Mixed Blessings - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 10: Family Politics
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Creed O'Hanlon
"IT'LL LOOK BETTER IN THE EDIT." The American producer, George Englund, used to say this to my father whenever they viewed the rushes of each day's shoot together in the preview theatre at Cinecitta, the film studios just outside Rome. The theatre was small and dim and the smell of stale cigarette smoke and spilled champagne clung to the worn velvet seating.
It was inevitable that someone would turn the book into a film. When Warner Brothers bought the rights to The Shoes of the Fisherman, they saw it as yet another big-budget costume drama, albeit in a contemporary context, with plenty of scope for the large-scale visual set pieces that appealed to audiences of the day, not to mention the sort of scenery-chewing theatrics that offered actors a shot at an Academy Award nomination. As my parents, my younger brothers, Paul and Michael, my younger sister, Melanie, and I set sail for Italy from Sydney aboard the P&O liner Oriana in late 1965, there were already rumours in the Hollywood "trades" of a stellar cast that would eventually include Anthony Quinn, Laurence Olivier, Vittorio De Sica and John Gielgud. No one envied the 45-year-old Englishman, Michael Anderson, whose credits included films such as 1984, Around the World in Eighty Days, All the Fine Young Cannibals and The Quiller Memorandum, when he was named director.
My father was listed as one of three screenwriters on the credits for The Shoes of the Fisherman but his role always seemed to change during the course of what was a notoriously troubled production. Whatever it was meant to be, he was happy at first just to have a reason to take us all to Italy. Since his first visit there in the 1950s, when he lived with my mother and me in the village of Sorrento, just south of Naples, he had regarded the country as "home". It was the closest that I ever came to having a home, too.
It didn't bring me any closer to my father. The disconnect between his public and private personae was so marked for me by then that understanding what he was really about was like trying to decipher some arcane cryptogram without knowing the key.
Living in Rome in the mid-1960s amplified the sense of unreality. Fellini's La Dolce Vita had been released six years before but the decadence and self-indulgence it portrayed still persisted, both in reality and in the public imagination. For tourists, the Trevi Fountain no longer evoked a young, elfin Audrey Hepburn as the runaway princess in Roman Holiday, throwing a coin into its waters to make an innocent wish. Now it was a stoned Anita Ekberg, a twisted sorceress in a low-cut gown, its black velvet split to her thighs, leaning into the sculpted marble to shower under a foaming waterfall before wading into a lubricious embrace with Marcello Mastroianni. The city's real dolce vita might have soured a little, but it still made money for gossip writers and paparazzi covering the old European and American money, the new Middle Eastern money and the Hollywood celebrity– none more famous than Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, who lived in a villa on the outskirts of the city during the filming of Franco Zeffirelli's 1967 version of The Taming of the Shrew – that still found its way to Rome in between party seasons in other parts of the world.
We lived in a modest pink villa, La Villa Rosa, with half a hectare of lawn and a swimming pool. It was one of eight villas within a large walled enclave on a road that ran from the 2,000-year-old black flagstones of the Appian Way to the village of Quarto Miglio, exactly four miles from the ancient walls of the city. For a time, our next-door neighbour was Peter Brook, the theatre director, and among those occupying the other villas were the film director Franco Zeffirelli, the actor Peter Sellers and his then girlfriend, the actress Britt Ekland, and Her Imperial Highness the Princess Soraya, the divorced second wife of the Shah of Iran, who kept live penguins around her swimming pool.
On summer weekends, my parents hosted an open house that was, depending on who turned up, part pool party, part Australian barbecue, part salon and part production conference. The mix of people was always eclectic: lots of actors (John Mills and David Niven became close friends), producers and directors, as well as artists and writers– many of them famous, like the painter Jeffrey Smart and the waspishly erudite Gore Vidal, but just as many not, or not yet (a still unknown Robert Hughes borrowed $50 from my father and never got around to repaying it). There were the mega-rich– Mellons, Vanderbilts, Guggenheims and Firestones – and royalty such as Frederica, the deposed Queen of Greece, not to mention various mad Italian princes whose realms and principalities had disappeared centuries ago. And there were theologians, philosophers, Vatican powerbrokers and priests, the last easy to recognise because they always ignored the strict protocol that required them to wear dog collars and basic black within the Holy City and favoured garishly coloured Hawaiian shirts.
My father presided over it all like a sixteenth-century cardinal. He ensured that glasses were filled and deftly guided conversation into those areas in which he could show off his own scholarship, inside knowledge or personal connections while pretending close attention to what everyone else had to say. He was rarely argumentative, but he was happy to let others be, as long as it was entertaining and inoffensive to everyone present. He was gracious with bores and wallflowers, but they were invited less often.
"Why is that man walking around in circles talking to himself?" my younger brother asked me at one party.
"He's an actor," I told him. "He's learning his lines." It was Laurence Olivier.
"Why does he have to do it in our garden?"
I shrugged. "Father says they're not very bright."
"You're very lucky to have Morris as your father," I would be told often by guests. I learned to be patient with them: after all they weren't really talking about my father, they were talking about the other Morris West, the public figure, the man who worked the crowd. That man was gregarious, charming, kind and entertaining but what he had in common with my father was little more than a name, an address and an occupation. My father was less accessible. He liked to keep to himself. All of us children had to be very quiet whenever he was around: writers were always working, my mother would remind us, even if they weren't sitting at a desk.
WE HAD BEEN LIVING IN ROME FOR ABOUT A YEAR when my father told me that I was not his eldest son. I was thirteen years old and the sudden news broke over me so hard that it felt like I might drown in its undertow. I couldn't breathe. I still don't know whether it was the shock of being told that one of the few certainties I had held throughout my young life was false, or that the frail screen on which my father's other existence was projected – a metaphor that enabled me to imagine that the existence he shared with me was real and the other wasn't – had been torn to reveal that behind it lurked a dark reality that had to do neither with his fame nor me yet another existence, this one obscured by old secrets – or worse, lies.
"What's his name?" I asked.
"Julian," my father said. "You also have an older half-sister called Elizabeth."
The idea that there were two siblings was too much for me to deal with at that moment so I focused on the one that undermined my grip on my sanity – and trust in my father – the most.
"So when will I get to meet him?" I asked.
"Tonight. He's coming with his wife to stay with us for a while."
"Tonight."
"Yes. In a few hours."
"It didn't occur to you to tell me about this sooner? Like, a lot sooner?"
"I'm telling you now. Anyway, it's a decision that your mother and I made together a very long time ago."
I had always known that my father had been married before. I had known, too, that his life before meeting my mother was uncomfortable for him to talk about. He had referred to his own father, Charles, just twice in my life and then only in passing. He never mentioned my grandmother's name and I still don't know it. He definitely never mentioned his other children. In all his press profiles, in his book-jacket biographies, in his entry in Who's Who, I was noted without qualification as his eldest child.
Many years later, I asked my older brother and sister what they had felt about it. In many ways, the three of us had shared the same emotional duality. Our father and the renowned author who shared his name were different people to us. The three of us had been separated from our father at a very young age and had spent much of the rest of our lives trying to make sense of the inconsistencies and contradictions between the man we knew and the man we saw (in their case, from a distance) in public. Unlike me, they found it harder to deal with the exercise of his fame, because they had been edited out of it completely. Like the rest of the children from his second marriage, I had been allowed to make an occasional appearance, if only as a footnote in a biographical entry, or in the background of a couple of seconds of news footage, but my older brother and sister were never mentioned. For a long time, they hadn't existed.
I was angry and resentful towards my older brother as soon as I heard about him and it took a long time for us to reconcile, let alone to be able to accept that we had common ground. We are still wary of each other, perhaps because we have much of our father in us, but the qualities, and faults, we inherited are very different: for instance, Julian has his good looks, his social ease and his erudition. I have his analytical abilities, his inclination to solitude and his ruthlessness. We both have some of the emotional waywardness of our grandfather – in my case, it's full-blown.
My older sister, Elizabeth, who followed in our father's footsteps more closely than any of the siblings, becoming a nun and making a mark in academia and as a writer on religious history and theology, understands both Julian and me and is an important emotional bridge between us. Our conversations are still coloured by moments of deep curiosity: for me about our father's life before he met my mother; for her about the life that came after, the life she got to share with him only after he had returned, at age 64, to Australia.
When our father died in October 1999, I wanted to feel a sense of relief, a dissipation of the burden of the past. Instead, I ended up grieving – as did, I suspect, my older brother and sister, not so much for the man himself as for the chance lost for a little clarity on both sides. If we had never really understood how and why our father made some of the choices he did, he had never understood – or accepted – how they had affected us.
Maybe this is telling: for my older brother and I, Rome was the city in which we had been happiest. It was also the city in which we came closest to seeing the true nature of our father, at his best and worst. Neither of us has returned there since his death. ♦