GENE GUTOWSKI DOESN’T NEED THIS PROFILE
by WRR
Gene Gutowski has it. And whatever it is. He has it in spades.
That was what crossed my mind when I first met him at a little party at his house in Zoliborz in 1992. It was a compact well-appointed house and he was with his fourth wife, an enticing ex-model 30+ years younger. That was something to admire right in itself. I was an already once divorced roving reporter with filmmaking ambitions. He was a guru, the man who invited Polanski to London (Polanski!) and single-handedly produced the great director’s first three English language films. I knew those films from film classes at university: Repulsion, Cul de Sac and The Fearless Vampire Killers. That was history.
He shook hands and said, “Hello, how are yaaaa?” in his characteristic sonorous burr. Call it class. Call it joie de vivre. Call it sophistication. Call it elegance, which is his preferred term. You knew that you were the presence of one who knows.
In fact, Gene (One of the princes of London during the swinging sixties, hanging with the Beatles and the Stones and the Soho-based heads of all the major Hollywood studios) might have been the most elegant, the most urbane, guy I’d ever met and this included a number of the British aristocratic set I ran with in London, who could be so well-mannered, so laid back, that they sometimes seemed to fade altogether into a rarified ambience of stylish good taste. I’m talking about young men whose hand-made shirts, accessorized with fraying cuffs and worn collars and ancient lived-in tweeds and lounge suits made you almost ashamed to be wearing something you had simply purchased rather than inherited from your forbearers. Such entitled style suggests volumes. To wit: you either have it in your blood or you don’t.
“My father said that it took not eight but 24 years of gymnasium to create a gentleman,” says Gene. That means three generations.
Gene! Fittingly, his assumed moniker, Eugene, means “well born,” and suggests something inherited, something in the genes, as it were. He was actually born Witold Bardach into a family and a Poland that no longer exist. His immediate family vanished in the Holocaust. The town, Rawa Ruska near Lvov, became part of the Ukraine in 1945. An old story. It’s impossible to think of Gene as Witold, though Witold is an honorable name. Witold means life-enhancing and this is what Mr. Gutowski has spent his life doing.
*By the way this profile very nearly died in the womb. GG doesn’t give interviews any more. So in keeping with the tenuous nature of this item’s existence there will be no sucker-punch questions about underage sex and no catchy quotes about Gene’s long-time friend, Roman Polanski. This is not that kind of story and Gene’s not that kind of man to tell stories out of school.
I’m not sure whether I’m tolerating Gene or he’s tolerating me. It’s probably somewhere close to 50-50. Anyway it’s time to start kissing ass. We’re doing this dance. Gene doesn’t do interviews any more. That’s what he says. But after a real ass-kissing email from yours truly—we’ve known each other since I co-wrote that Russian mob treatment with him for MGM. Real Bourne Identity stuff. . .
Somehow I conned him, cajoled the Grand Old Man to consent to this whatever it is. Let’s call it a story. Let’s call it a story about one of the most interesting people I’ve ever known. Bon mots from a bon vivant! The ostensible subject is elegance and how being elegant actually saved Gene’s life once upon a time. However, any time spent with Gene is more than worth it, if you can get him warmed up. And that’s harder than it sounds. He’ll be 85 on 26th July. His mind is still as clear as ever (my medical spies tell me he’s in damn fine shape for his age) but he does have this nagging heart condition. He takes special meds for that. The hell of it is that we were supposed to meet in St. martin to do a relaxing interview on the fringe of one of the best beaches in the world. Here we are however in Warsaw. This is the week of the plane crash in Smolensk so the atmosphere is dolorous and tense throughout the city—exactly the opposite of what you want when you are trying to land a Big Fish and Gene is a marlin. Make no mistake about that. He knows how to fuck with you. And why not? Why does he need another interview?
Does he dress left or right?
Dear Gene,
GENE: What the fuck is it that you want of me? (laughs)
WRR: Everything Gene. 99.9% of men would love to have had at least some of your great experiences. Whether they are willing to pay the price is an entirely different story. So what is the price? What is as you say the importance of being elegant?
GENE: (chuckle) I’m coming out of Europe the sole survivor of a famous family . . . everybody got killed off.
WRR: How would you define elegance and style?
GENE: I have a photograph to show you and then we’ll define it. (Goes for several photos and returns with framed photos showing him and CIC colleagues and first wife Zillah) Elegant? Zillah died ten years ago. . . I’m still alive. I will shortly be 85.
WRR: When’s your birthday?
GENE: July 26th.
WRR: So elegance. Why is it so important to you?
GENE: Because I came from an elegant family. Gutowski was not my real name. it was Bardach which I had to change during the War. And my grandfather Toefil (Bardach?) was a colonel in the Polish army in the Bolshevik war. There’s a list from Museum of Polish Army of officers from 1918-21 and three Bardachs come up, my grandfather, my father and his brother. Three officers.
WRR: So how does losing your family change you?
GENE: You lose family but you don’t lose your sense of entitlement.
WRR: Does that mean certain standards of behavior?
GENE: Well, yes it does. You come to accept certain standards of conduct. For example here’s my uncle Andrew who was a very elegant man, shipped out to a Gulag from Lvov. Came out with his wife and joined Anders army in Persia and was in all the campaigns in Africa and Italy. He was an elegant man and his wife came from an elegant family and after the war they immigrated to Brazil. After the war I was talking to someone in New York and mentioned I’d lost my uncle Andrew in the war and he said you didn’t lose him I just saw him boarding a ship for Brazil. He became the head of a wood factory in Sao Paulo. I brought him over to London in the eighties and got him an apartment right next to me. He died in 1990. He was then 87. He was a very, very cultured, sophisticated man.
GENE: You mentioned that your sense of elegance was critical to your survival in various situations? How?
GENE: The first thing that saved me was my knowledge of languages. Who was going to kill an elegant young man who spoke fluent German? Are you crazy? I can show you photographs that I came from very elegant cultured people. Even living in a small town near Lvov my mother read a French newspaper everyday. My father spoke five languages and because of his linguistic abilities he was a liaison to English and French officers during the Bolshevik war.
WRR: Can you give me a specific instance where being elegant or graceful saved your neck?
GENE: Well, even before I needed my neck saved, when I was 15 or 16 I fancied myself as a great lover and a great seducer. I remember using three different colognes, one for my hands to touch their lovely faces. You know, I was crazy. My uncle Bronislaw was insanely elegant. He had his suits made. He drove a large Packard with two windshields and enormous headlights. I don’t know where he even got that from. He was a bit of a prick actually.
WRR: So your background gave you a sense that you were somebody and that carried over?
GENE: Absolutely. I call it a sense of entitlement. That is who I am and this is what I respect. Let’s face it. I had a problem. My entire family was killed off in 1942 . . . for being Jewish. They just couldn’t save themselves. Sometimes I’ve held it against my poor father that he thought of trying to save his parents before saving himself and his children. Anyway, I came to Warsaw but with the knowledge that I had to be elegant within the means I had. Sometimes I was hungry. I don’t remember a single time during the whole occupation that I didn’t shave because once you stop shaving, I thought, you let yourself go. And razor blades were not easy to get. You used to sharpen them inside a glass.
WRR: Elegance of mind and appearance were your survival tools.
GENE: Yes, sometimes you hide under the lantern. Sometimes it’s best to hide where there’s the most light.
WRR: Do you think you were courageous?
Gene: Courageous I don’t know. I was totally foolish. Im not a physically courageous man. Im not the type to jump into a river to save someone. I want to say also that people have different standards. They do different things under pressure. . . informing or collaborating with the Germans. None of that for me.
WRR: You were smuggling German radios to the AK for example. That must have been terribly frightening. What was the scariest moment during the war?
Gene: (laughs) The scariest moment? Believe it or not an American officer scared the shit out of me. It was Germany after the war and I was courting this American lady, Zillah Rhoads from Culpeper Virginia. We used to travel all over the place sightseeing on the weekend. Being in the CIC (American counter intelligence corps) I could go where I wished.
WRR: You were living in Starnberg.
GENE Right. So we went to visit some of those palaces near Munich built by that crazy King Ludwig. We were on a boat on the lake. I always had to carry a gun I put the gun a pistol in my briefcase and when I had to pay for the trip I opened the briefcase and the German conductor of that little boat saw the pistol. So he got immediately got on the phone and called the American Military police saying “You better get over here, there’s a man with a pistol.” So at that point we are getting into my elegant convertible slowly slowly and suddenly a jeep rolls up with a young lieutenant MP comes up obviously scared shitless with a big .45. I see that it’s cocked and his hand is shaking. Well you don’t want to be hit by a .45. I put my hands up and he says “Where’s your gun?” and I explained carefully who I was and why I could carry the gun. And that was my scariest moment of the war.
WRR: Even scarier than the Germans?
GENE: Yes. Because he had a cocked and loaded gun pointed at me.
WRR: So you were almost killed by the people you were working for? Is that a metaphor for life?
Gene: (chuckles) Well maybe. He was young and nervous and he could have gotten off by saying he had to kill me and it was in the line of duty and so forth.
WRR: What would you say is the secret of success? If you were going to advise people on how to succeed . . .
GENE: Don’t be afraid. . . Or, at least, don’t show it. Make the most of your situation whatever it is. For example, there we were at the end of the war when Germany was destroyed and poor. I had a wedding at St Lukas cathedral in Munich. As it was an evening wedding . . . I had to organize the whole thing. I had to organize on black market coal to heat the church. I had to order a wedding cake from the army PX in Garmisch. A beautiful three-tier cake. I had to drive from Garmisch in a jeep, driving with one hard on the wheel and one on the cake. There was no place to get a set of tails but I knew a German lawyer in Garmisch and I borrowed the tails and had to have them taken in. but I never told him what happened so probably he thought he put on a lot of weight.
Did you read how I got my first suit? Through thick and thin throughout the war I had kept this suit to Latvia and into Germany that I had made in Warsaw so that at the end of the war I’d put on the suit and be elegant. . . so imagine the end of the war and everyone was running through Austria to the border. All I had was my German Tot uniform. I put my rucksack on a wagon and suddenly we heard the Russian tanks coming they were going to cut us off so I started running and made it over the bridge over the Ems River. There I was with no suit. Pretty soon, I got involved translating. But the Americans were still trying to gather up uniformed people and put them in POW camps. I had to think fast.
WRR: So you left your suit in the wagon and now you needed one . . .
GENE: Yes, so I went into this little town and found a tailor. It was basically armed robbery to get the guy to provide a suit. He had some suits waiting. I found one and he made a few alterations and once he realized I wasn’t going to shoot him his wife brought out some tea and cakes. I got some shirts and a tie and some shoes.
WRR: So everyone else was rag-tag and you looked good?
GENE: Right. Pretty soon I was in CIC (US Counter-intelligence Corps) and was having suits made. I found a glove-maker in Munich and had eventually had19 pairs of gloves . . . (paris photo) . . .
WRR: You said something that was very important. Don’t be afraid. How do you go about that? Convince yourself.
GENE: You have the inner force in you or you don’t. What can I tell you?
WRR: So whether you have a million bucks or not you say this is me and I’m somebody.
GENE: the important thing is to look like a million bucks.
WRR: That’s very old-school southern (US).
GENE: Really? I didn’t know. It’s a pity that Polish society doesn’t have this elegance of spirit which translates into the other stuff any more. Because by acts of omission and commission the whole middle class is gone: the landed gentry gone, the Jews are gone. The whole society has peasant roots. They come from small villages and towns. . . In 1940 there were 80,000 people with higher education in Poland and they killed 22,000 of them in Katyn!
WRR: Doesn’t this lack of grace, if you will, translate to contemporary culture as a whole?
GENE: Listen I don’t give a fuck about contemporary culture (laughs). You asked me a question. Because I come from generations of an elegant family . . . my father said it takes 24 years not 8 to make a gentleman. 3 generations of schooling. Who taught them how to dress and how to eat? Now of course they all go to Zejna or Armani.
WRR: But you still have to carry it off. Is that why you like the British?
GENE: I like the British and did well in London. What a time! Plenty of style. Of course the tailors out of Saville Row. Doug Heyward. Google and you find him. He was tailor to celebs. He started very small and worked with a Ukrainian who had a tailoring outfit in Fulham. Doug was the front man who came to your house and did the measurements. He opened a place in Mount Street later. I remember when Roman came to London in ‘63 and tore up his only pair of trousers. Dougie did the repairs for him. You go into his shop and gossip and meet friends. Everyone had suits made by Heyward. I even had a suit made for Uncle Andrew and his suits were very special because they required 20 pockets and he carried everything with him.
WRR: Was that in case he had to run? Some kind of fetish?
GENE: It was a fetish I suppose.
WRR: What would he carry?
GENE: A sliderule. Comb. Scissors. Cologne. He was so happy with Doug heyward who gave him all the pockets.
WRR: What part did the trauma of losing yr family and the war play in your subsequent life?
GENE: I started life it total denial. I invented a completely new identity. I beat up on myself. I never admitted I was Jewish. Not even to my own family. Not until a few years ago.
WRR: What form does denial take?
GENE: It wasn’t about being Jewish. To start with I have absolutely no religious training. In our home they used to slaughter pigs for Easter and make sausages. Not very Jewish is it? I simply was not aware of religion except as a kind of theater.
(My father was a machine gunner in first war and he ran out of ammunition and started crying and the Russians took him prisoner and he escaped from the camp to St Pete where he hid as a student . . .) note to myself: move this.
And then the Polish army was being formed and he joined and was promoted during the Bolshevik war.
WRR: Were you extremely close to yr father?
GENE: Yes very.
WRR: Do you feel your father was somehow with you through the years and that you carried his memory forward?
GENE: Yes oh yes I think so.
WRR: Why did you write so much about sex in your book?
GENE: To sell it better. But I overdid it and that can ruin the effect. But on the other hand I have a wide audience of younger people (smiles). It’s a different holocaust story. They couldn’t catch me because I was busy fucking somewhere. “Holofuck” is more like it.
All right, now here’s a photo of my Uncle. Look at him! Bronislaw’s wife drove a Bugatti, and he drove a Packard . . . Here he is wearing patent leather shoes with his uniform. I mean who does that? Crazy! Still it shows you a bit of style in a regimental photo from the 1921 war.
(Stasha) spelling? was something. She was General Grot’s (Stefan Rowecki) personal liaison during WWII in the home army until he was betrayed and captured. (What happened to her?)
Move this drowning anecdote or cross out. (It happened to me with a friend of mine. Stephen Wingate the guy with us went swimming and he was waving at us and we waved back and finally one of the boats pulled him out of the water and we thought he always makes friends but he was drowning.)
WRR: Have you been running away or toward during your life?
GENE: Just running.
(we are looking through photo albums) This idiot! His sons were my uncles . . . Tell you about class. He was born in 1838 and he enlisted in the Austrian horse artillery. They took a bad beating from the Prussians in 1866. And apparently he performed such acts of bravery that he got the highest bravery decoration on the battlefield called Golden Bravery Medal First Class (in german please gene). From that point there was no holding
back the little Jewish horseman. He became an officer and then served in prestigious hussar regiments. And away he went . . .
WRR: Hussars with lances?
GENE: Forget about lances . . . He went on to be adjutant of the cavalry school in Vienna as a major. After some years he became Edler von Chlumberg. He was the first cousin of my grandfather.
WRR: Was he a role model?
GENE: Yeah sure. We were a family of warriors. (Looking through photos.) He had two sons. Maximillian who died as a flyer in 1917. His brother Hans also a cavalry officer. He became a pacifist playwright. He wrote a play that appeared on Broadway, “Miracle of Verdun.” 1930. He died in Leipzig during a rehearsal of his play when he fell into the orchestra pit. And the doctor in charge instead of letting him sleep it off wanted to talk drama. So he was killed by his theater loving doctor. That’s my cousin George. That’s Kasia Skrzynecka. Her mother is my niece.
WRR: Here you are smiling with your friends by the river and yet you are stealing radios from the Germans. How is one able to do that?
GENE: You don’t show fear. The trouble the Jews had even when they had the so-called right look was the fear in their eyes that gave them away. I never had fear in my eyes.
GENE: Did you ever kill anybody?
WRR: No.
GENE: You bluffed your way through. . .
WRR: What’s the most important thing in life besides being brave.
GENE: Having enough money to enjoy yourself.
WRR: How important have friends been to you?
GENE: I have had and still have a lot of friends. (please elaborate on friendship Gene: Thomas Aquinas said life without friendship was not worth living)
WRR: What should we look for in friends?
GENE: Loyalty. Honesty. . .
(Photo: Gene on Champs Elysees wearing his gloves.)
WRR: What’s that?
GENE: A letter. You see I came to America on an affidavit signed by a priest from the Catholic Refugee Committee. The letter is to Zillah asking me to report to them. It was hard to leave Europe because the entire Polish quota was taken up by Jews of which I was not obviously one . . . Zillah fixed it for me at her office (what office?) and the guy wrote me an affidavit on his knee. Thank you very much. And I went to American on it.
WRR: What has been your greatest experience?
GENE: The Pianist was good one. I suppose you could call that payback for all the denials.
WRR: What was the worst mistake you made?
GENE: Not making the movie out of The Passion Flower Hotel. I blew it twice. I turned downed Stanley Kubrick and then Mike Nichols. I was ambitious. I’d been promised me a three-picture deals. So I blew off Mike Nichols and Kubrick. See you! Poor Mike Nichols even borrowed Burton’s apartment at the Dorchester to impress me, a schmuck from Lvov. It’s too painful too discuss. It’s definitely the biggest mistake I ever made business wise.
WRR: You can’t really make a bigger business mistake than firing Kubrick and Nichols?
GENE: It’s difficult to beat.
WRR: What was the best place you ever lived?
GENE: London in the sixties. Everything was happening.
(I’d like more here Gene, the atmosphere . . . )
WRR: I want to come back to this question if you don’t mind and ask what most motivated you to succeed in life?
(What follows is beautiful)
GENE: I’m like so many people who came out of the holocaust who are unable to deal with the tragedy and the losses. You want to go into complete denial put out of your mind what happened to you, invent a new curriculum vitae for yourself . . . put out of your mind what you’ve experienced, what you’ve seen. How else can you deal as a 15, 16 year-old boy when practically overnight the entire family is wiped out? Your grandparents, you’re your cousins, your uncles, everybody. You’re alone. You’re a fucking orphan. The worst part of it is I had a young brother who was left behind in Lvov and who wrote me a desperate letter once to help him and I wasn’t able to. That’s excusable. How could I have helped him? Yet the sense of guilt has been with me throughout my life. I should’ve been my brother’s keeper. I couldn’t have been. You know? These are the issues and you submerge yourself in life, in women in sexuality. I’ve done it all. You name it . . .
You live with a tremendous sense of loss which as I get older is getting stronger and stronger, but I was fortunate that I was able to extend my life because I have three sons and they have children so I see the continuation of the family, which otherwise would’ve been wiped out. In the end life wins over death. Right? That’s the essence of it.
You see this may sound very conceited and probably is because in a way I probably a conceited man but I am very proud of the genetic background. I have a very handsome family on both sides and I see the continuation of the good genes in my children and their children and that makes me very happy. They are good-looking intelligent, creative and successful in life at what they do. Life wins.
For example nothing pleased me more than a vast collection of beautiful London tailored suits that I was able to give to my son Andrew who is exactly the same size as I was. With that gift he became the best dressed real estate developer and architect in America. (laughs) In this way even elegance carries on . . .
I’ve assured myself of the continuation of life afterwards . . .
WRR: Through both your children and your work. What do your other children do?
Adam is a film producer who has just done a documentary about Halston which is in the Tribeca film festival and he’s just getting married to a beautiful girl. (fill in here what you like Gene please)
WRR: What was your reason for going to London in the 1960s?
GENE: I was going to meet an American producer living in London called Hanna Weinstein, who had her own studios. I was going to make a series of Sherlock Holmes films with her. . . Her daughter is also now a big producer in Hollywood. She was a teenager then . . . That’s what brought me to London. . .That didn’t come off but then I formed a company with Arthur Browner, another Polish-Jewish refugee, called CCC films and made a picture called Station Six Sahara.
It was a lovely cozy business then in England. All the major Hollywood studios had their offices in London, and these guys were easily accessible.
Did you know you mumble?
Yes yes I have to do something about that . . .
What? Speak up!
Gene’s like my professor in college. He could explode at any time. He might poke you in the eye. Then again suddenly he will say, “So what was Nicaragua like then?”
When I got married to Judy the entire film industry was at my wedding in the registry office and then everyone came to my house in Montpelier Street. It was a tight little group. Everybody knew everybody.
WRR: I studied Repulsion and Cul de Sac in college. What was it like making them?
GENE: Here’s a kind of funny thing. Back then you were the producer. One producer. Now you watch the print of Repulsion, Cul de Sac or the Vampire Killers and there’s one producer. Gene Gutowski. Now you see a picture. The producer credits go on and on. The agent wants a producer credit. The guy who makes sandwiches wants a credit too. In those days there was one producer. That’s it.
WRR: That gives you more responsibility but also more control.
Gene: That’s right.
WRR: When you were making Repulsion (1965) were you aware you were making a classic, a picture that would last?
GENE: (chuckles) No. Oh, my god, no . . .We were just making a picture. We thought it was great and it came out . . . and Bosley Crowther’s who was a big critic review at the New York Times said he thought it was one of the best movies he’d ever seen, we knew we were home free.
WRR: you also had Catherine Deneuve who had made the Umbrellas of Cherbourg which had made her something of a name. But really Repulsion really made her name. What was she like?
GENE: Very private. Really delightful. Very professional. She had a very good rapport with Roman.
WRR: Was she stunningly beautiful like, say, Bardot?
GENE: Stunningly beautiful.
WRR: Was there that feeling of “wow” this is a really extraordinary woman?
Gene: Sure. She was wonderful. . .That reminds me of a funny thing about her sister, Francoise Dorleac (star of Cul de Sac). She always carried her entire wardrobe wherever she went. So I had to pick her up to take her to location on that crazy Holy Island (Lindisfarne) on the film Cul de Sac. We had a pick-up truck full of her wardrobe. And we went on location, the rooms being difficult to rent because there was no hotel, we had to rent a special room for her wardrobe and then she never wore a single thing. For the whole film she wore the same jeans and sweater the whole time.
WRR: What was Lionel Stander (noted character actor famous to 80’s TV viewers as Max on Hart to Hart with Stephanie Powers and Bob Wagner) like?
GENE: (laughs) A big pain in the ass.
WRR: How was he difficult?
GENE: I’ll tell you. He ordered a big shipment of pastrami which was being shipped from New York to Holy Island. It got lost and as the producer I was elected to find what happened to the pastrami—oh come on—and then when it finally arrived we ate nothing but pastrami . . .
WRR: That’s showbiz. Was he professional when working?
GENE: Yeah, yeah. He was professional on the set. But Roman used to give him a bit of a hard time.
WRR: How?
GENE: Well for instance I knew he had a heart problem and there was a shot where he had to run up and down a staircase. Roman made him do it a few times and I said Roman take it easy, but he said he is just looking for sympathy like most actors. But then he ended up in hospital with a suspected heart attack.
WRR: Well he must have been pretty strong because he lived to be 86 years old.
GENE: Lionel Stander?
WRR: Yes.
GENE: Roman was right. 86?
WRR: He married five young actresses so his heart couldn’t have been too bad.
> > >
WRR; What to you think was responsible for your break in collaboration with Mr. Polanski?
GENE: What happened was that there was a young and hungry associate of ours who consciously worked on Roman to convince him he would be better than I. . . At that time he was doing Rosemary’s Baby and we had a three picture deal. And then roman didn’t want to do anything for a while. We were going to do the story of Paganini. Roman was farting about instead of having a meeting he was distracted in other directions. The writer finally delivered the screenplay which was to go to Paramount. It was way too long. Our lawyer Wally Wolfe was just afraid to take it to Paramount because it was just unprofessional. So we hired a writer to make it acceptable for delivery. So it was one of the pictures that never happened. But we did get paid.
WRR: Do you think Sharon Tate’s murder in August ’69 might have had something to do with the end of your collaboration with Roman then?
GENE: I don’t know . . . because at the same time he got a deal to write Day of the Dolphin with Kenneth Tynan and that’s why he was in London . . . So without him I made Romance of a Horse Thief and the Adventures of Gerard with Skolimowski as director. The point is that Roman settled me with Skolimowski. I had him under contract blah blah etc. And later when it didn’t work out, Roman said, “You should’ve fired him.”
WRR: You knew Warren Beatty around this time didn’t you? What did you think of him?
GENE: I liked him a lot. Super guy.
WRR: Was there any discussion of you ever working together?
GENE: No. . . but here’s a story about Warren and Brigitte Bardot. We were after dinner one time with Bardot and her sister not far from her apartment. So we were walking on the street and Warren who’s got a very good sense about it suddenly realized there were paparazzi hiding in the bushes who wanted to take a picture of him and Bardot. He asked me to take Brigit to the door. So I took Brigitte by the arm and Warren fell back into the shadows. When we came to the door lights flashed and the paparazzi took pictures of me and Bardot. The picture appeared in one of the scandal rags with me captioned as one of her new lovers.
Other questions:
- How are women today different from those 50 years ago?
- How does it feel when your mind is still as sharp as it's always been but your body succumbs to age?
- Do you think that getting old is about caring less?
FORGOT TO MENTION THAT THE ROLLS ROYCE OF MEN UNDERWEAR IS A SWISS MADE 'ZIMMERLI' A CLASSIC CUT OF FINEST WHITE COTTON
WHEN I STARTED BUYING AT HARROD S IT WAS 5 POUNDS A PAIR A FEW YEARS AGO WHEN I CHECKED IT OUT IT WAS 50 POUNDS AND GAINING
I GAVE UP IN FAVOUR OF MARK AND SPENCER BOXERS BUT STILL KEEP A PAIR AS MEMENTO, REMEMBER YEARS AGO ATTENDING ELEGANT DINNER
PARTY IN LONDON THE MATTER CAME UP AND PRACTICALLY ALL MEN AT THE TABLE (MYSELF INCLUDING) STOOD UP TO PULL DOWN THEIR
TROUSERS TO REVEAL Z I M M E R L I SHORTS
G<ENTHANKS AND A LITTLE VASELINE GOES A LONG WAY, PRINT OUT DOUBLE SPACE AND WE SHALL EDIT ETC. I WOULD LIKE TO SEEE MORE OF FACTUAL INFORMATION LIKE THAT IN THE FIFTIES WHATEVER ELEGANCE THERE WAS IN U.S. IT WAS ON EASTERN SEABORD WITH BROOKS BROS, TRIPLER
AND PAUL STEWART LEADING THE WAY WITH DUNHILL FOR BLAZERS, LOCK FOR HATS AND LOBB FOR SHOES THOUGH I ALWAYS PREFERED HE
LIGHT ITALIAN TESTONI OF WHICH I HAVE A FINE PAIR FOR OVER 30 YEARS. ENGLAND WAS OF COURSE A PARADISE FO THE MALEMAN SINE THE DAYS OF
REGENCY DANDIES. LONDON IS A MECCA FOR ALL THINGS A WELL DRESSED AND APPOINTED MAN COULD WISH WITH TAILORS ON SAVILLE ROW
TO SHIRT MAKERS ON JERMYN STREET LIKE HARVEY HUDSON OR TURNBUL AND ASSER (CHECK THE SPELLLING) DAKS FOR SLACKS AND HOLLAND
AND HOLLAND FOR THE HUNTING AND SPORTING MALE.
COUNTLESS PLACES FOR CANES UMBRELLAS SCENTS HAIRDRESSERS ETC ETC. UNTIL RECENTLY NO PLACE FOR LADIES TO SHOP. GENERALLY MY GENERATION DRESSED TO LOOK OLDER LIKE OUR FATHERS NOW OLD MEN TRY TO DRESS LIKE THEIR KIDS, ON THE WHOLE AMERICANS HAVE PROBLEMS WITH ELEGANCE MOSTLY BECAUSE OF THEIR BULK AS THEY SAY YOU CAN NOT BEE TOO THIN OR TOO RICH. IN MY DAYS IN VIRGIN ISLAND A SUAVE
ITALIAN FLAVIO BRIATORE LATER THE CHIEF OF A FORMULA ONE TEAM OPENED AND TRIED TO RUN AN ELEGANT NIGHT CLUB REGINE'S AND FAILED
BECAUSE WHILE THE LOCALS MANY BLACK WOULD DRESS UP WITH GOOD SLACKS AND A NICE SHIRT AMERICANS INSISTED THAT IT WA S THEIR
BIRTH RIGHT TO SHOW UP AT NIGHT IN SWEATY T-SHIRTS EXPOSING HAIRY BACKS DIRTY SHORTS AND SANDALS.
IN FLORIDA OLD MEN RUN AROUND IN SHORTS AND NIKE SHOES AND CALIFORNIA YOU CAN FORGET ABOUT. ONLY BRITISH UPPER CLASS HAD YHE RIGHT ATTITUDE TO BEING CASUALY ELEGANT AND REMEMBER THAT INVITED TO A FORMAL PHEASANT SHOOT I HAD TO WEAR A TIE AND BEAT UP A FINE TWEED
SUIT TOO LOOK PROPERLY OLD AND WORN OUT
ITALY OF COURSE HAD GREAT TAILORS WITH CARACENE AND SCHIFONELLI AND ANGELO'S LEADING THE WAY ON VIA CONDOTTI I ROME TOGETHER
WITH GUCI ETC. TODAY THERE IS OBVIOUSLY ARMANI AND ZEGNA BUT ALREADY FOR MASS CONSUMPTION
POLAND HAS MADE A GIANT STEP FORWARD AND IN CONNECTION WITH RECENT CATASTROPHE I WAS AMAZED AT A NUMBER OF MEN IN WELL CUT DARK SUITS. THE PRIME MINISTE TUSK IS OBVIOUSLY A ZEGNA MAN
Knife in the water 100%
Repulsion 100%
cul de sac 86%
fearless vampires 66%
rosemarys baby 98%
Variety: A study in kinky insanity, crowther: a wild swing . . . Roger Ebert compares Stander (3 stooges) to Frankenstein concetrating not on horror but on macabre humor . . . Fearless Vampire Killers Or: Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck (1967)T
A somewhat surreal black comedy directed and coscripted by Roman Polanski, CUL-DE-SAC is the tale of a mismatched married couple, George and Teresa (Donald Pleasence and Françoise Dorléac), living in an isolated 11th-century castle near the ocean whose home is invaded by two gangsters on the run after an unsuccessful heist. Lionel Stander plays Dicky, a thug who attempts to save the life of his mortally wounded partner (Jack MacGowran) by enlisting the help of George and Teresa, then holds them captive in their own home as the group awaits the arrival of the mysterious Mr. Kattlebach, the gangsters' boss whom Dicky has contacted prior to cutting the phone line. The nubile young Teresa proves more resourceful than her ever-cringing husband as they try to come up with a plan for eluding their boorish captor; further complications arise, however, after an unexpected visit from an old school chum of George's, who arrives with an entourage of annoying family and friends. In spite of tensions that, as Polanski later reported, existed between him and his often less than cooperative stars, all three principals give fine performances, most notably Pleasence as the cuckolded, humiliated, and (as Dicky at one point proclaims) hopelessly "square" British WWII veteran George. [Less]
And his life is better than fiction . . . hell even his wardrobe sounds fantastic in an age where technology encourages us to dress down instead of dressing up. bon mots from a bon vivant . . . At the 15th Berlin International Film Festival in 1965, Repulsion won both the FIPRESCI Prize and the Silver Berlin Bear-Extraordinary Jury Prize.[3] The film paved the way for Polanski's entry into the cinemas of Western Europe and drew attention to Catherine Deneuve with her performance
REPULSION, starring the incomparable Catherine Deneuve, was director Roman Polanski's first movie filmed in English. It chronicles the descent into schizophrenia of a sexually confused, isolated young woman named Carol who works at a beauty parlor and shares an apartment with her sister Helen (Yvonne Furneaux). One day Helen and her boyfriend, Michael (Ian Hendry), go off on vacation together and Carol is left alone in the empty apartment, where the only sounds are the constant ticking of a clock, faucets dripping, and the invasive ringing of a telephone. Extremely paranoid, Carol refuses to let anyone in and never leaves the building herself, in effect breaking off all contact with the outside world. In this claustrophobic environment, she begins to lose her grip on reality, suffering from hallucinations of being attacked by a phantom rapist and hands reaching out from the walls to grab her. Highly acclaimed and extremely gripping, Polanski's disturbing film can be seen as a prelude to his later work in the field of psychological horror: ROSEMARY'S BABY and, especially, THE TENANT. [Less]
Roman Polanski's first English film follows a schizophrenic woman's descent into madness, and makes the audience feel as claustrophobic as the character.
Gene Gutowski born as Witold Bardach (July 26 1925 in Lvov, Ukraine (then Poland))
Son of Julius Bardach (Lawyer) and Anna Bardach (Concert Pianist).
Gene Gutowski is most known as a Polish-American film producer having produced many of Roman Polanski's films.
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Spouse(s) |
Zillah Rhoades (1947-1952) |
zillah rhoades 47-52
judy wilson 63-73
Corrinna Liddel 76-83
Dorota puzio 1990-94
Son of Julius and Anna Bardach, Witold Bardach and his family lived in Rawa Ruska from 1933 until the beginning of war in 1939 when the Bardach family moved to Lvov where under Soviet occupation Witold Bardach began his studies as sculptor at the Institute of Plastic Arts.
In 1941 the Germans occupied Lvov and a year later his entire family who has lived there for generations was killed, Witold escaped to Warsaw where he took on the name 'Eugene Gutowski'. He first worked for a photographer and later as an employee of the Junkers factory at Okęcie Airport, secretly removing Luftwaffe radio-transmitters for delivery to the Polish underground army (Armia Krajowa) Escaping from the Gestapo at 18 he became the head of a construction company working for the Organisation Todt in Riga, Latvia and was later evacuated to Germany at the end of 1944.
At the end of war in May of 1945, again escaping from the advancing Soviet army, Gene Gutowski joined the US Army Counter Intelligence Corps. Worked as Special Agent out of the Garmisch-Partenkirchen office until March of 1947 when he married an American State Department employee, Zillah Rhoades and moved with her to New York.
After working for a few years as fashion illustrator, Gene Gutowski become a TV and film producer and with a few low budget productions to his name, including the TV series I Spy (1955 TV series). He moved to London in 1960 to produce Station Six Sahara and to join forces with Roman Polański in 1963. In a creative partnership they made Repulsion, Cul-De-Sac and The Fearless Vampire Killers, until Polanski moveed to Hollywood under contract to Paramount in 1967.
Pursuing separate paths, though remaining close friends, Gutowski and Polański joined forces again to produce together THE PIANIST an Oscar winning film. Residing in Warsaw, Gene Gutowski has staged several plays and also has written and published his autobiography Od Holocaustu do Hollywood (From Holocaust to Hollywood).
[edit] Filmography
- Station Six-Sahara "1962" (Producer)
- Repulsion "1965" (Producer)
- Passion Flower Hotel "1965" (Producer)
- Cul-de-Sac (film) "1966" (Producer)
- The Fearless Vampire Killers "1967" (Producer)
- A Day at the Beach "1970" (Producer)
- The Adventures of Gerard"1968" (Writer/Producer)
- Romance of a Horsethief "1970" (Producer)
- The Pianist (2002 film) (Co-Producer)
- Doubt: A Parable "2007" (Producer)
Passion Flower Hotel is a musical with music by John Barry, lyrics by Trevor Peacock and a book by Wolf Mankowitz, based on a novel of the same name by Rosalind Erskine. The story concerns a young girl going to an English girls' Boarding School. In the dormitory, the girls discuss losing their virginity and decide that the best way is to set up a "service" for the local Boys school situated across the lake from them. The subject is treated in a light manner.
The musical premiered at the Palace Theatre, Manchester, England on 30 July 1965, transferring to the Prince of Wales Theatre, London, on 24 August 1965. It ran for 148 performances
Gene knows first hard a list of women we love, classic “women we love” iconic everlasting beauties like deneauve like Bisset like Bardot like Sharon Tate