Then I had an awful criminal type, an Irish girl who was slightly demented. She was the friend of the girl who had been hired as a companion to Olivia Hussey, who played Juliet in Zeffirelli’s
Romeo and Juliet.
The secretary-companion was about three years older than Olivia, and she went everywhere with her, took care of her, helped her, listened to her lines, and all that. Olivia had a tendency to get fat, and the film producers put her on this terrible diet, and that’s one of the things the chaperone had to do: watch and see she didn’t eat. But I always invited Romeo and Juliet for late dinners and always cooked up whole potatoes drowned in butter for Olivia, because she was working hard, the poor darling.
When
Romeo and Juliet
was finished, I was looking for a secretary, and this Irish girl came to apply for the job. She heard of it through Olivia. The first day she came, she was wearing a miniskirt that barely covered her pubic hairs. I mean, if there had been one bit of exhaust from a bus, everything would have been revealed. And she had makeup like a signboard for Pizza Hut. And of course, it was the day that there was an archbishop going to call on the countess two floors below. They came in together. I said to her, “I think you ought to wear a more secretarial costume, because there are clergymen around here, and this is a Catholic country.” I think she thought that since I was of the film set, I would be racy, you see. Afterwards she always came in that English uniform for ladies: a jacket and a skirt with pleats and a sweater and a string of beads and just a little lipstick.
But she was demented. Time and again I would give her a script to deliver in a big hurry, and I’d give her money for the taxi. Well, she’d take the bus and keep the taxi money. Not only that, somebody was always saying, “Oh, I saw Marilyn in the such and such shop on the Via Veneto yesterday morning.” She would have just wandered about, window-shopping, for hours. I would say, “Did it really take two hours to get there?” And she’d say, “Oh, it was another one of those traffic jams.” Then, of course, there was her lover, a thoroughgoing crook. He worked for the Hindu embassy, and somehow he was able to smuggle precious stones through diplomatic channels and sell them in Rome. He came one day to ask if I would let him use my apartment to give a party. And would I invite my friends because he wanted to sell his precious and semiprecious stones? And I said, “Oh, I’m sorry, but I can’t really do it.” He was furious, and she was furious. So she quit and then tried to sue me for social security.
But most of my secretaries stayed until they found a better job that paid more. It was three hours every morning, and they typed, answered the telephone, did the accounts, collected bills from film studios, paid the light bill and the gas bill and the maid. And did some shopping. Occasionally—not always—they took my laundry to the laundry, dry cleaning to the dry cleaner’s. It was an easy job, and I always asked them to lunch, which wasn’t part of the contract. For two of them, they would come to me from nine to twelve and have lunch, then go to Muriel Spark from two to four. For Margaret Aubrey Smith, I found a penthouse apartment on the old servants’ wing of the palazzo where I lived. She had a charming artist’s studio with a huge terrace. I tried to treat them as family rather than hired hands.
*
After I had moved to Corso Vittorio, Miss Calico adopted me. I didn’t adopt her. She lived in the block, this tabby, calico cat. This shoemaker had taken her in when she was pregnant because she didn’t have any place in the street to have kittens. He used this tiny alley not far from where I lived. He gave her a box where she would take these kittens out to sit in the sun. One day a truck, which under law was not supposed to go in that alley, came sailing through and killed all four kittens. Smashed them flat. And she went around crying all over the neighborhood. So I got her into the courtyard of the palace where I lived and fed her and gave her a wooden box in one corner of this courtyard where she could stay at night. Once a day I’d feed her, and she more or less realized that the palazzo where I lived was her domain.
She eventually found her way up five flights of steps to where I lived on the top floor. That was before there was an elevator. Then later the countess put in an elevator. The elevator had only been in twenty-four hours when Miss Calico started using it to get to my floor. And she would never get in the elevator with anybody going to any other floor. Nobody knows how she knew to get in with somebody going to the fifth floor. It was a source of wonderment to all concerned. This dizzy countess who owned the building would always say, “I do not understand how Miss Calico chooses the person who goes to you.” Nobody could figure it out. Well, she knew where the cooking was going on, bless her heart.
She came to me to eat and to have kittens. She’d tell me when she was going to have the kittens, and I had this screen I’d set up in the corner of the landing with two boxes behind it, one for her to have them and one for her to put the kittens in. I’d lay out a smorgasbord arrangement, you know. And oh, she had beautiful kittens.
But she was a strange and biggity street cat. She never would come in my apartment. Wouldn’t come in. She found her way over the roof of the palace to my terrace. And at night, in the winter when the doors were closed and my cats weren’t on the terrace, she’d march up and down my terrace. Go back over the roof, and she went through some other palace. Down the stairs to the courtyard.
She was something. And I loved her.
Well, one day there was this guy out walking his dog. He’d taken off the leash and the muzzle. The muzzle was hanging on the dog’s collar, and he was swinging the leash. In Rome, there is a law that if you take a dog out of your house, or if you have a dog at all, when it is in the street, it has to have a muzzle and a leash. It cannot go free. That’s because of the prevalence of rabies in Italy.
Calico had begun, at that time, to sit in this vast
portone
, the huge carriage door in the Roman palaces. It’s in several sections and opens. There is always a little door for people. But usually in the daytime for cross-draft, they open the huge
portone.
She would sit there watching traffic and saying, “Actually, I’m the countess. There’s another pretender living on the fourth floor, but I am the countess.”
Well, this dog attacked her. Lunged for her. Calico was a very quick street cat, and she rose like an angel of song and bit the man’s chin and fled. And the man, of course, realizing that he’d caused this fuss, quickly got his dog leashed and all that. And left in a hurry. But his wife apparently convinced him the cat might have rabies. So he hired these two thugs to go and catch Miss Calico. They were apparently skulking about the neighborhood because later someone told me they had seen these two guys at the corner and then at the other corner. They finally followed her into the courtyard and caught her and took her off in a pillowcase they were carrying. Took her off to the pound. At the pound, they always kept them for ten days in quarantine to see if they had rabies and then sold them to laboratories and all kinds of things—fur factories and everything.
Well. She didn’t show up for dinner one night. And she was regular. She came right up to my floor. Either caught a ride or walked those flights. And she wasn’t there for breakfast the next day, and I was really beginning to worry. So at noon I went to this nice lady who had the Puerto Rico Coffee Company across the street, which is a bonbon shop that sold freshly ground blends and all kinds of candies and chocolates, some of which she made. Very old shop. Now, every block in Rome has a kind of secret service agent. Someone who knows everybody’s business. So I went over to this shop and told her that Miss Calico was missing and asked if she’d seen her. She said, “Miss Calico is missing?” She was a great cat lover, this lady. “Oh,” she said, “we’ll find out. She has to be somewhere in the neighborhood because she never leaves this block.” So she closed the shop and sent the three girls who worked in the shop out to canvass the neighborhood, door by door. And they reported, yes, in fact, they had talked to a street sweeper, and the street sweeper told me the whole story. But nobody knew where she’d gone.
Well, the bonbon lady got on the blower and called Anna Magnani, who was at the other corner in another Roman palace with her twenty-three cats. Just like my grandmother: twenty-three cats. Anna Magnani was the great Italian actress who was in several of the great Italian films that came out of Italy just after the war. She made
The Rose Tattoo
in Hollywood. She was a big international star and was a friend of Fellini’s, so I met her when she visited on the set of
8½.
She had a three-story apartment. Her son, who had infantile paralysis, was about nineteen then, in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down. He had a flat of his own with this lady who looked after him. He had cats. Then she was the floor below and had more cats. There was a top floor where there were servants and some more cats.
So the bonbon lady called Anna Magnani. Anna Magnani said, “Not that pretty tabby, red-and-white cat at number eighteen?” The lady said yes. “She belongs to a nice American writer who lives there.” “Oh,” said Anna Magnani. “Well.” So Anna Magnani called the mayor of Rome. She said, “You know, excellent sir, this is Anna Magnani. I need a favor.” Of course, he fell on the floor, you know, and swooned. And she said, “There is this cat, this timid little house cat, belongs to this nice American writer here in number eighteen Corso Vittorio, and somebody has stolen it, and we think—we fear—that she might end up at the pound. And we’ve got to find that cat.” And he said, “Oh, yes, we’ll put a plainclothesman on it.”
He found Miss Calico in this particular pound. They had taken her, and maybe they’d gotten a few lire for it. And the plainclothesman told the mayor, and the mayor called Anna Magnani, and Anna Magnani called the bonbon lady. The bonbon lady sent one of the girls over to my apartment. Well, I dropped everything. That was when I had this delicious English girl Margaret Aubrey Smith as my secretary—pretty, Yardley Lavender child. She was also a great cat lover. We jumped in a taxi, rushed to this place. And we just went in; we stormed in. The doorman was saying, “You can’t go in. You have to get a pass from the director. He’s over that way.” But we had to find Calico.
We couldn’t find her. There were hundreds of dogs barking. Three tiers of cages. All of the dogs were barking. The cats were all silent. A rather gray atmosphere. Finally we passed back again for the third time, and Calico’s unmistakable voice spoke. This raucous voice. From the bottom level. She was on the ground. The cage was full of water because they flooded the cages to wash them. She was sitting in the corner, half leaning on the wall.
I didn’t recognize her at all. Her red had faded. She was a calico, but she was tabby, white and red. And the red had faded. The shock of being snatched, stuffed into a pillowcase, hauled off, and put in a cage and then watered—the sheer shock. She was also in the beginning of pregnancy.
We were both absolutely destroyed. And we had rehearsed. I had said, “I want to tell how she’s this kitten that we found and how we’ve raised her. But when I get to the point where I have to stop, then you go ahead with the story.” Well, of course, we went into his office and we both burst into tears. Margaret and I just both burst into tears. He was saying, “Oh, my…” But we had to fill out these forms. We had to tell our names, our parents’ names, our four grandparents’ names, dates of birth, birthplaces, our education, our occupations. I couldn’t remember any of it. He said, “There will be a fine, but you can come at the end of ten days and get her.”
We went every day. I would go one time, and Margaret would go another. To take food and milk and to talk to her. Then we organized a lot of grand people to call on her. The very grand Sicilian princess Her Serene Highness, the Princess Topazia Alliata de Sallaparuta, would go. She had a battered car, a beat-up old Fiat, because she didn’t have any money. None of the Sicilians have any money. They owned vast acres. Her properties were big enough to show on a map of Sicily as a little province within a province. That’s what “Serene Highness” means: you are not the ruling monarch of a country, but your properties are big enough to show on a map of the world. The idea is that if you own that much real estate, you are serene. But she didn’t have any cash. So she borrowed from some fancy doctor in her neighborhood a big black car and got the boy from the chicken market in her neighborhood to drive her. She dressed, wore jewelry, and she arrived and asked at the door for Miss Calico. We had the Countess Gnoli, and we had a couple of actresses, including Barbara Steele, the English actress. She was one of the young actresses in
8½.
Willowy and demented and always dressed in something very outré. And we had the Baron Saint-Just, the painter that I introduced to Hans Werner Henze and who became the great stage designer of the Hamburg Opera and La Scala and everything. We had all the grand-looking people we could get. And Mary Harding, of course, who wrote
Dear Friends and Darling Romans.
Mary Chamberlin Harding is this little lady who played children on Broadway when she was thirty-five years old. Because she was so tiny. She’s petite and of that French type eternal female. She had three husbands and eighty-five lovers and was a success on Broadway. She came to Rome for two weeks and stayed twenty-five years.
About the seventh day, the director calls in and says, “Well, look, I suppose you all could take this cat.” He said, “There are so many people who seem interested in her.” And he said, “We really can’t have this traffic coming in and out of the pound.” I noticed the last two days her cage was dry. I learned later that Her Serene Highness had complained to the director.