The Other Chatwin: Life, Death, Miracles and Films by Mark Peploe, Oscar-Winning Screenwriter

He was the last of the Chatwinians. Mark Peploe , who died on June 18 in Florence at the age of 82, was the extreme downfall of a very rare breed, an Anglo-nomadic-bohemian lineage that had seen its best champion in Bruce Chatwin, the English explorer lined in leather and covered in Adelphi pastel shades. He had never published a novel but in passing without putting it too hard he had won an Oscar for the screenplay of “The Last Emperor”, Bertolucci’s masterpiece from 1987. With BB he had also written other blockbusters such as “The Sheltering Sky” and “Little Buddha”, but Bertolucci seemed above all a character, born as he was into a multilingual family that a Chat Gpt trained between Tatler and National Geographic would not be enough to invent: his mother was Clotilde Brewster, known as Clo-Clo, a painter, also known as “the goat” for the way she managed to hop from one rock to another on the Greek island of Amorgòs where she lived for a long time. She was born in 1915 in Florence in the convent of San Francesco di Paola, which offers the best view of Brunelleschi’s dome. The mansion still belongs to the family, and Peploe died there last month: it had been bought in 1874 by his ancestor Adolf von Hildebrand, the greatest German sculptor of the nineteenth century (his daughter Elisabeth von Hildebrand was also a notable painter): all part of that community of luxury émigrés, the “Anglobeceri” who crowded Florence. “We spent every Christmas there at the convent, even though we never had money for a ticket,” Mark’s daughter Lola told Il Foglio, in a mix of English-French-Italian, on the phone from Normandy. Clo-Clo was famous for serving “lapsang souchong tea and very very dry biscuits,” some other relative told the Financial Times. Yet an injection of liquidity had arrived in the lineage from Henry Brewster, the American inventor of modern dental anesthesia as well as “the last great writer of epistolary missives” according to Henry James who was obviously a family friend.

On the paternal side, Mark was the grandson of the Scottish painter SJ Peploe and the son of Willy Peploe who had chosen to become a gallery owner and then a civil servant in exotic places, fleeing the comparison with this deadly family tree of brains. At home, it is said that Peploe's parents did not tolerate any artistic artefact created after the death of Proust; and the love for cinema was born in the two brothers Mark and Clare because it was the only means of expression that their relatives had not already tackled with enormous success (and disdain: the mother painted for herself, without selling the paintings: how vulgar). The history of the house is told in the documentary “Grandmother's footsteps” by Lola. “Mark was certainly not a traditional father, the kind who takes you to school,” she tells Il Foglio, “and the most he ever cooked for me was, I think, a boiled egg. But he was a fabulous father from whom you learned so much; we went on incredible trips. With him, it was normal to find yourself in an oasis in the middle of the desert.” Or on the set of “Stealing Beauty,” Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1996 film where Lola plays Gabriella, a local girl seduced by a local nobleman.

At a certain point Bertolucci bursts into the Peploe tribe, marrying Clare. He had been peploized, like everyone else. “The two brothers were extremely charming, to the point that someone at a certain point coined the verb 'to peploe', meaning to bewitch, to hypnotize. When they entered a room, everyone turned around. We were all peploized at some point,” Francesca Marciano, a writer and screenwriter, told Il Foglio. The two peploizers, Mark and Clare, were born in Nairobi, the last stop in the feuilleton of their august lineage that encountered (but without giving it too much importance) the reversals of History: during the Second World War they moved first to New York, then Athens, then Cyprus and Palestine, finally they stopped in Kenya where their father became one of those English civil servants from Evelyn Waugh's novel (who surely must have been their friend). “It was bliss for a little girl to grow up there. I had no toys, but I don’t think I missed them; I had centipedes to play ball with,” Clare recounted in “Grandmother’s Footsteps.”

In the desert on the set of “Lawrence of Arabia”, and then with Michelangelo Antonioni, who stayed a year in a hotel in London to shoot “Blow Up”

The peploizing boys run around barefoot and shabby-chic in the twentieth century, including the islands: very curious about everything, they do their apprenticeship between Afghanistan and Nepal by hitchhiking, then they don't go to the summer camp or to Gardaland like us but attend the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, but the predestined terminus is the only art that their ancestors had not illustrated. From peplum to Peploe, with two friends in Morocco, lost in some oasis, Mark at a certain point finds a red sign among the dunes that says: "Lawrence of Arabia", and runs into Peter O'Toole all dusty who is making the history of cinema. There, “the love for the desert and the idea that precisely that art, the seventh, can be an excellent way to spend your life” was sparked, as Mark told at the Sole Luna documentary festival in Sicily in 2017. They returned to London with their mother, where she missed Italy and Greece (and Ponza, where they were the first pioneering tourists, for months, in the summer), and he went to Oxford to the famous Magdalen College where he studied mainly the Cold War, undecided between journalism and cinema; then he began making documentaries with the BBC: in search of guide animals he ran to Brasilia to meet Oskar Niemeyer who was building the white city of red socialist dreams, but was disappointed. Then he tried again with Max Frisch in Switzerland, then with the Greek pasionaria Melina Mercouri. But he didn’t like the “non-fiction” form of film, and was disappointed once again. He then began writing screenplays, and signed René Clement’s last film, “The Babysitter” (1975); but the fundamental meeting was with Antonioni. Mark had been on the set of “Zabriskie Point”, in Phoenix, Arizona, with the director from Ferrara pushing the pedal of the most quoted cinematic explosion in the history of cinema, “with a ton of TNT, the Phoenix airport closed to air traffic for days and 17 cameras”, Mark would always say. But Antonioni had been peploized in London many years before. “Michelangelo was in the English capital in ’65 for location scouting for Blow Up”, Gianni Massironi, screenwriter, director and producer who worked with Antonioni for years, told Il Foglio. “It was Peploe who introduced him to Swinging London, just as it was being born”. “Antonioni didn’t know London at all, and ‘Blow Up’ was supposed to be shot in Rome, but Antonioni was fed up with the Italy of the time, and had decided he wanted to become an international director”, Mark said. “He had heard that the Beatles were in London, and he stayed for a year at the Savoy Hotel with Tonino Guerra.” A year? “Those were the times, it was a cinema that allowed you these things,” continues Massironi. Forget tax credit and Rexal Ford. “One day in the hotel Antonioni meets the youngest of the Peploe sisters, Cloe, in the elevator, because there is also a third sister, and he is naturally fascinated by her. He can’t believe he stumbles upon young Londoners who can introduce him to this blessed Swinging London, and she had the advantage of even speaking a little Italian; in short. Antonioni goes to the Peploe house. Which of course is not a normal house. The three brothers in fact lived together in an apartment in Chapel Street, Belgravia, “a sort of bohemian hub.” Theatre actors would drop by for a drink after the evening performances. Several tenants lived there with the sisters and brother Mark, in a certain cheerful confusion (again, Bloomsbury).

When Antonioni shows up there is no one home except a large snake slithering across the floor toward him - it had escaped from its reptile house upstairs. Just as the great director is wondering whether to return to the Savoy, Clare appears. The little sister introduces him to the big sister. “She is the one for you,” the little one tells him, “because she is obsessed with work.” And it was true: she will become the muse first of Antonioni and then of Bertolucci, his only wife and a director in her own right. “She taught Bertolucci the difference between doing tourism and really traveling,” Valentina Ricciardelli, president of the Bertolucci Foundation and the director’s niece, tells Il Foglio. “She was the most elegant person I have ever met. She was shy, mysterious, but she became his rock.” She survived Bernardo until 2021, when she passed away.

From the stories, Antonioni didn't seem to be a real wild man. "At the Savoy he always ate alone, because he didn't want to talk to anyone, and over time he noticed that there was another gentleman who also always ate alone. After many meals, the two loners finally spoke to each other one day, and the other taciturn one turned out to be Edward Heath, the British prime minister in office, also on the run from pests", Massironi continues. Because Mark Peploe's story is also a great hotel story of the twentieth century. "I often saw him, in Paris, at the Hotel La Louisiane", Alain Elkann, who was his friend, told me. "Not a luxurious hotel, but with a history. It was the same one at 60 Rue de Seine where Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir had lived, from 1943 to the end of the war, and then Albert Camus, Boris Vian, Salvador Dalì". Verlaine and Apollinaire also passed through here at different times, as did Juliette Gréco, who occupied room 10 (where her love story with Miles Davis began). And also Hemingway, Saint-Exupéry, Henry Miller…

The Bertolucci-Antonioni Rivalry and the Little Clan: “I Know Which Side You’re On.” Clare Peploe, the Shy But Rock-Strong Muse of the Director of “Novecento”

In the wings of a still analog era, without lansquenets or slippers or Final Draft, “Peploe always wrote his screenplays with a fountain pen, an enormous Mont Blanc, or with a Hemes typewriter,” Elkann continues. “He wrote all night,” confirms his daughter Lola. “He never used a computer. Instead, he scattered his rooms with yellow post-its.” What was he like as a screenwriter? “A nightmare for a director. He chiseled every word to perfection, he maintained that a screenplay had to be like a poem,” says Massironi. Poetry rarely became prose, much less reality. Mark Peploe's first big success was the screenplay for "The Profession", Antonioni's classic from '75 with Jack Nicholson, the story of a successful journalist who is tired and bored with life and who one day discovers the possibility of starting all over again: finding the body of a man who resembles him, he stages a fake death and assumes the identity of the deceased, who is rebelling against an African dictator. Peploe wanted to direct this film himself, with the title "Fatal Exit". But the film remained in the drawer for years, and at a certain point Carlo Ponti, legendary producer, called and asked Antonioni to make it. Consolation prize: during filming Antonioni convinces Louise Stjernsward (Mark's girlfriend and then wife, Lola's mother, also with that elegance that consists of wearing a pair of shorts and a t-shirt and a beaded necklace, total value 39 euros, and then mixing everything in the Bimby with a chic that comes from at least ten generations of runaways in three languages, to outclass all the others who have spent time and resources on the outfit) and entrusts her with the costumes: "I just want the characters to look like you". Thus begins Louise's career as a costume designer, who will do, among others, "The Dreamers". But "The Profession" also well symbolizes "the radical nature of Peploe's political passion", says Massironi. He was in fact obsessed with politics: for a period he studied everything there was to study about the Kennedy assassination, “which was a trauma in my life,” he said, then he turned to more Italian issues with that passion that overwhelms august foreigners at a certain point (like Gore Vidal, even passionate about the regional squabbles of Campania when he was in Ravello); “Calvi, P2, Moro, Andreotti. He was obsessed with Andreotti, he had whole boxes of notes on him, and together we wrote I don’t know how many treatments for a film, long before Sorrentino’s ‘Divo’. But nothing ever came of it,” Massironi recalls. In the meantime, incidentally, Clare and Antonioni had broken up and she married Bertolucci. But the ghost of her rival from Ferrara would remain forever. In the small clan of the director of “Novecento,” of which the two Peploes were a founding part, “Bertolucci loved to pit everyone against each other, and he would show us the almost finished films, warning us: I’ll show it only to you, don’t tell the other two. When one of the three of us suggested some changes, he would jump up: ah, I know whose side you’re on! And he meant Antonioni,” Massironi continues. And did he ever argue with Peploe and his screenwriters? “It was difficult, but with Mark it only happened once when Bernardo changed the ending of ‘The Sheltering Sky’ to please Debra Winger.”

But in the end, how did these magnificent, disheveled Peploes make a living? Every now and then they sold one of their grandfather's paintings, they say. "Or a screenplay. Even if the films weren't made, they paid well at the time," continues Massironi. "Mark and Clare were inseparable. When they weren't together, they spoke many times a day, and on her deathbed, she made her last phone call to him: whispering: you've always been my alter ego," says his daughter Lola. One of Mark's dearest projects remained, as often happens, unfinished: "Heaven and Hell," a sumptuous biography of the 16th-century composer Gesualdo da Venosa, famous both for killing his first wife and her lover and for inventing musical modernism centuries before anyone else. Bertolucci wanted to direct it, then after his death in 2018, Martin Scorsese also showed some interest, but then he was distracted by other projects and, as often happens in cinema, nothing came of it.

In the meantime, what was Peploe supposed to do? He Peploized: broken hearts (many), and indelible memories. The English producer Jeremy Thomas remembered him like this: "His greatest happiness was drinking a whisky or a cappuccino in a Roman square, the Herald Tribune in his pocket and a notebook in his hand". It seems that he too, like us humans, had a touch of tackiness: a pair of cowherd boots that he wore constantly and that he was very fond of. But for some strange reason, on him they looked elegant. Perfect for a Roman cappuccino or for tea in the desert (with these temperatures it's the same, just with less traffic, oh well).

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