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Stephen Gundle
lifestyle took many forms, but it was always writ large, opulent, excessive, fantastic,
and exciting with respect to normal lived lives. Stars were, as Edgar Morin wrote
in 1957, beautiful, euphorically happy, healthy, rich, untroubled, leisured, at least
in their publicity. Their love lives, weddings, houses, clothes, tastes, favorite haunts
and so on were of enormous interest. 12 Illustrated weekly magazines like Oggi and
Epoca, which looked to Life as a model, conveyed these images to middle-class
Italian families.
The Rome wedding of Tyrone Power and Linda Christian in early 1949 was a
defining moment which attracted enormous press attention. Like everything
associated with glamour, it was slightly unrespectable. Power’s divorce from the
French actress Annabella became definitive only on the day of the wedding; the
latter was also ostentatious and therefore not in the best of taste. The journalist
Ugo Zatterin recounted it in Oggi as though it were a publicity stunt. “Tyrone
Power has acted in his second wedding,” he wrote:
At the start of the ceremony everything made the Church of Saint Francesca Romana
resemble a Hollywood “studio.” Mixed groups of people were making a dull, background
noise, huge cables snaked between the golden chairs, flashes of neon lighting gave a
white glow to the frescoes of the apse and, hidden among the white lilacs of the priedieu,
two cold microphones were waiting to gather the fateful “I do” of Linda and Tyrone
for the delight of radio audiences in Italy, France, Switzerland and America. The “shoot”
had been prepared in every detail. Since the altar did not lend itself well to the “visibility
of the stalls,” a substitute was set up at the foot of the statue of Saint Francesca. Even
the little organ of the church was deemed inadequate for the musical accompaniment and
another, much larger one was temporarily installed.
The spectacle also attracted the attention of the local population:
The curious and noisy Roman crowd provided the mass audience. People perched with
uneasy balance on the ruins surrounding the church, on the arches of the Colosseum and
on the fallen pillars of the temple of Venus and of Rome. An entire “Celere” unit,
Carabinieri on white horses whirling truncheons, tried to prevent thousands of uninvited
spectators from spilling on to the bride and groom and the few genuine guests. An acute,
high-pitched, almost hysterical yell from the thousand women stuck behind a gate was
the “Action!” that began the shoot. Throughout the whole ceremony the voice of the
priest and the solemn tone of the organ were overwhelmed by the distant shouting of the
crowd and the closer whirring of the movie cameras. 13
The wedding showed that American celebrities could be “adopted” by Italy, could
be used for internal purposes and could arouse enthusiasm, probably especially
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