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Prior to its commercial release, a new Italian film Oriana was shown to a select audience here last week. A disappointment in some ways, it nevertheless brought back to me a few old memories. Presenting his work director Marco Turco said: “Recounting the life of Oriana Fallaci was like writing the history of the twentieth century.”
I briefly met Oriana for the first time when she came to Karachi in 1972 to interview Z. A. Bhutto. We later had other encounters, in Paris and once in New York.
Born in Florence in 1929, Oriana Fallaci was steeped into politics at an early age as her parents were opposed to Mussolini and the way Il Ducé was delivering Italy into the hands of Nazi Germany. At age seventeen she was already working as reporter for the newspaper Il Mattino.
By the early 1960s the career of the dynamic young woman had assumed an international dimension following her interviews with Sophia Loren, Orson Welles … and Salvador Dali whom she had described as “very unsympathetic”.
She was soon covering the Vietnam War and the regional conflicts in South America where she was once injured by flying bullets.
By now her stories had started appearing in the Time magazine.
The next phase of her career is principally reputed for exclusive interviews with key figures in world politics. Slim, not very tall and always smiling, Oriana had a gift for enticing her subjects into personal revelations that they normally regretted afterwards. She was often called impertinent, a ‘quality’ that she never disowned.
Speaking to Z. A. Bhutto she somehow made him talk about his first marriage while still in his teens. When she insisted on an exclusive interview of Ayatollah Khomeini, she was made to wear a long chador in his presence. Her very first question to him was: “Why is it necessary for me to wear this?” On hearing from the Ayatollah that it was no obligation, she quickly unwrapped herself in his presence and went ahead with the interview as if nothing had happened. She later observed that the Iranian leader was “the sweetest old fellow I ever interviewed”.
But the event which created a worldwide scandal was the then US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s claim that his country was a convoy in the Wild West while he was a cowboy on horseback escorting it. Kissinger later regretted the boast and said his encounter with the Italian journalist was a debacle.
Her other conquests included the Israeli and Indian prime ministers Golda Meir and Indira Gandhi respectively as well as Dalai Lama, Muammar Qadhafi, Lech Walesa and Yasser Arafat.
When she was interviewed on a TV show, she was asked why she always tricked her subjects into talking about their private lives. She replied: “Most reporters are like photographers. They bring to you the likenesses of the politicians as they are. Think of me as a portrait painter. I present them as I see them.”
By 1980 Oriana had settled down in New York, writing novels and essays on world affairs and giving lectures at universities.
She would briefly come back to journalism following the Sept 11, 2001 attacks on the twin towers in New York. Then, observing her beloved Florence being invaded by immigrants from Arab countries, she would bitterly criticise the European Union’s policy of “transforming Europe into Eurabia”.
A heavy smoker all her life, Oriana Fallaci died in Florence of lung cancer on Sept 15, 2006.
Oh, I was almost going to forget. At the end of our short encounter in Karachi I asked her if she had a word of advice for me.
“Who am I to advise you!” she answered, “but if you insist, let me quote my uncle Bruno who was also a journalist: never bore your readers!”
—The writer is a journalist based in Paris.
Published in Dawn, August 30th, 2015
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