When in Rome do as Hollywood stars did! BOOKS
How a city ravaged by war was given the kiss of life by the sexiest, most glamorous sirens of the silver screen . . .
WELCOME to Hollywood!’ beamed Blake Edwards, when Peter Sellers arrived in Rome to play Inspector Clouseau. ‘But this is Italy,’ retorted the Goon, genuinely, if momentarily, flummoxed.
‘Hollywood,’ said the director grandly, ‘is a state of mind!’
Though this story isn’t in Shawn levy’s book, it underpins it. In the post-war period, dozens of spectacular american film productions were based at the Cinecitta complex — 73 buildings sitting in 145 walled acres — built by mussolini on the outskirts of Rome.
Hollywood companies were drawn to the Eternal City by the low cost of Italian labour and the high quality of their craftsmanship, the skill of the technicians and costume-makers and the genius of the sculptors and set decorators.
As Terry Gilliam, who later made The adventures Of Baron munchausen there, once said to me: ‘ They were descended from the Renaissance Old masters after all!’
When mervyn LeRoy filmed Quo Vadis there in 1950, ‘the whole of Rome queued up to get a chance at the golden ticket’ — the opportunity to be one of the 30,000 extras required in crowd scenes.
Many people, including the unknown Sophia loren, appeared in three or four costumes in a single day ‘so as to claim multiple dining chits or pay envelopes’. Good for them!
In the late Forties and early Fifties, Rome was still trying to recover from allied artillery attacks, nazi reprisals, looting and a chronic shortage of food, medicine and fuel. Hollywood was more than welcome to come and spend the dollars locked into Europe by currency restrictions.
American casts and crew also boosted the economy of the restaurants on the Via Veneto — and the drunken misbehaviour of the stars was recorded by a new breed of photojournalist: the paparazzo.
Invading the privacy of celebrities with a telephoto lens is common enough today, but in Rome after the war, the doings of stars gave the downtrodden masses a new and necessary fantasy — of escape.
Such was the demand for gossip and sensation, cheap magazines and tabloids sold half a million copies a week. The paparazzi — a word coined from pappataci, mosquito,
ragazzi, lads, and razzo, a rocket-burst or flash — hung around outside clubs ready to capture ‘the comings and goings and lingerings and dallyings’ of actors and actresses, candid and compromising shots which were lapped up by editors and readers.
ava Gardner with her latest squeeze, Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini, anita Ekberg, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Orson Welles, Barbara Stanwyck: they’d always find flashbulbs popping in their faces. The excitement of Rome was that you might bump into someone you’d only ever seen on a movie screen.
The denizens of Hollywood, in their turn, enjoyed mixing in ‘a melodramatic world infused with sex, booze, drugs and criminal undertones’.
THE stars jostled with gigolos and chancers and the impoverished nobility — the Italian princes and dukes who now didn’t have a pot to piddle in.
When it is noted, as in this book, that immediately after the war, Italy was filled with bomb craters, starving families, orphaned children and people in rags, then the renewal of the country’s energy, aided by america, was a miracle — a cultural renaissance in the cinema, fashion design, the arts and engineering.
Throughout the Fifties and Sixties, Italy became a byword for ‘ elegance, modernity, sophistication, licence and style’. laundry was done in a Zanussi washing machine, food kept in a Zanussi fridge. Typing was done on an Olivetti.
The motor industry meant lamborghini, Ferrari, maserati, lancia, alfa Romeo and Fiat. The Fiat 600, unveiled in 1955, was ‘not much bigger or more powerful than a motor scooter’.
as regards scooters, everyone wanted a lambretta or a Vespa, which means ‘wasp’.
In Roman Holiday, made in 1953, Gregory Peck and audrey Hepburn buzz about the city
on a Vespa, ‘ painting a portrait of Rome steeped in novelty, romance, gaiety and vitality’.
As regards home-grown talent, Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren were known as the maggiorata, or curvy girls. After the food shortages of the war, plumpness and ripeness were prized.
Sophia, in particular, was to become an international embodiment of glamour, ‘a tall, voluptuously propor-tioned knockout’. The police had to be called to control the crowds when she went shopping for lingerie.
She could never quite understand why Gina was miffed when the Press wanted them to stage a chest-measuring contest.
Though directors Vittorio De Sica, Rossellini, Visconti and Antonioni, among others, made critically acclaimed ‘neo-realist’ films about Rome’s suffering and poverty, it was the work of Fellini, with its intense theatrical and dream imagery, that would reliably provide an antidote to black and white records of ‘ordinary people living under unimaginable stress and challenges’.
Fellini, born in 1920 on the Adriatic coast, never forgot the ‘ fairytale vision’ of arriving in Rome from the provinces. Yet as much as he loved the excitement of the Via Veneto, whenever he made a film about it he had it reconstructed at Cinecitta.
Developed in 1933, and used as a refugee camp during the war, Cinecitta was Fellini’s true paradise; a three-ring circus boiling with noisy artisans and extras in crazy costumes — ‘cardinals, revolutionaries, SS men, troglodytes and green lizards more than 6ft long’. Fellini regarded the studios — and movie-making generally — as a ‘ combination of a football game and a brothel’. His homage to the Rome covered in Levy’s zabaglione of a book was La Dolce Vita, released in 1960, which culminates in Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni frolicking in the Trevi Fountain. It was nominated for many Oscars.
BUT perhaps the greatest monument to Roman excess, both ancient and modern, was the Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton extravaganza Cleopatra, which cost $310 million to produce in today’s figures. The rough cut lasted six hours.
The production took years and years, finally wrapping in 1963, and all this while, Taylor had been paid a minimum of $10,000 a day plus expenses.
The Forum they built was bigger than the real thing. Six tons of cement were used to prop up the pillars and porticoes. There were 26,000 costumes, 150,000 prop arrows. ‘ We disturbed the Roman economy,’ said the film’s producer, ‘ by hiring so many artisans and extras.’
VIP visitors to Rome no longer wanted to meet the Pope. They wanted to see Elizabeth Taylor at Cinecitta.
When the paparazzi caught Taylor and Burton kissing and whispering off- set, Roman fever reached a climax.
‘The stars of the biggest movie ever made were engaged in an affair in the world capital of sex and glamour,’ it was believed.
Taylor and Burton, married to other people and with families, were no longer playing Cleopatra and Mark Antony, they’d become them — with all the repercussions of guilt, shame, excitement, indulgence, glut, luxury and decadence that implied. Yet, I suppose, when in Rome . . . Today, Cinecitta is an amusement park, Cinecitta World. The paparazzi are mostly redundant, as anyone can snap a celebrity with their mobile phones.