Oriana Fallaci, the return of an indomitable journalist

Every myth has a beginning, and it could be said that Oriana Fallaci’s began with an interview that never took place. This is precisely the starting point of ‘Oriana Fallaci’, (Movistar +, premiere on January 28), a new series that remembers the famous reporter, nineteen years after her death. Year 1956. La Fallaci, at that time a young 27-year-old journalist who was working reluctantly in the Film section of ‘L’Europeo’, took advantage of a trip to the United States to snub her boss: she was going to interview Marilyn Monroe. . The journalist pulls all possible threads. He tries to approach him through a director whom he agrees to because he brings him a suitcase full of shirts, but there is no luck; He turns to a famous public relations person, but it doesn’t work either; He calls all the newsrooms he can think of, even worse. In two nights, visit 12 restaurants, 18 nightclubs, 8 cinemas and 14 theaters. He returns to Italy without an interview, so he decides to write a report about his non-interview.

«At this point –he narrates in the text when describing his adventures–, all of New York knew that an Italian journalist was trying to interview Monroe without success. After three days, journalists started calling me and wanted to interview me. Oriana always so Fallaci. The premiere of the series coincides with the editorial relaunch of the reporter’s work. If a few months ago Alianza reissued ‘A Man’, in which he narrates his relationship with Alekos Panagoulis, one of the leaders of the Greek Resistance, now it is the turn of ‘So adorable. Miss Fallaci to the Conquest of America’, which brings together for the first time in book form the profiles and reports she wrote about Hollywood in the 1950s.

In these texts one could already guess that she was a corrosive journalist who later specialized in asking uncomfortable questions, and in general making people uncomfortable. “One important thing to say about Mickey Rooneythe first husband of Ava Gardneris that at the age of twenty he was no taller than five feet tall and was the ugliest man in Hollywood,” he writes at the beginning of an article about Ava. “Above all, do not envy her, because she is an unhappy woman,” he will say. in another text about the actress. The article in which he recounts the death of James Dean It is titled with a very well-rounded phrase: “Death does not suit the world of cinema.” And another about adventures, in the very first person: «I brought a suitcase full of spaghetti to Hollywood to Sofia Loren. I brought them from Rome, her mother had given them to me, and I think that few events in recent weeks have excited the frivolous suburb of Los Angeles as much as the news that an Italian journalist has brought Sofia spaghetti.

Fallaci’s return to bookstores in Spain will continue with the next recovery of ‘Letter to a Child Who Was Never Born’. By the time she published this book, in 1975, she had already taken Kissinger apart in an interview. “The most disastrous conversation I have ever had with a member of the press,” the all-powerful Secretary of State would say. Not long after, he would take off his chador in front of Ayatollah Khomeini, an essential scene from the Fallaci myth. The journalist began to ask him about the closure of critical newspapers, continued with the persecution of homosexuals, then addressed the shooting of prostitutes or unfaithful women… and the definitive question: “How do you swim in a chador?” Khomeini responded that Iranian customs were none of his concern: “If you don’t like Islamic attire, you are not obliged to wear it.” Then she tore off her chador. The Ayatollah immediately ended the interview, which resumed a day later… with the same topic. «Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or from a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and detestable phenomenon. “I have always considered disobedience towards oppressors as the only way to use the miracle of being born,” Fallaci defended.

Raised in a family of anti-fascist militants, she served as a messenger during her adolescence in some Resistance operation. She was a fervent anti-fascist who established herself as a fierce feminist, but in her own way. The left first raised her to the altars, and then let her fall when, in the last years of her life and sick with cancer, after the 9/11 attacks, she warned of the risks of Muslim immigration in Europe. In three short books published after the attack orchestrated by Bin Laden, Fallaci wrote things like how the Muslim “invasion” was turning Europe into a “colony of Islam,” that minarets would eventually replace bell towers and burkas replaced miniskirts. «Islamism is the new Nazifascism. There is no room for hypocritical tolerance. And those who do not understand this simple reality are fueling the suicide of the West. Something like the “charter of republican values” against Islam that Macron has spoken of more than a decade later. Old age, Fallaci said, is the ‘non plus ultra’ of freedom: “Now I say what I want.”