Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: My Life Page 9

I would hang on his every word. I was there to believe in the reality of my character and the situation she was in. And I really did have to believe in it. Little by little, I let myself be influenced so that I could find the character that was waiting for me within. Thinking back to what De Sica had taught me, I traveled inside myself, pursuing what Nives’s most authentic reaction to the tragedy might be. With patience and devotion I made every effort to find the smallest answers even in the most unexplored corners of my mind. We worked so hard that, when the time came to shoot that dramatic scene, I took a deep breath and did it right on the first take.

  I had pulled through another challenge. Once more, I discovered that fear and vulnerability can help you if you pair them with hard work and discipline. And if you experience them with a true friend beside you.

  Only once did Basilio get distracted, and did he pay for it! My antagonist in the movie was Tosca, played by a French actress named Lise Bourdin. When, after an intense courtship, Basilio managed at last to take her to the beach to make love in a corner concealed by the shrubs, all their clothing disappeared, both his and hers. I’ll never know how the two absentminded lovers ever made it back to the hotel. Maybe they stole a sheet hanging somewhere, or they just ran as fast as they could . . . Of course, the whole crew found out and laughed about it for ages.

  Basilio was a shining light for our family: for Carlo, for me, for both of us. He was always close to me during the difficult time years later when I was trying so hard to become a mother, and when Carlo Jr. was born in Geneva, Basilio got so drunk in celebration that, as he was walking down the hospital steps, he couldn’t figure out where he was. He adored Carlo’s and my children, and whenever he came to visit us he’d spend whole days playing with them. Still today, even though they’re in their forties, Carlo and Edoardo remember him wistfully. “Wouldn’t it be great if Basilio were here now, if he could see our children.”

  Our beloved friend passed away ten years ago, in 2003, in Rome. He died alone, in his home, leaving a sense of emptiness that I try to fill each and every day with my memories of our long life together, and with the deep affection we exchanged on every occasion. He loved all of us equally, and reserved for each one of us a special fondness. He wasn’t just a friend of the family, he was one of us.

  I have Woman of the River to thank for another important encounter. There I met Maestro Armando Trovajoli, who was to write the music for my most important movies, including Two Women; Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow; and A Special Day. A trusted collaborator of the Ponti–De Laurentiis company, he was one of the most appreciated composers on the Italian scene. He was the soul of Rome, the soundtrack of our lives. A great pianist and lover of jazz, he played with the biggest names, from Louis Armstrong to Miles Davis, from Duke Ellington to Chet Baker to Django Reinhardt. When I first met him, he was the director of a pop music orchestra for the Italian radio station RAI and, along with Piero Piccioni, he conducted Eclipse, an important weekly radio program. Dino and Carlo had hired him for Bitter Rice and later for Anna, in which I had a small part and Silvana Mangano had danced to the notes of “El Negro Zumbon,” which became an international hit. And of course he is known for his work on the Quentin Tarantino film, Kill Bill, Vol. 1.

  Armando married the film and television actress Anna Maria Pierangeli (later called Pier Angeli), who made him suffer terribly. After their divorce, he married Maria Paola Sapienza, a delightful woman who was absolutely crazy about him. They thrived on music, in their lovely home in Olgiata. In the 1960s and 1970s, he, together with the songwriters Pietro Garinei and Sandro Giovannini, were the makers of Italian musical comedy. Armando wrote the unforgettable “Roma nun fa’ la stupida stasera” (“Rome, Don’t Fool Me Tonight”), written for the 1962 musical comedy, Rugantino.

  Each year, when the holidays came around, the first phone call I’d receive would always be Armando’s. Or the first call I’d make would be to him. That’s the way it always was, until the end.

  “Hello, Sophia? Set another place at the table . . .” he’d sing-song, poking fun at himself and the comedy he’d written the successful music for.

  “. . . what difference does another friend make,” I’d sing-song back, happy to hear his voice.

  We were like children playing. Since Armando left us, Christmas isn’t the same anymore.

  I love to sing, like everyone did at home, Mamma Luisa, Mammina, Maria. Maybe I was the least talented of them, and above all the shyest. Singing in public always made me feel very embarrassed. And yet, I still like to sing.

  Trovajoli was perfectly aware of the fact that my voice hadn’t been trained, but he thought there was something brilliant and sensuous about it. So he preferred not to work on it too much in order to preserve its naturalness. De Sica had taken the same approach to my acting. He offered a few technical secrets, a touch of reassurance, and a lot of cheerfulness. And then he gave me the gift of a song.

  In 1958, to the lyrics by Dino Verde, he wrote “Che m’e ’mparato a fa’” (The Things You Taught Me) just for me, and it was a huge success. He wrote it to fit me, adapting the notes to my voice. I could never have imagined someone writing a song for me, even less so a maestro like him.

  He died just last year at the age of ninety-five. To say good-bye to him, I softly sang these words to myself: “Capre, Surriento e ’sta luna, se ne so’ iute cu’ tté” (Capri, Sorrento, and this moon have gone away with you).

  THE RING

  The end of Woman of the River marked the start of a new chapter in my life. My asthma vanished just as quickly as it had appeared, proof that it had been psychosomatic. I now had two new friends, and a dramatic role behind me that would make the neophyte Pizza Girl of The Gold of Naples into a well-rounded actress. But most important of all, I had a ring.

  Yes, because the very last day of shooting, Carlo came to the set with a small leather case. During a break, he took me aside and handed it to me, without saying a word. I opened it to find a diamond ring.

  It was a silent, luminous, timeless moment.

  We never talked about our relationship, not even then, when he gave me the ring.

  I rushed off and, as soon as I turned the corner, burst into tears of joy. Ines Bruscia—the script supervisor, who was soon to become my trusty confidante and go everywhere with me, in life and at work—chased after me, concerned, wanting to know what was wrong. But when she saw with her own eyes the reason I was so emotional, she was brought to tears, too. That in itself was remarkable, because Ines was reserved. She was also affectionate, modest, and efficient, and for many years she accompanied Carlo and me in our lives. Without her I would have been another person, a different actress.

  I went back to Rome with a feather in my cap, new fears overcome—and a ring on my finger. When I proudly showed it to my mother, wiggling my fingers in the air to make the diamond sparkle even more, I got the only reaction a mother could possibly give, especially a mother like mine, with her personality, and her past: “What are you up to? (Nun ‘o vide ch’è spusato, tene ddoje figl’ ’e vint’ann’ cchiù ’e te?) Can’t you see he’s married, has two children and is twenty years older than you? What can you possibly expect from him? Back out while you still can and make a life for yourself. You’re still so young . . .”

  Each time she asked me, “Have you talked about the future?” I simply didn’t know what to say. The only thing I did know was that I loved him, and that he was the man of my life.

  From Via Balzani, Mammina, Maria and I moved to Via di Villa Ada, in the Salario quarter, close to the Catacombs of Priscilla. But I was spending more and more time with Carlo, in his large apartment above the studios in Palazzo Colonna overlooking Piazza d’Aracoeli. His marriage had been over for a long time, although he was not divorced. And he had two young children. I was in pain for them, for us, and yet there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I would have liked things to have happened more quickly for us, to have been clearer, out in the open. But the times would not all
ow that. I trusted our love, and I was ready to live that love.

  Nineteen fifty-four had been filled with irreversible changes, major surprises, and personal developments. I’d met De Sica and Marcello, I was directed by Blasetti and by Soldati, and I’d sung and acted with some of the biggest names. I’d gone from comedy to tragedy without losing my identity. And my relationship with Carlo had grown stronger. I was turning into a star, and the whole world was starting to talk about me. In the spring I’d been to Cannes for the first time to present Neapolitan Carousel, film director Ettore Giannini’s great movie, considered to be the only Italian musical capable of competing with the American ones. I’d played a small part in it where I sang, dubbed by a real singer, “O surdato ’nnammurato” (Oh Soldier in Love).

  In June I’d also been to Berlin, where a famous photograph shows me sitting next to Gina Lollobrigida, with Yvonne De Carlo right behind us. In October, when I got back from filming Woman of the River, in Comacchio, I was off to London, where I was invited to Italian Movie Week.

  The Gold of Naples and Woman of the River were both released in December, and I visited Milan for the first time ever, dressed as the Pizza Girl, handing out hundreds of pizzas to my fans thronging Piazza San Babila. When I got to the station I was welcomed by a festive crowd, and I was even greeted by the mayor. Suddenly, I was a star, with a press office dedicated to disseminating my image and getting me as much coverage as possible. Deep inside, however, I was still a child with wide-open eyes who wanted to be an actress, a woman who wanted to get married and have children, just like every other woman. I had my ups and downs just like everyone else, and I worked with passion and discipline, as I always had. I was growing inside my life, my great little story, putting it together day by day, line by line, page by page.

  THE LUCK OF BEING SOPHIA

  Just as 1954 had been a watershed, the year 1955 also started out well. At the Grand Gala del Cinema, held on January 15, the magazine Guild awarded me a prize that placed me in the company of Italy’s other three greatest actresses, Anna Magnani, Gina Lollobrigida, and Silvana Mangano, who’d received the same prize in previous years. It was an important acknowledgment, confirming my growing success.

  The world was changing, the war was a fading memory, and we were starting to see the first signs of the economic boom. Italian cinema was shedding its more overtly political nature and looking to make box-office hits. Italian comedic movies boasted such experienced actors, screenwriters, and directors, that they made money even as they produced some real masterpieces, capable of describing the whole spectrum of a country on the move.

  For a few weeks I’d been working on the set of The Sign of Venus, a comedy with an all-star cast: De Sica and Peppino De Filippo, Raf Vallone and Tina Pica, Sordi and, most importantly, Franca Valeri, an amazing woman, who had also contributed to writing the story and screenplay. Franca has given me so much. We’ve always loved each other, and we always will. The characters’ physical, geographical, and linguistic differences, played out with intelligence and wit, were the comic heart of the movie, which made us laugh even before the audience did. Dino Risi, whom I had never met before, was the director, and we would work with each other again immediately afterward.

  I play Agnese, Franca plays Cesira Colombo, Agnese’s cousin, who has left Rome for Milan to look for a job, and love. Franca describes her cousin as someone who walks “outward,” not that she does it deliberately, of course, and that’s why men ogle her. She, instead, has no one looking at her, so she stuffs herself with patatesse (potatoes), and lets herself be fooled by Signora Pina, the fortune-teller, into thinking that she’s under the sign of Venus: a small window of opportunity that won’t last more than a month or so, during which, if she keeps her eyes peeled, she can still hope to find her prince charming. The problem is that all the men she’s surrounded by—photographers, poets, traffic officers, stolen-car salesmen—somehow fall in love with her cousin Agnese, when they’re not thinking about their own affairs. The ending is bittersweet: poor Cesira ends up alone and disillusioned, her romantic dream vanished into thin air.

  That summer, Risi had me on the screen again acting alongside De Sica in the third chapter of the Bread, Love and . . . series. The first two movies, Bread, Love and Dreams and Bread, Love and Jealousy, were directed by Luigi Comencini, one of the leaders of commedia all’italiana (the ironic, humorous treatment of serious themes), and had been huge box-office hits, thanks to Gina Lollobrigida, who had come to be known as La Bersagliera for her headstrong personality, and to the acting bravura of De Sica, who plays an older, still attractive commander of the carabinieri, transferred from his native town of Sorrento to Sagliena, in Abruzzo. “La Lollo,” Gina’s nickname, was the first Italian movie star and the prototype of the maggiorata, the “full-figured woman,” as De Sica refers to her in the 1952 movie Times Gone By. This definition would also be used to describe me and some of the other actresses in my day, lumping us together in a single category, despite the fact that we were all quite different from each other, each of us on her own path.

  When it came time for the third Bread, Love and . . . movie to be made, this one to be called Scandal in Sorrento, Gina Lollobrigida backed out. Maybe she didn’t want to be trapped forever in the character of La Bersagliera, or maybe, since she loved to sing—she had a gorgeous voice—she was tempted by Beautiful but Dangerous, the fictional story of the life of the soprano Lina Cavalieri, which gave her a chance to sing on film.

  So when they offered me Gina’s part in Scandal in Sorrento, I didn’t think twice about it. I had no reason to say no. The press had a field day, of course, concocting a rivalry between the two of us that had absolutely no reason to exist. We were two completely different women and actresses, and if one of us was successful it didn’t mean the other one had failed. But that’s life, and that was Italy, and during that period of affluence, the people enjoyed following certain epic rivalries: that between the Italian cyclists Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali, the opera singers Renata Tebaldi and Maria Callas and, why not, Lollo-Loren. But both Gina and I were passionate about our work, and we had no time to waste in petty skirmishes.

  My chance to star in Scandal in Sorrento was very alluring. Just the idea of working with De Sica again was enough for me to celebrate, since I’d had fun working with him and I’d learned so much. Thanks to his good spirits, his experience, his unfailing eye, I’d been able to take risks and improved without thinking, managing to show sides of my personality that I usually kept to myself. In other words, I learned my trade. On top of that satisfaction, we would be making the movie in our native land, directed by Dino Risi, who understood me and knew how to get the most out of me after just working with me on two movies that year.

  So there we are in Sorrento, where Vittorio, as Maresciallo Carotenuto Cavalier Antonio, has just returned from Abruzzo and accepted a post as head of the metropolitan guard, or “metrotulip guards,” as the great Tina Pica in the role of his trusted governess Caramella, mispronounces it, hoping to overcome his sadness at being close to retirement. But when he arrives it’s me he finds, Donna Sofia la Smargiassa, the show-off, a fishmonger by trade, and the strong-willed tenant of his home.

  The Fishmonger sold fish the same way the Pizza Girl fried pizzas: “Frutti di mare, frutti dell’amore, frutti d’’o core so’ frutti ingannatori . . . Triglie rosse, triglie vive . . .” (Seafood, the food of love, and the fruit of the heart can be deceitful. . . . Red mullets, live mullets . . .). The character of this Sofia gave me the chance to express myself to the fullest, especially because I knew Vittorio had my back. “Donna Sofì, you’ve vulcanized me,” says this Casanova dressed in uniform. It was once again an explosion of happiness and vitality, which peaked with the unforgettable scene of our Italian mambo, I in my red dress, he looking at me puzzled and trying, in vain, to follow my dance steps.

  Maybe the scene was successful because of the spontaneity of the improvisation, as well as because of Peppino Rotunno’s f
lashy photography. The dance hadn’t been written into the script. It had just come to us, as a perfect line might, like taking a stroll, like going out to buy ice cream in town.

  “Officer, shall we dance this mambo?”

  “What’s a mambo?”

  “It’s a Brazilian dance.”

  Some critics said the movie marked the death of neorealism. But the Academy of Italian cinema crowned it with two David di Donatello awards, and the public swarmed to see it, sending it to the top of the box-office sales chart. The Pizza Girl in black and white had turned into the Fishmonger in Technicolor, maybe less authentically of the “street,” but no doubt more modern, and even more popular.

  In the meantime, my name was traveling around the world, and my photo would bask on the cover of Life and Newsweek.

  While still filming Woman of the River, I had met another marvelous director. One day, while we were shooting the last scenes at the lighthouse on Punta Pila, I saw a boat approaching us, steered by a man who was rowing so naturally it looked as though that was all he’d ever done in his life. I thought he might be one of the local fishermen, curious about the set, but as he came closer, wearing a bathing suit and a T-shirt wrapped around his head to shield it from the sun, I recognized him as Alessandro Blasetti, the father of Italian cinema. I was speechless.

  “I’d like to have you with me in my next movie,” he said, without even saying hello first. I burst out laughing and gave him a big hug. He was talking about Lucky to Be a Woman, on which I’d work with Marcello.

  So in the fall of 1955 I was on the set with Marcello, in Lucky to Be a Woman. The movie is the perfect description of that world of small stars, paparazzi, and society reporters that breathed life into the Rome of that period. For Marcello, it naturally paved the way to La dolce vita. For me, it was a watershed: from that moment on Sofia became Sophia, ready to head to the United States.