Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: My Life Page 4

  One morning in May 1950, Mammina and I hopped onto the blue streetcar that was leaving from Termini Station, and got off at the last stop. To my eyes, it looked as though the entire Roman army had camped outside the entrance to Cinecittà in search of a job, willing to work for anyone that had something to be done. As we made our way through the crowded field, we saw a multitude of people standing in line. Each was seeking to be hired as an extra or to get a bit part. We took our place in that line, putting all our hopes in it.

  As soon as he arrived, Mervyn LeRoy, director of Quo Vadis, had all us would-be actors parade by so that he could choose the most promising faces. My mother had told me to always answer “Yes” in English, whatever the question asked might be. Too bad LeRoy spoke English and I didn’t.

  I got ready as best I could for the scene.

  When he called my name I stepped forward and put on my nicest smile.

  “Do you speak English?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is this your first time in Cinecittà?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you read Quo Vadis?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Yes.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Yes!”

  LeRoy burst out laughing and, perhaps touched by my inexperience, gave me a small part all the same, one that had no lines in it. My role was that of a simple handmaiden, who tossed flowers at a triumphant Vinicius, played by a very handsome Robert Taylor. Mammina spent the whole day with a huge bronze basket on her head, and in the evening she couldn’t move her neck at all. We later discovered that the other extras, who were much savvier than she was, had refused to take that part at the last minute, leaving this newcomer with the heavy task.

  I still remember the din, the lights, the cries, the stifling heat, hundreds and hundreds of people standing for hours, and being moved from one set to another like post office packages. The extras were on the lowest rung of the ladder, and they weren’t always treated kindly, especially whenever they accidentally spoiled a scene so that it had to be shot over again. Each time I ended up in the front row, with the cameras in front of me, I deceived myself into thinking they’d get me in the shot, too. They did, but the truth is I was out of focus, just a tiny detail, really, in a majestic picture. Most times I felt very small, but I knew I was in the right place, and I knew in my heart that, with plenty of patience and perseverance, I would eventually succeed.

  One of the extras, although we had no way of knowing it, was a young Carlo Pedersoli, the future Bud Spencer, at the time an Italian swimming champion. Thanks to his athletic build he had been assigned the prestigious role of a legionary. A very young but already famous Elizabeth Taylor had also been given a small part. She was just a few years older than I was, but she’d become a world-class star thanks to Lassie Come Home.

  I was stunned to see in person Robert Taylor and Deborah Kerr, whom I had admired so many times at the Sacchini movie theatre. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. It was a dream just to be able to breathe the same air as they did.

  But every rose has its thorn, and the sharpest was yet to jab us. Once we’d passed the director’s test, the names of the extras who’d been chosen were called over the intercom so that we could be registered on the payroll. After “Villani” came “Scicolone,” but two Scicolones showed up. One of them was me. The other one was my father’s wife.

  I don’t remember exactly what happened, but I’ll never forget how deeply mortified I felt at that precise moment. My father’s wife went on a rampage. Mammina did her best to defend me, heaping on the woman her own frustrations. The real guilty party, as always, was nowhere to be seen. Finally, the production clerk came to my rescue: “Scicolone . . . Sofia.”

  It was clearly an unnerving situation for both of us, or, I should say, for the three of us, and luckily it never happened again. I wasn’t much more than a girl, and I had no interest in the affairs of adults. Besides, what good was that name without the love of the man who bore it? I had grown up without a father and would never really have one.

  In any case, the work would earn us 50,000 lire (about 80 US dollars), which we used to buy food for two whole weeks. And then what happened?

  And then we used up all the money and, along with our money, Romilda’s hopes dwindled as well. One day, looking me straight in the eye, she said: “Sofì, maybe the time has come to go home . . .” Although I was still a girl, I wouldn’t let myself be influenced by her fears, however justified they might have been. “What are you saying, Mammina? We have to stay here and keep at it. Sooner or later . . .”

  Maybe the light in my eyes convinced her that I was right. One thing was for sure, it was proof that the dream, her dream, was now mine, too.

  In the meantime, however, we received news that Maria had fallen sick again, so Mammina had to rush back to Pozzuoli, leaving me alone for a few days at our cousins’ house. I was scared to death, and tried to be even more invisible than before. Brought up by Mamma Luisa, I knew not to be a nuisance. I’d go to bed after everyone else did, and get up at dawn, making sure all my belongings were tidy so they wouldn’t get in anyone’s way.

  Before she left, my mother had lectured me at length about all the hazards of the city, with which she had become familiar. But I had always been sensible. I had a good head on my shoulders and a mission to accomplish, and I didn’t run the risk of falling into easy traps. To spur me on there was some good news, too: I had been noticed by the director of Sogno, and this meant my entrance into the magical world of photo-romances.

  I CANNOT LOVE YOU

  “What’s wrong, why aren’t you saying anything?”

  “His father killed my father. I cannot, I must not fall in love with him.”

  “Today my revenge begins, and it will be frightful. Can you see my heart, Mother, can you see how it bleeds, how it aches . . .”

  “No, Greg, no . . .”

  Rereading the lines from the comic books of those days, I feel as though I’ve been catapulted to another planet. Maybe even then the dialogs had brought a smile to my face. And yet, the genre of the photo-romance was the real postwar publishing boom, and it embodied the desire of Italians, especially women, to laugh and cry freely once more, to flee from a reality that was still harsh, to suffer because of someone else’s love pangs, and not because of the bombs or the food shortages. Obstructed relationships, terrible torments, unspeakable sins, switched identities, betrayals, and jealousies sparked the emotions of the readers, both men and women. The stories made no particular demands on its readers; the magazines had no ambitions to do anything but entertain.

  The Communists, a strong party in postwar Italy, called the photo-romances the opium of the people, the Catholics called them an instrument of perdition, the intellectuals—many of whom actually wrote and invented them—called them third-rate literature. But at least at the beginning, the photo-romance encompassed an element of transgression, youth, and modernity. They could be disconcerting. The power of the photography, the conciseness of those speech balloons and captions, those young, handsome bodies and often bold plots contributed to changing the rules of the game and expressing the urgent need of women, who’d come out of the war stronger than ever, to find a place for themselves in the sun. Whichever way one looks at it, the photo-romance taught many Italians to read and write, and it contributed to unifying the country, North and South, the country and the city. In time, the Communist Party became aware of this, too, and used it for its electoral campaigns, as did the Church, which employed it to entice the faithful with the stories of the saints, the absolute shining star being Saint Rita of Cascia, the patroness of impossible causes, who had made peace between warring families in the Middle Ages.

  The first to have the idea of combining the romantic novel and comics were the Del Duca brothers. They owned the Universo publishing house in Milan, which published Intrepido, a history magazine for kids, and delivered romantic novels in insta
llments from door to door. The fruit of their imagination was Grand Hôtel, the top photo-romance that offered tormented passions and impossible adventures in a series of comic strips illustrated by two great artists, Walter Molino and Giulio Bertoletti. It was the first step toward the genre of the photo-romance. In 1957, Molino drew me as the main character in a comic book novel, La peccatrice (The Sinner), in which he managed to capture both my facial features and my expressions. Grand Hôtel first appeared on the newsstands in 1946, with its “chained souls” and “golden teardrops.” I really liked the drawings, and I remember that in Pozzuoli one copy would be bought for a whole building, where it would then be passed on from one hand to another. There must have been lots of buildings considering that the first issue was reprinted fourteen times in the space of just a week.

  The following year Rome answered with the magazines Bolero and Il mio sogno (My Dream), which was soon shortened to Sogno, both focusing on photography, which had a more immediate effect and was quicker to produce. That’s how the photo-romance as we know it took shape, and Grand Hôtel soon followed suit. The first cover of Il mio sogno showed Gina Lollobrigida’s face, and many of the ones that came later would show mine.

  For those of us who aspired to the world of cinema, appearing in a photo-romance was almost a forced passage. It served to make you known, and it also taught you how to act in front of the camera lens, how to respond to the director’s orders, and to overcome your inhibitions at emoting. As the insightful journalist, Vincenzo Mollica, so rightly put it, you learned to come to terms with your own expressiveness. That’s how it was for me, as I finally had the chance to put to good use the faces I’d been taught so patiently by Maestro Serpe. In the evening, I would spend hours practicing in front of the mirror: I’d go from desperation to sadness, from furious hatred to the most foolish love, from scorn to concern, from rage to passion by simply raising an eyebrow, widening my eyes, pouting my lips.

  There was no real set—we were still at the dawning of what was soon to become an industry—but just a makeshift room in which all the photography was done with some lighting and a couple of pieces of furniture as props. We’d read the script and, much like a human jukebox, produce the corresponding facial expression. It was hard work and I took it very seriously. Different shots per pose, just under twenty images per episode, three or four days a week, less pay than the movies, but much more gratifying than the lack of a real job. Sometimes I was the “prisoner of a dream,” at other times an “adorable intruder,” or maybe a “princess in exile,” or else, like the great Alberto Sordi in White Sheik, I’d wander about “in the garden of Allah,” with lots of sand everywhere, wearing huge earrings and funny headdresses.

  The photo-romance allowed me to stay in Rome and earn a living, to familiarize myself with two different businesses, to meet the right people, and to get some training. It also allowed me to have fun. And God knows I needed it after all those years of hardship in Pozzuoli and Naples. I became a queen of the genre, along with Vera Palumbo and Anna Vita, and it helped me to understand that I might even make it some day.

  Naturally, the photo-romance was fueled by the plots and intrigues of Hollywood cinema, but it also drew upon the feuilleton, the light literature or entertaining stories in newspapers or magazines, and the adventure novel, in the tradition of Liala, Italy’s most popular romance author, and Carolina Invernizio, a popular serial novelist. Grand Hôtel had a more jet-set style, while Bolero preferred the exotic. Sogno, by constrast, was for all seasons. We who worked for the photo-romances were small, homespun stars. As I leaf through those magazines today, I find, to my surprise, letters that our readers sent us and our flirtatious replies. I wonder who really did write those letters, the ones that came in as well as the ones that were sent out.

  To Benito, Caserta: “Next time, for the second stage of your platonic love, you may use the ‘tu’ form to address me. See how bold I was to be the first of us to use it?” Signed Sofia Lazzaro. Yes, I was now “Lazzaro,” because Stefano Reda, the head of Sogno, had changed my name, his opinion being that my beauty was so stunning it could even raise the dead.

  While I played the parts of unyielding princesses and seductive Romanian exiles, proud maids, and gypsy heroines, I continued to attend the movie productions: I managed to get myself bit parts in lots of movies, some of which were even made by important directors. For instance, I appeared in Variety Lights, directed by a young Federico Fellini and Alberto Lattuada. I had a very small part in a theater production, as did Carla Del Poggio, Alberto’s wife. During the breaks, while the stagehands changed the lights and the sets, Mammina, who had come back to Rome with Maria, and who would always accompany me to work, played the piano on stage, to Federico’s delight. I’d go from the set for Bluebeard’s Six Wives to that of Tototarzan, from The Return of Pancho Villa to White Leprosy, forever trying to watch, to understand, to learn the trade.

  Little by little I began to get myself noticed. The production companies starting calling me to offer me small parts, my photographs began to appear in the press, and the following year, 1953, I was given my first lead roles in Aida, the film version of the great tragic opera by Giuseppe Verdi, and Two Nights with Cleopatra. Thanks to my photo-romance comic strips, I was becoming a real actress.

  The photo-romances taught me a lot, and gave me a chance to measure just how much the public appreciated me. But like everything, that stage of my life had to come to an end.

  On the cover of the April 5, 1953, issue of Sogno I gaze toward the horizon with an inspired and vaguely nostalgic look. Underneath the picture, a discreet but heartfelt caption:

  SOFIA LAZZARO, the unforgettable interpreter of so many of our photo-romances, has been whisked away to the movies: but Sofia hasn’t forgotten the readers of Sogno, and to them she fondly bids farewell and promises to remember them forever.

  III

  THE IDEAL MAN

  THE ROSE GARDEN

  Whatever it is I look at—my children’s eyes, the photographs scattered about in my home, the thousands of sketches accumulated over the course of our life together—it’s Carlo I see before me, smiling and self-confident. Even now that he’s no longer here, he inhabits my thoughts and inspires my plans. My story—personal, professional and, above all, familial—centers on my encounter with Carlo Ponti. From the moment we met, it was all one long, very long beginning, which we experienced together, without ever once leaving each other.

  It was an evening in September 1951, and the umpteenth beauty pageant was being held in a lovely outdoor restaurant overlooking the Colosseum, on the Oppian Hill. It was Miss Lazio or Miss Rome, I can’t remember now. A westerly breeze was blowing, the air was sweet and still smelled of summer. I had by then become a habituée of that sort of event, with what seemed like a habit for always coming in second. But that particular evening my thoughts were elsewhere. I was there to have fun, to take my mind off things, to dance, something I was very good at. I was with a girlfriend from Naples—she was a few years older than me, and, just like me, had come to Rome to seek her fortune. Two young men had accompanied us, because in those days good girls didn’t go out alone.

  The last pageant I’d entered, a year before, was Miss Italia. I’d made it all the way to that one after entering Miss Cervia (Cervia was and still is a resort town on the Adriatic coast). Although I hadn’t won Miss Italia, I had been selected for the big national event. Armed with patience, Mammina and I had headed north, in search of the victory that fate seemed to want to deny me. It was important to be seen, to meet the right people, to draw the attention of the photographers, hard work that there was no way of getting out of if you wanted to be successful. And I was there to win my battle, to set things straight for myself and my family, to offer Romilda the dream she hadn’t been able to live herself.

  What I most remember about that evening so long ago in Salsomaggiore is the swimming pool, around which we were supposed to parade in our bathing suits. My heart was racing, half t
he country was following us, not like the Queen of the Sea contest, which was still a local event. Only a year had gone by since I’d become a princess in that pageant, but to me it felt like a lifetime.

  Our “godmothers” were Gina Lollobrigida and Gianna Maria Canale, finalists in 1947 right behind Lucia Bosè, who would be my role model for a long, long time. I’d had my hair cut to look like Bosè’s, and in fact it did, to some extent. Her story had aspects of a fairy tale: she had started out as a salesgirl in a famous pastry shop called Galli in Milan, and had ended up working with the greatest filmmakers of the time. All the girls of my generation wanted to believe in her fairy tale, which promised rebirth, glory, and happiness.

  The high point would be the gala evening. That was when we were supposed to file past the audience that had paid to get in. As usual, my problem was, “E mo’ cosa mi metto?” (Whatever am I going to wear?) The patron of the event, Dino Villani, came to my aid, maybe touched by my lack of experience and lack of means. That afternoon, he sent me to see a friend of his who owned a beautiful boutique, a delightful lady, accustomed to dealing with socialites, but also with young Cinderellas, not all of whom were going to make it as far as the ball.

  “Cara, try this one on, it should look good on you . . .” she said to me in her lovely Emilian accent, as she held out a long white dress with fringe that she’d picked out without a moment’s hesitation from among the rest. My eyes sparkled as I looked at it, I didn’t even dare touch it.

  She helped me put it on, almost forcefully.

  “Signora, but I . . .” I tried to explain my reluctance.

  “Don’t worry, dear child, it fits you like a glove. Now all you need to do is think about this evening. Tomorrow, when it’s over, you can bring it back to me.”

  I thanked her with all my heart and went back to the hotel feeling reassured.