MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE
The story behind that photo of Loren and Mansfield
In April 1957, Paramount Pictures threw a glitzy party in Beverly Hills, Calif., to celebrate Sophia Loren's arrival from Italy. Studio executives hoped the evening would transform the European celebrity into an American superstar. Instead, that night, the “side-eye” was born.
In a photograph now so notorious that it has its own Wikipedia page, Loren is caught casting a withering glance at the pin-up Jayne Mansfield. “She sat next to me at the table and started talking — it was like a volcano erupting,” Loren recalled in her 2014 memoir. “As she got more and more worked up, suddenly I found one of her breasts on my plate. I looked up at her, terrified. She barely noticed, regained her composure, and left.”
It was a collision of two women whose careers seemed to be heading in different directions. In 1957, Loren — who appears in her first film in more than a decade, The Life Ahead, now streaming on Netflix — was being feted as Hollywood's next big thing, an exotic newcomer from a faraway land, Gina Lollobrigida 2.0.
Mansfield, by contrast, was on her way out. She had posed for Playboy and appeared on Broadway, and in 1955 Warner Bros. had taken her on with the hopes of her becoming Marilyn Monroe's younger, cheaper and more pliable doppelgänger — after Monroe herself grew tired of bimbo roles and wanted to prove herself as a serious actress.
But Mansfield's success was short-lived. After a series of box office flops, she resorted to elaborate publicity stunts to stay in the headlines. She arranged multiple product endorsements and photo opportunities each day, and dressed in provocative outfits while walking her dogs. In 1955, she dived into a swimming pool during a press junket in front of hundreds of photographers and “accidentally” lost her top.
In short, Mansfield arrived at Loren's Paramount party determined to be the centre of attention. The Associated Press filmed the buildup. Caught on camera, Mansfield's eyes dart around as she loiters near Loren's table, her chest tilted in a perpetual mid-lean. Loren herself recalls Mansfield “swaying on her heels, perhaps not completely sober.” When Mansfield eventually sat down next to Loren, the Italian was transfixed: “I saw her and I was going to have a fit because I didn't know what was going to happen. If she moved, everything moved, and it (would have been) a disaster!”
Two years later, another shot of Mansfield spilling out of her dress that night would end up on the cover of Kenneth Anger's notorious Hollywood Babylon, an exposé of the seedy underbelly of an industry that Mansfield had come to embody. “Hidden behind Hollywood's enchanted kingdom were some coarse and grotesque sides,” Loren later insisted, “which I refused to have anything to do with.”
Yet the Italian told Entertainment Weekly in 2014 that her expression in the famous photograph was one of concern not disdain. “Look at the picture,” she said. “Where are my eyes? I'm staring at her nipples because I am afraid they are about to come on to my plate. In my face you can see the fear. I'm so frightened that everything in her dress is going to blow — BOOM! — and spill all over the table.”
A decade later, Mansfield was killed in a car crash at the age of 34.
For all that the photograph seems to capture Loren and Mansfield at opposite ends of the Hollywood spectrum — the movie star versus the publicity hound; the mysterious European bombshell versus the loud, gauche American sex symbol — the truth is that the actresses had a great deal in common.
Mansfield reportedly had an IQ of 149, making her “the smartest dumb blond in Hollywood.” She moved on to more challenging dramatic roles far quicker than Monroe had, and seemed aware of the absurdity of Hollywood. “If you're going to be a movie star,” she once said, “you should live like one.”
Loren's career, meanwhile, drifted closer to Mansfield's, as she became more of a celebrity than an actress. She was never able to make films in America as powerful or stylish as those she made in Italy. In 1981, she was the first female celebrity to launch her own perfume. Later, in Florida, she advertised luxury condominiums. She nearly starred as Alexis Carrington in Dynasty, and played both herself and her own mother in a made-forTV story of her life.
Like Mansfield, Loren was prepared to play the bombshell tongue-in-cheek. “My aim was to act, to find roles that put me in the category of actresses with a capital A,” she told an interviewer in 1991. “If doing the so-called sexy roles gave me the popularity to choose what I wanted, fine with me. But I always did them with a great sense of humour, pulling my leg, everybody's leg. I had the look in my eye that said I was amused by it all.”