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Scrapbooks & Broken Families. Gina has a star's compulsive vanity. She has 300 dresses and 70 pairs of shoes, keeps 15 handsome, leather-bound scrapbooks filled with newspaper clippings about Gina; one scrapbook is devoted entirely to observations about her bosom. She will tell anybody who will listen how in 1953 she adorried the covers of 46 magazines —"eight in one week"—and her favorite anecdotes concern the way "I'm always breaking up families." Once, during an elopement scene in Fanfan, the actor who was carrying Gina was careless enough to bang her beautiful face into a low-hanging beam. Gina started to scream, stopped almost immediately to ask for a mirror, sat calmly until it arrived, inspected her bloody face and swollen lips, and only then permitted herself to faint.
Gina's most extravagant outbursts of vanity are connected with her hobby: suing people. She has been involved in as many as ten lawsuits at once. Her most famous day in court came when she asked damages from an Italian movie critic who wrote a derogatory review about her "udder." He and his editor were fined $176 and costs.
The Crazy Streak. All this temperament is not unusual in a Latin country, but the driving determination is. Where did Gina get it? Her family says it's just "the Lollobrigida crazy streak," which seems to come out in every generation. One of her uncles, for instance, thought he was a great poet. A doctor, he wrote all his prescriptions in rhyme, and after office hours rewrote the Divine Comedy into a monumental work that he said was better than Dante's. Gina's father once conducted an antiprofanity campaign, had posters printed, and stomped angrily around Rome, pasting them up at major centers of cursing.
At other times Father Lollobrigida was a sensible fellow who owned a small fur niture factory, employing 15 workmen, in the little town of Subiaco, about 50 miles east of Rome. There in the Sabine mountains 26 years ago Gina Lollobrigida was born, the second of four daughters. At seven, while playing a glowworm in a school pageant, Gina had her first romance —with an elf, aged nine. Her next flirt, as the Italians say, came when she met "a young businessman from Bologna." But Mother Lollobrigida chased him away because she was determined that Gina should marry a doctor ("It's always handy to have a doctor around the house"). Three of her daughters are now either married or engaged to medical men.
Art & Army Blankets. During the war Gina sang for the Italian troops stationed in Subiaco. But in 1944, after some Allied air attacks, the family moved to Rome. There the Lollobrigidas made a precarious living in black-market cigarettes, C rations and U.S. Army blankets. Part of the time they ate at the local charity kitchen.
Gina worked up a routine of strolling through U.S. Army messes and offering to do portrait sketches of G.I.s, soon had enough money to pay for singing lessons. She also got a scholarship to art school. Alas, she says, one of her instructors fell so violently in love with her classical proportions that the school had to transfer him. Meanwhile, for similar reasons, she was forced to change her singing teacher six times in six months.