"By 1965 there'll be total depravity. How squalid everything will be."

A line spoken in the 1961 movie, "La Dolce Vita," starring the woman the director, Federico Fellini called "the most wonderful woman created since the beginning of time." About herself, she said "When you’re born beautiful, it helps you start in the business. But then it becomes a handicap."

About Fellini, she said "they would like to keep up the story that Fellini made me famous, Fellini discovered me... So many have said they discovered me.'' She said she stood out in Italy, because she was blonde:

"On the Piazza di Spagna, in the 50's, I was completely mashed by paparazzi. And the public. My blond hair.... Now everybody is blond here. Have you seen a news presenter on television that is not blond? I mean, there are more blondes here, especially on Italian television, than in the whole of Scandinavia. Really. And they are all dark Mediterranean. But they all want to bleach their hair. Blond, blond, blond.''

Everyone wants to talk about her splashing in that fountain:

''Oh my God, her splendor was incredible, her outsized, totally exaggerated beauty,'' Tullio Kezich, a well-known Italian film critic and Fellini biographer, recalled.... "She was a horse. She plunged into that cold fountain in 'La Dolce Vita' without hesitation or a fuss. She was so Swedish and healthy; she never caught cold. Marcello was terrorized at the idea of getting wet.''

But I think of the image of her strolling aimlessly with a little white kitten carried on her head:



In real life, it was a dog — one of her Great Danes — that brought her down, breaking her hip, leaving her in a wheelchair. And now she has died, at the age of 83 — the most wonderful woman, born beautiful, Anita Ekberg.

And 1965 — the year when, in the reasoning of "La Dolce Vita," we would descend into total depravity — is half a century ago.

ADDED: 4 more things about Anita Ekberg.

1. She's important to me as the first of the icons of feminine beauty in my father's record collection, deeply embedded in my psyche:



2. "A really cool thing about the movie ['Divorce Italian Style'] is that at one point everyone in town — a small, claustrophobic place in Sicily — goes to see the movie 'La Dolce Vita.' 'La Dolce Vita' came out in 1961, one year before 'Divorce Italian Style.' We see the whole population of the small town watching Anita Ekberg on the big screen, and we never see Marcello Mastroianni as he appears in Roman form in 'La Dolce Vita.' We just see the Sicilian Marcello Mastroianni, in the audience, trying to work out his miserable little murder scheme." That's from a 2005 post of mine called "The attorney ... was brilliant, impassioned and sarcastic...."

3."The telephone rang, it would not stop, it was President Kennedy calling me up. He said, 'My friend, Bob, what do we need to make the country grow?' I said, 'My friend, John, Brigitte Bardot, Anita Ekberg, Sophia Loren.'" At least we still have Brigitte Bardot and Sophia Loren.

4. Only last November, I transcribed a dialogue that began with MEADE: "I just watched a movie called 'Valerie.' Starring Anita Ekberg. What rock star was she married to?" ME: "No. No. No. You're thinking of  Britt Ekland." MEADE: "It had everything: betrayal, justice, frontier justice..."