My Life in Focus

by Gianni Bozzacchi,Joey Tayler

  My sisters came to meet my plane in Rome. They were crying. Ottavia had lied to me. My father was already dead. He was only sixty, and had retired just two months earlier. I was too devastated to be mad at my family for hiding the truth from me. I embraced my sisters and wept along with them. The root cause of my father’s death dated to his military service in Africa during the war. He’d contracted an amoeba that never quite left him—a kind of incurable dysentery. Subsequently, he contracted hepatitis working on the restoration of books damaged in Florence when, in 1966, the Arno River had dramatically broken its banks and flooded the city. One ailment worsened the other. In the end he developed liver cancer. I’d known that my father had an amoeba that gave him trouble from time to time. But I knew nothing about the hepatitis or the cancer. My family simply didn’t inform me, even though I’d told my older brother Giampiero to call me if my father’s health ever took a turn for the worse. They were all so enthusiastic about my success, especially my father. He’d lived the last years of his life through my success. He’d given me photography, and he’d taught, encouraged, and challenged my talent. Now I was famous. People talked about me all the time in his local bar, at his office. My family hadn’t wanted to interrupt that dream. But it took me a long time to forgive them for having kept me in the dark.

  My father was Catholic but had arranged for his funeral to be held in an Adventist church out of respect for my mother. Our old friend Father Karol—now a cardinal—called my mother to give her his condolences and to thank us for the important work to which my father had dedicated his life, to the betterment of both the Polish church and Italy.

  I couldn’t sleep for days after the funeral. I couldn’t stop thinking of my father, all alone in the dark. I’d get up at night, go to the cemetery, and sit by his grave for hours, night after night. I kept him company. I spoke to him. I knew he’d wanted a grandchild from me and felt guilty about not having given him one. I lied and told him that Claudye was pregnant. I told him that my life was going great, that I wasn’t frustrated anymore, and that I knew what I was doing. Another lie.

  As a boy I hadn’t respected my father enough. I hadn’t understood. He worked all the time, getting up at dawn and returning late at night, and all I could think was, “What kind of a life is that?” We never ate in restaurants with proper tablecloths, just paper ones. The poor guy would fold back a corner of the paper tablecloth, jot down what we’d ordered and the price on the menu, then fold it back so the waiter wouldn’t see. When the bill came, he’d check it against his notes to make sure there were no mistakes. What kind of a life was that? But now I understand. He’d served his country, eleven years in the army—as an artist, not a soldier—and he’d served during wartime. He’d bicycled miles through a bombing raid just to be present at my birth, and had worked long, awful hours in a government darkroom so that we could all eat. Had I ever repaid him for all that he did for me, for all his sacrifices?

  A few months later, my family told me that my father’s last words had been, “I miss him, I miss him . . . I want to see my little Giannetto again.”

  And I wasn’t there for him. Even today, more than forty years on, I still miss him.

  Chapter 10

  Without My Father

  Many weeks passed before I was able to put my grief aside and critically analyze the figure of my father and his influence in my life. Where had that twenty-two-year-old kid found the courage to snap a photo of Elizabeth Taylor, without permission, on a movie set in Africa? From his father. He wanted to show his father that he knew how to exploit his talent and become someone. My ears still ring with what he’d tell me when someone said I was a great photographer: “You’ll get there, but you’re not there yet. You’ve got what it takes, but you’re still not as good as you think you are.” Meeting his standards, becoming the photographer he saw in me, was a tremendous challenge, the toughest in my career. Photographing beautiful people was easy. What was hard was taking a photo that Bruno Bozzacchi thought was beautiful.

  Even though he didn’t shower me with praise, I knew my father was proud of me. “You make us dream,” my sister Ofelia said, “and you have no idea how much our father dreams.” I believe he thought he was a better photographer than me. And he was probably right. My father was a man dedicated to art for art’s sake, and he wanted to instill in me the same respect and the same devotion. He hadn’t got rich and he wasn’t interested in doing so. His heart was set on his work. He was an artist in the purest sense, but he was unable to ever fully express himself because he worked for the government and because he had a family to feed. He was trapped inside two vicious circles, with no way out, unable ever to do anything just for himself.

  By the end of his career he was well known and highly respected by the government, the Vatican, leading museums, and many wealthy families. Once free of his government job, maybe he would have been able to do something for himself, even make a stack of money, enjoy life without having to worry too much. We’d talked about maybe working together. He didn’t know my business, but he knew all the darkroom techniques and he knew photography inside out. But he died before having that chance to try something new. He never received any recognition in the wider world. I was his recognition. He did so much for me. I hoped I’d done enough for him. I would have loved to do more.

  I was so depressed after my father’s death that I started to get terrible stomach pains. I began to worry that maybe Elizabeth’s doctor was right after all. Claudye arranged for me to see the famous Dr. Rudolph Trouques in Paris. He had a whole team of specialists poke and prod me from head to toe, but they couldn’t find a single thing wrong with me. When I explained to Dr. Trouques that Elizabeth’s doctor in Los Angeles thought I might have cancer, Trouques dismissed this as ridiculous and fired off a letter to the American doctor, complete with all my scans and charts. We never heard back, an all-too-common story in Hollywood—doctors preying on celebrities’ insecurities about their appearance, their bodies, their health, just to make money. In my opinion, Elizabeth was victimized in this way.

  Elizabeth and Richard told me to take all the time I needed to recover my health. But I decided that the best thing to do was to get back to work. So Richard asked me to go ahead of him to Yugoslavia, where he was due to play Josip Broz, “Tito” in The Battle of Sutjeska, a movie being produced by the state cinema production company, Yugo Films. It tells the story of a key turning point in World War II when Yugoslav partisans, led by Tito, managed to break a massive Axis offensive along the Sutjeska River, regroup, and eventually emerge victorious. Tito, now the president of Yugoslavia, had personally chosen Richard to play him in the movie. Richard thought my presence would keep Tito happy until he could finish shooting in England. In addition, I’d get a chance to photograph Tito in private, which might also help Richard understand the man’s character better.

  When we entered Yugoslav air space, military jets surrounded our plane and escorted it to Pula airport. This was nothing like landing at JFK or LAX. It was a full-on military base, with helicopters, tanks, jeeps, and armed soldiers everywhere. From there we boarded a boat and crossed from the Istrian coast to Veliki Brijun, possibly the most beautiful island on earth, and the biggest in an amazing archipelago. It bloomed with incredible plants and flowers and featured a hotel complex and gorgeous villas alongside the presidential palace. I wondered whether someone had accidentally spirited me out of Yugoslavia. To some extent they had. Veliki Brijun had previously belonged to Italy, and the elegant style of the island was in sharp contrast to the rest of Yugoslavia. Had I been president, I too would have chosen it as my residence! I hear it’s now become a national park, and there are plans to add a luxury tourist complex. Maybe I should revisit the place someday.

  When Richard was cast as Yugoslav dictator Tito, he asked me to go ahead and check the man out.

  Once my bags were unpacked, attendants took me to Tito. He had a very serious air about him. He asked in what language we might communicate. We
settled on a mixture of Italian and English. He invited me to take a seat, lit a cigarette for me and a big cigar for himself, and chatted with me for a bit before getting down to business: what would Richard need for the movie? I replied that I’d been sent to study his personality, the body language of the man Richard would be playing. Tito burst out laughing and gave me permission to photograph him.

  The following morning, Tito invited me to have breakfast with him. He inquired about my political inclinations. I replied that I didn’t have any but mentioned that my father had fought in Yugoslavia during the war.

  Tito asked, “Did I kill him?”

  “No.”

  “What did he think about me?”

  “I don’t know. My father never talked about you.”

  “Let’s ask him now. Let’s call him.”

  “He died a few weeks ago.”

  My answer didn’t seem to fluster Tito in the least. We kept talking. I asked him what he’d do when he retired from political life. He was eighty-one. I thought it was an appropriate question. He just looked at me and shrugged his shoulders. And in the end he never did retire, of course. Dictators don’t, as a rule. Tito would die in May 1980, just three days short of his eighty-eighth birthday. His funeral is believed to have been the largest state funeral ever held in history.

  Tito and Elizabeth enjoy a joke on his yacht.

  Not that he was always so serious. A couple of days later he showed me a 16 mm black-and-white Yugoslav cartoon. I couldn’t understand the language, but it seemed to be portraying the daily lives of common Yugoslavs. I couldn’t understand anything. Tito found it hilarious so I just laughed when he did. He watched it three or four times, laughing at every joke.

  When Richard and Elizabeth finally arrived, Tito wanted to show off a bit, so he drove us around Veliki Brijun in a convertible Cadillac that President Nixon had given him as a gift. Then he hit a rock, and the car ground to a permanent halt. So he took us to the zoo to show us the family elephant, all alone on a Yugoslav island. Then we went to Pula to see a Yugoslav movie about the war. It was partly in Russian and partly in German, so I didn’t understand a thing and didn’t recognize any of the actors. When Tito entered the theater, the audience began chanting: “Tito! Ti-to!” There are a lot of stories about the origins of the nickname Tito, though the one I heard most often explains that ti and to both mean “you,” in Serbian and Croatian respectively. Broz would get up every morning at the crack of dawn to greet the crowds, addressing them in Serbian and Croatian as “ti” and “to.” It helped him acquire popularity on both sides and thus work toward a united Yugoslavia. Indeed, I was struck by the deep respect both Slavs and Croatians had for him. His government was very authoritarian, but people never feared him in the way Iranians feared their shah. They loved him for how courageously he’d fought against the Germans and appreciated the socioeconomic reforms he was trying to realize.

  One thing that surprised me was the extent to which the Yugoslav coast had been Westernized. It was lined with casinos, strip clubs, and lots of good restaurants and bars. Then something even stranger caught my eye. I kept seeing magazines that I’d never heard of—whose names I couldn’t even pronounce—which published lots of photos of celebrities, including my own. The quality was awful, but they were undoubtedly mine. And I knew I’d never sold anything in Yugoslavia. So I rang my agent in Rome and asked him to investigate. We discovered that a company in Milan was buying the magazines, copying the photos without permission, and selling them in places like Yugoslavia, where there were no copyright laws.

  Tito’s wife takes Elizabeth to admire their family elephant and private zoo.

  Tito, Richard, and Elizabeth chatting in Brijun, Tito’s personal island resort.

  Elizabeth and Richard were given use of Tito’s villa in Kupari, near Dubrovnik. But they decided to live on their yacht, so the splendid villa, complete with waiters, a butler, and cook, was all mine. I wanted to do a fashion shoot in the gardens of the villa and realized I needed an electronic flash, which I had to get from Rome. So I asked my brother Renato to bring one over. He was just sixteen and believed communism was a good idea. I thought he’d be interested to see communism for real. I went to get him from the airport in a little jeep that Elizabeth and Richard kept on their yacht, and put him in a room next to mine. The following morning, I saw a servant cleaning my brother’s shoes. One of his fingers came out through a hole in the sole of one of them. That was how my brother demonstrated his commitment to communism—by wearing shoes that were so old they were falling to pieces. I decided to show him another side of communist life under Tito and took him to a strip club. He’d never been in one before and here, unlike in Italian clubs, the girls stripped buck naked. That was one communism we could both agree on.

  One day, while Tito had a meeting with Richard to discuss work, his wife Jovanka invited Elizabeth to visit one of their vineyards on a little island near Brijun. She was a robust woman, taller than either Elizabeth or Tito. She showed us the vineyard—its cellars lined with wine vats and bottles—and invited us to take a seat. “Let’s toast our friendship!” she exclaimed, and said something in Serbian to her butler, who proceeded to bring us three strange clay cups all linked together. I’d never seen such a thing. Jovanka had a bottle opened and emptied the wine into the cups in three equal parts. Then, addressing me, she said, “You’re the youngest, so you start. Drink. But if you don’t finish, our friendship will break.” I took the cup and started to drink, and drink, and drink. Holy smokes, it was never ending. I hadn’t realized. The three cups were all interconnected. Effectively, you had to empty all three. I’d just downed an entire bottle of wine in one go. Elizabeth and Jovanka were roaring with laughter. I was stone drunk.

  Richard and Tito discussed the movie with the help of an interpreter. Richard had read up on the history of Yugoslavia and respected Tito for standing up to Stalin and for uniting such a divided part of the world. Tito had only exchanged a few words with me. But with Richard he had long, extended conversations. Richard asked a lot of specific and complicated questions: about the politics of the country, the logistics of war, and the leader’s psychological state of mind. Tito answered every question, through the interpreter, quickly and with authority.

  As we were walking back to the villa after their first meeting, Richard marveled at how quick-witted Tito was, especially given his age. I figured, however, that Tito spoke—or at least understood—English, and said so. Richard didn’t want to believe me, but that night he went to the villa’s library and memorized a number of phrases in Serbian. When he met Tito again the next day, he asked a question and, while the interpreter was translating, interrupted him, saying, “No, that’s not what I said.” Tito smiled and replied, in English, “Mr. Burton, you’re not wrong, but if you prefer, if you have the patience and accept my English, we can continue without an interpreter.” He had an incredible mind. He understood everything that was going on around him, everything we said. But he’d preferred not to speak in English in order not to risk making a mistake. Which was why he’d been able to reply so promptly. He’d heard every question twice, and had had time to think.

  The first day of shooting finally arrived. A huge, Russian-made military helicopter took us to the set, which was along the Sutjeska River. And that was how we came and went, or at least Richard did. Helicopters already scared me to death. Then, during one flight, our door opened and fell clean away! The helicopter started rapidly losing altitude, while my bag, with all its equipment, began sliding toward the gaping doorway. “Let it go!” Richard shouted. But I managed to grab it just in time. On another occasion, we were flying back from the set at night when, crossing over a deep gorge, we ran into a thick bank of fog. You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. Suddenly Richard looked to his left and shouted, “Watch out!” We were about to fly into a mountain. The pilot pulled back on the stick, and the helicopter went into a breathtaking vertical climb. When we finally landed in Dubrovnik
, Richard fell to his knees and kissed the ground. I did the same. The following morning, I announced that I was never going to get into a helicopter again in my life. “Do as you wish,” said Richard, and from then on I spent an hour and a half every day crossing the mountain by road. Richard kept going by helicopter.

  Three or four days later we were supposed to shoot a scene in Sarajevo. It was too far to go by car, and I was terrified at the idea of getting back into that helicopter. I had an awful gut feeling about it. “Don’t worry,” said Richard. “You stay here.” When they got back that evening, Richard came to find me and gave me a big hug. “Gianni, we hit terrible weather,” he said. “The pilot said that we only made it back because we weren’t too heavy. If you’d been with us, the helicopter would probably have crashed.”

  Filming was also a dangerous business, with lots of accidents. The production employed the entire army, dressing some soldiers as Germans and others as partisans. There were lots of battle scenes, with flights of German aircraft strafing Tito’s soldiers. On one occasion, I was with Richard when an enormous, smoking shell case fell out of the sky right beside me. If it had hit me, it would have gone straight through my body and out my butt. Crazy! It wouldn’t have helped me at the time to know that Tito himself was supposed to have survived a similar incident in the real battle. All I wanted to do was get home in one piece. Yugo Films may have been a production company, but this was no normal cinema production. It was an army obeying orders from its commander, Marshal Tito.