Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: My Life Page 3

  One of those soldiers saw the scar on my chin and took me with Mammina to the troops’ camp doctor, who, as if by magic, made it disappear. Not content to have helped me in this way, he sent us back home with a jeep filled with food supplies. There were even some stortarielli, short pasta made with white flour. We thought we had to be dreaming to see this much food.

  At the time, Mammina tried to teach me to play the piano, which I loved, but every time I made a mistake she’d get angry and slap my head so hard I’d get a headache. I had to give it up, because of those headaches. I consoled myself by going to the movies at the Sacchini theater, which had reopened at the end of the war. That’s when American movies invaded the theaters. I saw Blood and Sand over and over again, falling hopelessly in love with Tyrone Power and Rita Hayworth’s ginger hair. Then came Duel in the Sun, which enthralled me in almost the same way. Lonely as I was, I would get lost in the dreamy gazes of Jennifer Jones and Gregory Peck, and I would dream of becoming just like them. It wasn’t the fact that they lived the lives of stars that fascinated me, but their ability to express what they felt inside.

  School had reopened, too, and I liked studying, even though as time went by my interest waned. The last year my report card was filled with low marks. To do my homework I’d wait for Zia Dora, the brains of the family, to come home from work. But she was so tired she’d often fall asleep between a Latin translation and a verb exercise. “Zia, scetate!” (wake up!), I’d whisper, feeling rather guilty.

  My chemistry teacher loved me, as did my French teacher. I’ve always been good at languages, something that helped me a lot with my career. But at the time I had no idea what I might become; for all I knew I was going to be teacher, which is what my father wanted for me. Or at least this is what I seem to remember.

  Many years later, upon returning to our home in Pozzuoli, I was amazed to find a notebook from when I was a little girl. Inside it, I read the words: “Sofia Scicolone is going to be an actress one day.” I must already have had some idea about what my future would be. And yet, when Maria and I would organize little shows in the kitchen, and Mamma Luisa, who had started out as a seamstress, helped us to sew our paper costumes, it was my sister who performed in front of everyone, members of the family, and neighbors. I would stand in the corner to watch, and even that made me feel shy and embarrassed.

  But things were starting to change. I was growing up, the ugly duckling was turning into a swan. Above all, the desire, the almost physical need to express my emotions, to translate into gestures and words the feelings I had built up inside and that I still could not interpret was growing inside me. I wanted to dive into a wider sea. Little did it matter that I couldn’t swim.

  II

  THE FAIRY-TALE FACTORY

  PRINCESSES IN CARRIAGES

  My transformation from ugly duckling to swan is clearly portrayed on a cover of Sogno, an Italian photo-romance magazine that I pull out of my treasure chest of memories. Now yellowed, the cover shows my face in a close-up that peers out at me, across another time and age to reawaken my memories. The year is 1951, and on it is a name that stretches way back into the past and has almost been forgotten: Sofia Lazzaro.

  The war had ended, Italy had gone back to living, people to dreaming their dreams. It’s hard even for me to recognize the Toothpick I had been until just before then behind the languid gaze of a heroine of fotoromanzi (photo-romances). In only a few years, my figure, face, and name had all changed. Even my city had changed.

  My adolescence was a full-fledged revolution, as unpredictable as revolutions always are. Time can speed up suddenly, old fears can make way for new challenges, and everything can take on a different appearance, while we head down unknown and unimagined roads.

  I had blossomed very late compared with my girlfriends, and by the time I finally did, I wasn’t expecting it anymore. As I was about to turn fifteen, I suddenly found myself living inside a curvy, glowing body, filled with life and promise. Whenever I walked down the streets of Pozzuoli, the boys would turn around and whistle after me.

  The first person to notice my maturity was my physical education teacher. He was a handsome, well-built young man, accustomed to thinking of the world as a basic floor exercise. One spring day he showed up at our doorstep, with a grave expression on his face, hat in hand, to ask my mother for my hand in marriage.

  “Donna Romilda, I have true feelings for your daughter. I have a house, and I even have a steady job. If you were to agree, we could marry in September.”

  “Dear Teacher, I’m truly sorry but it’s out of the question. Sofia is too young to marry.”

  My mother dispatched him kindly, but without a moment’s hesitation. She felt sorry for that mild-mannered young man, but she had other plans for me. I watched the scene from a distance, as if it had nothing to do with me, but I felt very relieved. I was still trying to figure out who I was, let alone think of getting married.

  Another boy had drawn my attention for a short time. His name was Manlio and he lived in La Pietra, a few train stops from Pozzuoli. We’d seen each other on the street, had felt attracted to each other, and one afternoon I found the courage to move beyond the borders of my small world and go look for him. All I can remember now are his red eyes and an enthusiasm I wasn’t prepared for. Maybe he’d had something to drink, or maybe it was just the ardor of youth, but he scared me. I wasn’t ready, and I ran off without looking back.

  While I may have looked like a woman on the outside, inside I was still a bashful, introverted girl. I knew I had to throw myself into what I wanted to do, but I didn’t know how or where. And maybe not even why.

  It was a beauty pageant in Naples that finally offered me a springboard. I would never have gotten that far if Mammina hadn’t taken me there, in spite of my shyness and our poverty. She was like a fairy godmother who, against all odds, gets Cinderella to the ball. No doubt about it, those years of my life have the feel of a fairy tale that comes true.

  One day in the fall of 1949, a neighbor came to see us, holding a newspaper clipping that said that the Corriere di Napoli, the city’s afternoon newspaper, was organizing a beauty pageant to elect the Queen of the Sea and her Twelve Princesses. The winners were to ride through the city streets in a carriage, transforming, as if by magic, the ruins left by the war into an enchanted kingdom.

  Romilda’s eyes sparkled and she shot me a knowing look. The moment she had been waiting for for a long time, our moment, had come at last. We still barely had enough money to eat, so no way was mother going to let this opportunity slip away. Her own chance had been denied her by her parents, and she’d never forgotten it. She would have done anything to get even somehow. I answered her submissively, which I usually did: “If you really insist . . .” I wasn’t quite old enough to enter the pageant, but she twisted my hair up to make me look more mature, and threw herself wholeheartedly into the job of preparing me for the big event.

  Not even Mamma Luisa dared disapprove this time, and, although reluctantly, she contributed in her own way. A proper ball requires a dress and slippers, so Luisa took down the pink taffeta curtains from the windows and in no time at all turned them into an evening dress, perhaps not exactly elegant, but at least dignified. As for slippers, I only had one pair of shoes, and they were dark and worn: all that could be done was to paint them white to make them look brand-new again. “Holy Mary, I beseech you, don’t let it rain,” my fairy godmothers whispered in quivering voices.

  So Mammina and I took the train, in a third-class carriage, headed for Naples. It was cold, and I’d put on my everyday coat—the only one I had—over my dress. Everybody kept staring at me, I looked like I was dressed up for the Mardi Gras. All it would take was a gust of wind, a drop of rain, a minute’s delay, to turn my carriage into a pumpkin and shatter the dream.

  The pageant was to start at Cinerama, the movie theater on Via Chiaia, and end at the Circolo della Stampa, inside the municipal authority building, a beautiful villa that is now
abandoned. At the time, however, it was the pride of Naples, and the city was making every effort to rebuild everything the war had destroyed. I followed my fate like a lamb to the slaughter, but as soon as I’d gone in I realized I’d been noticed. Maybe the judges were struck by my diffidence, so different from the attitude of the other girls, more than a hundred of them. They might prove luckier than I was, but they were acting like a gaggle of geese, flocking together. I took a deep breath and jumped into the audition: As I paraded in front of the members of the jury, against the glistening backdrop of the Gulf of Naples, my inherent shyness made way for an animated cheerfulness and confidence.

  This always happens to me, even today: before going out on stage I’m overrun by my fears, but as soon as the spotlights come on I let myself go, and I manage, who knows how, to show my best side.

  After what seemed like forever, the jury announced the names of the winners. I still remember how thrilled I was to hear my name among those of the newly elected princesses. It was really only half a victory, not having been chosen as queen, but that didn’t matter. I didn’t completely fulfill the canons of classical beauty, which undoubtedly had complicated matters. And yet the fact that I was different would be one of the secrets of my success. For now, I needed to believe in myself.

  I was overwhelmed but also energized by the applause, photos, interviews, and a lovely bouquet. My debut in the world had been a success. The pageant winners paraded down the city streets accompanied by a band, while the people showered us with flowers. The queen sat by herself at the front of a golden carriage, we princesses in the back. Via Caraccioli, Via Partenope, Piazza Municipio, Via Agostino Depretis, Corso Umberto, and from Piazza Nicola Amore, up Via Duomo, Piazza Cavour, then down Via Roma (now Via Toledo) and again toward the sea.

  When I think back on the scene, it was almost like being in a Vittorio De Sica movie! I was in seventh heaven. Who cared that it was raining—the rain made everything seem more romantic, more unreal. And my shoes stayed white. The record books say that Tina Pica, the noted actress, Sergio Bruni, the popular singer and “Voice of Naples,” and even Claudio Villa, the great singer and star of musicals, were there to celebrate the most beautiful girls of Naples.

  At the time, of course, I didn’t realize just how much that day would change the course of my life. Like any young girl, I focused on the prizes, which seemed too beautiful to be true: several rolls of wallpaper with a large green-leaf pattern, which made Mamma Luisa happy, a tablecloth with twelve matching napkins, and no less than 23,000 lire, about 36 US dollars at the time, a sum I had never in my entire life seen all in one place. But, most importantly, the prize included a train ticket to Rome, which, at the time, didn’t particularly impress me but made Mammina tremble with excitement. We were holding our passport to Cinecittà, the center of Italian filmmaking, Hollywood on the Tiber.

  But first Mammina did sign me up to attend an acting school in Naples, which she paid for with the money she earned from the piano lessons she had started giving again. To be honest, it wasn’t so much a school as an example of what they call arrangiarsi—the art of making do—by a genuine Neapolitan. That actors’ studio in the shade of Mount Vesuvius is where I took my first steps. The school taught a method of acting based on the years of experience of a single master, Pino Serpe, who bragged about carving actors and actresses from stone. How? By teaching us to make faces. All our facial muscles were trained to express the vast range of human emotions: horror, joy, desperation, sadness, surprise, arrogance, hope. Our eyebrows were absolute protagonists. It might sound silly, but this simple game of imitation forced me to come out and show others what I was capable of doing. And it would be of great help when it came time for me to enter the world of photo-romance magazines, which was just around the corner.

  A few years later, when I had arrived in Hollywood, I received a letter that read: “My name is D’Amore, we used to take lessons from Serpe, t’arricuorde?” (do you remember?). I was touched that my acting school friend remembered me. I pictured him clearly: he came from the countryside, and unlike many of us at the time, he seemed to have a chance in the world—his family had food. He’d pay our teacher with bread, salami, and eggs.

  Maestro Serpe arranged a few auditions for me. He got me a bit part in Giorgio Bianchi’s Hearts at Sea, and in Mario Bonnard’s The Vow. Most importantly, he informed me that in Rome MGM was looking for extras for an epic film to be set in ancient Rome. Once again, when Mammina heard that about MGM, she knew exactly what she wanted and, against my grandparents’ will, she decided we were going to relocate. Maria, who was still a little girl and whose health was poor, stayed with my grandparents in Pozzuli, while Mammina and I, filled with eagerness and fear, headed off toward our dream.

  QUO VADIS

  Rome welcomed us with open arms, or so it seemed. I can’t say the same for my father, whom Romilda called as soon as we came out of the station. She was so naive that she didn’t even know how to use a token-operated public phone, and had to go into a café and ask to use their phone to make her call. Evasive as always, Riccardo reluctantly agreed to meet us at his mother’s, but he was clearly disturbed by our unexpected arrival.

  Nonna Sofia offered me a glass of milk and then, without even asking us how we were or patting me on the head, left us to wait for him in the living room. When Papà came in, he glanced at me absentmindedly, his eyes filled with resentment. He didn’t seem at all surprised to see how I had grown and used every last ounce of energy to discourage us from going ahead with our plans. If it had been for him, we would have headed right back to Pozzuoli, leaving him with his new family. Because in the meantime he’d married another woman, and they had had two children, Giuliano and Giuseppe.

  I’ll always remember the day he’d come to Pozzuoli, several years before, to inform my mother of his imminent marriage. Until that moment I hadn’t really understood the great suffering between them, because all he ever did was spurn us. When little Maria walked into the room, he asked scornfully: “And who’s this?” even though he knew perfectly well who she was.

  In Nonna Sofia’s sitting room, Mammina had no intention of being demoralized by the coldness of her first and only true love. Not for a moment did she even consider backing down. When we left my grandmother’s house, she turned to some distant cousins of ours to ask them if they would put us up. They, too, tried to send us back home, but they eventually had to give in, and lend us a sofa to sleep on. They certainly didn’t make us feel comfortable, but nothing could stop us from pursuing our destiny.

  The morning of our second day in Rome we set off on foot for the “fairy-tale factory” on Via Tuscolana, dressed in black so that we’d look more elegant.

  History with a capital H hadn’t spared Cinecittà, either. The war had reduced its almost 100 acres to a pile of rubble, just like much of the rest of the country. In November 1943, most of the cameras and other equipment had been plundered by the Nazis and shipped north by train, although some were saved and hidden in storehouses around Rome. The large buildings had been used as German military storage spaces, but seven of the most important studios had been destroyed by the Allied air raids. When Rome was liberated, the area was transformed into a refugee camp. The Pisorno studio, halfway between Pisa and Livorno in Tirrenia, which predated Cinecittà’s founding—it was the first city in which an entire film could be produced, beginning to end—was used as a US military logistic command base. After the armistice, the workers, stagehands, directors, and actors who hadn’t supported Mussolini’s Social Republic of Salò, the last Axis stronghold established in Northern Italy after the invasion of Southern Italy by the Allies, had taken out the few machines they’d managed to hide and started working again, waiting for the rest of Italy to be liberated. Filming of Rome, Open City began in 1945, and the movie was released in September, less than a month after the end of the war.

  With very few resources and tons of ideas, everyone had to start from scratch. People’s lives were sta
rting up again and there were lots of beautiful and powerful things to describe. For Italian directors the time had come to get back to work. It was the dawning of neorealism, which was to change the history of cinema forever. Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, and Luchino Visconti went into the streets to document the reality of working people and the poor. They focused their cameras on people’s—and especially children’s—gestures and faces, and on everyday objects. Meanwhile, American troops were flooding Italy with Hollywood films that made viewers dream a different kind of dream, one that brimmed with freedom and hope.

  A new kind of war began between Italian filmmakers and producers and the major American film companies. As a young state undersecretary in charge of entertainment, Giulio Andreotti, who would later become Italy’s forty-first prime minister, did everything in his power to ensure Cinecittà’s rebirth. Andreotti managed to get a law passed that froze all the earnings from American films in Italy, thereby bringing money and work to Rome. When MGM arrived in the city to produce Quo Vadis, it was instantly Hollywood on the Tiber. And this is where my story as an actress really begins.