Sophia Loren at 80 recalls her
unconsummated affair with Cary Grant
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| Sophia Loren |
Sophia Loren at 80 recalls her unconsummated affair with Cary Grant
Still charming, engaging and beautiful at 80, screen icon Sophia Loren reminisces about her early years, path to stardom, great romances - and her love of eggplant parmesan.
November 13, 2014 — 12.25pm
Sophia Loren has always seemed to epitomise glamour, pure sex and the Hollywood state of mind, even though many of her movies were, in fact, Italian. There is probably no greater on-screen chemistry than Sophia Loren and Cary Grant in Houseboat (1958). They met when they made The Pride and the Passion in 1957. They really were in love.
I loved the chapters about Grant in her new autobiography, Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: My Life as a Fairy Tale. I have gone to Geneva, where she has lived for the past 36 years, to meet her and discuss the book.
She is wearing a black-and-white trouser suit. She is slim and voluptuous. A great body, even at 80. Her breasts still buoyant. Her eyes brown like chocolate melted over honeycomb. Giant eyelashes, giant lips.I note evidence of some facial landscaping and her hair is, in fact, a rather stiff wig. Nonetheless, she is still full of Italian-mama warmth and spiky charm. She comes over as an interesting mix of shyness, reserve, confident to the point of fearless, open and wary in equal parts.
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| Carlo Ponti and Sophia Loren at the Americana Hotel in New York, 1965 |
"I wanted to give in the book the facts of my life," she says. "How I succeeded. How my life was during the war. People have written books about me and sometimes it was not real. I wanted to say what happened to me, because I am proud. I was really a nobody, a little girl, unhappy, in desperation because of the life I was living with my family and no father. Everyone was starving during the war."
Her voice trails. What she was starving for all her life was a father. She had a father. She knew him. But he never married her mother, Romilda Villani. Romilda looked like a starlet. It was her dream to be an actress. When she was just 17, Romilda won a contest held in Italy by MGM Studios to find the new Greta Garbo - and the prize was to go to Hollywood. Her parents said she was too young and wouldn't let her go. Romilda, according to her daughter, "oozed allure".
Instead, she had a passionate, calamitous, on-off relationship with Riccardo Scicolone Murillo and became pregnant with Sophia. Murillo came from a good family but was one of these aristocratic losers. He gave his name to his first child but Sophia had to use her first pay cheque to buy it for her younger sister, Maria.
The older, authoritative male figure is something that she was always searching for, which is perhaps why she felt so instantly at home when she met Italian film producer and director Carlo Ponti, who was nearly 22 years older. Cary Grant was 30 years her senior.
At what point did she decide her father was a useless human being?
"When you are five, six, seven, you follow what your mother tells you because you want to make peace. You want the normality, which we didn't have. My father would always come to see me when my mother sent him a telegram saying, 'Sophia's very sick. Come.' It didn't matter why he came. What I always wanted, because all my friends had one, was a father. I wanted to be like them, to be normal. But this was not possible. So you see these things when you're 13, 14, when you're almost grown up. You see it for what it is."
Does she think this lack of a father is what attracted her to men who were older, that they were fulfilling a mentoring role? "No," she says abruptly. "I was never attracted to men like that." You see her nostrils flare slightly, still expressing disgust at her father.
She agrees, though, that she did want to learn. "And I had a lot to learn because I lived in a small town. There was no opportunity for me to have experiences even with younger men. It was all impossible, impossible."
She says of the first time she met Ponti, "I felt at home. When I was leaving him to go home after we'd seen each other, I would feel calm. I would ask myself, 'Why do I feel like that?' Because I trusted him. I was terribly young. I was 17 and we didn't have anything together until a long time later. It's not like today.
"He gave me confidence. He taught me many things. One day he bought me a suit and he said, 'You should always wear suits because it suits you very well.' But he was always saying stuff like that. I cut my hair to look like an actress who was very successful at the time, Lucia Bosé, and Carlo said, 'You should always wear short hair.'
"Each time I did something that he liked, he would always say, 'You should always do that.' And yes, this gave me confidence. He was protective and he ... took my insecurities away, yes. He looked and sounded like he would take care of me, which no other man had done." And did he take care of her? "Oh yes."
By the time she met Cary Grant in 1957, she and Carlo Ponti were definitely an item. They were together but couldn't marry because Ponti couldn't get a divorce - the laws in Italy at that time were extremely Catholic. Into this vulnerable moment came the gently seductive, impossibly charming Grant, who courted her on the Pride and the Passion set with many intimate dinners and then proposed to her. Why on earth didn't she take Cary Grant?
"They were very different men. It was difficult. I was doing my first American-language film and my American language was so very terrible I was upset. Many times I needed help with the language and Cary would help me.
"Cary belonged to another world in America. I felt that I would never fit in there. I would never have a future there because of my nationality. I was scared to change completely in life without knowing if this relationship or quasi relationship was going on.
"The picture finished. We exchanged numbers and he said he would call. In fact, he did come onto the set of [1960 Italian film] Two Women, and then when I was doing a picture in New York he came to the house. I was together with Carlo and already had my son.
"One day he called me in New York where I was for another film. 'How are you?' 'I'm fine,' I said. 'Why are you calling?' And he said, 'Because I wanted to say ciao.' That was it. He died. He must have known he was dying." Her voice is shaky with sadness.
Something in the book puzzles me. On the day Houseboat, her second film with Grant, wrapped, he sent her a giant bunch of yellow roses. She was leaving with Ponti on the plane and boasted about the yellow roses. "Yes, it was not a nice thing to do. Maybe I wanted to test him, to test how he felt. I was young and thought if he got angry and jealous it meant he loved me."
In fact, Ponti was so angry and jealous he hit her. "Yes he did. Very softly. Let's not exaggerate it. But that's what made me feel okay. That made me feel I'd made the right choice." I tell her I still don't understand, that jealousy doesn't equate to love. She is quiet, which is unusual because she's extremely chatty.
What about all these other iconic men she worked with: Marlon Brando, Charlie Chaplin, Richard Burton? Was she ever daunted by that? "I was friends with them, never nervous. Richard was having a very difficult time in his life. He was suffering a lot and we took care of him. He would play with the children and have a wonderful time but then Elizabeth [Taylor] would come and have lunch and it would not be good."
I also found it hard to fathom that when she was nominated for an Oscar for Two Women in 1962, she didn't want to go to the ceremony because she'd be too upset if she didn't win, so she waited at home. It was many years before live telecasts and while she waited she went to make a sauce to calm herself down. She was up against Audrey Hepburn for Breakfast at Tiffany's and Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass.
She aged over a decade for her character in Two Women, playing a mother in Italy during the war and putting every emotion from her starving and sometimes terrified childhood into it. It was a big deal. It was an Italian-language movie. She felt it didn't have a chance.
"Cooking is something that gives you a sense of home. If you have a sense of home you feel fine, or at least I do. I feel protected."
What is her signature dish? "Eggplant parmesan."
I tell her that I had that very dish last night.
"Oh, but in a restaurant. It's something you have to do at home."
So she made her tomato sauce instead of going to the Oscars because if she won she might faint and if she didn't win she'd be too upset? "Yes, that's true."
But later that night - in fact, in the early hours of the next morning - she got a call from Cary Grant saying, "Darling, you won."
Soon after this, in 1964, she and Ponti moved to Paris because there was still no divorce in Italy. "In fact, Carlo and his wife had to become French so we could get married. The situation was very complicated."
Years before, she and Ponti had gone through a ceremony in Mexico. She says it made her feel better, alleviated her pain, even though it wasn't a valid marriage. "It was very stressful but I thought that Carlo loved me and that was what counted. Life is not easy when you have the law against you and you can so easily get yourself in trouble, and that was the last thing I wanted for our harmony."
Loren, of course, always wanted to be a proper wife, have a proper family, be normal. "It took a long time but it happened," she says. "And then I had a bad time because I couldn't have children. Or at least I got pregnant but I lost them."
Heartbreakingly, a doctor told her she'd never have children. "But then I met this wonderful doctor who realised the miscarriages were coming because of a lack of oestrogen. He gave me oestrogen and then I got pregnant."
Her two sons are Carlo jnr, 45, and Edoardo, 41. One is an orchestra conductor, the other a writer and director. Both are very much adored. "My two boys are fine. They make me so happy. And I have four grandchildren. Carlo's son is very much like Carlo. And the girl is like his wife, who is Swedish. They have blue eyes," she says, flashing me her enormous golden-brown orbs.
Does she think her eyes are her best feature? "No. No, I don't. My character is my best feature."
She jokes that for a long time she had to live with a newspaper that claimed she said her beauty and her figure were down to eating lots of spaghetti. The quote went viral. "I never said that. I think the quote was, 'Everything I am, I owe to spaghetti.' How rude," she says, laughing. "I like to eat simple things. Yes, like eggplant parmesan. Yes, like ragout. It's very heavy. I suppose I like things that are not light.
"I exercise every day for about 20 minutes. It's important to do that instead of just lying in bed."
She is happy with her life in Geneva. She may love Italian food but the country's religiosity, rules and regulations certainly don't please her. Indeed, she served a prison sentence in 1982 after being convicted of tax evasion. Was it painful for her to write about this period of her life? "It was painful because all the time I was innocent. It was bad management but they went on with the trial. They gave me a month in jail and released me after 17 days."
Because they realised you were innocent?
"No, it took 40 years. Forty years later I won the trial. I had paid every penny. It's not really true that it put me off Italy but I made a lot of films outside of Italy and it was convenient, so we moved."
We wrap things up and as I leave she promises she's going to make me her eggplant parmesan. Can't wait to have her in my kitchen.
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