Playing a fallen screen goddess in
Sunset Boulevard, Gloria Swanson gets to say: “I am big. It is the movies that got small.” The line fits Anita Ekberg perfectly. At her glorious movie-star zenith in the Fifties, she was a cantilevered 40-23-37, a blonde bombshell bigger than Monroe in every department save that of talent. She is now 74, still larger than life and, indeed, still large. Her golden tresses rival Rapunzel’s. The sparkly crucifix that heaves over her chest is going on for life-size. Even the widescreen sunglasses she wears this dull morning in the Dorchester hotel seem likely to have come from a shop licensed to sell luxury items to Wagnerian goddesses.
Meanwhile, her most famous movie has just got small. Peroni, the fashionable Italian lager, has come out with an ad that’s effectively a three-and-a-half minute remake of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. The cinema commercial, which will also get an airing on More4, features an Ekberg epigone splashing about in the same Trevi Fountain that Anita teased into a gushing sexual metaphor 45 years ago.
What, I ask the real thing, would Fellini have made of his masterpiece being reworked for a Peroni Nastro Azzuro ad campaign? “I think,” she says in a baritone Swedish accent, “he would be jealous of people going into MY fountain.” Her personal PR and the PR for Peroni chuckle from the cheap seats behind the sofa.
“It was well done but they should have her go under the waterfall, which I did in La Dolce Vita. I got my hair all wet and my dress and everything. And that was January.” Does she drink Peroni, I ask, attempting to be fair to her sponsors. There is an unnervingly long pause. “Do you have anythings else you want to ask me? I’m here to be talking about films.”
Actually, her film career isn’t as easy a topic to pursue as it should be with an actress who, by her own count, has starred in 70 movies. An Ekberg retrospective would have to open with La Dolce Vita but other nights might feature Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953), Hollywood or Bust (1956), Call Me Bwana (1963) and Gold of the Amazon Women (1979). On the other hand, the programme director might plump for her more obscure works.
And so, then, back to La Dolce Vita. When Federico Fellini offered her the part of Sylvia there was no script to read. “I said, ‘How do I know what to do?’ He said, ‘You write the dialogues’.” The dialogues are fun, particularly the impromptu press conference held by the Hollywood starlet Sylvia. (“What was my favourite day? It was a night, dear.”) In her heyday Ekberg did not always get the easiest press — “The Bore With The Bust” concluded one Mirror headline — but somewhere along the line she mastered the art of good quote.
What was Fellini like? “A wonderful, sweet person, a great liar and very vain.” What did he lie about? “About everything, and he could be very nasty with some people on the set if they didn’t follow his instructions. He would pull both their ears, you know, and tell them off.” But not her? “Not even once.” In 1987, six years before his death, they made Intervista together. In one scene she and her co-star Marcello Mastroianni are seen watching their svelte former selves in La Dolce Vita. I had read that this had been an uncomfortable experience for her. She denies it. She is not afflicted by nostalgia, nor is she troubled by worries about her past or future. When I ask, she attributes her psychological health to being brought up in a happy family by strict parents.
Aged 20, Ekberg won a Miss Malmö beauty contest and then Miss Sweden. Her prize was a contract with Universal Studios in Hollywood, to which she flew knowing no one and speaking no English. By all accounts she did not take the proffered acting lessons very seriously but stood out anyway. Howard Hughes pursued her for a year, as did Gary Cooper. Having resisted the madman and the married man, in 1953, on the set of her first film, The Mississippi Gambler, she fell for her co-star, the swash-buckler Tyrone Power.
“But there was somebody called Linda Christian who was involved with him.” His wife, she means? “They were separated and going through a divorce but Linda couldn’t stand losing if there was somebody else that he got interested in. And she came back to tell him that she was pregnant when he was doing a movie in America, in Tennessee. His apartment in the hotel had photographs of me all over in silver frames. She showed up and the stupid hotel, not knowing that they were separated, let her in. When she got in she took all the pictures and opened the windows and just threw them out and they landed across on the top roof of the building across the street.” So Ekberg dumped him? “I didn’t need Linda in my life and so I didn’t need him.”
Did she go out with Victor Mature on Zarak (this Khyber Pass romance surely cannot have been the Mature movie of which Groucho Marx famously said the hero had bigger breasts than his leading lady)? “No. God forbid. I couldn’t stand him. I called him instead of Victor Mature, Victor Manure.” (I knew that, actually; I just wanted to hear her say it.) And Frank Sinatra? “Yes, he asked me to marry him, too. That’s another one I wouldn’t marry. To have an adventure is fine.”
Perhaps, I suggest, it was going to be hard for any man to match up to her father, the harbourmaster of Malmö who, after five sons, treated his first daughter like a princess. “Let’s say my father didn’t think I’d found a man that lived up to him and maybe he wasn’t wrong. My first husband was an alcoholic and my second husband was a thief.”
She met Anthony Steel, a 37-year-old former boxer who had been signed by Rank, on the rebound from Power. They married in Florence in 1956 and she realised her mistake a bender or two later. “When he wasn’t drunk he was charming and cultured, intelligent, a sense of humour. Too bad he got on that road. He would start arguments with anybody after one drink too much and then he became violent.” Did he hit her? “He did a couple of times until I got a knee up his you-know-where. But he hit my secretary as well. And he kicked my dog, broke his legs.” What happened to Steel? “He died in one of those council houses, I think you call them.”
In 1962, having divorced, she announced to the press that she intended to marry Rod Taylor, soon to star in Hitchcock’s The Birds. Instead, the following year she married a B-movie actor, Rick von Nutter, with whom, with his career in the doldrums, she set up a shipping business. “When I tell him I wanted a divorce, he stole everything I owned. He emptied three bank accounts of mine. He stole my yacht, my outboard motorboat. He stole my Ferrari. He stole my villa and all the art objects and silver and furniture, including my wardrobe. I had a cargo ship going around Singapore. He stole that as well.” Is he still alive? “Haven’t got the faintest idea.” She could have picked any man on the planet. Why so many wrong choices? “Stupidity.” What does she think of men now? “I prefer my dogs.” Her audience erupts.
