Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: My Life
Page 13
Before our collaboration with Paramount came to an end, we had one more film to make, It Started in Naples, with the great Clark Gable, which finally took us back to Italy. Gable was by that time a mature actor, oozing charm and bonhomie. Each time I saw him, his character Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind came to mind—those wonderful kisses, those sunsets, his staggering good looks. I would gaze at him as we worked together with the eyes through which I’d first seen him, and it made me dream.
Gable was and wasn’t there. He’d get to the set very early, right on time and very professional. He was always perfect. Perfect with his lines, perfect with his makeup, perfect with his schedule. So perfect that when five in the afternoon came around you’d hear the ringing of his wristwatch. Which meant that it was over, and that he could leave the scene midway through and just take off.
In August, Capri welcomed us with open arms, although we’d just received the news that the Italian court had charged Carlo with bigamy. The day of my birthday, the crew made me a cake with twenty-five candles, and Carlo, defying the authorities—and the whole world, it seemed—joined us.
Once again it all felt too impossible and too beautiful to be true. Another stage of my life had come to an end. Hollywood had given me everything it possibly could, and despite the trouble we had landed in, it was time to go home.
VII
A MOTHER WELL WORTH AN OSCAR
WHITE NIGHT
When I received an Oscar nomination in late February 1962, I could hardly believe it. “The Oscar?” “The Academy Award?” I kept rereading the names of the other candidates, Audrey Hepburn and Natalie Wood, Piper Laurie and Geraldine Page, saying to myself: “What is this, some kind of joke? Besides the fact that La ciociara (Two Women), is an Italian movie, spoken in Italian—when has anything like this ever happened before?”
And yet, of course I was flattered. It made me feel good, and I tried to fool myself into thinking that, having come this far—having become an international star with many good roles under my belt—it might even be enough. Deep down inside, though, I knew it wasn’t true. Every step I took made me quietly dream of another victory. Maybe I was daring too much, but hope and ambition were a part of me. Still, I knew that disappointment was potentially always just around the corner, and that triumph was only for the few.
After much procrastination, I decided I would not go to the ceremony. If I lost, I’d faint. If I won, I’d faint anyway. I couldn’t allow myself to do that in front of that audience, and before the eyes of the whole world. “I’m going to stay right here in Rome, on my couch,” I said to myself, and that is indeed what I did.
That fateful evening, Carlo was nervous, too—although he feigned nonchalance. If I had to choose one word to describe him, that would be “presence”: he had it in every situation, and projected it for others, for himself. He was a solid man, levelheaded, highly focused on his work, on the goals he’d set himself. A movie enthusiast ever since he was a child, he’d dedicated all his life to cinema. A determined businessman, he always had an eye on the results, but he also knew how to put up a fight for a good movie. And if he didn’t like the way it came out, he would personally get behind the moviola to edit it and put it back together the way he thought best. Cultured and sensitive, he was a man of few words, but he’d understood me right from the start, and he never once tried to force me to be different from what I was.
We’d worked so hard to reach that point. And we were perfectly aware that every small victory is made up of effort and sacrifice, and that any one achievement doesn’t necessarily represent the final goal. We were a team, a solid pair, we complemented each other as in the best of families. Today the word to describe it would be “synergy,” back then it went by the words “affection” and “mutual support.” We’d traveled, and had been out in the open about our relationship, yet we’d come back home at our own risk, despite the charges against us.
That April 9, 1962, we were in our apartment in Piazza d’Aracoeli, where we had been living more or less officially for some time. Because of the time difference between Italy and California we were going to be up all night. Before us was a stretch of very long hours of sitting and waiting. Worldwide TV didn’t exist yet. Too anxious to spend those hours chatting, we could neither rest nor read. On top of that, the phone kept on ringing, with voices submerging us in wishes that were sincere to a greater or lesser extent. The most brazen made predictions; sure of this and of that, they seemed to know everything. We looked at each other half smiling. However it turned out, it was going to be an unforgettable night, well worthy of an Oscar. Some music, a sip of wine, the umpteenth cigarette, a cup of chamomile, the window open to let in the springtime. And then what?
It was getting very late when I had a brilliant idea. Sauce, that’s it, sauce, how silly of me, I should have thought of it before. In the kitchen I’d feel safer, I could distract myself from this whirl of anxiety that I couldn’t stop. As I peeled the garlic, my thoughts flew back to Mamma Luisa, who’d died a few years before. Maybe she would have preferred for me to be a schoolteacher in Pozzuoli, with two rooms on the same landing, or maybe even on the floor above, Sunday dinners together, and maybe a few grandchildren underfoot. And yet, she would have been very proud of me tonight. After all, she’d been the one to teach me the value of discipline, the satisfaction that came with doing my duty, the pleasure of feeling right with the world. She would have been proud of my success that had been achieved with nothing more than willfulness.
My eyes were veiled with tears. Emotion can play such tricks on you. The phone rang one more time; it was Mammina again, for what must have been the twentieth time. She said she was calling to calm me down, but she was really trying to find a way to soothe her nerves. Carlo answered the phone with a slightly harsher tone than usual, even though they had great mutual esteem and respect, “Romilda, leave Sophia alone, we’ll call you as soon as we get word.” They were more or less the same age, and, in some ways, they were competing with each other, although Romilda had stepped aside somewhat when this authoritative gentleman had entered my life. She also still feared the “Scicolone effect”: never trust a man, especially if he’s married.
I sliced the onion to hide my tears and I felt better right away. Sometimes it takes very little to get your feet back down onto the ground, to regain the balance that surprises, whether good or bad, risk taking away from you.
At three in the morning I received a cablegram from Santiago, Chile, telling me that Doña Loren had won the Golden Laurel for best actress 1961. It was obviously a prank as Doris Day had won the prize that year. All the same, I wondered: Could it be an omen of victory or a trick of fate? Dawn was still a long way off and the thought of getting any sleep at all had vanished. Trying to think of ways to pass the time, I curled up on the sofa, waiting for the light of dawn, and soon Carlo joined me.
Luckily, time, even when it passes slowly, so slowly it seems to be going backward, never actually stops. The minutes became hours and the night turned to day. At six in the morning, according to our calculations, it was all over. But no call came through, no telegram, nothing. The silence all around us was almost physically painful. At this point we may as well go to bed, we thought. And yet we didn’t dare get up. We just kept sitting there in the gray light of dawn, staring at the walls, the paintings, the photographs. And we finally dozed off like two kids.
But at 6:39 a.m., the phone rang. As heartless as an alarm clock, and just like a siren. Carlo literally pounced on the receiver.
“Who? Who? Cary? Cary Grant?” An abyss of silence, and then an explosion of joy, in his unlikely brand of English, sparked off like a firecracker at a country fair: “Sophia win, Sophia win, Sophia win!!!”
I snatched the receiver from his hand. On the other end was Cary’s warm voice. “It’s wonderful, Sophia, it’s wonderful. You’re always the best!”
I was smiling at Cary all the way across the ocean, I was smiling at myself, at us, at life. As soon
as I hung up, I starting hopping all around the living room. Then, all of a sudden, I was overcome by a feeling of complete exhaustion. I didn’t know how I was supposed to feel. I felt all empty inside. I ran into the kitchen to make sure the sauce hadn’t burned.
Downstairs, outside the door, there was a throng of impatient reporters. Elbowing their way past them were Mammina and Maria, who promised them I would let them come in as soon as possible. My sister was holding a small basil plant: “This way you’ll always remember where you’re from.”
Our embrace was one of the most intense moments in my whole life. My Oscar was theirs. Their happiness mine.
MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS
To get to that night, I had embraced a role that I was given by Vittorio De Sica. He had been the first to catch sight of the promise of an actress within the extra, the actress within the full-figured woman, and now he could see the mother within the daughter. Yes, because this movie, Two Women, was entirely a question of mothers and daughters, which was anything but easy to unravel. And we had shot the film together over the last eight years between the lowly quarters of Naples and the piazzas of Trastevere, the alleyways of Sorrento, and the rugged, barren hills of Ciociaria.
Two Women is a novel by Alberto Moravia. One of Italy’s finest twentieth-century writers, he would often get together with Carlo and share projects, readings, opinions. Carlo had immense esteem and respect for him, and I, too, loved him very much. Thanks to Too Bad She’s Bad, which had been adapted from one of his short stories, I’d met Marcello, and Moravia and several other great writers had written Woman of the River.
Three years before the Academy Award, in Bürgenstock, Carlo was thinking about buying the rights to the novel, and he’d asked me for my opinion. I’d devoured it in two days, unable to put it down. Two Women had broken my heart. The story was about our land, about Italy, it was about me and my mother, about the war we’d lived through and the one we’d feared, about wounds that will never heal. In those pages I recognized the courage, hunger, and blind stupidity of bigotry and the ignorance that were part of the war, as well as the redemptive maternal instinct that thrives in every woman everywhere.
• • •
The main character, Cesira, was a burina, a country bumpkin working in Rome, trapped in a bad marriage when she was still very young. She finds herself widowed and alone with her daughter in Rome as the Allies bomb the city, trying to protect all that she has—her possessions, her shop, her daughter. The bombing is so terrifying that she decides to flee to her native village, Ciociaria, in central Italy. Everyone is saying that it’s a matter of a few weeks until the war’s end, that the Allies are at their doorstep.
Cesira’s voice enchanted me: She is open-minded, with plenty of common sense and a fighting spirit, and she would do anything for her daughter, Rosetta. Her way of thinking, so honest, so real, but so fully aware of her limitations, clashes with the confusion of the war, with the banality of evil around her. In one scene, a train headed for Naples stops in the middle of the countryside, as if it were lost, even though it is on tracks.
The countryside is made of dust and rocks, of mule trails up steep hills, where the crops grow on graduated terraces. They clamber to get to the top, surrounded by mountains, in search of a safety that no longer exists. Huts and dilapidated houses, which are more like stables than the homes of God-fearing people, host farmers, and evacuees, all forced by the emergency to live together. Those long weeks that were to lead to the end of the war turn into months, and even seasons. People from the city and from the country, their lives, their ideas, so different, and yet so similar, are mixed together. But everyone is focused on him or herself, and on the little they have left. Ideals count less and less in the face of hunger, cold, fear. “English or German, it doesn’t matter who wins . . . Let’s just hope they get it over and done with soon!”
In real life Moravia had been evacuated to Ciociaria with his wife, Elsa Morante. He, too, had suffered from hunger and the cold, he’d experienced boredom and fear, he’d slept on mattresses made of corn husks that stab your back, in the midst of the bugs and the mice. He’d wolfed down carob bread and hard pecorino cheese, oranges and goat’s entrails. Sixteen years later, he wrote his memories into Cesira and Rosetta who feel completely lost so far from home.
In a little town, mother and daughter begin to spend time with an idealistic character named Michele, who is very different from all the other townspeople—well read, he uses big words when he speaks, and no one seems to understand him. Yet he uses his ideas to try to reawaken the deadened feelings of people around him, to spark in them the longing to rebuild a better world. Little by little their friendship grows, as fresh as the sky, the cyclamens, and the maidenhair ferns that crop up along the edges of the balconies. But after the fall and winter have passed, and there are no provisions left, everyone is forced to eat chicory, sow thistle, and basil thyme. The English and German troops, at a standstill on the Garigliano front line, have squeezed Italy in their grip. After forty days of rain and mud, the north wind sweeps the clouds away and the skies clear up once again, but with that the bombing resumes, streaking through the sky and striking haphazardly. The Germans begin their retreat, but conscript more men as they go, and act even more ferociously than before, because it’s clear that they’ve been defeated. The Americans arrive, kind yet detached, lazily climbing the Via Appia as they head for Rome, handing out candy and cigarettes.
In this war, everybody is up against everybody else, dominated by selfishness, fear. Everybody grabs what they can. Cesira’s joy at the thought of their imminent freedom even makes her forget her friendship with Michele, who has been feeding her and her daughter all this time. But her joy doesn’t last long. She and Rosetta are about to be violated in the most extreme way, in the very last moments of the war and at the hands of those who claim they are there to liberate them.
• • •
That summer of 1959, as Carlo and I strolled through the woods of Bürgenstock, Two Women was all we seemed to talk about, like an obsession. Carlo was hoping to find international backing and an international audience for this venture, but the Hollywood screenwriters, although they appreciated the book, couldn’t see a movie being made out of it. “It takes too long for the tragedy to happen,” they said. “It’s too slow-paced, nothing happens until the end.” But those of us who had seen the war up close, who had lived inside it, and who had learned to wait through it, saw the potential movie very clearly. It was a story we knew far too well.
In the book, Cesira is thirty-five, Rosetta is eighteen. At twenty-six I was somewhere in between. At first, Anna Magnani had been considered for the part of the mother, with me as her daughter. George Cukor was to be the director; he had recently directed me, and he loved Anna passionately. Excited about the idea, he flew all the way to Italy to see her, but she refused to budge.
“It’s a great character, but I can’t play Sophia’s mother,” she’d said without mincing words. “She’s too tall, too overbearing. I appreciate her as an actress, but she wouldn’t be right in the role of my daughter. I’d have to look up at her, what sense would that make?
Without Anna Magnani, Cukor backed out, and Carlo had to start over again from scratch.
At that point, De Sica came into play, along with Cesare Zavattini, the great screenwriter and early neorealist. A ciociaro by birth, De Sica, too, insisted on having Anna Magnani in the film, convinced that he’d triumph where his esteemed American colleague had failed. But Anna was a tough nut to crack, and she was much too sure of her position to give in. Vittorio tried several times, using all his charm and savoir faire. The last thing he tried was to get Paolo Stoppa to convince her by making a tentative phone call. “Nannarella, I’m having dinner with De Sica right in front of your apartment, can we come up a minute?” But it was all in vain. “The daughter has to be less of an imposing presence, you know, someone like Anna Maria Pierangeli . . . we’d be perfect together,” she remarked.
No sooner said than done. Although he was unhappy about that “great refusal,” the next morning De Sica called me in Paris to suggest I play Cesira.
“What are you saying? The character is much older than me. She’s a mother! How can I do that?”
“Please, Sofì, think about it. She’s a mother you’re familiar with, you’ve seen so many like her, she’s a lot like your own. We’ll make Rosetta slightly younger and that will be that. Please, say yes.”
Carlo was amused by the idea, and he encouraged me the way only he knew how to: “If Vittorio thinks you can do it, it means you can. Trust him.”
The variety and depth of the feelings that a mother can express arouses all the heartstrings of any actress. Those facets, that complex and delicate psychology have always attracted me—maybe because, my own story being what it is—I have always strongly felt gut emotions. There’s no getting around it: the woman-mother represents the most complete aspect of the female personality, and in this sense it challenges every actress to give it her all.
Vittorio guided me through this adventure: “Cesira is a well-rounded mother figure. She’s humble, she’s always worked, and she lives for her daughter. Her approach to things is simple and straightforward. You’ve already experienced all these things personally, Sofì. You know perfectly well what I’m talking about. You’ll act with no makeup on, with no tricks. Be yourself, you become your own mother, and everything will turn out fine.”