Woman of Rome_A Life of Elsa Morante Read online

  Most nights, if they were not otherwise occupied, my father and Sergio Amidei, who wrote the screenplays for most of my father’s films (he also cowrote the screenplay for Rossellini’s Open City), dined together in a restaurant called Nino. Then there were two Ninos in Rome—one was expensive and fashionable and owned by a man named Nino; the other, less fashionable, and the one my father and Sergio Amidei went to, was near Piazza Barberini and owned by Nino’s brother, Mario. Mario had been given a small part (as a restaurant owner) in Le ragazze di Piazza di Spagna and he was eager to please my father and, by extension, me, by cooking us special dishes. Sergio Amidei always brought his bulldog, Cesare, to Nino; Cesare, although a gentle-tempered dog, wore a leather collar with spikes on it and every night he was fed a sumptuous dish of pasta in the kitchen. The atmosphere at Nino was cordial and lively, people shouted to one another across the tables, they joked about the quality of the food and the slowness of the service, calling the waiters by name. Most evenings one or more friends of my father or of Sergio Amidei joined us at our table. One evening Anna Magnani dined with us and I recall how shocked I was when I saw that she chewed her food with her mouth open. I also remember dining with Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman. While Rossellini and my father talked business, Ingrid Bergman asked me a lot of questions: What was I studying in school? What was my favorite subject? Did I like boys yet? I was the same age as the daughter she had had to leave with her first husband and no doubt I reminded Ingrid Bergman of her.

  Since I began writing about Elsa Morante, I have gone back to Rome several times—trips that have brought back vivid memories of driving to the beach in my father’s silver Lancia “Spider”; of cantering along the via Cassia, then bordered by fields, on a spirited gray mare named Magali; of eating late at night in trattorias with Mario Alberto, my first boyfriend; of buying impractical but beautiful high-heeled shoes; and of the luxury of being carefree, young and naïve. I also met a lot of people whom I might never have met otherwise, friends and associates of my father who worked in the film industry, actors struggling to be discovered and now almost forgotten: Francine, my father’s Jamaican girlfriend, who had the role of a slave in Ben-Hur and took me shopping for a bikini; the man whose name I have forgotten, more like a magician, who arrived on the set with just a small attaché case from which he unpacked a few ordinary items with which he managed to fill the film’s sound track; and handsome Lex Barker, who played Tarzan and also played high-stakes gin rummy with my father. Mostly, I remember how fortunate I was. And, fortunate, too, because although I never met Elsa Morante, who lived in Rome all her life, I can picture her there—vividly.

  The success of House of Liars gave Elsa Morante more confidence, especially since she had always felt that Moravia took her for granted. At the same time she valued his good opinion. Fortunately for her and for him, he liked the novel—according to Moravia, Morante was “something of a totalitarian: either you were with her or against her.” Moravia claimed that he had always been “with her” while she, in turn, had not always been “with” him. Unlike Moravia, who said that he had little pride and did not take offense from adverse criticism, Morante did, so that with her one had to be careful.13 As for the writers they admired, Moravia’s favorite was Dostoevsky while Elsa’s was Kafka. They both loved Rimbaud. Later on, Elsa gave up Kafka in favor of Stendhal, who was less “heavy.” “Stendhal, along with Mozart in music and Rimbaud in poetry,” Moravia said, “represented for her that ideal of lightness to which she aspired all her life.”14 Otherwise, they rarely discussed books or the virtues of the authors they were reading or, if they did talk about books now and then, they did so in the way any couple might. Interesting to note, too, that Morante and Moravia rarely played the role of the professional writing couple as did Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Mary McCarthy and Edmund Wilson or Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. They did not read each other’s works in progress, nor did they criticize each other’s manuscripts. In fact, Elsa, according to the poet Patrizia Cavalli, was the sort of person who never talked about what she was writing; she was superstitious that if she did, the writing would be destroyed. The one time Elsa showed Moravia a story, he did not like it and she tore it up. Later she regretted her decision and resented being influenced by him. She thought the story was good and she had been wrong to destroy it. This, in Cavalli’s opinion, showed that there must have been a very subtle kind of interior competition between the two writers, a competition that rarely surfaced. In any case, Morante never wrote “against” Moravia. She had her own very distinctive style and although she admired him as a writer, she could never write like him. Finally, their working methods were totally opposite: Moravia wrote every morning and he produced a novel a year, more or less (later, when Moravia had left Elsa and was living with the writer Dacia Maraini, both were very disciplined and even on a summer holiday in Ischia, they could be heard typing away all morning); Elsa, on the other hand, worked sporadically but when she was writing, she wrote obsessively.

  Elsa and Alberto Moravia, according again to Patrizia Cavalli, were like people who belonged to two different worlds. They did not understand each other, although Elsa understood Alberto better than he did her. On the most basic level they could not hear each other and they were constantly saying, “What did he say?” “What did she say?” The sensation this produced was that someone should be in the middle to interpret—not only physically since Moravia was slightly deaf, but also psychologically as one felt each was made of a totally different matter. Nevertheless, Elsa had a great affection for Moravia. She admired him at the same time that she wanted to protect him. Also, still according to Patrizia Cavalli, the fact that Elsa must have known that Alberto was never in love with her must have been terribly hurtful, because she could not have what she really wanted. This would explain her often bitter and aggressive behavior toward him. Elsa was always testing people and hoping that by sort of “breaking them” something strong would emerge. She would say funny things too about Moravia—for instance, how he was stingy while she was not. She liked splendor, luxury; she liked staying in fancy hotels like the Danieli in Venice, while Moravia preferred staying in a pensione so he could save the money.15

  In 1951, Elsa Morante went to work for RAI, the Italian public radio station, where she had a weekly show called Cronache del cinema (Chronicle of the Cinema), reviewing films. The job came to an abrupt end when Elsa refused to bow to pressure from the station and give the film Senza bandiera, produced by Luigi Freddi, a favorable review and she was fired. She wrote a letter of protest complaining that “it was clear that from now on it was impossible to express one’s honest and free opinion on the Radio.” The letter was published in the weekly Il Mondo, where she had begun writing for a column called “Rosso e Bianco” (“Red and White”).16 The dozen or so very short pieces she collaborated on over a period of less than three months (November 4, 1950, to January 27, 1951) range from a piece on the fickleness of glory to another on the pleasure derived from women’s fashion as opposed to men’s which are dreary, except for the necktie—itself the subject of an essay. The necktie, Morante writes, should be made from “brocade, lace, satin, ermine or painted with flowers and all sorts of surprises, composed out of feathers, woven from silver and gold. [The tie] is the last bridge between man and fantasy.” 17 Two pieces discussed Tolstoy’s Prince Andrei and Goncharov’s Oblomov, and how they both share the same characteristics: pride and indolence. There is an essay on the devoted nonjudgmental friendship of animals; animals, Elsa Morante writes, are special because unlike human beings they were not expelled from Paradise and therefore they still live in it. Another essay, “The Real King of the Animals” (“Il vero re degli animali”), is, not surprisingly, about the cat, the Siamese cat. In this piece, in order to do justice to the cat, Morante writes that one must adopt the precious language of Diderot and “dip one’s pen in a rainbow, and dry one’s writing with the powder from butterfly wings.”18 She also tells the story of a S
iamese princess who, whenever she washed her hands, was in the habit of slipping her rings around her cat’s tail, then, in order not to lose them, of tying the cat’s tail in a knot; this apparently is the origin of this graceful deformity one sees in the Siamese cat’s tail.

  Elsa Morante’s love of cats was legendary. Her favorite cat was called Caruso, named not for the Neopolitan singer but because, in Sicilian dialect, the word caruso means “child.” Caruso lived to be nineteen years old. He was not castrated and together, with the pretty little Siamese wife Elsa provided for him, they produced 150 kittens—or so Elsa claimed. She baptized each kitten with a different name (both a Christian name and a surname) and expended a great deal of time and effort placing it in a proper home, making certain that the prospective owner was worthy enough. On account of the cats, the furniture in her apartment on via dell’Oca was said to be in ruin. The upholstery was torn and shredded by Caruso’s claws—worse, the furniture was stained with his scent, which Morante called “the benedictions” of Caruso.

  Bernardo Bertolucci, who met Elsa Morante for the first time in the mid-1950s when he was fifteen or sixteen years old, talked admiringly of Elsa’s determination to embrace the truth, her rigor, and her refusal to accept half measures or any bullshit. No one, he said, was allowed to lie in her presence—if one did, Elsa immediately saw through it and called the person on it. Bertolucci talked about the difficulty of leading a life governed by such high, self-imposed standards and the invincible tension it created. Elsa always faced the absolute in the eye, and this was an inspiration to others. He praised Elsa’s courage and said he had never known anyone quite like her. Bertolucci also recalled how during those formative years, his father, the poet Attilio Bertolucci, had very much wanted him to go to university but he refused to go. “My university,” Bertolucci told his father, “is having dinner every night with Elsa Morante, Alberto Moravia and Pier Paolo Pasolini.”

  Bertolucci spoke with great fondness of Elsa and also with regret since, as time went by, they grew farther apart. Not without reason. Several years later in 1972, soon after Bertolucci made Last Tango in Paris and it was a great success although it was also, he said, a time of personal anxiety for him, he ran into Elsa in the street near Piazza di Spagna and she told him, “Oh, I have seen you on the cover of Time magazine and you have become just like Moravia and Adolf Hitler.”* Understandably, notwithstanding his great affection for her, Bertolucci was very hurt by Elsa’s remark, even though he understood that she had this idea that if someone was to suddenly become popular or famous, it would lead to a vulgarization.19

  But despite her high moral standards and her harsh judgments, Elsa Morante had a tremendous sense of fun. She loved to play games, guessing games and the tower game—in this last, the player imagined him-or herself in a high tower with two other people, one of whom he or she had to push off: Elsa or Alberto? Elsa particularly liked a game called Asassino (Murder in the Dark), which Pier Paolo Pasolini, another avid player, had complicated somewhat by adding psychological motives (before they began to play, each person had to give a reason why he or she would want to commit murder). One of the players, Ginevra Bompiani, laughingly remembered how Elsa always said she wanted to murder her because that way she could get her hands on the beautiful necklace Ginevra wore.20

  Still another well-known figure who loved playing games was the charismatic, aristocratic director Luchino Visconti. His friend the filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni recalled how “[s]ome of the games…were naughty. We played murder in the dark, the light went off and the ‘detective’ stayed away for a long time: in the darkness everything would happen.”21 Visconti owned a beautiful house on Ischia called La Colombaia (The Dovecote) with a garden planted with blue hydrangeas that grew all the way down to the sea, and a villa in Rome, on via Salaria, which was filled with his mastiff dogs and an eclectic assortment of splendid antiques (he was an avid collector and had wonderful taste). He entertained a great deal and both houses were always open to his friends and guests—even if no one was expected, his chef was told to prepare dinner every night for fourteen (so he would not get out of practice). Visconti’s regular guests, who became known as his “group,” included the actors Walter Chiari, Paolo Stoppa, Rina Morelli and Massimo Girotti, as well as Suso Cecchi d’Amico (his screenwriter), Franco Zeffirelli (his assistant, later a director as well), Antonioni and, for a time, Elsa Morante, who fell in love with her handsome host.

  Openly bisexual, Visconti, in his youth, had had a long affair with Coco Chanel and was engaged to marry an Austrian princess, Irma Windisch-Graetz, when he fell in love with the German photographer Horst Horst. His affair with Elsa began in the early 1950s and lasted two years—years during which Visconti staged Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, with Marcello Mastroianni, and Death of a Salesman, the first play by Arthur Miller to be performed in Italy. Visconti was also directing Bellissima, a film set in the crass and vulgar movie world at Cinecittà that starred Anna Magnani. In the course of shooting the film, Magnani was said to have fallen in love with Visconti, as well, and it is not difficult to imagine how these two strong, outspoken women, Anna and Elsa, might have competed hotly for Visconti’s affection.

  Accounts, however, differ as to what sort of an affair Elsa and he actually had. In his recent autobiography, Franco Zeffirelli, also Visconti’s lover, writes that he knew everything about Visconti’s love stories but that his private life was full of “mystery.” There were actors and several women, including Elsa Morante, who lost her head over him. Elsa, he writes, dedicated her poems to Visconti and filled his house with beautiful Persian cats.22 Zeffirelli also quotes Visconti’s jaded observation about his women lovers: “The problem is when you satisfy them once, they don’t ever leave you in peace,” to which Zeffirelli himself adds, “as the dear Elsa Morante knew very well.”23 Yet neither Bertolucci nor the actress Adriana Asti, who lived with Bertolucci for ten years and who knew Visconti very well herself, believes that Elsa Morante and Luchino Visconti had a “real” affair. Adriana Asti said that “everyone” fell in love with Visconti: he was so fascinating, so handsome, yet so distant and no one could have him—not even Marlene Dietrich, who also was in love with him.24 Visconti’s biographer, Gaia Servadio, too, supports this theory. She wrote that although Visconti adored Morante and was flattered by her attention, his involvement with women never really made a dent in his sentimental makeup. It did not keep him awake at night, while his involvement with young men often did.25

  According to Moravia, during those years when Elsa was in love with Visconti, she would spend the entire day at his house on via Salaria, taking part in his life. She only returned home late at night and since Moravia was usually still awake, she would sit at the foot of the bed and tell him in great detail all that had transpired between her and Visconti that day. And Moravia would listen, he said, “Like an affectionate friend.” Elsa described how, for instance, when Visconti looked at her, he was so moved that his legs trembled. Although Moravia admitted to being embarrassed by these intimate confessions, he also said that he and Elsa had not had physical relations for years and this proved to him that everything between them was over. Still he insisted on what he called an “existential symbiosis” that existed between them, which made everything comprehensible, even infidelity. At the end of the two years, Elsa told Moravia that she was leaving him to live with Visconti. On the actual day when they were supposed to meet and go off together, Visconti did not show up and Elsa Morante stayed on with Moravia. Soon after, Moravia and Morante went to Venice to a music festival, and Moravia recalled how Elsa dramatized and flaunted her grief and suffering over losing Visconti. Her grief, however, he said, eventually turned into rancor.26

  By the mid-1950s, Moravia had become a well-known public figure in Italy and he increasingly distanced himself from Elsa by his busy schedule as a film critic, a travel writer and the founder, in 1953, along with Alberto Carocci, of Nuovi Argomenti. This left-wing magazine was fi
nanced by Adriano Olivetti and modeled on Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes; its goal was to publish works that represented the new Italian culture such as painting and anthropology, as well as literature. But Moravia also complained of boredom. He admitted that his feelings for Elsa were cooling and he attributed this to Elsa’s preference for “the exceptional” and for the “impassioned moments” in life. He said that during the war and while they were in hiding “[a]t Sant’Agata she had found herself in her element: danger, devotion, sacrifice, contempt for life. In Rome, on the other hand, daily life made her lose patience and become difficult, intolerant and even cruel.” As an example of Elsa’s cruelty, he described how once when they were in Paris, staying at the Hotel Pont-Royal, she began to moan and then pretended to faint, lying motionless on the floor of their room, seemingly unconscious—perhaps to punish Moravia for some perceived misdeed—as Moravia tried to revive her. He even called several doctors, but it was Sunday and just as he was beginning to despair and not know what to do next, Elsa opened her eyes and started to laugh—not a joking laugh but a mean laugh. Her eyes too, he said, looked mean.27