A tipsy, ditsy blonde American starlet, wearing a clinging black décolleté dress, wanders into the Trevi Fountain in Rome. She tries to entice her escort to join her by calling, ‘Marcello, Marcello’, in seductive tones. This sequence from Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) is one of the wettest dreamiest images in cinema, and it made Swedish-born Anita Ekberg a sex symbol par excellence.

‘She had the beauty of a young goddess,’ Fellini commented. ‘The luminous colour of her skin, her clear ice-blue eyes, golden hair, exuberance, joie de vivre, made her into a grandiose creature, extra-terrestrial and at the same time moving and irresistible.’ Her co-star Marcello Mastrioanni was initially less impressed by the Nordic Goddess. ‘She reminded me of a German soldier of the Wehrmarcht who in a roundup asked me into a truck.’ However, after a week of getting soaked in the fountain and drying her dresses in the sunlight, Ekberg gained his respect and even affection.

According to Frank Tashlin who directed her in the punningly titled Hollywood or Bust (1956), Anita Ekberg was ‘a beautiful, tall, voluptuous leaning tower’. To quote Howard Hughes about another actress, ‘there are two important reasons for seeing her films’. Fellini placed Ekberg in a key position in his frieze of decadent modern Rome in La Dolce Vita, and in The Temptation of Dr Antonio episode from Boccaccio ’70 (1962), she is the gigantic, sexy model who comes down from a billboard advertising milk to pursue a little puritanical doctor who campaigned against it.

Although I knew that she had gained an immense amount of weight since those days, I was excited to meet this icon at last year’s Bratislava Film Festival where she had been invited as a special guest. The opening night of the festival was to begin literally with a splash. The Trevi Fountain scene would be projected and then Ekberg would be presented on stage. Instead, as the audience was still filing into the underlit and half-empty cinema, she took it upon herself to step on stage and announce who she was. There were no spotlights on her, which might have been the reasoning behind her curious behaviour.

She then spoke a little about herself and then asked the bemused spectators to ask her any questions. There was silence. ‘Come on’, she said. ‘I’ve never known such a dead lot. Is there anybody alive out there?’ She then stomped off stage and took her seat. The show started. The clip from La Dolce Vita rolled, after which she was introduced by the compére, but she stubbornly remained seated.

The face of the 72-year-old former Miss Sweden of 1951 was still comparatively lovely, but her imperious prima donna behavior was ugly. At a restaurant afterwards she complained that the fish she had ordered had not been cut up, and berated the waiter. ‘How do you expect me to eat a fish with a head and a tail still on it?’ Then admiring the wine glasses on the table, she expressed her desire to buy all of them from the restaurant. The manager was called and apologetically explained that they were not for sale.

The conversation turned to her films. I asked her what she thought of King Vidor who directed her in War and Peace (1956) in which, I thought, she gave one of her best performances. ‘King Vidor didn’t direct War and Peace,’ she snapped. I awaited some revelation about Vidor being drunk all the time and his assistant having taken over. ‘Oh, who directed it?’ I asked timidly. ‘I don’t remember, but it wasn’t King Vidor.’ Inevitably, La Dolce Vita was mentioned. ‘It was I who made Fellini famous, not the other way around. When the film was presented in New York, the distributor reproduced the fountain scene on a billboard as high as a sky scraper. My name was in the middle in huge letters, Fellini's was at the bottom, very tiny. Now the name of Fellini has become very great, mine very little.’

It was best to close one's eyes and picture oneself, like Marcello, lost in the waters of the Trevi Fountain and her embrace.

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© Copyright Ronald Bergan 2005. No part of this article may be reprinted without permission of the author.
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