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At MGM I wrote
The Catered Affair
for Sam as well as
I Accuse!
about the Dreyfus case directed by José Ferrer who also played Dreyfus. Halfway through the editing Eddie Mannix, speaking for the front office, asked Ferrer to cut any references to Jews. This was not easy to do in a film about anti-Semitism. Finally, the picture was not too bad but it is still mysteriously banned in France. When MGM bought the Elstree Studios in London I wrote
The Scapegoat
starring Alec Guinness and directed by the brilliant Robert Hamer who had written and directed
Kind Hearts and Coronets
. Unfortunately Robert had also taken seriously to drink; otherwise I would have withdrawn and fought for him to write as well as direct the script, a Daphne Du Maurier romance. By then my curiosity about the studio system had waned as had the studios themselves. But I was still curious about film acting.

When I was on leave from the army hospital, I was offered a screen test at RKO to play one of Rosalind Russell’s sons. Since I was writing my first novel in the hospital, I said no. But for someone brought up in the Golden Age of movies I sometimes wondered what if…?

TWENTY-SIX

Suddenly, there was Fred. “I make film about Roma. I want you and Sordi and Magnani and Mastroianni.” I asked
why
? This was Fred’s least favorite word. He was a droll and inventive liar and his verbal arabesques were for the most part entirely wasted on flatfooted showbiz interviewers. He blinked his eyes as if in thought:
Why?
We were in the restaurant of the Grand Hotel where he would establish himself at a special table set in what looked to be an opera box. “Because,” he said, “you all live in Rome and you are all from outside.” I laughed: “Magnani is Rome.” He realized his mistake. He waved his hands. “She is from everywhere. Like the sun. The moon. The…I have one question I will ask each of you who can live
any
where: Why you live in Roma?”

My scene was shot in a small square off Via dei Coronari…It was a freezing February night but we were all dressed in summer clothes, pretending it was the August Trastevere festival of
Noi Antri
. Tables and benches were scattered around the square. Huge plastic fish were on display in tubs. Howard and I sat at a table with three or four American friends. I was fascinated to find that Fred worked much the way Picasso did in the documentary where he paints on a sheet of glass while the camera shoots from under the table so that we can see what he is painting, as he erases, transforms, restructures. Plates of food kept arriving. Wine bottles. More plastic fish. Some tourists sit at a table opposite us. Fred directed his cameraman as he kept filling in the background with people, food, decorations. When
Fellini’s Roma
was released in 1972 (Fred’s name was part of the title), he was also ready by then to tell the world why he had picked his four stars. “I pick Mastroianni because he is so lazy, so typical. Alberto Sordi because he is so cruel.” An odd characterization: Sordi was a superb comic actor whom one did not associate with cruelty but then, at the core of comedy, there is indeed a level of sharp observation that the ones observed might easily regard as cruel. “I chose Anna Magnani because she is Anna and this is Roma. Vidal because he is typical of a certain Anglo who comes to Roma and goes native.” As I never spoke Italian properly, much less Roman dialect, and my days were spent in a library researching the fourth century
AD
, I was about as little “gone native” as it was possible to be but Fred clung to his first images of people. He wanted us all to improvise our dialogue on why we were living in Rome. I like improvising and since Fred never listened, particularly to English, that part was easy. I said something about a world dying of overpopulation and the poisoning of the environment, two new concepts for most Italians that year (one journalist even wrote how ridiculous I was to speak of these matters when he had never seen so much food in the shops). Then Fred and I had a row. I insisted on dubbing my own voice in English, French, and Italian (yes, there was, yet again, no direct sound). Fred was hurt. “Gorino, you no trust me?” I said, no, I did not: he was quite capable of inventing
anything
he wanted for me to say in three languages and I’d be duly quoted forever. Finally, he agreed. As I went into a fourth or fifth version of a speech that ended with “What better place to observe the end of the world than in a city that calls itself eternal?,” at that moment what sounded like an atomic bomb went off behind me. I turned to see four magnificent white horses drawing a large wooden wagon. The clatter of their hooves filled the square. Like Picasso, Fred had found his background a bit empty; hence, the horses and the wagon.

It is 1973 and I am playing myself in
Fellini’s Roma
. Between takes Fred, as I called him (he called me Gorino), would sit beside me at an outdoor table on a freezing cold Roman night, which we were pretending was a hot evening in August during the Trastevere festival of
Noi Antri
. I wear light August clothes; Fred is bundled up in overcoat and hat, with a heater just back of his chair. I shivered through the scene, actually shot in the Via dei Coronari.

It was a long night. In the end I survived and the horses ended on the cutting-room floor. Some months later I was summoned to a studio to dub my voice. On a large screen there was my scene. Fred looked contented. Since he had lost the soundtrack of the original scene, nothing but odd noises could be heard on the screen. I asked, “Don’t you have a transcript of what was said?” Fred winked. “No, Gorino. We just make up something else.” For two hours I sat trying to match words to my own lips on the screen. Fred was quietly triumphant at this victory in his war against direct sound. Finally I cobbled together three sets of words in English, French, and Italian. Then we started to record. There was a white ball that bounced along the top of the screen and when it stopped you stopped speaking, your dialogue presumably in place. I got through the French and the English easily, but Italian is longer than English and after the ball had stopped I was still speaking—
outside
the scene. Fred was gazing beatifically out the window as I struggled to keep up with the ball. After the third ruined take, I said, “You are considered the greatest living film director, so give me some direction. How do I end this speech with the bouncing ball?”

“Oh,
is
there trouble?” His eyes were wide with innocent concern. “Oh, is so
easy
. Before you talk, you take deep breath.” I did and the shot was perfect, concluding my career as a screen actor in Italy.

The logo of the novel
Myra Breckinridge
was a giant statue of a Las Vegas showgirl, which twirled in front of the Chateau Marmont hotel on Sunset Boulevard. Jim Moran, a publicist who once hid a needle in a haystack, drove the statue across America presenting it to a dozen governors who each saw fit not to accept.

A researcher notes that I began writing
Myra Breckinridge
in June 1965. I didn’t remember the date but I recall the day vividly. Howard and I had pretty much finished fixing up our Rome flat. I had a pile of lined yellow legal pads on my writing table which was opposite my bed. Across from the table a French door opened onto the terrace that overlooked the Largo Argentina—a great square with several Roman temples beneath the pavement’s level as well as a large colony of cats that flourished until the Rome city government complained that they were sick and spreading disease. The fact that they spread diseases that only
they
were subject to cut no ice with the city fathers and so, to the rage of a number of old Roman ladies who regularly fed the cats, they would be carted away. I did state, publicly, that as the cat was sacred to the goddess Isis whose temple had been here, to harm them was sacrilege. Of course, in time another cat generation settled into the ruins. Meanwhile, the grateful Isis smiled upon me. The day I started
Myra Breckinridge
there was a new silver moon just risen over the Vatican to the west of the apartment, a sign for me of good luck; the moon not the Vatican. Curiously, when I finished the first longhand draft, there was again a new moon. One month had passed. Also, as I was writing just now about the cats of Isis, I got a call from Italy that our thirteen-year-old cat has just died of a liver problem; only his tortoiseshell kid brother survives of all those dogs and cats that for half a century accompanied Howard and me down the years. R.I.P.

Although when I set a novel in history I do a great deal of note-taking from the necessary records, when I start an entirely invented book like
Myra
I seldom start with anything more than a sentence that has taken possession of me. In this case “I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man may possess; clad only in garter belt and one dress shield…” The voice roared on. Who was she? I could only find out if I kept on writing. She was obsessed by Hollywood movies. That was soon clear. No matter how kitsch a film she could swiftly penetrate its mystical magical marshmallow core. Even so, it was not until I was halfway through the story that I realized she had been a male film critic who had changed his sex; Myron had become Myra. Why? I wrote on, laughing.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Politics now interrupts my return in memory to that happy time in Rome. So I must leave
Myra Breckinridge
, all aroar on her lined yellow pages, while I ponder the film that I saw last night;
The Deal
stars David Morrissey as the real-life British labor politician Gordon Brown, currently chancellor of the exchequer. The deal is the one allegedly made between him and Tony Blair—two ambitious young politicians—before the election of 1997 that would make one of them prime minister with the understanding that after one or two terms he would step aside and let the other take his place. Though British journalists discuss “the deal” as though they themselves had been witnesses to it, the film looks to be accurate, unlike most American attempts at political dramas of this sort. In the matter of the deal itself, the film shows the studied ambivalence of Tony Blair as he sets forth from Glamis, armed only with a toothy rictus smile and bright vulpine stare; in a telling scene with Brown, he does not quite admit that there ever was such an agreement other than he had felt that Brown was their party’s
natural
leader: unfortunately, too many others preferred Blair’s easy managerial style to Brown’s old-fashioned seriousness, so he had no choice…At the time of the late election which won Labour a third term, a unique event in that party’s history, Brown was not only the party’s favorite but was also admired for the contribution his chancellorship had made to the United Kingdom’s economic prosperity; while the prime minister, thanks to his passion for the Bushite illegal wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, had appalled many Britons who thought Blair should have stepped aside for the less tarnished Brown; also, Blair was generally believed to have lied to the nation when he maintained that his own attorney general had assured him that his decision to join Bush in the preemptive war on Iraq was legally sound when it was plainly not, according to the attorney general’s actual memo as finally revealed.

Back in 1997 when the BBC invited me to the United Kingdom to cover the election, I went, first, to each party’s initial announcement that it would fight the coming election for control of the House of Commons. The Labour Party met in a handsome eighteenth-century hall. TV cameras were everywhere; print journalists, too. We were led into a sort of back room where on a low dais, faced by rows of folding chairs, sat Tony Blair and his Shadow Cabinet. I sat at the center of the first row a yard away from the Shadow Home Secretary David Blunkett, a blind man with a large black seeing-eye dog. The dog and I made immediate eye contact. The dog was an old hand at political meetings. He was also bored, chin resting on outstretched front paws; he gave me a friendly yawn. I yawned back. He shut his eyes. Almost directly across from me was Blair, looking smaller than life. According to the press his handlers had ordered him to ration his tic-like smile. So, solemnly, tight-lipped, he stared, one by one, at the TV cameras all around the room. But, apparently, my yawn to the dog had set off a Pavlovian response in Blair who managed three yawns in a row with mouth firmly shut, forcing air uncomfortably through his nose and suggesting to me that he has a deviated septum. Back of him, to his right, was Gordon Brown darkly morose as he endured the first phase of the deal: the party leadership of Tony Blair and Labour’s almost certain majority in the next Parliament followed, presumably, by the premiership of the other dealer.

As I recall, Blair took questions from the journalists, who raised their hands; I raised mine, too, but he only took questions from parliamentary journalists whom he already knew. The questions were perhaps more interesting to a foreigner than the answers which were intricately banal. Yet when a mildly sharp question was asked, the ghost of the rictus smile, like a negative undergoing slow exposure, would appear and Blair would say, gently, “Trust me!” That was that. But interesting, even dramatic changes were being made that day. If I had inquired more deeply, I might have unearthed the deal; in itself of no particular interest except to the dealers; yet, politically, Blair versus Brown represented the end of the old class-based party and the rise of a new managerial apparatus that represents administrative numbers rather than any specific class interest.

After Blair and Labour won in 1997, the journalist-politician Roy Hattersley wrote that Blair had “taken the politics out of politics”: he’d made
New
Labour out of Labour. Once elected, Blair called in Hattersley for a chat. Blair was sunny. “I didn’t, as you wrote, take the politics out of politics, but I was one of the first to notice that politics had already been taken out of politics.” Why? Because a majority of the voters now believe that they are middle class. Since this is demonstrably untrue (today many “poor” Americans think of themselves as in the top percentiles of income), Blair’s analysis is as applicable to the United States as it is to the United Kingdom. Particularly when he made the point that in political systems like ours you cannot have a real political party without a class base. Old Labour was real; it was made up of real working people. While FDR’s Democratic Party coalition lasted triumphantly until his heir Lyndon Johnson did the one saintly thing of his checkered political career and intoned: “We shall overcome,” knowing, as he said to friends at the time, that by enfranchising African American voters he had lost the
white
Southern vote to the Republican Party—perhaps for all time. FDR’s party of northern city machines plus organized labor plus repressed African Americans in the South was unbeatable for decades until Johnson—well, no good deed, et cetera.

The U.K. has no bloc of potential power quite like the African subjects of the old Confederacy. Even so, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans can now claim a class basis for their incoherent factions, only a possible collision between Bush imperialists and Dean anti-imperialists. So, as things fall apart, only the center appears to hold…barely. Good luck, Britannia. Good luck, Uncle Sam.