Was Caligula the greatest con in Hollywood history?

By Wendy Leigh
Last updated at 4:41 PM on 30th August 2008

Rome, AD41. High noon. Voluptuous, full-breasted women, naked under their flimsy see-through gowns, cluster in an opulent anteroom with groups of virile young men.

Drums beat relentlessly, yet  -  despite the rampant debauchery of the scene  -  there is sudden, respectful silence when the bride and groom make their entrance.

She is the epitome of a blushing bride. Radiant with joy, her brown eyes glisten with emotion and her lustrous raven hair is garlanded with white blossoms.

Beside her, her handsome young husband, dressed in white robes to symbolise his purity, gazes at her lovingly. Hand in hand, they make their way to the bridal chamber.

Shocking: An orgy scene from Caligula

But outside, the crowd parts. The Emperor Caligula strides into the room, a gold chain in his hand, the end of which is secured around the neck of his statuesque blonde empress.

He makes an announcement to the room. 'And now for Caesar's wedding present,' he declares.

He strolls into the chamber, strips the terrified bride, throws her onto a table, holds her down and  -  commanding her to look him in the eye, and her husband to watch  -  he proceeds brutally to deflower her.

Then he turns his attentions to her innocent husband.

What follows is shocking in the extreme, as Caligula forces the bride to watch him have sex with her husband.

Yet all this debauchery is merely a minor episode in a 156-minute movie that features protracted lesbian sex, filmed with a camera that lingers interminably on every intimate curve, homosexuality, cruel sadomasochistic acts, and continual explicit close-ups.

This is Caligula  -  the notorious 1979 film featuring every imaginable perversion. 

Emperor: Malcom McDowell clothed in Caligula

It has never been seen in its disgusting entirety on British screens. But it is now to go on sale in high streets all over Britain, after the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) cleared it for viewing this week.

Retailers will now be able to sell Caligula: The Imperial Version  -  featuring scenes hitherto banned by the censors and starring Helen Mirren, Malcolm McDowell, Peter O'Toole and the late Sir John Gielgud  -  with an 18 certificate.

The BBFC has, in its wisdom, seen fit to release Caligula uncut because of what it risibly terms 'its historical interest'.

But even 30 years ago, in the heat of the sexual revolution, critics and audiences alike agreed that Caligula, in the words of distinguished American film critic Roger Ebert, was 'sickening, shameless trash'.

Even the film's latest distributors say they were surprised by the BBFC's actions.

Alex Agran from Arrow Films said: 'When [the film] came back uncut, we were stunned.'

It's unsurprising, then, that the actors who participated in it dread the film's return.

Especially as the movie's producer, Penthouse boss Bob Guccione, shamelessly double-crossed them all  -  the film was actually to become a hard-core porn movie.

So how did Guccione fool some of the greatest actors of their generation into starring in one of the most disgusting pieces of pornography in cinematic history?

That the notoriously sleazy Guccione was able to convince stars of this calibre to participate in the first place was, in part, due to the fact that Caligula's writer was none other than American's most patrician man of letters, Gore Vidal, who counts Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Al Gore among his relatives.

Orgy: A scene from the film

The fact that Guccione was able to persuade Gore and others to cooperate on Caligula  -  and how he managed to fool them all with such a nefarious feat  -  is a little-known tale, and one in which I was peripherally involved.

During the summer of 1977, fresh from working for the BBC, I had moved to Los Angeles where I interviewed a series of celebrities  -  from John Wayne to Lord Lichfield, Zsa Zsa Gabor to George Best  -  on love, sex and relationships.

The result was a book of these interviews, Speaking Frankly.

Bob Guccione approached me with a view to publishing it. Summoned to New York to Guccione's Italianate East 67th Street mansion, complete with a mosaic-edged pool, lead sphinxes and 24-carat gold-leafed walls, I was determined not to sell my book to a man I considered to be a second-rate pornographer.

But curiosity killed the cat, as they say  -  and I couldn't resist going to meet such a notorious man in the flesh.

Guccione made his entrance, clad from head to foot in black leather and gold chains, strategically arranged across his tanned and toned chest.

His jet black hair and sideburns were clearly dyed and his blue eyes blazed almost feverishly. He was a cross between a latter-day Caligula and Elvis long past his prime.

This first meeting, at least, didn't convince me to sell my book to him  -  despite Guccione's deep voice and clever pitch.

At the end of our meeting, with as much pride as he might have exhibited had he won the Nobel Prize and showed it to me, Guccione introduced me to Gore Vidal.

Later, working relations between the pair would become so rancorous that Vidal would launch a legal battle to prevent him from billing Caligula as 'Gore Vidal's Caligula'.

But at that time, Guccione was clearly thrilled to have Vidal on his payroll. 

Graphic: A threesome is one of the film's many sexual variations

And, like me, despite his distaste for Guccione  -  and like Helen Mirren, who later confessed to a sneaking liking for the pornographer  -  Vidal was still amused and intrigued by him.

In fact, as Vidal told me, he had even gone so far as to ask Guccione to join him at a dinner party in Rome where Princess Margaret was also a guest.

'During dinner,' Vidal confided, 'Princess Margaret leaned over to Bob, extracted one of the gold chains from around his neck  -  the one with a gold replica of a penis hanging from it  -  and said: "So tell me, Mr Guccione, what exactly did you win this one for?" '

Unpalatable he may have been, but Guccione was a charmer, which helps to explain how Caligula ever managed to see the light of day.

Such was Guccione's persuasiveness that Gore signed to write the Caligula script for the (at the time) generous fee of $200,000.

The film was initially meant to portray the final years of Caligula, before his murder in AD41.

But Gore's contribution didn't end with the script. He was also instrumental in convincing Malcolm McDowell  -  fresh from his tour de force in the film A Clockwork Orange  -  to play the part of Caligula.

'When Gore told me it was Bob Guccione, I asked: "But isn't he a pornographer?'' ' Malcolm remembered.

'Gore said: "Malcolm, just think of him as one of the Warner Brothers. He just signs the cheques.''

McDowell agreed to take the part of Caligula and would end up being on screen for most of the film, often partially nude.

Before shooting in Rome began, McDowell also managed to snare one of Britain's brightest stars for the part of Caligula's wife, Caesonia  -  dubbed 'the most promiscuous woman in Rome'. 

Risky: Caligula attracts as much criticism now as it did in the 1970s

Helen Mirren, then primarily known as a Shakespearean actress, was at the start of an illustrious if somewhat adventurous career.

'I talked her into it,' Malcolm McDowell admits today.

Helen committed to playing a part which meant she would be seen naked from behind.

She would also participate in a threesome with McDowell as Caligula and his onscreen sister, Drusilla, played by Teresa Ann Savoy.

The actors knew the film would be explicit  -  but Mirren and the others had no idea just how gruesomely pornographic Guccione would make the final version.

In retrospect, Helen Mirren now says: 'The film was like being on an acid trip. It has its good moments and it has its bad moments and is a fantastical journey.

'It went where angels fear to tread. In many scenes, you're going: "Oh my God, I can't believe we're going to actually shoot this!" It was sort of horrific, but it was also wonderful.'

It's said that Mirren had to leave to be sick the first time she saw the huge set, which was populated almost entirely by naked people.

However, if Mirren and her co-stars had bothered to investigate the previous work of Caligula's director, Tinto Brass, they might have got a glimpse of what the film would be like, with its unrelenting focus on all permutations of sexuality and its sexist treatment of women.

Take Salon Kitty, Brass' most celebrated film. A pornographic saga set in a World War II brothel, it involved gruesomely unpleasant sex acts of all descriptions.

As the story goes, Guccione saw seven minutes of Salon Kitty, then jumped up and declared: 'I want this man to direct Caligula!'

With Brass on board, and no lesser luminaries than Sir John Gielgud and Peter O'Toole now members of the cast, shooting began on August 5, 1976.

When it was completed four months later, Tinto Brass had shot 120 miles of film. And although the cast did not know it at the time, Guccione had secretly also shot some scenes of his own.

Guccione decided to do so after one visit to the film set while Brass was in the midst of shooting a sexually explicit sequence.

The producer took a marked dislike to the female Italian extras, dubbing them 'ugly'.

Guccione's solution? To import a bevy of his so-called 'Penthouse Pets' to Rome.

After dark, Guccione smuggled them into the studio, where he proceeded to film them with his own camera having sex with one another.

The Penthouse Pets, while thrilled to be appearing in what was purportedly a big time Hollywood epic, had been brought to Rome under false pretences. 

Pornography: The film was blasted for the addition of hardcore sex scenes

They were told they would join the cast of the Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me, being filmed in Sardinia. Instead, here they were in Rome making a hard core porn film.

Worse still, no one knew Guccione intended splicing those same sex scenes into the finished version of Caligula. The cast continued unaware of Guccione's perfidy.

Perhaps all too predictably, relations soon deteriorated onset and by the end of filming, Tinto Brass had barred Gore Vidal.

When editing began, Tinto himself was banned from the editing suite by Guccione.

Brass  -  who was heard to mutter later that he thought Caligula would be an epic about the orgy of power, not the power of orgy  -  disappeared from the picture.

The film's illustrious cast learned the truth only when Malcolm McDowell and his agent gatecrashed a secret Hollywood screening of Caligula.

They saw, to their horror, that hard-core sex scenes had been interspersed in their movie.

'It was absurd,' recalled McDowell. 'The footage didn't even match, most of the time.

'Here would be a shot of me smiling, looking at what was supposed to be my horse or something  -  and then suddenly they would cut to two lesbians having sex.'

But there was nothing he nor any of the other stars could do to prevent Caligula from being given its high-profile premiere.

Gore managed to have his name removed from the title, but in May 1979 Caligula was shown uncut at the Cannes film festival.

There was an outcry and the all-powerful film studios refused to distribute the film, but Guccione was undeterred.

Despite being unable to release the movie in America, where no distributors would touch it, he made the bold move of hiring a Manhattan theatre himself and launched Caligula there.

Tickets were sold at the then stratospheric price of $7.50 and the film was a smash.

One audience member in particular was enthralled: Sir John Gielgud, who played the consul of the Roman empire, Nerva.

Malcolm McDowell recalls: 'I remember meeting John on Third Avenue. He was filming Arthur with Dudley Moore at the time and said: "Oh, Malcolm, I saw Caligula. I've seen it three times. It's frightfully good!'' '

Helen Mirren was not so forgiving. 'Guccione hijacked the film and sandbagged everybody,' she commented afterwards.

McDowell too, was furious: 'I'm proud of the work I did in Caligula, there's no question about that.

'But there's all the raunchy stuff, the blatant modern-day porn that Bob introduced into the film after we'd finished shooting.

'That, to me, was an absolutely outrageous betrayal and quite unprecedented. Frankly, it showed that Bob had no class whatsoever.'

If only the BBFC felt the same way. Thanks to them, Caligula is back on our screens in its ironically named Imperial version.

As witness to its creation, I say it should be avoided at all costs.

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