Like many boomers who went to high school in the hinterlands, I have Franco Zeffirelli to thank for introducing me to Shakespeare.
He directed film adaptations of The Taming of the Shrew with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in an early example of Hollywood stunt casting (he had wanted Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni) and Romeo and Juliet, starring a gorgeous, now forgotten, couple as young as the doomed lovers were supposed to be. My mother took me to see the former, in English, which I enjoyed tremendously, because it reminded me a bit of my parents' occasionally tempestuous marriage, played for comedy by the world's most famous paparazzi magnet, notorious for their on-and-off brawling.
The lavish production design impressed me, too, although I wasn't yet sophisticated enough to call it that. I'd only been watching the Oscars since 1965 (and haven't ever missed them since!).
I probably saw Romeo and Juliet, released a year later, on a field trip with my enriched English class. Leonard Whiting, like Mark Frechette and especially Christopher Jones and Jim Morrison, starred in my nighttime adolescent fantasies along with a pair of local hoodlum brothers, one of whom would end up buried in a shallow, desert grave.
Little did I know then that Zeffirelli was as gay as I was, with similar taste in men but who could trace his lineage back to Leonardo da Vinci! Born illegitimately in 1923, he got to hobnob with some of Hollywood's greatest directors. In this amazing 1979 photo, which includes William Wyler, Frank Capra and Robert Wise, he appears with two other gay colleagues, Vincente Minnelli and George Cukor, whose hand he is clasping. All mentioned except he won Oscars for Best Director.
What I hadn't appreciated until I visited the poorly designed Franco Zeffirelli Museum in Florence was his equally successful career in opera and theater, which began under the tutelage of another gay man, Luchino Visconti who also became his lover. Trained as an artist after fighting for the Italian resistance in World War II, he first showed his talent for costume and set design.
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| Unidentified Costume Sketch |
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| Set Model, "Euridice" (Florence , 1960) |
Zeffirelli soon graduated to the big time with no help from Visconti who would have preferred that he continue to work on his films. Several rooms in the museum immerse visitors in his opera set designs, projected on all four walls, while recordings play. One, which also features footage of Maria Callas singing an aria at La Scala, gave me goosebumps even though opera usually leaves me cold.
Nor was Zeffirelli afraid to tackle imports from Broadway, like this Roman production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf in 1963.
I'll bet he and Edward Albee--both in the early prime of their careers--had plenty of tea to spill! I couldn't help but wonder if they ever tricked. I keep harping on Zeffirelli's homosexuality because it has been entirely erased from the museum as far as I can tell. One need only to look at his posture in this photo. As they say nowadays, if you know, you know.
Zeffirelli directed Shakespeare on British soil, too, before taking the Bard of Avon to the silver screen. Would you believe this is a young Maggie Smith starring in Much Ado About Nothing at the Old Vic in 1965?
While he edited The Taming of the Shrew the worst flood since the Renaissance devastated Florence, his hometown.
Zeffirelli dropped everything to direct a documentary intended to raise funds for the city worldwide.
I lost interest in Zeffirelli after his movie adaptation of Endless Love, a quirky novel about contemporary teenage obsession I had loved but he over-inflated to the point of absurdity. The production design and amped-up emotion that served him so well in opera looked increasingly bloated and ridiculous on the wide screen in comparison with his earlier adaptations of period pieces.
In Endless Love he also continued his penchant for casting unknown male leads, at least two of whom later said he sexually harassed them. They all looked very much alike (Tom Cruise, who makes his screen debut in the film in a minor role, also fits the physical profile). I'm guessing Piero Tosi, the man who shares his tomb, is the reason behind that. The pair, both in their nineties, died two months apart in 2019. A romantic might characterize their joint interment as a bid for actual endless love.
The museum never alludes to anything other than a professional relationship, but it does devote a gallery to Tosi's successful career as a costume designer who often collaborated with Zeffirelli, earning an Oscar nominations for their work on La Traviata. I didn't see any similar acknowledgment of his Anna Anni, the other member of his eternal threesome. Italy definitely was a man's world in their heyday.
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| Teresa Stratas in "La Traviata" (1982) |
In 2014, Tosi, who earned three other Oscar noms for his work with Visconti, Zeffirelli's former lover, received the first honorary Oscar ever awarded for costume design. Someone should write a novel about the three artistic collaborators through the prism of incestuous gay love.
Zeffirelli's own awards case doesn't include a little gold man although his Best Direction nomination for Romeo and Juliet is exhibited elsewhere. La Traviata earned him his only other nomination, for Best Art Direction.
In the opera world, Zeffirelli coasted on his reputation for years. His crowd-pleasing 1987 production of Turandot at the New York Metropolitan Opera, one of the house's most elaborate, has remained in the repertoire for more than three decades.
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| Sketch |
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| Set Model |
A year later he reunited with Elizabeth Taylor for Young Toscanini, an Italian film.
Although she played a 19th-century opera singer who doesn't rank a Wikipedia entry, Zeffirelli had her portrait painted as a much younger woman for the role, no doubt appealing to the vanity of his star if nothing else.
Zeffirelli clung to his conservative Catholicism throughout his life which perhaps explains why he remained closeted until the mid-90s when he declared that homosexual sounded more elegant than gay. His admission didn't prevent him from winning a seat in the Italian senate when, as a septuagenerian, he aligned himself with Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party. Somehow, he still found the time to direct Cher and three Dames, (Judi, Joan and Maggie) in Tea with Mussolini, perhaps because the film offered and opportunity to pay homage to the British women in Florence's expatriate community ("scorpioni") who helped raise him from the age of six after the death of his mother. Or maybe just because hanging out with the four stars on set sounds like a gay man's (platonic) wet dream!
Oddly, the museum devotes the largest gallery to Zeffirelli's designs for Dante's Inferno, a never-produced film he began shopping around in the early 1970s.
With exhibition sponsorship by Moscow's Gum Department Store, it's difficult not to think of the destruction caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine while watching the animation of these designs on an enormous screen.
In 1967, while directing Romeo & Juliet, Zeffirelli bought a villa near Cinecittà Studios which Mussolini had established as a kind of fascist Hollywood three decades earlier. He lived and worked there until his death at the age of 96. The museum has reproduced his studio, filled with his father's furniture and a lifetime of mementos.
It reminded me of David, whose own career as a set designer, had been cut short by AIDS.
Despite his illiberalism, particularly regarding abortion--he insisted if it were legal, he never would have been born, a rationalization I've also heard expressed by a formerly close friend--Zeffirelli's legacy deserves better than the museum that documents it. Administrators of his foundation should take a short walk to the Ferragamo Museum to see how another icon of Italian culture has been properly honored.
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