My Life in Focus

by Gianni Bozzacchi,Joey Tayler

  I heard a story about how Hutton, as a young, penniless actor in New York, had decided to open a restaurant with his friend Al Lettieri (who later played Sollozzo in The Godfather). It was an international restaurant, offering all kinds of food: Chinese, German, Italian, French, Japanese. But no food was prepared on the premises. Hutton and Lettieri paid guys to go by bicycle to various nearby restaurants and buy takeaway dishes, delivering them to the door labeled “Kitchen” in an alleyway behind the restaurant. The meals were then served to patrons at a higher price. For a while they were very successful. But then restaurants caught on to the scam and started refusing to sell to the bicycle boys. Soon enough, the enterprise folded.

  The weather in Austria was very unstable. One day we were forced to evacuate the set when it was swept by a blizzard. Half of us were taken out by helicopter. The others drove down to the valley by jeep. So much snow fell that the following day our location was unrecognizable.

  There was one scene where two actors came down by parachute, and the one with the radio had to fall and die. Hutton then wanted Richard to walk out over the virgin snow and retrieve the radio. Richard took two steps and vanished. No one had realized that there was a huge ditch in his path because Hutton had forbidden anyone to disturb that snow by walking over it. Everyone rushed to pull him out. It was a very funny moment. But Richard flew into a rage with both the director and cameraman, who were both doubled up laughing.

  For some reason unknown to me, the same cameraman took great pleasure in making my life difficult. He was a huge guy, and he loved to come up behind me and give me a hearty slap on the shoulder—bang! “Gianni! How’s it going?” It hurt like hell. He kept this up for weeks, seeming to think it was funny. Then one day I was taking some photos when he shouted, “Shadow in the shot!” and pointed at me, gesturing for me to shift because my shadow was in the camera’s field of vision. But what I caught was “Shut up!” and besides, I was already annoyed with him. So I went straight over and punched him in the head. He collapsed and almost vanished in the snow. Richard smiled, winked at me, and gave me a thumbs-up. Surely he didn’t think I’d hit the guy on his behalf?

  During a break in production, I went with Richard to Salzburg to meet Rock Hudson, who was there shooting a movie with Claudia Cardinale. Claudye and I had met Claudia and her husband, the producer Franco Cristaldi, in Paris. I went to greet her, and she introduced me to Rock, who replied with a curt “Hi,” as if he were far from pleased by our visit. We stayed no more than half an hour, during which time I got the distinct impression he was flirting with Claudia in an exaggerated fashion. That bothered me a lot. I considered Franco a friend and admired him. Back on set, I mentioned this to Clint, who calmly told me not to worry: Rock was homosexual. “But he’s been married!” I said, flabbergasted. As if that had anything to do with it. Remember, we were still light years from the mid-1980s, when Rock would become the first major celebrity to die from AIDS, a tragedy that would help transform public awareness of a still highly stigmatized disease and push his good friend Elizabeth to the forefront of AIDS activism.

  From Austria, the production of Where Eagles Dare moved to England, where filming was completed at the MGM Studios in Elstree. Elizabeth had already signed to act in another Joseph Losey movie, Secret Ceremony, which was being shot across the street in another part of the studio. As a result, I found myself photographing the sets of both movies. This was Elizabeth and Richard, remember. You’ve got to work. And now I had to work as well! I ended up being so busy doing Secret Ceremony and Where Eagles Dare that I barely got a moment to enjoy London. A car would take us to the studios in the morning before it was even light. And by the time we finished it was already dark. On a few occasions we went out for a nightcap. But mostly we went straight to bed, hoping to grab as much sleep as possible before that car came to get us again in the morning.

  In Elizabeth and Richard’s case “bed” was on a rented yacht moored in the Thames. Elizabeth had insisted—as she usually did—on bringing her dogs along. But this was England, which had a six-month quarantine period for any dog brought into the country. So Elizabeth’s typically extravagant solution had been to get the yacht and keep her dogs on board. Thus they never had to go through quarantine. One day, flipping a finger at the British government, she had me take a picture of them propped up on the yacht’s railings, with London Bridge clearly visible in the background. Then, rather than sign it myself, she had me send it out to the press as if some paparazzi had snapped it.

  I didn’t like Joseph Losey any better the second time around. Boom! hadn’t been much of a success, but Elizabeth still admired him for his earlier work and because he’d been blacklisted. I knew nothing about all that. All I knew was that Losey was still weird and grumpy. “I liked some of the photos you took on the set of Boom!” he said, emphasizing the word “some.” Then he started calling me “Guillotine” because of the noise the motor on my new Hasselblad made. That was about as friendly as Losey got.

  Years later, I had a chance to see just how unfriendly Losey could be. It was 1982, and Michelangelo Antonioni and I were going to a preview of his latest movie, Identification of a Woman, which I’d already seen and didn’t think worthy of Antonioni. Regardless, I’d persuaded Michelangelo to give a speech, which we’d written together, before the screening. My girlfriend at the time, Tahnee Welch, read it through with him beforehand to help him memorize it. We got to Lincoln Center in a limousine and climbed into an extremely slow elevator from the garage. When it stopped on the first floor, Losey stepped in. And before the elevator could crawl to our floor, he made one of his comments I’d come to know so well: “Michelangelo, this elevator reminds me of one of your movies.”

  It took all my self-control to keep from laughing. I was amazed Losey could be so spiteful. Michelangelo was furious. I could see his facial tic accelerate. He refused to give the speech we’d planned, and the screening was a disaster. Having worked with Losey on two movies, I knew exactly how Michelangelo felt.

  On the first day of shooting Secret Ceremony, I arrived at the set around 7:30 in the morning and was walking down a corridor when Mia Farrow stepped from her dressing room. She had a bottle of Italian wine in her hand, a Verdicchio. “Can you open this for me?” she asked, waving the bottle in the air. Her marriage to Frank Sinatra had just ended. It was strange to think of this actress and Sinatra ever being a couple, although I’d actually seen them together in Los Angeles. We’d all heard the story of how he’d served her divorce papers right while she was in the middle of shooting Rosemary’s Baby, apparently furious that, as his wife, she’d dared to go back to work. So while I opened the Verdicchio, I couldn’t help asking her why they’d separated. “Because I like the Beatles,” she replied. I took a photo of her posing with the album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which she then put on a turntable and began dancing to, right there in the dressing room.

  Mia Farrow had just left Frank Sinatra when she invited me for an impromptu 7:30 a.m. drink in her dressing room on the London set of Secret Ceremony.

  “Why didn’t it work out with Sinatra?” I asked. “Because I like the Beatles,” she explained, bopping to Sgt. Pepper’s.

  Mia Farrow (1968) and her mother, Maureen O’Sullivan, otherwise famous—especially to me—as Tarzan’s companion Jane.

  One Saturday Mia called asking if I could take a photo of her with her mother, Maureen O’Sullivan. We met in the street, and as they were coming toward me, I thought, “But that’s Jane!” Which indeed Maureen was: Jane of Tarzan fame. I’d seen her so often as a kid, up there on the silver screen alongside the legendary Johnny Weissmuller, that I couldn’t help calling her “Jane” all day. We took a stroll and I snapped a number of shots of the two of them together. In some photos I took of Mia she looked very sad. I don’t know if her sorrow was connected to her breakup with Sinatra or not.

  I enjoyed a good rapport with Mia. She was like a child, sweet, kind, and innocent. I never felt out of pl
ace with her. She never criticized others and never made a big thing about her celebrity. At the same time, although I liked her, she was strange, enigmatic. You couldn’t have a real conversation with her. She’d keep jumping from one thing to another. I never really understood her personality. Maybe it was because she was so young. Or because I was so young. Or maybe I just couldn’t separate her from Rosemary’s Baby. I hated that movie, its darkness, its abstract quality. I’d come to cinema through neorealism and American epics.

  Another star of Secret Ceremony was Robert Mitchum. He seemed to behave a bit like Losey. He came and went as he pleased, without getting close to anyone. The attitude fitted with the image he wanted to give of himself—tough, distant, cynical, like a lot of his characters. But after I’d spent some time with him, I actually found him very friendly. I’d chat with him in my stumbling English, and he’d tell me dirty jokes in his equally stumbling Italian.

  He asked me a lot of questions about Italian women. He’d been out with a few and found them confusing. He’d say, “I can’t work out how they think. It’s impossible to understand them. They’re sexy. They’re beautiful. But I’ve never understood their way of thinking. They say ‘no’ when they mean ‘yes.’ They desire you. But when they’ve had you, they pretend they don’t care anymore. Why do they do that?” Of course, Mitchum was a man from the previous generation, one who still found the free love of the sixties unpalatable. I thought he was very funny. There was absolutely no point trying to explain the women’s liberation movement to him.

  Secret Ceremony star Robert Mitchum, one of cinema’s leading men, who liked to project a tough-guy image, but we became friendly anyway. He asked me a lot of questions about Italian women.

  Mitchum never liked to pose, which was just perfect for me. He had a very interesting face. Light sculpted it. He didn’t have conventional good looks—like Richard. His features were more consumed than defined, and he had a shrewd air, which didn’t inspire trust. Photographing him made me understand more clearly the difference between having a woman as a subject and a man. The exposure can be the same, but the stop has to be different. With the right light, you can smooth a woman’s face without having to resort to artificial retouching (or a computer, as they do today). With a man, on the other hand, you have to close down the stop in order to highlight the features of his face.

  In Mitchum’s case, that meant highlighting all the marvelous crevices in his face, the furrows of a survivor, his gangster’s grimace. Mitchum appreciated my photos. He said he was never conscious of my presence, never noticed when I was on set, and he liked that. A lot of photographers only worry about pleasing their subjects. I concentrated on the overall context of a photo, on its artistic quality.

  I surprised everyone with my work on Secret Ceremony, including myself. For the first time, I got huge compliments from the producer, the actors, and even Losey, who never seemed to like anything I did. It was the movie that made me feel I’d grown as a photographer. And the fact that so many important people had appreciated my work instilled a great sense of confidence in me. Around then, an interview with me appeared in the London Daily Mirror under the headline “The New King of the Camera.” The newspaper asked me to provide a self-portrait, which I did with a sense of irony, using a double exposure.

  The world seemed to be trying to convince me that I’d succeeded, that I’d reached the peak of a photographer’s skill. But the only opinion I really trusted was that of the best photographer I knew, my father, who simply said, “You’re getting better, but you’re still not there . . .”

  Naturally, he was right. And I needed his honesty to avoid losing my bearings. Immortalizing the life of the jet set, being in daily touch with all those extraordinary people, was already hard enough. Sharing that kind of life felt like an impossible task for a street kid like me. I’d only ever felt at ease behind a camera, and it was there that I hid. I became a full-on introvert, a guy sitting in a corner observing the most famous people in the world enjoy life, snapping photos when my instinct told me to.

  The self-portrait I took for the London Daily Mirror when that newspaper dubbed me “the new king of the camera” (1968).

  During the shooting of Where Eagles Dare and Secret Ceremony, Claudye and I decided to get married. I completed the layout of the two movies before shooting ended, and Elizabeth and Richard gave me time off to plan my wedding. It is Italian tradition that the breadwinner, the father, should help with the wedding arrangements, so I rang my father to give him the news. “Hi, Dad, I’m calling to tell you that I’m going to get married.”

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean, why? We’ve been together for a year and . . .”

  “If it’s fine by you . . .”

  “Of course it is. We’ve got to organize everything, so you’ve got to come to London.”

  “What?! Have you gone crazy?”

  My father didn’t sleep a wink for a week before the trip. He and my sister Paola used to take the same bus to work, and according to her he told everyone he met on the bus that he was going to London because his son was getting married. He was very excited, and very nervous. I had to call friends in Rome to help him prepare for the trip and apply for a passport. Then I had to call him just two days before he was due to leave to tell him there’d been a change in plans. He had to stop off first in Paris because Claudye’s family wanted to meet him. He went off his head: “You can’t do that to me. I’m only ready to go to London.”

  I went to meet him at the Paris Orly airport in my future father-in-law’s little Deux Chevaux Citroen. He was as white as a sheet. He’d never been on a plane before. I tried to find out what had happened, but he just kept saying: “It’s all fine, just fine.” Whatever problem he might have had, he had no intention of telling me about it. When we got to passport control, my father refused to give his passport to the agent. Someone in Rome had told him to be very careful about his passport and not to let anyone touch it. I had my work cut out convincing him that he absolutely had to give it to the agent. Finally, my father presented his passport, shouting, “Hey! Hey!” and pointing his finger until the guy stamped it.

  Shortly after we left the airport my father asked if we couldn’t maybe get a taxi. “Why?” I asked. “Because I feel like I’m still on the plane,” he said, referring to the Citroën’s bouncy suspension. After a while he calmed down and then proceeded to ask me to take him to the Louvre. I told him that Claudye’s family was waiting for us.

  “No!” he replied. “When Bruno Bozzacchi gets to Paris, he goes immediately to pay homage to art! Take me to the Louvre.”

  “All right!” I cried, and took him to the Louvre. He wanted to go in on his own. I said I’d come by and get him later, but he insisted on having the address of the restaurant where we were to meet Claudye’s family, saying he’d get there by taxi. When he finally got to the restaurant, he was again as white as a sheet and gasping. I ran over to him and asked what had happened.

  “Sortie, sortie, sortie!” he said. “There’s no way of getting out of that place!”

  Sortie means “exit” in French, and in Roman dialect we say sortire. But in the Louvre, those signs only mean that you’re leaving one gallery and going into the next. The museum is organized as a one-way route. When my father realized it was getting late, he began running toward those signs hoping to find a way out. He lost count of the number of galleries he raced through in his desperate dash. All the same, we spent a lovely evening with Claudye’s family. Then we left for London.

  Elliott Kastner knew I was arriving with my father and put a Rolls Royce at our disposal. The driver was waiting for us outside the airport—bald, with a black overcoat, black boots, and an icy stare, an authentic English character from the sixties. My father took one look and said, “Is that our driver? He looks more like a Nazi. I’m not getting into a car with a Nazi. Look at his face. He’s not English, he’s German.” He was determined not to get into that car. I had to go to the driver
and ask him what his nationality was. English, he replied, in a strong Cockney accent. I told my father. He remained suspicious, but he got into the car all the same.

  On the way, I said, “Dad, we’re going to the studios to meet Elizabeth and Richard. They asked me to bring you. Is that okay?” He got agitated: “Do I really have to?” I said we couldn’t avoid it; they were going to be best man and matron of honor at my wedding. He hesitated. He was worried that he didn’t know any English. “Dad,” I said, “we have to go. Just shake their hands and say, ‘Nice to meet you.’” Throughout the rest of the drive he kept practicing: “Nice to meet you.”

  We got to the MGM Studios, where Richard met us. He hugged my father, apologizing that he had to run back to the set to finish shooting a scene. So we crossed the road to the Elstree studios and got to Elizabeth’s dressing room, where I told my father to wait by her secretary’s desk while I went to get Elizabeth. He just stood there tugging nervously on his thin moustache until Elizabeth arrived wearing nothing but a negligee. “Hi, Bruno!” she cried, rushing forward to hug him and kiss him full on the mouth. My father broke into a stutter, “Nnnnice . . . to . . . mmmeet you . . .” I could see he was embarrassed and stepped next to him. His knees were literally buckling, as if he was slowly turning to water. I grabbed one of his arms. His eyes were glazing over. He was in ecstasy. “You are coming to dinner with us tonight, aren’t you?” said Elizabeth, whereupon she hugged him again, and once more kissed him full on the mouth. If I hadn’t held him up, he’d have fallen to the floor. We left the studios with my father moving like a zombie, in shock, bewitched by Elizabeth’s charms. In the car, all he could manage was: “Damn, she’s so beautiful! Oh! And don’t say a word to your mother that she kissed me on the mouth!”