Yestermorrow Page 9

  If he had been born in 1900 instead of 1920, Fellini could have conceived and directed such films as Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera, whose villainous hero Erik is first cousin to the lost Fellini souls who wander out of sunlit midnights into moonlit noons. All three characters in La Strada, the parts written for Giulietta Massina, Richard Basehart and Anthony Quinn, are borrowed from Quasimodo’s flesh, reformed, made more palatable, but still destined to run on unseen tracks to destroy or be destroyed. Under the clown’s makeup of Gelsomina, or under Erik’s Phantom of the Opera mask, is the death’s head. Chaplinesque lady or monster pursued, we weep for both as they are driven to their graves.

  In Fellini’s Films, the authors put his entire cartoon-oriented, vaudeville-circus-carnival-church-Roman-sweatbath mythology on full display.

  His early imagination was concussed and formed in silent theaters by rambunctious Tramps and Cabinets that birthed Caligaris. Fellini as a young man was a writer of photo-comic strips for Italian newspapers. His becoming a director reminds one of a scene in Modern Times. In it, the innocent Chaplin, picking up a red flag fallen off the rear of a truck, suddenly discovers that a mob has rounded the corner behind him. He finds himself inadvertently heading a revolutionary parade. So, one morning 27 years ago, Fellini woke to find a director missing and himself asked to fill the empty shoes.

  The rest is truly a history of filmmaking sieved through his mind onto the screen, into this book.

  There is more of The Gold Rush and The Circus in his films than the post World War II Italian classics Open City, Shoeshine, or The Bicycle Thief.

  He would have been at home with Fatty Arbuckle, Marie Dressler, Wally Berry, Ben Turpin, Rudolph Valentino, John Barrymore or Mickey Mouse—oversized cardboard-cutout grotesques, all of them, or outright cartoons.

  Fellini’s bent has always been the outrageous contained, the colossal ego in miniature surroundings, the Milquetoast hero/heroine, walking like Chaplin, cringing like Langdon, occasionally as brave as Harold Lloyd, and the wagon train surrounded in a wilderness of baroque/rococo monsters.

  Chaplin, threatened by the immense avalanche of meat that was Mack Swain, was hardly different from Fellini’s clown-wife floating down Rome’s Via Veneto at midnight amidst cannibal movie-starlet piranhas and superproducer crocodiles with 40-foot-wide smiles.

  To repeat: When Charles Chaplin grew old, he changed himself to Federico Fellini. The aging comedian, whose comedies had become more serious and less funny and less successful, found the right receptacle and passed his soul on to the young Italian.

  Fellini as disciple, doppelganger Tramp, moves down the same road Chaplin started off on in 1912. That road extends out of silent-film America, across the world and down the boot of Italy. Somewhere along the line The Tramp becomes Fellini’s actors on an identical road in Variety Lights, I Vitelloni, La Strada, and Amarcord. Along the way The Tramp changes sex, and becomes Fellini’s wife.

  This book is full of such magical pictures and magical confrontations as a small boy stunned by an encounter with a horned beast on a misty road; Cabiria onstage in a cheap theater where a fourth-rate hypnotist enchants her so she becomes beautiful and recounts a lost childhood; the appearance as if by miracle of a peacock in a town square on a snowy day in winter when the town needs that tail with all its incredible eyes to stare upon its desolation.

  This book proves that Fellini is a religion unto himself. He snorts at the church’s dubious miracles and goes forth in the world to find the quiet miracles he makes his own, and ours, forever.

  His imagination, perfect as well as flawed, is that of a saint, if we remember that the greatest saints were taken with fits, starts and fevers. They enjoyed prophecies, illuminations, insanities and visions on wider screens than we have since invented. Fellini, like them, seems to have wandered in his own wilderness and wakened 40 days later, temperature normal, meanwhile having changed himself and the world.

  This collection of photos, then, might well be retitled the Temptations of St. Federico, or Fellini’s Gardens of Terror and Delight. The trouble is, Fellini disbelieves his sainthood but suffers his visions nevertheless. He is the novelist-author-cartoonist suffering like Job, playing carpenter as the Boy Christ.

  He is the innocent child on the rim of a wilderness of city, seeing wildflowers between the tractors and the construction beams.

  And instantly he is the child become disillusioned man, seeing only struts and girders, lost in that city, seeking his younger self, hoping that the boy, re-found, can show him thistle seeds on the fresh wind. Spring come again to save mankind, himself and sanity.

  If Shakespeare invented Freud (and he did, he did!) then surely Fellini reinvented his younger self, his dreams, and us and ours along with it.

  Here comes the rub. In recent years, not necessarily visible in this book but brutally apparent in the projected films, Fellini has been at war with himself.

  He has allowed the disillusioned doubter, the middle-aged cynic (which is only a post-puberty stance prolonged to excess) to win out over the boy. Hence, many of his films have become all gargoyle and no acolyte.

  Can Fellini run back on his own time track, regain that lost innocence, to some degree at least, and keep it? Or is he doomed to wander the earth like the Mastroianni character in 8½, haunted by ghosts and guilts, which will not be exorcised by trapping them on film and rerunning their terrors again and again? Where is Fellini’s catharsis, or do the old rules still apply? Nietzsche said that we have our Arts so we won’t die of Truth, but does Fellini listen or, listening, believe?

  Even as the older self must contain and illuminate the young without smothering it, so the younger self must blood and energize the intellect of the full-grown man. But if that older mind is tired by cynicism, the blood is poisoned and the child that runs the gamut from heart to head and back again is hamstrung in midstride. Fellini seems almost to have doubted himself out of existence, helped by those false friends we all find surrounding us, using up the air we need to breathe. Whether he knows it or not, Fellini is mobbed-in by such friends who are the dumb enemies of true self. Mass firings are the answer. Failed imaginations and failed wills are not proper company. The sooner Fellini gets back out on that road, long as it is, sad as it is, funny as it is, the sooner his films will breathe again. He will give up waltzing with empty mechanical dolls, as does Casanova in the dire ending of Fellini’s film, and dance with himself. There could be no better, truer, livelier companion.

  The road is waiting. The boy is there on the edge of the city, the best part of Fellini’s self. We can only beg the great Federico to listen and hope that the boy yells loud enough.

  While we are waiting and the finale is a long way off, and many films ache to be finished and born, there is this picture book, photographed from the walls and ceilings inside Fellini’s magic-lantern head. It is Halloween and darkness. It is the New Year of Christmas. It is a true Easter and its certain death and its promise of rebirth. It is being sure you will die at midnight and wake the next morn to find that you have another chance.

  It is Fellini’s Films. And it is beautiful.

  1977

  This article, read by Fellini, caused him to invite R.B. to Rome.

  THE HIPBONE OF ABRAHAM L.

  I don’t think anyone else in the country has what I have in my basement office.

  The hipbone of Abraham Lincoln.

  We’ll come back to the hipbone in a moment. First…

  On the Bob Hope Radio Show in 1938 I heard Jerry Colonna shout as follows:

  “Hello, Hope! We’re building a bridge. And starting at the top.”

  “Impossible, Colonna!”

  “Alright, boys, tear it down!”

  Which about describes the artists, architects, blueprinters, builders, and the dreamers of Disneyland, Disney World, and EPCOT, all located at WDI, Walt Disney Imagineering, in Glendale, California.

  The gentlemen golfers who build bridges, starting at the top.


  Long before I met them, I had defended their dream. Having found from meteorologists the location of the best California weather, they built near Anaheim. When Eastern critics laughed at their fantasy land that would soon sink into the earth, I fired back. My first visit to Disneyland had been with Captain Bligh, Charles Laughton, who plowed through the crowds, cresting the waves of people to take over the Jungle Ride boat and deliver me to joy. Anything, I said, that was good enough for Captain Bligh, was good enough for me.

  So, the Disney gentlemen saw me coming a long time before I arrived. But, finally, how did I get to meet these master Imagineers, who painted futures in the middle of the air and then ran to build a foundation under them?

  I met them through Walt Disney, who came to me gift wrapped one week before Christmas 1964. Crossing a crowded Beverly Hills department store, I saw a man bearing down on me, his chin tucked over an armload of presents.

  My God, I thought, it’s my hero.

  “Mr. Disney?” I asked, and told him my name.

  “I know your books,” said Walt.

  “Thank God,” I said.

  “Why?” asked Walt.

  “Because,” I said, “some day I’d like to take you to lunch.”

  “Tomorrow?” asked Walt.

  Not next week or next year. But—dear Lord!—tomorrow!

  Before lunch the next day, Walt’s secretary warned me: “One hour, from twelve to one. Then—git!”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said and went in to sit with Walt for a lunch of soup and sandwiches served on a card table.

  “Nothing has to die,” said Walt.

  He said this not as prophecy but practical fact.

  He was, in fact, speaking on some future blueprints for Walt Disney World, the architectural clone, one-size larger, of Disneyland. And far off in the future, EPCOT Center, in Florida.

  We were commiserating with each other over the fact that in the history of nations, World’s Fairs were built one year, to be torn down the next. Dumb, stupid, ridiculous were some of the terms we tossed back and forth. Why not, we asked in our verbal badminton game, build a fair and let it stand forever? And, on occasion, tear off the wallpaper inside and repair with new fancies, notions, concepts, ideas, dreams?

  At one o’clock that afternoon, I leaped to my feet, shook Walt’s hand, rushed for the door on cue. “Wait!” Walt said. “I have something to show you.”

  He hustled me out the door to examine the latest robot hippo, some spare-part mock-ups for the future Pirates of the Caribbean, and the plans for a PeopleMover that could one day solve big city traffics.

  Breathless, we staggered back to Walt’s office at three in the afternoon. Walt’s secretary glared at me, tapping her watch. I pointed at Walt and cried: “He did it!”

  And indeed he had. If Walt saw from your face that you truly lit up about one of his wildest notions, you were lost and gone on the grand tour, always winding up at Disney Imagineering.

  Disney Imagineering’s artists thrive and pomegranate-seed explode inside a nondescript Glendale building that looks as if it might house a thousand endless noon board meetings. There is no sign out front to indicate that at Christmas and Easter, here hides a madhouse of costumes and ambulatory self-wrapped gifts.

  No hint that, at Halloween, Imagineering becomes a ghost manufactory, a giant Ouija board that summons up ghouls, skeletons, a mirror with a grotesque mask frozen in it that runs about telling folks they “are not the fairest of them all,” while Maleficent the Dragon inflates herself to tower above the outside parking lot.

  Who are the maniacs in charge of this madhouse? John Hench, sent by Disney to study at the Sorbonne in 1939, and the nearest thing to Walt himself. Beyond eighty, John, as he chats with the inhabitants of this millrace, scribble-sketches blueprints and critters with a fine-artist’s hand.

  Marty Sklar, the quietest of maniacs, keeps Imagineering off the rails but on the tracks. Hired at age twenty-one, while editor of the UCLA Daily Bruin, Marty remembers that Disney gave him—a raw, untrained reporter—a chance to edit a Disneyland newspaper the month before Disneyland opened, 33 years ago. On Walt’s behalf, he gives other young people a chance to jump off cliffs and build their wings on the way down, at Imagineering.

  Between these two, Disney Imagineering has hired some fairly improbable, as I mentioned before, gentlemen golfers, to tee off mind-grenades instead of golf balls.

  Item: Tony Baxter, whose career was popping popcorn at Disneyland in his spare time, built a working model of a gravity-fall train. This 3-D calling card gained him the Imagineering job of creating the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad that roars down mountain tracks at Disney’s theme parks. Its twin will soon be built at Euro-Disney, and the chief designer for this new Magic Kingdom will be… Tony Baxter.

  Item: Harper Goff, lover and collector of miniature model railroads. Walt Disney and Goff met in a London railroad-model toy store and saw the glazed stare of an amateur locomotive fiend in each other’s faces. Goff wound up helping art sketch-design the Adventureland Jungle Cruise and making sure Disneyland’s locomotives ran on time.

  Future item: Tom Scherman. The young man who was so enamored of Jules Verne that he secretly converted his Hollywood apartment into a clone of Captain Nemo’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea submarine with portholes, periscope, and seashell telephones. His landlady, unaware of the transformation, blundered into the apartment one day and, stunned, threw Scherman out and dismantled the submarine. Scherman wound up with Disney Imagineering, building Nautilus submersibles and dreaming up The Jules Verne Discovery World.

  And so it went and so it goes.

  Sklar and Hench, then, are curators of a vast and vital storage hall of history, a living museum, a World’s Fair unto itself.

  In sum, the Renaissance did not die, it just hid out at Imagineering Inc. You need but ask for Sleeping Beauty’s castle, the turrets of Pierrefonds, Mad Ludwig’s towers, or touches of Vaux Le Vecomte. So summoned, they will sprout in a Glendale back lot to be truck-transited down freeways to Anaheim, Orlando or across the ocean airs to Japan.

  Let me recount a telephone episode of a few years back.

  An editor for the French magazine Nouvel Observateur called from Paris. “Monsieur Bradbury,” she said, “it has been announced, Disneyland comes to France. How do you feel about this? All those toys and games!”

  “My dear young woman,” I said. “You don’t understand. It is not toys and games. It is France’s gift of itself to itself!”

  “What, what?” the lady cried.

  “Good grief,” I said, “don’t you know how much Walt loved France and Paris and your gardens and flowers, and your twenty thousand restaurants and art museums and Carcassonne and Chantilly and Chambord and how he came to visit you year after year and looked around at the United States and said, ‘I will bring all this to my country, one way or another?’ And the gardens were planted and thousands of tables, chairs, and umbrellas were placed where visitors might sit and people-watch, and the castles arose and one was Disneyland and the other Walt Disney World.

  “A final touch, my dear young lady. In the past few years, visiting France, I have fallen in love with the work of the French architect Viollet-le-Duc, who rebuilt Pierrefonds, Carcassonne, part of Notre Dame de Paris, and who designed and placed the stone gargoyles up there in the wind and rain. Returning to Disneyland last year, I saw a spire on the side of Sleeping Beauty’s castle, a duplicate of the convoluted and beauteous spire Viollet-le-Duc raised atop Notre Dame one hundred years ago. I called John Hench out at Imagineering, ‘John,’ I said, ‘how long has Viollet-le-Duc’s spire been on the side of Sleeping Beauty’s castle?’ ‘Thirty years,’ said Hench. ‘My God,’ I said, ‘I never noticed before! Who put it there?’ ‘Walt,’ said Hench. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Because he loved it,’ said Hench.

  “Because he loved it.” Something not needed but needed, not necessary but necessary. Costing approximately $100,000. But added to the castle at that time bec
ause Walt wished it to be there. Because of Walt, Viollet-le-Duc lives in America.

  “Oh, Monsieur Bradbury,” cried the lady editor in Paris. “You make me feel so good!”

  “Because,” I replied, “it’s true.”

  What else is true? Besides Euro-Disney, what other wonders have Sklar and Hench summoned up by striking the earth with Walt’s old sketchbook?

  Norway, with its fjords and dragon-headed ships as part of the EPCOT Showcase territory.

  A pulsing heartbeat excursion through the human body in the Wonders of Life adventure at EPCOT Center.

  And the lazarus-like resurrection, out of the California tombs, of Hollywood itself!

  Millions of Japanese camera-hung tourists fastbrake their limousines at Hollywood and Vine each year. Leaping out merrily, they are shocked to be greeted by slimy winos, dilapidated hookers, arthritic dogs, burned-out hot dog stands and homeless vagrants whose arms look fresh from a porcupine fusillade.

  All this being true, do you rebuild Hollywood? Yes!

  But, two-thousand miles away! at the Disney-MGM Studios at Walt Disney World.

  Here stands Grauman’s Chinese, when it first rose to confound the apple-yard architects and cowboy real estate agents of the 1920s. Here lives Hollywood and Vine as it never was but should have been, with real movie stars on each corner. The last time anything like that happened was when Cecil B. DeMille drove his chariots through the intersection, on his way to Galilee. Once, as a child on roller skates, I thought I saw Clark Gable there, flagging a taxi. But it was another country, another time. Disney will rebirth the whole thing. Harlow, Gable and Colbert would feel right at home parading down this boulevard.

  Ironic then, that while the old Hollywood staggers toward a renovation that will maunder on until 2005, Disney’s Tinsel Town, for the same cost, will long since be up and operating.