Sent for One

Time after time, the TV cameras in Hollywood zoomed in on Natalie Wood in her aisle seat, the betting-odds favorite for the best actress of 1961 for her performance in Splendor in the Grass. But the best actress of the year was sitting in Rome smoking Viceroys.

Sophia Loren's absence from last week's Academy Award ceremonies was unvarnished nervousness. The Hollywood correspondent of Rome's Il Messaggero had written a convincing argument that the "xenophobes" of Hollywood were not about to ''dig their graves with their own hands" by honoring furriners. Sophia canceled her plane reservations at the last moment, feeling too overwrought to fly halfway round the world to play the gracious loser.

Where It Counted. But she also stayed up all night. A friend called from Hollywood to say he would call her again if she won. Two and a half hours went by. "Someone else got the award, and no one has the courage to call me," wailed Sophia, lighting up another carton. In Hollywood. Burt Lancaster had just come forward to read off the names of the nominees for best actress. He got so carried away on his ministerial tones that he almost left Sophia out altogether. But her name was where it counted--in the winner's envelope.

The phone rang in Rome at 6:40 a.m. Sophia's husband. Carlo Ponti, picked it up, then shouted: "Sophia win? Sophia win? True? True?"

Doors opened. The big apartment began filling like a leaky boat. Sophia pirouetted around wildly in a white nightie and green peignoir, kissing Ponti, kissing her mother, her sister, her director Vittorio De Sica,* even one or two paparazzi. Back in Hollywood, M.C. Bob Hope curled a lip slightly and said: "It must be wonderful to have talent enough to just send for one."

Geared for television, the Oscar show itself worked like a greased piston, and was not much more interesting. Most of Bob Hope's jokes seemed to have been written by the muscle-bound clod whose likeness is preserved in the Oscar statuette. There were some good ones, however, including one quip on the gritty mood of current moviemaking. For the best sup porting actor award, Hope pointed out, "those in contention are actors who played a juvenile delinquent, a Nazi, a gangster, a gambler and a poolroom hustler."

Big Gesture. West Side Story won the Oscar for best film of the year, sweeping with it almost as many subsidiary Oscars as 1959's Ben-Hur (which set a record by copping eleven). West Side Story's George Chakiris and Rita Moreno won the awards for best supporting actor and actress. They beat out Montgomery Clift and Judy Gar land of Judgment at Nuremberg, which probably reflects the voters' disapproval of major stars lusting after minor Oscars. In an upset almost as surprising as Sophia's, Switzerland's Maximilian Schell (Nuremberg} was named the best actor of the year. "How did all these foreigners get in here?" cracked Hope.

But Hollywood had shown it could rise above its own parochialism and proved itself willing to honor achievement in any language. In Sophia's case, it was the first time that anyone had been voted an Oscar for a performance in a foreign-language film. "America has made, really, a big, big gesture," said Sophia in her careful English. "Only Americans can do this thing, to make an award like this for an Italian actress. So big."

As if to make up in some way for Natalie Wood's being left without an Oscar, Warner Bros, at week's end released a blizzard of pictures showing her being left with hardly anything. Taken on the set of Gypsy, a movie version of the Broadway hit in which Natalie will appear as Gypsy Rose Lee, the shots showed her stripping down to the Wood.

* In her next picture, De Sica will direct Sophia in a loose adaptation of Jean-Paul Sartre's The Condemned of Altona. The screenplay has perhaps the darkest plot that has ever thickened. A young German (Max Schell) feels so guilty about his part in the war that he becomes a dope addict. Various women try to cure him with love, first his sister, then his sister-in-law (Sophia Loren), but not even that much sex can help him. He has a fight with his ex-Nazi father (Fredric March), then a reconciliation. Then both men commit suicide.

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