My Life in Focus

by Gianni Bozzacchi,Joey Tayler

  Pierluigi showed me around his studio, and I watched while he photographed a number of actresses. He had the most astonishingly sophisticated equipment: the very best cameras, lights on electrically operated mountings. But in my opinion, despite the surroundings, Pierluigi was a mediocre photographer. Even with my limited professional experience, I already knew how to recognize the technical superiority of a Beny and the innovation and creativity of a Moncada, all of which Pierluigi clearly lacked.

  Some truly exceptional 35 mm cameras were coming out in those days. But the majority of photographers weren’t able to use them to their full potential. And Pierluigi was one of them. He’d always been more of a paparazzo than a professional studio photographer. His photos never had that touch of quality that you could see in work by better photographers. The latest cameras made it easier and cheaper to produce modern, sophisticated, artistic photos. But Pierluigi didn’t care. He didn’t know where to begin with the new technology. He told all his photographers: “Shoot, shoot, shoot. Don’t worry, we’ll fix everything in the darkroom.” But when you looked at the negatives, only one or two were any good. Those were the ones he printed, retouched, and then signed himself. He wasn’t precise. He didn’t design any sets or dream up creative photos. All that mattered to him was doing, doing, doing. Quantity, not quality.

  Yet Pierluigi had built his studio from scratch. He’d begun as a paparazzo, and when he acquired enough money, he’d opened a studio, then a darkroom, then an international agency. Thanks to this, along with famous photographs he had taken on all the most important Italian movie sets, he enjoyed a lot of respect in town. Neither handsome nor fascinating, he was always surrounded by beautiful women. One evening I stayed behind to talk. I wanted to sketch out a theory I had, a way of avoiding retouching by making certain adjustments to the lighting during shoots. He was irritable; we talked about it but only tested it when everyone else at the agency had gone home.

  I’d begun as a retoucher, but slowly I began taking photos. Pierluigi worked for a lot of production companies: MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros. He handled photo shoots and layouts for big stars. He wasn’t managing a mere photography studio but a major enterprise with as many as ten apprentice photographers working under him, plus correspondents in major cities throughout the world, just like a newspaper. But the buyers of celebrity magazines or 18 × 24 photos of stars never heard anyone talk about other photographers—guys like me—because the only name to appear on photos coming out of Pierluigi’s studio was Pierluigi’s. He took all the credit and the copyrights, regardless of who’d taken the photo. Years later I discovered that a number of photos I’d taken for Pierluigi had appeared in important publications like Look. At the time I didn’t know where the photos ended up. Pierluigi was the one who signed, sold, and archived every photo produced in his studio. Our job was to do what he told us to do. What happened to the work later was not our business.

  At some point the Tony Rome job in Spain began turning into a night-mare for Pierluigi. Sinatra kept getting sick on account of the wild life he was leading in Madrid, forcing frequent production delays. The on-set photo service started taking much longer than planned and began to overlap with another job Pierluigi had taken on. So he returned to Rome and sent me to Madrid, though word went around that those delays weren’t the only reason why Pierluigi had left Madrid. It seems he’d argued with Sinatra, who’d told him to get out and not come back.

  It was only the second time I’d been out of Italy and only the second time I’d flown in a plane. I’d never been to Spain, and like the rest of the world, I adored Sinatra. What a job! But when I got to Madrid, no one was waiting for me at the airport, and I had no idea where I was or where I was supposed to go. Plus, my Spanish was worse than my English. I changed enough money to phone Pierluigi, who told me to wait where I was. Four or five hours went by before a car finally showed up. Pierluigi had told no one I was coming, even though I had all the cameras they needed in my luggage. The car took me to a hotel, and that was pretty much all I saw of Spain. Sinatra still didn’t feel well, so shooting had been interrupted again. They told me they hoped to restart in a couple of days. But two weeks passed, during which time I didn’t take a single photo. No one knew who I was or what I was doing in Madrid. I had no one to talk to, and my hotel room didn’t even have a television. A couple of times I found the courage to leave the hotel to buy something to eat. But I got lost. And with production in such chaos, I didn’t dare go far in case they needed me suddenly.

  Whatever the true story was about Sinatra’s health, it seems he also got arrested. He was out drunk one night in a bar and started hurling insults at the Franco regime. “Fuck off, Franco! Franco’s a piece of shit! Look what he’s doing to his people!” and stuff like that. I never heard for sure whether Sinatra got sick or whether he really did cause a minor diplomatic incident and irritate the government. Or if there were other problems I knew nothing about. In any case, the production was a disaster. I went home without taking a single photo.

  A few months later, Audrey Hepburn came into the studio for a shoot. She was a little early, and Pierluigi was busy on the phone. I set up the lights while she went to the dressing room with makeup artist Alberto De Rossi. When she finally got on set, Pierluigi was still on the phone. She was dazzlingly beautiful and elegant. Given my sketchy English, I was too intimidated to strike up a conversation. So, instead of standing there like a mute, I started photographing her. I must have given the impression of being a professional photographer because when I stopped, she hugged me good-bye and left, just as Pierluigi came into the room. He was furious. Until he saw the prints.

  One of the photos I took of Audrey that day became so famous it was printed and sold as a poster. Pierluigi signed it, just like all the others. He never told us who commissioned a service, maybe to avoid giving us some way of claiming authorship. In fact, he was so good at taking all the credit that, just a couple of years ago, in a cinema souvenir shop in New York, I spotted a poster of that very same photo of Audrey that I’d taken forty years earlier—and it still carried Pierluigi’s signature. I bought the poster, cut Pierluigi’s name out, framed it, and hung it in my studio.

  The incident with Audrey made me realize just how jealous Pierluigi was, and how distrustful he was of his collaborators. I got the impression that he kept an even closer eye on me after that, like he was trying to catch me stealing something.

  One day I was busy photographing one of the many models and actresses who constantly hung around the studio, each hoping to get into a shot that might result in getting a commercial or even movie work. For this particular shoot, I had the girl stretch out on the floor while I stood taking photos of her from above. I then got down on my knees, straddling her, while I kept shooting. I liked the sexual tension that developed between a subject and myself. It was a technique I used often throughout my career, sometimes clothed, sometimes not. Pierluigi was standing off to one side with a man I didn’t know who was watching me closely. From the way Pierluigi was talking to the guy, I could tell he was someone important. But I’d no idea who he was, or why he seemed so interested in me. When I was through with the shoot, Pierluigi called me over and introduced me. It was Michelangelo Antonioni, the great director, in the studio reviewing some work that the agency had done on his movie The Three Faces, featuring Princess Soraya of Iran. We’d also handled a number of photos of his girlfriend, Monica Vitti, which Pierluigi had shot, we’d printed, and I’d retouched. From the expression on Pierluigi’s face, it seemed I’d done something wrong. I figured I was in trouble. When Antonioni asked if I’d like to go to London to work on his next movie, Blow-Up, I realized why Pierluigi was so put out. It was possibly the first time someone had come to his studio and asked for one of his employees. It wouldn’t be the last.

  I nearly got fired for taking this shot of Audrey Hepburn on my own initiative. But then my boss, Pierluigi Praturlon, signed it as his own and took all the credit.

  The
camera I used to capture Hepburn was this Hasselblad. (Photo by M&S Materiale fotografico.)

  Michelangelo didn’t want me to take photos but to work with the star of the movie, David Hemmings, who had replaced Terence Stamp at the last minute. My job, in secret, was to help the actor play a photographer in the movie as authentically as possible. What I really had to do was teach him how to move, teach him my “body language.” So that’s what I did. I showed David how to hold a camera, how I’d move in order to get the right angle, how and why I made models lie on the floor. Michelangelo liked the angle so much he got Hemmings to repeat it with the model Veruschka in what became a famous scene, later called “the most sensual cinematographic moment in history” by Premiere. In the scene, while Hemmings is photographing Veruschka, his shutter starts opening faster and faster, in time with her growing excitement, until in the end she almost seems to have an orgasm. The scene, however, is as emotionally empty as it’s sexually charged. Hemmings and Veruschka are physically very close, but they couldn’t be farther apart, which was Michelangelo’s genius: his portrayal of the sad poetry that he sensed within our inability to relate to others.

  Michelangelo portrayed this void best in the famous last scene of Blow-Up, something that would never have occurred if he’d been as presumptuous and self-indulgent a director as many accused him of being. In reality, producers found working with Michelangelo far easier than you could ever imagine. He never complained about feeling held back and never attempted to squeeze extra money out of anyone. For example, his 1960 movie, L’avventura, which made Monica Vitti an international star, was a true miracle. It ended the way it did simply because Michelangelo had run out of money and just edited what he had. One of the greatest movies ever, winner of the 1960 Cannes Jury Prize, has no real “ending” because Michelangelo couldn’t afford to shoot one.

  I witnessed something of his genius in London. The last scene in Blow-Up involves a game of tennis. We went to shoot it in a park one Sunday, which turned out to be the only day in London that I didn’t spend shut away in some hotel showing David how to hold a camera. When we got out of the car, Michelangelo didn’t look at all happy. The weather wasn’t good for shooting exteriors. But that was nothing compared to what came later: the prop master had forgotten the tennis balls. We scoured the park, hoping someone had left some behind. Nothing. And this was 1960s London on a Sunday. You couldn’t just pop into a Walmart and buy a few tennis balls. And Michelangelo had permission to shoot the scene only on that one Sunday. What’s more, the English production people were decidedly unhelpful, possibly on purpose. The impression was that someone in the government or the British cinema department was worried about how Michelangelo intended to portray the nightlife and drug culture of “swinging London,” and word had gone out that the Italian wasn’t to be trusted.

  When Michelangelo finally calmed down, he decided the actors should simply mime the tennis game, hitting an imaginary ball. It sounded crazy, but the cast and technicians listened to the master. Michelangelo’s improvisation turned out to be even better than the scene he’d planned. Mimed, the match became amusing and surreal, a snapshot of the playful madness of the last years of the 1960s. And it portrayed perfectly David Hemmings’s existential problems in the movie, the nothingness of his existence, the way the more he looked at life, the less he saw. Had the props guy done his job, the end result would have been just a long shot of a man walking past people playing tennis.

  On my return from London, Pierluigi figured he’d concocted the perfect punishment for me. I was to be sent to Dahomey (now Benin), where Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were filming The Comedians, a Peter Glenville movie based on the novel by Graham Greene, who also wrote the screenplay. Nobody in the studio wanted to go to Africa, me included. But Pierluigi persuaded me that it would be good experience. He said I’d handle every aspect of the job: I’d photograph Elizabeth and Richard, costars Alec Guinness, Peter Ustinov, and James Earl Jones, and retouch and print all the photos on location. All this sounded good, so I accepted. When I said good-bye to my girlfriend, Patrizia, she cried, as if she’d had a premonition. And possibly she really had.

  So, at the end of November 1966, I packed all my stuff, including a full darkroom kit, and flew to Paris, along with one of Pierluigi’s printers, Franco. Once we picked up our visas from the Dahomey embassy and suffered a string of vaccinations, we set off on the long flight to Africa. I knew Pierluigi had no interest in giving me any extra experience. My trip to Africa was merely punishment for stealing Antonioni’s attention. But what I didn’t know was how, when I eventually returned to Rome, Pierluigi would have even more reason for annoyance. And I didn’t know I was about to soar clear out of my basement life forever.

  Chapter 4

  Jet-Set Jungle

  The plane landed in the middle of nowhere. Cotonou airport consisted of a single landing strip surrounded by jungle. Being so fully immersed in nature was beautiful, exciting, and terrifying all at the same time. The entire town boasted precisely two hotels: La Croix du Sud, a five-star place carved out of a half-star hotel, where most of the production lived, and the Hotel de la Plage, a smaller establishment run by French staff.

  Franco and I stayed in the latter, though we also had a house rented by the production where, a couple of days later when all the equipment arrived, we set up a darkroom. We shot and developed a few trial photos to make sure everything worked properly. But the climate was so humid that the pictures took forever to dry, which meant we weren’t able to retouch them. So we decided to work at night, when it was a little cooler and the humidity less oppressive.

  The intense heat obliged me to sleep naked. One morning I woke to find two large eyes staring at me. They belonged to a young African woman who worked in the hotel. She addressed me in French, asking if I had any laundry that needed washing. A couple of days later, the same thing happened, only this time she asked if I needed washing. Not sure if I’d understood correctly, I managed a strangled “Oui” and let myself be led under the shower. She didn’t waste a second shedding the multicolored sheet she wore for a dress, revealing a stupendous body, which made mine look even more pasty and pallid. I wondered if this kind of thing also happened to the classy people in other rooms, whether they got the same “room service.” But I wasn’t complaining, and she said that they didn’t. She was just infatuated with me.

  Wandering around Dahomey left me feeling very ill at ease. Everywhere I went, people would stop me and touch my hair. I don’t believe they’d ever seen anyone with bright-red hair like mine. A few days after we arrived, we heard the sound of explosions coming from outside the city. A new president had just come to power. After that, all of us who’d served in the military or knew how to handle weapons were authorized to go around armed. In fact, the movie’s production company, MGM, quietly distributed guns to any employee who wanted one. I called Pierluigi to tell him what was happening and he replied, “Don’t be stupid, don’t take unnecessary risks.” So I got a pistol. I must say it felt strange the way a sense of vulnerability could turn so easily into potential aggression.

  Pierluigi wanted me dead for taking unauthorized photos like this of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton on the set of The Comedians. However, when Elizabeth saw them, she hired me herself. Richard signed this print for me.

  In reality, the “revolution” wasn’t such a big deal. The Italian ambassador to Ghana, the Ivory Coast, and Dahomey came to my hotel and asked me to accompany him to meet the new president, mostly because I was one of only a few Italians in the country and he wanted to turn up with an entourage. So I went although, to tell the truth, I didn’t have a clue what was going on. At the time, being in such an unstable country was a little scary. I acquired the unusual habit of never going out without my pistol.

  During those days I got to know Umberto Betti, an engineer from Genoa, a well-known figure in town. He’d worked in a lot of African countries and had set up a plantation in Dahomey, along with a proces
sing plant that produced a textile obtained by crossbreeding two species of plant fiber. It was called K-NAP, a commercial material similar to jute. He invited me to visit the plantation and I accepted. The moment we left Cotonou, we plunged straight into deepest Africa, the one you usually see only in nature magazines. We drove hundreds of miles through countryside alive with giraffes, lions, zebras, elephants, and—every now and then—a village or two. Finding myself in the middle of untamed nature stirred strong emotions in me, the same mixture of awe and fear that I’d felt the first time I got off the plane, though now far more heightened. The plantation was run by four Italians, with ten thousand Africans working the fields, for God knows what pay. But the Italians were much loved by the Africans, thanks to engineer Betti and other entrepreneurs who’d invested in local infrastructure, launching construction projects and creating industries. The Africans who worked on the plantation knew how to say only two things in Italian: “Fuck off” and “I swear to God.” Every time I passed one of them, they’d give me a huge smile and say one phrase or the other, convinced they were saying something more like, “Good day, how’s it going?”

  On my first day at work I met Bob Penn, the movie’s set photographer, and realized that Pierluigi had been lying to me from the start. Elizabeth Taylor’s press agent, Jean Osbourne, told me what I’d actually already guessed: under no circumstances could I photograph Elizabeth. It seems she’d liked a number of photos that Pierluigi’s agency had printed and retouched and had asked them to send the person who’d done the retouching. Me. I later learned, in fact, that the only reason the production had hired Pierluigi’s agency at all was because Elizabeth had wanted the retoucher. Me.

  I could take whatever photos I wanted of anyone else, but not of Elizabeth who, at that stage in her career, had total control over who could and could not photograph her on set. I was to retouch Penn’s photos—nothing else. It was like taking a kid into a candy store, putting a dollar in his hand, and then telling him he couldn’t buy any candy. Endless hours of travel, vaccinations against everything from malaria to yellow fever, and I couldn’t take a single photo of the most famous woman in the world. And even if, by chance, I happened to produce a beautiful image of Richard Burton, Peter Ustinov, or Alec Guinness, no one would give a damn. Penn’s official set photos would be the only ones published.