The Man Sophia Loved

Boris and Natasha. The gangster and his moll. The statuesque babe and the little round man. Beauty and Obese. That double image, like joke figures on a wedding cake, was the one struck by the great Italian actress Sophia Loren and her discoverer, mentor, curator and prime exhibiter, producer Carlo Ponti. They had been together since 1950 — when he was nearly 40, she just 15 — and they stayed that way through 56 years, two marriages to each other (the first annulled) and 37 movies that he sponsored and she appeared in.

They faced plenty of obstacles: the rude public merriment at their pairing; all the misery the Vatican-cowed Italian government tried to bring to their joint political, financial and personal life; the stories of his infidelities and of the movie stars (Cary Grant, Peter Sellers) utterly smitten by her allure. Yet Ponti and Loren persevered, becoming a metaphor for the lasting attraction of opposites.

With his eternally gorgeous wife at his Geneva bedside, Ponti died Tuesday at 94 of that loveliest of incurable maladies, extreme old age.

In the early 50s, it was hard for a movie producer not to notice Sofia Scicolone (or as she sometimes called herself, Sofia Lazzaro). She was the towering (5’9″), striking (those eyes! That neck!) creature who occasionally lounged topless in low-budget epics. She might have been one of a thousand pretty playthings a producer finds on the casting couch and discards when distracted by the next in line. But Loren knew she had something to put on screen besides a spectacular bosom: an actor’s passion and skill, a worldly woman’s generous, capricious wit. As for Ponti, he had the drive, the devotion and the clout to turn her into a top international star, Her Oscar for Best Actress in 1962, as the ravaged war mother in Vittorio DeSica’s Two Women, which Ponti produced, was proof of his and Loren’s mutual mission — their shared triumph,

Their off-screen story was every bit as dramatic as any of their movies. It might take the name of one of them: Marriage, Italian-Style. Ponti, then married, had tried keeping his relationship with Loren hush-hush, as his lawyers won a Mexican divorce from his estranged wife, Giuliana. In 1957 the producer and his star were married by proxy in Mexico, with two male attorneys standing in for them. But the Italian government forced the annulment of their marriage and branded Ponti a bigamist. The couple had to live either abroad or secretly in Italy, until 1966 when they became French citizens, the certificate personally signed by Prime Minister Georges Pompidou, and were able to be married there. Two years later, after several miscarriages, Loren gave birth to Carlo Ponti, Jr., the first of their two sons. This happy ending continued, apparently, for nearly four more decades, on family estates in France and Switzerland.

But Ponti was not merely the 40- or 49-year husband of Sophia Loren — though, really, gentlemen, wouldn’t that be enough? He was one of Italy’s grandest producers, perhaps second only to Dino De Laurentiis. The two forged a partnership in the early 50s, when De Laurentiis was producing films with his own bombshell wife, Silvana Mangano. Dino and Carlo’s signature film was Un Americano a Roma, a modest comedy about a young Italian besotted with all things American. It expressed the hope of two paisan producers to make films that appealed both to the local market and the American, often by pairing one of their star spouses with a Hollywood name. Thus Mangano played Penelope (and Circe) to Kirk Douglas’ Ulysses; Loren was the honey to Anthony Quinn’s Attila. Quinn, in Federico Fellini’s La Strada, was the circus brute to the sad clown played by Fellini’s wife, Giuletta Masina. Europa 51, directed by Roberto Rossellini, starred his then-wife Ingrid Bergman. Their grandest production — King Vidor’s War and Peace, with Henry Fonda, Audrey Hepburn and her actor-producer husband Mel Ferrer — was also their biggest flop.

The producer-titans inevitably clashed, and Ponti went solo to shepherd Loren’s international career. He juggled routine Hollywood product (The Black Orchid, That Kind of Woman, Heller in Pink Tights) with more simpatico Italian films — not just Two Women but Marriage Italian Style, Boccaccio 70 and Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, all of them directed by DeSica and usually co-starring Loren’s ideal screen companion, Marcello Mastroianni. These international hit were a splendid showcase for Italy as the second Hollywood, and Loren and Mastroianni as the prime exponents of earthy adult sexuality.

Aside from his Sophia films, Ponti was at his busiest in the 60s and early 70s, when he sponsored a host of ambitious projects by gifted, strong-willed directors: David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup and Zabriskie Point, Jean-Luc Godard’s A Woman Is a Woman, Les Carabiniers and Contempt, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Leon Morin, Priest and Doulos the Finger Man, Agnes Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7, Claude Chabrol’s Landru, Jiri Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains and Milos Forman’sThe Fireman’s Ball, plus Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein and Roman Polanski’s What?

“I don’t make deals,” he used to boast, “I make films.” But Ponti wasn’t a hands-on, obsessively creative producer like David O. Selznick; he was more the money-raiser and -maker. Which isn’t to say that some directors didn’t find him obtrusive. In the behind-the-scenes movie drama Contempt, the notoriously independent Godard based the coarse producer played by Jack Palance in part on Ponti, A scene in which Palance kicks cans of films around a screening room is supposedly based on a Carlo outburst. Ponti’s one creative contribution to the movie was to insist that the female lead, Brigitte Bardot, be given a nude scene. Godard obliged, in his fashion, by opening the film with the naked Bardot quizzing her husband (Michel Piccoli) on his appreciation of her body parts — thus acceding to Ponti’s demand and simultaneously undercutting it.

Godard wasn’t the only one to get Ponti in trouble over his films. His first film as producer, the 1941 Piccolo Mondo Antico with the lustrous young Alida Valli, got him slapped in jail by Mussolini’s fascists for supposed anti-German sentiments. In 1973 his movie Massacre in Rome, which detailed Pope Pius XII’s collaboration with Nazi Germany, earned Ponti a six-month sentence — first suspended, then reversed on appeal. And in 1979 a Roman court slapped him in absentia with a four-year jail term and a $24 million fine for “illegal transfer of capital abroad.” It took another decade for Ponti to settle the dispute and win the return of his art collection, which the government had seized.

Through all the turbulence, Ponti always had Loren as his champion and consoler. More than a half-century together, they seemed no longer a joke but a fairy tale. The leer of Italian gossips in the 50s turned to an indulgent smile and, today, a fond tear. Carlo and Sophia — it must have been love.