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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Namedropping with Niven

When I worked the airport beat (this was London Airport, before it was known as Heathrow) the two people I saw and interviewed most frequently, by a long chalk, were David Niven and Sophia Loren, each passing through at least once a week to Geneva and Rome respectively. And of the two of them, I saw much more of Niven.
Airports are boring, soulless places. Holidaymakers may find a bit of excitement in anticipating their annual ten days on the Costas, but frequent travellers – and those poor benighted sods who work in these mini-townships – find none. For the airport’s ‘resident press’ corps of about a dozen hacks and snappers, there’s the additional frustration that everybody is going somewhere, and you are stuck there.
So Niven always lighted up my life. He’d check in and then, if I hadn’t been waiting for him, come and seek me out. During the long waits in the departure lounge he would regale me with stories about his life, his co-stars and about Hollywood. Years later, I discovered that he had been rehearsing the tales that were to form his best-seller, The Moon’s A Balloon, and create for him a reputation as one of the funniest and most engaging and entertaining chat-show guests of all time. He needed to talk and I was always delighted to listen; in that way we were the perfect couple.
He always came through Arrivals without luggage. Somehow – and I never figured out how – he managed to get somebody to collect his luggage and take it out to the waiting chauffeur. He still had to wait, like everybody else, but while waiting for it we could at least get a drink.
He spotted me wading through the dense Easter Saturday crowd to meet him as he emerged baggage-free from Arrivals, spotted my face above the travellers, waved a walking stick in the air, and shouted, across maybe 50 yards: ‘There you are, dear boy! Tell you what, come and have a pee with me… Got to have a piss, otherwise I’ll flood the fucking concourse!’
The thing was that, with his exceptional accent, it didn’t sound like swearing. So people said, ‘Ooh, look, that’s David Niven’, rather than ‘Ooh, did you hear what he just said?’ He had hurt his leg during filming, when thrown from a horse. Explaining the stick, he told me, in a voice that could be heard by maybe a hundred people: ‘An aircraft flew so low over us, it virtually passed between the horse’s fucking ears.’
He was due later that day to return as a celebrity guest at the Open Day of his old school, Stowe, and introduce a special screening of Guns of Navarone. I remember wondering in what terms he would explain the stick to the parents and boys.
Niven always expressed an interest in who else was travelling and to where, and one evening I passed my notebook across the table to show him a fairly impressive list of that day’s eminent arrivals and departures. I also told him that the list formed most of the text of my weekly letters home to my childhood sweetheart – people still wrote letters in those days – but said I was a bit embarrassed about having become such a blatant name-dropper.
‘As I said to David Niven today,’ I joked, ‘I really must stop name dropping!’
‘Don’t worry on that score,’ he assured me. ‘When you have just had tea with Sophia Loren [as he knew I had, that afternoon] people don’t expect you to tell them about the fucking waiter.’
Late one afternoon I told him that Trevor Howard and Rod Taylor would be flying out to Nice, shortly after he had taken off for Switzerland. ‘Be a pity to miss old Trevor,’ he said. ‘And Taylor’s such a pleasant young man…’
I told him I’d been talking to Taylor who’d said he understood that Howard was a big drinker. He planned to put him to the test in Nice, ‘by showing him how Australians can drink.’
‘Really?’ said Niven. ‘Trevor is going to enjoy that!’ He thought for a moment, then asked, ‘Isn’t there a later flight to Geneva tonight? Maybe I could change my booking.’ So I walked him to the BEA desk in Departures and he switched to a late night flight.
They all missed their flights that night.
I kept waking up to find bottles of light ale that had been ordered for me stacking up on the table. I gave them my best shot; however I was but a callow youth and I was playing here with world-cup standard drinkers. And they were all three on top form, drinking short after short and never faltering in their tales or reminiscences about Hollywood greats. I reckoned I could catch up on all their stories from Niven, at a later date.
In the morning I showed them where they could take a shower (Executive Club lounges hadn’t been invented), made sure they knew which flights they were supposed to be on to complete their journeys, and went home.
I awoke when it was time to return to LAP for my next shift. I tapped my jacket pocket confidently to ensure that my notebook was safe and when I reached the airport I went straight to the coffee bar in Departures (‘resident’ press could walk freely through passport control: there was no other form of security apart from an always-bored Special Branch man) and reached for the little blue book.
Sometime late during the previous overnight session I’d had the inspired idea to interview three of the world’s most experienced drinkers about their and their friends’ favourite cures for a hangover. It would make a great feature, I knew, and in my mind’s eye I could already see it in print in either the Express or the Mail.
I sipped black coffee and opened the notebook. There was page after page, headed DN, TH, RT… then HB would be Humphrey Bogart, RB Richard Burton, EF Errol Flynn...and then DN, TH, RT again as they had come up with second thoughts and suggestions. It was all written in quite beautiful, almost copperplate, Pitman’s shorthand. The trouble was that not a single line of it made any sense whatsoever.
When, eventually, Niven’s book came out I immediately bought two copies – one for me and one for my mother. She’d enjoy reading it, I reckoned, not least because she’d already have heard most of the stories in it, as related to her by me on my rare weekends spent at home in Leeds. She’d be able to tell her friends: ‘This story was in David Niven’s best-selling book, but our Revel told me about it, ages ago.’
She never got to see it. Immediately I started reading, it seemed that every time in his life Niven had used, or heard somebody else use, the word ‘fuck’ he had put it in his book.
Mum, I thought, would not have approved of the famous company I was keeping, if she knew how it talked.
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She’s the real thing

Living on a remote island, I hadn’t heard about Britney Spears, who I think is an actress [No: apparently she’s a singer. –Ed], getting $65million to promote Pepsi until I read it in the on-line Daily Telegraph leader column.
But 40 years ago, as a young reporter, I heard a possibly better story from David Niven about Sophia Loren doing it for nothing.
La Loren was hosting a live - remember that: it’s important - concert on TV called something like A Night Of A Thousand Stars, sponsored by Coca Cola (remember that, too).
At rehearsals the director said that, at the end of the show, she should go on stage, clapping. She should kiss Frank Sinatra, who was top of the bill and would still be receiving applause, then take the mike off him and ad-lib. It always sounded better if it was unrehearsed, he told her.
All she had to do, using her own words, was thank all the performers - she didn’t need to remember all their names - and thank the sponsor, also in her own words, for making it all possible, then say good night.
So she did that. She went on stage and kissed Sinatra, and took the mike and thanked all the stars “too many to name individually” then said:
“And a special word of thanks to our sponsor, without whom this wonderful night would not have been possible. I have to say that, all my life, I have been a great fan of Coke. I drink it every day... Although in Italy, of course, we call it Pepsi. Good night, everybody!”
Like a lot of Niven’s stories, it might not have been totally accurate. But one would dearly like to believe that it was.
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