Gina Defends Her Honor

Oscar Wilde once observed that life imitates art, not the other way around, but Oscar's generation didn't produce many girls the likes of Italian film star Gina Lollobrigida. In her latest celluloid epic, modestly named The Most Beautiful Woman In The World, Gina takes up a sword in defense of her honor; she spends a goodly part of her off-screen life defending the same thing, though usually preferring counselors to cutlery for the purpose.

In the film, Gina plays a turn-of-the-century prima donna who is insulted by a rival singer. The two hot canaries do a little hair-pulling and finally meet on the field of honor, complete with rapiers, seconds, and other paraphenalia, prepared to perform a bit of spirited surgery on each other. Gina's rival swoons before things start to get messy, but her real-life critics aren't so obliging. Usually they are members of the fourth estate who raise questions about her acting ability. Gina doesn't take criticism kindly and almost always counters with rapier-like court action.

One Italian columnist suggested that the Lollobrigida popularity might be due more to epidermis than emoting and was promptly slapped with a law suit; another reporter was sued for offering the opinion that all of Gina's talent is locked up in her bountiful bosom. It isn't unusual for the litigious Lollobrigida to have two or three court hassles going at the same time.

Her latest legal gambol grew out of some publicity photographs taken by an International News Service photographer during the filming of Most Beautiful Woman. The pictures are of Gina doing a high-kicking can can sequence and the actress became miffed because INS flashbulbs rendered her lace panties transparent. Her attorneys charged abuse of her image and defamation of character.

Gina wasn't always so concerned with the transparency of her britches, of course. There was a time, not too long ago, when she was perfectly willing to remove them completely when the script required. In Beauties of the Night, she strolled into a harem bath as naked as the well known jay bird.

A lot of water has flowed under the brigida since then, however, and Gina is now a star. And when a celluloid cutie becoames a star, she also wants to become an actress. "I have worked hard to learn acting," Gina confides. "I hope American audiences will not think I am trying to get by with a shapely figure and nothing else.

"I wish they would stop comparing me with Marilyn Monroe," says Gina. "She is a beautiful girl, but she has no acting ability." Perhaps not, but she's suffering from the same dramatic delusions these days as the lovely Lollo. The sexy blonde who skyrocketed to stardom on the strength of a nude calendar and a couple of suggestive screen roles is now studying drama in the east, would like to do a Broadway play, and star in a film version of Dostoevsky's grim novel, The Brothers Karamazov.

None of this is new, of course. A pretty fraülein named Hedy Kiesler romped au naturel through the foreign film, Ecstasy, a generation ago and the publicity won her a Hollywood contract. There she changed her name to Lamarr and acquired a husband who spent most of his time buying up prints of the movie and destroying them. Joan Crawford, Myrna Loy, Claudette Colbert and a number of other Hollywood notables appeared in near-nude pictures in their starlet days, but shunned the revealing once they were established.

This cinematic schizophrenia has become so confusing, of late, that young starlets not yet certain of their position in the Hollywood heavens don't know whether to play it sexy or straight. Tempting Terry Moore entertained the boys in Korea in a furry bra and panties, appeared in a Las Vegas stage show wearing nothing but a few sequins where a brassière should have been, and then cried bitter tears when a Turkish photographer took a picture of her at the opening of the Istanbul Hilton Hotel in which her skirt was slightly askew. "I cried all night," she said, after the (concluded on page 56) Gina (continued from page 20) picture had appeared in the Milliyet Halk Gazetesi, a leading Istanbul newspaper. "I would never wittingly pose for a picture like that. I happen to be a dramatic actress. I even fight with my studio when they make me pose in a bathing suit. I get embarrassed when I undress in front of another girl." Miss Moore made such a fuss that the Turkish newspaper editors returned the negative of the photograph. At that point an American exposé magazine picked up the story and, by blocking out the lower half of the picture, suggested it was far more revealing than it really was. Actually, the photograph showed no more Moore than a bathing suit might, but all the hoopla convinced a lot of people that the shot must have been obscene.

And so are the ways of the women of filmdom. The only sunlight in a dark sky is being supplied by Deborah Kerr. Firmly established as a star and an actress of some ability, Deborah felt she was being typed, and revolted against the sweet, "wholesome" roles in which she was being regularly cast. She sought and got the part of the strumpet wife in From Here To Eternity and her sexy beach scene with Burt Lancaster became the most famous in the film. Next, she accepted the lead in the Broadway play, Tea and Sympathy, in which she goes to bed with a school boy. Now, as she poses for charming cheesecake photos, she informs the press that she will not play the same part in the film version of Sympathy unless the seduction, an important part of the story, stays in.

What does all this prove? Probably nothing more than the old bromide, la donna è mobile -- females are fickle. But we've known that for a long time.

Wistful male moviegoers sigh in vain for the exposed Gina of yesteryear.

The pre-Karamazov Monroe kept busy being "blonde all over" for the camera.

Gina

Joan

Myrna

Hedy

Claudette

This is the controversial photograph of Terry Moore exactly as it appeared in the Turkish Milliyet Halk Gazetesi.