Show Business: A Model Woman. She Gets $9,000 a Day

The warm, natural beauty of Isabella Rossellini is an Italian variation on a Swedish theme

Thirty-five smart people from New York City have flown down to Puerto Rico on an errand that is surpassingly silly but not at all foolish. They are filming a 30-second TV commercial intended to make every woman in Europe, where it will be shown, rush out to the corner parfumerie to buy a scent called Ô de Lancôme. To do this, their script says, they must make Puerto Rico look like the south of France.

But why should not Puerto Rico, which is very beautiful, look like itself? Because the client is a French company, and the client says so, that’s why. Don’t argue. Lancôme is paying a boxcarful of money for its whim (some $9,000 a day, or more than $1,100 an hour, for instance, just for the services of Star Model Isabella Rossellini), and arguing costs about $50 a word. So Nick LaMicela, the project’s art director, has selected a quiet country road, with no palm trees to spoil the illusion of France. Somebody has found a French cowherd. Actually he is a Puerto Rican waiter, but in beret, smock and scarf, and with rouge on his round cheeks to suggest a history of drinking wine for breakfast, he looks as French as Pierre’s pig.

Lancôme’s expensive illusion is about to take form. Isabella is not in view yet; she is taking a 20-minute, or $375, nap. But LaMicela is at work, as are a film director, a cameraman, gofers, riggers and grips, and several black-and-white cows. The reason for all of this impressive activity—the concept, as agency philosophers put it—is that Ô de Lancôme is “a Saturday-afternoon fragrance.” The woman who wears it is fresh and casual, and, although breathtakingly lovely, not obviously paired with a lover. Such a wild flower, as LaMicela explains with a poet’s shy pride, might ride her bicycle alone down a country road some misty afternoon. She might glide round a bend, only to find the road blocked by a herd of cows. The cowherd, struck by her beauty, might shoo his beasts away, and she, touched by his courtesy, might hand him a flower from a bouquet she had gathered. Cut: and the noise you hear is millions of women stampeding to the drugstore.

Clearly, the entire fantasy depends on the rare beauty of the bicyclist. Doubts fall away as Isabella appears. The commercial is no longer silly, and Lancôme is getting its money’s worth ($325,000 for 35 days a year, said to be the richest contract ever signed by a model). More than its money’s worth, since she is six months pregnant. But no one seems troubled by that; if Cheryl Tiegs and Lauren Hutton established a few years ago that it is fine for models to be 30, Isabella’s age now, Rossellini seems to have brushed away objections to pregnancy. The camera will simply dodge where it can.

Rossellini pedals off, for an hour or more, through a dozen or so takes of the cow playlet. As she waits at rest for the camera to roll, her resemblance to her mother, Actress Ingrid Bergman, is powerfully clear: the wide cheekbones, the astonishing directness, the serene impression of physical and moral strength. In motion, as she smiles and gives the flower to the cowherd, she flashes the life and openness that were, she says, the unforgettable traits of her father, Film Director Roberto Rossellini. These characteristics are not physical. It does not seem especially important to catalogue her face, to mention that the exotic, slighty aquiline curve of her nose is balanced by the take-it-or-leave-it simplicity of her short, dark hair.

What the skilled camera sees in Rossellini is the rich texture of a life. Two top fashion photographers make almost identical observations about her. Richard Avedon calls her “a joy to work with—she’s the product of an interesting life, not a model wired to a Walkman.” Says Bruce Weber: “It’s inspiring to shoot a woman who really is a woman, not a teen in woman’s clothing. Isabella has turned everything around, making age, depth, experience, substance attractive.”

The children of Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini did not really understand the scandal that raged when their parents fell in love and Bergman left her husband, Dr. Fetter Lindstrom, to live unmarried with Rossellini and have a child, Roberto, by him. Isabella and her twin sister Ingrid were born in 1952, two years later, and their parents were married. But the scandal continued to haunt them. Says Isabella: “Every time Father came out with an unsuccessful film, the critics said he was old and crazy. We felt these assaults, and the intrusion of the paparazzi, very deeply, and we became very protective of our parents. Every time we’d see a long lens poking out from a bush, the whole gang would rush out and throw stones.” Isabella still reveres her parents. “Father was an incredible man, both intellectual and emotional at the same time, very original. Mama’s strength was her capacity to be direct. She had terrific instincts for dealing with children.”

Bergman and Rossellini divorced when the twins were five. Although Ingrid had custody, the children moved eventually to Rome, where they lived with a nanny across the street from Rossellini’s own house. Ingrid occasionally spent time there, and Pia, her daughter by her previous marriage, moved in for three years. Rossellini’s three children by other alliances were often on hand. “Like all Italian children,” says Isabella, “we were integrated into adult life, taken to restaurants, to the theater, doing whatever they did.”

The two Ingrids, mama and twin, nursed Isabella through an agonizing two-year struggle with scoliosis, which began when she was 13 and threatened to deform her spine permanently. She was in a head-to-toe cast for much of the time, her sister recalls, “and we decided that if she could get through scoliosis as well as she did, she could get through anything.” Ingrid was shy and scholarly as a child (“I did all our homework”), and Isabella, in her own words “a disaster in school,” was sunny and adventurous. The twins, who are New York City neighbors, are still warm friends, and the rest of the crew of siblings and half-siblings remain close. “Now that the adults of the family are dead,” says Isabella—Rossellini died suddenly of a heart attack in 1977, and Mama Ingrid last August after a long battle with cancer—”what makes me feel like an adult is working with the others to keep up the family visits and ceremonies.”

Isabella married Film Director Martin Scorsese in September 1979, and they divorced last November, after prolonged separations caused by his career and her trips to London to visit her ailing mother. She had met Scorsese when she interviewed him for RAI-TV, the Italian state television system. She worked for RAI for several years, interviewing such diverse characters as Muhammad Ali and Barbra Streisand and appearing on a program she describes as a sort of Italian Saturday Night Live. “I was something of a star,” she says, sounding a little surprised.

She had always, as an active feminist, felt that modeling created false values and expectations for women. Now, caught up in the challenges of her new career, Isabella has to some extent changed her opinion. “She works on each sitting as though it were an acting problem,” says Avedon. And acting, he thinks, will be her next step. Possibly, but the words of parents hang heavy. Her father did not want her to become an actress, and her mother emphasized, perhaps too much, that to act well one had to feel a fierce passion for the art. Says Isabella: “My passion has always been infinitely controllable.” She got good notices in her one serious film, a slow-moving Italian mood play called The Meadow (1982), by following her mother’s advice. “She said that since I didn’t have the tools yet, to keep it simple. ‘Make a blank face,’ she said, ‘and the music and the story will fill it in.’ ” She did not understand acting enough to enjoy it then, she says. Now, like everyone else in show biz, she would like very much to see a good script.

In the meantime, she is joyously enthusiastic about being a new mother and a new wife. Her husband Jonathan Wiedemann, 25, is a tall, thin, redheaded Texan who two years ago graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, where he studied visual arts and political science. He is now working on a master’s degree in film making at N.Y.U. and supports his movie habit by modeling. It was on a modeling shoot in Mexico 2½ years ago that he met Isabella. “After she and Marty split up, we became much closer,” he says. “We fell in love, started a family and got married. I guess we mixed up the order a bit.”

The two of them live (with a dachshund they call Wiedellini) in a handsome old brick structure in Manhattan’s chic Tribeca district. They both plan to work, and they are not quite sure how to arrange this. Isabella, musing on the subject, pointed out that planning a pregnancy this year shows that “my sense of identity isn’t bound up with my career.” She paused: “Americans tend to be like greyhounds, running all the time. I enjoy being in the race too, but suddenly I’m struck by the sun and decide, if I’ve got enough money, to do nothing for six months. That’s very European. I don’t fear the loss of success.” —By John Skow. Reported by Elaine Dutka/New York