La Dolce Ekberg

When Anita Ekberg, she of the flowing flaxen mane and the overflowing Nordic frame, set the tone for Federico Fellini's esoteric epic La Dolce Vita with a gown-popping Roman rock-'n'-roll fertility rite, she might have been starring in a rerun of This is Your Life. It was a stroke of pure artistic and financial genius worthy of the Medicis that had Fellini cast La Ekberg as the child-of-nature American movie star who soaks up Rome's high-level hanky-panky. Several scenes in La Dolce Vita come off like newsreel clips of past Ekbergian revelries.

Back in 1958, Hollywood expatriate Anita, a guest at a Roman night-club soiree sponsored by full-time socialite, sometime photographer Peter Howard, was caught up in the spirit, or spirits, of the evening, tossing off a sheath-straining cha-cha that made up in exuberance what it lacked in subtlety. Not to be daunted by any Swedish pastry, one Haisch Nana, a far-from-brittle bit of Turkish taffy, then proceeded to strip until she was completely exhausted and almost as completely exposed. The carabinièri finally put a damper on the evening's activities, swooping down midst cries of the Italian equivalent of "It's a raid!" The ever-present Roman Photographers had by that time snapped everything in sight and the Italian tabloids had a field day. Anita, somewhat chastened, went back to less-front-pageish divertisements, except for a brief yet exhilarating episode last year when she held a coterie of Roman reporters and photogs at bay with a bow and arrow while her producer-escort chose discretion as the better part of valor and let Anita make all the William Tell overtures.

It has been Anita's penchant, until her present Fellini-sparked renaissance, to garner more newspaper space for her off-screen contretemps than for any thesping accomplishments. In August of 1956, Playboy chronicled Anita au naturel, in the flesh and in bronze, the latter a statue executed with loving attention to detail by Cuban-based Hungarian exile Sepy Dobronyi. The sculpture and the pix that ostensibly were taken to aid the sculptor set off a minor tempest in a Miami teapot when one-time husband Anthony Steel threw a couple of left hooks at Dobronyi at Anita's behest.

According to Steel, Anita was much given to demanding this sort of knuckle-chafing chivalry. He has been quoted as saying words to the effect that: "She was always making me do things like that. She would say, 'Darling, I don't like the way that man over there is looking at me. Go over and hit him.' So I would go over and hit him." Even for a muscular chap like Steel this could be rather nerve-racking.

But it was just this sort of thing that made Anita a member of that breed peculiar to Hollywood -- movie stars with almost no film credits whose stellar status has been achieved on the basis of press books packed with off-screen peccadilloes. The sensational Playboy Ekberg uncoverage brought Anita to the apex of a somewhat less than stratospheric Hollywood career that included such diverse roles as a Chinese peasant in Blood Alley and as an Asian nautch dancer in a Z costume epic, Zarak. Ekberg, who never seemed to receive Hollywood parts big enough for her admittedly immense charms, finally cut out for the Continment and the company of the rather racy nobility who lend an aroma of high life to Roma's beguiling night life. It was in Rome that Anita gained a reputation and dropped a husband as she embarked on assorted public and private escapades.

That was the Ekberg story -- a minor flick here, a major newspaper pic there -- until La Dolce Vita. Now, with a starring role in the top all-time European box-office smash tucked neatly in her bodice. Anita's basking in the Swede smell of success -- whether it's cruising on a yacht in the Mediterranean or steaming the camera lenses in Fellini's latest effort, Boccaccio 70. Meanwhile, to movie audiences all over the world, Anita has become the nubilest Roman of them all.