I’m still very protective of my photos of Grace and her family. Sometimes I don’t feel I have the right to show them. Grace put her all into everything she did, and those photos were also her work. They are photos of her dream come true. I merely had the good luck to be there in the moment. Sometimes they don’t even seem real to me. I see Grace and Rainier with their children, but I’m unable to see myself behind the camera off-screen. From a basement apartment to Elizabeth Taylor’s yacht, my penthouse, and the Monaco royal palace . . . If it weren’t for the fact that I still enjoy the privilege of a friendship with Prince Albert and am able to observe him continue Grace and Rainier’s wonderful legacy, I’d find it hard to believe I’d once played a minor role in the Monaco royal family’s fairy tale. I’m still not even sure whose dream that was—whether it was also partly mine. When I and my memories revisit Monaco today, it feels even more unreal.
One small regret always brings me back to earth. The only occasion I saw Grace in her old environment was when she came to Elizabeth’s fortieth birthday party in Budapest, years before I was hired to photograph the royal family. Grace came alone. I was the only photographer, and everyone knew I worked for Elizabeth, so she felt free to have fun with her old Hollywood friends. She had left “Princess Grace” in Monaco while I, as often happened, had left the famous jet-setter “Gianni Bozzacchi” in Rome. Maestro Bozzacchi was possibly too intimidated by all those stars. Perhaps he still felt ashamed by that first, embarrassing meeting on the Kalizma. Whatever the reason, it was Gianni Il Roscio who turned up at that party, the timid street kid who stood to one side snapping photos of Grace, Elizabeth, and all their friends, all busy sipping cocktails and telling American jokes which Il Roscio rarely understood. Then dancing on the tables. They were having so much fun I was tempted to ditch my camera for a moment. Grace danced magnificently, and I wasn’t so bad in those days either. Maybe just one drink, a quick dance . . . But the moment I took my eye off the lens, an invisible wall sprang up, an insurmountable barrier between me and what I was observing. Every now and then I managed to mingle with the others without drawing attention to myself. But that evening, as on many others, I realized I could no more enter the party than I could have climbed into a painting. If I got too close, the dream would shatter.
And yet . . . I could have danced with Cinderella herself. Who turns down a chance like that?
Chapter 13
Daddy
My concern for Claudye’s physical and emotional state only grew as the due date for the birth drew closer. I wanted to be near her to help her feel as relaxed as possible. Life with Elizabeth and Richard was getting increasingly difficult. They argued constantly, always over the same issues: fame and money, who was working and who not. In my opinion, we all needed our own space, Claudye especially.
So I refused a lot of offers in order to ease off a bit and stay in Rome with Claudye. We began to participate more in the Roman “scene,” which Claudye appreciated but I personally couldn’t stand—that whole Roma Bene thing, going to all the right parties, restaurants, and clubs just to see and be seen, to meet all those so-called friends. But frequenting these Roman society circles won me great popularity. I was bombarded with requests for interviews and photo shoots, many of which I just couldn’t avoid. People knew I was in Rome and not very busy: an excellent opportunity to hire me. I stopped answering the phone, declined invitations, refused a lot of work offers. And not only because we were about to have a baby.
The less I dedicated myself to photography, the more I considered it superfluous to my life. The world still saw me as the “new king of the camera.” But I wasn’t. However good my photos may have been, to shoot them I had to live someone else’s life—follow some star around for a few hours, or travel and live full-time with Elizabeth and Richard. I’d been photographing them for years now. How much longer could I keep it up? And if I quit working for them, what else could I hope to do? I’d never find anyone else to photograph as stimulating, interesting, and famous as they.
So . . . What if I just . . . quit?
The idea had been buzzing around in my head for some time. Drawing away from photography in order to concentrate more on my family highlighted this growing need to realize myself professionally, to do something that would be exclusively mine. On Elizabeth and Richard’s last two movies I’d enjoyed going beyond my job as special photographer. I was good at bringing people together, making them my friends, and a lot of production work involves doing just that. I was honest; I inspired trust and sympathy. One day Elliott Kastner said, “Come work with me, you could be an excellent producer.” I handled the directing of a number of commercials in Rome. Then, entirely unexpectedly, Luchino Visconti called, asking me to photograph a girl he wanted to hire for his next movie, Conversation Piece. Claudia Marsani was no more than fifteen years old. When she got to my studio I realized that what Visconti actually wanted was my opinion as to whether she’d be suitable for the part, despite her age. That was production work too. It involved giving advice, and people seemed to listen to mine. I liked working at my own pace, doing as I chose, rather than what Elizabeth, Richard, or some movie bigwig told me.
I was even offered a chance to realize my juvenile dream of acting when director Luigi Mangini presented me with a script inspired by an interview with me that had been published in installments in an Italian magazine. The script was basically an anonymous version of my life story: a shy and awkward young photographer is thrown into the jet set, where he discovers talent he never knew he had. I liked the script; it was amusing. “Why not?” I thought. Both Fellini and Leone had often said I should be an actor. Why not try? I was living at a less hectic pace and had time. It would be relaxing to be on the other side of the camera for a couple of months while waiting for the birth of my child. I met the financiers, and even though it was a minor production with a tight budget, the producers were convinced that my name would attract important actors. I accepted, and the movie was on. Claudye didn’t seem all that enthusiastic, but she was feeling well, according to both her and her medical tests.
I had to go to Los Angeles for some layouts that I’d already committed to doing, and there I was stunned by the reaction that the little movie had provoked. Jet Set was headline news in magazines and newspapers around the world. Everyone wanted to interview me. “The photographer of the stars becomes a star” was the angle. I’d agreed to do the movie thinking it would be a relaxing job in my hometown. I’d been looking for less attention, not more. That trip to Los Angeles was already frenetic enough in its own right. Now I had a pack of journalists on my heels. I had to turn down a lot of offers and concentrate on the jobs at hand. New offers kept coming in daily anyhow: a layout for Cindy Williams; one for Russ Meyer’s wife, Edy Williams; another for actor Robert Stack, who said he’d love to play my father in Jet Set; and one for Clint Eastwood, who was so persuasive that he even roped me into doing yet another, years later, after I’d totally retired as a photographer. On that occasion, Condé Nast wanted him on the cover of Vogue L’Homme, the French edition of Vogue, and Clint called me in person. I did my best to refuse, explaining that I’d quit, was out of the business. “I don’t even have a camera,” I said. “Then borrow one,” he replied. I got to the location an hour late. It was swarming with stressed Condé Nast staff, and Clint was delighted to see me. I took six shots and declared the job done. The Condé Nast people were outraged. Not Clint. “If Gianni’s happy, I’m happy,” he said, and that was that. In the end, they published a really nice cover.
Clint Eastwood, the actor Sergio Leone was about to turn down until he saw a certain scowl . . .
However, one offer that I couldn’t turn down came from Jack Painter, the MGM agent who had set me up with Al Pacino a few years earlier. Now he wanted me to photograph John Wayne. But when I got to John’s Newport home, I was told that he was too sick to pose for a photo shoot. He wanted to apologize in person, so I was taken to his bedroom. He was secluded in an adjoining
bathroom, his voice speaking to me from the shower, saying how sorry he was to have made me come all that way, but unfortunately he didn’t feel very well. So there I was. I’d been in the great John Wayne’s house. I’d spoken to the man himself. But I never got to see his face. I’m sorry to say the shoot never happened.
Rock Hudson, 1974. He was Elizabeth’s great friend and a driving force in her AIDS activism.
Rock Hudson was another engagement that I accepted on that trip. I photographed him on the veranda of his home in Beverly Hills. He had a pack of German shepherd dogs, all of them male. “A couple of them are gay,” he said. Years earlier Clint had told me that Rock was homosexual, but there was nothing effeminate about him, nothing stereotypical. He had great class, a certain grace, and an almost European way about him that you rarely see in the States. We spoke a lot about Elizabeth, and I quizzed him about James Dean and Giant. I’d only been commissioned to do a portrait, but he let me take a bunch of other photos. He was a sweet, marvelous, and fascinating guy. Years later Elizabeth would have a plaque erected in his honor on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
I got back from Hollywood even more enthusiastic about Jet Set than when I’d left. I’d freed myself of all other commitments in order to concentrate exclusively on the movie, which was turning out to be much bigger than I’d ever imagined.
But Claudye didn’t like the project. One evening she confronted me about it. “Our life together is already in trouble as it is,” she said. “I totally don’t want you to do this movie. If you go ahead with it, I’ll ask for a divorce.” I couldn’t understand why Claudye was so dead set against the movie. But I didn’t want to upset her more than I apparently already had. The weeks before the birth of our baby were anguishing. So I pulled out. Mangini was understanding about it. “If you don’t do it, I’ll burn the script,” he said. “I’ll never shoot it without you. You’re the only one who can play this part.” And that was the end of Jet Set.
Our gynecologist decided not to wait until the ninth month, a precaution considered necessary because no one knew exactly what had gone wrong the first time. With a month still to go, the baby was in good health, so they induced the birth.
The birth of my daughter Vanessa unblocked me. All my professional worries vanished, along with my irritable moods and arguments with Claudye. We were a regular Roman family. I wanted to dedicate myself totally to Claudye and my daughter. It was only then that we began to live the good life for real. We hired a driver, a cook, a nanny, and later a governess. My family became my life. I totally adored being a father. The pressures I’d been accustomed to for years—on movie sets, following Elizabeth and Richard around—vanished.
I was a father, a husband, a man who provided for his family. But my father’s words kept coming to mind all the same: “Now pedal!” Sooner or later I was going to have to get back to work. However, while I was living on the fringe, concentrating on my own affairs and my family, the entertainment and publicity world was changing at a dizzying speed. Television was taking over as the principal medium for news, gossip, and publicity. One by one, the magazines that had once published so many of my photos—Look, Paris Match, Epoca, Europeo, Stern, Life, and many others—all began to vanish. The ones that survived the crisis were no longer interested in quality photos of stars, or in real news. Newspapers and magazines all dumbed down. None wanted beautiful layouts any more. They were all after scandals.
But I didn’t want to play the game anymore anyway. I was a father now. No more ducking into the darkroom with girls at my studio, no more all-nighters on movie sets and sudden trips to the other side of the world. Magazines and newspapers could get all the obscene photos they wanted from the new paparazzi, but they’d never get one from me. I wanted to live with Claudye and Vanessa like a regular family man. And things seemed to be working out just fine that way.
Vanessa and me in 1974. I loved being a father.
Strangely, Claudye didn’t appreciate me participating more in our new home life. I tried to invite my mother and brothers and sisters around more often, but they didn’t seem very important to Claudye. She only cared about her own family. All our vacations had to include a stop in Corsica. I was also expected to financially maintain Claudye’s parents as well as her brother and sister. My mother never spent a single night in our stupendous apartment, but Claudye’s came to stay every three months, and her sister and niece became pretty much full-time live-in guests. After a while, all this began to bother me. Her family’s constant interference began to create a rift between us.
Unlike me, Claudye suffered being out of the limelight. She wanted to get back to the Roma Bene scene as soon as possible. I began to wonder whether that was why she’d stopped me from shooting Jet Set. She liked the “new king of the camera” just the way he was, at the peak of his career, desired, capable of bringing fat checks home for just a few hours’ work—even if he didn’t get any satisfaction out of it anymore. Despite the publicity, doing that movie would have meant me starting again from scratch, risking my name and reputation in an entirely new venture. What if the movie flopped? What if I proved a disaster? Would we have kept getting so many invitations to dinner? Would people still stop us in the street to shake our hands? If the king put his crown down, would he be able to pick it up again later, or would it already be riding on someone else’s head?
I did a few quick calculations to work out just how long we could afford our lifestyle were I to quit photography. I figured I had time to evaluate all the options. Not much, but enough. So I took a trip to London, where I spent a week with Elliott Kastner at Pinewood Studios and watched him at work. He was incredible. Elliott was a genius. I saw him put a western together with just a couple of phone calls. He had no script, no story, but he called Marlon Brando all the same, because he knew Brando wanted to work with Jack Nicholson. Brando accepted, so he then rang Nicholson, who also accepted. The movie was done; all he needed was a director. So he then asked both actors which director they’d like to work with. Both said Arthur Penn, who happened to have a book that he wanted to turn into a western, and that was how they came to make The Missouri Breaks. The movie later proved a major flop—in large part due to Brando’s erratic behavior on set (which included catching grasshoppers after shooting as well as taking a bite out of a live frog)—but that was tomorrow’s problem. Right then, Elliott had got his movie.
He then asked me to go to Paris on his behalf. “Go convince this guy to invest in my production company,” he said. I was still a photographer at that point, and Elliott probably thought that closing a business deal would be good experience for me. The guy I met in Paris was Arnon Milchan, known today as one of Hollywood’s most prolific independent producers—as well as a key Israeli intelligence officer, at least until the mid-1980s. But what did I know? He was rich and wanted to invest in cinema. I explained just how good Elliott was and did my best to convince him to invest in a number of projects.
I soon began to realize that Elliott was good at doing business, but not at making movies. Some producers are also creative people who leave their own mark on a movie, on a par with the director or scriptwriter. That wasn’t the case with Elliott. His talent was getting the right people together, finding the funds, identifying people (like Milchan) who could prove useful in certain circumstances. Elliott did four or five movies a year. He’d close one business deal after another. And he had fun doing it, maybe because he’d started out as an agent. But from a creative point of view, he wasn’t nearly so good, especially when it came to judging the potential of a script. I discovered this in the worst possible way.
Elliott invited me to accompany him to Los Angeles, where he was shooting Farewell, My Lovely, starring Robert Mitchum as Raymond Chandler’s immortal private eye, Philip Marlowe. With all my expenses covered by the production, I didn’t even take a camera—to make sure Elliott couldn’t ask me to take any shots. As we were wandering around the set, I met a young Italian American actor, a guy about my age who, unt
il then, had had just one minor role in a single movie. He wanted me to look at a script he’d written in which he planned to play the lead role. I can still remember the expression on his face as he handed me the script: “Read it. It’s monumental.”
That evening I ended up hanging around my hotel. With nothing else to do, I started flicking idly through the young guy’s script, and ended up reading it cover to cover straight. I fell in love with it. It reminded me of Somebody Up There Likes Me, one of my all-time favorite movies. I identified with the characters, with their backgrounds. Maybe it was a little too tough. The lead character, a boxer, died in the end. But it really was a “monumental” script.
I rang Elliott. He’d already heard talk of the script around Hollywood. But he could tell how passionate and enthusiastic I was, so he agreed to read it, and I took it that very evening to the house he rented in Bel Air. I was so excited I couldn’t sleep. It would be my first movie as a producer, the beginning of a new career.
The next morning, I joined Elliott for a light breakfast. He was drinking prune juice and very healthy California-style food, which didn’t interest me in the least. He stood up, put one arm around my shoulders and said, “Gianni, I adore you, I love you, you’re a friend, you’ve got talent, but I think you should go back to photography. This script is a disaster. I read it because I could tell you were really enthusiastic. But I’m sorry. You don’t understand a thing about scripts.”
I was devastated. He made me feel ridiculous. My English was clearly still too limited, and in all the time I’d spent on movie sets, I’d obviously learned nothing about the business. I was getting this straight from an incredibly prolific and successful producer. What could I have been thinking?
The prospect of making a big leap into producing was very attractive. But I admired Elliott so much that I’d never dare doubt his opinion or his loyalty toward me. Then, by chance, I met Arnon Milchan again at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He was with Robert Mitchum. He hugged me and thanked me for putting him in touch with Elliott. That meant I’d done my work well. I’d convinced Arnon to invest in, among other things, Farewell, My Lovely. So I figured I’d be included in the agreement somewhere. Yet Elliott hadn’t even told me he’d closed the deal, thanks—above all—to my own contribution. Following this encounter, one of Elliott’s collaborators proceeded to inform me that Arnon had agreed to pay half of all script costs for every project he did with Elliott. But I knew Elliott never acquired scripts, just the options. So I told Arnon. I didn’t want to be responsible in any way, even indirectly, for the scam that Elliott was running. He’d convinced Arnon to pay for half of something he didn’t even possess. But maybe Arnon was just too wealthy to care. He wanted to get into the movie business, and Elliott knew how to promote movies. The pair of them did a lot of movies that way.
My Life in Focus Page 24
