Saturday, September 16, 2006

Obit 2: Oriana Fallaci, 77, Glamorous, Fearless, Provocative. But Cancer, Age Turns her to Bigotry

The ANNOTICO Report

 

In the mid-1960s and for two decades that followed, Fallaci covered wars, and wrote the interviews that brought her international fame. Just her name came to represent a kind of interviewing style.

The Kissinger article in 1972, for example, was a classic; to counter her contention that he was weak against Richard Nixon, Kissinger argued that he was admired as the "cowboy" who rides in, alone, to the rescue. Kissinger was ridiculed endlessly after that, and he later wrote that his encounter with Fallaci was "the single most disastrous conversation I have ever had with any member of the press."

Margaret Talbot, who profiled Fallaci for the New Yorker magazine, wrote that Fallaci always managed to take her subjects by surprise.  "Fallaci's manner of interviewing was deliberately unsettling: She approached each encounter with studied aggressiveness, (she often disarmed her subjects with bald questions about death, God and pity) and displayed a sinuou! s, crafty intelligence,".

To me it is interesting the political "transformation" that took place  with Oriana Fallaci. She started out as a Leftist, and always justifiably  excoriated those who abused power, whether they were politicians or denizens of the cultural elite. She believed that having power inevitably corrupts. And she believed journalism was the perfect weapon to fight back.

 

Yet in her later years she came out of semi retirement  and launched her on her final crusade, and ranted against Islam, much to the delight and encouragement of the far right Lega Nord,using derogatory, ugly, distasteful language,laced with political venom.

Therefore, the death of Fallaci posed difficulties for many of her colleagues and Italian luminaries attempting to offer condolences.

Politicians from Italy's ruling center-left coalition tended to emphasize her earlier years in their memorials; from the right wing, several praised her as a woman of rare intellectual honesty.

The Italian journalists' union called Fallaci a "great, courageous and scrupulous journalist" who was also "an intellectual whose most recent views were unacceptable and in many respects dangerous."

 

 

ORIANA FALLACI, 77; Renowned Journalist Confronted Power

 Los Angeles Times

By Tracy Wilkinson
Times Staff Writer

September 16, 2006

ROME  She cornered ayatollahs and challenged dictators. She was glamorous, fearless and always provocative.

Oriana Fallaci, Italian author and globe-trotting journalist whose interviews produced piercing portraits of world leaders for decades, but who in later years channeled her energies into bitter diatribes against Islam, died Friday, her publisher said.

Fallaci was 77 and had been suffering from cancer. She died at a private hospital in Florence, where she had arrived about 10 days ago from New York, aware that her health was failing, the publishing arm of RCS MediaGroup said in a statement.

"She wanted to die in [her native] Florence, and that is what happened," Riccardo Nencini, head of the Tuscan regional government, told reporters.

Raised in a family of rebels and anti-Fascist resistance fighters, Fallaci went on to be! come one of the most renowned journalists of her generation, conducting remarkable interviews with the world's most powerful people, from Deng Xiaoping to Henry Kissinger, the Ayatollah Khomeini to Golda Meir.

One secret to her success was her ability to disarm her subjects with blunt candor and exotic good looks that masked, though not always, what she described as deep rage at the arrogance of power. And she was never afraid to take a position, nor to offend.

Her life was one of celebrity, self-involved theatrics and high drama. She got shot during student protests in Mexico, covered the Vietnam War  managing even there to maintain her mascara and eyeliner thick and dark  and insulted Federico Fellini. She shed her chador in front of Khomeini, bickered with Yasser Arafat and got Kissinger to admit the futility of Vietnam.

In the last few years, as she battled cancer, she had been living mainly in New York, in what she called a self-imposed exile from ! "an Italy more ill than I am," and making only rare public appearances.

Accolades poured in Friday for the combative writer, some with caveats because of the vitriolic and often bigoted nature of her final essays on what she called the Muslim invasion of Europe and Islamic assault on Western values.

Even so, she won praise in some quarters for daring to articulate the visceral fears of Europeans and Americans confronted and confounded by Muslim immigrants who refuse to assimilate, and those who advocate violence.

"We have lost a journalist of world fame, an author of great publishing success, a passionate protagonist of lively cultural battles," Italian President Giorgio Napolitano said.

"Oriana Fallaci was the greatest Italian journalist of the last century," said Pier Ferdinando Casini, former speaker of the Italian Parliament. "She was an extraordinary woman, an unsettling witness of the West and its values."

Rage and hefty ego permeated! Fallaci's writings as well as her flamboyant style and her approach to subjects. With a cigarette permanently dangling from her fingers  even after her first cancer surgery, she continued to smoke  she excoriated those who abused power, whether they were politicians or denizens of the cultural elite. She believed that having power inevitably corrupts. And she believed journalism was the perfect weapon to fight back.

"Today's history is written the very moment it happens," she wrote in the preface to the 1976 "Interview with History." "For this reason I like journalism. For this reason I fear journalism."

"Journalism is an extraordinary and terrible privilege," she said. "Not by chance, if you are aware of it, does it consume you with a hundred feelings of inadequacy. Not by chance, when I find myself going through an event or an important encounter, does it seize me like anguish, a fear of not having enough eyes and enough ears and enough brains to look and li! sten and understand like a worm hidden in the wood of history."

She added that "those who determine our destiny" are "not really better than ourselves," and that more often than not, those in power do not deserve to be there.

"Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon," she wrote. "To the same degree that I do not understand power, I do understand those who oppose power, who criticize power, who contest power, especially those who rebel against power imposed by brutality."

Fallaci was born June 29, 1929, in Florence. Her father, Edoardo, was a member of Justice and Liberty, an anti-Fascist resistance movement, daring work that landed him in prison. As a teenager, Oriana, the eldest of three daughters, joined the underground resistance as well, helping to guide escaping Allied soldiers to safety.

She became a journalist in her la! te teens while attending the University of Florence and was hired by a top Italian magazine at the age of 21. She was dispatched to Hollywood, where she wrote about stars such as Clark Gable through the 1950s and into the '60s. She published her first book in 1956, "The Seven Sins of Hollywood." Orson Welles, who had become a friend, wrote the preface.

She once said that her uncle, noted journalist Bruno Fallaci, hated newspapers and would only forgive her choice of profession "if I risked my life in some war."

In a film clip that Italian television broadcast repeatedly Friday, Fallaci can be seen in a 1961 interview where she is the subject. The journalist, Ugo Zatterin, tells her she is often called "nasty" and mean. She widens her heavily made-up eyes, flips her then-bouffant chestnut hair and feigns baffled innocence.

"What does it mean to be nasty? Telling the truth?" she says coyly. "I think I'm very nice. When I interview a person I always try to b! ring out the best in that person. When I draw a picture, for example, I try to describe his good points, don't I?"

Zatterin suggests that perhaps she sometimes gets it wrong and paints an unfairly negative picture.

"It's not my fault," she says, batting thick eyelashes, "if those are his best qualities."

In the mid-1960s and for two decades that followed, Fallaci covered wars, starting at a time few women entered the battlefield, and wrote the interviews that brought her international fame. Just her name came to represent a kind of interviewing style.

The Kissinger article in 1972, for example, was a classic; to counter her contention that he was weak against Richard Nixon, Kissinger argued that he was admired as the "cowboy" who rides in, alone, to the rescue. Kissinger was ridiculed endlessly after that, and he later wrote that his encounter with Fallaci was "the single most disastrous conversation I have ever had with any member of the press.! "

Margaret Talbot, who profiled Fallaci for the New Yorker magazine in June, wrote that the author always managed to take her subjects by surprise.

"Fallaci's manner of interviewing was deliberately unsettling: She approached each encounter with studied aggressiveness, made frequent nods to European existentialism (she often disarmed her subjects with bald questions about death, God and pity) and displayed a sinuous, crafty intelligence," Talbot wrote.

"It didn't hurt that she was petite and beautiful, with straight, smooth hair that she wore parted in the middle or in pigtails; melancholy blue-gray eyes, set off by eyeliner; a cigarette-cured voice; and an adorable Italian accent."

After her interview in 1973 with Greek resistance leader Alexandros Panagoulis, convicted of attempting to assassinate military coup leader George Papadopoulos, she and Panagoulis became lovers. Fallaci's paramour was killed in a suspicious car crash in 1976, inspiring ! her 1979 novel, "A Man."

Her cancer struck in the 1980s, slowing her production and pace.

It was the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon that jerked her out of semi-retirement and launched her on her final crusade, against Islam. She saw radical Islam  and argued there was no such thing as moderate Islam  as the new brand of Nazi Fascism, "SS and Black Shirts who wave the Koran." In the book that emerged, "The Rage and the Pride," she ranted against Islamic terrorists and fundamentalism.

But Fallaci did not stop at terrorists; all Muslims, she wrote, posed a problem for Western civilization. She assailed European officials and the intelligentsia for bending over backward to accommodate Muslim immigrants who she said were hostile and insulting, who refused to adapt to Western values and customs, and who were ruining her city of Florence and much of Italy.

Using derogatory, ugly, distasteful language, she portrayed the "Muslim intruders! " who "infest our streets and squares" as drug dealers, thieves, leches and prostitutes spreading AIDS. "They breed too much," she said.

"The children of Allah spend their time with their bottoms in the air, praying five times a day," she noted.

She also attacked the Vatican under the late Pope John Paul II, saying that the church appeased Islam and did not do enough to solidify Christian values in Europe.

"Tell me, Holy Father: Is it true that some time ago you asked the sons of Allah to forgive the Crusades that your predecessors fought to take back the Holy Sepulcher?" she wrote. "But  did they ever apologize?"

Fallaci last year praised the election of Pope Benedict XVI, who has taken a much harder stance against radical Islam, saying this week that the violence it espouses is "contrary to God's nature." Despite a lifetime as a declared atheist, Fallaci had a private audience with Benedict in August 2005.

In her 2004 work "The Force of R! eason," Europe was becoming an Islamic colony that she called Eurabia. An Italian judge ordered her to stand trial on charges of insulting a recognized religion, a case that would have made it to court later this year. Meanwhile, her final books became bestsellers in Europe.

Among critics, however, her writings have been picked apart not just for their political venom.

"Not since 'A Farewell to Arms' have such vacuous heroines wandered through a war" is how a review in the Los Angeles Times panned her 1993 novel about Beirut, "Inshallah." "Fallaci spews words at the target like shrapnel from a claymore mine  and still misses!"

Fallaci frequently insisted on translating her own works, to awkward and sometimes laughable end.

She described writing as a torturous process.

"I never write rapidly, I never cast away: I am a slow writer, a cautious writer," she said in "The Rage and the Pride." "I'm also an unappeasable writer: I do not resemble t! hose who are always satisfied with their product as if they urinated ambrosia. Moreover, I have many manias."

The death of Fallaci posed difficulties for many of her colleagues and Italian luminaries attempting to offer condolences.

Nobel laureate Dario Fo, who has been more sympathetic toward Islam, said simply that "in front of death there is always sorrow" but that he harbored "deep disagreements" with Fallaci over their contrasting politics.

Politicians from Italy's ruling center-left coalition tended to emphasize her earlier years in their memorials; from the right wing, several praised her as a woman of rare intellectual honesty.

"I weep for the death of a symbol of culture, intellectual honesty and freedom," said Roberto Calderoli, a former government minister from the xenophobic Northern League political party. "In spite of her illness, she foresaw and denounced the risks we face from Islamic fundamentalism spreading in a sea of cowardice a! nd a conspiracy of silence."

The Italian journalists' union called Fallaci a "great, courageous and scrupulous journalist" who was also "an intellectual whose most recent views were unacceptable and in many respects dangerous."

In her 2004 book, a short work called "Oriana Fallaci interviews Oriana Fallaci," she spoke of her mortality.

"Why did you agree to see me?" Fallaci the interviewer asks Fallaci the subject. "Because death hangs over me," she answers. "Medicine has given its verdict: Signora, you cannot be healed. You won't heal. According to that verdict  I do not have much time to live. But I have so many things to say."

Fallaci never married nor had children. She is survived by a sister, Paola, of Tuscany, who was at her bedside at the time of her death; and Paola's three children. One of them, nephew Edoardo, said funeral services would be small and private.

 

tracy.wilkinson@latimes.com

 

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