I wanted to grow. I was a married man and a father. I wanted to do something for myself. It’s easy enough to photograph some Mr. Nobody. But when you’re photographing important people, when you look after their image as I did for Elizabeth and Richard, every photo has to have a reason to exist. Merely having an impulse to take a photo was never reason enough for me. What satisfaction can you get from that? If I’d felt greater artistic satisfaction, I’d have believed I’d made more of myself. But the photos I took and the satisfaction I took in them were often in conflict. I was fed up with always having to put my own ambitions as an artist in second place. Today I can appreciate the quality of my photos, their art, their personal style—which I didn’t think I had back then—much more than I ever could when I was thirty. Because back then I just saw them as a job done for others, not as a creative act.
What else could I achieve as a photographer? Where should I go next? The magazines I’d worked for in the past had shut down or changed. Ugly photos paid more than beautiful ones. When I tried to do something new, different—like my Virna Lisi layout—I couldn’t get it published. If I tried to innovate, using unusual lenses for a fashion shoot, my efforts weren’t repaid. I attempted other work—cinema posters, advertising—with the same sense of invention, the same quality that I always demanded of myself. I did a poster for a documentary entitled The World by Night for which I did twelve shots on the same negative, each time moving the position of the model to give the impression that she was actually moving inside the picture. It looked like a good job of editing, only it wasn’t editing—it was one photo, painstakingly shot piece by piece during the course of a single day. But it was all pointless. People just weren’t interested. Quality no longer had any importance. Beauty even less so. Standards had plunged. You wanted to advertise a movie or sell a product? You just had to do a poster and print it a thousand times, far faster and cheaper.
What could I do? How much further could I push my photography career? If I’d wanted to, I could have earned a fortune working in advertising or fashion. But whenever I did a commercial, my photos had to be whatever the client or PR agent said. Or, worse still, whatever a team of PR agents said, plus an art director. And usually fashion magazines and designers have a specific design they want you to adhere to. I was at a fork in the road. I could keep repeating myself, or I could try something new. That’s when I hung my camera on a hook and decided to move to Los Angeles.
Claudye didn’t want to come with me. She tried to make me stay in Rome, keep working as a photographer, keep going to all those Roma Bene parties. She wanted to revive all the attention she got when I was famous. But I’d escaped from that life. I didn’t allow anyone to ask me about Elizabeth or Grace Kelly or whoever else it was they asked about when my latest photos came out. I’d turned my back on all that—those elite clubs, restaurants, and society folk. But Claudye hadn’t. She adored that life. She loved being Mrs. Bozzacchi, the queen of the “camera king.” But I wanted to grow, do something big as a producer, take more risks, see if I could maybe succeed and find satisfaction.
We began separation procedures, first in practice and then legally. All the while, though, I still felt sure that once I’d settled in Los Angeles, Claudye would understand that my new life could be as stimulating as my old one. I didn’t want a divorce. I never did. Sadly, however, we weren’t even given a chance to reconcile. Claudye had a fear of needles, and, following a dental operation, she refused the prescribed antibiotics. Septicemia flared one night, and she died on the spot, in her sleep. I flew back for the funeral in Rome, and we buried her in her hometown in Corsica. Then I settled down for a while in Rome, where my first priority became my daughter Vanessa.
I don’t know what would have happened if Claudye hadn’t died so suddenly. While I watched our marriage collapse, I began to wonder whether she’d actually been far more in love with the life she’d had with Elizabeth and Richard than with the one she had with me. All the same, I’d wanted to share this new phase of my life with her, begin a new one that would be ours alone. Claudye didn’t want that. And then she lost any chance of joining me. She left, and I had to face the change alone. The man once dubbed the “king of the camera” put down his crown. And Gianni moved to Los Angeles, taking the Redheaded Devil from Rome with him.
Epilogue
I thought retiring from photography would be simple. I was done taking pictures. The end. But nothing in life is ever that easy, of course. No one believed I was serious. I insisted that my retirement was real, and my camera hung idle. The truth only set in when I sold my black-and-white lab to my printer and my studio to another photographer. After only thirteen years, and with an apparently endless career ahead of me, I was done.
Which is when the whispering started: “Bozzacchi’s burned out,” they’d say. “He’s lost his eye, doesn’t have what it takes anymore.” What other reason could there be? Then I began getting a new kind of phone call: magazines around the world offering a ton of money for me to gossip about Elizabeth and Richard. “He doesn’t work for them anymore, so we’ll pay big and he’ll tell all” was how they figured it. I turned them all down.
Everyone thought I was crazy to leave photography, making a huge mistake. But my transition into producing over the next decade was so rapid that I didn’t have time to weigh my decision in terms of “good” or “bad”—things just kept happening, both personally and professionally.
Vanessa continued her schooling, first in Rome, then in Corsica. Right after I sold my studio, I was back with Elliott Kastner shooting The Missouri Breaks, then premiering it at the Cannes Film Festival. The next thing I knew, I was prepping China 9 and Liberty 37 with director Monte Hellman, followed quickly by Together, starring my friend Jacqueline Bisset. I was a real producer, making movies! But my next couple projects didn’t work out as planned.
Sergio Leone called me and asked me to help him produce Once upon a Time in America. I’ll never forget what he told me when he handed me the script: “Read, you’ll see with this film we give the answer to The Godfather.” I started working for Greg Bautzer, described by the press as “the man who seduced Hollywood,” the former attorney of Howard Hughes, and the current attorney of Kirk Kerkorian, owner of MGM. Greg and I helped Leone promote the project and started his partnership with MGM. Studio executives didn’t like the title, so I suggested a new one, “In Gold We Trust,” which Sergio also liked. After several attempts to edit, even halve the seven-hundred-page script, the project was ultimately rejected by MGM. I found Leone a deal with financier-producer Arnon Milchan. But I was under contract at MGM, so I was greatly disappointed to be unable to produce the film. My contribution was forgotten by both Sergio and Arnon, most notably in the credits. C’est la vie.
The plaque that the Leone family gave me, presented as an annual prize given in Sergio’s hometown, Torella dei Lombardi, Avellino.
Around the same time, I had begun to collaborate with Michelangelo Antonioni, who with the help of Tonino Guerra had completed a screenplay titled “To Suffer or Endure.” It was an extremely complicated story addressing the problem of faith in a traffic jam of love in search of truth. It was very well written, but—I have to be honest—I did not understand much. Mick Jagger was interested in playing himself in the film. I went to meet Mick, who was very nice and an excellent businessman, and I managed to work out an agreement.
Many scenes of the film were to be shot inside Vatican City. I made an appointment with one of the secretaries of Pope John Paul II, who to me was still my dear Father Karol, to try to get permission. The answer was fast and precise: “No!” At that time, if the Vatican said no, what it really meant was: “This movie cannot be made at all!” And sure enough, “To Suffer or Endure” was never made, and it’s never even mentioned in the biographies written of Michelangelo Antonioni.
Michelangelo at the time wrote short stories for the newspaper Corriere della Sera, including one entitled “The Boat Drunk,” inspired by a true, myst
erious story involving a yacht drifting in Australian waters, three men locked up for days in the hold, and a captain who climbs out on deck and disappears. I wanted to make a movie out of that story. We started to develop the project with a new title: “The Crew.” Mark Peploe and Antonioni wrote a beautiful script. L’Ente Gestione Cinema and Cinecittà were interested in financing the film, believing it might be Antonioni’s last. Michelangelo agreed, on the condition that I produce the film. After analyzing the project, I realized that the budget was too high for L’Ente Gestione Cinema and Cinecittà. I asked the American company Orion to co-produce the film, and they agreed.
Michelangelo and I traveled around the United States and Mexico scouting out locations and picking the cast. We spoke with many actors—Robert Duvall, Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro, Matt Dillon, Roy Scheider, Dustin Hoffman, Sean Connery—and all of them were excited to work with Antonioni. We were confident we could put together a great team with great names on the marquee. Mexico’s president, Jose Lopez Portillo, even made his personal plane available for our research, and we found the remains of a small port destroyed by a hurricane, perfect for the end of our film.
At Cinecittà, production designers Dean Tavoularis and Ferdinand Scarfiotti and cinematographer Carlo Di Palma began preparing the film. Everything was going at full speed when Michelangelo was hit by a devastating stroke, losing the ability to speak. Gone was the voice that used to speak famous quotes like: “Loneliness is the lack of words around us.”
We tried various solutions to get the movie made anyway, including employing Martin Scorsese as standby director, but unfortunately he did not at the time have dual citizenship, and therefore he couldn’t work in Italy. This project, unfortunately, was shelved.
Meanwhile, I wrote a semi-autobiographical script, I Love N.Y., and then found myself directing it, alongside my soon-to-be wife, Kelley. We married, moved to Wisconsin, and had a beautiful new baby, Rhea. Then Kelley got sick with cancer. We battled that for five years and more before she finally left us, by which time a full decade of my life had gone by.
Michelangelo Antonioni and I discuss plans for his film La Ciurma, which unfortunately never materialized.
Whether or not I should have quit photography had become irrelevant, which probably means I made the right decision. But nonetheless, Kelley hadn’t been wrong when she urged me to revisit and share the celebrated works of my past. I’d been so determined to create a new career beyond photography, entirely separate from Elizabeth and Richard, that I never bothered to take stock of everything I’d accomplished during my jet-set years. I’d wanted to find my best so badly that I overlooked the best I’d already achieved.
Meanwhile, the old dissatisfaction began to set in again. I was making movies because I could, but not because I truly wanted to make them. My mind kept returning to a challenge my father had posed: “Gianni,” he’d say, “when art and science traveled together, there was a pure sense of logic. If you grow up to be who I think you’ll be, you should do something about it.” Which is why I decided to put the true history of the Renaissance on film, to dramatize, in Shakespeare’s words, that “brave new world,” the rebirth of civilization, many of whose priceless documents I had watched my father lovingly restore in his work. Researching the project, I visited the archives of all the great Renaissance families in Italy, many of whom still live in the very same palaces their ancestors did five hundred years ago. My studies made me realize just how much we’ve lost the sense of logic that reigned in the Renaissance, the logic my father had spoken of.
Today we call it common sense . . . though what’s common often doesn’t make sense. And it’s definitely not logic. When religion and politics embraced each other, the meaning of the word logic changed. I want The Renaissance to show the world that we need to get back to basics, start over from where we went wrong. What’s true remains true, after all. When Galileo was condemned for teaching the “heresy” that the earth revolves around the sun, he is said to have muttered, “Yet still it moves.”
The world keeps spinning. Your life keeps changing. You change with it.
These days I always wake up very early, even after a harder day than usual. I go to my study, its walls lined with so many precious mementos and photographs, and stand at the window, inviting the light to enter, that light which has always been my companion and the master of my life’s itinerary. When you choose the light, you have to embrace the changes it brings, the metamorphoses, allowing life to take the shape of a circle, the way a beam of light, if uninterrupted, will go on forever, until finally it will circle back on itself, creating a circle with no circumference whose center is everywhere, constantly repeating and renewing. That’s where I sit now, at that place where the light of my present stretches ahead of me until it touches my past, leading me forward, brightening my future, and exposing every memory before my eyes. Finally, I now know who I want to be when I grow up.
Directing my 2015 documentary We Weren’t Just Bicycle Thieves: Neorealism.
As the great Leonardo da Vinci said, “What is beautiful and mortal passes, but not art” (Cosa bella e mortal passa e non d’arte), and I for one could die happy if even one of my photos, a single shot, were considered a work of art.
I never wanted to write this last chapter, but everything has a meaning, even things that are almost impossible or too painful to make sense of. And life has, sadly, made me something of an expert in this art. So let’s proceed.
Elizabeth was afflicted by endless ailments, many of them physical, some dating as far back as her famous fall from a horse while shooting National Velvet. The last years of her life were, for her, a terrible ordeal. I spoke to Elizabeth on February 27 for her birthday and then again, for the last time, on March 7. She was confused and didn’t want to talk, or maybe didn’t have the strength to.
When I hung up, I couldn’t help but think about the upcoming date of March 13, and I felt a shiver of fear run down my body: what else might this day have in store for me? I started thinking, short of breath. I lost my first daughter, Bruna, on March 13, 1973. More than ten years later, her mother joined her on the exact same day. Yet that very special date had also brought me joy: Kelley, my second wife, was born on that day. Was there meaning in all this?
March 13 arrived, and as always, I tried to call Elizabeth. But I couldn’t get through, and a certain fear set in. Was fate playing with me again? Would I have to face yet another terrible loss? Later that night, I managed to speak to Christopher Wilding, her son. He had grim news. “She’s in hospital with serious heart problems,” he said, and all I could gasp was, “No! That’s impossible.” I couldn’t bear the thought of losing her.
On March 23, 2011, the last star faded, and with her died a very special part of my life. I’d known her as Baby Boobs. The world knew her as Liz.
Dear Baby Boobs, thank you. You always loved to play and joke about everything. You just loved having fun, always amazing me with new surprises. And the biggest surprise of all was the very first. To this day, and every day, I still wonder why a woman who could have had anything and anyone chose me, way back then in Africa. During the many years we spent together, I may have found an answer, and I’ll try to explain it shortly.
But first a word about Elizabeth. She didn’t just work in cinema: she was cinema, the essence of cinema. Hers was a seventy-two-year mission strung with sixty-two movies, beginning in 1939 (when she was not yet seven) with There’s One Born Every Minute, followed immediately by the hugely successful Lassie Come Home. The times were difficult, scored by the uncertainty of war. Yet before those two movies had even come out, Elizabeth was signing for two more: Courage of Lassie and, of course, National Velvet, which is when the world truly witnessed the rising of a new star.
I smile at my memory of the last time we spoke, only a few weeks before she died. Elizabeth had a wonderful sense of humor and a predilection for jokes tinged with bawdy innuendo. And she was a great audience. I’d tell her my stories, describing
people and events, and she’d listen with her whole body. She always used to ask for the latest jokes, and made no exception on that last occasion.
“Gianni, do you have a new one?” she asked, her voice weak.
“Of course,” I replied. “I saved this one just for you.”
“What are you waiting for then?”
“We’re in a small town in Sicily, you understand?”
She was already laughing at my heavy voice and Sicilian Mafia accent.
“Two old men, very old men.”
Here’s looking at you, Baby Boobs!
“Vecchi!” she said, which means “old” in Italian.
“Yes,” I replied. “Vecchi! Well, these two old guys are sitting outside a bar in the center of town. ‘Have you heard about this new medicine?’ says one to the other. ‘It’s a blue pill, blue like our sea . . .’ ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘Viagra!’ ‘Ah, Viagra, and what does it do?’ ‘Well, they say it keeps your dick hard for a full two hours!’ ‘Okay, so it’s a sedative.’”
Elizabeth burst into laughter. “You don’t happen to have that second guy’s number, do you?”
And that is just how I want to remember Elizabeth Taylor . . . What a woman! Honest, unpredictable, charming, affectionate, sensuous, and so beautiful it was impossible not to stand in awe of her. Those penetrating violet eyes could touch you so deeply you’d drown, not knowing how to react. Nothing seemed appropriate. You turned to stone. Believe me, I’m not exaggerating.
Elizabeth was all this, plus everything else from the universe of women. She was stunning. Yet, as I’ve already said, I never once considered the idea of us getting together. Quite why I couldn’t say, though I know in my heart I could never have agreed to be Mr. Taylor. The story may possibly have been different for her, as some people have had occasion to speculate.
My Life in Focus Page 26
