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
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."
By Tracy Wilkinson
Times Staff Writer
September 16, 2006
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
"She wanted to die in [her native]
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
In the last few years, as she battled cancer, she had been living mainly in
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
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
She became a journalist in her la! te
teens while attending the
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
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
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
"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,"
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
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
"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
tracy.wilkinson@latimes.com
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