Movies Abroad: Much Woman

(7 of 9)

She is ingenuous, but she is also bright, forthright, candid and savvy. In conversation, she is an excellent listener. Her voice goes very small when she is lying. She has an exquisitely nutty sense of humor. When someone begins to tell her a joke about the papacy, she says: "I'm a good Catholic. I'm no supposed to listen. What is it?" For a Neapolitan, she has a remarkably subdued temper. "I get angry," she says, "once a year."

At home, she wears slick slacks and roomy sweaters. But when she puts on a dress, it is almost always Dior. Jean Barthet of Paris makes her hats. She has had the same private hairdresser for eight years. "I have never been to a beauty parlor in my life," she says, setting up a memorable non sequitur: "When I go there, they ruin me." She eats reducing tablets to help keep her measurements from becoming 38-38-38. She loves spaghetti with meat and tomato sauce, hot peppers, and grapes. "It still seems an occasion to eat meat," she says, and her childhood hunger now turns up in her terms of endearment. She calls Carlo Ponti her "Melanzana Parmigiana," her little eggplant.

Magnifying Glass. Off-camera, she reduces sex to a pilot light. Cary Grant once tried to turn the flame full on. He fell wildly in love with her, and gossips said that he wanted to marry her, but the answer was: "No, grazie." Asked if he still loves her, he says: "Doesn't everybody?"

Everybody does, from bootblacks to bank presidents in a hundred countries, for the dark Latin magic of her personality is saved largely for her life before the cameras. She has few interests outside her working life. She drives herself through film after film, collapsing in bed for four days after each one, then starting in on another. She has three new pictures completed (Five Miles to Midnight, Madame Sans Gêne, Boccaccio '70) and five more in preparation (To the Victors, A Shot in the Dark, Of Human Bondage, Moll Flanders, The Prisoners of Altona).