Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: My Life

by Sophia Loren

  One evening, while shooting Marriage Italian Style, Vittorio lashed out at him: “Last night I lost five million lire because of you.”

  “Who, me?”

  “I looked for you, but couldn’t find you. If I had, we could have gone to eat a nice pizza and I wouldn’t have been forced to go to the casino.”

  “Commendatore, pardon me: but may I ask why you squander all that money at the betting table?”

  In contrast, with Fellini, Marcello had a brotherly understanding that was born right away. It was the kind of immediate recognition and understanding that school friends have. As Marcello liked to say, jokingly, their friendship was very sincere because it was based on a complete lack of trust. They had fun loafing around; they’d lie just for the sake of lying. They were even more than brothers. Together, they went through life making some of the masterpieces of Italian cinema. Just think: La Dolce Vita, 81/2, Ginger and Fred.

  Marcello’s affections were unwavering, and he never abandoned the people he loved. His marriage to Flora Carabella lasted until the day he died. He had loved other women, other companions, but he refused to divorce her. She was his wife. Not even when he met Catherine Deneuve, not even during his amour fou for Faye Dunaway did he ever come to that decision, which he felt would have brought about unjustifiable pain. Flora knew it; she loved him and she spent her whole life putting up with his affairs. He was a kind and loving father to both Barbara and Chiara, who would, sometimes, even comfort him over his lost loves.

  The first thing that comes to mind when I think of Marcello is his bonhomie. In most of the stories we acted in together, he was always the accommodating good guy. I, instead, was the aggressive, raucous, bitchy one. After doing a scene in which I’d roughed him up, I’d say: “Sorry, Marcè, I didn’t want to. This time I think I went overboard . . .”

  And he, being a real actor, as well as a good person, never got upset. “You’re a witch, Sofì, come over here. Let me give you a hug, te voglio da’ ’nu bacio (I wanna give you a kiss).”

  He’d end up consoling me, and I, to thank him, would make him one of my specialties, fagioli con le cotiche (beans and pig rind).

  Our friendship didn’t need many words. All it took was one look, a gesture to understand each other; we encouraged each other by staying close together. We would never scold each other, complain about each other, expect anything other than what each of us felt like doing. Sometimes, to ease the tension of a difficult scene, to needle each other, we’d say. “Nun me piace come l’hai fatta” (I don’t like the way you did it).

  But there was a smile in our eyes, and we knew right away that we were just trying to be funny.

  FROM ROMAGNA TO BRECHT

  Faith, faith . . . It almost sounds like a password. In time I learned that the real challenge in our job, and maybe not just in ours, lies in transforming other people’s faith in us into self-confidence, self-esteem, a belief in ourselves and our abilities. That’s where the experience begins, the moment you start believing in yourself, and you treasure both your successes and your mistakes.

  That moment for me came in Two Women. After doing Cesira, I felt ready to handle practically any role. It was that success, a personal one before being a public one, that started a very intense decade, in which I was a recognized actress, and would ultimately become a wife and mother, too.

  It was the Fabulous Sixties, which were to change the world forever. The years of the Beatles and JFK, of 81/2 and James Bond, of the popularity of nightclubs and the nonviolent protests of Martin Luther King, Jr. I was often working on several fronts, on the international scene, but, also, whenever I had the chance to, I’d go back to playing Italian characters, in whom I could be myself completely.

  Before appearing with Marcello again on the set of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, I traveled in time and space, adapting to very different worlds. After playing the part of Jimena next to Charlton Heston in El Cid, a sort of “Superwestern” in costume, I played Madame Sans-Gêne, a revolutionary washerwoman who became a duchess, in Madame.

  In the fall of 1961 I left my historical costumes aside and let De Sica drag me into doing “La riffa” (“The Lottery”), one of the four episodes of Boccaccio ’70. The others were directed by Visconti, Fellini, and Monicelli. The screenplay was credited to Ennio Flaiano and several others, including Italo Calvino, as well as the ever-present Cesare Zavattini, from whom it had all begun. Parading in front of the camera were great talents such as Romy Schneider and Paolo Stoppa, Peppino De Filippo and Anita Ekberg, who had just acted in La Dolce Vita with Marcello.

  In my episode, De Sica used all the irony he could muster—which was always gentle and delicate even when it was just one step away from the grotesque—to stage a clandestine lottery during a rustic country fair in Romagna. I was the prize, Zoe, the queen of target shooting.

  “People of Lugo, it’s time for balloon shooting . . . pistol or carbine?”

  To the rhythm of an irresistible cha cha cha by Trovajoli—“Soldi soldi soldi tanti soldi, beati siano i soldi, i beneamati soldi perché / chi ha tanti soldi vive come un pascià, e a piedi caldi se ne sta . . .” (Money money money lots of money, blessed money, beloved money because / when you have money you live like a king and your feet are always toasty), I sang cheerfully and also somewhat coarsely—wearing a flaming red dress, I had found another incarnation for the Pizza Girl, giving up wealth for true love.

  I had lots of fun shooting the movie in that rural area, surrounded by cows and clouds of dust from the amusement park nearby. Hearing the Romagnolo accent always put me in a good mood, and by the time we’d finishing shooting I’d almost made it my own. I always seemed to be happy, and everyone was aware of it. I’d ride to the set on my bike, cook during the breaks, listen to jazz, sing. Sometimes my sister, Maria, would join me and we’d launch into Neapolitan duets and the whole crew would stay up late to listen to us. As if that weren’t enough, the flower growers in Lugo named a rose variety after me. What more could I possibly have wanted?

  My Zoe so resembled the Pizza Girl that it annoyed Marotta, who had written The Gold of Naples, causing him to good-heartedly accuse Zavattini of plagiarism. The movie was hugely successful with the public, and the producers were thinking of making an international Boccaccio ’71, with Jacques Tati and Charlie Chaplin directing jointly with De Sica.

  But the movie was never made, and in 1962—after working on Le couteau dans la plaie (“The Knife in the Wound”) which came out in America as Five Miles to Midnight, a thriller directed by Anatole Litvak, and after receiving the Oscar for Two Women—I was back under Vittorio’s wing with the drama The Condemned of Altona. The original play was by Jean-Paul Sartre, and we had some three Oscar winners on board: the actors Frederic March and Maximilian Schell and the screenwriter Abby Mann, backed by Zavattini. I played the part of a sophisticated Brechtian actress of the Berliner Ensemble, at odds with a Nazi brother-in-law and his shady past. The role was far from my personal experience, in a movie that didn’t really work, despite the excellent names involved. It was a beautiful story, though, and we actors did what we could to interpret it in the best way possible. But the critics tore it to pieces, maybe because they were somewhat bewildered by it. These things happen. As you grow older you realize that failure is not a tragedy: tomorrow morning the sun will rise again and at breakfast your appetite will be back. In any case, for me it was an interesting experience, which won me another David di Donatello award and an extra pinch of know-how.

  While we were shooting, Carlo called. From his voice I could tell he had bad news. We’d just finished shooting and I was back at the hotel.

  “Sophia . . .”

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Marilyn’s dead . . . we just got the news. Barbiturates. They say it was suicide.”

  I hung on to the receiver speechless, not knowing what to say. I was so quiet that Carlo started to worry. He knew that behind my carefully controlled, determined façade lies an e
motional woman.

  “Sophia, are you still there?”

  “Yes, yes, of course I am. Where else could I be?”

  That death, so untimely, so ambiguous, caused me terrible distress. And it got me thinking. I thought about the meaning of beauty, about loneliness, about the need to feel love that’s hidden in the heart of each and every one of us. I remembered Marilyn’s seductive smile veiled with sadness. It wasn’t enough to be the most beautiful woman in the world to be happy.

  Marilyn had been a great actress, crushed by the weight of her own talent, by all the men who had asked her for everything without giving her anything in return, or by those who had wanted to transform her according to their own tastes. Marilyn’s allure had ended up destroying her, reducing her to an ill-fated sex symbol. She hadn’t managed to find her own way. I felt a shiver run up my spine, as if a shadow had been cast all around me.

  The world is a cruel place, nourished by and satisfied with appearances, rarely concerned about what lies beneath the surface. This is why it’s up to each of us to keep any fairy tale anchored to real life, so that we never forget who we are, where we come from.

  YESTERDAY AND TODAY

  “But, Vittorio, I’ve never seen a striptease before, nun saccio proprio comme se fa” (I have no idea how it’s done).

  “Sofì, don’t worry, I’ve called in an expert on the matter.”

  I’d spent a long spring in Spain making The Fall of the Roman Empire with Alec Guinness and Omar Sharif. In the movie, Alec, probably the most accomplished all-around actor I’ve ever met, played my father, Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Whenever he started to say something, the world just stopped, and I would stand there watching him with dreamy eyes. From there I’d taken a short break to go to Hollywood and give Gregory Peck an Oscar. I’d come back to the set with Vittorio, who was in better shape than ever before, and was again pushing me to become better than ever. It was July 1963 and with us was Marcello, with whom we once again formed a magical trio.

  Despite my reluctance Vittorio wouldn’t let up.

  “You’ll see, Sofì, you’ll see. We’re going to prepare such a sexy scene that all that’ll be left of Marcello is a pile of ashes!”

  I looked at him, dismayed, but underneath it all I knew I was in for some fun.

  Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow is also a film in episodes, like Boccaccio ’70, but the main characters are always the same. Marcello and I portrayed in different cities and contexts. We started shooting the end of the movie first, then proceeded backward as we traveled up and down Italy.

  My character, Mara, is a big-hearted prostitute who lives in Piazza Navona. Her balcony overlooks the rooftops of Rome and is adjacent to that of a young seminarian, who falls hopelessly in love with her and because of that runs away from home. The boy’s grandmother is in despair and accuses Mara of having seduced him, but then the two women make peace and actually become accomplices. The unbelievable result of this is that Mara vows abstinence for a week so that the young man will come back home. She does, however, dedicate to her most passionate customer a striptease, which has become famous in cinema history.

  The expert summoned by De Sica to help me was Jacques Ruet, choreographer at the legendary Crazy Horse cabaret in Paris. After a few “training” sessions, during which he taught me about the gestures, the rhythms, the moves, I was ready to do a striptease my own way.

  Before doing the scene, I didn’t sleep for a week. I must not have been completely at ease the morning of the shoot, either, because I made a request of De Sica that was unusual for me: “Vittorio, listen, how about clearing the set for this scene?”

  So Marcello and I were left alone, with just the cameraman and De Sica’s wife, who was often on the set. Marcello, lying on the bed completely dressed, was ready to enjoy the show. “Go, Sofì, full steam ahead!” he said with an encouraging smile. His sweet, amused attitude paved the way for me. As I disrobed to the notes of “Abat-jour,” the original soundtrack for the movie, Marcello was curled up with his chin in his hands, watching me like a greedy child. Every once in a while, he’d mop his brow with a handkerchief. When I removed my garter belt, he let out a coyote howl of love, which summed up all the happiness a human being is capable of. This touch of genius won Vittorio an Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1965.

  I know I’m going to sound like a broken record if I say one more time that neither Marcello nor I could ever have made it without Vittorio. But that’s the truth. Neither of us was prepared to be exhibitionistic, to flaunt sex in such an unabashed way.

  “I remember that in old movies,” Marcello said to Enzo Biagi during that same interview, “you’d be watching, let’s say Marlene Dietrich; she and someone else might go behind a folding screen, and suddenly you’d see a corset. And you’d fantasize, you’d pierce that screen and imagine her naked as she got undressed.” Instead, if there’s a wall here at all, it’s De Sica’s irony, his way of never taking things completely seriously, his smile filled with affection and humanity. The striptease was probably one of the most amusing scenes I’ve ever had to do in my life. And I think it still works, even though times and customs have changed so much.”

  Omar Sharif, whom I’d met only recently then, told me, “For me that striptease wasn’t at all a surprise, Sophia, I’d dreamed of you naked so many times that it appeared to me that I was seeing something I’d already seen before!”

  As soon as we finished that scene, we moved on to Naples to shoot the “Adelina” episode, written by Eduardo De Filippo based on the true story of Concetta Muccardi. A seller of black-market cigarettes on the streets of the Forcella neighborhood, Concetta had figured out that if a woman was pregnant she wouldn’t have to go to jail. So she had fourteen children, which for the movie had luckily been reduced to seven. In the movie version, seven children aren’t enough to prevent her from being arrested. But they’re a lot to deal with anyway: those kids are all over the place, in her arms, under the bed, outside the jail waiting for her to come out.

  Marcello played the funniest part as her exhausted husband, Carmine, who can no longer fulfill his marital duties to his wife. The scene when they go to the doctor’s to find a solution is hilarious.

  “So you don’t want children . . .” says the doctor.

  “No, tutto ’o cuntrario” (the exact opposite), “chisto non funziona cchiù!” (he doesn’t work anymore!).

  “But when the horse is tired,” the doctor warns her, “you have to stop whipping it, and put it back in the stable . . .”

  It just so happened that while I was shooting the Neapolitan part of the movie I started feeling out of sorts. After a few days thinking that maybe playing Adelina had made me feel pregnant, I started thinking that maybe I really was pregnant. I went to see a local doctor who had me do some tests, but they all came back negative. However, the feeling wouldn’t go away, so another big expert from Rome arrived, carrying a dark leather briefcase. When he opened it I jumped with fright. Inside it was a tiny green frog staring at me, his eyes bulging, scared to death.

  “E chisto che c’entra?” (What does this have to do with it?).

  The doctor was unperturbed and injected the animal with some of my urine.

  “If the frog dies, it means you’re pregnant . . .”

  It wasn’t long before the tiny animal started moving around erratically, as if it had been hit on the head. But it didn’t die. I got rid of the doctor and went out to take a walk in Mergellina, releasing the poor creature into a pond.

  “Too bad,” I said to myself, “for a moment there I thought I was pregnant.”

  However, contrary to all expectations, just before the shooting ended, my pregnancy was confirmed. I was desperately happy, happier than I’d ever been before. I was twenty-nine, which at the time was considered old to have children, and my desire for motherhood had become an obsession. I loved children, and the idea of having one all my own gave me a sense of peace and fulfillment I’d been searching for all my life.

&n
bsp; “Sophia was born a mother,” said Vittorio, who was particularly sensitive to children, and had given them leading roles in many of his movies. I myself had met many child actors on the set, and stayed in touch with some of them for a long time. The little girl in Houseboat even wrote to me a few years ago to tell me she’d become a grandmother!

  In Woman of the River, I had been a despairing mother, in The Black Orchid, a mother in crisis, and in Two Women, the embodiment of the great Mediterranean mother, a woman who will do whatever it takes.

  In It Started in Naples, which was shot in 1959, I had played a happy, unconventional aunt and I had in fact become an aunt shortly before. On December 30, 1962, nine months to the day of her marriage to Romano Mussolini, a talented musician and the youngest son of Benito Mussolini, Maria had given birth to Alessandra. The little one was born too early and in the first days she gave us cause for concern. But she was christened on January 12, with me in the role of the proud, happy godmother.

  In hindsight it seems impossible to believe, but even a joyous and innocent event like my niece’s christening had its meddling gossips and detractors. Yes, because a sinner like me should never have been allowed to participate in a religious ceremony. Carlo’s and my situation was far from being solved, and it continued to fuel the morbid interest of the well-wishers. We didn’t let their unkind thoughts affect us too much. Anyway, after the initial scare, Alessandra grew strong and healthy and this gave us consolation for some of the upset. Now it was my turn to be a mother, and I couldn’t wait to look my own child in the eyes.