My Roman Holiday

Here's the Scene: The Gulf war just broke out and I'm in my house looking for condoms and packing for a three-month trip to Rome and Monaco to co-star with Sean Young in a film, Once Upon a Crime. Aside from abandoning my therapist (who will undoubtedly miss my sessions, particularly when I sing like Jolson), I'm leaving behind some of the most narcissistic, self-involved, controlling, manipulative, possessive, jealous, unappreciative, beautiful, seductive, magnificent women I have ever had the pleasure of dating.

Besides the thrill of leaving these abusive relationships in the dust, it will be the first time in 20 years that I won't have to do stand-up comedy and be lied to by some bogus promoter, like the time this guy--oh, I'll just call him Irv--said I was the one who misunderstood when he booked me into what I thought was a famed concert hall in Denver, which, in fact, turned out to be a dangerous mental-health facility where the patients were shouting out, "Where's Silas Marner?" and "Are Steve and Eydie one person?" The show went all right and I got paid (by a guy dressed like Captain Hook), and though I'd be the first to admit that I'm no genius, the pain of watching the audience, with their backs turned to me, making Pia Zadora dolls out of imaginary cloth took most of the spark out of my performance.

In truth, I'm also no genius when it comes to selecting the right woman, so I feel a little guilty about bad-mouthing these Satanettes. To be honest, I might have misled some of these women, because as unwilling, or rather, incapable, as they are to commit to a meaningful relationship, I am probably a thousand times more freaked, even with a great lady. One way of distancing myself--short of suggesting that I have only days to live--is to blurt out, "Did I tell you about Eve?" while my lover is (supposedly) having her climax. Since therapy has thus far been of no help to me, I was longing to disconnect my answering machine, get to Italy and work with an amazing cast, including one of my idols, Giancarlo Giannini, as well as John Candy, Jim Belushi and, of course, Sean Young. Unhappily, I was torn by my fear of going to Europe during a war and by my fear of acting with Sean, who has been a victim of more bad rumors than Joan Crawford and Lee Harvey Oswald combined.

Sean asked to meet with me at my house before we left for Rome. Despite all the gossip, which was pouring in progressively faster as my departure drew closer, I agreed, even buying a bottle of spectacular champagne and getting out my finest glasses for the occasion. Just as I finished fastening my bulletproof vest, the doorbell rang and, trying my best to hide the garlic necklace, I answered the door. There she was, the woman who gave Kevin Costner the best "limo lay" in film history, looking very sane, not in any costume and not carrying any suspicious-looking packages. Although the vest was making me sweat and the garlic was starting to stink, I gave her the opportunity to deny all the hundred thousand atrocities attributed to her.

The meeting went well, and she had a nice look in her eyes when she hugged me goodbye. After she left, I fell to my knees and prayed that the Sean I had just experienced was the real one and that I wouldn't meet my untimely death at the hands of some large, mechanical, homicidal rabbi that she was already having made to greet me upon my arrival at Leonardo da Vinci International Airport: "R.L.! Shalom, dead man!"

Days later, my excitement swelling, I needed to punish myself unnecessarily the last few hours at home by monitoring my answering machine. When I pack for a flight, I automatically think that I'm going to die. To be honest, I'm stuck with the same unfortunate feeling moments after I achieve an orgasm, but at least after I pack, I have a certain sense of accomplishment.

There's no way I'm going to answer the phone tonight.

Call from hell, number one:

"Richard. Cleo. Pick up. Shit, I know you're there, Lewis. Look, I'm really excited for you, but I can't fucking believe you don't call me on your last night home. How do you expect me to feel? Christ! Three months is a long time. I haven't bugged you, have I? And I'm not doing well, in case you haven't heard. [Author's note: Like I really subscribe to the Struggling Actress Today newsletter.] My landlord's on my ass and, by the way, I fell on my ass in dance class and my brakes won't work unless I scream at the pedal. But who can afford to fix them? Call me."

There were about ninety other calls, most of them from angry women. So, in a way, this lengthy trip was my first chance to be alone. The only goodbye call I made other than to a few close friends was to my lawyer. He insisted I bang out a will and talked me out of leaving a substantial amount of bread to bullies from my adolescence whom I periodically try to contact as self-punishment for not having safe sex.

•

The next day, I found myself on Alitalia, in first class, all alone and full of fears, dreams, expectations and sedatives. Being extremely nervous, I trusted a doctor friend who gave me the pills, but since she knows me so well, she also slipped me an article from some medical journal about the pill and its side effects. Fortunately, short of one rat out of a million that appeared less interested in eating cheese and more inclined to persuade the other rats to invest in a comedy club in a mall-like setting, the pill seemed safe enough. On that pleasant note, I, and only I, thank God, crashed.

"Welcome to Rome."

Wow, what a pill. What a sleep! Crazily groggy, I was ushered off the plane by a beautiful flight attendant and sort of collapsed into the arms of someone who worked for the production company of Once Upon a Crime. I passed out in the back seat of a Mercedes-Benz, rousing myself when we arrived at the Hotel de la Ville, adjacent to the Spanish Steps. After I mumbled something to the driver--"If you ever get to America and happen to make it to Vegas, I'll try and get you in to see Siegfried and Roy, but trust me, it's a tough ticket"--my fatigue escalated into a dreamlike state with the horrifying thought that I would become like that one rat in a million.

I can feel overwhelmed even during a pleasurable orgasm, so it's no surprise that the prospect of ten weeks in Rome, with a ministop in Monaco, made me feel disoriented and anxious, based largely on the fear that I'd miss one of the major sights that you hear about from some obnoxious asshole tourist: "You mean, you didn't see that little church next to the bar near the oldest synagogue where the Three Kings show up live and sing Tuesdays on open-mike night?"

So, with my paranoia of missing the boat, I began what was to become a ritual of walking all over Rome on my days off--guidebooks in hand and gigantic, unruly maps sticking out from my pockets--fearing that I might be standing at the place where Julius Caesar lost his virginity and not just in front of the new McDonald's. As luck would have it, I was a bit distracted on my first jaunt. On the way out of the hotel, I received a fax from a buddy, Mick Shaw.

Mick, unfortunately, as nice a guy as he is, is also lonely, dependent on me for practically every contact to the outside world and could give a rat's ass about art history. However, since he was going to be 50 soon, he felt desperate and had all this time on his boring hands because he successfully runs some strange mail-order business from his house in the Hollywood Hills. I have to give him some credit for being a fine photographer. He took shots of the Hollywood sign at different times of the day, and when I made comparisons to Monet's series of paintings of Rouen Cathedral, he blinked momentarily and said, "What do you say we order a few pizzas, huh, buddy?" That gives you a little clue about his capacity for discussing art. It's only women he wants, naked women who want him, and since he never leaves his house (except to walk his beautiful collie, Postage, which he so cruelly had fixed after realizing she had a better social life than he did), he felt it was high time to become less of a recluse and visit me while I was working on the film.

Don't get me wrong, the guy would give me the shirt off his back (though it most probably would be one of mine that he had begged for), but this was supposed to be my Roman holiday, and I was haunted by the thought of his becoming a blithering idiot in front of celebrities or, God forbid, doing something to set off Sean. Anyway, don't I have a responsibility for being good to myself, without feeling like I always have to be the nice guy? Damn right! (continued on page 140) My Roman Holiday (continued from page 88) So with every bone in my body yelling, "Don't be a schmuck!" I faxed him back immediately and told him, "I'll take care of everything. Start packing."

Mick and the history of angina in my family aside, I'm more into paintings than ancient ruins, and quite frankly, as amazing as some of these sites are, my budding existential lifestyle was getting me more in touch with my horniness than with anything else. I saw these crumbled reminders of the glorious past as locations where lots of people screwed their brains out. So I dedicated myself, on my time away from the filming, to finding the woman of my dreams.

Being alone is not particularly easy, even if you are lucky enough to be sipping wine at an outdoor café that faces the magnificent Pantheon. This is one hell of a romantic city. I mean, pigeons do it rather than eat bread crumbs from five-star restaurants. Everyone does it, will do it, is doing it, plans to do it or, like me, is looking to do it. As cautious as I have been in practicing safe sex at home (in fact, it took a concerned Shaker, who was very knowledgeable in sexual etiquette, to beg me to stop asking my lover to boil herself before we had intercourse), it seemed that in Italy, lovemaking was dangerously carefree. Although I had all the intentions of using condoms, let's face it, it's like throwing a penalty flag in bed. Putting a balloon over your dick never fails to ruin your "erection, direction or Mafia connection" (my apologies, Mr. Dylan).

My mood continued to decline when I discovered that my cologne broke on the flight over and drenched my warehouse-sized box of condoms, forcing me to use sign language in a drugstore to buy prophylactics. After an hour, the young girl waiting on me went into the supply room and brought out a curling iron, which proved that I needed a better dictionary.

I had promised myself not to have phone sex with any women from the States--even though my occasional premature-ejaculation problem would have saved me a bundle. I mean, is an orgasm between you and yourself really worth a thousand bucks? Plus, the hotel's operators listen in. If I'm nothing in the sack, I am at least the best dirty-talking lover this side of Columbus, Ohio, and it's not a ball in a hotel to have the doorman say, "Good morning, Mr. Lewis, and how is your ladyfriend, scum suck my cock you pussy slime queen whore bandit of the Nile?" Phone sex was definitely out. The last thing I needed was a reputation for being foulmouthed to get back to Dino De Laurentiis, the movie's producer, and the cast and crew.

Still determined to fall in love, worried sick over the escalation of the bombing in the Gulf and clutching my script for security, I realized that for the first time, I could live the life of an artist, with almost no responsibility except for making sure my mother was in good health back in the States. I could throw myself into the film with total self-indulgence, just like my actress ex-girlfriends did. When they were on a job, they'd gladly ignore me as I lay dying in an emergency room and refuse to give me lifesaving blood if it meant missing out on doing another take. Thankfully, I couldn't hurt anyone by being selfish because I had no one--at least not until the moment I first saw her, the possible Mrs. Lewis. I always know it's a potential bride when I stop breathing.

Greta was unreal and either Chinese, German, Scandinavian or African American--I'm really bad at nationalities--but I knew I wanted her to want me with the same irrational lust I already had for her, even though she was probably madly in love with someone else--a pimp, an impressionist, whomever, who cares? There was the chance she might be available, so I tried desperately to make a toothpick out of a napkin to remove some cheese from between my teeth, turned around as subtly as I could, spit out a piece of pepperoni that was lodged somewhere near my former tonsils, stood up and, in some kind of primordial dance (which I attribute to being at the many weddings my father--may he rest in peace--catered so magnificently), bunny-hopped over to this raven-haired wonder. She laughed. So far so good.

Hyperventilating in the most sexual way I could, I sat down next to her and told her that I was a choreographer for weddings and bar mitzvahs and was looking for an assistant. What happened next is a story that I will sadly fill you in on later, but now it's time to tell you about the real love of my life there--Once Upon a Crime.

•

Once Upon a Crime was being directed by yet another idol of mine, Eugene Levy. He and his SCTV cohorts were, for my taste, the very best improv troupe ever on television, right up there with Your Show of Shows. I instantly discovered that Eugene appeared to be on the verge of falling into a deep sleep at any moment, even in midsentence. In actuality, it was just his erudite way of concentrating. He introduced me to Sean, who was to play Phoebe to my Julian, and left us alone to get acquainted, not knowing we had already met in L.A.

"Hello, Sean," I said as we eyed each other, me in my funereal outfit (everything I wear, even if I were duped into trying on Bermudas, is black) and her in her leotards and a T-shirt with a pattern that looked like an eye test Picasso might have created during his cubist period. There seemed to be a long pause before she shoved me up against a wall and threw me down on a cot like some usher gone berserk at a heavy-metal concert while seating last-minute fans. Upon reflection, Sean has this wonderful way of getting close to her co-stars by (in my perception) combining stuff like yoga, karate, screaming, laughing, slap-fighting, you name it.

Of course, she didn't realize that I have trick knees, and when she suddenly got me in this nooselike position--which to me seemed like the "suicide lotus" position--all the tabloid headlines about her appeared in hologram fashion before me. Then she gave me this strangely tough yet tender squeeze that sucked out all my oxygen and my paranoia about her. As she saw my half-frightened grin, she said, "OK, now I guess we're buddies."

Easy for her to say, but any other guy, even Gandhi, might have flattened the bitch for her unexpected physical stunts. But I sort of understood how she wanted to reach out in some loving, cosmic way, and I will always think that her behavior--even that which seems inappropriate or pathological--comes from either a scared or a good place. Of course, my benevolent analysis of her sometimes hyperkinetic actions was somewhat altered when she occasionally drew blood, but I'm certain that it was only accidental. I'm an adult and I didn't have to say yes all those times to what I think she called--and don't quote me on this--the Pit and the Pendulum game, which she easily convinced me was an actors' warm-up exercise.

We rehearsed at the old Pathé Studios, a cavernous lot with some of the largest sound stages in all the world. Why not, considering that it was Dino De Laurentiis who was behind it all. He sort of transcends whatever project he is working on. I could easily see him stopping the chariot race during Ben-Hur (had he produced it) and demanding that the hundred thousand extras "Shut the hell up" (put in a more aristocratic way, of course) so he could tell his stars where he wanted to have dinner with them that night. If, God forbid, one of his actors tried to back out, there would be a good chance the script would be changed on the spot, even if it meant that Mr. Hur came out the loser and the screenwriter killed himself.

Thus, I never said no to a dinner invite by the main man, though I was initially afraid to dine with him because his heavy accent caused me to lose the thread of many of his amazing stories. At our first meal together at his Beverly Hills home, I recall being paranoid that he would have me fired after popping a surprise quiz with a question like, "What the fuck did I say in the last fifteen minutes?" Eventually, I started to comprehend every word of his storytelling, so vividly in fact, that I would often reflect upon the stories the next day.

Before trying to sleep at night, I usually sat in the famous American Bar at the De la Ville, which is run by some of the greatest, friendliest bartenders, who serve you appetizers until your cardiologist appears in a lifesaving hallucination and scares them away. I was either going over my next scene and jotting down any jokes I might want to share with Eugene, rereading a Richard Yates novel or nervously leafing through some new tabloids overnighted to me by jealous exes. It was hard for me not to be concerned with one headline: He Didn't Keep His Distance So I Hacksawed Him in Half. I kept my distance from Sean for lots of reasons, not just because she was happily married.

Basically, it was a pleasure to be alone, and, lest you forget, I was--and I say this in the strictest feminist sense--on the make and didn't want to talk to anybody except people on the set or to a potential new lover. I felt that I desperately needed a woman to fondle and nurture, someone with whom I could enjoy restaurants, make out on the Spanish Steps or simply snuggle under the covers while watching the war news on CNN.

When I would get really bummed, I would visit the Keats-Shelley Memorial House, which is one of the most astonishing hidden treasures in Rome. The last place Keats resided has been magnificently preserved, with a wonderful collection of works by the romantics. Even more thrilling was looking out of his bedroom window toward the Via Condotti, a sort of Fifth Avenue of Rome, and spotting a place that became my favorite hangout, the Antico Caffé Greco. More than two centuries old, it was the hangout for artists and literati. You could just feel the presence of Orson Welles and Goethe and Byron and even Buffalo Bill, all of whom frequented the place before it was surrounded by chic stores.

Once again, I discovered a potential Mrs. Lewis. This one looked French, perhaps, though there was something Dutch about her or even maybe Southern Californian. Her face was so astonishing that you knew she was in show business. Although I've had visitations from Moses himself telling me to stay away from people in "the biz," I was too horny to care. I would have been grateful for someone whom I could worship, or who would worship me. With a little luck, perhaps we could worship simultaneously.

She seemed to be talking to herself (a problem I could handle if certain other conditions between us were met, like, for openers, her unconditional love) and she was studying photographs with a type of magnifying glass that lots of models use. Between angry snorts and joyous smiles, she would return to talking out loud. Finally, stricken with the fear that she would leave before I had the chance to be rejected, I went over to her table. She, too, had a Keats book and was reading his poetry. What a break! It was too good to be true, because I, by sheer fate, had memorized the very poem she was reading, On Death.

Her name was Colette and she had to get right to bed because she needed at least 17 hours of sleep before a shoot. She told me to call her in two days, which was fine with me. That floating period of high expectation is usually the most fun anyway and, with all due respect, she wasn't the only one working the next day.

Since it was my first day on the set, it was just as well that a potential wife hadn't rejected me the night before. As I looked around, I thought, Jesus H. Christ! What a place to start! Like a rookie pitcher making his debut in Yankee Stadium. I'm hardly a rookie, but shooting a film in Rome with hundreds of people--not to mention Dino and Eugene behind the camera--it was hard not to feel some butterflies. I felt like the only known Jewish porpoise at Sea World that, legend has it, wouldn't do tricks on Yom Kippur.

It was quite a first day, the kind you hear about. I got there at seven A.M. and left at six P.M. and didn't act for one second. Even so, I thought I was fabulous, as did Eugene. He directed patiently and was capable at any moment, especially when he was around John Candy, of launching into some inspired improvisation to break the tension. Eugene, in his own quiet way, asserted much authority and knew exactly what he wanted, and once he got it, he had the nice habit of allowing another take for his actors to do it their way, though his favorite take was usually mine as well.

•

Sure, Monaco is pretty and all, and I know that royalty lives on this big rock and you can gamble, but after hanging out with Bernini and Michelangelo in Rome, Astroturf lawns didn't cut it. I rarely left my hotel suite in Monaco except for an occasional jaunt to the sea with Sean, who tried to convince me to meditate. Mostly, I counted the days till I could get back to Rome and--voilà!--through the magic of writing, I was again back at the Greco. I felt at peace, unfortunately not with myself but with some stranger sitting across from me, but, hey, I hadn't spoken to my shrink in what seemed like ages and I felt it was a good sign. I even started to feel good about the acting I had been doing until the excruciating realization hit me, like I imagine a heart attack would feel, sort of like a big brick on my chest, that my pal Mick was coming to town.

To this day, he foolishly thinks that his presence in Rome was a positive influence on me. I, on the other hand, blame him for my declining health, constipation, a general lethargy about the 1992 election and an obsession with whether or not I will ever get into the Mile-High Club.

But who needs to have sex in a cramped airline john when I had Greta on her gigantic bed in the Grand Hotel for what turned out to be the greatest oral sex I had ever had? By the way, the only reason I didn't say blow job is: (1) it would offend my mother and (2) I think it's a little sexist unless I could boast of returning the glorious favor. Unfortunately--maybe this is why I'm still a bachelor--I sadly admit to having this freak nerve problem in my jaw that not only takes away my sexual prowess in that area, but I even have to pace myself when I'm eating my favorite steak (no pun intended) at the Palm because I can get spasms. Luckily, through spending many hours in those weird, mystical bookshops all over L.A., I have found an illustration of how to give a woman a tremendous orgasm without its affecting my jaw.

(Author's note: I must pause here for a second because I am racked with guilt. I'm proud that I can share these feelings with you, but I couldn't live with myself if by chance this openness caused my mother to suffer a life-threatening illness and she was overheard on her death bed to mutter to her nurse how "my baby goes down" on women.)

Greta the Great was the name I coined for her moments after having the most satisfying orgasm in my life. So much so that the next day, I followed her around to different cafés and ordered with bravado. "And what does my Greta the Great want now?" Well, you might think I was in heaven, but I was (as I later discovered) in the presence of a brilliant, gorgeous, proud lesbian who was busy writing a manual on gay lovemaking and wanted, for the sake of research, to give head (sorry, Mom) to a guy for comparison. And as it turns out, her mind-boggling technique was pure luck.

•

Thank God, Colette was a heterosexual. I knew this because after the Greta shocker, I made her swear to it during foreplay. Since coming to Rome, I had had the overwhelming desire to make love as Julian Peters, my character in the film. I did this in an attempt to improve my acting technique. It's not easy acting with a guy like Giannini without pulling something new from your actor's bag of tricks. Of course, an actor of Giannini's stature would not need this tomfoolery, but his seemingly all-knowing acting sense made it easy for him to glide effortlessly over to me (gliding effortlessly is yet another gift of his) the day after my experience with Colette and whisper, "Don't make love as the character. You don't need it." He grinned and made his way into a sea of admirers, leaving me standing there wondering whether he was psychic or, more importantly, if he had fucked Colette. That bastard! How could he? I'd met his wonderful wife. They seemed perfect together, so my initial fear of his having bedded down with Colette quickly evaporated. However, it's fair to report that in Italy, the men seem to get a particular kick out of publicly announcing their flings to just about everyone--terminally ill people, clergy and everybody on the production--and they even have letters of approval from adoring wives and girlfriends. In a panic, I just figured Giancarlo was psychic and let it go at that.

The night before, Colette didn't have to be psychic to see that I was intent on unleashing an awesome display of sexual prowess. This was going to be my best performance ever, making my Carnegie Hall show look like some Greenwich Village gig back in the early Seventies. Screw my bad knees. Screw my jaw problem. This was going to be the first day of the rest of her sexual life.

We started to neck and it got so steamy she insisted on taking a walk before the inevitable. Each step away from the bed made me want her more and more, but just as we got back to the De la Ville, the revolving door crashed into my face, knocking me momentarily senseless. Two bellhops helped carry me away as Colette, perhaps as a harbinger of things to come, waved at me unsympathetically. My last memory of Colette, even under those dire circumstances, was trying to figure out the proper tip for Gig and Raphael, the two bellboys. By the next morning, Colette had disappeared without a trace. Needless to say, I was feeling miserable when the doorbell rang.

"Hiya, buddy boy," Mick Shaw blurted out, adding, "Jesus, you look like shit."

Now mind you, though he bares no physical resemblance to Max von Sydow in The Exorcist--who also was standing outside a doorway but dressed in black as opposed to Mick's pastel outfit--Mick still looked like a Jewish aurora borealis with kinky hair. He seemed to have something very secretive on his mind, besides making my next seven days off the most miserable, anxiety-provoking, guilt-ridden Roman holiday in history. He was smirking because he had devised a plan on the flight, but he steadfastly refused to share this with me until Easter Sunday when "we just had to see the Pope at St. Peter's." What Mick wanted to tell me was that he had developed a plan to make my death easier for him. What a guy.

As it turned out, Easter was a nightmare. Not only did we get to the Vatican about four hours too soon, but the Pope very graciously blessed every country, coffee klatch and semipro baseball league, all done alphabetically under a torturously hot sun. Worse, I was being pushed into a wooden barrier as if I were erroneously being blamed for the death of Christ. The Pope is a crowd pleaser, though from our vantage point, for all we knew, he could have been Flipper. For most people, it's a joyous day, but not to a Jewish comedian with a heat rash on his inner thigh and burdened with a friend who has no discernible personality.

I think it was just about after the thousandth blessing (and my fuse was very short at this point) that I seriously thought about murdering Mick. That, however, would ruin his idiotic "secret death plan." You see, this cheap maniac felt that since one of us will die first (and by the way, we are, inexplicably, great friends and really do care for each other--in fact, since neither of us has a wife and kids, we never eat in the same deli at the same time to minimize the possibility of having simultaneous heart attacks), he figured we should put in our respective wills that the first to die gives the other $50,000 to help cushion the devastation. It would happen something like this: A mutual friend would call and say, "Mickey, Larry. You better sit down."

"Why? What's wrong?"

"Richard's dead. A massive coronary. And on stage, too. But that son of a bitch, wouldn't you know it, doing all new material."

The tears would start to stream down Mick's penny-pinching face. But with the new plan he had so sickeningly devised, a little smile would soon overtake the tears because he had just made a bundle off my passing.

Meanwhile, I was still suffering back at St. Peter's. Proudly being in show business for almost 25 years, I make it a rule never to leave a show before it's over, unless there's a death in the family. Hoping for the best, I told my chum that on "three," we were going to turn around and, like great, rare Jewish running backs, clear a path through the sea of Pope-adoring gentiles, keeping our heads down, never stopping until we hit the De la Ville. He came through and for that, I bought him a book on erections because he complained all week that he felt he might have a potential problem after seeing "those damn obelisks" all over Rome.

The next morning, Mick's last, as the driver was loading his bags, Mick reached into his ugly orange sports jacket and pulled out a souvenir ashtray from Keats's former pad, which he had visited. I was touched--until he told me that he hadn't actually gone in but had bought it from a vendor out front. With a "Ciao, buddy," I waved goodbye ecstatically since I could now, once and for all, devote myself to Once Upon a Crime.

I celebrated with a walk across my favorite bridge, the Ponte Sant'Angelo, where you can marvel at the angels designed by Bernini. Those geniuses were so prolific. And yet, why shouldn't they have been? Where could they go? Let's assume Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were at the Paramount Theater then and a couple of masters were pretty well burned out working on ten churches at once and said, "Hey, fuck it, let's go get some laughs." It would have taken them about sixty years just to get to the Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel, assuming it had been there. So they worked instead. And so did I.

The last day's shooting was coming up and I made a mad attempt at revisiting the sights and smells that I will always cherish. Since there are zillions of guidebooks, I'm not about to tell you that, for example, Michelangelo's original concept for the palazzo on the Capitoline hill was eventually changed by the architect Della Porta. Half the fun of visiting cities in Italy is finding places on your own, by walking if you want to be safe, since most Italians drive like madmen out of Rollerball. In Rome, dings on men's cars are not so much a source of stress and body-shop bills as they are documentation of how many bars they crashed into or women they impressed with their driving.

Mick, being the obnoxious businessman he is, obsessed on all the little openings in the Colosseum by proposing aloud his fantasy about putting in boutiques like St. Pizza Pie and St. Undies. His demented entrepreneurial funk aside, that old place truly gives you goose bumps, particularly when lit up at night. The last straw for me with Mick was when he got us thrown out of the Sistine Chapel. He laid on his back and screamed like an escaped mental patient. "Lewis, there are those two guys who are almost touching their fingers." Well, at least he showed some passion.

At the Piazza del Popolo, I suggest you walk up the steep stairs from there to the corner of the Villa Borghese, look down at the city, especially when the sun is setting, take a deep breath and, if you're better adjusted than I am, enjoy yourself.

As far as gifts are concerned, I don't have a clue. Everything I ever bring back from abroad is greeted with either a scared smile or phony thanks. This trip, at the last minute, I found a store that had autographed codpieces for sale at half off. They were supposedly worn by gladiators who fought with emotional problems. So I made a deal for a hundred. I'm no fool.

I sadly had to race through a Dali exhibit. It occurred to me that it's easy to become drained in even the world's greatest museums, since many noted painters focused mainly on Jesus in his most glorious moments. As a result, you wind up seeing about four billion versions of three events. Maybe it's just me, but every once in a while, it would be refreshing to see an unexpected broiler in the painting or someone who looks like, say, Steve Allen sitting next to a disciple, just to whet your palate for the next three million works on this same theme. That's my one complaint, not bad for a guy who went cold turkey without therapy for the entire filming. One drunk tourist told me that he called his shrink from his hotel room and it took him almost an hour to put in all the digits from his credit card. His session ran about a thousand dollars. So, proudly, I survived without it and made it to the last day, which ended just about as surreal as one might dream it should.

•

Although Sean Young wasn't meant to be Catwoman, she was the quintessential Phoebe. The night we wrapped, she threw a catered party for the crew. I had to break away to get back to the hotel to pack. I got about 50 feet down the spooky corridor at the studio and was heading toward the Benz for the final drive back when I heard something that sounded like Eugene's voice: "Ladies and gentlemen, Richard Lewis." I looked back at the group of 80 or so people applauding and saw it not only through my eyes but also the way Giuseppe Rotunno, our director of photography, would see it. He had been next to Fellini during his film making more times than anyone else. As I stood there doing some silly bows, I truly felt very happy with myself for having stuck it out in this business when there were so many fucking times I wanted to hang it up. Thank God, I stayed around long enough to get the chance to be appreciated by all these warm, eccentric, talented people. In the car as I sat back and listened to my driver give me kudos in his own incomprehensible manner, I shut my eyes and didn't want to look out the window because I felt I had finally earned the right to say, "I know Rome."