The trattoria shimmered in the Italian sunshine. Just behind Oskar Werner’s baby-blond head you could see the ruins where Julius Caesar was assassinated and across the line of tourist buses on the piazza, the stone columns of the Colosseum pierced the sky like fat, timeless darning needles. It was a warm, boozy day in Rome, when most people were asleep: a perfect time to sit under the pine trees and talk to a movie star with the day off. “I’m not vain, I am humble,” he said. And yet: he showed up in dark glasses and a khaki safari jacket unbuttoned down to his navel, rearranged everyone under the luncheon umbrella so his was the only face to sip the sun (might as well do the bloody interview and get a sun-tan at the same time) and did five hours on the subject of Oskar Werner, who, if not vain, is at least on close speaking terms with the subject.
He was in Rome to make The Shoes of the Fisherman, a super-colossal MGM road-show fantasy about the first Russian Pope. Anthony Quinn plays the Pope; Oskar plays a disillusioned priest who stirs up the Vatican and gets tried for heresy. Oskar himself is a non-practicing Catholic whose own behavior, on and off the set, is so incorrigible his first question, after being introduced to the Jesuit priests in Rome, was “Have you ever slept with a woman?” The script also required him to die of a heart attack during his heresy trial. No dice. “I did that already in Ship of Fools and I never do anything twice, so I made them change it to a brain stroke. I have complete approval of all scripts, so when I arrived in Rome I said, ‘This script is terrible. Re-write it or I won’t do the film.’ They re-wrote it.” Such demands have earned him a reputation for being difficult. He admits it. “I am a director and a stage actor first, a movie star second. If a director is nice to me and lets me do a part the way I see it, I give him a whole performance. If not, I only give him half a performance.” In Rome, they’re calling him the Viennese Orson Welles.
At the age of 45, Werner’s talent is so great most directors let him get away with it. If they are lucky enough to get him at all. “After Ship of Fools I turned down 56 Hollywood projects. I will not make films I wouldn’t pay to see myself. Acting is a bit like surgery. You get a part, make a diagnosis, then decide what to do with the corpse. If the body is still warm, I make a transfusion from my own blood to keep the patient alive. Sometimes it still dies.” [Shoes of the Fisherman has since opened—it didn’t survive the operating table.] Werner has very few good things to say about his previous films, either. “In films, we only realize the shadows of our dreams. Thank God the public never knows how bad films are or how many things do not turn out right. If you’re lucky, you get 25 percent of the dream. I know exactly what I want when I shave in the mirror in the morning, but when I see my films I’m always unhappy. I tailor my parts. Very few things are ever given to me. After Ship of Fools, doctors wrote me letters asking how I studied the heart attack. I didn’t. It was only two lines in the script that said ‘Fall over from chair and die.’ I imagined all the pain, how the throat chokes, how the air stops on its way to the brain.” He was silent. Then he lunged forward, knocked the forks and spoons off the table and fell to the cobblestone terrace, giving a perfect imitation of a man having a heart attack. People leaped from their tables in horror. Two waiters came flapping at him like gulls. “You see? I did it myself. Fantasy is my bank account.”
He liked his work in Ship of Fools, although he admits “others were terrible, so the film was not a success. Signoret and I had the phoniest parts in the world—a dope addict and a doctor with heart disease. We had to create everything ourselves. I told Stanley Kramer I had a bad reputation for being difficult and he said, ‘When you get to Hollywood, everyone will tell you I have a bad reputation, too,’ so we got along. I changed the role completely. They even had a business suit and tie for me to wear and I refused. I said, ‘No Nazi ship’s captain would ever wear a suit,’ and I ended up wearing an officer’s uniform designed for one of the extras.”
He considers Jules and Jim a moderate success, but the subject of Truffaut sent his fist crashing into the table, upsetting two glasses and creating a dark river of vino rosso winding its way along the white tablecloth. “We used to speak, but not any more. During Jules and Jim I gave him advice, tried to teach him something, and he listened. Whole scenes, whole pages of dialogue came from me. But when I went to England to make Fahrenheit 451 he thought he had learned it all. He destroyed that film. It was a 70-millimeter film with an 8-millimeter print. It had nothing left of Ray Bradbury in it. It was ridiculous to cast Julie Christie in two parts. He only did that to save paying an extra salary. Nothing was worked out. The dramatic plot was completely lost. He refused to accept any of my suggestions. I was 15 when Hitler came to power and I saw the real book burnings. Truffaut’s film was child’s play compared to that. Every time I had to register an emotion that was true to my character, Truffaut would cut away with his camera. That’s the trouble with these nouvelle vague directors. They care nothing about actors. Antonioni is like a man masturbating. He does it all by himself.”
For his latest film, Interlude, Werner learned to conduct the London Philharmonic and became so adept at it that once, when the camera ran out of film, the orchestra kept following him. “They ruined Interlude, too. I did it because music is my greatest love in life and I always wanted to play a conductor. But when I saw it I was furious. They cut most of my conducting and left only the love story. I loathe sex on the screen. There is nothing more tedious in art than to show everything. Sexual intercourse is boring when you have to watch it. Miniskirts are not sexy. It’s like watching girls walking in their underwear. I like women in long dresses. The ankles are very erotic. Viennese waltzes are the sexiest dances in the world. Yet films feed on sex. In Interlude they wanted me to make love to Barbara Ferris on a tigerskin rug. Naturally I refused.”
Naturally. And yet women the world over have made Oskar Werner a new kind of sex symbol onscreen—the great white hope for women over 40. There’s not a line in his schoolboy face and sometimes, when he takes off his sunglasses and his baby-blue eyes half close in the Mediterranean sun, he looks like a sleepy wombat. It’s a look that could keep him going for years, playing roles that bring out both the carnal and the maternal instincts in female moviegoers. But Oskar Werner is too smart for that. “After Ship of Fools the ladies of the press called me the new heart throb, the new matinee idol. I said nonsense, and played a villain in a supporting part in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and they didn’t like me in it. So I don’t know if I will ever be very big in movies, because I want to play hunchbacks and village idiots. Once I was on a ship and a man asked me what I did and I was so embarrassed to say ‘actor’ I said I studied. ‘What?’ he asked. ‘Human beings and their destinies,’ I said. That was no lie. That’s what I do. But I don’t want to be typecast in parts. Type parts are for automobile factories.”
He was born in Vienna, the only son of a poor insurance clerk. His family knew nothing about the theatre, but sometimes when he helped his grandmother with the dishes she would tell him tales of the National Theatre. One day when he was eight his mother let him cross town alone to visit his grandparents. He pretended he was blind, turning his eyes up and feeling his way along the street. Two people came up and said, “Little boy, where do you want to go,” and he felt so guilty he let them lead him. It was his first audition and he passed. From that day, his future was sealed. “I never studied. I loathe acting schools. You can teach musicians, but actors are their own instruments. Training an actor does great damage. You might be training a flute to be a violin. I’ve always said, ‘Don’t explain it to me, just show me.’ Otherwise, why play Hamlet? Just write an article about it.”
When he did his first play he said to himself in the wings, “Later, when I become famous, people will ask me what my first line was, so I remembered it.” He played a fireman and his first line was “Where’s the fire?” At 18, he debuted with the Vienna Burgtheatre, Austria’s equivalent to England’s Old Vic, but in 1941, when he was 19, he was drafted into Hitler’s Wehrmacht. He hated his uniform, hated himself. Before the war was over, he deserted and hid in terror with his wife and eight-month-old daughter in the Vienna Woods “without Johann Strauss. I weighed only 110 pounds, I was secretly married to a half-Jewish woman and I was only 22 years old. It took me 22 years before I had the courage to visit a concentration camp. Last year, when I was 44 years old, I took the train and spent two days in Dachau and it all came back. People said they didn’t know it was happening, but I did. I watched 70-year-old university professors washing down sidewalks because they were Jews and after the war, when the Russians came, I sat in the National Theatre in Vienna and smelled the dead bodies rotting under the cellar and we could look out the window and watch the women carried to the hospital on stretchers after being raped by the Russians. They used to rape 20 or 30 women a night.”
In 1950, he decided to make “my confession” by doing his first American film, Decision Before Dawn. He signed a big contract, but he loved the theatre more, so it wasn’t until Ship of Fools that he made his second American film. “It was Stanley Kramer, really, who talked me into a film career. He asked me to meet him in Munich, but I still hate Germany so much I asked him to change it to Paris. I feel more comfortable there. We talked five minutes about the film and hours about life, and I said yes. I liked Hollywood, but I’ve never been back. It was all parties and ye-ye music, and I hate both. If I want to get drunk, I can do it alone. You can’t talk to anyone in Hollywood. I don’t like films. I only do it for money. I’m married to the theatre, films are only my mistress. Now is the first time the mistress has paid off and she pays very well. Onstage nothing can stop me. You have to fire me to tone me down. I have space. Not in films. I have no control there. I only do them to become famous enough so people will pay to see me onstage. I was invited to bring my Hamlet to America before I was famous and I said I would never bring it in English. If I make a few more films now, I could come to New York and read the telephone book. Now I can have artistic freedom. I will come back and play Hamlet and they will say, ‘We saw him in Ship of Fools, let’s see what he can do.’ So I did this film about the Pope and I had the most beautifully paid Roman holiday I ever had in my life. And I made very much money.”
He borrowed everyone’s cigarettes, rubbed his chest under the safari jacket, tore his napkin into a zillion shreds and threw them on the ground, played with a chain around his neck, and idly forked a rather sickly-looking plate of prosciutto swimming in oil and getting stale in the hot sun. At several intervals the suggestion was made by the press agent that it was time to leave. “Stay and buy me another double benedictine,” he said. And so we stayed, through the afternoon, until the sun came down. And Oskar Werner kept talking, like a self-appointed politico doing a marathon filibuster. “I only met Laurence Olivier for the first time in my life on this film. He has a very small part, but I asked to give him second billing and I’d take third. I’m very humble. He gets last billing now, because that’s how film people think. The two biggest dangers are to be vain and ambitious. If there is no spiritual manifestation in acting, it becomes very close to prostitution.”
He is married to Tyrone Power’s daughter now, but he refuses to discuss her. He pretends not to care about money, but he lives in Lichtenstein (no taxes there). “I have a sauna and a pool, but my home is small. I don’t want anyone staying overnight. I’m always working. I am haunted and hounded by this profession. Last night I walked until 4 a.m., then I went over to the set to see Tony Quinn shoot some night scenes and I watched from the sidelines, playing all the other actors’ parts. My motor is always running. I would never become an actor again. It is the most primitive profession. You have to depend on other people. I want to do it alone. I can play Hamlet alone, because it is practically a monologue, and that is my greatest role. You can have any Ophelia—a fat Ophelia, a short Ophelia, an ugly Ophelia. But I turned down Romeo five times because I could never find the right Juliet. She’s the viola and Romeo’s the second fiddle.”
He began to conduct an imaginary orchestra playing Schubert. He hummed. He syncopated. Everyone in the piazza was looking. “Maybe I will conduct the Vienna Symphony. Or perhaps I will direct my own films. I will do a film next about Judas. I can control everything if I direct it myself. Then I will be so independent I can tell everyone else, ‘Thank you very much, drop dead.’” He drained his eighth double benedictine and the press agent helped him to his feet as he staggered off into the traffic, narrowly escaping a head-on collision with a crazy Italian driver careening through the square behind the wheel of a cabbage truck.
“He’ll make it,” said the press agent.
And he did, too.