Charles Wooley: on interviewing Hollywood stars

Once upon a time in Hollywood, back when she was still a big star, I interviewed Sophia Loren. It was a big deal for 60 Minutes, but doubly so for me, because Sophia and I had a past.

Italian actor Sophia Loren in 1962.

ONCE upon a time in Hollywood, back when she was still a big star, I interviewed Sophia Loren. It was a big deal for 60 Minutes, but doubly so for me, because Sophia and I had a past.

When I was 12, Sophia Loren was the most beautiful woman in the world and the first woman I longed for.

Her buxom allures were abundantly on display in Frank Long’s barber’s shop in Launceston’s northern suburbs.

Even now, I can smell the heady mix of Brilliantine and Californian Poppy (hair cream), as Sophia, dripping wet and diaphanously clad, emerges like a goddess from the sea.

Waiting my turn in the chair I was “reading” the now long-defunct Pix Magazine, once the Australian home of the most curvaceous international movie stars of the early ’60s.

Not even the staples in Sophia Loren’s midriff could calm the racing beat of my 12-year-old heart.

Fast-forward decades and, improbably, I was flying across the Pacific to sit down with that same goddess, the divine object of those first juvenile stirrings.

“Mate, this is a must read. It is everything you need to know about Sophia,” said my producer handing me a copy of the book Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: My Life, by Sophia Loren.

I threw that book away during the interview (spoiler alert) so I can only quote from memory, but it began much like this: “It was not easy being born illegitimate in Naples in pre-war conservative Catholic Italy”.

So began my interview. “Sophia it couldn’t have been easy being born illegitimate in Naples in pre-war conservative Catholic Italy?”

The diva exploded like Vesuvius. “Hey what is it that’s happening here? What kind of interview you call this when you start out by calling me ‘illegitimate’?”

She waved her arms wildly and I thought she might hit me. Sophia appealed to the film crew who were by now pretending they had never met me.

“What is going on here? How come straight away he calls me a bastard?”

I reached out to mollify her by tendering the offending copy of My Life by Sophia Loren. “Sorry Sophia, but please just read the first page of your book.”

It was almost as if she had never seen the book before, but she read anyway, “It was not easy being born illegitimate in pre-war conservative Catholic Italy.”

Her anger subsided as quickly as a passing Mediterranean storm. She shrugged, handed back the book and declared an end to the whole unpleasant matter.

“OK,” she sighed. “So, I say it once in the book and I never wanna talk about it again.”

Inspired to make a grand Italian flourish, I threw the book across the studio and we started over. This time I told her what she really wanted to hear, about my childish infatuation in Frank Long’s barber’s shop. And this time she loved me back.

A life in media has taught me that although stars might twinkle, that is mostly all they do. They don’t even read their own autobiographies, let alone write them.

Without a surrounding constellation of brilliant producers, directors, writers and minders, the illusory twinkle of stardom would quickly vanish into a black hole.

Years later, I interviewed one of the biggest ’90s Hollywood stars, and then afterwards, one of her disgruntled producers confided over a quiet Budweiser, “She is dumb as a box-full of hair.

“But she has so many people blowing smoke up her ass, she actually thinks she directed the movie and wrote her own lines.”

Oh dear! I won’t disillusion you with the name but I had thought at least for once in Hollywood I had secured a quite engaging interview with a famous star.

But apparently, I had simply been blinded by the light.

Journalists can at times be terrible toadies, especially when they have stars in their eyes. Rarely are we reliable drama critics, nor when it comes to public life are we always good judges of character.

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Over time I have been beguiled by politicians poles apart, like Bill Clinton and Margaret Thatcher or Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, and by Bill Shorten (well it was a long, boring flight) and Malcolm Turnbull (he approved of my library) and by hundreds of others.

I came away from such encounters saying that despite appearances, “He’s not such a bad bloke after all.” History so often proves us wrong.

In Europe on the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, I met an ancient American correspondent who had met Hitler in 1939, at his Berghof retreat in the Bavarian Alps.

He was now ashamed that he had ever found the Fuhrer “charming”.

The venerable but gullible scribe told me, “My wife and I were invited to lunch and the Fuhrer was most solicitous of our welfare.

He was a vegetarian, but had gone out of his way to provide us with venison from his estate and wine, although he didn’t seem to drink himself.

“Eva was there, too, and we had a most convivial time. We came away thinking Adolph Hitler was a hell of a charming man.

“ It was only much later that we learnt about the unpleasantness with the Jewish people. I can’t believe I got it so badly wrong.”

That was among the worst cases of journalistic seduction I have ever heard.

It put me forever on guard against the charms and persuasions of all dictators, no matter where we find them and no matter what blandishments they offer.

I will never forget the misjudgment of that complaisant and naive old pre-war American journalist — if only because I fear that, once again, we live in such times.