Cary Grant begged for Sophia Loren’s love in letters

Did the uber-masculine Cary Grant really beg Sophia Lauren to love him?  Apparently so!

80 year old Sophia Loren is about to tell all in a 300 page memoir, called Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow: My life as a Fairytale, digging through the archives of her life to uncover the true love between her and Cary Grant.  Pictures and love letters feature in the book, but the love letters are the bit most of us want to read… let’s face it.

The book, which has been published by Rizzoli in Italy, is due for release in English in the United States in December by Atria Books, a division of Simon and Schuster.  A sneak look at the cover was dropped on the Internet overnight too.

Each chapter of the book will apparently open with a different memento — a sketch she made of Carlo Ponti, a letter from Cary Grant, portraits given to her by her grandchildren — to illuminate a part of her life story.  And reading the letters is a buzz.

Sophia Loren and Cary Grant became a well-known love story of the 50s, and paved the way for romance and true love for many of this generation.  At just 22, Lauren and Grant worked together on a film where Grant worked his hardest to seduce her.

For 52 year old Grant, on his third marriage, knew the power of his sex appeal and proposed to Sophia Lauren while working together on The Pride and the Prejudice.  But it wasn’t powerful enough, with Sophia choosing her Director -love Carlo Ponti, whom she married, seeking love, family and a future.  He prayed they would make “The right decision” about their love in love letters.

The love letters in her book uncover the desperate romance in times of a different era – one everyone here remembers well.

‘Forgive me, dear girl,’ reads one letter reproduced as a photograph in Loren’s book. ‘I press you too much. Pray – and so will I – until next week. Goodbye Sophia. Cary.’

‘You’ll be in my prayers. If you think and pray with me, for the same thing and purpose, all will be right and life will be good’.

They also tell tales of some of the biggest and best in Hollywood in the era, a who’s who list if you will.

It tells the tale of Grant’s return two years later, for another go at winning Loren’s heart.  Oddly, the idea to feature Lauren in the film, a romantic comedy Houseboat, set in Washington was an idea by Grant’s wife Betsy Drake.

According to the book, Director Melville Shavelson later complained that the simmering sexual tension between Grant and Loren made the movie difficult to make.

And, the book describe romances with other men, big men in Hollywood at the time.

‘All of a sudden he put his hands on me. I turned in all tranquillity and blew his face, like a cat stroked the wrong way and said, ‘Don’t you ever dare to do that again. Never again!’,’ she writes. ‘As I pulverised him with my eyes he seemed small, defenceless, almost a victim of his own notoriety. He never did it again but it was very difficult working with him after that.’

She also describes the 17 days she spent in jail in Italy in 1982 as part of a plea bargain over a failure to file an income tax return. At the time she blamed her accountant.

How do you remember Sophia Loren and Cary Grant?