Goring the Egotists

Oriana Fallaci likes to be disliked.

The more hostility between her and her subject, she feels, the better the interview. In waging this belligerent kind of journalism, her weapons are a tape recorder, an eye-catching figure and a vulnerable glint in her wide blue eyes. She roams the world in search of people who are not simpatico but antipatico, and she has bagged dozens--Norman Mailer, Federico Fellini, Michael Caine, Dean Martin, El Cordobes, Hugh

Hefner and the Duchess of Alba, to name a few. The results have made Oriana, at 37, Italy's leading woman journalist with a following in many other countries as well. She has just published a collection of her interviews.

The English language version is appropriately titled The Egotists.

The egotists do not have the stage to themselves. Petite intense Oriana is much in evidence in all of her interviews.

Her approach is blunt. She told H. Rap Brown: "It would be hard to find a racist who is more racist than you are, a man more filled with hate." She used irony on Fellini. "Not even about Giuseppe Verdi has so much been written. But then you are the Giuseppe Verdi of today. You even look alike, especially the hat. No, please, why are you hiding your hat?"

Sexless in Paradise. Oriana stays in command during an interview; she has the first word and the last. After complaining to Oriana that she could never find a man strong enough to dominate her, Actress Anna Magnani finally asked, "Tell me, what do you really think of me?" Replied Oriana: "I think--I think you're a great man, Signora Magnani." When she caught Hugh Hefner in flagrant hypocrisy, Oriana remarked, "Here the donkey falls."

Hefner: What did you say?

Fallaci: Nothing. It's an Italian way of speaking.

Hefner: What does it mean?

Fallaci: It means that while I'll go to hell, you'll go to paradise, Mr. Hefner. There, among the saints and martyrs, together with your Bunnies, you'll go to discuss the sex of the angels.

Hefner: Do they have sex?

Fallaci: They don't.

Oriana's victims react with predictable outrage. "Dirty liar. Rude little bitch!" Fellini called her in the course of his interview. Nevertheless, the egotists invariably say much more than they plan to. Oriana managed to bring to the surface Nguyen Cao Ky's latent anti-Americanism: "I've never thought that the white race is a superior race--on the contrary. You have to realize that the future is here among us, not among you whites. America should not be called 'the New World' any more; it should be called 'the Old World.' Its time is over." Geraldine Chaplin spoke of her father: "Certainly I'm afraid of my father. I feel this constant reproof, this constant comparison. I feel that only when I'm no longer in his shadow, when I'm no longer afraid of him, that only then will I finally be able to do something myself." Alfred Hitchcock gave one of the less-known reasons why he has filmed his thrillers over the years. "I spent three years studying with the Jesuits. They used to terrify me to death with everything, and now I'm getting my own "back by terrifying other people."

Often Oriana rouses her subjects to introspective eloquence. "Women today," said Jeanne Moreau, "tend so much to minimize the gift of giving themselves and to belittle the woman who gives herself. In French novels of the last century one often reads this phrase, which I find so right, 'I gave myself.' Today it's no longer a gift, it's more like abandonment, prompted by outside factors such as a pleasant evening, a momentary closeness, holidays, sunshine, whisky, a movie."

Inside Is Better. When Oriana's subjects read the result of the interview, they often complain that she has fabricated the quotes. She denies it. But she does take a few liberties. "I transcribe the whole interview," she says, "then I make it into what I print in the same way that a movie director makes a film--eliminating and cutting and splicing." This makes her a kind of impresario of interviews, which she freely admits. "Of course I'm an actress, an egotist. The story is good when I put myself in."

Oriana learned to be daring as she grew up in Florence under Mussolini. Her father, a onetime socialist politician, was in and out of jail because of his anti-Fascist activities, and she herself studied English in school in order to assist Englishmen and Americans in the underground. Influenced by her uncle, Bruno Fallaci, founder of the magazine Epoca, she started reporting at 17 while attending medical school at the University of Florence. Ultimately, she says, "I gave up what I loved, medicine, for what provided money. Journalism is my Pygmalion." It also became her love; her heart is in her work for the picture magazine L'Europeo, and apparently not anywhere else. "To get married," she explains, "only means that later you have to get a divorce."

Sometimes she gets more involved in her stories than even she would like to be. During last month's rioting in Mexico City, she was shot twice in the leg, once in the back. With her usual self-dramatization, she wrote a piece for L'Europeo that was entitled "The Night of Blood in Which I Was Wounded." No body wounds Oriana without paying for it. When the Mexican police were taunting her while she was awaiting help in the hospital, she reported that she shouted at them: "You better play God now, because if I live I will shower filth on Mexican cops all over the world." Even the Spanish matador El Cordobes admitted that she frightened him as much as an angry bull. "Why?" she asked. "Because you use words like the horns of a bull."

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