by Sophia Loren
The last mother I played in the 1980s was Cesira (from Two Women), again—the role that had won an Oscar for me. Dino Risi, a filmmaker who had already directed me years before in several comedies that had become classics, had decided it was time to bring her back. He asked me to instill new life into that great character. She had been tailor-made for me by De Sica, so naturally, I had to rise to the challenge of honoring the greatness of the movie that had changed my life and to give another worthy performance.
While the shooting was taking place, I had the distinct feeling that watching me from behind the camera was the Cesira from the past. My early fears, as well as my youthful determination, resurfaced in my mind. Guided by Dino’s sensitivity, with the memory of Vittorio to inspire both of us, I brought all my experience as a mother to this new version, experience I hadn’t been able to draw upon the first time around.
Running Away was aired in two episodes in April 1989, again on Canale 5. It was successful and it moved me deeply, just as it had the first time. Drawing on the different seasons of my life gave new meaning to my years of experience as an actress and gave me the strength to look forward. The past lives in the present, and it constitutes our future more than we might believe.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
When Robert Altman invited us to the set for Ready to Wear (Prêt-à-Porter), I was sixty and Marcello seventy. It was 1994 and we were happy to celebrate our birthdays this way. These were my words to him:
Dearest Marcello,
We’ve reached a point in our lives where our birthday wishes surprise us: me 60? You 70? Have we gone crazy? For me, time must stop, let’s not be silly. The only injustice in human destiny is that of spending half our lives regretting the other half (the first half, of course), pursuing the sweetest dreams of youth. But it’s precisely in the balance of what we have behind us that we can find the joy of our more mature years.
Dear Marcello, my friend and companion in so many stories, we have behind us a gallery of characters, feelings, emotions that can richly nourish us our whole lives. I imagine the emptiness and squalor of those who can no longer find a moment of joy, the thrill of love in their past.
On this day, thinking about all the work we’ve done together, and proudly measuring the time that has passed, I want to tell you once more how grateful I am for having had you as an irreplaceable companion in a long adventure filled with characters that—allow me to be presumptuous just this once—the public will never forget.
Marcello’s reply arrived shortly afterward.
Dearest Sophia,
I was moved, touched by your words. But most importantly I’m grateful because they made me see my gripe about these days from a different angle: people can say what they like, but as the years start to pile up, you can hardly believe it when a birthday like this one comes around, and you start looking around for a line of defense. “Have we gone crazy? for me, time must stop, let’s not be silly.” In this passion-filled alarm your words are like a balm, and they have prepared me to enjoy such a difficult role. On the other hand, these past few days, we’ve gone back to working together on Altman’s set. It has all the air of a benevolent sign of fate. Who knows, maybe there’s some wise god who metes out surprises and joys . . . It’s hard to accept the idea that everything will end with us, that this marvelous concert of feelings and passions will suddenly be arrested and no longer expand throughout the universe. Yes, I believe that some part of us will remain rooted to the earth, to the world.
Unfortunately, Marcello’s end was not long in coming. Neither he nor I could ever have imagined that he would pass away only two years later. But meanwhile, rooted to the earth, to the world, we experienced our last, fabulous adventure together.
“ABAT-JOUR”
As soon as I read the script for Ready to Wear, I knew we were in for a lot of fun. The plot had all the flavor of the thriller, but actually it was a merciless cross section of the fashion world, assembled in Paris for Fashion Week.
In the movie I play the part of Isabella de la Fontaine, the widow of the head of the Chambre de la Mode—who has just been assassinated—and the ex-wife of a Russian dressmaker played by Marcello, named Sergei, who turns out not to be Russian after all, and whom I meet again after forty years.
The production was huge, the cast star-studded: thirty-one main characters, in addition to famous singers, models, and fashion designers in the flesh. Julia Roberts and Rupert Everett, Kim Basinger and Tim Robbins, Ute Lemper and Anouk Aimée, Lauren Bacall, Jean-Pierre Cassel, and many, many others shared the scenes with Cher, Harry Belafonte, Nicola Trussardi, Gianfranco Ferré, and Jean-Paul Gaultier, who played themselves. In the meeting between these splendid characters, the three-ring circus of haute couture, with all its neuroses and perversions, reflects like a mirror the passions and frailties of our lives.
During the shooting, I always stayed close to Marcello. In that whirlwind of film cameras—five, six at a time, you never knew which of them was filming you—his familiar face made me happy and gave me a sense of security. As did Altman, who understood my deepest needs.
The first day, when I got to the set and he didn’t come up to greet me, I felt hurt.
“Sophia, what’s the problem, you’re not going to succumb to these small formalities, now, are you!” he said, with an embarassed smile when he noticed my disappointment.
“Bob, we’re all different. I’m here to to support you, but to be able to do so, I need you, your smile, your trust.”
From that day on, he never forgot to come over and say hello first thing in the morning. As for trust, he gave Marcello and me lots of it, leaving us totally free to do the scene that was to be the throbbing heart of the movie.
“How do we want to do this?” he asked us, with a crafty smile, the morning it was our turn. “You can speak Italian, if you wish. Of all the movies you’ve done together, which scene would you like to do over again?”
We needed to be alone for moment, somewhere where we could talk that was far away from the spotlights. There, in that sheltered corner on the set, Marcello had such a mischievous look in his eyes, like a little boy who knows he’s up to no good.
“What do you say, Sophia, how about doing our striptease again?”
“You’re a real scoundrel . . .” I answered, pretending to be shocked. The truth is, I was tickled by the idea. The insecurity of the past was behind me, I no longer needed a choreographer from the Crazy Horse to guide me. De Sica’s lesson had become a part of me. As for my age, experience had taught me to make time my biggest ally: I neither fought against it nor subjected myself to it passively. I lived each day for what it was, letting my beauty mature peacefully, just as the Mona Lisa has.
Marcello and I went back over to Altman sure of the fact that we were on the right path. He looked at us, understood, and shouted out: “Action!”
Although fate had separated us in our work, the places of our lives, our habits, all of this vanished as if by magic when the shooting began. For a few hours we were young again, ready to embrace life and to love each other.
Mara’s striptease in Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, remade thirty years later to the same languid notes of “Abat-jour,” welcomes the passing of the years with a smile, and discovers in the vulnerability of each and every one of us the real essence of life.
As I performed, my heart went back to Vittorio, to his sensitivity and his amazing talent. And besides Vittorio, to María Mercader, his second wife, who was on the set the day we shot our first striptease, in that faraway summer of 1963. As she watched me get dressed again, having left behind the hardest part of the movie, she’d said, “You’re a real beauty!” Her sincere, somewhat masculine remark, struck me, and it still brings a smile to my lips today.
While watching Mara, Marcello had howled with pleasure, but in Ready to Wear he looks like he’s on the verge of yawning. At the climax of the act, in the split second it takes for me to twirl around, he’s fallen fast asleep in his soft white terry-cl
oth robe. Even De Sica would have admitted it was a brilliant idea.
A TIMELESS STYLE
Ready to Wear’s fashion princes and geniuses revolutionize the way its characters see the world. And in the real world Giorgio Armani is the king of kings of fashion, the wizard of beauty. He has been interpreting, dressing, and renewing me for years.
The worlds of cinema and fashion are very close, the one constantly communicating with the other. Richard Gere knows something about this, having been the first to introduce Giorgio to the world by wearing Armani fashions from head to toe in American Gigolo. From that moment on—it was 1980—Hollywood could no longer do without Giorgio. And he has continued to dress the stars, bestowing his touch on newcomers as well. With the same generosity he welcomes the younger generation of fashion designers, whose debut shows he hosts in his theater.
Maybe he chooses to be like this because he hasn’t forgotten the arduousness of his own first steps, just as he hasn’t forgotten the public at large, believing that the passerby encountered just round the corner may conceal a more authentic and natural elegance than the VIP. We can all be chic as long as we don’t surrender to the latest fad styles and don’t let ourselves get wound up in the desire for something new at all costs, which is a way of thinking that’s devouring our world nowadays.
I met Armani when he was still working for Nino Cerruti, in Paris. He was so handsome, with sharp, blue eyes, and a presence that made you feel at home, and that abounded with class. As a young man he had wanted to become a doctor, but during a military leave he had by chance ended up working at the Rinascente department store in the clothing department.
Giorgio and I have many other things in common, apart from being exactly the same age.
We both love our work passionately. And both of us have evolved out of our shyness. In spite of our success, we are still introverts, who prefer a small group of real friends to a huge number of acquaintances. We’re both terribly stubborn, always out to achieve the goals we set for ourselves.
We both scorn hypocrisy and pretense, we can’t stand approximation and negligence, we live encouraged by the desire to find the substance behind the appearance. Maybe that’s the secret of our great, indissoluble friendship.
Over the course of my career I had met and come to appreciate other designers before Giorgio: the bubbly Emilio Schuberth, who dressed my debut on the red carpet, and the very talented Valentino, with whom I shared a long period of my life. I just can’t part with some of the dresses he designed for me. And then the prince of milliners Jean Barthet, and Pierre Balmain, who made the costumes for The Millionairess, and Christian Dior, Cristóbal Balenciaga. Yet entering King Giorgio’s universe was like landing in the peaceful eye of the storm, in a perfect calm, in a style that can’t be ruffled by sensationalism.
Giorgio’s line has an indefinable soul to it; all you can say is “How wonderful!” and nothing more. It’s pure creativity, to be worn, to be used for life. Phillip Bloch, one of Hollywood’s greatest designers, says that when you slip on an Armani outfit you feel rich, you feel good. You don’t even need a mirror: you know it fits you like a glove, and it enables you to express your most beautiful side.
That’s it: what keeps Giorgio going, besides the fear of stopping, is the dream of offering men and women the discovery of their own beauty.
For me, just as for him, fashion hides a deeper dimension that triumphs on the catwalk, a dimension beneath its exterior, which is often exaggerated and ridiculous. It’s the sum of certain fundamental elements and the natural laws of good taste, which never change. Fashion has nothing to do with shocking images that expose or disguise more than dress a person. It is not only that often perverted system that for years has imposed the images of dangerously anorexic models on the imaginations of young women and girls who contradict the concept of elegance.
Not Giorgio. Each and every day Giorgio interprets what’s classical, simple, and natural: it is there, in this lightweight and creative operation, all played out on nuances, details, that he expresses his genius. And turns his life into a sublime work of art.
All that I’ve said is true. But King Giorgio gave me an additional gift named Roberta. Born and raised in beauty, Roberta is Armani’s niece, a remarkable woman, with an amazing and original sense of style. She’s the great soul who welcomes me every two or three months in Milan, when I drive down from Switzerland. Together, we go over all the latest collections and I choose the clothing most suited to my needs. We have lunch together at the Hotel Armani restaurant, surrounded by flowers, chocolate candy, and champagne. We sit at the most secluded table and pretend to put on airs, like two little girls playing grown-up ladies.
With her, everything is always a game, as serious and as amusing as the most successful of games.
“I love your necklace, Roberta!” I whisper to her admiringly.
Without a moment’s hesitation, she takes it off and gently slips it around my neck, as if she were adorning a queen. There has never been a time I haven’t left with something of hers: a piece of jewelry, a coat, a scarf. It’s as if I were taking away with me a lived-in sign of our friendship.
SECRETS
Friendship is one of the most precious gifts that life can give, yet from them each of us has secrets that we don’t want to, or can’t, reveal. However juicy and ripe a piece of fruit may be, at its center is a seed that can’t be shared. Mona Lisa understood this.
For years I’ve kept a personal diary, a shelter in which I could be myself completely. It acted like a small inner movie camera before which I could finally play my whole part. I started keeping it after going to prison, and haven’t stopped. In the solitude of writing I found comfort and companionship, and I discovered aspects of my voice I wasn’t aware of. I felt safe in my intimacy, as if only there could I truly, finally, be home again.
But life, we all know, doesn’t flow smoothly; rather, it moves along in steps, and one spring morning, all of a sudden, I looked in the mirror and was afraid. “What’s going to happen to my diary when I’m gone?” I asked myself.
Although I may be emotional, I do know how to make my own decisions.
“If anyone asks for me, tell them I’m not here!” I said to Ines and to Ninni, and then I went into my bedroom. I stared at that hardcover black notebook for a while. It had been my companion through so many thoughts and emotions. I thumbed through it lightly, slowly. As I turned the pages, I could smell the fragrance of the years. I could see when my mood changed by the differences in my handwriting, at times sharp, at other times edgy, sometimes relaxed.
Finally, I went into the bathroom with a box of matches, struck one, and burned the diary. All my words turned into fire, and then ashes. I never regretted it. Only now and again have I felt a bit of nostalgia. And I’ve never stopped writing. Since then, however, when the end of the year comes around, I take out another match, the magical instrument that lights a small ritual between me and myself.
XIV
GOING HOME
MAMMINA
“Chère petite maman . . .” The round, fussy handwriting of Carlo Jr. when he was a child matches the blue butterfly wings that the teacher had him glue to his letter to me. It’s one of those prefabricated poems for Mother’s Day that the little ones proudly bring home after having struggled to overcome their messiness and inexperience. I come across letters such as these all over the place, in every drawer of every one of our homes. So there simply had to be one in my treasure trove of memories, which has by now dwindled down to the very last of its surprises.
As I look at it tenderly, I glimpse other sheets, written by me as a young girl.
Has anyone ever told you that you’re the dearest mother in the world? Happy Birthday! Sophia
The letterhead in gilt italic lettering from back in 1961, or maybe 1962, reads Piazza d’Aracoeli 1, Palazzo Colonna, Rome. It’s one of the many letters I wrote to my mother during my life, one of the many daily thoughts I sent to her from every corner of
the world.
And now I find another one, written a few years earlier:
Dear Mammina,
I wish your letters were slightly longer and a bit more fun to read . . . Why don’t you describe your days to me, the things you do? What’s happening at home? Things are fine here and, please, Mammina, if you read anything in the newspaper that concerns me put it in an envelope and mail it to me. The movie is going well and here in America everything works like a well-oiled machine. I miss Italy and you’re the main reason for that. I adore you Mamma.”
And there’s another one, dated January 27, 1958:
Dear Mammina,
you know the letters I write at the beginning of a movie always say the same thing. Filled with concerns, torment, and especially so for this movie . . .”
I wonder if it was The Black Orchid, as I continue to read.
It’s a particularly difficult movie, a very dramatic one, it requires my undivided attention, so don’t be upset if I don’t write to you quite as often. I can’t say the same for you because I’m sure you could devote 10 minutes a day to me if you wanted to. You know how happy it makes me to read about what you’re all up to there, and especially to have news from Italy.
Mammina and I were always close, in spite of the thousands of miles that separated us time and time again. And, thank God, we were close even at the time of her death, which happened quite suddenly. This is the only thought that has lessened the pain over the years. A thought that now forces me to stop, along my journey through memory, and take a step backward. Death, especially the death of a mother, disrupts the chronology of one’s existence. It interrupts the timing of the plot and leaves you suspended in an empty space made of darkness and silence.
It was early May 1991 and I was on my way back from a trip, I may have been returning from Carlo Jr.’s graduation ceremony at Pepperdine’s Seaver College. I was to fly into Zurich, and go home from there. But that’s not how things went. There wasn’t anything urgent for me to do, and something inside me made me phone Mammina in Rome. I really wanted to see her. “What’s wrong with that?” I thought to myself. “It only takes a minute to change flights.”