CHAPTER 12
ROME IF YOU WANT TO
Once Buddy and Sterling were settled in Paris and had begun rehearsals for their new show, The Lido de Paris on the Champs-Élysées, they convinced me to get my butt over there and try out. I packed up my place; sold my car, TV, and what little furniture I’d acquired; and headed for France.
Buddy and Sterling had rented a large, charming house in Le Perreux-sur-Marne, a suburb of Paris, taking the train into town daily to rehearse. I moved into the cozy, sloped-ceiling attic room.
They introduced me to Miss Bluebell, the famous dance mistress for the Lido, and I was granted an audition. She was well aware of Vive Les Girls and was impressed that I’d been in the show. But despite that, I didn’t meet the five-foot-ten height requirement to be one of the famous Bluebell Girls, and no matter how Buddy and Sterl begged and cajoled, she wouldn’t budge.
Weeks went by while I hung out at the house on the outskirts of Paris, wondering what to do and where to go next. I loved staying with the boys but knew I couldn’t freeload indefinitely—I was blowing through my savings and would have to find work sooner than later. By now, Sunny had also left Vive. She came to Paris for a visit and joined us in the house in Le Perreux. Soon, I talked her into coming with me to Rome. I convinced her we would find work there, and if we didn’t, the Italian men would more than make up for it.
We bought our train tickets and made plans to leave France on January 1. New Year’s Eve was spent watching the Lido show, then celebrating with the boys at the famous Georges V hotel. High on Dom Perignon, I went to sleep in my little attic room for the last time. Sometime during the night, much to my surprise and elation, Buddy slipped into bed with me and we made love for the first and only time, bringing my longtime crush to a dream-fulfilling “climax.”
First thing New Year’s Day, while Buddy slept, Sunny and I said our tearful goodbyes to Sterling and left for Rome. I listened to “(I Can’t Live If Livin’ Is) Without You” by Harry Nilsson on my little tape recorder, thought of Buddy, and cried all the way to Italy.
Arriving in Rome was an awakening. Walking down the ancient cobblestone streets, past the ruins and the beautiful decaying buildings, made me feel better than alive. The sounds, the tastes, the smells were all so delicious and familiar. Whether sitting in a little bar sipping cappuccino or strolling past a fountain in a grand piazza, I had the distinct impression that this was where I was meant to be. I explored the ancient city streets for hours on end and it felt like coming home.
Sunny and I found a tiny, but comfortable room in Pensione Ginevra, not far from the Via Veneto, on Via Quintino Sella. It was a second-story walk-up above a coffee bar, where I went every morning for warm, freshly baked cornettos. The pensione was also home to the Italian family who owned it, Signora and Signore Fabrizi and their teenaged son, Picci (pronounced “Peachy”). They lived in a cordoned-off area consisting of a kitchen, bathroom, and one bedroom that they all shared. The other four bedrooms were rented out nightly. Sunny and I slept in a cozy room with two twin beds and shared a bathroom with the other residents. The place was modest in the extreme, but the family was warm and welcoming and the intoxicating smells of homemade Italian food wafting from their kitchen at all hours of the day gave it a homey feel.
Sunny and I met another guest staying at the Pensione—an older Black man, probably in his thirties, named Eduardo—who happened to be an excellent guitarist from Brazil. We came up with the idea to form a singing duo and talked him into accompanying us. After getting a short repertoire of songs together, we landed a gig at a nightclub nearby. It didn’t pay much but provided us with enough lire to keep a roof over our heads and buy a little food. The gig ended abruptly when Sunny got fed up with living hand to mouth, crammed into a tiny room with me. Declaring she was homesick, she headed back to the US, leaving me on my own.
But my time alone in Rome didn’t last long. Another former Vive showgirl, Maria Gambotti, soon came to visit from Corsica where she now lived. Despite the Italian last name, Maria spoke only French and English, which didn’t help us much when it came to navigating the city. She arrived in her little car, a Cinque Cento that looked like a sardine can but came in handy for tooling around Rome and its environs.
One evening, Maria and I went to Trastevere, the “old” section of Rome. As we walked down the quiet, narrow streets, the sound of our heels reverberating off the ancient buildings, we heard a commotion up ahead. Bright lights pierced the dark sky, and we could see that a crowd had gathered. Following the sound and light we discovered a film crew shooting a movie—exciting! We edged our way through the gathering to get a closer look. There among the crew, running to and fro moving cables, setting props, and hollering out instructions, was a familiar face from Las Vegas, Stuart Birnbaum. Maria and I instantly recognized him as the film student who had interviewed us in Vegas for a documentary he was making about showgirls. Small world, right?
We waved our hands in Stuart’s direction and squealed his name. He was as surprised to see us as we were to see him. He explained that he was there working as a student director on the film Roma, directed by Federico Fellini. My jaw dropped. The Federico Fellini? The same Federico Fellini who had directed La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2, and Fellini Satyricon? I was stunned when Stuart assured me it was the one and only.
“Would you like to meet Signore Fellini?” he asked. Seriously? E il Papa cattolico?
“Yes!” we shouted in unison.
A few minutes later, there we were, shaking hands with Federico Fellini himself. He cut an imposing figure and seemed larger than life, but was gracious, soft-spoken, and flattering.
“Deed-a anyone ever tell-a you dat you look-a like my wife, Giulietta Masina, when she was-a young?” he said, staring at me pointedly.
Honestly, at that moment I had no idea who the heck she was or how she looked, but that didn’t stop me from answering, “Oh! Yeah. All the time!” Fellini went back to his directing duties and left Maria and me standing there, dumbfounded. A few minutes later, Stuart was back. The words that came out of his mouth nearly knocked us over.
“Mr. Fellini asked if you’d like to be extras in the scene we’re setting up?” Before you could say “porca miseria,” we were in a wardrobe trailer changing into evening gowns and having our hair and makeup done. We were playing guests at a boxing match, taking place in the center of a piazza. I blended into the background while Maria got a nice close-up, standing up and screeching, “Kill him! Kill him!” while the boxers duked it out. Much to our delight and surprise, after a very long night, we were actually paid! We were so thrilled to work in a real film, making money hadn’t crossed our minds. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to pay for a few more nights at Pensione Ginevra.
Several days later, Maria headed back to Corsica to take care of her ailing mother, and I was once again on my own in Rome. Stuart and I had exchanged numbers and, before long, I got another call from him asking whether I’d like to work as an extra in a few more scenes. He didn’t have to ask twice; I was there! Night after night, for almost thirty days, I showed up on the set. Fellini shot a sequence in which I rode on the back of a motorcycle, my arms wrapped tight around a super-hot Italian guy, zipping through the streets of Rome, past some of the more famous sights: Piazza di Spagna, the Roman Forum, and the Colosseum. Nice work if you can get it, right? I later played a hooker in a ’40s bordello scene and a student in a ’60s riot. I worked on Fellini’s Roma every night for a month and ended up as a mere flash of red hair in the finished film but had a great time and made enough to keep myself alive for a few more weeks.
Our last shots took place at Cinecittà, Europe’s largest film studio, on the outskirts of Rome. I somehow wound up at lunch in the commissary sitting at a long table with some of the cast, crew, and Signore Fellini himself. I was in awe to be in the presence of such greatness and had the good sense to keep my mouth shut and just listen. Someone at the table mentioned he’d heard they were hiring extras for another movie shooting on the lot, a bizarre, avant-garde film called Salomè starring the famous German model Verushka and written and directed by Carmelo Bene. I immediately looked into it and soon returned to Cinecittà to play a cornice (or was it a “buttress”?), hanging my bare ass over the edge of a building. The beautiful Black actress who played the same role, but on the opposite corner of the facade, glanced over at me at one point, rolled her eyes, and said, “If anyone asks me what I was doing last night, I ain’t sayin’ nothin’!”
Feeling lonely and a little homesick, I convinced my parents to allow my sister Melody to come over and stay with me, and they bought her a one-way ticket as a belated high school graduation gift. I was happy to see someone from home, especially someone who spoke English, and I was excited to show her around Rome. She shared my room at the pensione and soon I was able to get her some “extra” work too. As redheads we were a popular pair!
A few film gigs came our way, mainly in spaghetti westerns or horror films, where I sometimes got to deliver a line or two. I was offered a part as a Catholic nun in a major international film, I Diavoli (The Devils) from director Ken Russell, but when I discovered that the part entailed not only nudity but also having to shave my head, I reluctantly declined. I mean, naked is one thing, but baldness—no, my brother! One film Melody and I worked on together, All’ Onorevole Piacciono Le Donne, was coincidently directed by legendary gore-meister Lucio Fulvi. It was filmed in an ancient monastery in the mountains and Melody and I played Catholic sorelle, sisters. We slept in tiny, freezing medieval cells for a week. Method acting.
Melody and I went from one little acting gig to another, but we were having fun and, most importantly, keeping a roof over our heads. But a month after she arrived, my sister hooked up with Massimiliano, an out-of-work, English-speaking Italian she’d met at our favorite hangout, Club Yellow, and off she went with him, despite me begging her not to leave.
The low point of my stay in Italy—actually one of the lowest points of my life—happened around this time. I also met a guy at Club Yellow who I liked. Franco was good-looking in a mafioso sort of way, dressing impeccably in expensive suits, crisp white European-cut shirts, and lots of gold jewelry. He was so much more worldly and charming than the other guys I’d met there, and soon he was taking me to the fanciest restaurants in the city for some fantastic Italian meals, which was a nice break from my usual diet of mozzarella and suppli, fried rice-balls. After dating a short time, I began staying over with him occasionally in his creepy basement apartment.
Franco spoke Italian only, and my poor language skills must have impeded my sense of character judgment, because it wasn’t long before I made a strange discovery. Every night, around 3:00 a.m., Franco would creep out of bed, get dressed, and silently leave the apartment while I pretended to be asleep. One night, after I was sure he’d gone, I climbed out of bed and began snooping around. I snuck into the empty second bedroom and opened the door to a large closet. The rods were jam-packed with dozens of fur coats, and the shelves held boxes and bags full of high-end jewelry. I stood for several minutes, staring at the luxurious loot, wondering what it meant. Was Franco really a burglar? That’s the only conclusion I could draw.
When he returned to the apartment just before dawn, I confronted him in my best, very limited Italian. He flipped out and charged toward me, flailing his arms with dramatic Italian flair and shouting a string of words I couldn’t decipher, except for a few phrases: non dire niente—“say nothing”—and ti ucciderò!—“ I’ll kill you!”
I fell hard onto the bed. The blow came out of nowhere, striking the side of my head and sending me reeling backward. The room went black and I saw a tiny white-gold fireworks display behind my eyelids. It’s true, you really do see stars, I remember thinking. I heard the blood rush into my ears, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, as pain throbbed in my temples.
The heels of his expensive Italian boots clicked back and forth across the tile floor with resolved purpose. “Franco?” I called. My voice echoed through the sparsely furnished apartment. Somewhere, the sound of a distant siren blared, then grew faint. The door slammed so hard I felt shock waves shudder through the mattress.
I sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, massaging my temples. When I felt steady enough, I grabbed my things, stuffed them into my bag as fast as I could, and headed for the door. It wouldn’t open. I tried again, tugging, pulling, jiggling the lock. It still wouldn’t open. I sat down and waited. Would he come back? And if he did, what then? I soon fell into a restless sleep.
When I woke up, the room was beginning to grow dark and Franco still wasn’t back. I realized there was no phone in the apartment. As night approached, I tried yelling for help at the top of my lungs, but no one answered, no one came. I used a hairpin I’d found in the bottom of my purse and a knife from the kitchen to try to pick the lock, but the door wouldn’t budge. Because it was a basement apartment, the only opening to the outside was a window well topped with a layer of thick glass brick underneath a sidewalk. I could see blurry images of people hurrying by above me, but no matter how loud I yelled or how hard I banged on it with a kitchen saucepan, no one reacted. After four days I’d gone through almost every bit of food that I could find in the kitchen cabinets and was getting more and more scared and desperate by the minute. Then, in the middle of the night, I awoke to the sound of someone unlocking the door. I held my breath. My heart pounded so hard it felt like it would burst through my chest. It was Franco’s partner in crime, Mario, a chubby little chain-smoking gangster, dressed in black. He looked at me but didn’t speak. I lay there staring at him, scared to death of what might happen next. Suddenly he threw the door open. Vai!—“Go!”—he commanded. Still wearing my clothes and shoes, I bolted out of the apartment without my purse or overnight bag. I ran down the brightly lit hallway and up the stairs as fast as my legs would carry me, not turning to look back once. When I reached the outside, I kept running, down dark streets and narrow passages between buildings, intermittently ducking into doorways and peering around corners to make sure he wasn’t following me. When I finally felt safe, I stopped to catch my breath and broke into sobs of relief. My heart pounded. The cold winter air burned my lungs and my sweat felt like icy fingers running down my spine. Now I had a new problem. Where the fuck was I? I had no idea what part of Rome I was in. I had no money, no phone numbers, no passport. I was starving. I’d eaten almost nothing for the past two days. I wandered the streets until the sun came up. By morning, I was reduced to standing on a corner bumming change, something I’d done back in my hippie days in Colorado Springs when I’d needed cigarettes, but now I was much more desperate. I eventually got enough lire together to buy a loaf of bread. Using a combination of the few Italian words I knew and my best charades-playing skills, I managed to glean enough information from the Roman locals to catch a series of buses back to Pensione Ginevra. The relief I felt when I arrived quickly dissolved when Signora Fabrizi informed me she’d had to give my room away because I hadn’t paid that week. She’d kept my clothes, toiletries, and most importantly, my passport, which she’d safely stashed in her room for me, hoping I’d return. Before I left, she let me use the family’s phone to call the only number I could find scribbled on a scrap of paper at the bottom of my suitcase—Gerta, an English-speaking German girl I’d met at Club Yellow.
“Pronto?” a stranger answered. I shoved the receiver toward the proprietaria, who was hovering nearby. There was a brief exchange in Italian, then she cupped her hand over the receiver and tried to explain that we’d reached the phone in an apartment building lobby, and someone had gone to look for my friend. Several minutes went by before Gerta came to the phone. I explained my predicament, and hallelujah! she invited me to stay with her. The kind Signora gave me enough money for the bus and hugged me goodbye. I must have said “Grazie” a hundred times.
After dragging my gigantic suitcase on and off three buses, I finally arrived at Gerta’s apartment building on the outskirts of Rome. The relief I’d felt when I’d learned I had a place to stay dissolved before my eyes. I had no idea there was such a seedy, run-down area in the city. I stood on the sidewalk, staring up at several gray, multistory cement buildings, probably built after the war for fast, cheap housing, in an area that tourists never see. In America we’d call it “the projects.” Broken wire fencing, graffiti, and trash seemed to be the hallmarks. As if the building wasn’t bad enough, after making my way to Gerta’s apartment, I found that it was even more dismal. The only furniture was a dirty, bare mattress on the cold cement floor. There was no electricity or heat, and the door didn’t lock. It became obvious she was squatting. By some miracle there was water—freezing cold, but actual H2O. Although there weren’t many niceties, like toilet paper for example, the toilet actually flushed.
When the sun dipped behind the building, the apartment went dark. Gerta lit a candle, sat on the mattress next to me, and began digging through the clothes in my suitcase.
“Cassandra, do you haf any segsy clothes mit you?” she asked. Illuminated by the candlelight, her hard-edged face peered out from beneath dark, stringy bangs, giving her a tough look that belied her supposed twenty-four years.
I hesitated for a moment, wondering what she was up to. “Uh, yeah. I guess. Black satin hot pants and a midriff top?” Remember, it was the early seventies. “Yah! Gut!” she exclaimed. It seemed Gerta had a plan to make us some money. “Get dressed! Vee going out.”
We left the apartment decked out in our sexy best, which wasn’t that great, but apparently did the trick—so to speak. We hung around on a street corner until a car pulled up and offered us a “ride.” In her fluent Italian, she told the male driver we were available for a ménage à trois—t wo for the price of one! She must have been the ultimate scam artist because she convinced the guy to meet us later that evening at a place she named, but in order to secure us, she somehow talked him into paying half the money up front, the equivalent of fifty dollars. Of course, once we got the dough, we disappeared. It felt pretty damn sleazy, but we were young, desperate, and hungry. I reconciled my behavior by reminding myself that the guys we were conning weren’t exactly angels either.
After a few days of performing our scam, I woke up late one morning, or possibly afternoon, to an empty apartment. Gerta was gone. So were all her things—and mine. Every cent I’d made, every piece of clothing I owned, all gone. Out of the kindness of her heart, or possibly just because they were dirty, she’d left the clothes I’d been wearing the night before, and thank you Jesus, my passport.
I wasn’t about to continue the “fake hooker” scam on my own—way too scary and dangerous—but once again, I found myself without food or money. I had to find a job, and fast. Somehow I made it back to the center of Rome and spent hours wandering into clubs to see whether I could land a job waitressing, which I knew would be a long shot with my limited Italian and even more limited waitressing skills, but I had to try. I finally came upon a place that featured “hostesses.” The manager, a heavily made-up, world-worn woman, explained the job to me in Italian and I did my best to follow along. It seemed like it mainly entailed drinking champagne and dancing with customers, which sounded pretty sweet to me.
As a hostess, I’d receive only a minimal salary but could make a lot more by talking patrons into buying champagne and “dance tickets.” Sounded easy. It wasn’t.
I started the evening with eight or nine other ladies, much older than I was, hanging out at the bar waiting for customers to show up. The club smelled of cigarette smoke and years of spilled cocktails. The men who came in were mainly old, overweight foreigners, so it wasn’t nearly as fun as I’d imagined it might be. I spent every evening forcing down cheap champagne (when the client wasn’t looking, I was able to dump most of it into one of the strategically placed fake plants that had been conveniently located around the club) and, despite the signs posted in several languages that translated to “No inappropriate touching allowed,” blocking determined hands from creeping onto my various body parts. The songs they piped in were almost always slow, sexy ballads, of course, so every dance became a virtual wrestling match. I’d gone from manifesting the movie Viva Las Vegas to living out the film Sweet Charity! With the money I made, I couldn’t afford much more than food and bus or cab fare, so every night I wore the only outfit I owned—a skin-tight, spaghetti-strapped, maroon jersey dress that grazed my ankles—washing it out and wearing it again the next night, which got old fast.
After work, I’d return to Gerta’s dark, ice-cold apartment alone, on the verge of puking from the cheap champagne and even sicker from the shame and humiliation I felt doing what I had to do to survive.
My next-door neighbors were three enormous Maasai tribesmen from Tanzania. As if they weren’t scary enough just based on the fact that they were all well over six feet tall, their faces were covered in elaborate scarification, making them look like they were wearing permanent scary Halloween masks. With no lock on my door, having three strange, gigantic, foreign men living next to me who could walk in at any moment, day or night, scared the living hell out of me. But once I got to know them, they became my guardian angels. They spoke beautiful English and turned out to be kind and gentle souls, often bringing me delicious exotic food they’d made. They also assured me they were always keeping an eye on me and my apartment, which made me feel a lot safer. Nobody in their right mind would fuck with these guys!
I don’t remember how long I worked at the “dime-a-dance club.” It seemed like forever, but was probably only a few weeks. Somehow I miraculously reunited with Melody, and a few days later we found ourselves walking down the tourist-jammed streets near the Fountain of Trevi, bemoaning our sucky lives and pouring our sad stories out to each other. Her situation was as bad as mine. She’d broken up with Massimiliano because he’d given her a black eye during an argument. Just like me, she had no money and no place to go. Suddenly, out of nowhere, looming head and shoulders above a boisterous crowd of autograph seekers, we spotted my Vegas roommate’s boyfriend, Wilt Chamberlain! For those of you who are too young to know who he is, Wilt “the Stilt” Chamberlain, at seven-foot-one and over 300 pounds, was sometimes referred to as the strongest athlete ever. He was called the most dominating and amazing basketball player of all time and holds dozens of unbroken basketball records to this day. Melody and I got his attention, then plowed our way through the crowd. This was crazy! I mean, what were the odds? The next thing we knew, we were having lunch with the world-famous basketball star in a posh restaurant and wolfing down the best food Melody and I had eaten in months. We regaled him with tales of our adventures, sugar-coating them so he wouldn’t think we were quite as desperate as we really were. After lunch, “Uncle Wiltie,” which is what I’d always called him, got in his limo and headed for the airport. Before he left, he hugged us both, wished us luck, and discreetly slipped each of us a hundred dollars’ worth of lire.
Feeling like we’d just won the lottery, we high-tailed it back to good old Pensione Ginevra. The Signora, although happy to see us, explained they were full up. But if we didn’t mind, she’d squeeze us into a large closet she had at less than half the price of a regular room. We were thrilled because that meant our money would go twice as far! The room fit a twin bed only. When we opened the door, we crawled directly onto the bed, which Melody and I shared, and crammed our stuff underneath it. That didn’t last long. Melody’s boyfriend, Max, tracked her down, and despite my warnings, she took off with him again.