You, Capucine. The first time I saw you on the screen I thought you looked like Ingrid Bergman but without blood. That crack got laughs. But at that time, people knew who you were.  I thought it was funny that your name was like cappuccino. But I didn’t know then that cappuccino was named after the capuchin monks. The hooded white cowl—the foamy milk. And the brown cloak the coffee. Now I know that you chose the name of a French flower, to rescue you from the more mundane Germaine Lefebvre. The most interesting thing about your forbidding beauty was what a light touch you had in playing comedy. You with your regal aristocratic looks had a sense of humor. How rare that is. Was. Now of course we know that beautiful women can also be hilarious. We even knew it then but thought that every example was an exception. Think Kay Kendall. Carole Lombard. Probably the same percentage as in the general population. But one doesn’t expect it in people who are, well, let’s admit it, as snootily beautiful as you.

You, Silvana. I remember as a child seeing you in what, in those days, we called coming attractions—now we call them trailers or previews—for Bitter Rice, I remember you were sitting on a bed wearing a black slip. You had hair under your armpits. I can’t say for sure if I had a little bump in my 6- or 7-year old pants but I certainly remembered that image. When I saw the movie, Bitter Rice fairly recently, you were still wearing a black slip as you sat on the same bed. You still had hair under your armpits, even though movie stars today would never dream of having hair under their armpits. Americans never did. They still don’t. When you were in the rice fields planting rice seedlings, wearing black stockings and showing, for that time, a daring amount of thigh, I remembered that, too.

Obviously you made a great impression on me as a child and on my childhood libido. When I saw the film, just a few years ago, you, the real Silvana Mangano, as opposed to the character you play in the film, also called Silvana, was dead. It seemed creepy to be attracted or to have been attracted to someone who had died–in a movie that was made about 50 years ago. But that’s part of what movies are about. Freezing and isolating beauty. Perpetuating desire. Keeping mortal flesh fresh, as if it were kept in a bottle of formaldehyde, permitting the viewer to imagine…imagine what? Imagine love? Imagine desire? Imagine sexual attraction? Yes. Especially if it’s impossible. If you were still alive, you would probably be a grandmother many times over. For all I know, you may even have been one before your death. Dead from cancer at the age of 59. But people die of cancer all the time. Movie stars are people too so they die from cancer as well. But things have changed, at least for me. I had cancer last year. We now have that in common. So much to talk about. And I was just about the age that you were when you died. I wanted, if I could, go back into the past and, if I knew you—that’s already a lot of ifs—to cradle you in my arms and tell you that everything would be alright. Even though it wouldn’t be alright. And we both would knew it wouldn’t. But we all appreciate the unsolicited gesture of assurance and hearing the lie, momentarily believing it, wanting and needing to believe.

You, Silvana. Your nose got longer, your face got more aquiline over the years as if a sculptor of the flesh was secretly remodeling your face, scraping minute layers of flesh away, millimeter by millimeter, year after year, burnishing your flesh until the bone practically shone through, making you as sleek as a borzoi or a machine built for speed. The mask that you wear in the Pasolini and Visconti films, films that will grant you immortality, is a daunting apparition but it was Bitter Rice that gave men hard-ons all over the world. Your new forbidding features dared anyone to kiss you—your face, despite its new unearthly beauty, looked as inviting as a bear trap—although your face in Bitter Rice dared everyone not to fall in love with you. Your face and pouty lips were an invitation for men everywhere, encouraging them to dream about rolling down your black stockings.

Times change. We become different  people. You did. Film directors mold us or, rather, you to their needs. But let’s not pretend that that mask of ice wasn’t hiding beneath the warm, fleshy exterior, the Miss Roma face you wore when you were younger. One must have the capability of being transformed. Nothing can be created where nothing exists. Bela Lugosi had to be Dracula before he became Dracula. Don’t imagine for a moment that it was a part he was playing. He didn’t earn Dracula-hood. He just realized the Dracula-hood in himself. You can’t be what you aren’t if you aren’t that.

You Silvana, your alabaster skin is buffed into an eggshell thin translucence with lips that are borrowed from a cycladic sculpture. Your mysteriously disappeared eyebrows have been replaced by sharp lines that suggest perpetually surprised but disapproving parentheses. You become a monstre sacrée as did Capucine in Fellini Satyricon. An untouchable goddess. Time was implicated in helping you achieve god-hood. Both of you, gorgeous gorgons, glorious gargoyles. Pasolini and Visconti both, as if they discussed it, conspired to mold you, Silvana, into a stunning looking paradigm of eternal harpiness. Visconti did not much like women, not in his films he didn’t. His sympathies and hormones are always and very clearly with the incredibly handsome young men who are foregrounded in his films. Pasolini did not much like women either, except for his mother, and it too shows in his movies. But both of them, however, in their films are kind to you because they are able to reveal the real beauty of the middle-aged you.

You Silvana. You died at the age of 59. From cancer. You Capucine, the world having left you behind, now acting in third-rate European co-productions or mediocre French and Italian TV movies, no longer in demand, no longer as beautiful as you used to be—but who is?—not being fortunate enough to have a Pasolini or Visconti to rescue you from cinematic oblivion, you jump out of a window at the age of 57. Who knows why people jump out of windows. One would immediately think, oh, her age—she’s no longer a star and can’t forgive a world that allowed her to grow older. Or didn’t have a husband who loved her enough. Or a family in whose bosom she could find comfort. That’s always a good one—the myth that a family can give you what you can’t give yourself. Or maybe a disappointing love affair, another favorite. Maybe you couldn’t face the fact that you were approaching 60, your aging body pulling your face along with it, the time of youthful beauty having abandoned you long ago. We can only speculate. But to what end? We’ll never know. We’ll never feel the way you did when you leapt out of the window. We’ll never be you. Although we can still see some of your films, those that are still available. Someday they’ll see the films you made when you were in your 30s and wonder, “Who was that beauty? Whatever became of her? Now she should have had a career.” You did. Most of your big Hollywood films were produced by your long-time lover. And then it stopped. But as in life, you have to constantly re-invent yourself. Just as you, Silvana, did—from a luscious neo-realist babe, in a decadent, erotic betrayal of neo-realism, into a Viscontian ideal of marbleized unforgiving beauty and with Pasolini, into a variation of the distant unapproachable mother sharing her sibylline secrets with no one.

Could it be that you, Capucine, found your ticket to immortality in The Pink Panther? A sobering thought, playing second fiddle to Inspector Clouseau, your patrician imperturbable beauty as a counterbalance to his incessant bumbling. Complementing each other, arm-wrestling each other, making you appear doubly hilarious, because of your distant beauty, as the philandering wife who has to put up, without condescension, with the perpetually incompetent Clouseau. Maybe that will be your legacy. One hates to think so but very likely.

You Capucine, you weren’t one of those models-who-turn-actresses who had voices that did not match their looks. Your voice in many languages was a perfect fit with your face. In your truncated biography it says you had affairs with Peter Sellers and William Holden, who left you an ungenerous $50,000 in his will. And other lovers, too. And why not? A beautiful woman like you, a woman with a sense of humor… You had affairs with dead actors who were fortunate enough to have been in films that survived better and longer than yours. Does any of it matter now? Life is brutal. Life is unfair. Yours. Theirs. Ours. But let’s put it another way. You had something that most of us never get. You were a star, although of a lesser magnitude than star stars. A red dwarf rather than a white mega.

You were in demand. You were seen. Your face was familiar all over the world. You had access to a life most of us can’t even begin to imagine. You may miss that life but you shouldn’t. It was there for a while and then it stopped. How can one regret that it didn’t go on forever? Nothing does. Neither happiness nor misery. Your life was no better than anyone else’s—no, that’s not true. But your unhappiness was no more bitter than other peoples’. But as we know, that‘s cold comfort farm. It’s like saying a person with a bad cold doesn’t have as much right to complain or as much discomfort as someone with a life-threatening disease. Our unhappinesses in no way lessens yours nor can it give you any comfort. And certainly vice-versa. But you have to look at it this way, both of you, Silvana, Capucine—movie stars can’t go on forever and, more often than not, hit their peak in their youth when their looks carry them through the rough spots of forgettable movies. You both did as well as anyone, better than most.

Take, for instance—James Dean 24, Marilyn Monroe 36, Elvis 42—as if those numbers are on the back of their baseball uniforms. They didn’t have the time to grow old, possibly knowing that older versions of themselves could only rob the public of its desire to imagine what still might come, what might have been. Their deaths precluded disappointment. You Silvana, you Capucine are in another realm. Neither young nor old. Too old for people to cluck—so young, so beautiful, so much potential unexplored. The best that was yet to come would never come. Too young to say, well, it was a goodly run, perhaps even a long run. No wish unfulfilled, no movies unmade, no regrets. And if there are regrets—tough. But one doesn’t live or die for the amusement of an unseen public, which doesn’t really care in any case. One doesn’t keep an eye cocked on immortality as one is dying. One dies. Without fanfare, without glory, without apology, without laurel wreaths and victory parades, and the promise of thousands of grieving mourners who might never show up. One would much prefer to live than to be apotheosized after death. Isn’t that true? Especially, as in the case of you, Silvana, and you, Capucine, to die mostly forgotten and soon, in death, to be even more forgotten, as if “forgottenness” has degrees, to be washed over by the waves of time as if one never existed. Well, not forgotten but not remembered either. But both of you will exist as long as some of us remember you. And, you Silvana, even after that—for people who will know or will care or will care enough to know who Pasolini and Visconti are. They will say—who is that glacial enigmatic harpy, who also is such a finely chiseled beauty, her eyes practically disappearing in an opaque puddle of mascara and eye shadow?

And then there were the other all too early deaths, many of them were just around your age. Flaubert, 58. Joyce, 59. Woolf, 59. Dostoyevsky, 60. Hemingway, 61. Melville, 62.  All of them had finished their life’s work before they were claimed by death. Maybe there would have been more and maybe they could have surpassed the works which made their respective reputations. We’ll never know. Even if one lives to work, one lives, more importantly, to live. Think of all those writers, none of them died too young to achieve what they needed to achieve. And the same is true with beauties like you, what you might have done, you’ve already done. Movies are merciless. It’s a youth machine. It’s a beauty machine. It devours its own children. It’s a hungry god that can never get enough, its maw an endless pit.

You Silvana, You Capucine—both in your lonely graves, you are beautiful still, more distant than ever. But this time the distance is of a more insurmountable sort. Even if we or, at least, many of us, have forgotten you or are forgetting you with each passing year—except for those rare moments when your celluloid image flutters across a darkened screen or on a cathode ray tube or on a wall of clouds or memory—your films, seen or glimpsed, will sporadically remind us of who you once were.

Let us pretend that you, Silvana, and you, Capucine, cheekbone divas united only in your all-too-early deaths but also in my yoking the two of you together, are eternally playing bridge with Humphrey Bogart, dead of cancer at the age of 58, and Gary Cooper—cancer at 61—although by the time he died he looked like Methuselah’s dad. Maybe Delphine Seyrig, the perpetually swooning star of Last Year at Marienbad, always on the verge of fainting, who dies, also of cancer at the age of 58, will pinch hit, in case any of you needs a break or wants to go to the bathroom. Or maybe the two of you are at a different table with, say, Delphine and Susan Hayward, class of ‘58.

It’s a festive gaming room or as festive as a place like that can be, glittering with the famous deceased. No chandeliers, no baroque wall sconces, no fancy candelabras twisted into fantastic shapes The only source of illumination in the darkened space comes from the former actors themselves, as if they had absorbed the essence of all the studio lights that shone on them for years and years. They look as radiant as they were in their finest films, as if the light was emanating from their skin, as if they were radioactively glowing in the darkness that enveloped them.

Everyone was there, drinking champagne, nibbling at caviar, laughing gaily, or as gaily as they could under the circumstances, and reminiscing about the old days, comparing war stories, regaling each other with hilarious anecdotes about the making of their respective movies. The jocularity distracts them from mulling over the tragic events that brought them, unasked, unforeseen, uninvited, to the gaming tables. No civilians allowed.  No fans, no autograph hounds, no star-gazers, no movie-mad aficionados, no idol worshippers, no stalkers, no fanzine freaks, no paparazzi. Just stars playing cards with stars. Exactly the way it should be.

Mark Rappaport