Dino is gone. And with so much work left undone. I didn’t even get the chance to give him the abstract of the book he had asked me to read for Giada. I can imagine his huge desk still overflowing with scripts to revise, so many piled so high that he almost disappeared behind them. There’s never a good time to die, but it was still less timely for De Laurentiis than for any other.
I have been looking at the card he sent to my son for his christening. Dino didn’t have nice penmanship but at least it was legible. The message in the card, in Italian of course, reads: “Andrea, I wish you a happy life and I hope you’ll grow into as hard a worker as your mum”.
This was Dino’s greatest gift to me: he made me love working. Working was everything to him, he loved it with a passion and for 11 years I loved it too. Work has been my absolute priority at all times. Even when I arrived at the hospital to give birth to my baby boy, I was carrying my laptop under my arm, just in case a script arrived during those days. Somebody could pity me, if not worse. But that somebody does not know how rewarding it was to make Dino happy. He could be as enthusiastic as a child, “You’re an angel, what would I do without you?” he would say when I delivered a translation, meeting the insane deadline that he had set. I used to work at night a lot because he wanted to read the material on the same day and 5pm in LA was 2am here. But the happiness of those moments will never return.
Of course he ruined lots of my birthdays and vacations with his most urgent scripts that couldn’t wait another second. I fell out with friends and boyfriends who I had left standing in the middle of a party or a trip thanks to him but he rarely forgot to thank me and never lost the opportunity to make me feel precious and irreplaceable. This is what was special about Dino: he made you feel indispensable. Furthermore, he was funny and amusing. I remember some jokes with which he used to dismiss things or people he didn’t like. Working for him was better than being in a spa: it was a pleasure and fun.
We met by chance at the end of the nineties. He was looking for “a good but more importantly fast translator because a good one who’s slow is no good” for an American novel he wanted to read in Italian. His efficient secretary Elvira asked the Feltrinelli publishing house and they gave her my name. I was at home when I got a phone call. “This is Dino De Laurentiis, I want to talk to Elisabetta.” I thought someone was pulling my leg. “Yeah, sure, and I’m Queen Elizabeth “. He said: “You sound younger,” and asked me how much time I needed to translate an 800 page manuscript. A man who didn’t have time to waste. I don’t remember what I said or how long the job took me. I only remember the day Mister D. called me from his mansion in Capri and said: “Elisabetta, I’ve been looking for you for 30 years. Do you want to come to LA to work with me?” It was a Tuesday. On Sunday I was on the 10.25 Alitalia flight from Malpensa to LAX.
His wife Martha and he put me up in their guest room for a month, just the time it took to find proper accommodation in LA. Dino would wake me up at five in the morning saying “Come on, get up, it’s time to get to work”, and we would sit at the round table in the living room cutting and polishing film scenes. That’s how the best adventure of my life started, an adventure that continued uninterrupted even after my return home for personal reasons and ended last night because death took the father of cinema in his bed by surprise and took him away. I’d love to tell this story of mine one day, and I might actually do it. I could even post it here on this blog.
I’d love to tell you about the little things which made me love him more than the big ones, the ones for which the world saw him as a legend. For instance, I’d love to talk about how he would get angry when he didn’t get me on the phone right away, and if I answered his second try, ten seconds after the first, I would hear him shout: “Elisabetta, where the hell are you? You’re always on vacation!! Why don’t you ever answer this fucking phone?” Sure enough, patience was not his strong point. He expected me to summarize a 500 page thriller in three minutes, and when I took four, he would say I was lingering on petty details. When I was translating something he was particularly eager to read, he would call every fifteen minutes asking how many pages I had to go before finishing. Once I had to tell him that if he kept on interrupting me, I would never finish. Moreover, he was so quick to grasp what people were going to say that he would complete their thoughts before they expressed them. He would give me a new script to read and ask: “So, what do you think?” I wouldn’t even have a chance to begin my considered explanation before he would cut me off: “Ok, I got it, it’s a shitty story, let’s move on to something else.” I’d love to tell you about how he appreciated that I always told him the truth, even when it was not what he wanted to hear, or when we exchanged comments in Italian so other people in the movie business couldn’t understand and we had fun like school kids. I’d love to tell you about the hundreds of post-its that he used to stick on script pages, of how a shot of a cemetery was enough for him to ditch a film and of how films were always too long for his liking. And most of all, I would like to tell you about how much he loved his daughters and his family, and how there were no ifs, ands or buts when the Lazio football team - or Inter, in these latest years - were playing. I’d love to say that if I have felt special so far, I owe it to the fact that I worked for him.
Some days ago he gave me a call. “Elisabetta, you know I love you, don’t you?” His Neapolitan accent was barely detectable, his deep voice not as deep. I knew at once that he was saying goodbye to me.
With tears already in my eyes, I tried to answer lightheartedly: “Of course I know, doctor.” I know that he loved me and I love him too. I really hope to see him again, one day, somewhere. Needless to say, I’ll have my laptop with me.
