(6 of 8)
She was therefore understandably suspicious when, one day in 1947, a middle-aged man rushed up to her in the street and said (in Gina's English translation): "Do you want to do the cinema?" "Go to the devil," replied Gina. When the fellow protested that he was really Mario Costa, the famous regista, she made him show his identity card to prove it. Gina went to work as an extra at about $3.30 a day, soon rose to be a stand-in for a well-known actress, but was fired, she says, because the star was jealous of Gina's looks. In 1947, Gina entered a beauty contest, was chosen Miss Rome, ran second in the Miss Italy competition. Two years after that, she married Dr. Skofic, got a showy role in a picture about beauty contests called Miss Italia, and an urgent invitation from Hollywood to come quick and take a screen test, all expenses paid. The sender: RKO Boss Howard Hughes, who had just seen a picture of Gina in a Bikini.
Into the Dawn. What happened next (according to Gina—Hughes is not talking) was all a terrible mistake. Gina's story: Hughes sent a T.W.A. plane to Italy, flew her to Hollywood. At the airport she was met by Hughes agents, who shooed reporters away, bundled her into a limousine, hurried her off to "a hotel distant from the center of the city . . . I discovered I was practically locked in the hotel, unable to get in touch with anyone." All day she endured English lessons, '"orrible RKO peectures," rehearsals for her screen test, and the importuning of lawyers, who wanted her to sign a contract written in legal English.
At 2 a.m. Producer Hughes would drop by, order the hotel orchestra to keep right on playing after closing hours, and just the two of them in the darkened ballroom would dance romantically into the dawn. After six weeks of this, Gina broke down, signed "a preliminary piece of paper," flew back to Italy. Hughes has the option still, but Gina insists she will go to Hollywood "only if I get the right sort of contract."
After the Hollywood experience, it was one good part after another in a series of better-than-average Italian films. But the higher, she goes, the harder Gina has to work. She and Mirko have formed three corporations to handle her career and investments, and they have permitted themselves only two extravagances: a glaring red Lancia Aurelia and a pink stucco villa on Via Appia Antica, right next door to the place where the Empress Poppaea used to take her daily bath in the milk of 300 asses. They have planted 300 trees on the grounds, laid out broad English lawns, strewn the area with ancient paving stones and 3rd century sarcophagi. As she surveys these domestic comforts (which she can en joy. only on weekends), Gina sighs, not quite convincingly: "I hope that the producers next year will give me time to do a baby."
Tutelage & Torn Pants. Italian moviemakers may give her time for more than that if they are not very careful. The awful truth: the Italian movie industry is just about the craziest thing constructed in Italy since the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and it may fall down and go broke at any moment.