men as well. Visconti walked out to adjust the soldiers’ shirts and hats before turning himself to Valli’s hair, which he pulled apart and mussed until it achieved the wreckage he was after. He held her by the shoulders and whispered something in her ear. Then he sat back down, folded one of his long legs over the other, put on his glasses, and paged through a paperback as he waited for the actors to return to their marks and the horses to cooperate with the soldiers in their carriage. By the time they were all in place and the scene was ready to reshoot, the light was wrong. It was just past the siesta hour, and the shadows were changing by the second.

  It soon became obvious that, second choice or satisfactory, bohemian or baronessa, Alida Valli had Anja Blomgren in her thrall. Watching Anja closely, Frank saw that she followed every flicker of anguish on Valli’s face, the angle of every calculated stagger, each twist of her torso as she writhed in the arms of the brutish soldiers. “She is marvelous,” said Anja, wide-eyed, and her lips stayed half parted, words failing her in all three languages she knew. For the first time, Frank saw Anja for what she really was under all her hard and practiced defenses: a teenage girl, a child blushing at the discovery of a pure new pleasure. In this light, she was at her most beautiful, like a novice sanctified by her calling.

  “Valli does have a fugitive energy,” Tenn said. “Though I must agree she’s no Bergman.”

  “The next Bergman might be you,” said Frank to Anja.

  “Not Garbo?” asked Tenn.

  “What she is doing, it is—” Once again Anja’s lips refused to close, but this time she couldn’t find the word.

  “Marvelous?”

  “Marvelous!”

  Tenn laughed. “We talked quite a bit in Portofino about your education,” Tenn said. “Are you prepared for the hard work it takes to be someone else for a living?”

  “Go easy on her,” said Frank. “It’s the first day of school.”

  Anja paid no attention to their chatter. She bit her fingernails and leaned in as far as she could to see Valli and Visconti through the harsh shadows between the film lights. The sun was fading fast. Valli shook her head when the men closed in around her. Then she fell to the ground again in a catlike crawl. She thrashed and beat her stomach with her fists and craned her neck to the sky, exposing her naked throat as if begging for one of them to cut it. A soldier grabbed her by the hair, she let out a guttural scream, and Anja jumped.

  Visconti clapped his hands together once in triumph. Finis! The crowd of onlookers clapped as well, and they thought, for a moment, that the filming was over, until Visconti said no. Valli had done her part—“Brava!” he called out to her, and blew her a kiss—but the soldiers had not. He needed more menace from their faces.

  The director sat back in his chair, but it was too dark for his paperback. He crossed both his arms and his legs. When he noticed Tenn, he gestured with his chin for the trio to approach.

  “You are the protégée?” he said to Anja, standing, smiling handsomely, when she was introduced. He was a tall man, broad and imposing in the shoulders, with a strong jaw and slicked-back hair. Born a count, he was wealthier than any of them could hope to be, with all the time in the world to conform his films precisely to his vision.

  “I am nothing yet,” said Anja. Her eyes were still not on the director, but on his leading lady, quickly rebuttoning the coat she’d pulled apart just moments before. “And I could never be that.”

  “That is my creation,” Visconti said proudly. “Just wait until Italia sees how I’ve debauched their innocent sweetheart. The whole country will hate this film.” He turned to Tenn. “They will love the words, of course. And the colors! Did I tell you what I was doing with the colors? It is the first—”

  “How many movies has she played in?” Anja interrupted. “I want to see all of them.”

  Confused, Visconti looked at her and shrugged. “Thirty-six or so,” he said. “After Senso, she might say no more often.” As he said this, he put his hand on Anja’s right cheek and looked more closely at her. He turned her head to one side and then to the other, to catch the light. She barely registered his touch, though his large hand covered most of her right side from chin to eye to ear. She stood on her tiptoes, trying to see above his shoulder to where Valli was patting one of the horses. Visconti then took a step back to assess her from head to toe against the backdrop of the busy street. His face was agitated.

  “This is her first time in the presence of a real actress at work,” said Frank, by way of explanation.

  “I saw actresses onstage in Sweden,” she corrected him. “They bored me.”

  “Bored by Strindberg?” asked Visconti, incredulous. “You are even younger than you look.”

  “I don’t know if it was Strindberg,” said Anja. “We have other plays in our theaters besides Miss Julie. And I never said I was not young.”

  “Can we all at least agree that The Dance of Death is one of the three great modern dramas?” said Tenn, quickly, but the damage was done.

  “She is hollo
w,” Visconti said to Frank, later, when Frank pulled him aside. Anja and Tenn were barely out of earshot. “I don’t have the time or the inclination to ‘fill her up.’ I don’t even believe such a thing can be done. In the very special actresses, you see the fullness right away, no matter how young they come to you. I have seen it in girls in pigtails! The fullness overflows from them!” He lifted up his hands and shook his head. “Take Valli. She is not one of the greats, but the fullness is there. Anna Magnani. Rita Hayworth. These women, the too-much-ness of them, it electrifies me. I’m sorry, I do not see too much in your little Swede.”

  “You know this after one minute of conversation?” Frank asked. “What about a screen test?”

  “Boh,” he said, that infuriating Italian expression that meant, “How could I possibly know?” Invariably, it was uttered by a person—Frank’s father, Alvaro, the teller at the Amexco office—whose very job it was to know.

  “Ask Tenn about the women they’ve cast in his plays, he’ll tell you: sometimes at first they seem like the wrong type, but then they learn his lines, they swallow them, and his words turn them into something else, something bigger than they were before. More full, maybe, as you call it.”

  “This has not been my experience,” Visconti said. “Some actors, put them in any light, they don’t glow.” He was already distracted. There was a man on a bicycle doing circles in the middle of the set, disturbing the horses and scattering the crew. “Vai via!” he shouted at the man, shaking his fists. “The village idiot,” he murmured to Frank. On the way back to his chair, he called over to Tenn: “Soon I will see pages from my American script, yes?”

  “I’m making magic for you, maestro!” said Tenn.

  If they were indeed to lead Anja’s education, Frank and Tenn needed to start with the basics, including how to flatter a great director. You listened to him go on about his colors. You didn’t throw all your attention on the leading lady you knew he considered second-rate. You did praise him for getting so much blood out of that particular stone, and then you showed a barely restrained pity for the stone herself. You hoped aloud that the stone worked again, maybe in a smaller picture better suited to her range. You looked the director in the eye, and then when he gazed upon you to accept the compliment and the pity, you shied away. You didn’t mean to speak so boldly.

  Tenn bid Visconti a quick farewell before he could ask any more questions about the stalled script. Then they crossed through the middle of his set so that Anja could finally take Alida Valli’s hands in hers and tell her of her marvelous work while gazing with adoration into her royal gypsy eyes.

  “He did not impress me,” Anja said, as they walked off. It was the dinner hour, and they were winding their way through the narrow, jagged streets of Trastevere. “You really want this bully to film your words, Tennessee?”

  “Bullishness is not the worst quality in an artist,” said Tenn. “Its opposite is.”

  She thought for a moment. “Is that one of my lessons, too?” she asked. “Along with how to flirt and make the big man feel like the king?” Her tone was playful, but Frank caught the chill.

  “Is it possible you are not inclined—romantically, that is—toward men?” Tenn asked. “You don’t have to be shy about it. It’s very much in fashion.”

  She laughed. “Because I find the leading lady transcendent and her director imperious to the point of nausea?”

  “Yes. Because—I’m sorry to say it—she is a Garbo knockoff and he is famously, undeniably magnetic. So, it occurred to me just now that you may have Sapphic inclinations and, if so, they’re distorting your perceptions, which are otherwise sharper than those of any twenty-two-year-old I’ve ever met.”

  “We should start telling people she’s twenty-five,” Frank thought aloud.

  “This could work to your advantage, you know,” Tenn went on. “As we speak, a grand tradition is forming: Marlene Dietrich, Tallulah Bankhead and, well, who am I to know or care which women are doing what to each other and why they’d want to do it in the first place?”

  Anja, who rarely responded to a question right after you asked it, pondered this one longer than usual. “My inclinations are my own,” she said finally, which meant everything and nothing and put an end to that line of questioning. Besides, after standing around for hours waiting for the nod from Visconti, they were all too hungry and overheated and desperate for a drink to think straight about anything.

  They were unfamiliar with the maze of Trastevere’s streets, which were mostly deserted for the holiday month. They were darker than anywhere else in Rome but for the bursts of light they’d come upon at the turn of a corner, where they’d find a tiny restaurant packed to the rafters. They stood at the front window of one of these places, one of the few open this time of year, somewhere on the Via dei Genovesi, and gazed lustily at the fat working-class men stuffing glistening forkfuls of carbonara between their greasy lips and chasing it with sweet wine.

  “It’s enough to make you fall in love with life again,” said Frank, dreamily.

  “I didn’t know you’d fallen out,” said Tenn.

  “To be old and round like those men, it’s beautiful, don’t you think?”

  Tenn and Anja looked at each other and laughed. “We better get some food in him.”

  To be a romantic was to be seduced as easily by a beautiful boy as by a room full of jowly stonemasons passing around jugs of cheap chianti.

  Frank sweet-talked the maître d’ into a table, and by the time the first course of prosciutto and melon was set before them beside their very own jug of wine wrapped in straw, he’d turned the entire episode with Visconti into a short lesson for himself. He should trust Tenn’s instincts, as well as his own, over those of an agitated director and a starstruck girl. Visconti had simply had a bad day; Anja was a naïf. He made a toast to “the education of Anja Blomgren,” and to “the success of Senso and Battle of Angels” and to—it was then that he struggled; he couldn’t come up with a wish for himself, not one that he could voice—“to Truman Capote for bringing us all together.”

  “And to the Little Horse,” Tenn said. He leaned across the table and kissed him, full on the mouth, and the coarse men behind them guffawed as if it was a bit of drunken buffoonery. “May he grow old and fat . . . but not yet!”

  “To the Little Horse!” said Anja.

  It wasn’t until the wine kicked in with its heady fuzz that the weight of Frank’s unsayable wish settled on him. He listened to Anja talk, on and on, ignoring her plate of fried artichokes, reminiscing, rapturously, about the power of Valli’s overwrought performance, and wondered, again, if Tenn had given another moment’s thought to his request in the garden of the Splendido. Frank was the nagging type, but he had too much pride to nag Tenn about Senso. He made his desire known, and now it was up to Tenn to fulfill it.

  “Just a few days ago, you said acting was childish,” Frank said. “Do you remember? Our conversation in Portofino?”

  “Yes, I did,” Anja said. “Am I not a child?”

  “So you now believe it’s worthy of you? That you’re well suited to it?”

  “Oh, how should I know?” she said. “I will outgrow it, that much is certain. By tomorrow, probably. In the meantime, I am willing to give it a try. I like what she did, all that rolling around on the street like a madwoman. It is very Italian. I suppose I am Italian in my aspirations, if not my inclinations.”

  * * *

  • • •

  THE NEXT MORNING, Frank called Anna. “Here is the program,” he’d said. “It’s time for you to meet our runaway.” He didn’t let on what had happened with Visconti the day before, as he didn’t want to prejudice her first encounter with Anja. He suggested they meet for pizza at a place near Piazza Navona, just the four of them, at eight o’clock.

  “Here is a better idea,” Anna said. There was a filmmaker she’d been avoiding, someone tryin
g to seduce her to star in his next project. He was a young Dane, reportedly handsome, with lofty ambitions but only a single film credit to his name. Had Frank heard of Mirror? No, he hadn’t. No one had, and yet Mirror had earned heaps of praise from the French, which was Anna’s main reason for putting him off. “He sounds to me like a better fit for your little Garbo,” she said. “Unless I fall for him myself. Oh, Frankie bello, what do you say we all have dinner insieme, and we make it a little contest?”

  “Anja can’t compete with you,” Frank said. “She’s never acted a day in her life!”

  “Meglio così,” said Anna. “I prefer games I’m guaranteed to win.”

  “We were hoping you might help her, if you could, not intimidate her.”

  “They are the same,” she said.

  “Her mother does think she needs to be toughened up,” Frank said. “But in my opinion, she’s too tough as it is.”

  “Basta!” said Anna. “Enough of the trailer. I want to see the movie for myself. I will tell this Martin Hovland to meet us at the Osteria al Fontanone at nine thirty. Excellent fish. The owner is an old lover, Don Umberto. He is in Ostia, worth the drive. There is a bus but don’t take it, it never comes. Hovland will pay the bill. In my experience, the auteurs who cry poor are always the ones with money. Ciao ciao bello Frankuccio. With me, you always do better than a pizza shop in Piazza Navona. Come at eight thirty, do you hear? We need time together before the Dane ruins the night. Bah!”

  For two women whose names were off by only a consonant, Anna and Anja were more different than Jersey and Jupiter. It was something to walk with them around the courtyard garden of the Fontanone restaurant—Anna with her polio limp and full-bosomed laugh and those permanent smears, dark as bruises, under her eyes; impish Anja in her demure dress of pale roses, her face stretched tight from the pins pulling back her hair—an ox and a plover struggling for a common tongue. A native Italian, Anna could speak pidgin English but was uncomfortable doing so; Anja, a native Swede, spoke a botched Italian and an overly formal and heavily accented English she learned from a posh British tutor. They kept turning to Frank for help. He knew Italian and English well enough to translate, but he was keeping his distance so that the two women could forge a friendship separate from the ones they had with him and Tenn.