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| Sophia’s Choices |
ou haven’t lived until you’ve seen Sophia Loren walking. Bare-legged and pregnant on the stony streets of Naples in Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow or walking through the war-ravaged Italian countryside while balancing a suitcase on her head in Two Women. “It’s like watching all of Italy walking—there’s the Tower of Pisa, here’s the Pitti Palace, there’s the Uffizi … the gondolas of Venice,” Roberto Benigni rhapsodized for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences tribute to Loren last May.
Loren’s is perhaps the most famous walk in the history of movies; you can see it as early as 1954 in The Gold of Naples: a languorous walk through rain-soaked streets in which she exults in the movement and the feel of wet fabric clinging to her skin as the men around her look on in wonder. They still do.
The night before the Academy celebration, Jo Champa (who, incidentally, at 17 was one of Helmut Newton’s favorite models) threw Sophia a dinner party at her home in Beverly Hills. “When you make a dinner party for Sophia Loren, you either have to have some very strong women or strong, beautiful men,” says Champa. “So this time I invited mostly men,” including Al Pacino; John Travolta; Warren Beatty; James Caan; Andy Garcia; the writer-directors Michael Mann and James L. Brooks; Matthew Weiner, creator of Mad Men; legendary agent-producer Jerry Weintraub; and Billy Crystal, who hosted the Academy tribute. “At the end of the dinner, all the men lined up like little boys, waiting to have their picture taken with Sophia. Al [Pacino] asked the photographer if he could take his picture over again, so he could be seen smiling in one of them.” James L. Brooks wrote in Champa’s guest book, “I always knew she was beautiful. I didn’t know she was funny.”
Her admirers have been legion from the moment she appeared on-screen. Richard Burton described her “beautiful brown eyes set in a marvelously vulpine, almost satanic face Stupendously intelligent. Beat me at Scrabble twice. In English yet See her move, swaying like rain.” Noël Coward said that she should have been “sculpted in chocolate truffles so the world could devour her.” Peter O’Toole, who played Don Quixote to her Dulcinea in the 1972 movie of Man of La Mancha, said simply, “The more I was with Sophia, the more edible she looked.” Writer John Cheever, who interviewed her in Naples in 1967 for The Saturday Evening Post, wrote, “Here is the actress; the slum child; the chatelaine of a great villa; the beauty whose pictures, cut from magazine covers, lonely men carry around in their wallets; and the wife of Carlo Ponti. She brings all this into focus with a shake of her head She seems sincere, magnanimous, lucky, intelligent, and serene.” (After publishing the article, the celebrated short-story writer bragged for years that Sophia had kissed him!) Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote a song for her, “Pass the Wine (Sophia Loren),” released on the remastered version of Exile on Main St. And journalist Pete Hamill, who visited her in Naples on the set of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, wrote, “Her nose is too large, her chin too small Her feet are the biggest of any movie queen since Greta Garbo. But head her in the direction of a camera, set her Etruscan eyes dancing, and Sophia is one of the most magnificent women in the world.” Lina Wertmüller, who directed Sophia in four films, said recently, “There is Garbo, Dietrich, Monroe—and Sophia. Who else inspires the whole range of feminine charms, from sex to motherhood? Who does not dream of falling asleep in a magical moment on Sophia’s breast?”
For someone who has been as famous as Sophia Loren for six decades, there still remains an aura of mystery about her. One wonders, for example, how she was able to resist Cary Grant’s proposal of marriage, when the two starred in The Pride and the Passion in 1957, and instead choose her mentor and protector, the producer Carlo Ponti, 22 years her senior, four inches shorter than she, and still married to his first wife. One also wonders why Sophia, long revered by many as the patroness, if not the face, of Italy, has lived mainly in Geneva, Switzerland, for the past 43 years, like a queen in exile.
When Vanity Fair approached Sophia, she was reluctant to be interviewed. “My life is not a fairy tale, and it’s painful still to speak about it,” she said over the telephone. She has clung to that belief, granting fewer interviews as the years go by. But she finally agreed to meet on a blisteringly hot afternoon at her grand apartment in Geneva’s Vieille Ville, not far from the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire. Once past the imposing wooden doors of her apartment building, I was greeted at one end of a long, cobbled passageway by Ines Bruscia, her secretary of more than 50 years, who ushered me into an ornate room, decorated in gold and burgundy, overlooking a private garden. We were surrounded by many of the beautiful things that once graced the famous villa in Marino, the Pontis’ 50-room estate outside of Rome: the tapestries; the small chairs laced with gold thread; the 25-foot-long red plush couch; antique tables crowded with framed photographs of the Pontis, smiling, and their two sons, Carlo, 43, and Edoardo, 39; and photographs of Sophia laughing, captured by Yousuf Karsh’s camera.
Then Sophia Loren quietly slipped into the room.
At 77, she still dazzles. One is instantly struck by her perfect posture and dancer’s walk. Wearing black slacks, a black V-neck sweater, and a silver-medallion necklace, she is the soul of elegance and timeless beauty. “I won’t even ask you how you’re feeling,” she said, after settling herself at one end of the couch. “It takes me a week when I come to Los Angeles to get over the jet lag, but I give in to it. When that delicious sleep comes over me, I surrender to it.” Ines brought in a tray holding two cups of espresso and tiny pieces of chocolate wrapped in gold foil—this is Switzerland, after all—and Sophia’s reluctance to speak about her life soon melted away as the past caught up with her.
Up from Poverty
Raised in Pozzuoli, a small town of fishermen and munitions workers outside of Naples, Sophia experienced some of the worst privations of the Second World War—terror, bombing, starvation. Born in a charity ward for unwed mothers in Rome on September 20, 1934, Sofia Scicolone was taunted throughout her childhood for being illegitimate. Her mother, Romilda Villani, was a proud beauty who returned to her family home in Pozzuoli to live down her shame; in Catholic Italy then, being an unwed mother was not just a scandal, but a sin. They moved in with Romilda’s parents, an aunt, and two uncles; Romilda soon had another child with Riccardo Scicolone, who still refused to marry her and who would not even give Sophia’s younger sister, Maria, his name. Now eight people shared their apartment. Until she left Pozzuoli, Sophia never slept in a bed with fewer than three family members.
By 1942 they were starving, living on rationed bread, hiding from the air raids at night in a dark, rat-infested train tunnel, full of “sickness, laughter, drunkenness, death, and childbirth,” as she described it in A. E. Hotchner’s 1979 authorized biography of her, Sophia, Living and Loving: Her Own Story. Romilda foraged for food for herself and her two daughters, but Sophia was so skinny her school-mates called her “Sofia Stuzzicadenti”—toothpick.
Romilda looked so much like Greta Garbo that people stopped her on the street to ask for her autograph. When she won a Greta Garbo look-alike contest at the age of 17—the prize being a screen test at MGM in Culver City—her mother refused to let her go. She was convinced that Romilda would be killed in America, because she believed Rudolph Valentino had been murdered there by the Black Hand. So Romilda later put all her ambition into her elder child, a gawky, unattractive, sullen girl until the age of 14, when everything suddenly changed.
At 14, Sophia blossomed. “It was as if I had burst from an egg and was born,” she often likes to say. Suddenly, she started hearing wolf whistles when she walked down the street. Romilda entered Sophia in a beauty contest—Queen of the Sea and Her Twelve Princesses. They had no gown for her to wear, so Sophia’s grandmother pulled down one of the pink curtains in the living room—like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind—and made an evening gown. Romilda took Sophia’s scuffed black shoes and applied two coats of white paint to them. When they showed up, Sophia was intimidated by the more than 200 contestants in their real gowns, jewels, and flowers, but when it came time to parade in front of the judges, she comported herself with serene dignity. She was chosen as one of the 12 princesses, winning $35, a ticket to Rome, and several rolls of wallpaper, which the family happily used to cover the cracks in the plaster of their apartment caused by the wartime bombing. From that moment on, Romilda dedicated herself to her daughter’s career. “Everything that I dreamed of for myself has happened to Sophia. I live in her image,” she admitted to Hotchner.
The ticket to Rome changed the trajectory of Sophia’s life. She found work as a model, appearing in fumetti, the Italian form of comic-strip-styled soap opera that ran in newspapers and magazines, using models whose dialogue appeared in little puffs of smoke (hence fumetti) coming out of their mouths. Sogno, one of the magazines she worked for, changed her name to Sofia Lazzaro—which they considered classier than Scicolone. She would spend much of her youth searching for a family name, beginning with using her first movie earnings to buy her father’s name for her illegitimate sister—in front of a notary, Romilda paid him one million lire (about $1,500) for the right, to ease Sophia’s sister’s shame of illegitimacy.
Soon Sofia Lazzaro would be renamed yet again, by the producer of a low-budget film called Africa Under the Seas, who wanted something “not so Italian,” with the non-Italian spelling of Sophia and the last name of Loren—inspired by the name of a popular Swedish actress at the time, Märta Torén.
But it would take eight years for the next name she acquired to be recognized legally—Mrs. Carlo Ponti.
When they first met, Carlo Ponti was a 38-year-old married father of two, a quiet intellectual who had studied law in Milan and negotiated contracts at his father’s law practice before becoming a movie producer. Partnered with Dino De Laurentiis, he had already discovered and promoted Gina Lollobrigida, and had produced more than 20 films. He first noticed Sophia in the audience of a beauty contest he was judging and invited her to his office for a screen test. The cameramen didn’t know what to make of her irregular features—her nose was too long, her hips too wide. She was advised to get a nose job and lose weight, but she refused. Nonetheless, Ponti’s unerring instincts would soon prove right.
They fell in love, though she realized that part of his appeal was as a father figure. The absence of a father had been the cruel bane of Sophia’s childhood, so in Ponti she found a stand-in, as well as a lover and a husband and an astute manager of her career.
While in Rome making her way as a model and fledgling actress, she supported her mother and her sister. Sophia recalls in the biography, “I was the head of the family, the husband, going out to work every day, my mother was the wife, and my sister … was the child.” Her breakout role would come when she was 19, because Lollobrigida had turned down the part of Aida in a filmed adaptation of the opera, with the voice of the great soprano Renata Tebaldi dubbed in. Lollobrigida did not want to be dubbed, so Sophia took the role. “I couldn’t afford to be so proud,” she says today.
At 19, she became Ponti’s lover.
They began to see each other secretly, as he was still married to Giuliana Fiastri, the daughter of a general. Romilda disapproved, fearing that her beautiful daughter was following in her own disgraced footsteps. Later, Sophia recognized that in some sense she had “married her father,” yet hers and Ponti’s would prove to be a deep and enduring love despite almost insurmountable obstacles. For Sophia, the difficult things in life would prove easy to conquer, but the ordinary things—a marriage, childbirth, a legitimate name—would be her greatest challenges. “What I wanted to have was a legitimate family,” she says, “a legitimate husband, children, a family like anybody else. It was because of the experience I had with my father.”
In 1954 she began to work with the director Vittorio De Sica, who had been a dashing leading man on the stage and in movies in the 1920s and 30s. By this time an esteemed director (The Bicycle Thief, Umberto D.), he insisted on casting Sophia in The Gold of Naples. By the end of the first day’s shooting, De Sica had become Sophia’s one-man acting academy, and under his inspired guidance she came into her own. Playing an overripe pizza vendor, she was able, under De Sica, to liberate that part of herself she had kept hidden behind a wall of shyness—her wonderful laugh, her sensuous walk, the volatile passions, her impatience, her sorrows, her joy of life.
Sophia wasn’t just liberated as an actress. By now, she and Carlo were “father-daughter, man-woman, producer-actress, friends and conspirators,” she told Hotchner. But not husband and wife, to Sophia’s (and Romilda’s) chagrin. In Catholic Italy, a divorce for Ponti seemed impossible.
He continued to develop Sophia’s career, realizing that she must learn English and not limit herself to Italian films. When she first arrived in America, “she received a telegram from Ponti, with only two words on it: ‘Learn English,’ ” Jo Champa recalls. “And you know what she did? Within 20 days, she was speaking English. Sophia is the most determined person I know.”
Onstage at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater last May, Sophia brought herself nearly to tears paying tribute to Carlo Ponti, and then later recalling how he had once taught her the proper way to eat an omelet, without using her knife. However, she and her younger son, Edoardo, a director, believe too much is made of the Pygmalion story. “It’s too easy a shorthand to look at my father as her Pygmalion,” says Edoardo. “But if he was the coach, then she was the athlete.”
In 1956, Ponti landed Sophia a leading role in the American production of a historical romance to be filmed in Spain and directed by Stanley Kramer, The Pride and the Passion, in which she would co-star with Frank Sinatra and Cary Grant. Kramer gave a cocktail party at the start of filming. Beforehand, Sophia was so nervous she changed her dress a half-dozen times. Grant, who had wanted Ava Gardner for the role, arrived late, but Sinatra came even later.
At their first meeting, Grant teased her, pretending to mix her up with Lollobrigida, but he soon found himself confiding in her about his three unhappy marriages and his early life in London as song-and-dance man Archie Leach. They saw each other every night, dining in little Spanish restaurants, and they soon fell in love. Later, he wrote her an endearing letter, anticipating her arrival in America: “It is, probably, the most important year of your life. Spend it thoughtfully, dearface In these next months you will create the lasting impressions by which you will be judged and remembered all your life.” He asked her to wear two little gold bracelets he’d given her—“They will keep you safe.” Grant had begun to talk about marriage.
But Sophia was still involved with Ponti. After filming in Spain, Libya, and elsewhere, they made their first trip together to Hollywood. By then they’d been secretly engaged for three years. They checked into a posh suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, then attended a reception in her honor at Romanoff’s restaurant. Photographers surrounded her, but her party was crashed by Jayne Mansfield in an alarmingly low-cut dress—complete with wardrobe malfunction—in a publicity stunt seeking to upstage Sophia Loren’s moment. That stunt would augur Sophia’s problems with Hollywood: she was initially perceived as little more than a busty Italian bombshell—and Jayne Mansfield was there to prove that there were already homegrown sex goddesses in residence.
The studios didn’t really know what to do with her, which Sophia soon realized. In America, Italians “were either waiters or gangsters All they saw was a foreign actress. They tried to change me,” she recalls.
Nonetheless, Sophia would continue to appear in American movies. Boy on a Dolphin included a riveting image of her climbing onto a fishing boat, dripping wet from the sea like Aphrodite in a sheer, clinging tunic, which two decades later would grace many a college- dorm-room wall. The movie itself was forgettable, as were That Kind of Woman and It Started in Naples. The problem, Ponti felt, besides the stereotypical roles, was that Sophia was just too strong a presence to be partnered with most American leading men—Alan Ladd, William Holden, Tab Hunter, Anthony Perkins, a too old Clark Gable. Time magazine noticed the disparity, commenting that Sophia “was matched with leading men whom she could have swallowed with half a glass of water.” That would change, however, when she was re-united with Cary Grant in Houseboat.
It’s her most appealing American film. She plays the sophisticated daughter of a renowned symphony conductor who escapes for a night to meet a real American—and ends up pretending to be an Italian peasant who takes on the job of housekeeper-nanny for newly widowed Cary Grant and his three kids. Only at the end is her true identity revealed; the rest of the time she performs a priceless parody of an Italian working-class girl. The chemistry between Sophia and Grant is as real as it gets, and her comedic, earthy performance takes the starch out of his personality.
By then it was clear to Ponti that he had better do something or lose Sophia. Grant was sending her flowers every day and made his intentions clear. “You know, I had to make a choice,” Sophia explains. “Carlo was Italian; he belonged to my world,” and Cary Grant did not. She was too afraid to give up everything she’d known; some part of her realized she needed her native soil to thrive. “I know it was the right thing to do, for me.”
Marriage, Italian-Style
One morning Sophia and Ponti were having breakfast together in their bungalow at the Hotel Bel-Air when she picked up the newspaper and read in Louella Parsons’s column that Ponti had finally secured his divorce in a Mexican courtroom in Ciudad Juárez, and that two lawyers had stood in for Ponti and Sophia, so that they were now married, by proxy. Even Ponti was surprised it had finally happened—they were now, at least in the eyes of much of the world, a married couple.
But not in Italy.
The day after the news appeared, Cary Grant gamely congratulated Sophia and kissed her on both cheeks. Ironically, the only scene left to be shot in Houseboat was the wedding of their characters. That scene would be the only time Sophia got to be the bride-in-white in a traditional wedding.
The Vatican swiftly condemned the marriage outright, in the pages of L’Osservatore della Domenica, the official Vatican newspaper. Citing canon law, the article declared that the marriage of an anonymous “young, beautiful Italian film actress” was illegal and that her “husband” was a bigamist and should they live together it would be concubinage. They were threatened with excommunication and condemned as public sinners. Though she was not a religious Catholic, Sophia considered it the saddest day of her life. How could she ever return home?
Things were made worse when an Italian citizen in Milan brought a charge of bigamy against Ponti and a charge of being a concubine against Sophia, demanding criminal prosecution of the Pontis in order to preserve the institution of matrimony in Italy. They would spend the next eight years trying to appease the Italian authorities. “At the time I didn’t have any regrets,” Sophia says today. “I was in love with my husband. I was very affectionate with Cary, but I was 23 years old. I couldn’t make up my mind to marry a giant from another country and leave Carlo. I didn’t feel like making the big step.”
But it had become almost impossible to return to Italy. Sophia and Ponti were now exiled, knocking about in rented villas and chalets on the French Riviera and in Switzerland. Sophia’s longing for Italy became so great that Ponti would drive her to the top of the St. Gotthard Pass just so she could feast her eyes on the country of her birth.
In 1962, Ponti’s lawyers discovered that the marriage hadn’t been legal, as no witnesses had been present. Five years after their Mexican marriage, Ponti and Sophia returned to Rome, though under threat of arrest if they were seen to be cohabiting. So they spent nights in Romilda’s apartment, or rented homes under assumed names. When invited to dinner, they had to arrive and leave separately—under no circumstances was the couple allowed to appear together in public. Although they would finally wed in France, in 1966, it seemed as if Sophia were fated never to have a church- or state-sanctified name. “As illegitimate children, we had dreamed of the day we would be married and have proper names of our own,” said Maria, Sophia’s younger sister. “But now Sophia had been publicly humiliated, the joy of being Mrs. Ponti having turned into … ashes,” she told Hotchner.
Sophia’s performance in Two Women would change everything once again.
Paramount had bought the film rights to Alberto Moravia’s wartime novel, with Carlo Ponti as producer, George Cukor attached to direct, and Anna Magnani to star as Cesira, the widowed mother of an 18-year-old daughter, Rosetta, both of whom are brutally ravished in a bombed-out church by Moroccan soldiers. Magnani balked at casting Sophia as her daughter—she was too tall! She didn’t want to have to look up to what was supposed to be her daughter. So she withdrew from the project, joking that Sophia should play the 50-year-old widow. Cukor backed out when Magnani withdrew, and that’s when Vittorio De Sica stepped in. This time, Sophia would play a widow of 30 and her daughter would be 13. “I owe my career to the magnificent Anna Magnani,” Sophia explains.
She didn’t have to research the part. She simply had to remember—the bombing raids, the nights in the tunnel, the starvation, the brutality. More to the point, she simply had to remember how her mother protected them during the war—Sophia is essentially playing Romilda in Two Women. The film can be seen as a daughter’s tribute to her mother’s courage during the years of deprivation and danger. And if Sophia was inspired by her mother’s bravery, she credits De Sica with giving her the faith in herself to relive those terrible war years. Sophia says today, “When you see the film, when I throw the stone and I kneel down and cry in anguish—even if you don’t know what the film is about, you cry…. Before I made Two Women, I was a performer. Afterward, I was an actress.”
The world agreed. She was nominated for a best-actress award by the Academy, but felt too insecure to attend the ceremony. She was up against Audrey Hepburn for Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Natalie Wood for Splendor in the Grass, Geraldine Page for Summer and Smoke, and Piper Laurie for The Hustler. The awards ceremony did not appear on Italian television, so Sophia went to bed at 6 A.M., certain that she had not won. And then the phone rang. It was Cary Grant. “Darling, have you heard?” he asked in that unmistakable voice.
“Heard what?”
“You won! You won the Oscar!”
“It made him so happy to be the one to tell me,” Sophia recalls.
A photograph from that morning shows the Pontis in their bathrobes, Sophia embracing De Sica while Ponti uncorks a bottle of champagne. Sophia says, “I would never have won the Oscar if I’d stayed in Hollywood. I knew that there, in Italy, I could really show what I had inside, what came from my background. In America, I was not given roles that fit me well enough to become a successful actor. The irony was I became successful in America because of Italian films.” Indeed, it was the first time that the Oscar had been given to an actress in a foreign-language film.
They were one of the great screen couples of the 20th century, on par with Tracy and Hepburn, Astaire and Rogers, William Powell and Myrna Loy, appearing together in a dozen films over a span of 40 years. You can’t think of Sophia Loren without thinking of Marcello Mastroianni, her romantic lead and, often, comic foil. “One of the secrets to their success,” Edoardo Ponti says today, “was simply that you have two incredibly good-looking people who were also funny. Most good-looking people are not funny In their films, she was continually outfoxing him, making fun of him, getting the better of him, and he let her. He didn’t mind, because his character was so in love with her.” In life, the two were friends, “enormously fond of each other, but like brother and sister. They saved their passion for the screen.”
When asked about Mastroianni, Sophia smiles wistfully. “We made films for 40 years together. I love each one of them, since the first film we did together, which was called Too Bad She’s Bad. When the film came out, it was a big success. They loved the idea of us as a couple. After that, we did one picture after the other.” Sophia put her hands together as if in prayer and brought them to her lips, a familiar gesture straight out of her films. “He loved women and cigarettes. And food.” Shaking her folded hands, she added, “Oh, the cigarettes! That’s what killed him.”
Their incredible electricity is perhaps most charged in the wonderful 1963 film, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow—De Sica, again, who had a genius for bringing out his actors’ comedic gifts. “My mother, Marcello, and De Sica were all from the South,” Edoardo explains. “In Italy, Sophia Loren was known as a comic actress; before Two Women, there were many comedies. De Sica saw that and brought it out of her. Let’s not forget my mother is Neapolitan, and Neapolitans have comedy in their blood. The taxi drivers of Naples are comic geniuses! They are amazing, the way they perceive the world.”
The film contains the most famous striptease in the history of the movies, and the sweetest. In one of the stories, Sophia plays Mara, a call girl with a heart of gold, and Marcello is Augusto, a hopelessly besotted rich man’s son. He sits fully dressed on her bed, a pop song playing on the record player, while Sophia playfully, languorously starts to undress. Her negligée slithers to the floor, she steps out of it, never taking her eyes off Marcello, until she is down to her teddy, stockings, and garters. Raising a leg onto the bed she begins to peel off her silk stocking. Marcello, who through all this has been sitting on the bed with his hands neatly tucked under his chin, soon lets out a howl of pure joy.
“No scene ever gave me more pleasure,” she recalled in her biography. “Marcello and I had finally found a script that let us open up, with insouciant, Neapolitan give-and-take.” Years later, in 1994, Robert Altman cast them in his ensemble send-up of the world of high fashion, Prêt-à-Porter. Looking resplendent at 60, Sophia replays her famous striptease in front of Marcello, but with a different result. “They wanted to do the striptease,” Sophia recalls with a smile, “to re-create that moment. But Marcello was much older … so instead of being excited, when I undress for him, he falls asleep. He’s snoring.”
It was the last time Mastroianni and Sophia appeared together on film. He died two years later.
The Perils of Fame
Sophia wanted desperately to become a mother. She had miscarried in 1963, just before she began filming the Milan segment of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, and again in 1967, soon after the London premiere of A Countess from Hong Kong. She discovered that she suffered from a hormonal imbalance that required estrogen shots. Ines Bruscia, who had worked as a script girl for Ponti before becoming Sophia’s secretary and confidante, believed that if Sophia had been unable to bear children it would have devastated her.
With fertility treatments Sophia became pregnant a third time, and she was advised to undergo complete bed rest. She cloistered herself on the 18th floor of the Intercontinental Hotel near Lake Geneva, not even talking on the telephone, with Ines as her only company. When she finally brought her first child, Carlo Hubert Leone Ponti Jr., into the world, in 1968, the only way to handle the international attention was to hold a press conference in the hospital’s amphitheater. Her bed was wheeled in, her infant at her side, while her husband and her doctor answered questions from hundreds of reporters. Four years later, and again after months of bed rest, Edoardo Ponti was born. (Edoardo would follow in his parents’ footsteps to become a filmmaker, while Carlo Ponti Jr. inherited his grandmother’s considerable gift as a pianist. He is currently the music director of the San Bernardino Symphony Orchestra.)
In 1960, Carlo and Sophia began to restore a magnificent 16th-century villa in Marino, in the Alban Hills, 13 miles from Rome. Pete Hamill described it as “painted chalk red, and set among 18 acres of rolling lawns, manicured hedges, fig trees and waterfalls, with a riding stable, an aqueduct, a tennis court, an orchard and a pool.” They spent the equivalent of $2 million to restore it. The villa was photographed for Life magazine by Alfred Eisenstaedt in September of 1964. (Sophia was proud of being on the cover of Life seven times, among the countless magazine covers she’d graced since 1950, when Sogno had introduced her as a “violent and aggressive beauty.”)
In 1977 the villa was raided and searched by Italian authorities, after Ponti had let it be known that he was contemplating moving his film and business interests to Canada and Iran. Ponti’s files and personal papers were confiscated. He was being investigated for violating Italian law, which prohibited taking large sums of money out of the country without government approval.
That same year, Sophia attempted to bring artworks—including paintings by Picasso, Braque, de Chirico, and Canaletto—from their villa to their triplex apartment, across from the Hotel George V, in Paris. She was stopped at the Fiumicino Airport, in Rome, and was brought to tears by a police investigator who grilled her for nine hours about her husband’s tax and currency problems. The paintings, valued at an estimated $6.7 million, were seized and turned over by the Italian government to Milan’s Brera gallery. In 1979, Ponti was convicted, in absentia, of smuggling $10 million in currency and art out of Italy, as well as the illegal possession of archaeological artifacts, and was sentenced to four years of “penal servitude.” He was fined 22 billion lire ($26 million). The confiscation of the villa in Marino was perhaps the cruelest cut. After all the years of borrowed apartments and elaborate ruses just to be together, the villa was “a very important house for us,” recalls Edoardo, “because it was the first house my father and mother built as a family. They dug their roots into it—there were strong memories there.” (The villa and the art collection were returned to them in 1990.)
Insiders believed that Ponti’s criticism of the Communist Party in Italy as worse than Fascists triggered the political persecution, and that Ponti had begun moving his empire out of Italy because he feared what was coming. He spent the next few years fighting the charges, from Paris, but their woes continued. In May of 1982, Sophia began serving a 30-day jail term for tax evasion, convicted of failing to pay $180,000 in supplementary taxes for 1963–64 (an error, she said, “due to a little mistake by a tax specialist. This man is now dead—may he rest in peace—but now I have to go to prison”). She ended up spending 17 days in the women’s prison at Caserta, 20 miles from Naples, taking her meals alone in her cell, while paparazzi camped outside the gates. Like the perpetually pregnant Adelina in Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, who goes to jail for selling contraband cigarettes, Sophia left the prison in grand style, wearing dark sunglasses while four escorts carried her luggage to a waiting silver Mercedes. Speculation was that the Pontis were being made examples of because of their international fame, in the Italian government’s efforts to staunch the flow of wealth out of the country. Jo Champa believes “the reason the Pontis were given such a hard time was jealousy. The fact that Carlo—this man from Milan, this intellectual educated in Italy—was able to have the most beautiful woman in the world, and from the south of Italy. And not just from the south, and not even Naples—but from Pozzuoli! And Sophia was essentially fatherless, in a country that reveres patriarchs and the family.”
Sophia was no stranger to allegations in the press about her private life, particularly, in 1981, when stories appeared linking her to Étienne-Émile Baulieu, developer of RU-486, the so-called abortion pill. And during the filming of The Millionairess, in 1960, her co-star Peter Sellers fell madly in love with her and left his wife, Anne. Sophia maintains that the rumored affair between them was a sad delusion on the actor’s part.
There were also whispers of Ponti’s affairs. When Hotchner interviewed him for Sophia, Living and Loving, the producer enigmatically told Hotchner, “In the press, I am always having an affair. I’m not saying that I’m pure as the driven snow, but if I had all the affairs that the press inflicts on me, I’d never have time to produce a movie.” Ponti felt that, given their long marriage against all odds, “we are a phenomenon that’s beyond their belief. It’s almost as if they resented us.” Ponti would say, “I have done everything for love of Sophia. I have always believed in her.”
Nonetheless, Hotchner says today, “My feeling about her and Ponti is that there was no real warmth there. It was business.”
Sophia dismisses that view of their relationship—and rumors of past affairs—with a Neapolitan shrug. “They always had us having affairs. We were many years in Rome, apart. But we were in love. That’s what kept us together.”
Unlike many other actors her age who have been honored in retirement, Sophia has not been content just to present and receive awards. She’s still working. In 2002, she appeared in her son Edoardo’s film Between Strangers, and in 2009 she was in the movie musical Nine. “She’s not one of these actors who knows the craft of acting inside and out, but she has a gift for portraying enormous empathy,” Edoardo told Vanity Fair. “A Canadian journalist once said, ‘When she laughs on-screen, everyone laughs with her; when she cries on-screen, everyone cries for her.’ That’s exactly right.”
One piece of advice Sophia would like to give to young actresses everywhere is “Learn how to kiss. Now they kiss in another way,” she said, “like they are devouring each other.” She demonstrated. “They should see how people like Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant kiss in Notorious. Do they eat each other’s faces? No!”
When asked if she felt as if she were living in exile in Geneva, Sophia dismissed the idea. “I’ve been here since my children were born, 43 years, and my grandchildren were born here. I go and stay with my sister in Rome for one or two weeks, and then I come back. That’s enough.” But the one thing that is missing to make the picture complete is Ponti, who died in 2007. “It doesn’t get any easier,” Sophia explained. “I miss Carlo very much, my husband. You can’t have everything at the same time. That’s life.”
She walked across the room, raised a white shade, and opened the French doors to her garden. She plunged her elegant fingers into a blue hydrangea on the terrace, to see if it needed watering. No sooner had she lifted her hand out of the flowerpot than a bird landed on the stone balustrade that overlooked the garden. The tiny thing looked a bit wobbly among the flowers. “Must be jet lag,” she said. And then it came—that marvelous cascading laugh, halfway between a tease and a call to joy. In the temple of the cinema, Sophia Loren is the last living goddess, and despite her many hardships, she is still laughing.
