Burt Lancaster by Kate Buford

Author:Kate Buford [Buford, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-5128-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-09-25T04:00:00+00:00

Lancaster was getting older, forty-eight years old in 1962. The flesh was starting, barely, to shift. Never, in his almost half-century on the planet, had he looked back, but now he would portray a character whose entire existence was predicated on the past. Il Gattopardo was written by Giussepe di Lampedusa partially as a response to the Allied bombing of Palermo in April 1943 which virtually destroyed the palazzo of his aristocratic family. The wave of change and development that swept postwar Italy further accelerated the end of everything his class knew and valued. The author looked back to the previous big change of his culture and history—Garibaldi’s fight against feudalism and privilege and the triumph of the bourgeoisie in the new, nonfeudal, unified nation-state of modern Italy in the 1860s—to bury his people with full literary honors. Di Lampedusa’s only book, Il Gattopardo, was published in 1958 shortly after his death and became a surprise best-seller, even in America.

His gattopardo, the Sicilian Leopard Prince of Salina was, Lancaster said, “inimical to me.” At first glance, he was right: Don Fabrizio of Salina is an aristocrat with an exquisite fatalism about life, death, history, his own class, his own person. Missing nothing, he is yet so detached from the immediate life around him that a measure of his distance is his absorption in the study of the stars. He is not defined by what he has made of himself; he is who he always has been. The idea of change and progress has no meaning for him except, as the novel famously said, to ensure that nothing changes. He bestirs himself to act strategically, like a retreating commandant, only in response to the Risorgimento, Garibaldi’s revolt.

Lancaster lived for change, for the act of transforming himself in response to the changing world around him. He knew from years of observation the East Harlem legacy of Italian feudalism: torpor, despair, brutal manual labor, fear of education, squalor. Nick was one of the dark, small, faceless minions Don Fabrizio would have been aware of only as a paternalistic obligation lurking at the back of the stable. As Salina, he had to play the kind of man whose inability to change had caused one of the greatest human migrations of modern times. As Burt Lancaster, he was for millions of non-Americans the American, whose presence and avid energy and natural grace seemed emblematic of a new nation.

Yet there were in the American elements of the Italian Leopard, the big cat whose paws bent silver teaspoons during fits of rage. Salina was graceful, strong, magnificently, drolly oblivious, and so was Lancaster. In the multilayered personality Odets had found so contradictory, there was a strong streak of noblesse oblige. The prince is, supremely, a patriarch and so was Lancaster, the male who will take care of everyone whether they wish to be cared for or not. To be depended upon is a kind of power that Lancaster relished, and the ultimate anguish of the Prince of Salina comes when he knows that he and his class are now useless, needed by no one.

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