(Editor’s note: Alberto Anile is an Italian film critic, historian and journalist, and currently directs Cineteca Nazionale, the Italian national film library, in Rome. He is the author of several books, including Orson Welles in Italy. The following article on Welles and mobster Charles Luciano was first published in 2015 in the film magazine Cabiria n°180 and in the newspaper La Repubblica. Reworked and integrated, it is presented here in English for the first time.)
By ALBERTO ANILE
“I was chased all over Italy by Charles Luciano — known as ‘Lucky’ by ignorant newspaper readers — in order to persuade me to make the true story of his life. He thought I should do it. I should write it and direct it and act it. I could elevate him to the proper position historically” — Orson Welles to biographer Barbara Leaming a few months before his death.
Welles hints at an unproduced film project with a legendary gangster. A mysterious episode, so fictional as to make one suspect that it was totally invented. We know of a vague interest of Welles in the story of outlaw Salvatore Giuliano, and even of a couple of cinematic hypotheses on the subject, but very little about a film commissioned by Mafia boss “Lucky” Luciano. It seems that Welles fired it big, just to impress the author of a well-paid biography.
Welles had an extraordinary career and a very intense life, told in long interviews with which entire books have been filled, packed with humor, politically incorrect bluster and a wealth of anecdotes: the breakfast with Roosevelt on the morning he went to Yalta, the days when he had a certain Norma Jean as a girlfriend, Houdini giving him tips on magic tricks… Inventions? Exaggerations? From the director who deceived millions of Americans by staging an alien invasion on the radio or by artfully ennobling the work of the forger in F for Fake, one expects this and more. But with Welles you never know. It has already happened that some possible braggarts were then confirmed in the sudden discovery of incontrovertible supporting documents: his complaints about the authorship of Monsieur Verdoux’s subject seemed like blatant braggadocio until the receipts to Chaplin surfaced.
In her book, Barbara Leaming did not add anything to the short quotation from the filmmaker about Luciano. She did not insist, she did not ask the classic “second question.” Instead, Henry Jaglom did it in My Lunches with Orson, culled from their recorded conversations at the Ma Maison restaurant.
Welles talked about mobsters and thugs and Jaglom pressed him: tell me the truth, have you really met gangsters? “I knew them all,” he replied. “You had to. If you lived, as I did, on Broadway during that period, if you lived in nightclubs, you could not not know them. I liked screwing the chorus girls and I liked meeting all the different people who would come in, and I liked staying up until five in the morning, and they used to love to go to nightclubs. They would come and sit at your table.” Welles also reminded Jaglom of having seen a fight between Luciano and a Broadway policeman called Brannigan: “I saw him put Charlie Luciano, head first, into a garbage can outside of Reuben’s, at five thirty in the morning.”
Director Peter Bogdanovich, co-author of This Is Orson Welles, had also asked him which gangsters he had known. “Oh, I knew Luciano and Costello,” Orson told him, “and even Capone, and lesser lights. It was easy to be in movies and not know them, but almost impossible to be in show business – Broadway – without knowing them, unless you never went out at night to a nightclub and never knew anybody in any form of show business. … You couldn’t get to a nightclub without Costello sending over a bottle of champagne, or sit in Lindy’s without Luciano coming over.” Bogdanovich is the only other person to have heard Welles talk about Luciano’s project, albeit in even more vague terms, and partly debunking it: “Luciano and his gang used to descend on me in Rome and Naples during his exile … He was a particularly unsavory fellow – I disliked him more than the others.” Did you associate with him because you were scared of him?, asked Bogdanovich. “You didn’t associate with him. You’re sitting having coffee in the Excelsior Hotel in Naples and ‘Lucky’ Luciano sits down at your table. That’s associating with Luciano — until the coffee is finished; you say, ‘Yes, Charlie, glad to see you’ — that’s what you call him, Charlie — and a couple of the other boys sit down. ‘Wouldn’t you like to make a picture about me, Orsten?’ he used to say. ‘The real-life story of me?’ He was always trying to promote — that’s one of the reasons he kept chasing me around Italy. And I always used to say, ‘Oh, yes, yes,’ and wave wildly for the bill!”
The doubt arises that Welles embroidered on an occasional acquaintance, inventing a cinematic hypothesis that looks a lot like the “offer he could’t refuse” from Coppola’s The Godfather. Welles, in fact rejecting it, even makes us a bit of a hero. Actually, there is a document that we reproduce here, a now declassified U.S. military report, in which the names of Welles and Luciano are explicitly juxtaposed. It is proof that those meetings (and, together with it, that crazy cinebiography project) really existed: Luciano intended to make that film, and to do it with Welles.
It is a one-page typed file from 1948, preserved in the National Archives at College Park, Maryland, a copy of which is in the archive of Giuseppe Casarrubea, a Sicilian historian who has studied the events of Salvatore Giuliano for years. The document is reproduced with the kind permission of Casarrubea, and comes from his archive in via Catania 3, 90047, Partinico (PA), NARA collection, JPEG, envelope C, doc. 133; the original is kept at the National Archives. (Record Group 170, Entry 71A-3555, Box 2, Folder 2.)
The report bears the date of March 17, 1948, at which time Welles was about to finish filming Black Magic in Rome. At that time Salvatore Lucania, renamed Charles Luciano in the States, had been in Italy for almost a year, pardoned by the governor of New York Thomas Dewey (the one who had arrested him in 1936, as special prosecutor) it is said for Mafia collaboration offered to the American military during the landing in Sicily in 1943. Sent back home as “undesirable,” Luciano was observed by the Italians with a mixture of fear and fascination. Local police stopped him and interrogated him several times but in the absence of established crimes on Italian soil he was essentially left in peace. The Americans, who, having sent him away, knew what he was capable of, instead continued to monitor him with pressing regularity.
The National Archives document is part of this intelligence work. The report was drafted by Henry L. Manfredi, a U.S. Army agent charged by the Criminal Investigation Division with collecting useful information. Manfredi reports having come into direct contact with Luciano a week earlier through Ralph Liguory, a friend of the mobster and a mobster himself, expelled from the U.S. together with Luciano. Agent Manfredi writes among other things that Luciano “talked about a future meeting with Orson Welles, the famous actor who is at present in Rome residing at the Excelsior Hotel.” He doesn’t go into detail, but there is no doubt that the subject had to be cinematic: agent Manfredi informs that “Luciano is making a strong bid to enter the Italian movie industry.” For this, Luciano would also have made use of the help of one of Liguori’s uncles, a manager in an Italian production company (the agent, actually, admits that he was unable to identify either one or the other).
Manfredi’s report also mentions the name of another Hollywood star: George Raft. Luciano had announced to the agent that the actor, expected shortly thereafter in Paris, “would at later date stop in Rome for some talks with him concerning the Italian movie industry.” It should be remembered that Raft, in addition to having Italian maternal blood, had achieved success playing glamorous gangsters in Scarface and Each Dawn I Die, and Luciano, like many other Italian-American mobsters, was particularly intrigued. Welles explained, in one of his lunches with Jaglom, that “the classy gangster was the ideal of every real gangster, who then started to dress like George Raft, and tried to behave like George Raft, and so on.”
The aforementioned Ralph Liguori is a key-figure. Lieutenant and friend of Luciano, he was an habitué of the La Nirvanetta nightclub in Rome. It is possible that it was Ralph Liguori himself who set up a first rendezvous between the gangster and Welles. Agent Manfredi did not know it but Welles and Liguori had friendly relations. Traces of it emerge in a 2014 book by Rosemary Valenti Guarnera, Me and the General, based on the stories of Liguori. “Ralph loved the clubs”, writes the author. “They were like a pastime for him – a gathering place for friends, old and new, like Orson Welles who always stopped in for a drink to say hello. Ralph tought he was a genius”. Valenti Guarnera’s book mentions at least two meetings between Liguori and Welles, both in 1948, the year of Manfredi’s report, both described as casual. The first took place one morning at the Kursaal Beach Club in Ostia, the seaside town not too far from Rome; also present were Liguori’s wife, Elena, and an anonymous girlfriend of Welles defined as “a high-class one”: Lea Padovani, for sure. The four would spend an entire day together, after which Welles, learning that Liguori’s car was broken down, towed it to Rome.
Another meeting between Welles and Liguori would have taken place in October 1948, at the Excelsior in Rome. Liguori first saw Luciano and immediately after Welles, who proved his ability to do several things at the same time: “while he was talking to Ralph, drinking, he was eating a sandwich and writing a script at the same time. He told Ralph about a new film that he had just signed to do with 20th Century Fox. He was to play Cesare Borgia, and Tyrone Power had the leading role of Count Orsini. Welles was also working on many other things in Italy.” The details are correct: in that autumn Welles, now finished Black Magic, had obtained from Zanuck the role of Cesare Borgia in Prince of Foxes and was preparing to start Othello.
Another small link comes from the memories of Joseph Cotten, colleague and friend of Welles from the glorious days of the Mercury Theatre. He too knew “Lucky” Luciano, better: he was about to meet with him for drinks. In 1949, in Italy to shoot with Joan Fontaine September Affair, Cotten met him a couple of times at the entrance to the Excelsior in Naples, until one evening he received a note in which the gangster invited him, Fontaine and Life photographer Slim Aarons to have something together at the bar or in his suite. In a few days, Luciano perhaps knew, Cotten was going to Venice to see Welles filming Othello. The three were about to accept but were blocked by an FBI agent who advised them against doing so: speaking with Luciano would have meant writing their name in a report and creating a lot of hassle for them at customs when returning to New York. Luciano, a few meters away, understood very well what was happening. The photographer took the boss’s note and blatantly tore it into small pieces. “Mr. Luciano,” writes Cotten on his humorous autobiography Vanity Will Get You Somewhere, “with sorrowful dark eyes, bestowed on us that classic Italian gesture as his head tilted slightly, his elbows almost touched his ribs, and he extended his arms with the palms up”.
One of the greatest directors in the world and one of the most dangerous Mafia gangsters therefore met to talk about a film. It is difficult to understand whether Welles behaved with Luciano in the way described to Bogdanovich or if instead he paid even a little attention to him as Leaming’s book suggests. His possible attention to the mobster could also be understood; in the late 1940s, in a nation still suspicious of the “liberators,” a country where few knew English, any American had a soft spot for anyone who spoke their language or came from overseas like him.
On the other hand, Welles’ life was not without what can be called “bad acquaintances,” especially when among them there could be someone willing to shell out dollars, or other current currency, to pay for his cinematic dreams. Anyway, it’s remarkable that Welles, in his interview with Bogdanovich, speaks of Luciano’s stay in Italy as an “exile.” Born in Lercara Friddi, a very poor Sicilian town, the gangster at that moment considered himself more American than Italian, and, visibly uncomfortable in his former homeland, hoped to return to the States as soon as possible. Welles, who was born in Wisconsin, thought at that time of becoming an Italian by adoption, maintaining a relationship of curiosity and ambition mixed with regret with the two homelands, and was probably able to well understand the gangster’s nostalgic mood. In this, the figures of Welles and Luciano, opposite and specular, are also curiously similar: a genius of cinema and one of crime who find themselves at the height of their existence in the uncomfortable position of outcasts.
Luciano toyed with the hypothesis of a cinebiography for a long time, and continued to do so well beyond Welles’ unavailability. Luciano himself spoke about it in 1953, interviewed in Naples by Joachim Joesten for the book The Luciano Story (1954, co-author Sid Feder). On that occasion, the gangster willingly submitted to the questions, even if the idea of a biography written by others did not find him enthusiastic, asserting that he wanted to write his own story, also hoping there would be a motion picture on the same subject. Both film and book had to prove that society alone was to blame for his life of crime. “I’m gonna write about my side of it”, Luciano explained. “But the time ain’t right yet”. Then, red with anger, he took it out on the film producers who had approached him to try to milk him, demanding that he had should payed all the costs he said, about $300,000! Anyway, he won’t have to spend even a cent out of his own pocket, because he had just to wait: at last he would receive offers from other producers, who would pay him well.
Actually, one came forward. His name is Martin Gosch, whose flagship was Abbott and Costello in Hollywood. In 1961, as stated by Gosch, Luciano had become a tired and bitter man, who has already suffered of a heart-attack. He was offered by Gosch and partner Barnett Glassman to authorize a movie about him for which he should receive $100,000 on the first day of principal photography and 10 percent of the producer’s profit.
But other problems came from the Mafia, not inclined to be portrayed in a film with names and surnames. Gosch would remember a note shown to him by Luciano, with which Meyer Lansky ordered the film to be put aside – Lansky was one of the leading exponents of the New York Mafia and one of the architects of Luciano’s luck; a similar order had already came from Tommy Eboli, the caretaker for the underworld interests of Vito Genovese.
As stated by Gosch, the gangster still wanted to make sure that someone would divulged his version of his life: Luciano told his memories to Gosch in various meetings for the next ten months, asking to publish them in a book, not before ten years after his death. The last meeting between the two took place on January 26, 1962, at the airport of Capodichino, Naples. They barely had time to see each other: Luciano collapsed pale on the floor. One of the most dangerous and feared bosses ever died of a heart attack, like any pensioner with clogged arteries.
Ten years later, Gosch called Richard Hammer, a former reporter for the New York Times, and began work on the book, which was titled The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano, accompanied by an advertisement concerning Luciano audio tapes. But when it was released in 1974, several controversies arose: the book contained numerous errors, the audio cassettes had probably never existed, the original notes of the book had been thrown away by the widow of Gosch (who had died of a heart attack shortly before the release of the book): it is suspected that a good part of the content was taken from other books about the Mafia. In his Lucky Luciano. The Rise and Fall of a Mob Boss (2010), William Donati writes that in 1962 the film project had not collapsed, and that in reality Gosch had come to Naples to talk about it again, in the light of the fact that Cameron Mitchell had been identified as the protagonist.
The film that Orson Welles wouldn’t make and that Martin Gosch couldn’t, was finally directed by Francesco Rosi, in 1973, titled Lucky Luciano and interpreted by Gian Maria Volonté. It tells more of hypotheses than concrete facts, leaving many gangster secrets intact. And maybe Luciano wouldn’t even mind the result. Meanwhile, the few lines told by Orson Welles to Barbara Leaming have sown new seeds of inspiration here and there: in 1994, Davide Ferrario put Luciano and Welles together on his novel Dissolvenza al nero, which originated Fade to Black, a film directed by Oliver Parker in 2006; and Italian filmmakers Ciprì & Maresco in their last film together (2003) attribute to Luciano the commission of Return of Cagliostro, an imaginary remake of the Ratoff film starring Welles in 1948.
As for Welles, he ignored for a long time that Luciano had died in the arms of a film producer. It was Bogdanovich who revealed it to him during their interviews. “I didn’t know that,” observed Welles. “I knew he was poisoned, certainly by the Mafia.”
Perhaps, they should open an investigation into Luciano’s death?
Copyright held by Alberto Anile; © 2015 (Italian) and © 2023 (English). All rights reserved.
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