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Errol Flynn

Gina Lollobrigida – the temptress of the Tiber

1958. Gina Lollobrigida in Solomon and Sheba. Photo by Leo Fuchs. Read more.

Gina Lollobrigida was one of the great international sex symbols of postwar cinema.

In its January 1956 issue, Modern Screen magazine reported that:

L’Italienne is downright gorgeous but you can find others just as beautiful. But she is currently the most important international star. Almost single-handed, Gina of the unpronounceable last name has lifted the Italian film industry up to glossy respectability and reasonable solvency.

The “unpronounceable last name” was regularly abbreviated to La Lollo, and a few websites suggest that the frilly red lettuce lollo rosso was named after her tousled coiffure or even her panties – seriously? 

The previous year she had played the title role in La donna più bella del mondo (literally, The Most Beautiful Woman in the World but released to English-speaking audiences as Beautiful But Dangerous). It was a sobriquet enthusiastically embraced both by the star herself and by the salivating media.

And before that, in October 1954, Pane, amore e fantasia (Bread, Love and Jealousy) had been the hit of Italian Film Week in London and Gina had been presented to the Queen. It was an early triumph but also a reminder that she had competition. At the premiere she had been rather upstaged by another upwardly mobile actress, Sophia Loren, who had drawn attention with a daringly low-cut gown. Swords had been crossed and the feud continued for decades.

Until the mid-fifties Gina had been seen mostly in Italian films but she was about to star in a series of hit movies made for the US market that would transform her hitherto limited fan base – films like Trapeze (1956), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1956) and Solomon and Sheba (1959).

In a career that stretched from 1946 to 2011, IMDb credits Gina with 69 appearances on screen. While the movies in which she starred vary in quality, they demonstrate her flexibility as an actress, perfectly at home in serious drama, romantic comedy and high farce. Although she was always considered more a sex symbol than a serious actress, she won more than a dozen awards including three for best actress at the David di Donatello awards (Italy’s equivalent of the Oscars).

Around 1955. Gina Lollobrigida snapped by a paparazzo. Read more.

Growing up

Gina Lollobrigida is born in 1927, one of four daughters whose father is a furniture maker. Towards the end of World War II, their home is destroyed by Allied air attacks and the family moves to Rome, where they end up living in a single room. Gina would tell the Associated Press in 1994:

I know what it is to be hungry. I know what it is to lose your home. I remember when I had fear. I know what it is to grow up never having a toy.

To get an impression of the poverty and desperation around at the time, you have only to watch Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 neorealist film Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves).

After school, Gina has lessons in singing, dancing and drawing. To help pay for these, she does sketches of American GIs and part-time work modelling for comics. And it turns out that there’s another opportunity too. In her own words as reported in La Stampa (a newspaper) in 2001:

I had two directors stop me twice outside of my school and ask if I wanted to be in movies. Curiosity led me to make appearances in two or three films. Then when I was offered the lead role in Love of a Clown [based on the opera Pagliacci] I absolutely refused.

My final strategy for getting them to leave me alone was to ask to be paid one million [lire], which was a lot compared to the 1,000 I earned for secondary roles. I thought this would be enough to discourage anyone. To my great surprise they accepted and this is how I began my cinema career.

Or perhaps not so surprising given her hourglass figure, her sultry looks and the reputation she’s built already for diligently learning her lines and taking her work seriously. Pagliacci – Amore tragico is released in 1948 and she’s on her way to stardom.

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Gina Lollobrigida at the Cannes Film Festival in 1958

Gina Lollobrigida at the Cannes Film Festival

1958. Gina Lollobrigida, surrounded by photographers, makes an entrance at the Cannes Film Festival.

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Gina Lollobrigida conversion behind the scenes as director John Sturges looks on

Gina Lollobrigida behind the scenes

1959. Gina Lollobrigida conversing behind the scenes of Never So Few. Director John Sturges (wearing glasses) looks on.

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Gina Lollobrigida with her minder

Gina Lollobrigida with her minder

Around 1960. Is that Gina Lollobrigida's minder behind her or someone else? Unfortunately the caption is missing from the back of the photo. Photo by Leo Fuchs.

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Gina Lollobrigida dining with André Maurois

Gina Lollobrigida dining with André Maurois

1965. Gina Lollobrigida dining with French author André Maurois at the Cannes Film Festival.

Gina Lollobrigida and Milko Skofic

The following year she marries a doctor from Slovenia (then part of Yugoslavia) who is helping refugees temporarily being put up at Rome’s Cinecittà film studios. Throughout the fifties, the couple are more or less inseparable, their relationship reported with a mix of enthusiasm and implicit astonishment by various movie magazines such as Modern Screen. This is from an article, Gina Lollobrigida and her backstage husband, which appears in the January 1956 edition: 

For eight of her 27 years she’s been married to the same man, Dr. Milko Skofic. They say the Skofics don’t have trouble because the good doctor is so madly jealous he never leaves his glamorous wife’s side long enough for trouble to begin. Well, he’s only in Paris (where Gina’s making Trapeze with Lancaster and Curtis) on week ends but Gina just isn’t interested in anyone but Milko.

Skofic has not yet lived down the decision they both made soon after the marriage. He chose to manage his wife’s career instead of continuing his medical practice. As a foreigner and a refugee he was faced with difficulties in reestablishing himself. But Gina’s star was rising and she needed advice. She still does.

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Gina Lollobrigida being laced into a corset for a scene from Crossed Swords

Hourglass Gina

1954. Her dresser laces Gina Lollobrigida's corset to emphasize her already voluptuous curves. You can see the result in Il maestro di Don Giovanni (Crossed Swords, 1954) in which Gina stars opposite Errol Flynn. This photo is reproduced in the January 1954 issue of Screenland magazine to illustrate an article called It’s True What They Say About Gina.

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Gina Lollobrigida as Adriana Silenzi in La romana (Woman of Rome)

Gina Lollobrigida in La romana

1954. Gina Lollobrigida as Adriana Silenzi in La romana (Woman of Rome).

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Gina Lollobrigida as Adriana Silenzi in La romana (Woman of Rome)

Gina Lollobrigida in La romana

1954. Gina Lollobrigida as Adriana Silenzi in La romana (Woman of Rome).

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Gina Lollobrigida arriving at The Tivoli

Gina Lollobrigida arriving at The Tivoli

1954. Gina Lollobrigida arriving at The Tivoli. A caption on the back of the photo reads:

The Italian Film Festival opened last night at the Tivoli with the film “Neapolitan Fantasy”. Italian film stars were presented to the Queen who along with the Duke of Edinburgh and Princess Margaret attended the performance.

PS: “La Lollo” they call her in her native Italy – Gina Lollobrigida arriving at the Tivoli

But the marriage gets off to a tricky start.

1958. Gina Lollobrigida in Solomon and Sheba. Photo by Leo Fuchs.

Howard Hughes and Hollywood

And that tricky start is down to studio boss and arch-womaniser Howard Hughes. Gina catches his famously roving eye – accounts differ as to exactly how – and she’s summoned by him to Hollywood for a screen test. She asks for a pair of tickets so that Milko can go with her but she ends up setting off on her own. It’s possible that’s because he can’t get a US visa but more likely because he’d get in the way of Hughes’ seduction routine. So just the one ticket turns up. 

When she arrives Hughes sets her up in a suite at a luxurious hotel on Wilshire Boulevard and arranges an English teacher and a voice coach for her. At this point in her life she knows very little English.

And then he gets down to the real business – embarking on an affair. She’s not allowed out except in his company, of which there’s plenty on offer. Hughes arranges a series of dates, a priority being to avoid any media attention. So they end up eating at cheap diners or even, sometimes, in his car. As part of the entertainment he teaches her to swear.

She gets increasingly frustrated and desperate. After two and a half months of these goings-on and with no movie-making in sight, she agrees to sign a seven-year contract, Hughes’ condition for letting her go home. The terms of the contract all but prevent her from making a film with any other studio in the US. The get-out, such as it is, is that she can star in American films shot outside the US.

That’s handy as the Hollywood studios are beginning to take advantage of the talent and lower production costs available in Europe and particularly at Cinecittà. Beat the Devil (1953) in which she stars opposite Humphrey Bogart is shot in Italy and directed by John Huston. The following year, Gina appears on the front cover of the August 16 issue of TIME magazine

Gina Lollobrigida (pronounced low-low-bridge-id-ah) was in town to make a movie. And who is Gina? Hardly anywhere in the world today except in the U.S., could such a question be asked. In Europe she is the most famous seven syllables since “Come up and see me some time.”

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Gina Lollobrigida as Adriana Silenzi in La romana (Woman of Rome)

Gina Lollobrigida in La romana

1954. Gina Lollobrigida as Adriana Silenzi in La romana (Woman of Rome).

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Gina Lollobrigida as Adriana Silenzi in La romana (Woman of Rome)

Gina Lollobrigida in La romana

1954. Gina Lollobrigida as Adriana Silenzi in La romana (Woman of Rome).

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Gina Lollobrigida on the set of La legge

Gina Lollobrigida on the set of La legge

1958. Gina Lollobrigida in a décolleté top on the set of La legge (The Law).

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Gina Lollobrigida filming La bellezza di Ippolita

Gina Lollobrigida filming La bellezza di Ippolita

1962. Gina Lollobrigida, uncharacteristically blonde, filming La bellezza di Ippolita (She Got What She Asked For) in Rome.

Beat the Devil is the first of a string of English-language films that propel her to megastar status in the US. Indeed such a desirable property that, in an interview quoted in The Scotsman: 

When I finally returned to America to do a film with Sinatra, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had to pay $75,000 to Howard Hughes. The Hollywood contracts I had were truly a dream. They gave me everything I wanted. I had approval of the cast, the director, the producer, and I got quite a significant percentage of overall earnings. When I went to do a film, I’d take my husband, my son, my nanny, my seamstress, my hairdresser, and my ‘lady-in-waiting’, a French countess who helped me perfect languages.

During the sixties, Gina stars in one movie after another, many of them romantic comedies, opposite the likes of Ernest Borgnine, Sean Connery and Bob Hope. Most of those films are both unmemorable and lucrative.

1956. Gina Lollobrigida as Esmeralda in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Gina Lollobrigida – anything but “the girl next door”

The emergence of Silvana Mangano, Anna Magnani, Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren as major stars prompts a piece in the August 1957 issue of Photoplay magazine titled What has she got that Hollywood hasn’t?:

While there is a great shortage of female stars in Hollywood the dismal truth is that there hasn’t been a major American actress of star calibre to burst on the scene, outside of Kim Novak, since Grace Kelly. Part of the answer seems to be that all the girls who show up in Hollywood these days turn out to be a replica of the girl next door. And about as glamorous. Pigtails and jeans may turn a head or two on Main Street but they don’t cause a stampede at the box office. … In the impact of the foreign stars on the American public, Italy continues to play the biggest role.

Three years earlier, Gina’s arrival in the US was hotly anticipated in an article in the January 1954 edition of Screenland magazine – It’s true what they say about Gina:

Fortunately for 150 million Americans, particularly the masculine half of the population, this tantalizing Roman dish of potent anatomical force, already considered Europe’s Queen of Perfect Pulchritude, will be paying our shores a visit around the first of the year. Luscious new star of the Italian cinema, Gina is probably the most perfectly formed creature Europe has ogled since Aphrodite. Her challenge for the title of Number One International Pin-Up Girl is a formidable one. In the six years since this Roman tidbit was chosen Miss Italy, she has become one of Europe’s biggest box-office attractions. …

There is no question that her extraordinary appeal has also had a profound effect on some of filmdom’s outstanding connoisseurs of female attributes. Errol Flynn, who chose Gina as his leading lady in “Crossed Swords,” had this to say: “What a department store this lovely is! She has everything you could want on every floor, and plenty of overstock, too.” Humphrey Bogart, soon to be seen with Gina and Jennifer Jones in John Huston’s “Beat The Devil,” was overheard muttering these lava-soaked words: “This gal is molten ore. What an ingot! She burns me, burns me, burns me. Look at me, I’m a crisp!” And John Huston himself had this point to make: “In any serious discussion of Gina’s talent, you can’t ignore her bosom. That, my friend, is an extraordinary talent to have and to hold. In fact, every time I recall Gina to mind, I must confess that even her elbows seem to be bosoms.”

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gina lollobrigida guardian brief bio

1. A look back at the life and films of Gina Lollobrigida

A brief biography of Gina Lollobrigida illustrated by stills and video clips assembled by The Guardian.

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gina lollobrigida trapeze

2. Trapeze (1956)

Extracts from one of the movies that made Gina Lollobrigida a star in the US. The trapeze scenes are enough to make your fingertips tingle. Scroll forward to 9:30 if you want to get straight to the action.

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gina lollobrigida sheba

3. Solomon and Sheba (1959)

The original trailer for the biblical blockbuster, promising a vibrant melodrama with plenty of sexual tension and action.

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gina lollobrigida 10 movies

4. Top 10 Gina Lollobrigida Movies of All Time

Introductions to and extracts from ten of Gina Lollobrigida’s films assembled by Stream TV.

The piece goes on to recount how Gina’s male leads reacted to their first encounters with her:

When she first met Bogart and Flynn and John Huston, they did not understand her. They could not see how a woman who, when she was before a camera was a Latin volcano, could, when she was by herself, be so demure. They used to call her Lollofrigida or Lollofrigidaire. But once they found out that she was naturally shy with anyone not her husband, and was not a snob at all, everyone became good friends.

Indeed Humphrey Bogart revises his opinion and memorably observes that “She makes Marilyn Monroe look like Shirley Temple.”

The overt sexism is particularly striking given that the magazine’s readers are predominantly female. Perhaps not surprisingly, the most perceptive analysis of Gina’s appeal to her male fanbase comes from her husband:

She is every man’s ideal come to life. She is the epitome of woman, caught at that moment when her beauty and femininity are at their zenith — rich, full and ripe. Her greatest appeal is with married men. They see in her the wife incarnate, beautiful, ever-appealing, always fertile.

Gina’s second career

With the advent of the 1970s, Gina Lollobrigida’s career as a movie star is petering out and she embarks on a new life. In 1971 she and Milko divorce (they separated in 1966) and she plunges into a second career, reprising the interest in fine arts she gave up to become a star and building on what she learned during her time on sets talking to directors and cinematographers.

Perhaps her most striking achievement is to get an exclusive interview in 1972 with reclusive Cuban revolutionary and prime minister Fidel Castro. She uses this as the basis for Ritratto di Fidel, a short documentary written, directed and produced by herself.

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Gina Lollobrigida at The Prado

Gina Lollobrigida at The Prado, Madrid

1958. Gina poses in front of three Velasquez portraits of dwarfs: Juan Calabazas, Francisco Lezcano and Diego de Acedo. Photo by Leo Fuchs.

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Gina Lollobrigida at the Prado

Gina Lollobrigida at The Prado, Madrid

1958. Gina tours one of the galleries at The Prado. But who is her companion? Is he the museum director or one of the curators? Photo by Leo Fuchs.

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Gina Lollobrigida at the Prado

Gina Lollobrigida at The Prado, Madrid

1958. What would Goya have made of Gina? Here she looks admiringly at a sex symbol of a previous era, the artist's Naked Maja. Photo by Leo Fuchs.

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Gina Lollobrigida at the Prado

Gina Lollobrigida at The Prado, Madrid

1958. It looks like Gina (or someone else) has been making a copy of Titian's painting of Salome with John the Baptist's head on a plate. Photo by Leo Fuchs.

She also turns her hand to photography and sculpture. Italia Mia, published in 1973 is the first of five books of photos, while in 2003 a collection of 38 of her bronze sculptures is exhibited at a number of venues including the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

She still has time to become a voracious collector of glitzy jewellery – opulent creations of gold and precious stones. In 2013, she auctions 23 of her Bulgari gems, worn at landmark moments during her career, at Sotheby’s in Geneva, using the proceeds to donate £3.2 million to stem cell research.

1958. Gina Lollobrigida poses in front of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights at the Prado. Photo by Leo Fuchs.

And then there’s the gossip and scandal surrounding her liaisons, many with much younger men. Well, we won’t go down that rabbit hole except to note Gina’s disputed marriage to Spanish businessman Javier Rigau y Rafol, 34 years her junior, whom she originally met at a party in Monte Carlo in 1984.

Want to know more about Gina Lollobrigida?

Gina Lollobrigida died on 16 January 2023 and there are plenty of excellent and informative obituaries, notably in The Guardian, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Hollywood Reporter, The Economist and The Scotsman.

For a somewhat drier account replete with sources, look no further than Wikipedia. And for a catalogue of her films, go to IMDb.

Other topics you might be interested in…

Claudia Cardinale – up for a challenge
Elsa Martinelli – Italy’s sassy Audrey Hepburn
Monica Vitti
Monica Vitti – a sad childhood, a glittering career and a bitter old age
Tazio Secchiaroli – more than a paparazzo
The paparazzi – shock horror birth of a monster

Filed Under: Films, Stars Tagged With: Cinecittà, Errol Flynn, Fidel Castro, Gina Lollobrigida, Howard Hughes, Humphrey Bogart, Javier Rigau y Rafol, John Huston, Leo Fuchs, Milko Skofic, Solomon and Sheba, Sophia Loren, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Most Beautiful Woman in the World

Virginia Hill – a seriously bad good-time girl

Virginia Hill, queen of the mob, mixed it with the most powerful and ruthless gangsters of her day. Streetwise, sassy and shameless, she serviced her bosses every which way.

They in return let her in on their secrets and showered her with cash to fund the lifestyle of ostentatious luxury to which she aspired. She was an impostor who gatecrashed Hollywood and seduced (literally as well as metaphorically) its denizens. It was too good to last.

1941. Virginia Hill and friends celebrate Hallowe’en. Read more…

Virginia Hill’s Hollywood heyday

January 1942, and Virginia Hill is having the time of her life. She’s been in Hollywood for a couple of years and she’s the talk of the town. Now, according to Modern Screen, she’s about to marry actor John Carroll:

It’ll be a great day for Hollywood when John Carroll takes plumpish, black-eyed Virginia Hill to be his blushing bride. If the pair do bounce to the altar, John will bring into the great Movietown family the most fantastic personality it has known since Bogus Prince Romanoff was in his prime.

At 23, Virginia Hill is a woman of mystery. Her wealth is inestimable and untraceable, though it is surmised her three marriages (the first occurred when she was 14) might have had something to do with it. Her extravagances are notorious. A $1,000 evening gown, the gem of Designer Irene’s fall collection, draped her body only three or four times before she gave it to a friend. Other gowns for which she pays from $100 to $400 are often discarded without being worn at all.

Her parties are reminiscent of something that went out with the Romans. Starting with two or three couples, Virginia frequently finds herself winding up the night hosting a mob of fifty. One evening she rented the Mocambo and its entire staff for a private shindig. Conservative estimators say that little social cost her well over $3,000 [roughly equivalent to $50,000 in today’s money]!

It’s always cash on the line for Virginia Hill. She travels with gobs of it tied in a rubber band. She’s never used a checkbook even to pay bills for her Chicago apartment, her New York and Hollywood hotel suites, automobile upkeep, maid and secretary.

There’s no denying, Husband Number Four will have to step fast to keep pace with the mad, exciting Miss Hill. But if anyone can do it, John Carroll is the boy. He’s not exactly a rest cure, himself!

In the event, the marriage never materialises. It’s a lucky escape for John. Virginia’s days of blushing at anything are way behind her. With Miss Hill, John would have got more than he’d bargained for. A lot more. Her past is murky, her future fraught with danger. The truth is she’s entangled with the mob and she’s the girlfriend of notorious gangster, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel.

November 1941. Virginia Hill, cash dispenser. Read more…

Virginia Hill’s back story

Virginia Hill grows up in Bessemer, Alabama, an industrial city dominated by steelmaking. One of ten brothers and sisters, she is something of a wild child, perhaps because she’s lonely and insecure. Her father remembers how she tried to buy friendship:

One time Tabby [his nickname for her] charged several alarm clocks to my account, and then gave them away to the playmates who looked up to her, just as her frequent guests of ‘The Nightclub World’ were to do later for Tabby’s generosity.

It’s a pattern that will persist throughout her life. Her parents divorce when she is 14, and she moves with her mother to Marietta, Georgia. She can’t get away soon enough. Age 17, she marries George Rodgers, four years her senior, and heads for Chicago, where she promptly dumps him.

She soon falls in with the city’s mafia, sleeping her way straight to the top. Key to her progress is Joe Epstein, Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik’s chief accountant (Guzik is the Chicago Outfit’s treasurer and financial wizard). Epstein takes Virginia under his wing and introduces her to various prominent members of the gang. She’s well able to take things on from there herself.

At a 1936 Christmas party thrown by Charlie Fischetti (Al Capone’s cousin), she gives blow jobs to her host and several other top mobsters right in front of the guests as well as Fischetti’s wife – classy. It’s around this time that she starts keeping a diary of all the financial shenanigans she’s in on.

The following year, she is dispatched to infiltrate the New York mafia and find out whether they’re paying their dues to their Chicago counterparts. She loses no time in embarking on an affair with Joe “Adonis” Doto, one of the New York mob’s two most powerful bosses (the other is Charles “Lucky” Luciano).

In 1938 she becomes a courier and dealmaker. It’s the start of years of zigzagging across the US between New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Mexico, often with her brother Chick, running cash and drugs and sleeping around. In Mexico, among others she sleeps with the son of a Mexican finance minister in order to milk him for information and get him on side. In Hollywood, Errol Flynn is just one of the visitors to her bedroom.

Mid-1940s. Portrait of Virginia Hill. Read more…

Bugsy Siegel

Passing through Alabama in January 1939, Virginia takes the opportunity to seduce, marry and divorce in short order Osgood Griffin, a naive 19-year-old football player and, crucially, a son of one of the state’s richest families. The divorce enables her not just to get her hands on some useful alimony but also to marry (but only briefly) Carlos “Miguelito” Valdez. The big deal here is that it gives Valdez, a Mexican national, the right to enter the US in order to consolidate the drug alliances he and Virginia have established. 

While all this is going on, she hitches up with John “Handsome Johnny” Roselli, whom the Chicago outfit have sent out West to work under Jack Dragna, the boss of the of the Los Angeles crime family. Roselli becomes the conduit through which Virginia will report the goings-on she finds out about back to the bosses in Chicago, who in turn will relay the information to their New York counterparts.

Virginia also has a brief affair with Pasquale “Pat” DiCicco, an agent, movie producer, occasional actor and playboy, as well as an alleged mobster working for Luciano. His ex-wife, actress Thelma Todd, died in 1935 under suspicious circumstances.

DiCicco introduces Virginia to actor George Raft, known (like Frank Sinatra) for his mafia connections, who in turn puts her back in touch with Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel – his nickname a reference to his reputation as a thug with a short fuse who gets off on violence and killing. He has graduated from petty extortion to being an associate in the New York syndicate run by Adonis, Luciano and Meyer Lansky.

Virginia first met Bugsy in a Brooklyn bar in NYC in February 1937. They spent the next night fucking each other’s brains out. Even as an experienced practitioner, she will remember it as the best sex she ever had. Later that year, the lovers had to part when Siegel was dispatched by his New York partners to Los Angeles to look after their gambling, racetrack and bookmaking rackets on the West Coast.

Bugsy is regarded as a dangerously loose canon by the mobs in Chicago and New York and not to be trusted. So Dragna instructs Virginia to get into bed (literally as well as metaphorically) with him and report back about what he’s up to. She’s more than happy to oblige and it’s not long before she and her brother Chick move into a house with Bugsy.

It’s the start of probably the best five or so years of Virginia’s life. Not only is she hitched with her favourite (albeit violent and abusive but perhaps that’s part of the attraction) lover, but thanks to her underworld connections she has the spondoolies to fund the lavish parties and publicity on which she thrives. What’s more, Bugsy is a good looking guy who can turn on the charm and whose underworld associations give the Hollywood community a pleasurable frisson. It’s all fine and dandy.

1947. Virginia Hill in Paris with her mother. Read more…

The end of the affair

But all good things must come to an end, and so it proves for Virginia Hill and Bugsy Siegel.

He is a slick operator with delusions of grandeur and an eye to the main chance that will be his downfall. In 1944 he spots the potential to turn an unpromising plot on a dusty road on the edge of Las Vegas into a glamorous casino hotel financed by the mob. Back then the city was nothing like the gambling Mecca it would go on to become.

The plot is being developed by Billy Wilkerson, founder/owner of The Hollywood Reporter, Tinseltown’s first daily entertainment trade newspaper, and various nightclubs. But he’s run into financial problems, which gives Bugsy and his associates the chance to step in. In May 1946, Bugsy, increasingly obsessed with the project and arrogant to boot, engineers Wilkerson’s departure and his own appointment as president with total control.

But whereas Wilkerson has experience of construction projects, Bugsy doesn’t. He’s out of his depth. This combined with constant meddling and insistence on upping the specification at every turn means that costs start to spiral out of control. Meanwhile, in spite of multiple ongoing infidelities on both their parts, he’s still besotted with Virginia. His name for the hotel, Flamingo, is apparently inspired by his nickname for her.

She, though, prefers the razzmatazz of Hollywood to the rudimentariness of Las Vegas and knows which side her bread is buttered. Bottom line: she’s not prepared to move permanently to Las Vegas but she does make regular visits that combine passion (bonking and bust-ups) and business. The business in this case is espionage. The mob are worried about the overruns and suspect Bugsy of taking a cut without telling them. Virginia’s job is to record the costs in her diary and report back on how things are going and how the money is being spent.

Caving in to pressure from his backers, Bugsy opens the Flamingo in December 1946 before it’s finished. It’s a disaster. The hotel has to be closed again post haste and another round of funding agreed. The Flamingo reopens in March 1947 and this time it’s a very different story. The punters and the money pour in. But this brings with it another problem for Bugsy. The mob reckon it’s payback time and they’re not prepared to hang around.

When Bugsy stalls, they lose their patience. Virginia is summoned to Chicago and on 16 June put on a flight to Paris. She tells Bugsy she’s there to buy wine for the Flamingo. In practice, she’s out of the way for the final act of the drama.

Four days later at around 22:30, Bugsy enters 810 N Linden Drive, Rudolf Valentino’s old house in Beverly Hills, now rented by Virginia. He makes his way to the sitting room, turns on the lights and makes himself comfortable on the sofa to catch up on the day’s paper. Perfect for the assassin lurking in the shadows outside. The first shot explodes through the window and hits Bugsy in the head, blowing his eye 15 feet from his body. The subsequent bullets crash into his body, breaking his ribs and tearing up his lungs. It’s like something out of The Godfather.

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bugsy siegel

1. Bugsy Siegel – American Mombster

A brief and entertaining biography of Virginia Hill’s favourite lover.

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kefauver committee

2. The Kefauver Committee

An overview of organized crime in the US and the Kefauver Committee’s attempts to tackle it.

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virginia hill

3. The Kefauver hearings

Extracts from the television coverage of the Kefauver hearings including a clip of Virginia Hill.

Virginia Hill gets her comeuppance

From here on, it’s going to be mostly downhill (pun intended) for Virginia. Bugsy’s demise may have come as no surprise to her, but it still leaves her shaken and insecure. She’s still up to her old tricks, including an affair with wealthy 21-year-old heir Nicholas Fouilette. But within months she’s taken an overdose, the first of at least four suicide attempts that year. Rumour has it that she’s terrified that she’ll be next on the mob’s hit list because, with her diary and everything else she knows, she’s just too much of a risk.

Still, she returns to the US and meets her sponsor, Joe Epstein a couple of times. He wants her to hand over her diary; she won’t. The following year, she settles for a time in Mexico City but soon she’s inexorably drawn back to the US. In early 1950, she travels to Sun Valley, Idaho, where she meets and marries ski instructor Hans Hauser, a former world champion downhill skier from Austria. That November she gives birth to a son, Peter, and the family moves to a luxurious home in Spokane, Washington. It’s around this time that the IRS seems finally to have noticed that Virginia’s and her husband’s lavish lifestyle has no apparent means of support.

1951 is the year it all comes crashing down. In March, Virginia is summoned before the Kefauver Committee, which is investigating organized crime. The hearing is televised, and Virginia puts in a performance to fit the occasion. Her cheeky, evasive, sometimes vulgar answers to the prosecution make an entertaining change from the bland, stodgy, often bureaucratic language used by the other courtroom participants. Try this:

6 July 1951. Virginia Hill chatting at El Paso Airport. Read more…

Senator Tobey: “But why would Joe Epstein give you all that money, Miss Hill?”
Virginia Hill: “You really want to know?”
Senator Tobey: “Yes, I really want to know.”
Virginia Hill:  “Then I’ll tell you why. Because I’m the best cocksucker in town.”
Senator Kefauver: “Order! I demand order!”

Writer and director Robert C Ruark reckoned that Virginia’s testimony “created a new art form” and observed that:

Virginia Hill seems to have been an Alice in a wonderland of illegality…. Any secrets she holds are safe, because this is a girl who don’t know nothin’ about nobody and is little loath to say so.

On her way out of the courtroom when her questioning was over, she slugs Marjorie Farnsworth, a reporter for the New York Journal-American and screams at the others “I hope the atom bomb falls on every one of you!”

She leaves as something of a celebrity but it’s a Pyrrhic victory. The IRS and the Immigration and Naturalization Service have Virginia Hill and Hans Hauser in their respective sights. He is not a US citizen and when he is ordered to leave the US voluntarily, the couple go into hiding. In July the IRS slaps a demand for $161,000 on Virginia for unpaid income taxes for the years 1942 through 1947. In August they seize and auction her personal belongings but the sale raises just $41,000.

By then, Virginia has fled to Europe, never to return to the US.

Curtains for Virginia Hill

Virginia spends the last 15 years of her life in Europe. She’d like to return to the US but she can’t do a deal to avoid prison. She also tries to go to Cuba and Mexico, but her attempts are barred. In the mid-1960s she separates from her husband and moves with Peter to a modest hotel in Salzburg. On 22 March 1966 she leaves her home and fails to return. Two days later, her body is found in the snow, alongside a tree-shaded brook just outside the city. Two days later, the Los Angeles Times reports:

Virginia Hill’s Death Ruled Poison Suicide SALZBURG, Austria (UPI)

Virginia Hill, onetime glamour girl of the American underworld, took her own life by poison, an Austrian court ruled Friday. A farewell note said the 49-year-old auburn-haired beauty was “fed up with life.” 

A medical examiner who performed an autopsy ruled she died of poisoning, and a coroner’s court ruled her death was suicide. Her body was found Thursday in a mountain meadow outside the city near a night club. She had been missing two days. Miss Hill, estranged from Austrian ski instructor Hans Hauser, the last of four husbands spent her last years living in a rooming house on a small side street with her 15-year-old son who worked as an apprentice waiter. Friends said she had left a will with a lawyer in Switzerland. Miss Hill was born in Lipscomb, Ala. She rocketed into the headlines when Benjamin (Bugsie) Siegel was shot to death in her Beverly Hills home in 1947. She was in Paris at the time.

Given her previous seven suicide attempts, the pathologist’s verdict is probably correct. But rumours continue to circulate that shortly before her death she tried to blackmail Joe Adonis, then exiled in Italy. And that he subsequently sent his henchmen to force-feed her the drugs.

7 July 1951. Virginia Hill at Denver Airport. Read more…

The photos

You’ve probably noticed that the quality of most of the photos of Virginia Hill here is not up to aenigma’s usual standard. Most of the photos on aenigma are studio shots or the product of planned outdoor sessions, taken by great photographers using great equipment. They are posed, lit and enhanced in post-production (typically in the darkroom and/or by retouching the negatives). Their purpose is to promote a movie, a star or a look by creating an aspirational, even iconic, image.

That may have been the case with the head-and-shoulders portrait of Virginia Hill but the print looks like it has been made from a second- or third-generation negative. The print itself has also been heavily retouched and coarsened to make it suitable for reproduction in low-quality newsprint. The cropping marks further detract from the image.

With all the distracting detail in the background, the Hallowe’en party photo, while clearly posed, is an informal snapshot, which could have been taken by a studio or a press photographer. It’s a bit of fun. The photo of Virginia perched on a sideboard console hasn’t been so messed about but again it’s little more than a snapshop, likely taken at her home.

The photos of Virginia at Denver Airport and in Paris are clearly press shots, snapped on location in less-than-ideal conditions and using relatively cheap cameras. The photographers in these cases are the forerunners of the paparazzi.

The shot of Virginia at El Paso airport is a wirephoto. Wirephoto technology was introduced in 1935 and continued to be used by the newspaper industry until the mid-1970s. It involved scanning an original print and transmitting it over telegraph or telephone wires, a bit like a fax. Wirephotos typically suffer from poor contrast and lack sharpness. A wirephoto usually has an extended caption along one of its borders that is integrated into the image itself.

Want to know more about Virginia Hill?

There are lots of accounts of the life and exploits of Virginia Hill and a good many discrepancies between them. I’ve done my best to take a balanced view but who knows where the truth lies.

As part of my research, I read three books: 

  • Bugsy’s Baby: The Secret Life of Mob Queen Virginia Hill by Andy Edmonds
  • Virginia Hill – Mafia Molls – Beautiful Broads With Brass Balls: Volume 3 by Joe Bruno and Lawrence Venturato
  • We Only Kill Each Other: The Life and Bad Times of Bugsy Siegel by Dean Jennings.

The former is wonderfully scurrilous and sensational and casts its two protagonists in pretty much the worst possible light. The latter, on which the 1991 movie, Bugsy, starring Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, is based, takes the opposite view. It gives Bugsy and Virginia the benefit of the doubt whenever possible and indeed suggests on the back cover that Bugsy was “The man who invented Las Vegas.”

The TV movie, The Virginia Hill Story (1974) starring Dyan Cannon, takes a similarly romantic view, characterising her as a naive girl eventually betrayed by her movie magazine fantasies of glamour and romance – courageous and vulnerable, sexy and tender.

Other sources include Newspapers, Wikipedia, Glamour Girls of the Silver Screen, The Mob Museum and Nevada Public Radio.

Other topics you might be interested in…

Ava Gardner – the journey to Hollywood
Fashion and movie photos – why collect them?
Movie stars of the 1940s – talent, savvy, looks and luck
Barbara Stanwyck in The Two Mrs Carrolls
Unsafe sex – the starlet’s dilemma

Filed Under: Collecting, Press, Stars Tagged With: Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, Billy Wilkerson, Bugsy Siegel, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Charlie Fischetti, Errol Flynn, Hans Hauser, Jack Dragna, Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik, Joe “Adonis” Doto, John “Handsome Johnny” Roselli, Kefauver Committee, Meyer Lansky, Pasquale “Pat” DiCicco, Virginia Hill

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