Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: My Life

by Sophia Loren

  I called her, happy to be able to surprise her.

  “Mammina, it’s me, Sophia! How are you feeling?”

  “How can I possibly be feeling when I never see you . . .”

  “Get my room ready, put the peppers in the oven, I’m on my way!”

  She was so happy she started crying, and I knew I’d made the right decision.

  After I arrived there, we spent two days sitting on the couch and talking. I slept a lot to make up for the jet lag, and in between we ate all the delicacies she cooked for me, seasoned with all her love: salsa genovese, meat slowly cooked in onions, stuffed veal, eggplant Parmesan, a staple in her kitchen. The hours we spent together were peaceful ones, almost as if fate had allowed me to become a child once more before the end.

  That evening I was already in bed when she suddenly appeared at the bedroom door. Leaning up against the doorjamb for support she stared at me, her eyes unfocused.

  “Mammina, what is it?” I asked, half asleep.

  “Sofì, I’m not well.”

  I could see right away it wasn’t just a whim. I got up quickly and rushed over to her.

  “I feel peculiar, let’s go to the bathroom, please.”

  With one hand on her shoulder, and the other one under her arm I slowly led her along the hallway, step by step. It seemed to take forever. I opened the door for her, she went in, stared at the washbasin, and then she started spewing blood. She kept her eyes on me, terrified, as if she were asking me to explain what was happening to her. I tried to reassure her, to smile, but I was scared to death.

  “Help me to my bed,” she said breathlessly.

  I walked her back to her room and helped her to lie down. She closed her eyes, as if to rest.

  “Mamma?” I said.

  I called the concierge: “Come up, come up right away!” He arrived, looked at her, and shrugged helplessly.

  “Signora Sophia, I think you need to call someone . . .”

  I phoned Maria, who was in her car on her way to the countryside with a friend. She came racing back, waving a white handkerchief out the car window. But it was too late.

  When my father died, fourteen years earlier, I tried hard to feel something, but had felt nothing.

  Mammina, instead, had taken a part of me with her.

  The more time passes the deeper the wound left by her death is. I miss our daily phone call. I miss her sudden fits of anger, her combative, exclusive love. Often when I’m with my sister, and especially when we’re alone, we look at each other and, without saying a word, we’re overcome by the same feeling of loss, the same irreparable absence.

  My mother’s story always interested me, as both an actress and a daughter. She was emotional, naive, dramatic, hysterical, and deeply loving. Nineteen years after her death, in 2010, I played her in My House Is Full of Mirrors, a TV miniseries broadcast by RAI, adapted from Maria’s autobiographical novel. I’d actually already brought Mammina to the small screen thirty years before with the TV movie inspired by Sophia: Living and Loving, the book in which A. E. Hotchner, the author of Papa Hemingway and a close friend of Hemingway and Paul Newman, had collected my memories along with those of my family and friends. In that first movie the challenge had been even more exciting, because I had to play her part as well as my own. It was an exciting and at times distressing exercise of having to be two people at once. Looking back at our lives, maybe she, not I, was the real star.

  When we made My House Is Full of Mirrors the emotion was even greater, because Mammina was no longer with us. It wasn’t easy to get things straight in my heart so that I could give her a voice and a credible guise. I wanted to do more than that, though. I wanted to pay tribute to her, in the only way I knew how.

  I don’t know whether I succeeded. But playing her part forced me to relive our life together, our very close relationship, which was more like the relationship between two sisters than between a mother and her daughter. By embracing her point of view I understood things that had escaped me before. In some ways, it took me back home.

  THE IMMACULATE

  For me, going home today means staying with my sister Maria. Our lives, however different, are intertwined. Little does it matter that we live far apart, that we have different jobs, that we were born under two different signs of the zodiac—she’s a Taurus, exuberant and determined, I’m a Virgo, determined and reserved. We’ve always helped each other out, supported each other, and have always been present during the critical moments. Whenever I arrive in Rome and enter her home, I can smell the scents of our childhood again, as if time hadn’t passed at all.

  Maria lives with Majid, an Iranian physician she has been happily married to since 1977. She had met him, years and years before, in a Roman hospital, where he was a young doctor, about to go back to Iran, and she was a gutsy journalist with a marriage behind her, out to rediscover herself. As soon as she saw those fabulous Middle Eastern eyes, Maria promised herself she wouldn’t let him slip away. She courted him and won his heart. In her handsome Persian prince I find the brother I never had. And in Maria I find all the affection of my original family rolled up in one long, strong embrace.

  The first thing I can see as I cross the threshold is the “queen” of their home, L’Immacolata, a painting of the Immaculate Virgin Mary. It’s a small painting that, a long, long time ago, lay inside the drawer of a mirrored wardrobe in Pozzuoli, one of those drawers that contain a huge variety of things: spools of thread and handkerchiefs, letters and dried flowers, train tickets, photographs, hairpins, elastic bands, medals, receipts . . . The Immaculate Conception had belonged to Mamma Luisa’s sister, who had moved to America in the early twentieth century and left it behind. Maria saved it from oblivion and has never parted with it. Now that they live together, Maria honors her with the eternal flame of a candle and fresh leaves, and she entertains her with games, tiny paper angels, stuffed toys.

  “Sofì, see how well L’Immacolata is? With all her hard work to protect us she’s aged, and she needs to take her mind off things . . .”

  “Maria, what on earth are you saying?” I pretend to scold her. But I understand her perfectly. Each one of us harbors a spiritual, enchanted dimension that we nurture in mysterious ways, letting ourselves be guided by our heart.

  Whenever we get together, Maria and I spend our time chatting and cooking. Actually, to be precise, she does all the talking and I listen, she cooks and I eat . . .

  “Remember that time in Spain, you were sleeping and I . . .” she said, pausing.

  “You what?”

  “And I went out with the crew. As soon as you dozed off, I’d go dancing. I absolutely loved dancing the Sevillana . . .”

  “Oh really? If only I’d known! But maybe you did the same thing in America, now that I come to think of it . . .”

  “That’s right, as soon as you fell asleep I’d get up, get dressed, and go downstairs where Frank Sinatra’s car was waiting for me . . . I’d go hear him sing in the clubs, and sometimes I even sang along with him.”

  “You don’t just live life, Maria, you steal it!” I say to her, smiling, “You’re like a thief!”

  And just like a thief, sometimes, she tries to find out some of my secrets . . . She taunts me, she circles around me, she asks me trick questions. And I, like any true actress, try to lead her astray with a gaze, a gesture, a line. But I know it just doesn’t work with her, and in the end I give in to her clever directing.

  “It’s no use acting with me, Sofì, I know you too well,” she exclaims, amused and proud of herself. These skirmishes between sisters keep us alive, they give us joy, and we feel tender toward each other. And they reach a peak when we’re cooking something.

  “Maria, do you put garlic in friarelli?”

  “If you don’t want me to, I can make them without garlic . . .”

  “How can anyone eat friarelli without garlic?”

  “Sophia, please decide, do you, or don’t you want me to add garlic?”

  It
’s wonderful to know that there’s nothing in the world that can separate us, just as nothing has ever separated us in the past. And that, for as long as she’s around, I’ll always know the way home.

  Whenever I’m in Rome, when I’m not on Maria and Majid’s sofa, I have a home at the Boscolo Hotel, where the fabulous owners, Angelo and Grazia, reserve a suite for me. For me it’s a peaceful oasis, where I can spend days of serenity, sheltered from curious onlookers . . . pampered by the impeccable, warm staff. Signor Giuseppe has become my friend, and every time I leave we say good-bye to each other with great affection, as if we were already missing each other.

  THE GAL WITH THE WHITE GLASSES AND CONTAGIOUS LAUGHTER IS ALWAYS IN A GOOD MOOD

  In the early 1990s, there was another great Italian filmmaker who brought me back “home.” That filmmaker was Lina Wertmüller, the gal with the white glasses and contagious laughter. I hadn’t experienced anything as intimate, as familiar on the set since my days working with Vittorio. I trusted her and let her tell me what to do, and it was the right decision. Today I think the fact that it was a woman who directed me in my mature years was no accident.

  And you have to admit, Lina is an outstanding woman. She’s extremely sophisticated, but she knows how to stay close to the people. She has a great imagination, she’s a warm human being, she’s positive. She’s beautiful inside and outside. She reminds you of a child, with her desire to live life to the fullest, to be joyful. Even though we don’t talk very often, we have a marvelous relationship.

  We had already worked together in the late 1970s on a movie whose title I dare any Italian to remember: Fatto di sangue fra due uomini per causa di una vedova (si sospettano moventi politici), more simply translated Blood Feud in English. Producers generally prefer short titles like Senso and Sciuscià, so Lina would tease them with long ones and be amused when they were mispronounced.

  Lina has a Neapolitan street urchin side to her that makes her irresistible. I hope Lina likes the title of the section I’ve devoted to her.

  In Blood Feud, as she tells us in her lively autobiography, Tutto a posto e niente in ordine (Everything’s Fine and Nothing in Order), she played around with my makeup so that my more tragic Mediterranean side would come out. The movie was set in Sicily, in the 1920s, when the island was barbarous and there were frequent clashes between the people. That’s how she wanted me to be, too.

  When Carlo and I were at our home in Paris, Lina came to see me with the script, which had just been written. While we were talking about the movie, she started fooling around with my face.

  “Let’s bring these eyebrows down, down, like the pediment of a Greek temple!” she chuckled, using an eyebrow pencil to torment me in front of the mirror.

  She wanted to be sure to erase any trace of the international movie star so that she could stage a real Italian woman, a typically Southern one.

  “Lina, Lina, what are you doing?” I tried to back her off, but ultimately my heart told me to trust her. And so I let her do what she wanted, with the acquiescence you might use with enterprising children—the ones everyone considers pests, but can actually be quite delightful.

  As she prepared us for Blood Feud, Lina didn’t just have it in for me. She forced Marcello, who was also in the movie, to wear a very long beard, the kind the Socialists wore in those days, which bothered him for the entire movie.

  We’d started out with a comedy and ended up with a melodrama, to the heartrending notes of “Casta Diva” sung by Maria Callas. And we had so much fun.

  In 1990 Lina was back, with Eduardo De Filippo this time, with Saturday, Sunday and Monday. The set always took me straight back to Mamma Luisa’s kitchen in Pozzuoli, because ragù, meat sauce, “the holiest event on Sundays,” was always simmering in the kitchen.

  The whole movie revolved around the preparation of ragù in Rosa Priore’s majolica kitchen, a great family woman busy restoring her honor, on which doubts have been cast owing to her husband’s jealousy. All the members of the crew—myself included, as well as Luca De Filippo in the role of Peppino, Luciano De Crescenzo, and Pupella Maggio, on down to the technicians, the electricians and the stagehands—were convinced they knew the only real recipe for meat sauce. We continued to challenge each other to duels fought over unforgettable spaghetti dinners. All you have to do is watch the beginning of the movie, which is set in a butcher’s shop, to understand that, against the backdrop of that ungraspable, chaotic Neapolitan anarchy, everyone has an opinion on the matter and it’s impossible to reach an agreement.

  “Donna Cecì, ve voglio bene” (I love you, I’m in a rush), says Donna Rosa. ‘I need one and a half kilos of chopped meat, three kilos of tender veal, a piece of rump, some shoulder, and two kilos of hindquarter and bone.”

  “No sweetbreads, no beef brain?”

  Line after line, each woman tries to impose her way of doing things:

  “My mother-in-law, who’s famous for her meat sauce, taught me to sauté the meat before cooking it, without the onion . . .”

  “Madonna signo’,” Rosa lets slip imprudently, “what you’re saying is blasphemy!”

  “Excuse me if I butt in, but the lady’s right, because if you cook the meat and the onion separately, the meat sauce will be more delicate, fancier . . .”

  “Oh, so you’re saying that meat and onion cooked together is low class . . . ? Sorry to have to ask this, Signora, but where are you from?

  “What does that have to do with anything? I’m from Afragola, so what about it?”

  “Aha . . . that explains it.”

  That “Aha” is what triggers the fight, and the glorious weekend is about to begin.

  Fortunately, on the set we were much tamer, although, to be honest, we weren’t really that different from Rosa and the other women. Whatever the case may be, we worked really hard on that meat sauce, and the results were excellent.

  Lina likes to recall that the delicious aroma of meat sauce even drew Al Pacino, who was also making a movie at Cinecittà, to our table.

  “What’s for lunch?” the great actor inquired as he stuck his head inside the sliding door of our field kitchen one day. As if by magic, we found a chair and squeezed closer to make room for him at the table, too. For us it was a surprise, an honor. For him, a good chance to taste genuine Neapolitan meat sauce, which is different from the kind you get with international cuisine. Karl Malden, who’d played Peppino on Broadway, also showed up for a taste.

  Even though this comedy was known all over the world, and had been performed by Sir Laurence Olivier in London, its essence can’t really be translated—all those dialogues, those arguments, those atmospheres. So Lina, while working on the script along with Raffaele La Capria, had shifted the time frame back from the early 1950s to 1934, right into Pozzuoli, allowing me to identify totally with my character. Actually, it wasn’t hard: that world was very familiar to me, and I hadn’t forgotten it. And the set designer, Enrico Job, Lina’s adored husband, had reconstructed my native town just as I remembered it. Nothing remains of that world today.

  My niece Alessandra was also a member of the cast, playing the part of Rosa’s daughter, Giulianella. She had already played my daughter in A Special Day, but she had a much more important part in this movie.

  One morning my sister, Maria, showed up unexpectedly on the set, saddened by a serious health-related problem. She took her daughter to one side and shared her anxiety with her. I knew nothing about it, I could see them conferring in the corner, and I didn’t know why. But I was soon able to notice its effects. While shooting the lover’s argument, Ale’s eyes, bright from having cried for real, worked perfectly, and gave the scene its authenticity. My niece was talented, but she would soon choose another path in life.

  Luckily, there was nothing wrong with Maria, and even her husband, Majid, who had been very worried, brightened up.

  Saturday, Sunday and Monday was a huge success in Italy and abroad. The first time Carlo Jr. and Edoardo saw the movie they
couldn’t stop laughing: in Rosa they recognized many of the expressions, gestures, and lines that their own mother uses every day, and they thought it was hilarious.

  • • •

  But the time had come at last to shut the kitchen door behind me and go back to the big world: awaiting me was a decade to be rolled out like some long, marvelous red carpet.

  STANDING OVATION

  In 1963, I was asked by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences to deliver the Best Actor Award. Wearing a very elegant white dress designed by Emilio Schuberth, my hair teased in the style back then, I started out by reciting from the script: “It is my privilege to present the Oscar for the best performance as an actor . . .” But when I turned to the organizers backstage, I automatically switched to Italian: “La busta, per favore . . .” causing the audience to burst into laughter. The winner was Gregory Peck for To Kill a Mockingbird.

  Twenty-eight years later, at the Shrine Civic Auditorium in Los Angeles, Gregory and I had exchanged roles, but the wonderful mood in the room was exactly the same as before.

  This time—it was March 25, 1991—Gregory was waiting for me at the bottom of a very long staircase, which I walked down carefully, overcome by emotion, in a glittering Valentino dress.

  I had met him the evening before at the hotel. Almost thirty years had gone by since we’d last seen each other, when filming Arabesque. When the elevator door opened, there he was standing in front of me, as if time had never stopped. A flash, a moment that lasted an eternity. In his surprised look, in the slight hesitation he’d shown as he moved to the side to let me by, I had glimpsed a world of things he would have liked to say, but hadn’t. Nor would ever say.

  When he handed me my second Oscar, this one for my career, the audience stood up in a standing ovation while I tried hopelessly to hold back the tears. If anyone out there thought I was just acting they were wrong. I spoke of my gratitude, happiness, and pride. I recalled how in 1962 I had been too fear-stricken to fly out to Hollywood to get my Oscar for Two Women.