The Writer's Life 11/14 - Remembering Two Beauties

Last night the Movies! channel ran The Battle of the Bulge (1965), which ate up a four-hour time-slot. It's a middle of the pack WWII epic that has a star-studded cast featuring Henry Fonda, Robert Ryan, Dana Andrews and Charles Bronson. Two women had brief roles. Anna Maria Pierangeli died of a barbituate overdose at 39 in 1971. Born in Sardinia, the beauty was utterly charming as the wife of boxing legend Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956). She didn't have much luck outside of that role. She has only 34 titles under her name at IMDb. In ...Bulge she played a black marketeer partnered with a tank sergeant played by Telly Savalas. According to her bio, Pier and James Dean were very much in love and wanted to marry, but her mother disapproved because of Dean's behavior and because he wasn't Catholic. She helped arrange Pier's marriage to Vic Damone. Three years before she died, the National Enquirer published an interview in which Pier said Dean was the only man she ever really loved. She is also quoted as saying: "He wanted me to love him unconditionally, but Jimmy was not able to love someone else in return . . . it was the troubled boy that wanted to be loved very badly. I loved Jimmy as I have loved no one else in my life, but I could not give him the enormous amount that he needed. Loving Jimmy was something that could empty a person." She had a son with Vic Damone, and another with composer Armando Trovajoli. She divorced both.

Barbara Werle had only one scene in the film, as a prostitute sent by a general to a colonel played by Robert Shaw, who has no interest and ushers her out. She did not have a long Hollywood career. She has only 24 titles under her name at IMDb, divided almost equally between the big and small screen. One was with Elvis, Harum Scarum (1965). She had success off-screen as a soprano for the St. Elizabeth Seton Traditional Choir in La Costa, California, and as half of the ballroom dance partnership of Barbara and Mansell, who performed in Las Vegas and in nightclubs across the U.S.. She married once, had a son, and passed away in 2013 at 84.

I have a new Facebook friend who probably came to me through my Godmother. Her name is Nunziatina - Nun-zee-ah-teena. Love it!

Broward County Florida is still counting and moving to extend the Thursday deadline. 55 of 57 counties, even those ravaged by the recent hurricane, got their votes in on time. This takes incompetence to a new level - even for politics.

It was too cold to do business at my usual nook. I needed to stand in the sunshine, so I took the floating book shop to Bay Parkway. My thanks to the gentleman who bought three DVD's, and to the one who purchased five and Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama by Ann Coulter, and the WWII non-fiction classic Is Paris Burning? by Larry Collins & Dominique Lapierre. 

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