Cinema: Girl from a Private World

Not even the Brothers Grimm would have dared to write a fairy tale about a girl who started at the top and stayed there. But that is the story of Marisa Berenson, 28, the suffering heroine of Barry Lyndon. The French fashion magazine Elle once called Marisa “the most beautiful girl in the world.” That is not precisely accurate (both the mouth and nose are a trifle too large), but it conveys the right idea.

Marisa’s father was the late Robert L. Berenson, a proper Bostonian and career diplomat. Her granduncle was the art historian Bernard Berenson. Her mother Gogo, now the Marchesa Cacciapuoti di Giuliano, was the daughter of Elsa Schiaparelli, the Parisian designer who introduced colors like shocking pink to the sober world of 1930s haute couture.

Impressive credentials, and they helped immensely a decade ago when Marisa decided to bid adieu to Gstaad, Paris and London and try to make it as a model in New York. But what really turned the trick was the lithe body, green eyes, pale ivory skin and a gaze that seemed to come from some private world too secret to be spoken of. Marisa went on to live a glace confection of a life spun out of Vogue covers, yacht cruises, love affairs with the likes of David de Rothschild and, at the moment, Auto Heir Ricky von Opel. Early in Marisa’s career, Vogue Editor in Chief Diana Vreeland announced: “Many faces are alluring, but hers is chic. She can wear a hat like nobody else.” She could also take it off: she posed nude for both Vogue and Playboy. “Some of the greatest works of art are of nudes,” Marisa explains.

La vita turned really dolce for Marisa in 1971, when Luchino Visconti signed her for her first film as the elegant young mother in Death in Venice. Bob Fosse then hired her to play the German-Jewish department store heiress in Cabaret. Both parts required Marisa to appear both remote and vulnerable. She is very good at it.

Today, trying to explain what he found in her, Stanley Kubrick says: “There is a sort of tragic sense about her.” Actors do not always see their leading ladies as directors do, and Ryan O’Neal wondered why Kubrick had cast her. “Overbred, vacuous, giggly and lazy,” were Ryan’s first impressions; as the filming progressed, O’Neal decided that the role called for Marisa to be just that. “She’ll be nominated for an Oscar,” he says.

“But she’s just being herself.”

A bit churlish, that. Yet Marisa seems to sense that life with the trendies, where role playing is de rigueur, has locked her into an outgrown character.

She concedes that in her younger days, her own shyness gave her a frantic need to be on the scene. Modeling gave her self-confidence, and acting “is a vent for my fantasies.” Last week in Manhattan, cuddling her Shih Tzu, K.K. (short for King Kong), she reminisced about her most notable fantasy to date, Lady Lyndon. Done up like a portrait by Gainsborough, Marisa seems the model of 18th century English womanhood, even to the torrents of tears Lady Lyndon sheds at her son’s death. “I could do nothing else but cry, looking at that sweet boy—I am quite good at crying,” says Marisa. “Once I start, I can go on and on.”