South of Sunset Boulevard
It’s a warm and slightly hazy May morning as I drive over Laurel Canyon from the San Fernando Valley, down the long winding descent toward Sunset Boulevard and West Hollywood. If you live in L.A. and you love the movies, it’s hard not to think about the two Sunset Boulevards: the actual street and the classic 1950 film directed and cowritten by Billy Wilder. There have been any number of great films made about the movie business, but none that captures the awful, perverse blurring of past and present, youth and age, celebrity and anonymity like Sunset Boulevard. At the end of the film, Gloria Swanson descends the stairs with the weird grace of an aging ballerina and a look of frozen madness on her face before delivering the famed closing line, “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my closeup.” Then as she glides toward the camera, half–Cobra Woman, half-Vampira, the image literally blurs and dissolves, as if Wilder were acknowledging that she was slipping into that terrible gray zone between the actual making of a movie called Sunset Boulevard and the myth that would become Norma Desmond.
While working for the American Cinematheque in Hollywood in the 1990s, I made any number of attempts to get Wilder to come out for a tribute. I was patient—usually if I waited long enough I could get a filmmaker to appear in person—but not Wilder. He just wasn’t interested. He dodged one invitation on the phone, saying, “I’d like to tell you that I have to rush down to San Diego in an ambulance to see my sick sister, but the truth is I just want to stay home and watch football.” Then he hung up. But, if you wait long enough, strange things happen in Hollywood. For many years the nonprofit Cinematheque had announced one permanent home after another, only to see the projects fall through, but in the mid-1990s it took over Sid Grauman’s legendary 1922 Egyptian Theatre and launched what became a $15 million renovation. As part of the fundraising campaign, they updated its prospectus with quotes from well-known filmmakers. Most, like Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Spike Lee, offered earnest, boilerplate, “We think the Cinematheque is a really terrific idea” statements. On January 14, 1998, I was sitting at my desk at lunchtime when our startled office manager, Nancy, came to the door. “Dennis, Billy Wilder is here to see you,” she said and stepped aside. I looked up dumbfounded as the ninety-one-year-old Wilder shuffled into my office accompanied by an ancient secretary who looked, if anything, more infirm than he did. Wilder launched into a mini-tirade about the impossibility of getting anyone on the phone at the Cinematheque, so he could give his fundraising testimonial, and then fixed me with a blunt glare: “Do you take dictation, young man?” I mumbled yes, and then he delivered the following in his thick Austrian accent:
Once upon a time, I knew a blind director. He was legally blind. He didn’t want any guide, anybody with a white cane or a seeing-eye dog. He directed a few good pictures, really remarkable for a blind man. Then one day—wonder of wonders—he saw. The idea that he could now see what he directed before, instead of just shadows and walls. What’s more, he could write. Boy, did he rewrite! Two pictures altogether—one is still on the shelf at the studio, the other went straight to the toilet. He died before he was seventy. Poor schnook!
Wilder insisted I print it out so he could proofread it; he added a punctuation mark at the end of “Poor schnook!” dated and signed it, and then disappeared as mysteriously as he came. To this day I have no idea what Wilder’s bizarre parable means. Is he the blind director who gets the double-edged gift of sight? And I’d even doubt the whole incident occurred except that I was there, and the Cinematheque printed his testimonial in their fundraising brochure. It was, all in all, a moment straight out of Sunset Boulevard. This weird, unexpected encounter often comes to mind as I’m on the boulevard, but today as I cross over and drive south of the Directors Guild building, I have no idea that I’m about to meet Norma Desmond in the flesh.
The apartment building I’m looking for is a classic two-level Hollywood job with a central pool in the courtyard, the kind that underemployed actors and actresses tend to congregate around. But the pool is empty now; only a few brightly colored beach balls float on the surface. Behind a metal-gated door on the second floor is the man Jeff and I have come to meet: Tony Turano, former Broadway chorus dancer (or “gypsy” as he says), talent agent, casting director, and film collector. I’ve already been warned that Tony tends to fabricate stories, and sifting fact from fiction can be tricky: he claimed for years that he was the baby Moses in the bulrushes in The Ten Commandments, until confronted with the fact that it was Charlton Heston’s son, Fraser, as clearly listed in the film’s credits. Another story he likes to tell is that when he was a boy, he was a passenger on the RMS Lusitania when it sank.
Tony greets us seated in a motorized wheelchair, wearing gray sweatpants and T-shirt with stains under his arms and thick, square glasses. His left leg is missing. His raspy voice still has a hint of an East Coast accent. “I was raised in Brooklyn right down the street from a synagogue. You’re either Italian or Jewish in Brooklyn,” he says. “I used to sit outside the synagogue and listen to the rabbis. You know how many times I’ve heard Kol Nidre in my life?” Inside, his apartment is unnaturally dark, with the sun blocked out by dust-covered curtains; the main source of light is a huge flat-screen TV which is playing John Ford’s The Searchers as I enter. The place has the odor of sweat and a slight smell of urine like it hasn’t been aired out in quite a while. The first impression is of an antique store or a mortician’s office with a morbid Egyptian theme: to the right is a creepy black bust adorned with a gold headdress, which turns out to be Claudette Colbert’s from the 1934 version of Cleopatra; to the left is a poster from The Ten Commandments next to a vase of peacock feathers and, appropriately, bulrushes. A 16mm projector sits on the kitchen table surrounded by dozens of pill bottles. It’s a telling combination, movies and medicine, since the two seem to dominate Tony’s life these days.
As he leads us around the apartment showing off his prized costumes and props, I ask if I can take photos. He recoils in horror: “No, no. I haven’t had my picture taken in thirty-five years, and never without my wig,” he says excitedly. After I reassure him that his face won’t be seen, he allows me to snap a photo of his hand clutching the priest’s wooden staff from The Ten Commandments. As I sit down and open my computer, he remarks enigmatically, “You’re sitting on Ben Hur, you know.” I look at him mystified until he gestures to the dark blue couch: “There are four reels under Jeff and two reels under you.” I’ve seen film stored in some odd places, but this is possibly a first. “I now have ninety-seven prints,” he tells us proudly. “They’re all over the house. That’s why you’re sitting on Ben Hur.”
A Meals-on-Wheels driver knocks at the door to deliver Tony’s lunch, as he tells us about a movie that survives—at least part of it—only in his memory. When he was growing up he saw a preview screening in New York of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s The King and I, courtesy of his cousin Al, who worked for 20th Century Fox. Several numbers were apparently shot, including “I Have Dreamed” and “Shall I Tell You What I Think About You?” but were cut from the film before its initial release and have since completely disappeared. Tony clearly remembers seeing them at the New York preview. “It doesn’t even pay to talk about it anymore, because nobody believes,” he sighs, then abruptly bursts into song in his sandpapery Brooklyn voice: “There is very much I like in you, but it’s also very true—that you’re spoiled!” It’s a strange and remarkable performance, watching this unshaven, wheelchair-bound former Broadway gypsy imitating Deborah Kerr. Jeff comments that his late wife Lauren had confirmed Tony’s account, having seen the same preview print in Hawaii as a child, but that the missing scenes exist now only in memory. I’ve often wondered if it would be possible to extract the memory of lost films the way that Dumbledore extracts memories in the Harry Potter novels and relives them in his magical Pensieve. I clearly remember a luncheon years ago at Musso and Frank Grill in Hollywood with my director friend Curtis Harrington, who recalled in detail seeing a nitrate print at Paramount Studios of the now-lost 1929 Josef von Sternberg silent film The Case of Lena Smith, while writing his monograph in the late 1940s on the great filmmaker. The movie had vanished, but it still existed, however faintly, in the reflection of Curtis’s aged eyes, where I could almost see it flickering. Now that he’s gone, it too is truly lost.
I try to ask Tony to talk about his childhood, but I quickly learn this is a difficult subject. He dodges the question, bursting into song: “I was born in a trunk, in the Princess Theater in Pocatello, Idaho,” he trills, quoting Judy Garland’s famous number from A Star Is Born. It’s apparent that everything for Tony can be turned, or deflected, into a song from a Broadway show or movie musical. Instead he proceeds to tell us about possibly the rarest film materials that he helped rediscover, one that didn’t get away. Tony was at the home of his friend Hermes Pan, the legendary choreographer of Fred Astaire’s Top Hat, Swing Time, and others. Pan had just installed a large-screen TV and asked Tony for help with the cables; while rooting around back there, he discovered a reel of film in a false closet. “I took it out and said, ‘Hermes, what is this?’ He said, ‘Oh, I don’t know, I’ve had it for years. I don’t know what the hell it is.’” It turned out to be footage from the fairly forgettable 1940 musical comedy Second Chorus, starring Astaire and Paulette Goddard—but not just any footage.
“I brought this reel back to my house, put it on the screen, and to my amazement, it was the missing Fred Astaire number that everybody’s been looking for for fifty years,” Tony recalls with barely controlled excitement. “It was ‘Me and the Ghost Upstairs,’ the missing number from Second Chorus. Now, in that, Fred dances with a female in a shroud. Well, it’s not a female—it’s supposed to be a female, even wearing high heels—but underneath that shroud is Hermes Pan.” Pan preferred to work off camera. His film appearances were exceedingly rare to begin with, and he’d appeared only once on-screen with his famed partner Astaire, in a number that was subsequently cut from Second Chorus. Tony had the foresight to videotape the missing sequence while the print was playing (he now wishes he’d made a 16mm dupe of the footage, but such is life). He returned the footage to Pan, and it later disappeared, leaving Tony’s grainy video the only surviving copy. Watching it now, the sequence begins in fairly routine fashion with Astaire singing in front of an orchestra, “It’s an ectoplasmic tapping / That disturbs my nightly napping,” like a hepcat 1940s version of the Ghostbusters theme. Then Pan appears, completely hidden in a long gray shroud, towering over Astaire, and what follows is a truly remarkable duet between the two men who essentially redefined the art of dance on film. They are an exquisite pair on-screen, long-limbed and fluid and perfectly matched. While the Ghost played by Pan is technically “female,” it’s now apparent that it’s a man under the gray shroud, and not just any man, but a dancer as brilliant as Astaire: at one point the Ghost picks up Astaire and swings him from side to side, setting Astaire in its lap. It’s over far too soon. The entire duet is barely two and a half minutes long, but it’s the only two and a half minutes we will ever have of these two men dancing together. When Jeff shows Tony that several bootlegs of his video have turned up on YouTube.com, he literally squeals with outrage: “But that’s mine! That’s from my copy!” he protests, then finally simmers down. At least the number exists and hasn’t been lost, like The Case of Lena Smith or the missing songs from The King and I.
It’s obvious that dance has been and still is central to Tony’s life, so his current situation, disabled, confined to a wheelchair, is literally too painful for him to contemplate. (His leg was lost to diabetes.) He finally begins to open up about his childhood. He was born in Brooklyn in 1946. He claims his mother, Antoinette DeStefano, was a Busby Berkeley chorus dancer at one point and appeared in Gold Diggers of 1935 and in The Wizard of Oz as the blonde with the hedge trimmers in the “Clip clip here, clip clip there” sequence. Her name doesn’t appear in the credits for either film, but that’s not unusual for anonymous chorus line girls. As with much in Tony’s life, it’s hard to tell what’s fact and what’s embroidery. She encouraged him when he caught the dance bug, but his father, Salvador, was dead set against it. Salvador, who had connections with the Mafia, according to Tony, was by his account a monster: “My father used to beat me, he used to whip me,” Tony says in his raspy voice. “If anybody did to me what my father did to me then, he’d be in jail. I don’t really want to go back there, because my parents are dead. It’s all water under the bridge; that person no longer exists. I’m a disabled cripple, that’s my lot in life.” His voice goes silent. I find myself staring at the heavy gold chain around his neck and then, almost unavoidably, at the space where his missing leg would be.
“I’ll tell you what a stupid collector I am of The Ten Commandments,” he says, brightening somewhat. “On its rerelease in 1960 I had a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and I went over to my local theater. I was thirteen years old, and I asked the manager of the theater if I could bring in my reel-to-reel recorder and record the sound of the film. And for years that’s what The Ten Commandments was for me, because it was never going to be on television: I had the whole movie on four reel-to-reel audiotapes.” It’s a touching image, of Tony playing his homemade audio over and over, reliving the images in his mind. It’s also apparent that for him, as for many collectors Jeff and I spoke with, the movies were a balm and an escape from a painful family life as children, a place where they could feel safe, if only for a few hours. It’s no wonder they continue to return there as adults.
The blank space in Tony’s life, the period he refuses to talk about on record, is his years as a dancer. He’ll only confirm that from age fifteen to thirty-one he was a Broadway “gypsy.” He then rattles off a dizzying list of shows and movies that he appeared in as a background dancer, from the 1960s through the mid-1970s. In a later interview he confirms that he moved out to L.A. permanently in 1975; he worked as a fill-in dancer on TV’s The Carol Burnett Show around that time, and that was apparently his last professional work dancing. He became a subagent at the Norah Sanders Agency in 1980 and then began work as a casting director in 1984, casting commercials for McDonald’s, Pepsi, Lay’s potato chips, and Peter Pan peanut butter, along with extras casting for features, or “under-fives,” as he calls it in professional lingo, meaning actors with under five lines of dialogue.
Although he won’t discuss his dancing days, he’s remarkably open about the fact that he’s a gay man and a film collector. As he quips, “I don’t know a film collector who isn’t gay.” It comes as a surprise to me in a follow-up interview that Tony confirms he was married—not once but three times—and fathered two girls and twin boys. (One of the boys was later killed in a motorcycle accident.) He came out as a gay man at age thirty-five and apparently never looked back on his former life. When Jeff asks if Tony is in touch with any of his three surviving children, he bluntly responds, “No.” Jeff presses him why not. “Because I’m gay. New topic,” he says. I ask if Tony has any thoughts on why so many film collectors are gay men. He closes his eyes for a moment: “It’s a thing of fantasy. It’s like watching Fred Astaire: you get wrapped up in the beauty of his movement, and it’s total escapism,” he responds. “You are Fred Astaire. You are Gene Kelly. You are Rita Hayworth. You are Leslie Caron. You are Ginger Rogers. And I guess this desire for beauty and elegance turns a person’s personality if he’s male to the effeminate. Not a sexual desire but a desire for beauty and elegance which you can’t get in today’s world.
“I came out because I was in love with a man from the time I was a teenager and didn’t know it,” he continues. “I saw him on Broadway with Carol Burnett in Once Upon a Mattress. I became a fan and wrote him fan letters every week. He gave me his phone number and told me if I ever came out to California to look him up. So I came out to do a movie, and we became friends. He even got me a job on The Carol Burnett Show. On set one day another dancer turned to me and said, ‘You’re quite an item, you and Don.’ ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘It’s obvious you’re in love with him.’ I’d even bought him gifts, like a turquoise bracelet. That’s when I knew I was in love with Don. But it was never consummated. He had a lover at the time, a big talent agent. He lives in Florida now. I stayed in touch with him until his lover died. I guess all my life I’ve been looking for another Don.”
As Tony talks he’s interrupted by the arrival of a home nurse, “Nurse Norah,” as he calls her, but he waves her off. “She was going to do a leg wrap and give me an arm flush, but she can come back later,” he says dismissively. “She’s working for me, I’m not working for her.” He wheels around the apartment in his motorized chair, confined now to his kingdom of movie memories, recounting a stream of celebrity encounters real or half imagined: of being on the set of Giant in 1955 as a nine-year-old and seeing James Dean unzip his pants and take a piss in front of startled onlookers; of narrowly missing a private party at Sharon Tate’s house the night she and four others were murdered.36 My writing partner Jeff later adds, “I used to have a hard time swallowing some of Tony’s claims, like the fact that he knew Michael Jackson.” But then Tony wound up acting as middleman when Jeff sold a rare IB Technicolor 16mm print of the Beatles’ Let It Be documentary to Jackson for three thousand dollars in cash. So that story was true. Another involves famed director George Cukor, who, like Tony, was an avid film collector. “Every Monday night Cukor had people over; he loved to cook,” Tony recalls with obvious glee. “He told me about one night where Vivien Leigh, Marilyn Monroe, and Hurd Hatfield were at the table eating, and the first course was matzo ball soup. And when Marilyn Monroe was served the matzo ball soup, she tasted it and said, ‘Oh, George, this is so delishy-ous. What is it?’ George said, ‘That’s matzo ball, Marilyn.’ And she said, ‘Is there any other part of the matzo that’s edible?’”
Besides celebrity contacts, Tony’s work as a talent agent and casting director gave him a dependable stream of income, much of which he sank into print collecting and often more than he could afford. “I’d rather collect film than eat,” he admits. “You sacrifice a lot of things because you want this print, or do something like edit 35mm trailers for a week to pay off a print because you can’t afford it, which I have done. I did that for about two weeks to pay off an IB Tech print of Carousel.” Like many collectors of his generation, Tony acquired exclusively 16mm prints; the smaller format was much easier to screen at home and store. The crowning glory of his collection is, no surprise, a rare British IB Technicolor 16mm print of the 1956 The Ten Commandments, which he bought from Jeff. “I still have that print. It’s the jewel of my collection, and I’m just selfish enough that I have it in my will that when I’m cremated, the print is cremated with me, so that no one else will ever own that print. I’m just that sick,” Tony says adamantly, and I believe him. Jeff later confirms that he’s offered a number of times to sell some of Tony’s prints and costumes to pay for a prosthetic leg, but Tony refuses to part with them. He’d rather have the movies than an artificial limb.
As the interview starts to wrap up, he brings out his proudest possessions, the ones he saves for the end, starting with an arm cuff that Yul Brynner wore in The Ten Commandments, which Tony calls an amulet. “Look at that baby … look at the workmanship,” he purrs as he slips the jewelry onto his fleshy arm. He repeats the word several times like a mantra, each time accenting the syllables: “Ahm-you-let.” He manages to navigate his bulky chair into a corridor, where he opens a narrow closet. Inside are stacked more 16mm prints, and sitting on top of them, a battered cardboard box. He reaches inside and lifts out several old plastic bags marked “Technicolor,” and after rooting around pulls out a woman’s top embroidered with gold sequins. “That belonged to Marilyn Monroe,” he says dramatically. “She wore it personally.” I’m momentarily taken aback: I never thought I’d see one of Marilyn’s outfits, but here it is.
He digs around and produces other treasures: a green sequined top also owned by Monroe, a stunning gold and black robe designed by Travis Banton for Claudette Colbert to wear in Cleopatra. “I also own Aaron’s robe from The Ten Commandments,” he announces. “It’s all goat hair, hand-done … DeMille wanted everything authentic.” He hesitates for a moment, as if he’s trying to decide whether he should show this next item, then finally asks, “Do you want to see Marilyn Monroe’s watch?” He pulls out a velvet jeweler’s box. Nestled inside is a piece of jewelry that looks more like a bracelet, encrusted with jewels. I ask if the diamonds are real, and Tony shakes his head: “The only diamond she ever wore was the one Joe DiMaggio gave her. Everything else was baguette or crystal. Which is kind of funny because she’s famous for ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.’” Finally he stuffs Marilyn’s watch back into the crummy plastic bag with the other clothes and returns it to the cardboard box.
As I pack up my computer to leave, something Tony said earlier comes back to haunt me. “Since this happened to me, nobody comes to see me anymore,” he confessed, referring to the loss of his leg and his virtual imprisonment in his apartment. “It’s kind of lonely. When I think, when your best days are yester. I had a life where … oh, good God, I went to Scandia [Restaurant] with Broadway actress Nell Carter. She said, ‘I’ll take six ounces of beluga!’” His eyes light up as he imitates Carter’s high-pitched voice calling for more caviar, and more. As Jeff and I leave his apartment and walk across the courtyard, we see a pretty brunette with big Ray-Bans hiding her eyes, sitting with a male friend near the pool. They both look like actors. She looks up and smiles broadly. “You want to use the pool?” she says invitingly. “Sorry, didn’t bring our suits,” I smile back. “You don’t need suits. You’ve got pants. You don’t even need pants. Just swim naked. We always do,” she giggles, with a hint of a tease. As I cross Sunset Boulevard again and head back up Laurel Canyon, I spot a pair of glittery high-heeled silver pumps incongruously strung over the traffic light cables at an intersection, the way you usually see old Nike sneakers that someone’s chucked over the lines. Something about the high heels hanging there reminds me of Tony, the one-legged, wheelchair-bound Broadway gypsy who can’t bear to talk about his dancing days.