The Night I Tried To Kill Myself—Gia Scala

Gia Scala asked the cabdriver to stop.

“Right here on Waterloo Bridge?” he asked, thinking she was joking, “—at this time o’ night, Miss?”

“I asked to please stop,” Gia said.

“All right, Miss,” said the cabdriver, shrugging. And he pulled over.

The beautiful, green-eyed movie star reached nervously into her purse, handed the man a couple of shillings and got out of the cab.

“Have a nice walk, Miss,” the cabdriver called out.

But Gia didn’t answer. Instead, she took a few steps, paused for a moment, and then took a few more steps, toward the bridge’s railing. She clutched the railing with her trembling fingers. She looked down at the water of London’s Thames River below. The water was black, Gia though, as black as the night around her. The water was black, Gia thought, so black that it could easily hide a person who went plunging into it, hide the person and her hurt and her broken memories. The water was black, Gia thought, and soon—God forgive her, oh all-knowing God forgive her—soon she would be a part of the water’s blackness and then it would all be over, everything, over once and for all.

“Miss!” she half-heard the cabdriver call out behind her as she looked down.

“Cosa?” she asked in Italian suddenly. “What?”

“Miss!” the voice called out again.

“Cosa—” Gia started to repeat. And then, she let out with a terrible scream. For in that short moment she had forgotten where she was and what she was about to do, and she had remembered another railing and another terrible time in her life when she had stood, like this, clutching and looking down at the water below . . . The memory flooded her mind. . . .

That first time

The big ship had just pulled out of the Naples dock. A band was playing an Italian song, sunnier than the huge sun that lounged spectacularly over the scene that unforgettable afternoon. Everybody on the ship was shouting and saying goodbye and throwing confetti like it was the greatest New Year’s Eve of their lives. Some of the people laughed and some of them cried. But all of them strained their eyes towards the dock and watched the people who’d come to see them off, the friends and family they knew they might never see again as long as they lived now that they were off to a new life in the new world across the ocean.

All except the fourteen-year-old girl named Giovanna Scoglio. She would not look. She knew her mother was there on the dock with the others. She knew Mama was waving like the others, waving her long white handkerchief in time with the music like the others, waiting for her daughter to wave back. But the girl would not wave and she would not look.

“I had been so anxious to get on the ship and come to America,” she has since said. “But at the moment the ship began to move I was suddenly afraid to be lonely, and I was afraid now to be leaving behind the person I loved most in the world—my mother. And even though she had promised me she would come to America someday and join me, I thought maybe that day would never come. And I was sad. I was sadder than I ever imagined any human being could be.”

So she stood there, the pretty fourteen-year-old girl, clutching at the ship’s railing, staring at the water below, not daring to look up. And it was a long time later, after the others had left the railing and the big ship had passed the islands of Capri and Ischia and was practically beyond the sight of land, when the old, gentle-faced deck steward had come up to her and said, “Miss?”

“Cosa?” Gia had asked, looking up for he first time, “What?”

“Is there something I can do for you?” the deck steward had asked.

“Yes,” Gia had said, the tears beginning to rush into her big eyes. You . . . you can take me back to my mother!”

And where is your mother?” the steward had asked, not quite understanding.

Gia pointed back, toward Italy, her home.

“Ahhhh,” said the steward, understanding now, “but that is impossible, Miss. You are here and your mother is there, and every moment you are getting farther and farther away from her.”

“I know,” Gia said. “I know.”

And with that, unashamed, she’d begun to sob and she’d thrown herself into the old man’s arms and cried and cried. . . .

Gia discovers Queens

America for Gia was not a dream come true at first. It had been her dream. For years she had wanted nothing more. She knew it would mean leaving her family behind in Rome, her mother, her sister Agatha, her father—though she did not really see too much of her father since he was in the import-export business and spent much of his time traveling. But even at her young age Gia had had a vision—to leave her war-torn country and go to the land of so-much opportunity and become an actress in such a land. She had an aunt and uncle living in New York—or rather in that city’s very regal-sounding borough of Queens. And she knew that if she could only live with them for a few years and get to know America and its language and its people, everything else would be simple.

On Gia’s fourteenth birthday, her mother had written to the relatives in America telling them of her young daughter’s great wish. Three months later, to the day, Gia arrived in the United States.

That night, alone in her new bedroom, she sat down and wrote a letter to her mother. She wrote:

Queens, New York City, it is not quite what I imagined. I mean, it is not like all the pictures of America I have always seen. But it is comfortable and there are trees and that is important.

Aunt and Uncle are much older than I thought they would be, and though they seem quiet and not very used to having a younger person around, they are very nice. Tomorrow they will take me to the school which is called Bayside High School and I will meet many Americans my own age. I hope I will make many friends of them.

Gia’s hope was dashed first thing that next morning. Still used to the European way of doing things, Gia couldn’t understand why most of the other kids giggled when, on being introduced to them, she put out her hand for a handshake. And she couldn’t understand, not at all, why two of the girls she met no sooner listened to her talk for a few minutes when they began imitating her accent and then broke into a fit of hilarious laughter.

Almost immediately, Gia turned into the shy and lonely young person she was to remain for the next few years.

“Maybe if I’were not only fourteen—that very difficult age—things would have been different,” she told MODERN SCREEN in an interview only a few months ago. “But that was my age and that was my problem—and everything was so new and different than in my old country. The girls, for instance, they all wore sweaters and skirts and blue jeans all the time. And I had only very plain dresses, the kind young girls wear in Italy—the black dresses with the white collars, and I could not very well ask my aunt and uncle to buy me new things. So I looked very different from all the other girls.

“And some of the customs—I couldn’t understand them. Like the day a girl who was trying to be very nice to me invited me to join a sorority. I was happy at first. “This will be good, I thought at first, ‘in this way I will meet some new people.’ But then when I got to the sorority meeting I sat and listened to the girls talk about other girls they were thinking of asking to join, and I heard them say some nice things about some of the girls they would ask and some terrible things about some girls they decided they wouldn’t ask. And I thought, ‘This is the way it is done in the land of democracy? No, it is impossible!’ And in the middle of it all I got up and walked out and I never went back again.”

Gia gets pinned

Gia smiled a little as she went on to say, “Of course, there were the funny moments, too, funny when I think back about them. Like Tiso and the pin, for example.

Tiso was the boy who sat next to me in my mathematics class. I think that if I was the shyest girl in the school, Tiso must have been the shyest boy. He was also a year younger than I and about two inches shorter. And we never talked to one another, never. But one day when we were leaving the class, Tiso came up to me and, his face all red, he handed me something and said, ‘Here, I would like you to wear this.’ I said, ‘It is very pretty, thank you, but what is it?’ He said, ‘It is a fraternity pin.’ And then quickly, subitosubito, he rushed away. Well, I thought it would be an insult not to wear the pin and so I put it on.

Later, a couple of girls asked me about it and I told them the story. They began to laugh. They asked me if I knew what a fraternity pin meant. I said no. They told me it meant I was now practically engaged to Tiso. I didn’t know what to do. Of course, I didn’t love Tiso. I didn’t even know him. But could I embarrass him by giving him back the pin? I decided to wear it until the next day when I was sure he would say something to me and I would have to then say, ‘Ah, now I understand, Tiso—but I am sorry and in that case I must give you back the pin.’ But the next day Tiso, as usual, didn’t say anything to me. Nor the day after that. Nor ever. And so I just kept wearing the pin, not to embarrass him. I even wore it the last day, the day I graduated, the last day I ever saw Tiso . . . Now when I think back, I am not surprised that no other boy in the school ever asked me for a date. They all must have thought I was practically married!”

And Gia laughed a little at the end as she finished telling us about that, just as she’d smiled a little at the beginning. But we could tell, even as she spoke and tried to laugh and smile now, that her good and sensitive heart had made her an even more lonely person than she need have been back in those early years, that those years with only her two aging relatives and without friends had already taken their toll.

“After I graduated,” Gia went on, “things started to happen better for me. The best thing was my mother writing to me that I should not be discouraged about her not coming to America all this while, that my father was going to live and work in England for a few years—where she did not want to go, and that my sister Agatha was going to get married soon and that she would definitely come to America before the next year was over. I cried two days of happy tears after I got this news.

Gia meets a real friend

“The second best thing was meeting my friend, Ada Petkovich. I was working in New York City for the big insurance company now. Oh no, I had not given up the idea of becoming an actress. But for a few months before this I had gone around to all the casting offices in New York and nothing happened for me and I began needing money. So I thought I would take this insurance company job for a year, in which time I would save some money and buy some nice clothes and then go back to the casting offices again.

“It was long work, boring work, but I was managing to save and I enjoyed it for that. I even met some nice people there and I confided in some of them what my real wish was. I remember that I told one of them, especially an Italian-American girl named May. ‘You want to be an actress?’ she said. ‘Gia, honey,’ she said, ‘what do you want to go into a crazy business like that for? Why don’t you just concentrate on being a woman first and settle down with some good guy and raise a family?’ I remember saying, ‘Not me . . . me, I’m going to be an actress first!’ It’s funny how I never forget that girl May, or what she said to me. . . .

“Anyway, it was on one of those days I was working for the insurance company that I walked out on the street at five o’clock and ran into Ada. Actually, I didn’t know her too well and I didn’t recognize her right away. First, I thought she was a girl from school. But after a moment I realized I’d met her on the ship when I came over from Italy. I remembered she was the nice Austrian-Italian girl I’d borrowed a fountain pen from one day and talked to a little. But the way she greeted me now, it was like two sisters getting together. Right away she said, ‘Let’s go into a cafeteria and have a cup of coffee. And we did.

“She told me about herself in America and then I told her about myself.

“ ‘You are not happy,’ Ada said, when I was finished.

“ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘my mother will be over by the end of the year and then I will be all right.’

“ ‘But now you are unhappy,’ Ada said, ‘and it’s important to be happy as much as you can.’

“Then she told me she had an idea. Why didn’t I leave the house in Queens, she said, and come to New York to live with her and her father?

“That night I talked about this with my aunt and uncle. I was surprised, but they didn’t object. And so the next day I was moving into Ada’s with her and her wonderful father, Filippo. And how wonderful everything became for me now, how full of life.

“All of a sudden I realized I could sleep late on Saturdays and Sundays if I wanted. All of a sudden I realized I could go downstairs to the delicatessen at three o’clock in the morning if I wanted a sandwich. I’d become interested in painting in high school and all of a sudden now I realized I could sit and paint whenever I wanted without anybody objecting or saying anything about how the paint smelled or how messy I was making myself.

“For that next year I lived, really lived, for the first time in a long time. Ada introduced me to boys she knew and I went out on dates. Ada’s house was always so full of people and there was always laughter and singing and friendship there. Ada’s father was not rich but he would buy good food and he would cook and we would sit down to the table with some wine and all this food and relatives and friends, and it was always a feast there, always a celebration and a lot of fun.

“It was so wonderful that there was only one thing that could ever have torn me away from it all.

“That was my mother’s coming to America.

“And she did come to America, finally, at the end of that beautiful year, 1954. . . .”

Mama brings good luck

It was shortly after her reunion with her mother that Gia got her big break—“just as if Mama’s being here brought me luck,” Gia says.

This is the way it happened:

Gia, who’d just quit her job with the insurance company, began making the Broadway rounds again. One day she walked into the office of agent Lester Shurr. Now Mr. Shurr is one of the top names in the business and not everybody gets to see him. But Gia did. And Mr. Shurr was immediately interested.

“Have you ever done any movie work—here or in Italy?” he asked.

“No,” Gia said.

“Television?” Mr. Shurr asked.

“A little,” Gia said.

“Good, that’s good,” Mr. Shurr said, the excitement in his voice beginning to show.

“I mean,” Gia said, “in the last few weeks I have been on a few of the quiz shows. My mother—she has just arrived in this country—and she said to me, ‘Giovanna, I like this American television and the way they give money away all the time. Why don’t you try to get some of that money?’ Well, ever since I am a little girl I know a lot about music. So the other week I went on the Arlene Francis show. They asked me a question about opera and I answered and they gave me a prize, a what-you-call a waffle maker. When I got it I smiled for the camera, but when I got outside the theater I took another look at it and I said to myself, ‘What’s this thing?’—and I gave it away. I wanted money, not a thing you make waffles with. So the next week, last week, I went on the Bill Cullen show. This time they asked me a question about the violin. I answered it and they gave me fifty dollars and—”

Gia stopped suddenly and shook her head. “No, Mr. Shurr,” she said, a little embarrassed, “I have never done any acting on television, if that is what you mean.”

Mr. Shurr laughed. He didn’t seem to care anymore about any acting experience. What he did care about now was that here was an extremely beautiful girl sitting across the desk from him—a girl with a bittersweet yet vivacious quality that defied description.

He got right down to business. He told Gia that Universal-International Studios in Hollywood was conducting a search for a girl to play the lead in The Galileans, a big-budget picture they were planning. Three girls were being flown out to test for the part within the week, he said. Would Gia like to be the fourth, he asked.

“I had never fainted before in my life,” Gia told us about this moment, “but I had to do much heavy breathing to keep from fainting now. Finally, though, I managed to say yes to Mr. Shurr and then I left the office and I got very extravagant and took a taxi back to the apartment to tell Mama that we should pack right away, that we were both going to Hollywood, California!”

Gia blunders

In Hollywood about a week later, Gia tested for the part and won. And though U-I decided not to make the picture right away for various reasons, they lost no time in signing Gia to a contract, changing her last name from Scoglio to Seala, finding her and her mother a small apartment not far from the studio and advising her to wait. . . .

Meanwhile, there was the usual publicity build-up. And this is where Gia nearly miffed it. For at her very first interview she flatly refused to answer questions about busty Italian actresses and American-men-as-lovers and so on.

“Qh-oh,” Hollywood muttered. There were some people who would have bet right off that here was a girl destined to go no place fast if she kept on being so honest with the all-important press.

But, as it turned out, Gia didn’t need the press. What she would do in the next couple of years, she would do on her own. It would be hard at first, lots of study, not much money, playing a few tiny roles, waiting and hoping that someday the bigger role would come along. And then, sure enough, it would when U-I would give her a lead in their romantic comedy, Four Girls In Town. And after that Columbia Pictures would borrow her for Garment Jungle—and arrange with U-I to share her contract. And then the MGM casting people would decide that here was the girl they wanted for Bob Taylor’s Tip On A Dead Jockey and then for the prize role of the South Seas native girl in Glenn Ford’s Don’t Go Near The Water.

And, during those couple of years, Gia, ecstatically happy now, would sit down to supper with her mother every night before going out, maybe, or staying home to practice her lines, and she would wonder if all this good fortune were really happening to her—but always at the end of their talks she would take her mother’s hand in hers and she would say, “Sometimes I am afraid, Mama—

“I am afraid,” she would say. “This is too good for us and something will happen in some way to spoil it.”

And then her mother would laugh and make the horns with two fingers—for this old European custom would always make Gia laugh, too—and she would say, “God forbid that the Devil ever touches us and spoils anything.”

And Gia would laugh more than ever now, loud, as if her happy noises would surely keep the Devil away. And then, until the next time, she would forget about her one awful fear. . . .

Gia’s premonition

She learned about her mother’s sickness on the telephone. Her latest picture was just about ready for national release and the studio had sent Gia to New York to help plug the picture. It was a Sunday afternoon—Mother’s Day, 1957. Gia was at the NBC television studios where she’d just finished rehearsing with Steve Allen for an appearance on his show that night. Midway during the rehearsal she’d felt a strange chill run through her body and for a moment she’d closed her eyes and, even more strangely, she’d seen her mother, just her face—suddenly old and tired-looking, calling out for her.

Right after the rehearsal Gia phoned home. There was no answer. Half an hour later, she tried again. No answer. She kept trying, every half hour, then every fifteen minutes, then every ten.

It was about five minutes before the Allen show went on that night when Gia’s mother answered.

“Mama,” Gia shouted into the receiver, “is everything all right with you? Is there anything wrong?”

“No,” Gia heard her mother answer, softly. “I am fine. Do not worry. I am fine.”

Gia could hear right away that her mother sounded different, that her voice sounded husky and deep.

“You are sure, Mama?” Gia asked, worried. She knew that if her mother laughed now and said something funny—the way she would always do when Gia was unnecessarily worried, that then everything would be all right.

“Mama,” Gia asked again, “you are sure?”

She waited for the laugh.

But it never came.

Instead a voice, almost a strange voice to her, tired and low and more-and-more weak sounding, said, “Si, figlia—yes, I am in very good health.”

At that moment, the Allen show director rushed over to Gia and asked her to please hang up. The show was ready to begin and she was scheduled to go on in just a few minutes.

Confused, more worried than ever, Gia called out good-bye to her mother and nervously cradled the receiver back into the hook.

Then someone, a woman, came rushing over to her with a comb and began fixing up her hair. And someone else, a man, rushed over with a huge powder puff and swished it across her cheeks a few times. And then a third person, an assistant director, rushed over and took Gia by the arm.

“This way, Baby,” he said, “you’re on.”

He didn’t notice that anything was wrong with Gia as he led her to the stage and they waited there, together, for Allen—already on camera—to introduce her.

When, moments later, the introduction did come he let go her arm. “Okay, Baby,” he said. Then he caught the dazed expression on her face. “Hey,” he said, “you gotta smile for the people . . . you gotta smile.”

With that, he nudged her onstage.

“Gia Scala, ladies and gentlemen . . . Gia Scala,” Steve Allen said as she walked toward the camera.

Then there was applause, lots of it.

Then, like the assistant director had told her, Gia tried to smile.

But as she tried, the tears began to come to her eyes. She knew that there were millions of people all over America watching her now, that she must forget about her mother and the sudden fear deep inside her, that she must not cry.

But she couldn’t help it. And she cried, with all those people watching. And then she looked up at Steve Allen, whispered, “I am sorry,” and turned and ran back into the wings. . . .

Mrs. Scoglio died a few months later. She had had cancer of the throat. She had discovered it the day after Gia left for New York and there had been an operation shortly after Gia returned. But it had not been a success. And now she was dead.

Gia faces life

Gia did not cry much. Those months of sitting with her mother practically twenty-four hours a day, pretending that nothing was wrong, talking about the trip they would take to Italy when all was well, about the villa they would rent on the Mediterranean when the operation that would never heal had healed—this had taken all the cry out of Gia.

And to many of her friends in Hollywood, this was a good sign.

“She realizes that this is part of life,” they said, in effect, “and that she’s got to forget her sorrow and live her own life now.”

They were encouraged when she started going out a little again a month or so after the funeral. They were doubly encouraged when a month after that Gia kissed her sister Agatha good-bye as Agatha left for Europe, thanked her for coming to America during Mama’s illness and staying with her these past few months and assured her that yes, yes, she would be all right now all alone, not to worry, that she would be all right.

Gia’s friends were especially happy when, shortly after Agatha’s departure, MGM gave her a part in a gay screwball comedy entitled Tunnel of Love, which costarred Doris Day and Richard Widmark, two of Holly wood’s nicest, most fun-loving people.

“This will be just the right thing for her,” said these friends, in effect, “—this will make the cure complete.”

To her friends, to the camera, to the crowds of eyes at Hollywood’s nightclubs and fancy premiéres, Gia Scala was taking it all just fine.

But Gia’s heart knew differently—the hidden heart that had been so broken during the past few months and that every day and every night continued to break into a thousand more yearning pieces, the heart that had for so long beat in time to another heart and that now, alone, was secretly ready to crumble completely. . . .

“It began to show late this spring,” someone has said, “when Gia went to make the Jack Hawkins picture—The Clock Without A Face—in England. She was a lone wolf all during the shooting. Nobody ever saw her at night. And during the day she would sit in her dressing room when she wasn’t working and sometimes she would lie back on her cot and hum some strange-sounding melody, or else she would wave her finger in the air, her eyes closed, as if she were drawing pictures. This would go on for hours and it was all very odd and, to tell the truth, when we weren’t laughing about it we were all pretty worried.”

Early this summer—right after the Hawkins picture—Gia went on location in Greece to begin a movie with Robert Mitchum.

The peculiar behavior continued.

Nobody understands . . .

“I took Gia out in Athens one night,” a friend of hers has said. “Everything went fine at first. We stopped somewhere for cocktails—I remember Gia had more than a couple, something that was new with her. Then we went to dinner at one of those open-air places that looks up at the Parthenon. Midway through dinner I remembered that I had to make an important phone call. I got up, excused myself and said I’d be back in five minutes. I made it back in less than that. But when I got to the table, Gia was gone. She told me the next day that she was sorry, but that she’d had a sudden desire to go walking through the streets—alone. ‘I know you understand,’ she said. I told her no, I didn’t understand. She said she was sorry again, and then as she walked away, very slowly, she said, very softly, “How nobody understands anymore. How nobody understands. . . .’ ”

It was a month later—Tuesday morning, August 5, 1958, back in London again, when Gia’s mind went suddenly wild.

She was living with her father, in his London apartment. She’d gone out to dinner with a date at six o’clock the night before. She’d drunk, a little all through the evening, and now it was 2:30 a.m. and she arrived back at the apartment.

According to neighbors, Mr. Scoglio was up waiting for Gia. He’d asked her to be home at one, he told her, and here it was an hour and a half later. Why, he wanted to know.

Gia told him that it was none of his business why.

Mr. Scoglio insisted that she explain her lateness—and promise never to be so late again.

“No,” Gia repeated, over and over again, no . . . no . . . no . . . no!!”

And then suddenly she began to cry and scream.

“If Mama were here,” she sobbed. “If my mama, my mama, if she were here.”

And then Gia rushed out of the apartment, slamming the door behind her.

Bate on the street again, she hailed a cab.

“The water,’ Gia said, when she got inside.

‘ “Where was that?” the cab driver asked her.

“The bridge,” Gia said.

“London Bridge . . . Waterloo Bridge?” the cabdriver asked, slightly amused.

“Yes, Waterloo Bridge,” Gia said.

When they got to the bridge and had started to cross it, Gia asked the cabdriver to stop.

“Right here on Waterloo Bridge?” he asked, not so amused now, not after he’d sat listening to his passenger sob and moan the way she had all during the ride, “—and at this time o’ night, Miss?”

“I asked to please stop,” Gia said.

“All right, Miss,” said the cabdriver, shrugging. And he stopped.

Gia paid him and got out.

“Have a nice walk, Miss,” the cabdriver called out as she did.

But Gia didn’t answer. Instead, after a pause, she walked toward the bridge railing and clutched it and stared down at the black water below.

“Miss,” she half heard the cabdriver call out behind her as she looked down.

“Cosa?” she asked in Italian, suddenly. “What?”

“Miss,” the voice called out again.

“Cosa—” Gia started to repeat. And then she remembered that other time, that other railing, that other water, the boat pulling out from Naples, her mother standing on the dock waving her big white handkerchief, that other time, that other terrible time.

And she screamed now. And as she did she began to push herself over the railing.

“Miss!” the voice called out once again, behind her, much closer behind her this time.

And then she could feel the man’s hands grab at her legs, trying to pull her back.

“Lasciami,” Gia cried. “Let me go.”

But the man continued to pull. And as he did he called out for a policeman now.

“Lasciami,” Gia cried again. “I want to do it. Let me do it. Let me die!”

By this time the policeman had arrived. He grabbed Gia by, the shoulders.

“Easy, Lady—” he started to say.

But Gia swung her head around and bit one of his hands.

“I told you, please,’ she screamed, “I want to die, to die!”

The rescue

The cop whispered something to the cab driver. “One,” he called out then, “two . . . three.”

And on three both men pulled back with all their might. And this time they managed to get Gia off the railing.

She was still screaming, and kicking, as they dragged her back to the cab.

And she continued kicking, screaming, when they got her to the police station a little while later where a doctor tied her down onto a long, white slab and slowly administered a sedative. . . .

It was a few hours later when Mr. Scoglio showed up at the station house. He’d been worried about Gia and he’d phoned the police and one sergeant had told him they had a girl in tow who refused to give her name but who answered Gia’s description.

“I suggest you come right down,” the sergeant had said.

And now Mr. Scoglio was there, ready to be led into the room where the girl lay.

The room was very quiet. Gia lay on the bed, the straps off her body now. A police-nurse stood next to her.

“My daughter,” Mr. Scoglio said, approaching the bed.

Gia turned to look at him. Her eyes were very large and glassy.

“I am sorry for the argument we had,” the man said, his voice shattered, stunned.

Gia nodded.

But she turned her face away from her father just a little.

“My daughter,” Mr. Scoglio said again. And this time he laid his hand on Gia’s.

For a long time the room remained quiet and neither of them talked.

Then Mr. Scoglio spoke again.

“Gia,” he said, “your mother, Mama, my wife, your mother . . . she is gone, Gia. In a way she will always be with us. But in another way she is gone and she will never be back again. . . Do you understand, Gia? Do you understand?”

He waited for her to nod again.

But she didn’t.

Instead she closed her eyes now and she whispered, “I want to die. I want to die.”

Still clutching her hand, Mr. Scoglio got down on his knees alongside the slab to pray, to pray that someday soon his daughter would understand.

We at MODERN SCREEN—along with Gia’s sister Agatha, with her friends, with all Hollywood—join him in that prayer.

THE END

Watch for Gia in Columbia’s THE CLOCK WITHOUT A FACE, and in U-I’s RIDE A CROOKED TRAH.

 

It is a quote. MODERN SCREEN MAGAZINE NOVEMBER 1958