Fallen Angel

by William Fotheringham

  * * *

  After the world championships of 1953, the affair continued. The week after the race and a few hours before the star was due to face the Australian Syd Patterson in a pursuit match, a soigneur entered Coppi’s hotel room close to the Vigorelli track in Milan. He found the cyclist in bed with Giulia. The soigneur asked if there was a risk that Coppi might sap his strength before taking on Patterson, who was world champion at the discipline; Coppi replied that he was good enough to make love and then beat the Australian later.

  Coppi’s gregari played their role in keeping the affair secret. Giulia Locatelli would travel to Milan to meet Coppi, taking her daughter Lolli as cover. In Milan, the eight-year-old would be consigned either to Ettore Milano or Giovannino Chiesa. She would be taken to a film or a puppet show, while the couple spent time together.

  Lolli, naturally, was under orders to keep her mouth shut, because Dr Locatelli had his suspicions: he was receiving letters that warned that something was going on. ‘My husband wanted to make me swear that the contents of the anonymous letters he received did not correspond to reality,’ said Giulia Locatelli. ‘I swore, yes, on the heads of our children, and I was sincere when I shouted through my tears that only sporting fanaticism connected me to Coppi.’ The doctor and his wife would spent entire nights arguing, and he would set off to see his patients at 7 a.m. without having slept. At some point late in 1953, Fausto and Giulia escaped on holiday for a week on Capri ‘like man and wife’, she said later. Also late that year, she discovered that she was pregnant – or so she claimed in 1978 – but had an early miscarriage. In the wider world, however, the affair had yet to make headlines, although the podium photograph at Lugano had in effect made it public. Still the affair remained an open secret. ‘Everyone in cycling closed their eyes. It didn’t create too much trouble,’ says Fiorenzo Magni.

  All that changed at the 1954 Giro, where, as the defending winner and the world champion, Coppi was the overwhelming favourite. He lived up to his status on the first stage in Palermo, a team time trial that he and his Bianchi team-mates won by four minutes from Koblet’s Guerra squad. However, on the second day he effectively lost the race, suffering serious stomach trouble after eating oysters for dinner in a Sicilian hotel. His deficit was eleven minutes; at the end of stage six, where he failed to respond to an attack by the promising young Italian Carlo Clerici, he had lost a colossal thirty-nine minutes and had no chance of overall victory.

  That would have been bad enough for his public image, but the state of his private life finally hit the headlines during the rest day on the shores of Lake Garda. Both ‘la signora’– as the team called Giulia – and Bruna turned up, almost simultaneously. Doctor Locatelli had received an anonymous letter, recommending that he keep his wife at home. Giulia had promptly fled with Lolli, pretending that she was going to help a friend in Bergamo prepare for her wedding. Lolli would later describe phone calls along the way to the race, the sudden appearance of various members of Coppi’s entourage and her mother saying at one point, ‘When I have married Mr Coppi, he will be your father’.

  The race caravan was awash with rumours: Coppi and his wife had had an intense argument, their angry voices echoing down the corridor of the Bianchi team hotel. The mystery ended when Giulia got in her car and followed the cyclist on a time trial stage, the forty-two kilometres from Gardone to Riva del Garda – something completely unheard of. Bianchi were staying in an out-of-the-way hotel where a room had been booked for an unnamed guest. One writer described a pretty girl of eight or nine trying to persuade the police to let her into the hotel, saying ‘I must go to Uncle Fausto’. It was Lolli. A Bianchi domestique let her in; the journalist said he didn’t know Coppi had a niece, and the rider replied she was ‘the daughter of the woman on the third floor’.

  Five days later, amid the chaos, Coppi won the race’s toughest stage across the Dolomites to Bolzano in his old style, but he could do no better than finish second overall behind Clerici. Giulia was also in evidence in St Moritz – the day before the finish in Milan – and this was the day she acquired the name La Dama Bianca, the White Lady, thanks to her white Montgomery duffel coat, of the style made famous by the English general during the Second World War. The gregario Sandrino Carrea recalled: ‘We finished the stage into St Moritz and there was this lady with a white coat. “Carrea, where is your hotel?” she said. I told her we were at the Poste. It was the first time I had seen her. And Fausto didn’t come to eat with us.’ ‘Who is Fausto Coppi’s lady in white?’ asked Pierre Chany in L’Equipe.

  A couple of relatively minor events on the race were immediately linked with Coppi’s private life and turned into a scandal. On the leg into St Moritz the field staged what amounted to a strike, covering the two hundred mountainous kilometres in nine hours without any significant racing. ‘Sheep on bikes’ was how La Stampa described the riders. Coppi himself had a fight with a Swiss cyclist, Emilio Croci-Torti, as they pedalled along, reflecting the stress he was suffering. The blame for both events was put on Coppi’s ‘physical and moral crisis’, amid rumours that he and Bruna were about to separate. A weekly magazine headlined its review of the race ‘Il Giro degli scandali’: the report said that the stars of cycling were overpaid and the sport was decadent, violent – there had been a fight at a stage finish as well as the Croci-Torti incident – and drug-riddled. The writer pilloried the stars for abusing their power over the gregari by making the lesser lights race how they wished. The vitriolic tone had been set.

  * * *

  When the White Lady is mentioned to one of Coppi’s circle the response does not vary a great deal. To start with, she is never referred to by name, but in various derogatory terms – as quella signora, la dama or, in the case of one former team-mate, quella la – that woman. There is usually one small anecdote, enough to make it clear she is not approved of, before the eyes are raised to the heavens, and the former cyclist says he cannot say more, for fear of offending her son, Faustino. The questioner is then referred to another member of the inner circle, who ‘knows much more’. Needless to say, the response is identical when that other ex-cyclist is questioned. It is enough, however, to get the message across: feelings have not weakened over fifty years.

  A quietly spoken man in his early fifties, Faustino Coppi is gently protective of his mother. Given the odium that has been heaped on her over the last half-century, he has good reason. Faustino describes Giulia Occhini as ‘protective, gentle, but a very, very strong character. She always knew where she wanted to get to and got there. There were no half-measures with her. She said what she thought and people took it as being unpleasant. There are people who have laid the responsibility for his death on her. They have said she changed my father [but] he was a person who had a certain way of living, then became famous and that changed. I don’t think it was so much marriage with my mother, but an evolution in his lifestyle.’ He uses the word ‘marriage’ in spite of the fact that Fausto and Giulia were never to be united in a ceremony that was recognised in their home country.

  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 dat
e 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.