Word: tiberius
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...Angeles, according to one observer, the basic rule is to defer to old money, and when that fails, defer to money. Consider a recent black-tie dinner for eight in the Trousdale Estates section of Beverly Hills, where liveried attendants park the cars and the houses are modeled after Tiberius' villas on Capri. The table was authentic Chippendale, the service gold leaf, the goblets and tableware gold. A chamber trio played. Among the guests: a history professor, a concert pianist, the wife of a German philosopher. And beside her: a young actor in a shimmering silk T shirt with...
...history's most colorful monsters. The movie is the grandest spectacle to be shot in Italy since Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra (1963). Guccione hired some of England's best actors-Malcolm McDowell to play Caligula, Peter O'Toole for the diseased Emperor Tiberius and John Gielgud for the aristocratic Nerva. He then set about constructing half of ancient Rome: a mile-long facsimile of a 1st century street, a 100-yd.-long stadium, and a 175-ft.-long floating bordello, encrusted with gold leaf, where the wives of Roman Senators were forced into prostitution to fill...
Peter O'Toole is Roman Emperor Tiberius, Malcolm McDowell is the Emperor Caligula-but Author Gore Vidal is the kingfish when it comes to his newest screen project. "It's called Gore Vidal's Caligula and not just Caligula, since that gives me some control," he says of the film now being produced in Italy by Franco Rossellini. Still, in a rare lapse from his usual impermeable poise, the screenwriter confessed, "Control entails responsibility, and sometimes I just don't know what's going on." Vidal expects his appearance on TV's Mary Hartman...
...ends in megalopolis, where man coheres "unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter of fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful ..." Arnold Toynbee, in his monumental A Study of History, charted Rome and America through similar cycles of triumph, disintegration and collapse; like the empire of Augustus and Tiberius, imperial America could end in "a schism in the soul...
Other lesser observers have made blatant comparisons. In 1968 The New Republic editorially linked the assassinations of Gaius and Tiberius Gracchus, two reforming fraternal politicians of Rome who lived more than a century before Christ, with the murders of John and Robert Kennedy. At a background briefing for press executives a year before Watergate, Richard Nixon spoke of the "great civilizations of the past, subject to the decadence that eventually destroys the civilization." Nixon went on to speculate that "the U.S. is now reaching that period." Although he agrees with Nixon on hardly any other subject, Novelist Gore Vidal...