A BIT OF MY 'LA DOLCE VITA'
A BIT OF MY LA DOLCE VITA
It’s been a hectic week of travel from London to New York to Los Angeles for pleasure, work, and fine dining. In one of the airports, I passed through I found a restaurant for breakfast where, of all things, Federico Fellini’s ‘La Dolce Vita’ (aka The Sweet Life) was playing on multiple screens. So over hash browns and chicken sausage I watched sub-titled scenes from the 1960 Italian classic, a quite unexpected pleasure after a typically mind-numbing experience of getting through a TSA checkpoint.
I love ‘La Dolce Vita’ for several reasons – it’s visual style, it’s panoramic vision of Rome, it’s wrestling with decadence and spirituality etc. But to be honest, the film fascinates me because I completely identify with Marcello Mastroianni celebrity journalist, a creature of tabloid newspapers who’s access to fame allows him entry to a lifestyle he’d never sample otherwise
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Back in the 1980s, when music journalism was my full-time job, I had access to parties, events, and women I’d have never experienced otherwise. In Fellini’s film Marcello (the character’s name is the same as the actor) has a number of intense encounters over the course of seven days with heiresses and starlets, including one crazy night into morning when he ends up cavorting in Rome’s Trevi Fountain with blond bombshell Anita Ekberg. I never had anything quite as extreme happen to me, but I did have some encounters with lovely bold face names.
As I watched ‘La Dolce Vita’ while having breakfast I recalled several unexpected events, but the most powerful one occurred when I was very young. It was salacious in any way, but it had an undercurrent of desire that still makes me smile. I was in my early twenties, very new to journalism, when I was assigned to attend a movie junket in Manhattan for a film starring several major black stars. But what really excited me about the gig was that one of the supporting actresses was a woman I’d had a crush on since the days of blaxploitation movies.
After sitting with the male leads, I was placed at a table with the actress, who was about fifteen years older than me and was still fine as hell. My puppy dog looks, and adorning questions must have amused her because, after the junket was over, I found myself spending the afternoon with her. We went shopping on Fifth Avenue with me carrying her bags. We sat for a bit in Central Park talking on a bench. We had a had lunch at a posh restaurant in the West 50s that the movie studio ended up paying for. It was first time being around a woman who I’d first seen larger than life on a movie screen and it was intoxicating. I’ll never forget her smile or the thrill of that long afternoon.
Nothing sexual happened. We parted with a nice hug and then she took her shopping bags back into the hotel. Not quite on the level of Marcello’s misadventures in ‘La Dolce Vita,’ but close enough that I cherish the memory all these years later, one that I can tell now without any risk of embarrassment. The truth is that living ‘La Dolce Vita’ is an experience of long nights and fleeting acquaintances that, seductive as it is, can lead you deeply astray and away from the rhythms of regular life. At the end of Fellini’s masterpiece Marcello hosts a disastrous party that degrades everyone in attendance. I have been to a few of those and they never end well despite the “fun” everyone seems to have at the time. Finishing my breakfast I headed to my flight and took one more look back at Marcello, glad my sweet life hadn’t made me sour.