Cortina, 1958: “Brigitte Bardot? A fairytale girl”
“Brigitte Bardot? A fairytale girl". So begins the photojournalist Giancolombo in an old interview to a newspaper in which he tells about the exclusive reportage on the actress that he realized in Cortina for Paris Match in 1958. “When I must define something of exceptional and beautiful I always think to the fairy tales for children, to the fairies that appear without warning in the forest. Brigitte Bardot was like that!
“A fairy that appeared to him without warning on the large alleyway of the Miramonti hotel in Cortina.”
With Brigitte Bardot he had feeling and a special intimacy. Given that Giancolombo knew which rank distinguished a simple paparazzo from a big photojournalist. He sent flowers while the others crowded screaming and pushing trying to steal images. The first time he met B.B. it was in Cannes. It had been Roger Vadim - a journalist of Paris Match, the newspaper Giancolombo was correspondent for - to introduce her. Her career was still rising and not definite at all. “As I said, she was a marvelous starlet who tried to arouse interest". Of their first encounter 4 years earlier Giancolombo still has the shots: B.B. keeps a Leica - that he had lent to her - with which he amused herself on the beach playing photographer.
“Go to Cortina - said Paris-Match – she’ll come to relax. And she’ll look for you ". She has had travelling with Paul Chaland, editor of the newspaper, her double and her sister. Giancolombo left immediately for the Miramonti Hotel, where the company would have stayed. The newspaper tells that when he met her, he was breathless. B.B. was dressed in black. Thin and beautiful. “It’s immediately understandable why an actress becomes successful, and her double is the example, because notwithstanding she looked like her, she will never be.” was the thought of Giancolombo.
It’s a matter of undertones, looks, elegance. “In short, all another thing”. Had it been the first reportage he made, it would have been logical that he was impressed. “Macché!
I had taken her four years before in Cannes, I had portrayed her in Paris, and we were somehow friends, since Vadim period. But that night, I had a strange feeling ". When she appeared and tightened his hand she was sad, her eyes were vague and a little red. “Eyes that could have wept”, remembers the photographer. And it was not impossible.
She came to Cortina in one of her hardest moments. What had been of her last affaire with Gilbert Bécaud, famous singer in those days, was not well known, but for sure it hadn’t had a happy ending. Rumors said that in Paris she had tried to swallow some tablet of sleeping pill. “Fortunately, she tried or not suicide, now she was alive in front of me ", amongst the hosts of the great and some ancient Miramonti hall. People around talked. But it was like there wasn’t any. Brigitte gave the hand to him and didn’t speak. He didn’t say her at once that he was there for job, just to photograph her.
He didn’t feel like playing the role right away. “It was just for this perhaps that an atmosphere different from the usual was created between us and it lasted all her stay long".
She was delightful in her evening dress. Soon, a knot of people gather all around: it took people a little to realize who we were. And for sure B.B. wasn’t lacking of fans, were they women or men.
He realized that she wanted to get rid of that people, and that she was asking him to do something. He seized her for an arm and brought her outside. “We jumped in the car and we went to dance to the Cristallo. We danced amongst most aristocratic people from Paris, Milan and Rome. But she wanted to dance only with me. She didn’t trust the others in that moment".
The next morning she woke him up with a phone call. Giancolombo had already fixed the program. He had managed to get the whole Olympic Ice Stadium, an absolute exclusive right. He swears that he felt outside his own trade while shooting photo on and on. He felt like he was making all in order to improve his personal scrapbook. “Five days were spent in this atmosphere of odd intimacy".
So relates the newspaper. And whether nowadays someone ask Giancolombo for the things went exactly like that, he answers that the chronology of the events was not really respected. And that the journalist had fictionalized a little on their encounter in Cortina and the aftermaths. At that time, hot stories were in fashion. But the affectionate friendship and the mutual esteem that tried one for the other were true, beyond the professional rank. As it was true that B.B. was the most beautiful woman, with a special fascination that was difficult to ignore.
“After the reportage in the Stadium, Bredo, the owner of the most famous fashion store in Cortina invited us. And B.B. was amused to try on most of the samples" remembers Giancolombo. Another exclusive reportage. Then all went in the kitchen of the Hotel Ancora, in the same building, so the constant siege of the photographers could be avoided. Other place, other exclusive shooting.
It could not go always so well. “Often we found the car with deflated wheels - in fact - because my colleagues were truly annoyed from the fact not to be able to shot her even one picture. And so they took their revenge on us and on me ".
It was easy to understand.
The day after B.B. wanted to go to Passo Falzarego. That was a bad morning. She was nervous, feeling on her all that attention. He needed an idea, a ploy, and a good one, that will do the job. “We let leave a car carrying her perfect double. Everybody swallowed the bail. We hid her in another car and we minded our own business". Giancolombo asked always the permission to B.B. before photographing her. This was the deal. And she could say yes or not. At the Falzarego she was stiff and didn’t want to be taken, not even by him. “So I just took few photos". But so was to be done, because if she didn’t want, Giancolombo didn’t photograph her. That was the way they got along.
“Then came the last day, we had to leave. She was going to France, to Paris, and I went to Milan. The films must be quickly developed and sent off". They took leave with that tender and friendly hug that sometimes she distributed with confidence to the friends. The old newspaper tells that they lied still for a moment before braking apart.
Then she said: "au revoir cherie" The tale was ended.
Brigitte Bardot was photographed by Giancolombo, and in his press agency he wouldn’t have allowed anyone else to do it, unless for insurmountable impediments. Sophia Loren, Raf Vallone, Alberto Sordi, Claudia Cardinale, Clark Gable, Sylva Koscina and all the divi of the period of the Dolce Vita, in Cortina or elsewhere, could also be shot by the other photographers of his scuderia. But she was a different story.
There were many good photographers between the rows of the “Giancolombo News Photos” - beyond him, the Maestro - because it was one of the more important agencies in Italy. Good photographers, so much to make, then and later, the history of the photojournalism in the peninsula. They all made the agency of Giancolombo a reference point for all the press of our country and for most of the foreign one in the period between the ‘50 and the end of the ‘60.
He set it in 1949. After the first successes, the French magazine Paris Match asked him the correspondences from the North of Italy. At the same time the greater foreign agencies had begun to send him reportages from every country, bringing shortly Giancolombo to his best expansion. All Italian newspapers were his customers; and abroad Paris Match, Life, Picture Post, Schweizer Illustriert, Stern, Jours de France, Daily Express.
The Beginnings 