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June 18, 1999 - Image 97

Resource type:
Text
Publication:
The Detroit Jewish News, 1999-06-18

Disclaimer: Computer generated plain text may have errors. Read more about this.

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Franco Zefferrelli, right, directs Cher on the set of "Tea with Mussolini."

r

panels against which she had hung
these 'monstrosities,' as I then saw
them. It was my first exposure to the
work of Picasso, and I hated it. I asked
my mother, 'When are we going to see
the paintings?' And she said, 'The
paintings are here.
Zeffirelli meticulously re-creates the
Jewish woman's villa in Tea With
Mussolini; he also recounts how the
woman placed all the money she had
owed his late mother, and then some,
in a trust fund for his education.
Indirectly, she helped create the
artist who captured Italian film direc-
tor Luchino Visconti's attention and
went on to achieve a splendid, if not
always critically acclaimed, career in
the dual worlds of film and opera.
The character of Elsa incorporates
another wartime memory of Zeffirelli's:
the story of another Jewish-American
woman who was incarcerated with his
British friends upon the outbreak of
war. The British ladies asked Zeffirelli,
then a teenaged partisan, to aid in the
woman's escape. Soon thereafter, he
smuggled money on her behalf, via
bicycle, to a secret apartment occupied
by the partisans in Florence.
Under the cover of darkness some
days later, he spirited the woman into
a waiting truck, where he hid her
under a pile of vegetables. He watched
as the truck sped away in to the night.
"I never saw her again," he says. or
did he see his Jewish friends from
school when he returned to Florence
after summer vacation in 1941.
We kept asking, What happened

to Ancona? What happened to Levi?'"
Zeffirelli says. "Though there were a lot
of whispers, nobody gave us a direct
answer." When young Franco rang the
bell at the home of his good friend
Raul, he saw that the family name had
been removed from the buzzer.
Many years later, as the director
was participating in a pleasant tele-
phone interview, he remarked on the
simpatico nature of the Italian journal-
ist. That is because I know you well,"
the man replied. He revealed that he
was Zeffirelli's old school chum Raul,
who had survived the war after fleeing
to Switzerland.
The director, who fears that some of
his other friends ended up in
Auschwitz, takes time during the inter-
view to clear up what he calls a terrible
misunderstanding. When Martin
Scorsese's controversial The Last
Temptation of Christ played the Venice
Film Festival a decade ago, Zeffirelli
says, a journalist falsely reported that he
had dubbed the film the product of
Jewish cultural scum in Los Angeles."
The director, who vehemently.denies
the report, says the ensuing fallout was
"the nightmare of my life."
"To accuse me of being anti-
Semitic is blasphemy," insists
Zeffirelli, who has an honorary doc-
torate from an Israeli university. "I
know that I would not have had a
career without my Jewish friends.
"I can't convert to Judaism," he quips,
"because I am already converted.
According to Pope Paul VI, we Catholics
are all your younger brothers."

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Detroit Jewish News

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