I began a dialogue with that camera, weighing it in my hands, studying the aperture, the two lenses, the exposure meter. I felt confused, but I knew that camera and I had to get along, had to go somewhere together, although the road we took was going to be radically different from my father’s.
To be absolutely honest, I have to confess that I feared photography for another reason. Despite the natural talent with a camera that everyone recognized in me, I had never done any formal study. I’d observed and imitated my father. The rest was instinct. What I didn’t know at the time was that a path was actually already opening above my head, right outside, in the streets of Rome.
Chapter 3
After the Neorealism
It’s not easy trying to describe major cultural change. At school they taught us that a series of small events eventually gives rise to something new. In movies, there’s a major event, then a fade to black, and everything’s different in the next scene. I’ve always felt more at ease in a cinema than a classroom. What’s more, I’d just faded to black myself, almost literally. Which is why, for me, it felt like the sixties began overnight. I went to sleep beneath the clouds of De Sica and Rossellini and woke in the sunshine of Pietro Germi and Federico Fellini.
Returning to the streets of Rome after my accident, I discovered that La Dolce Vita was the movie of the moment. So I went to see it again, and this time I understood it a bit better. On the one hand, it exalted the widespread sense of excitement and liberation that was in the air at the time. Simultaneously, it put us on guard against the decadence that could follow. What had captured the imagination of the world was not just the beautiful people, the clothes, the restaurants, the wild parties and carefree sex, but also the ease of “the sweet life” that Fellini had brought to the screen. After a decade spent rebuilding cities, brick by brick, Italians had had enough. We didn’t want to scrimp and save just to buy bread anymore. We wanted to buy restyled French or American jeans and designer shirts. We didn’t want to be slaves to a corrupt government anymore. We wanted to party in the best restaurants. And then, of course, “the pill” arrived, and suddenly everyone was talking openly about sex, without feeling afraid or guilty. It was as if everyone took one deep breath, then let everything out at once. And all this despite the fact that the Vatican dome still loomed over not just Rome but over much of Europe too.
Fellini went straight to the heart of this new feeling in the famous opening scene of La Dolce Vita, in which a statue of Jesus, suspended from a helicopter, soars over a snarled-up traffic jam. In a city so dominated by the Vatican and religion, we all grew up with the constant refrain that God was looking down on us from on high, and would judge us for everything we did. Fellini broke with all that, making use of that sense of irony that we Romans are masters of, dangling Christ on a rope above our heads. It goes without saying that the Vatican didn’t appreciate his sense of humor and soundly condemned the movie. But that only served to reinforce the split between the old Rome and the new, a fissure that the Catholic Church would start trying to heal a few years later with Vatican Council II. Fellini’s Christ became a symbol of an irreverent search for pleasure and of the flowering of a new culture that would characterize postwar Rome.
I’d watched Fellini shoot his masterpiece in 1959. Now, in 1963, it felt as if I’d punched a hole in the big screen and stepped right into the movie itself, wandering through the streets of the same glorious Rome anticipated by La Dolce Vita.
The epicenter of this renaissance was Via Margutta, a street of artists just around the corner from Piazza di Spagna. Imagine the potent concentration of Hollywood glamour offered by Sunset Boulevard all compressed into just a few short blocks, and you’ll get an idea of what Via Margutta felt like in those days. It was the place to go to see Rome’s beautiful people, the place to be seen if you were one of them. Or—as in my case—if you were trying to be.
One of the leading figures in the Via Margutta scene was Johnny Moncada, the famous fashion photographer and business entrepreneur. His family owned a lot of buildings in that unique, extravagant, exceptional street. Moncada looked like Jack Lemmon dressed as a European aristocrat. The Moncada family belonged to Italian nobility and Johnny was actually a titled count. At some point he’d decided to become a photographer, bought everything he needed, and opened a studio in Via Margutta.
You could see Johnny was rich. More important, however, he had class. Almost anyone can make money, but not many people know how to do it with Johnny’s style. Always impeccably dressed, with beautiful cars and an American former model as a wife, it was he who launched Ali McGraw and Veruschka. Nicola Pietrangeli, the leading tennis player of the time, was one of his best friends and a frequent customer in the same bars and restaurants.
I recognized people with class easily and was convinced that my family’s humble background, along with my lack of schooling, separated me much more from Moncada’s world than money. I was acutely aware of the difference between the Via Margutta community and my own.
Word went around that Moncada was looking for an apprentice, someone good not only at retouching but also in other areas of photography. “Okay. Go for it,” I said to myself, spurred on by youthful arrogance as much as the hard life I was having to deal with. I went to his studio and told him straight: I was the guy he was looking for. He thought I was too young but gave me a photo to retouch. I did an excellent job. A few days later he rang, and I began work the next morning.
Moncada had a lot of important customers and a lot of beautiful models. Definitely one of the perks of my job was watching all those stupendous women wander naked around the studio. Moncada had an original style that distinguished him from other fashion photographers of the time. He used a lot of contrast, giving mobility to the immobility typical of standard fashion shots. On one occasion, for example, he shot a collection with a sports car race in the background. He was the first to use 35 mm film for fashion, instead of TMX 120 film or other large formats. And he never used a tripod. He worked hard on 400 ASA film, pushing it up to 1600, creating a heavily grained effect, very unusual for a fashion shoot in those days. He was also very creative with light. With the help of an umbrella flash, he’d project light first off the ceiling and then onto the models, rendering it much softer and suffused but with the same high contrast. Moncada effectively found a way to illuminate shadow. His photos winked at critics and the public, but also turned off a lot of people. At all costs, he wanted to be considered an artist, not merely an aristocrat in search of recognition. Consequently, he did everything he could to produce unusual and provocative photos with great artistic flair. The result was a very innovative style, very different from that of other photographers, and the fashion industry respected this.
Working with Moncada, I saw the how and why of his flirting with models. The aim was to make them more attractive and sensual, from the inside out. In those days, models were almost mannequins. It was up to the photographer to tell them what expression to assume, how they should pose, everything. The girls were all incredibly thin. They didn’t eat, they didn’t drink, they all looked sad. Moncada was the first to penetrate their veneer, stimulate their intimacy, and make them feel like real women. I watched him do a shoot for a Permaflex mattress commercial that became famous. He got the model Pupa Baldieri to stretch out on a bed and then addressed her in an almost obscene fashion, or at least that’s how it sounded to a young guy like me. But the result was so successful that Baldieri became known forever as “the Permaflex girl.” These days you can regularly see more explicit scenes on prime-time TV. But at the time, I felt scandalized. Moncada wanted Pupa to look like she felt she was in heaven on that bed, a symbol of relaxation—but also a nod in the direction of sex. His veiled sexual innuendos brought out Pupa’s sensuality, rendering the photos provocative but at the same time classy.
In the same period, I made friends with the character actor Mario Brega, a huge, kindhearted, rough diamond of a guy, almost famous. He got me a bit pa
rt in a B movie he was in, Buffalo Bill: Hero of the Far West. He was forty, six foot four, and almost three hundred pounds, a crazy monster. We once fought because he couldn’t bear wearing socks that didn’t match. I dared suggest that it didn’t matter and he flew into a rage.
One day Mario took me to the Café de Paris, where he had to meet a director about a part in a western. The director was Sergio Leone. And he was in a foul mood because the actor they’d given him for the lead role seemed too young and inexperienced. He’d wanted Eric Fleming, the star of the highly successful American TV series Rawhide. Instead he’d got Fleming’s supporting actor, a barely known American by the name of Clint Eastwood. We met them sitting at the bar with cameraman Massimo Dallamano. Clint looked out of place, irritated because nobody spoke English. A full-on American, he was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, tie, and tennis shoes, which looked very funny to us Italians. Sergio just sat there looking black as thunder, chomping on a Toscano cigar. At one point, he offered one to Clint. The scowl of disgust with which Clint brushed it aside caught Sergio’s attention. Gesturing to make himself understood, framing a camera angle with his fingers, Sergio made it clear that he wanted Clint to repeat the scowl. Which he did. We’d be seeing that look on screen for years to come, marking an era and a personality.
Clint was so shy that it took me a while to realize just how smart and ambitious he was. He knew exactly what he wanted. “One day I’ll win an Oscar,” he told me, and I had no trouble believing him. Nevertheless, nobody took him seriously at the time, either as an actor or as a person, mostly because he worked in spaghetti westerns—but from these he would proceed to build a majestic, lasting career crowned with success.
He was the first American I’d met: calm, relaxed, simple, precise, completely himself, all the qualities we associate today with Clint’s best roles and with the movies he’s directed. He was a natural-born star; the rest of the world just didn’t know it yet. And there I was, without a camera. It’s a good memory and a bad one. If I’d had a camera, maybe then I’d have taken my first step toward that fabulous life I felt excluded from. But I was just a kid without a story, still struggling to create one.
Mario later invited me onto the set of A Fistful of Dollars, which had been built at Cinecittà after shooting ended in Spain. I hoped to get work as an extra in the movie, but I was too young. Instead, I got two days’ work serving drinks.
I adored westerns, but it was weird watching all those Italians, who didn’t speak a word of English between them, playing cowboys. Not to mention how odd Sergio seemed to be. No one understood why he shot the way he did; no one could fathom what he wanted. I was sure the movie would turn out ridiculous. Then I saw it: all those incredible angles, the Ennio Morricone soundtrack, Sergio’s mastery in handling tension. Sergio had the entire movie in his head before he even began shooting. He couldn’t care less whether anybody else understood a particular frame. He already knew how it would fit into the whole picture, and he was right.
When I turned twenty, the army interrupted my work with Moncada. Everyone had to do an obligatory fourteen months’ military service. I figured my family already did enough for the government, considering the long hours my father spent at the Pathology of the Book Institute. But I had no choice. At the medical exam, I tried to get myself rejected, faking convulsive breathing. But the draft card came all the same, destination Bari, an Adriatic port city some three hundred miles south of Rome. Anywhere was pretty much the same to me.
What upset me most was the thought of wasting all that time. I turned up for duty slouching and depressed. I had eight to ten weeks’ basic training to do before the army decided where to relocate me. But even there, something I knew how to do was waiting for me. Three days in, one of the officers asked if any of the recruits was a photographer. I raised my hand, and that was the end of my training. I was transferred immediately to Rome. My father couldn’t believe his eyes when I turned up back at home. Nobody did military service in his own hometown. But I did. I was sent to the army school of photography, run by a field marshal who knew absolutely nothing about the subject. He asked if anyone knew how to do retouching. Again I raised my hand. They made me do a test. “You’re not going anywhere, son,” said the testing officer. “You’re too good. Stay here with us.” Every time I raised my hand, the army promoted me.
Before and after my military service, age twenty and twenty-one.
My first job in my new post was to photograph one of Italy’s top generals. I used everything about light that I’d learned from my father to smooth his face. When I’d finished retouching the photo, he had the skin of a newborn baby. The general was so impressed by my talent and my photo that, from then on, when I wasn’t in service I was free to do whatever I wanted. I went home, visited my friends, even kept in touch with Moncada, hoping to go back to work for him after my military service.
What I didn’t realize was that one of my “promotions” had landed me in an espionage department. Had I raised my hand once too often? One month before my discharge, someone noticed that I hadn’t done any military training. That wasn’t allowed, so they sent me to complete my training in Bologna with the elite Arditi assault corps. The very word Arditi—“audacious”—got on my nerves.
The day I arrived at the base, the place was swarming with scary-looking guys leaping from helicopters on ropes, shooting machine guns, and chucking hand grenades. But when I registered at the office, I realized it was they who were scared of me, including the general. Nobody believed I was just some kid close to discharge. They couldn’t understand how I’d come so far in such a short time, why I’d been allowed to serve in my hometown, and why I’d been sent for basic training after working in an espionage department directly under a top-ranking general. I tried to explain that I was just a photographer and the army had merely wanted to exploit my skills. But to no avail. They were all convinced that I’d been planted there as a spy and were determined to make me do my basic training, so that I’d submit a favorable report to the people I really worked for.
On my first afternoon off duty in Bologna, I drank ten strong coffees, plastered my uniform in mud, and, doubling up in simulated pain, presented myself at the military hospital, telling doctors that I’d fainted. They put me in a bed and subjected me to every analysis in the book. Naturally, they found nothing. Someone thought maybe they should remove my appendix—a strange diagnosis, given that my appendix had been taken out when I was five. While they kept me under observation, I discovered that the nurse needed someone to develop their X-rays, a process still done manually in those days. I raised my hand, which by now was a key part of my military training. As a result, I spent my last four weeks with the army working in yet another darkroom. I can even claim to have worked as a radiologist, since one night I developed X-rays that I took of myself. I wanted to check the injuries I’d suffered in my accident. I couldn’t figure out a thing.
By the time I was ready to go back to work with Johnny Moncada, he’d transformed his photography studio into an advertising agency. There was a lot of money in that business, and Moncada could boast prestigious clients like Alitalia airline, which could guarantee regular, long-term work. I knew that if I stayed with Moncada, I’d be condemned to do what I was trying to avoid: retouching, lighting, occasional developing, and a few prints. But the idea of becoming an independent professional like Moncada felt like an unachievable dream. Financially, he could do whatever he wanted. He bought cameras like I bought cigarettes. What’s more, although I’d accumulated a lot of experience collaborating with top photographers, I still hadn’t made a name for myself, so I couldn’t just set up shop on my own. Which wasn’t necessarily a good idea anyway. When Moncada went into advertising, his longtime assistant had left to set up his own shop as a photographer and had ended up doing provincial weddings. I sure didn’t want that. I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to be a photographer at all. But I definitely needed a job.
My friendship with Mario Brega and time
spent on Sergio Leone’s set had reignited my interest in cinema. One day I read an article about the photographer Pierluigi Praturlon, who had a private studio in Rome and an international advertising agency. He’d been the guy responsible for taking the set photos of La Dolce Vita, photos that had proved fundamental in promoting the wonders of Rome, Fellini, and the movie itself in America and abroad. In fact, the famous scene of Anita Ekberg in the Trevi Fountain was based on a photo that Pierluigi had taken himself some years before the movie. That story goes that he and Ekberg had been walking back from a restaurant to Ekberg’s home when she stopped to bathe her aching feet in the fountain. Pierluigi quickly got a car owner to shine his headlights on the scene and, with that as lighting, took a series of photos. Fellini saw them in a magazine and used the idea in his movie.
I called Pierluigi’s office to ask if they needed anyone. They said they already had a lot of photographers but needed someone who knew how to do retouching. Not again, I thought, but I put a brave face on it, shrugged my shoulders, and told them I was the best in the business. They asked me in for a test. At the time, Pierluigi was in Spain working on Tony Rome, a Gordon Douglas movie starring Frank Sinatra, so I was interviewed by his brother. He gave me a photo of Elizabeth Taylor to retouch. I did what needed doing and gave it back to him. He began looking at it from various angles. He got another copy printed and compared it with the retouched one. I knew I’d done an excellent job. Nobody could tell where I’d intervened. When Pierluigi got back from Spain, he called, asked me to come in to see him, and gave me the same photo of Elizabeth to retouch. He wanted to see if I was capable of doing it again. When I’d finished, he examined both retouched photos and couldn’t find any difference between them. “You’re hot shit,” he said, unable to believe I was so good so young. I got the job.
My Life in Focus Page 5
