MY VISCONTI MEMOIR

1 0 4 Y M Y V I S C O N T I M E M O I R G O R D O N R O G O F F What follows is a fragment – chapter 2 to be exact – from a tale never fully told about a biographical search for a man who resisted biography. I began the research and the book more than twenty years ago and submitted four chapters to the publishers, only to be thwarted by them as I was thwarted by Luchino Visconti. At the time I was a working drama critic eager to spread my critical wings. When my prospective editor suggested that I combine my critical forces into a form new to me – biography – I slipped too easily into accepting that miscasting as a logical next step. Perhaps it was also logical that I should consider Visconti an ideal subject for a biographer who lived almost in the shadow of his younger brother’s enormous villa in Tuscany (part-time in my case) even before Luchino’s death in 1976 at the age of seventy. I liked the coincidence that he and my mother were born in the same year, and I was delighted to learn that despite his renown as a film director, he was well known in Italy for his theatrical work, including opera productions (I had seen two of them); even more to my taste were what I knew of his politics (patrician left) and his sexuality (paternal gay). We parted in more salient ways: he was allegedly wealthy (which I am not); he appeared to be at financial liberty to command movies, stage pro- 1 0 5 R ductions, and operas, to say nothing of Maria Callas, Alain Delon, Romy Schneider, and Helmut Berger (which I was never likely to negotiate). And he was Italian, which I clearly have never been, though I had learned to speak and read the language su≈ciently to put me in range of serious discussion in it. Within a matter of weeks after that seductive lunch, I signed the contract, arranged a term’s sabbatical for research in Rome, and embarked upon what turned out to be the greatest fool’s errand of my life. There have been others, but nothing to match the way I was directed by Visconti to fail. New to the game, I adopted procedures that seemed unavoidable at the time, especially given the nature of a life not lived as a writer, leaving in its wake letters, notes, fictions, poetry, and other traceable remembrances. With the help of contacts in Rome, and eventually in New York, I embarked upon a series of interviews with more than forty of Visconti’s friends, relatives, and colleagues; even, in my eventual absence from Rome, enlisted a good friend, herself a movie maker, to conduct interviews with those I had been unable to find during my first intensive three months. In time, some of my best sources came directly to me. Edoardo Visconti, Luchino’s youngest sibling (there were three brothers and two sisters), had become my stand-in for his deceased brother: I concluded that Edoardo had even modeled his own tastes and sensibility on his older brother’s since it had become clear that Luchino, despite his detour from even an obligatory marriage, was the true head of the family; it was natural, therefore, that Edoardo’s widow, Elena, by then my friend, would allow me to see Luchino’s early writings and drawings, even permitting me to make copies of whatever appeared to help me tell his story. One day, in the elevator of my Upper West Side apartment building , I told an inquiring neighbor that I had been in Rome, Tuscany, and Milan in pursuit of those who knew Visconti reasonably well. ‘‘But I went to school with Luchino,’’ he replied; they had spent many afternoons in Milan together – reading stories, soon ‘‘publishing’’ an amateur newspaper. He also recalled Luchino’s puppet theater, soon to become short plays written and directed by young Luchino and performed by a cast of friends and family in the Visconti palace’s small theater. I was delighted by the discovery...