My date with The Millionairess

I first heard the name of Bill Tuttle, who has died aged 95, when Sophia Loren mentioned it to me during an interview more than 40 years ago.

She was making a movie called Lady L co-starring Paul Newman and David Niven and was required by the script, written and directed by Peter Ustinov, to age from 18 to 80.

Looking 18 was no problem for La Loren (she was 30 at the time) but progressing through six more decades required all the ingenuity of Mr Tuttle, who was MGM’s top make-up man. He had been assistant make-up artist for The Wizard of Oz in 1939.

The ageing process on Loren’s face and neck took hours every morning as layers of rubber were overlaid and etched with wrinkles and crows’ feet, capillary tubes simulated prominent veins, and bags were created beneath her stunning brown, green-tinged, almond-shaped eyes.

How accurate his work was can be judged by comparing pictures of the 80-year-old Lady L character with recent pictures of the former movie star who will be 73 next month. To me – but I am biased – the basic effect was to make the then most beautiful woman in the world look like the most beautiful woman in the world with tons of stage make-up.

I saw her on TV recently and she looked less like the aged lady in the movie and more like she had looked when we met in 1965.

In those days there was no Oscar for best make-up – this wasn’t to be introduced until 1981 – but earlier in 1965 the Academy had created one just for Bill Tuttle – to commemorate his work on the 7 Faces of Dr Lao, starring Tony Randall in the title role.

Sophia Loren was born in the same month and the same year as Brigitte Bardot, and I don’t wish to appear ungallant, but…

Anyway, did I ever tell you about the date I had with Sophia Loren? No? You must be the only one, then.

I was working the airport beat mainly interviewing celebs, except that, in 1965, they were called stars and were, in fact, real celebrities who were recognisable on an international scale. We would meet at least twice a week as she flitted between home in Rome and the main set in Castle Howard, Yorkshire, and we’d chat in the departure lounge. All I had to do was provide a few lines to give the papers an excuse to carry another photograph of her. There was plenty of different subject matter: her marriage to Carlo Ponti had been denounced by the Vatican; she had a natural gift for one-liners (‘everything you see, I owe to spaghetti’); sometimes we even talked about the movie which was totally forgettable, except by me.

I can picture her now (ok, I have a photograph of us both on my desk).

She was not a conventional beauty: her nose was perhaps too aquiline, her nostrils too flared, her mouth perhaps a little too wide and her lips too prominent. She looked and moved (she told me this and I of course refuted it) like a giraffe – ‘a pretty dumb animal!’ – because she thought her neck and her legs were too long.

I was well qualified to argue because, as a schoolboy five years earlier, I had sat and gawped at her performance with Peter Sellers in The Millionairess. Well, not so much at her performance as at her figure, for she wore a basque. And a hat. And gloves. Stills from the movie were published in almost every newspaper and magazine in the western world. Like every kid of my generation I knew more about La Loren than about any other Italian from Julius Caesar to Garibaldi. She was 5ft 8ins, 120 pounds, 38-24-37. I had no idea what Garibaldi looked like.

Nevertheless she insisted: ‘I am not a sexy pot. Sex appeal is 50 per cent what you’ve got and 50 per cent what people think you’ve got.’

So there we were, sitting in familiar intimacy in departures, the most lusted-after woman on the planet, and your correspondent. On this occasion she had sent her driver from the Dorchester to the door of the Terminal Two press room to ask for me and invite me to join her in the lounge. She actually did that. She was about to appear on the front cover of Vogue and they’d given her all the transparencies of the shoot so she could choose the photos she preferred and eliminate any she didn’t like. She invited me to help her make a choice.

‘We’ve seen a lot of each other recently,’ she said, as she drew a chinagraph line across a photograph of her face. ‘But I am going to be in Italy for a few weeks so you won’t see me for a while.’ Sheets of trannies slid from my knees to the Cyril Lord carpet. I must have appeared crestfallen, for she immediately removed her glasses, fixed me with those exotic eyes, smiled with those luscious lips, and said: ‘But I am coming back!’ And she dictated the details of her return flight on Alitalia for me to enter in my notebook.

‘I’ll be here,’ I promised.

‘Great,’ she said. ‘So we have a date!’

And that was it, really. But look. I was a dreamy starry-eyed youth of 20 and she was Sophia Loren. And we had a date. She had said so herself with those fantastic fleshy lips.

I floated back to the press room and said: ‘Hey – who’s got a date with Sophia, then?’

I was greeted by a barrage of telephone directories, coffee cups and beer bottles. But the lads were just jealous. They could not destroy the magical moment.

When she returned she was on the arm of Carlo Ponti. She wore her sunglasses, like always, and he was so small I thought he looked like her guide dog. She introduced us and as we shook hands he just snorted, in that way Italian millionaire film directors do.

I guess she had decided that she preferred older men. But I’ll get over it, one day. I really will.
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