Sophia and Clint

From: HOLLYWOOD IS A FOUR LETTER TOWN

by James Bacon

Sophia and I run into each other all over the world.

Once she was making a movie in Paris with Paul Newman. She took me aside on the set one day and asked: "Do you know a cowboy in Hollywood by the name of Clint Eastwood?" I told her he was an old friend. "Well," said Sophia, "he is the biggest box office star in Italy, bigger than Mastroianni. He made a picture called A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS and at every theater where it's playing the lines are four blocks long and four abreast. I have never seen anything like it."

I knew that Clint, during a hiatus in his Rawhide TV series, had gone to Spain to make the first of the spaghetti westerns. He had done it for $15,000 - peanuts. I also knew he was about to make another one for the same money. As soon as I got home, I saw Clint and relayed Sophia's message. He hadn't heard a damn thing about the picture. In fact, didn't even know it had been released in Italy. I caught him in time to renegotiate the contract so he could get a piece of the action. A series of these spaghetti westerns starring Clint made him a fortune and also made him into the number one box office star in America and a top draw around the world. Clint is now the world's richest cowboy. Last time I saw Sophia was in an Etruscan field near Rome, and we talked about the conversation in Paris some years previously.

Sophia and Clint had never met, but Clint is eternally grateful to her. He had figured that A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS was a European western and nothing more. He was convinced that he had been paid $15,000 for a disaster:

"You can't imagine the problems I had making that picture. The director and producer wanted me to wear tennis shoes instead of cowboy boots. It took me a week to talk them out of it. Then the character killed everybody in sight. He was supposed to be the hero, but he was one of the rottenest villains alive. I never dreamed it would catch on." The Europeans love violence and Clint gave it to them. "I come into town to save the place, then proceed to kill everybody in it and finally burn down the town - and be heroic about it."

Amazingly, the pictures became as big a hit in the United States as they were in Europe. Some theaters showed all of them at one time - a Clint Eastwood festival - and the lines were just as long as they were those first days in Italy.

Sophia knew what she was talking about: "I was in Rome and I saw this line trying to get in to see an American cowboy I had never even heard of. I got out of my car and introduced myself to the theater manager, who let me right in. I had to see him for myself."

Clint had director Sergio Leone over a barrel when he negotiated for that second picture. All told, Clint made millions off his spaghetti westerns - the three made with Leone, followed by three of his own American-made films of the same genre. The money is still coming in. The least Clint could do, it seems, would be to do a picture with Sophia. Those two would be dynamite together.

Sophia's English Teacher

From: HOLLYWOOD IS A FOUR LETTER TOWN

by James Bacon

Sophia Loren today speaks English like a British duchess, but there was time when she had Frank Sinatra as teacher and she spoke English that would have made George Burns blush.

I met Sophia when she first arrived in this country on a polar prop flight that took twenty-seven hours to make it from Europe. As an opening remark, I asked her how the flight was.

"It was a fucking gas," said Sophia.

Then one day after she had been here awhile, I heard her say to Carlo Ponti, later to become her husband: "Hey, Carlo, how's your cock?"

She would deliver these four-letter words with such innocence that you could see immediately that she didn't have the slightest idea what they meant. I finally found out why. When she had done THE PRIDE AND THE PASSION in Spain, Sinatra had taken charge of her English lessons. He told her that "fuck" was a form of endearment in the English idiom; that she should use it as much as possible. And "How's your cock" was the same.

I gave Sophia a little English lesson myself and told her she should have taken lessons from Cary Grant instead of the incorrigible Frank.

Jean-Pierre Melville on Gian Maria Volonte

From: MELVILLE ON MELVILLE

Edited by Rui Nogueira

Jean-Pierre Melville: The billion [francs] for LE CERCLE ROUGE was possible because I had Delon, Bourvil and Montand, and because there was a sizeable Italian coproduction interest since I was using an Italian actor Gian Maria Volonte - totally unknown in France, I might add - whom I had in mind to play Vogel after seeing him in Carlo Lizzani's BANDITI A MILANO.

But, if you want me to talk about Gian Maria Volonte, that's a very different story. Because Gian Maria Volonte is an instinctive actor, and he may well be a great stage actor in Italy, he may even be a great Shakespearean actor, but for me he was absolutely impossible in that on a French set, in a film such as I was making, he never at any moment made me feel I was dealing with a professional. He didn't know how to place himself for the lighting - he didn't understand that an inch to the left or to the right wasn't at all the same thing. 'Look at Delon, look at Montand,' I used to tell him, 'see how they position themselves perfectly for the lights, etc, etc.' I also think the fact that he is very involved in politics (he's a Leftist, as he never tires of telling you) did nothing to bring us together. He was very proud of having gone to sit-in at the Odeon during the 'glorious' days of May-June 1968; personally, I did not go to sit-in at the Odeon. It seems, too, that whatever he had a week-end free he flew to Italy to spend it there in what I would call a super-nationalist spirit. I once said to him, 'It's no use dreaming of becoming an international star so long as you continue to pride yourself on being Italian - which is of no consequence, any more than being French is.' But for him everything Italian was marvellous and wonderful, and everything French was ridiculous. I remember one day we were setting up a back-projection scene and he was smiling to himself. I asked him why, and he said, 'Because... you've seen BANDITI A MILANO? There are no back projections in BANDITI A MILANO. Everything was shot directly from a car.' 'Really,' I said, 'And did you have night scenes like this? You were inside a car filming the action going on outside at night?' 'Well, no,' he said, and it seemed to sink in that we weren't using back projection just to amuse him. He's a strange character. Very wearying. I promise you I won't be making any more films with Gian Maria Volonte.

Jayne ridicules herself out of the business.

From: MADE IN HOLLYWOOD

by James Bacon

I was in on the birth of the most publicity-minded of all Hollywood personalities - the late Jayne Mansfield. I was even responsible for getting her started.

I was sitting all alone at my desk in the AP office on a day before Christmas in the early fifties. All of a sudden, I felt a warm kiss on the back of my neck. It felt strange in the all-male newsroom.

Looking up, I gazed on a beautiful young blonde, twenty-one at most, with the most beautiful pair of breasts I had ever seen. They were falling out of her low-cut dress. Then she bent over and gave me a warm kiss on the lips. I kept my eyes open because I couldn't take them off those gorgeous breasts.

"Here's a present from Jim Byron," she said, and wiggled out the door.

Byron was an old friend, the press agent for Ciro's nightclub on the Sunset Strip. I called him immediately and asked who in thehell that girl was.

"Would you believe," said Jim,"this girl walked in my office off the Strip and said she was a coed at UCLA and wanted to be a movie star. I had your present on my desk so I told her to deliver it to you and I'd get your reaction. What can I do with her?"

I had on my desk at the time an airplane ticket to Silver Springs, Florida, where RKO was about to premiere a new Jane Russell movie called UNDERWATER. I couldn't make the trip and told Byron I would call Nat James at RKO and also Howard Hughes, who owned the studio and who was a great tit man.

If they agreed, Jayne could take my seat on the flight. I called Howard first. He was much easier to get on the phone in those days. After I described Jayne, he agreed on the spot.

As a matter of formality, I called Nat, the publicity man in charge of the junket, and told him what Hughes had said.

Jayne was on the flight. The other girls who went along were Debbie Reynolds, Mala Powers, and Lori Nelson, all beautiful but none with the assets that Jayne had.

Jane Russell, the star of the picture, was delayed a few days in New York. She couldn't have cared less for cheesecake shots at this stage of her career.

So, for the photographers, Jayne had a wide-open field and she handled it like O.J. Simpson. She wore a bikini that was twenty years ahead of its time and when all the photographers were focused, a strap conveniently broke. And before long, the magazines and newspapers were filled with pictures of Jayne Mansfield, a new international star who had yet to be even interviewed for a movie. Unfortunately for Jayne, that heady debut caused her to eventually ridicule herself out of the business.

I first noticed this happening at the famous reception for Sophia Loren when the glamorous Italian star made her first visit to this country. Sophia, full-bosomed, presented a threat to Jayne. Naturally, the photographers all wanted to get shots of the sexy Italian import. This infuriated Jayne, who acted as one possessed.

Every time the photographers shot the seated Sophia at her table at Romanoff's, Jayne would rush over and lean over her with her big breasts almost drooping on Sophia's shoulder. It resulted in one of the most remarkable pictures ever taken, with Sophia peering down into Jayne's hugh mammaries.

Toward the end of her tragic life, Jayne could get little work but opening supermarkets and shopping centers. But she was no dummy; her fee was never less than $5,000 a shot.

I was very fond of Jayne because, basically, she was a lovable girl. Often I would try to advise her but she would never listen.

She had a talent to make it big even without publicity, but you could never make her believe it. Only thing I ever talked her out of was when she decorated her big honeymoon mansion on Sunset Boulevard. She wanted everything heart-shaped - the bed, the bathtubs, lighting fixtures, even the toilet seats.

I told her the toilet seats wouldn't work.

"Why?" she pouted.

"Because you haven't got a heart-shaped ass," I said.

All the toilet seats remained oval.

A birth certificate for Anthony Quinn

From: MADE IN HOLLYWOOD

by James Bacon

Tony Quinn the Irishman

Somehow you don't think of Anthony Quinn as half-Irish, even though Quinn is his real name. But he is.

Amazingly, Tony has more believers in Ireland than he does south of the border.

"I once went over to Cork to visit my grandfather's birthplace and I was received royally as an Irishman. I also found out I looked Irish. There's lots of Irishmen who look like me."

There's a historic reason for that. When the English fleet sunk the Spanish Armada back in the time of Queen Elizabeth, the Spanish sailors who escaped to the Irish shore were hid by the Catholic Irish. Eventually they married the Celtic colleens and that's why you have Spanish-sounding names in the West of Ireland (Costello is a prime example). It's also the origin of the term Black Irish.

In Mexico, the land of his birth, Tony always got the pocho treatment, the derogatory term for Mexicans who are gringoized.

"When I made a picture down in Durango, the people accused me ot being born in America - and called me a phony Mexican. Finally, the governor of Chihuahua happened to visit the set. He said he always admired me on the screen and asked if there was anything he could do for me.

"I said: 'Yes, for God's sake, get me a birth certificate.' I was born in Chihuahua during the Revolution and no one had time for recording births in those days.

"The governor went back home and talked with people who remembered my Mexican mother and my Irish father and when I was born.

"So, at age fifty-one, I was issued a birth certificate. If he hadn't gotten it for me, I know I could have gotten one in Cork that would have made me Irish."

Tony is the hardest-working actor I know. He's always working, so much so that he often is in competition with himself on the screen. He's also one of the best. He holds the record of winning an Oscar for the smallest role - little more than a big part. In LUST FOR LIFE, the story of Vincent Van Gogh, Tony was only on the screen for seven minutes, but he made that brief stint pay off with an Academy Award for best supporting actor.

No one gets deeper in the part than Tony. We have been friends for thirty years, but when I visited him in Rome during SHOES OF THE FISHERMAN, in which he played the Pope, he kept calling me "My son," even in his dressing room.

I'll never forget the first day I walked on that set at Cinecitta studios outside Rome. It was a replica of the Pope's balcony in the Vatican and Tony was imparting a pontifical blessing on the imaginary throng below in St. Peter's piazza.

Except for one thing - the people below were Italian grips and studio laborers on the soundstage. Tony was so convincing that the devout among them were crossing themselves, forgetting they were looking at a Mexican-Irish actor and not Pope John.

Few people know that Tony was a special protege of John Barrymore in that great actor's last days in Hollywood. Tony was so impressed with Barrymore that he once tried to match him drink for drink one night.

If you think that the Barrymore-Quinn relationship is something dreamed up by me, read Gene Fowler's classic THE MINUTES OF THE LAST MEETING and you'll find Tony's name in there with Barrymore, W.C. Fields, and the rest.

"I was only nineteen at the time and I survived because of my youth," says Tony.

Despite Barrymore's keen perception of Tony's talent, he played mostly Indians or Latin gigolos in his early days. Even the fact that he was Cecil B. DeMille's son-in-law then didn't help matters much. C.B. cast him as an Indian in THE PLAINSMAN.

Tony was bursting with pride and ambition in those days. One day on location during the lunch break, C.B. invited his son-in-law to lunch with him privately in the great director's tent.

The next day, a columnist wrote: "Anthony Quinn is too big to eat with the other actors on the location of THE PLAINSMAN, he eats his meals with C.B. DeMille himself."

For some strange reason this item upset Tony enormously. He began avoiding DeMille and eventually it led to an estrangement between the actor and his father-in-law.

Worse, in the early days of television, during the heyday of Hopalong Cassidy and Davy Crockett, Tony was offered a $1 million dollar contract to do an Indian series on TV. He could have used the money but he turned it down.

"The sons of bitches wanted me to play a Mohawk and keep my head permanently shaved, Mohawk-style. Worse, the contract stipulated that I could never appear in public unless me, my wife, and children appeared as the last of the Mohicans."

That offer, from a breakfast cereal company, drove Tony to Europe, where he became one of the all-time great actors.

Tony is the only person I know who has his footprints in the forecourt of Grauman's Chinese theater - the same theater where once he was turned down for a job as usher.

"The guy who was hiring ushers said I looked too Mexican to work in a Chinese theater."

Ealing Studios attempted to kill Alec Guinness

From: MY NAME ESCAPES ME

by Alec Guinness

Monday 6 May (1996)

THE LAVENDER HILL MOB is being shown on TV this evening but I won't be watching it. (If only I had received 1 [pound] each time one of the Ealing comedies was shown I would be a rich man. My contract didn't cover mechanical reproduction.) It was a good film, I think; well over forty years old now and mercifully it only lasted an hour and a half. Stanley Holloway and I got on exceedingly well and became good friends. He was always genial, easy-going and meticulously professional.

Ealing Studios never succeeded in killing me in spite of some quite good tries, the first of which was during the making of LAVENDER HILL. Rehearsing a brief scene in which Stanley and I were required to escape from the top of the Eiffel Tower, the director (Charles Crichton) said, 'Alec, there is a trap door over there - where it says Workmen Only - I'd like you to run to it, open it and start running down the spiral staircase. Stanley will follow.' So I did as asked. A very dizzying sight to the ground greeted me. But I completed half a spiral before I noticed that three feet in front of me the steps suddenly ceased - broken off. I sat down promptly where I was and cautiously started to shift myself back to the top, warning Stanley to get out of the way.

'What the hell are you doing?' the director yelled. 'Down! Further down!'

'Further down is eternity,' I called back.

Stanley and I regained the panoramic view of Paris pale and shaking. No one had checked up on the staircase and no one apologized; that wasn't Ealing policy.

Showering in Almeria

From: MY NAME ESCAPES ME

by Alec Guinness

Monday 19 February (1996)

This morning Matthew telephoned, having just got back from his skiing holiday in Bulgaria. He seems to have enjoyed it but found the meals fairly grim. He said his chalet was pleasant enough but he was puzzled by the showerbath, the floor of which was slanted so that water didn't go down the plug but sloshed into the bathroom. It sounds to me as if the Bulgarians have picked up a few tips from the Spanish. Tony Quayle and I, when filming LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, rented a wretched little guncrack house in Almeria for a few weeks. The only way of making the shower work was to sit on the loo, and the only chance of flushing the loo was to turn on the hot tap in the shower. The view from the front of the house was of mangy dogs rutting on a rubbish dump. I am told Almeria has greatly improved in recent years but I'm not going back.