When Phil Castro played live ball to me and Lollobrigida

A1 Digital India News: I am 80 years old and this is my 60th year in the entertainment business. It's hard to believe even as we write this. Most of my career was spent in public relations, working with the biggest stars of the day. There was a lot of mystery in Hollywood at the time, but sometimes I forget the mystique of icons like Paul Newman, Robert Mitchum, Ali McGraw, Diahann Carroll, Charlton Heston and many others. They addressed the public primarily through their work and carefully controlled the press to promote their latest film. That mystique allowed me to achieve one of my most unusual accomplishments for a client, when I traveled to Cuba with actress and photojournalist Gina Lollobrigida in 1974 for an exclusive photo essay and interview with Fidel Castro.

Watching Castro play 5-on-5 basketball on an empty court, I wondered how a girl from a small town in Virginia got here. After graduating from Emerson College I moved to New York in the summer of 1964 and got my first job at WNEW-TV working on the children's television show Wonderama produced by Sonny Fox. I did everything from booking talent to schmoozing the audience and climbing up into the attic to collect the prizes for the day. I knew I loved working with celebrity guests and thought maybe that was the direction I should go in.

Kathy Berlin and Paul Newman. Courtesy of Kathy Berlin
In 1968, I got my first job in PR as a radio and television publicist for United Artists. It was a dream job, and I had amazing opportunities as one of the few women in the office. I was brought into screenings and focus groups to share my feelings as a "woman viewer." I worked with incredible directors and producers on films like Midnight Cowboy, Women in Love, Yellow Submarine, Fellini's Satyricon, and many others. I went to MGM in 1972 for two years, which wasn’t our creative peak, but there were some great moments with films like Westworld and Soylent Green.

I moved to Rogers & Cowen in 1974, where I eventually became president and ran the New York office. There’s not enough superlatives to describe my time there. We represented the biggest stars in the business and handled some of the best films of the seventies and eighties. The incredible impact of walking down the famous Philadelphia stairs one day with Sylvester Stallone for the premiere of Rocky, launching Newman’s Own with Paul Newman and raising money for a camp for children with cancer or working with Bette Midler for the Oscar campaign for The Rose is incredible.

Nothing prepared me for traveling to Cuba with my lifelong friend Gina Lollobrigida. I met Gina when I started at United Artists in 1968. We worked together on Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell and quickly became friends. That's how I met my husband, journalist Richard Valeriani. We had dinners with journalists and powerful people in DC and Richard kept talking Italian to Gina. She wanted to practice English, so we switched seats and he was there. We were married for 38 years before she passed away in 2018.

Gina, who was called "the most beautiful woman in the world," discovered that she had grown beyond naivety and had many artistic accomplishments, including becoming a brilliant photographer. In 1974, I teamed up with her to produce a series of articles in Ladies' Home Journal entitled "The Ten Most Attractive Men in the World."

Unfortunately it still takes years to compile a list of attractive women. Gina photographed and interviewed the subjects, and I wrote the copy for the monthly feature. The first issue featured Neil Armstrong and the second featured Henry Kissinger. They got a good response and Gina decided she wanted to photograph Fidel Castro in Cuba.

I contacted a contact person in DC who put me in touch with the Cuban ambassador. I presented the idea, and surprisingly (or maybe not surprisingly) Castro immediately said yes to being photographed by Gina. He was going straight to Cuba from Italy, but I went via Mexico City because no US citizen can officially travel there.

I met Gina and her team of cameramen and sound men in Havana. We were taken to a beautiful house on the outskirts of the city. When we walked in I couldn't help but think that this house had been taken over by the government. Meals were brought in during our week there, and we only left the house on trips led by Castro or his people.

Castro comes home the next morning, and you can tell he's nervous about Gina. He films everything with his camera and soundman and attaches the microphone to her push-up bra. As soon as he saw it, he immediately looked away in embarrassment. I don't think the position of the microphone is an accident. He likes Hollywood movies and apparently he knows that she likes Hollywood movies