Fallen Angel (26 page)

Giulia Locatelli began attempting to get her point of view across in the press from the day the scandal broke in 1954. On 15 June she emerged from obscurity. ‘Today we met the mysterious lady known as the White Lady’ read the headline in
La Stampa
. The interview was as revealing for what it did not say, as for what it did. Giulia was accurately described as a ‘decisive woman, very sure of herself’, but she insisted, disingenuously, that ‘between me and Coppi is nothing more than a sporting friendship’. ‘My life is ruined’, she told the reporters, adding that she hoped her husband would forgive her rather than throw her out of their house. It was a virtuoso performance: the link with Coppi was established but she gave nothing significant away.

In the years that followed, no version of Fausto’s life was produced without a reaction from her; interviews and ghost-written articles appeared from time to time in which certain facts of the affair were subtly changed to present her in a better light: the date at which she and Coppi became lovers, the way her husband behaved during the affair, her own conduct, what happened when Fausto died less than six years after their life together began. As an attempt to rewrite history, it makes sense: this was the woman who was, as she put it, portrayed as ‘Italy’s biggest sinner’. She was not defending only herself but the lover who was put in the dock alongside her.

Giulia resented being labelled the White Lady: ‘Don’t I have the right to my own name, like every other woman?’ The title probably depersonalised her, if the tone of the letters she says she received is anything to go by. One, signed ‘a mother’, suggested sarcastically that she should get rid of her children if they were all that was keeping her from happiness. After a photograph was taken of her wearing a fat bracelet covered in precious stones, she was accused of gold-digging. Over the years, she met the opprobrium head-on. The contrast with the self-effacing Bruna could not be greater.

She described herself as ‘impulsive, and tending to repent what I’ve done when it’s too late to go back’. Even Faustino admits she was opinionated. Given the position of women in Italian society at the time, a woman like Bruna was seen as the ideal. Sandrino Carrea describes Giulia as a woman who saw things in black and white, and had no hesitation when it came to making enemies: ‘[Her attitude was] you are either for me or against me.
Era una bestia così
– she was that sort of creature.’

Giulia, clearly, was not an easy person to be around. Another former team-mate of Coppi’s says: ‘She was the kind of pushy woman who made herself known, who liked to be talked about. It was embarrassing. It was hard to be with a woman like that, who believed she was important, who boasted that she was Coppi’s girlfriend. Bruna was the complete opposite: modest, shy. If there was a party, she would stand in a dark bit of the room.’ When the White Lady went clothes shopping, eyewitnesses recall that she would have every item brought down from the shelves, and then buy none of them, to their embarrassment – these things get noticed in small-town Italy. ‘If she was buying ham, she would always taste the first sort she was given, then buy the second. She was a terror. The important thing [for her] was that she was no longer an Occhini, she was a Coppi.’ The reporter in
La Stampa
was a
little more polite: ‘
La signora Giulia
has an impetuous temperament, and you can see that in a few moments by the way she drives. She drives fast, and doesn’t stick to the rules of the road if they might slow her down. When she can, she runs red lights.’

Giulia Locatelli left her husband shortly after the Giro ended. As she later told it, when she got to Tortona to meet her Fausto, in a distraught state at being separated from her children, he was off racing in Turin. Welcome to the world of professional cycling. As for Coppi, he left Bruna and Marina with a heavy heart. ‘I don’t ask you to pardon me, but don’t hate me,’ he said. He had written a letter to Bruna earlier saying, ‘Something atrocious is happening to me but I am obliged to go through with it. I am sorry if I am hurting you. I love this other woman, about whom people will say things that are worse than hanging, without ever knowing her. If someone tried to ruin our love, I would be capable of killing him.’

Popular cycling tradition held that sex weakened the male athlete. Coppi would have had this dinned into him by Biagio Cavanna from his youth. Managers such as Eberardo Pavesi would shake their heads and say their team’s poor form was due to a recent spate of marriages or new girlfriends. ‘For years, I was abstinent,’ Coppi told Rino Negri. ‘Then I tried, and won the Baracchi after a night of love.’ His first win in the autumn two-up team time trial came in 1953, after his affair with Giulia began. Riccardo Filippi, world amateur champion in 1953, put it this way: ‘As for women, I recall only huge sexual fasts.’ As Fiorenzo Magni said: ‘A married athlete owes a lot to his wife. “No” today because it’s the Giro di Lombardia, “no” because it’s Piedmont. And imagine the abstinence for the Giro d’Italia or the Tour.’

Given the abstinence that Coppi says was part of his cycling lifestyle, the affair with Giulia must have been a
sexual awakening of sorts for him. Much is made of his mistress’s sensual appeal: amid the disapproval, one former team-mate still waxes lyrical about the beauty of her hair and eyes, which distracted the Bianchi
gregari
when she turned up at races. Raphael Geminiani is one of the few who does not disapprove of her and he is emphatic about what she must have brought to Coppi: ‘
La Dame Blanche
– oh lalala. She was the kind of woman who can lead a great man by the nose and he will still be happy. She took Coppi in hand. The White Lady made him discover a new side of life: pleasure’ – he makes the sensual implications of
le plaisir
obvious as he says the words – ‘
l’amour
, restaurants, clothes, soirées. She was flattered to have someone like Fausto; he was flattered by her attentions.’

As a man who shied away from confrontation, Coppi would probably have preferred the affair to be secret, if not necessarily brief, but he had set in motion a chain of events that he could not control. Some of those close to him say he was put in an impossible position once Giulia had walked out on her husband. ‘With Giulia he ended up
incastrato
, taken by the balls,’ said one. ‘It could have been a romantic adventure like any other, but the fact that she left her husband and two children and went to live with him put him under an obligation to do all the things that men say in that situation but don’t actually mean. He behaved like a man of honour. In inverted commas.’

* * *

The trail that led Fausto and Giulia to the villa on the Serravalle road was not an easy one; matters were not helped by a freak accident in which he was hit by a wheel which fell off a lorry while he was training. A cracked skull was diagnosed, a month off racing recommended. Finding somewhere to live was the
urgent priority, however. The couple stayed in hotels initially but were pursued by the press and the fans. Before finally settling on Villa Carla, they inspected various houses but were not welcome as tenants. One owner, learning it was Coppi and his mistress who wanted to rent, refused point-blank. The owner of a secluded hilltop villa near Tortona asked them for a completely unreasonable amount.

In the summer of 1954 the villa outside Novi was the subject of a three-page article in
Oggi
magazine – Italy’s equivalent of
Hello!
. The walls of one of the bedrooms were papered in white and Bianchi blue, with bedclothes to match. There was a room solely for Fausto’s cycle clothing, a billiards room, a waiting room for visitors, two servants’ rooms, a bar in the sitting room, rooms full of toys for the children and cupboards full of trophies. It was, in short, the perfect bourgeois residence for an upwardly mobile couple, with its hints of aristocracy – the high ceilings, the elegant archways, the statues on the mantelpieces. There was one false note: two rooms had been set aside for Marina in the initial hope that she might come to stay occasionally. That never happened, even before Coppi’s death.

The trouble the couple had finding a place to live showed how public opinion had turned against Coppi after that Giro, but there were other signs. At a track meeting in Turin, on relatively local soil, he and Magni were greeted with whistles. He was also whistled when he visited Castellania with Giulia; he asked the whistler what was the matter and was told it was because he didn’t win the Giro. Given the tone of the newspaper coverage, it was hardly surprising. ‘No one in Tortona can forgive him for leaving his wife Bruna and daughter Marina for the White Lady,’ wrote one journalist. ‘It is all people talk about. Above all, because this was not a spur of the moment passion of the kind that happens in a bike race, but a situation that matured slowly under the eyes of his wife
with three children caught up in it. Everyone believes that Bruna does not deserve this fate in the slightest … Her life has become hell.’

Coppi’s marriage was major news: the Italian media of the time was obsessed with sex. In weekly magazines such as
Oggi
, every variant of domestic scandal was explored: bigamy, marriage between old men and young girls, countesses running away with their grooms, jealousy killings, marital murder, wives who threw themselves under trains. Such articles appeared alongside photographs of young girls talking to the Madonna, pieces about weeping statues and the Virgin of Lourdes curing disease, and discussion of the qualities of the ideal wife. There was obsessive reporting of the case of Wilma Montesi, a young girl murdered amid rumours of sexual scandal that went to the highest levels of the establishment.

The picture is that of a frenetic mingling of Catholicism and emerging sexual freedom. At the same time, a celebrity culture was emerging, with the reporting of every move made by figures such as Marilyn Monroe, Ingrid Bergman, Princess Margaret and Liz Taylor. The White Lady was included in
Oggi’s
list of personalities from ‘a troubled 1954’, together with Gina Lollobrigida, Katharine Hepburn, Princess Maria Pia of Savoy and Alcide De Gasperi (who had merely died, without sexual scandal).

Coppi and his mistress actively courted the media at times – Giulia rather more than her reticent lover. The impending separation of the two couples was announced by the cyclist’s lawyer to a horde of journalists outside a Milan hotel on 8 July. Inside, Coppi lay in bed, recovering from the skull fracture; his mistress was at his side. Bruna did not want the marriage to end, and the coverage was massively in favour of the slighted wife, apart from one frenetic point in late August when it was rumoured that Fausto had committed suicide by shooting himself with one of his hunting rifles. There was
prurient speculation about Marina’s state of mind and Bruna’s fainting fits. There were reports of a letter written by Bruna to the Pope, and his answer. The Pontiff expressed the view that, if Fausto did not return home, the hand of God would descend on him.

The wrath of Jacques Goddet certainly did. In a vicious full-page article in his newspaper
L’Equipe
the Tour organiser pilloried Coppi: ‘pitiful’, ‘cloistered in vanity’, ‘blinded by the opinion he has of himself’, ‘a poor
campionissimo
, afraid of suffering, of not dominating, of failing, of disappointing’. Goddet concluded: ‘He is no longer able to withstand the very idea of competition, he is the cholera of professional cycling.’ As editor of
L’Equipe
, Goddet was in a unique position to make his disapproval known, but he was using Coppi’s affair as a pretext for his own interests. The Italian’s decision to stay at home rather than ride the Tour in July 1954 and 1955 had meant that sales of
L’Equipe
suffered. In addition, Goddet was embroiled in a major battle with the Italian teams over Fiorenzo Magni’s decision to bring in the first team sponsor from outside the sport, Nivea. Coppi had sided with Magni, and that was enough for Goddet.

In his defence, Coppi said that he was avoiding the Tour to save his strength as he got older. He modestly requested that his private life remain private and that he be judged by what he achieved on his bike. But competing had its difficulties, because of Giulia’s presence. He managed two stage victories in the Tour of Switzerland on his comeback after the accident, but there was a major falling out with the Italian national team manager Alfredo Binda, who was unhappy when he realised that the White Lady had accompanied her Fausto to the race. A few months later, when Coppi defended his world title at Solingen, Denmark, Binda suffered another blow: he arrived at the town to discover that Giulia had appropriated his room in the team hotel because it was next to Fausto’s. He declared her
persona non grata
.

Showing something like his old form, Coppi took sixth in that world championship, helping Michele Gismondi to fourth place. Even that did not improve matters when they returned to Italy. He and Giulia were living in relative seclusion in their elegant villa. Coppi had banned the press, but Giulia occasionally let them through the gate to give interviews in which she put whatever spin she could on the situation. Negotiations were under way for both of them formally to separate from their spouses. There were convoluted discussions over the separations, at times lasting into the night. Bruna would not give up the belief that she could get her man back; Dr Locatelli was intransigent over allowing his wife access to their children. Fausto, on the other hand, was looking for divorce: at the time, this had to be approved by the Holy See. Not surprisingly given Pope Pius’s public expression of his disapproval, the marriage could not be annulled.

That, however, was merely the beginning of their tribulations. There were attempts to persuade Coppi to go back to his wife. Both his team-mate Michele Gismondi and another confidant, the journalist Rino Negri, told Coppi to return to Bruna. Negri received this answer: ‘If you talk that way you have never loved. If anyone else was doing what I am no one would talk about it.’ Gismondi was told: ‘If you knew
la Giulia
like I do, you would do what I have done.’ Coppi justifiably believed he had the right to a private life, but all of Italy wanted to know about the affair. Unfortunately for Coppi, the reaction was not limited to a few whistles from disillusioned fans, yells on the roadside that Coppi should go back to his wife, vitriolic news-paper articles and vicious anonymous letters. The backlash against the errant couple went far higher up the human food chain than angry
tifosi
and sensation-seeking journalists.