(6 of 9)
None of this bothers either of them. She obviously loves him as much as she needs him. "Now she has all the best that is Italian," says Carlo frankly, "Neapolitan gaiety and artistic sense, and Milanese sense of proportion and balance, which she learned from me." For the rest, they are silent. "The one who loves very much," Sophia tells the endless strangers who ask for The Real Truth, "talks little about it." People say that Ponti serves as an image of the father she never had, but she treats him as if he were her own little boy. They say he is her Svengali, but at most he is only a part-time Svengali, being chiefly concerned with minding their considerable enterprises.
Pocket Aqueducts. Last year she and Ponti acquired a chalet in Bürgenstock overlooking Lake Lucerne, partly to establish themselves as residents of Switzerland in order to sidestep Italy's haphazard tax code. They keep an immense apartment in Rome. They have also bought and are refashioning a 16th century villa eleven miles southeast of the city. It is on 18 acres and has 50 rooms. Before they are through, it will cost them $2,000,000. The place sits on catacombs that will become the world's weirdest wine cellar. Sophia and Carlo will each have an apartment consisting of a bedroom, a library, a study and an oak-paneled bathroom. Outside, Carlo is excavating a 135-ft. swimming pool surrounded by a sort of pocket aqueduct with Romanesque arches on top of which will rise a huge, four-apartment guesthouse with 16th century curves and a frieze of stone statues and cannon balls.
The rest is greenhouses, olive groves, tennis courts, a trotting course, a farm-produce center with chickens, pigs, goats and sheep. At the bottom of the garden, Ponti is constructing a small monastery for Jesuits.
Edification. Stretched out in bed in one of her miscellaneous palaces, 27-year-old Sophia likes to think about her childhood. "Then I feel important," she says.
"It makes me feel that I have done something in life, and that I have achieved many things, and that I have been very fortunate, and it makes me feel well." She smokes a lot and drinks little. Her idea of a good evening is dinner in bed, then television until it puts her to sleep. She has a recurrent dream in which she always runs toward the sea. Hearing this, someone suggested that she needed a doctor. Pulling her pullover down tight across her front, she demands: "Do I look like I need a doctor?"
At home or on location in cities or deserts, she constantly plays American popular music on tape recorders and phonographs. Her lares and penates range from Ella Fitzgerald to Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee. She securely describes herself as a beautiful woman, but she fears that people think she is dumb as well. She is forever polishing her English, syllabically going over new words again and again: "Edification, feasible, feeesible, sì? That will be feasible. Good." She has trouble with some names, like Kerrygront and Clargable, and she says Barbara Stan-wich as if it came between slices of bread. She orders "Scotch on the stones" because it still gets the laugh it got when she first made the mistake.