La dolce Sophia
Being slapped across the chops may not seem like a declaration of love, but Sophia Loren doesn’t see it that way. In 1957 she was flying home from Hollywood with her boyfriend, the much older film producer Carlo Ponti, when she happened to mention that Cary Grant, her previous lover, had sent her some flowers. Wham!
‘I knew that Carlo’s slap was the gesture of a man in love,’ explains Loren. ‘I wanted to die but inside I knew that I had somehow deserved it.’
It says a lot for Loren’s candour that she’s prepared to share this incident with us. A more calculating writer would either leave it out altogether, or else explain it away as her lover’s ‘Latin temperament’. But Loren does neither. At 80 years old, perhaps she feels that life is too short to care what other people think.
The result is an autobiography that feels as authentic as the ‘struffoli’ that Loren still makes every Christmas for her American grandchildren.
While there’s plenty of glitz and glamour here – JohnWayne,PaulNewman and Peter Sellers all drift in and out of the narrative – the real power of Loren’s narrative is rooted in her account of her humble beginnings.
She was born in 1934, the result of her teenage mother’s on-off relationship with a middle-class engineer who refused to marry a girl from the wrong side of Naples. Sofia Scicolone, as she was then, grew up knowing real poverty but a great deal of love.
Her account of living with her maternal grandmother, Mamma Luisa, simmers with cooking smells, shouts of laughter and first Communion dresses. She didn’t meet her father until she was five and never got a single lira from him – but this only strengthened little Sofia’s determination to succeed.
The way she tells it, she wasn’t concerned so much with bettering herself as making a decent life for her mother, who had been forced to give up her theatrical ambitions when she became pregnant.
The moment she was old enough, Sofia started entering beauty pageants. She seldom won first prize – she was too tall, her nose was too long and her mouth too big – but her earnings as perpetual runner-up were enough to get her and her mother to Rome, where she was talent-spotted for the movies. Cast initially as a buxom bombshell, Loren worked hard to be accepted as a serious actress in Italy’s burgeoning post-war film industry.
Her reinvention paid off in 1962 when she won an Oscar for playing a dowdy rape victim in Vittorio de Sica’s
Two Women. It was the first time that a foreign-language actor had been honoured in this way.
Loren may be an inspired chronicler of mid-century, working-class Italian culture, but she’s savvy enough to know that what her readers really want are anecdotes featuring Hollywood’s big names. And she’s happy to oblige.
There’s the time, for instance, that a tipsy Jayne Mansfield tottered over to her at Romanoff’s and flopped one of her naked breasts on to Loren’s plate as a warning to the new girl not to try to compete.
Or the time that Loren and Ponti went to lunch at Audrey Hepburn’s house in Switzerland and were appalled to be served a single lettuce leaf with a tiny crispbread on the side while Hepburn murmured something about having eaten too much. And that’s not forgetting the endless games of Scrabble with a detoxing Richard Burton who, despite his Oxford education, was no match for Loren, who taught herself English and French by immersing herself in classic literature.
Loren doesn’t shy away, either, from the murkier sides of her story. The fact, for instance, that in 1979 Ponti was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment for smuggling money while, three years later, Loren herself spent 17 days in a Neapolitan jail for tax evasion. Were they guilty? Loren says not, and such is her confidence and determination to enjoy la dolce vita without too much soul-searching that it would seem rude to doubt her.