The Star Who Drank From Fountains and Dried Up in the Sun

Anita Ekberg once stepped off a plane in Rome with nothing but a cardboard suitcase and a smile sharp enough to slice bread. The airport wind lifted her blonde hair like a movie poster, and even the cab driver knew her name before she spoke it. Sweden had told her no—her preacher father swore acting was sin dressed in sequins—but Italy said yes in every neon language. Within months she was dancing with Mastroianni under studio lights, her laughter looping through dubbing rooms while secretaries practiced her pout in powder-room mirrors. Women bought the same lipstick, men bought daydreams, and producers bought her time by the mile.

Fame tasted like fountain water scooped in cupped hands: cold, sweet, impossible to hold. She drank anyway. Hollywood shipped her scripts wrapped in gold ribbon, and she signed them between kisses from kings and soccer players. Paparazzi flashed bulbs until night looked like day, and Anita learned to pose as casually as breathing—one hip cocked, eyes half-lidded, the eternal invitation. But every spotlight casts a shadow; hers arrived wearing a wedding ring that didn’t fit and scripts that grew thinner each year. The mirror, once a friend, started asking rude questions about wrinkles and waistlines, and the fountain began to taste of rust.

Two divorces later the phone stopped ringing with first-class tickets and started offering cheap horror films shot in abandoned castles. She said yes because saying no meant silence, and silence felt like death with the lights still on. Illness moved into her bones without asking, knitting pain into every step while old magazines in dentist offices kept showing the girl who once bathed in Trevi water. Visitors found her in a small apartment cluttered with trophies and unpaid bills, her beauty now a memory she wore like a faded coat too precious to throw away. She still powdered before breakfast, still answered the door in lipstick, still signed autographs for delivery boys who stared as if greeting a ghost.

Anita died on a winter morning that smelled of pine and disinfectant, the television muttering in a language she no longer bothered to understand. The world rushed to post side-by-side photos—goddess then, “gargoyle” now—forgetting that marble cracks and water dries, but the dare to jump the fence and chase the impossible remains. Somewhere in Rome a fountain still spills, and if you squint through the coins you might glimpse a girl who refused to apologize for wanting everything, even when everything refused to stay.