From the Magazine
February 2015 Issue

Gina Lollobrigida Breaks The Silence on Her Outrageous Tabloid Scandals

Humphrey Bogart said she made “Marilyn Monroe look like Shirley Temple.” Howard Hughes and Prince Rainier of Monaco both pursued her for years. And, at 87, Gina Lollobrigida is still in the headlines for the men in her life: the ex-fiancé, decades younger, who claims they are actually married; the son who has sued over control of her fortune; and a handsome, 27-year-old assistant. In an exclusive interview in Rome, one of the last icons of golden-age Hollywood tells James Reginato about it all.
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Gina Lollobrigida in the Indian-style den of her villa on the Via Appia Antica, in Rome, summer 2014.Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

On the outskirts of Rome, high, mysterious walls flank the ancient Appian Way. When the gates to Gina Lollobrigida's home of nearly 60 years swing open, a large, verdant property with white storks perambulating about is revealed. An elderly servant ushers visitors into the entry hall of the expansive villa, which is packed with Baroque antiques and art. Then a petite figure resplendent in emeralds magisterially descends the grand staircase: Gina Lollobrigida still knows how to make an entrance.

Terrible days,” she moans. “What’s happened to me is more incredible than film!”

What has transpired in the life of the 87-year-old living legend once known as “the most beautiful woman in the world”? Some clues can be gathered from a series of headlines in the international press over the course of the past decade:

LOLLOBRIGIDA, 79, TO MARRY MAN 34 YEARS YOUNGER

GINA’S WEDDING TO HER TOYBOY IS OFF

‘WORLD’S MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN’ IN BIZARRE SHAM MARRIAGE SCANDAL

“YES, I DID MARRY GINA LOLLOBRIGIDA—BY PROXY”

SCREEN STAR UNMASKS HER “FAKE HUSBAND”

GINA LOLLOBRIGIDA’S SON SEEKS COURT CONTROL OVER HER BUSINESS DEALINGS

One can’t help but imagine Lollobrigida’s villa as the set of some Italian version of Sunset Boulevard. While the comparison is fanciful (and, one hopes, the writer will not end up floating facedown in the piscina at the end of this story), the picture was released the same year—1950—that Lollobrigida arrived in Hollywood, having been flown there by a besotted Howard Hughes. Three years later, her breakout film arrived, Beat the Devil, directed by John Huston, written by Huston and Truman Capote, and starring Humphrey Bogart, who said that Gina made “Marilyn Monroe look like Shirley Temple.”

Lollobrigida would go on to star opposite a string of leading men that included Errol Flynn, Burt Lancaster, Anthony Quinn, Yul Brynner, Frank Sinatra, and Rock Hudson, and be directed by such greats as Carol Reed and King Vidor. With almost everyone from that era long gone, she is among the last living vestiges of Hollywood’s golden years.

Born in 1927 in Subiaco, a hill town near Rome, Gina Lollobrigida spent her teenage years dodging wartime bombs with her three sisters, mother, and father, a furniture-maker. As Italy dug itself out of the war’s rubble, the voluptuous “La Lollo,” as she was dubbed, virtually embodied the country’s newfound energy and glamour, much of which was manufactured at Cinecittà, the Roman film confectionery.

It was to Cinecittà that she was summoned after a talent scout spotted her outside Rome’s Academy of Fine Arts, where she was studying drawing and sculpture.

As Gina recalls, however, she didn’t care to go to any audition. “But they insisted,” she says, referring to studio executives, as we sit down to chat in a dimly lit library. “I refused when they offered me my first role. They insisted again. They asked my mother to convince me and said they would pay me one thousand lire. So I told them my price was one million lire, thinking that would put a stop to the whole thing. But they said yes!”

Thus a pattern was established: La Lollo got whatever she wanted, because, basically, she didn’t care. “I was successful very early,” she explains. “I never had to ask for what I wanted. I just had to say yes, because they always offered me so much more. At one point, I had in my contract, in addition to 10 percent of the gross, approval of my co-star, the director, and the script.

“I had more publicity than anyone because I refused it—I didn’t care about it,” she continues. As Gina tells it, her approach to the press contrasted starkly with that of 20th-century Italy’s other superstar screen siren, Sophia Loren, who has often been depicted as Gina’s great rival. “My God!” says Gina, rolling her eyes and flashing annoyance when I mention Loren. “She and her press agents started this ‘rivalry’ with me—and she hasn’t stopped for 50 years. It was really boring for me. I had enough of that. Even when she changed press agents—which I’ve never used—she continued it.” (Sophia Loren declined to comment.) “We are different,” Gina says with a shrug. “We made completely different careers. I wanted to be an artist more than anything else. I wanted a career on a high level.”

Lollobrigida also maintained her self-possession where men were concerned; she’s fought off some of the world’s most powerful males. For two decades this was in order to stay true to her marriage vows. In 1949, Lollobrigida was wed to Milko Skofic, a Slovenian physician some seven years her senior, who became her manager and with whom she had a son, Andrea Milko Skofic, born in 1957.

Howard’s Friend

Her most ardent and persistent admirer was Howard Hughes. Beginning in the 1920s, the business magnate had independently produced a number of blockbuster pictures such as Hell’s Angels (1930) and Scarface (1932); in 1948 he gained control of RKO, then one of the major studios. His infatuation with La Lollo began in 1950 when he saw publicity photos (taken by Skofic) of a 23-year-old bikini-clad Gina, who, at that point, had appeared in a few Italian films but was not well known. Hughes, then 44, quickly located the ingénue and invited her to Hollywood for a screen test. She accepted, with the expectation that her husband could accompany her. Not surprisingly, just before their planned departure from Rome, only one of the two promised plane tickets arrived. “But my husband trusted me,” says Lollobrigida today. “He said, ‘Go. I don’t want you to say one day that I didn’t let you have a career.’ So I went alone.”

Upon her arrival at Los Angeles International Airport, she was met by Hughes’s agents, who installed her in a suite at the Town House Hotel (a luxurious establishment of the day on Wilshire Boulevard), staffed with her own secretary, chauffeur (though Hughes didn’t like her seeing any man but him), English coach, and voice teacher. She was given a script to rehearse—a divorce scene.

“It was very funny,” recalls Lollobrigida.

The trip lasted two and a half months, during which time she saw Hughes daily, fending off his passes continuously. “Time and time he tried to get me! But he didn’t succeed. I wanted to be correct.” Not to say that she didn’t enjoy his company, odd though he could be. “He was very tall, very interesting,” she says. “He had two jackets and one pair of pants that he wore every day—full of dust and dirt, like a worker’s. He hated being seen by the press, so we always went to very cheap restaurants and sometimes ate in the car. I spoke very little English then. Howard Hughes taught me the swearwords!”

“There was just too much difference between us,” she says, explaining why she didn’t accept his proposals. “I said to him, ‘If you lose all your money, then perhaps I’ll marry you.’ Maybe he was surprised that there was one person who wasn’t interested in his money.

“Then my husband realized it was time for me to come home,” she continues. Before she flew back to Rome, however, Hughes presented Lollobrigida with a seven-year contract. The document made it exorbitantly expensive for any other American movie studio to hire her. “I signed it because I wanted to go home.” But, for the better part of a decade, Hughes continued to pursue her: “He didn’t give up! He sent all his lawyers to see me. They played tennis with my husband.”

In retrospect, she might have done things differently. “I was too innocent at the time,” she admits. “I later realized he was a very interesting man. More interesting than my husband.”

The Skofics divorced in 1971, though she says they had been drifting apart for some time. “People thought we had a very happy marriage, but I didn’t want to say the truth. The house is big, and we didn’t want people to know, so he lived here for the last years of the marriage, but we weren’t really together. When divorce was legalized in Italy, I was one of the first to get it.”

While the divorce left her a free woman, she had to contend with advances from admirers (some of them married). His Serene Highness Prince Rainier III pursued her for years, she says. During his marriage to Grace Kelly, he was not very subtle: “He would make passes at me in front of her, in their home. Obviously, I said, ‘No!’

“ ‘My God, at least do it carefully—not in front of her,’ ” Gina says she told him. “He was burned up at me for 20 years for refusing him. But, after she died, he forgot about that, and we became friendly again,” she adds.

Gina seems to have elicited real passion even from Rock Hudson, her co-star in Come September (1961) and Strange Bedfellows (1965). “I don’t think he was gay then—people can change,” she says. “When we did our love scenes, he was quite … normal. He liked me very much. I felt something … it was more than a kiss. He was the most adorable person I ever worked with.”

Signore Right

Notwithstanding her many suitors, the sad fact seems to be that “the most beautiful woman in the world” has had lifelong troubles finding Mr. Right: “My experience has been that, when I have found the right person, he has run away from me. I am too strong, too popular. Important men, they want to be the star—they don’t want to be in your shadow.”

Which leads us to the genesis of Gina’s current predicament. By the early 1980s, her movie career had slowed, though she has remained busy since then, having re-invented herself as a photographer, then a political candidate (she ran unsuccessfully for the European Parliament in 1999), and, currently, a sculptor. Lollobrigida maintains an enormous studio in Pietrasanta, the Tuscan artists’ colony, where she creates figurative sculptures—some of them colossal—in marble and bronze that have a kinship to the work of Jeff Koons and have been exhibited in Paris, Moscow, and Venice, among other places.

As Gina tells it, she is really a loner, dedicated to her art: “I have never made any compromise, remaining independent and always alone. My strength is my free spirit, and my great imagination gives me strength and vitality.”

She is free to do as she wants, being a wealthy woman. According to reports, she has a fortune of around $50 million. (Gina dismisses the estimates as “totally unfounded.” She adds, “I never cared about money.”) Last year, a sale of some of her jewelry at Sotheby’s netted around $5 million, which she donated for stem-cell research.

According to a “love” story that has been widely reported, it was in 1984—at a party in Monaco, where she maintains residency and also owns a villa—that Gina met Javier Rigau y Rafols, a tall, charming Spaniard. “I was 23 and she was 57, which I would say is the perfect age between a man and a woman,” he told The Mail on Sunday in early 2013.

In October 2006, they went public with their relationship and announced their imminent wedding. “Gina is my life,” Javier told the Spanish magazine ¡Hola! at the time. “I have been in love with her divinely during all these years.”

“In the beginning,” Gina explained, “what there was between me and Javier was only passion, not love. That came later.

“I have always had a weakness for young men,” she added.

Wedding Jitters

Two months later, however, she called off the wedding. Gina blamed intense media scrutiny for the cancellation: “Javier is desperate. Ever since we have announced this wedding, he has been tormented with lies and slander. He can’t take it anymore.” Rigau, who has been described as a “debonair entrepreneur,” promised, for his part, that he would “always love and respect” his former fiancée.

Much about this relationship, it turns out, was not what it seemed. Lollobrigida now claims that the couple had been together for only 2 years, not 22. They met in 2004, she says, and before they announced their engagement, in 2006, Rigau decided to add two decades to the story to make the union sound more serious, a fabrication Gina went along with. (Photos of the pair together that date back to 2000 can be found, however.)

It only gets weirder.

On November 29, 2010, Rigau went ahead with their wedding, using a stand-in for Gina. According to Lollobrigida, this was entirely unbeknownst to her. She says she found out about her “wedding” only by chance, in January 2013, from documents she stumbled across on the Internet. Rigau claims that she had willingly signed all necessary paperwork and agreed to marry him by proxy in order to avoid a media spectacle, and that they were happily married. Lollobrigida says that he was able to arrange the proxy marriage using a power of attorney she had once granted him to take care of a different legal matter.

In late January 2013, she filed a complaint with police in Rome and lawsuits in Italy and Spain, objecting to the “wedding,” which had taken place at a church in Barcelona, with eight witnesses brought by Rigau. Speaking to the press, Gina referred to Rigau as “this vile person” and dismissed the proxy marriage as a “vulgar fraud.”

Rigau threatened to countersue. “If I have to take action against my wife, I will,” he told a reporter from The Mail on Sunday. “I cannot remain silent because my only asset is my name and it’s being dragged through the mud…. We’re married now even if she doesn’t want to be,” he added. “It breaks my heart to hear her speaking about me the way she is.” (Through his lawyer, Rigau declined to comment for this article.)

Rigau’s case seemed to be bolstered when an attorney who had represented Lollobrigida for several years, Giulia Citani, stepped forward to claim that prior to the ceremony she had traveled with Lollobrigida to Barcelona, where the prospective bride signed papers to authorize the ceremony.

“I can tell you she is legally married,” she told The Mail on Sunday. “You have to remember that Gina is 85 so she sometimes has trouble remembering things.”

At the same time, however, the attorney added, “I don’t really want to go into too much detail as I can’t betray my lawyer’s oath—also I no longer represent Gina as we had a disagreement.”

Lollobrigida claims that Rigau and others engaged in a conspiracy, over which she now has multiple legal actions pending. “Lawyers in Rome, lawyers in Barcelona, lawyers in Monte Carlo—lawyers everywhere!” she says with exasperation.

Affairs of the Heart

Knowing the bare outline of these bizarre events, one can understand what led Lollobrigida’s son last March to request a court in Rome to appoint an administrator to take charge of his mother’s business decisions. “I fear she may no longer be capable of handling her affairs by herself,” said Skofic, who develops scientific-information systems in the field of plant genetics. Until a few years ago, he lived with his wife, Maria Grazia Fantasia, a journalist, and their son, Dimitri, now 20, in an apartment in Lollobrigida’s villa; after the couple separated, he moved to another home in Rome, Gina says.

“The [legal] action was not ‘against’ her, but it was an attempt to protect her from people who have estranged her from her family,” Skofic elaborated recently. “It was two years since my mother had allowed me [and my son] to see her…. I am worried.”

It’s likely that it wasn’t just the situation with Rigau that had prompted Skofic’s legal action. There is a new man on the scene, and he’s 27.

Ironically, Rigau seems equally suspicious of this young individual. “I believe she has been turned against me and against everyone else who loves her—her family and friends—by a new adviser,” he said.

“I’ll call my assistant,” says Gina, when a logistical question arises during our interview. “Andrea!” she trills.

In a flash, the person who is clearly the object of Skofic and Rigau’s concern appears: Andrea Piazzolla. A handsome fellow with wavy black hair, he wears a tight bright-green polo shirt and snugly fitting jeans. Piazzolla proceeds to quickly answer Lollobrigida’s question and then disappears.

A short while later, Piazzolla beckons photographer Jonathan Becker and me to come outside to the driveway. “Who knows motorcycles?” he inquires. He is standing with what he identifies as a Ducati Desmosedici RR. “It’s No. 1 in the world,” he says proudly, and invites inspection of this limited-edition model (sticker price: $72,500). He points to the custom paint job on the bike’s tail—a kitschy James Bond-themed illustration in which Andrea is 007 and Gina is a Bond girl.

She’s known Piazzolla, who is now her manager, for, she attests, “more than five years.” How did they meet? “He had an uncle who worked for the king of Abu Dhabi,” she says. “Andrea helped me with an exhibition of my sculptures that I was planning in Qatar.” In the past few years, Piazzolla seems to have become indispensable to her, prompting inevitable speculation about the nature of their relationship. When asked if they are having a romance, Lollobrigida seems to issue a denial: “There are many years’ difference between us!” she says with a laugh.

Nevertheless, she believes that her relationship with Andrea has in some part sparked her son’s lawsuit: “[He is] afraid I will give the money to Andrea.”

That’s Amore

‘I haven’t opened my mouth about any of this before,” Gina says. Now she appears ready to vent. Here goes.

On Rigau: “I was going to get married to him because this was a period in my life when I was depressed. I thought a change would help me, but then I realized I was not in love with him and he was not in love with me. There was nothing between us…. I will destroy the son of a bitch.”

On Piazzolla: “Andrea has this ability to sniff out if a person is not honest; he can smell if something is no good. He is so honest and clever. Andrea is the best person I have ever found in my life until now. He has helped me more than anyone else.”

On her son Milko’s legal action: “I have a strong character. My son, unfortunately, no. It’s completely wrong what they are doing. It’s disgusting, because I worked all my life and stayed away from scandal. Why should they do this to me? I was so generous to them.

“If a person is old and their brain isn’t functioning anymore, it’s O.K. to get help for that person. An administrator can be good in that case. But my brain is working very well. So I don’t need anyone to put their nose in my business. If I need an aspirin, I should have to ask someone? It’s not right.”

On July 9 in Rome, the judge concurred with her. According to the statement Gina’s agent made to the Italian press, the judge found that “Ms. Lollobrigida had no need of an administrator as she is, from a mental point of view, autonomous, coherent and lucid, in the light of an excellent interview with her.”

Just a few weeks later, the movie icon demonstrated her resolve when she appeared at one of the glitziest events on the international social circuit, Monaco’s Red Cross Ball. Dripping in jewels and wearing a bright-lemon-yellow gown that was itself studded with crystals, she swept in on the arm of Piazzolla, to the long-familiar-to-her blaze of paparazzi flashes.

“Life goes on,” she told me afterward, on the phone, sounding jubilant. “I want the world to know.”

Yet her most recent legal win came with a high price, Gina concludes. “The disappointment was greater than the victory in this case.”