She mentioned Corinne Luchaire, a prewar French star. “She was Göring’s mistress.”
I vaguely recalled a slender, beautiful blonde. “His mistress? Not really?”
“Of course!” she hissed. “Don’t you know anything?”
Corinne Luchaire, she said, had been arrested in her apartment in Paris by the French Resistance and kept there all night while forty-one men raped her. She spent three years in jail. At her trial, her lawyer read aloud the entire Maupassant story of collaboration, Boule de Suif—the whore, the soldier who came to see her, didn’t she know he was a German? “No, he was naked.” I had never read the story, which was the first Maupassant ever published, and even now I am not sure if her version was correct, but it is the one I remember.
What she was exactly, I never discovered — writer, publicist, researcher of some sort, but withal, a Scheherazade who colored Rome for me with stories told in a slightly accented English; she hadn’t learned it until she was seven and the “th”s were missing. “Ortodoxy,” she pronounced it, and for “with” she said “wid.” She rained images on me, some of them so intense they remain in my flesh like wounds.
She introduced me to Fellini, with whom she collaborated in some way. She brought him stories. “Talk to me, talk to me”—he wanted nothing in writing; he was inspired by listening, he said. It was often remarked that there were, at the time, only two real artists in all of Europe, Picasso and Fellini. Picasso was ancient and remote. Fellini was a man who sat in shirtsleeves and resembled his photographs, rumpled, with black hair growing out of his ears, like a lovable uncle.
I met him at the studio where he was working. The conversation began in Italian; he did not speak English, he apologized, but soon we had drifted into it. I had recently been to the Vorkapich lectures at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. They were essentially a tribute to Slavko Vorkapich, the master of the kind of montage used in the 1930s and ’40s: pages of a calendar falling away to indicate days or months passing, the wheels of a train, then a car, then perhaps an ocean liner to show travel over great distances. The entire film world of the East Coast had attended the lectures, I said. It was difficult to obtain a seat, and of all the directors whose work had been chosen to illustrate concepts, Fellini was the one most often used, with Eisenstein second. Fellini gave a modest nod. He seemed grateful, the honor. He had only one question. “Who is Vorkapich?” he wanted to know.
On a slip of paper he wrote his telephone numbers — if there was anything in regard to which he might be of some help, he urged me to call him. I was not in Rome long enough, however.
She introduced me also to Zavattini, the dominant writer of Italian postwar films—Shoeshine, Umberto D, The Bicycle Thief—whom I was prepared to greatly admire. He was bald, and wore a baggy blue suit of the kind that has buttons on the fly. He was disheartened. “The cinema has failed,” he said.
I was particularly interested in another person Gaby presented, Nany Columbo, who owned a boutique and had been a mannequin in Rome and Genoa before the war.
“Do you speak English?” I said.
She shook her head. A pity.
The Italian girl I was writing about and whose reality, as on a sheet of photographic paper, was only slowly forming — for a while I imagined a younger Nany Columbo in the role. What ruined girls, she explained in Italian, was all the luxury around them. She said it as if she had lived through it herself, with easy resignation. Everything about her seemed authentic, every word the bare truth. When her husband came home from the war, she said, she was living in the country with her son. He came walking down the road. She looked awful. Her hair was awry, her dress shabby. She pushed a bed in front of the door, she said, and ran upstairs to fix herself up before he could see her.
In the countryside a few hours north of Rome there were vineyards below the big houses; a man with his dog working in a field; wood piled up by the doorway. The serene terraces of land with their views of hills and groves were unchanged since the twelfth or thirteenth century. In ancient churches the Piero della Francescas were slowly fading, like the close of an act, from dark walls.
The thing I failed for a long time to understand was the connection between the vineyards, the great houses, the cloisters of Europe and the corruption, the darkness, the riches. They have been always dependent on one another, and without each other could not exist. Nature is ravishing, but the women are in the cities. There was one night in Rome, one morning really, about two, when a man walked into a café near the Piazza Navona with two women, one blonde in a blue-and-green silk dress, the other girl even better-looking. He was in evening clothes. They sat down; the waiters began to stir. He smiled and after a moment he uttered two words, but with his entire heart: “Beautiful party.”
—
I am turning the pages in a small, greenish notebook, half the size of a postcard, with a Spencerian Notes printed on the cover, bought probably in a dimly lit shop near Via Bocca di Leone in the summer of 1964. In it are the invariables: people, telephone numbers, restaurants, clubs, places to dance, piazzas, beaches, wines, unique things like the location of the cardinals’ door through the keyhole of which the dome of St. Peter’s could be seen floating above the edge of the garden, exceptional streets, and the names of two Italian whores who worked at the bar of a large hotel — actually one was a South African.
From these ample hints I can almost re-create the period, many dialogues, faces.
I was at the Hassler one afternoon and the women were talking about travel and food. A director’s wife had her coat draped over the back of her chair. In proud black letters behind her neck, the words: GIVENCHY, PARIS. She was not the same one who, in Sophia Loren’s apartment, admiring a wall of ancient frescoes, said, “Your decorator really did a fabulous job.” The star said afterwards, in Italian, to another woman, “What can you expect?”
In a hotel one evening I sat with Scott Fitzgerald’s onetime mistress, Sheilah Graham, and two magazine writers. Money was the sole topic, how much they earned, how much it cost to live. I tried to visualize the younger, unhardened woman Sheilah Graham had been, the unexpected gift for the broken writer. Love is your last chance. There is really nothing else on earth to keep you there. Nothing of that seemed to remain.
One of the writers was a film critic, the other was a tall woman in her forties who had braces on her teeth. She didn’t like Italy. As for France, it was hideously expensive, she said. She hated France. It dated from the time she saw the French army leaving Indochina, “My dear, that was something, I assure you.” France was not even a beautiful country; she had never seen a view there that she remembered.
“Where have you seen views?”
“Oh, India, Ceylon. That’s where you see views,” she said.
I was seated one night in a restaurant and two women sat down at the next table. One was American, older, with thin hands, and the other young, blonde, with a striking figure. Her first words were a complaint that she was “sitting downhill.” The waiter hurried to bring her another chair and smiled at me in an aside.
They had just been to Capri and were talking with animation about it. Soon they were tasting a dish I had ordered and I was testing their wine. The younger one’s glances were open and friendly. I could read palms, I told them — I found myself eager to touch her, to hold her hand. “Tell me your name,” I suggested.