What Are 14 Actual Journalists Doing
in a Classic Comedy Film?
Faces and stories behind the final scene
of William Wyler’s “Roman Holiday”
Year-end festivities are typically rich in presents and old films rerun on TV. Italian public broadcaster RAI’s screening of “Roman Holiday” two days before Christmas gave blog Giornalismo d’altri the opportunity to offer its readers a present in tune, broadly speaking, with its usual theme of International journalism.
This is the 1953 film directed by William Wyler and featuring a young Audrey Hepburn alongside Gregory Peck, cast as a penniless American journalist stuck in Rome, who helps a young princess roaming the city in search of evasion and forgoes his greatest scoop for love and honor. Not exactly one’s typical professional behavior was the tongue-in-cheek comment of a bunch on Italian journalists in their “second screen” asides on Twitter and Facebook; a pretty comedy that has nothing to do with “real” journalism, right?
As a matter of fact — as we will try to prove here — “Roman Holiday” is full of bona fide journalists. During the festivities, while the rest of the family were out doing actual work, Giornalismo d’altri endeavored to inform its readers just who those journalists are, or rather were.
The relevant scene — as connoisseurs know — is the final one. Princess Ann, back in her official capacity after 24 hours of folly, holds a press conference — during which, to add another touch of professional realism, there don’t seem to be many journalists taking notes or even holding paper and pencil.
In the short exchange (journalists ask only three bland “questions”) the princess manages to obliquely communicate with her beloved, but already lost journalist, who guarantees her that he will keep his mouth shut about the crazy day they spent together.
After the Q&A and a photo op, the master of ceremonies asks everybody to leave, but the princess breaches the protocol, steps down from the stage and greets personally each correspondent. They introduce themselves by name and news organization. Here is the (partial) scene.
Although the circumstance is mentioned in specialized books and websites, it is not generally known that the journalists greeted by the princess in three or four different languages were actual Rome correspondents for various international news organizations and were using their real names. They were not credited in the film, but the American Film Institute’s website meticulously lists them — albeit with some imprecision. We added a bit of biographical information to those names, hoping to put some professional flesh on what otherwise would remain little more than cardboard cutouts in a cult movie. Here they are, in the order in which the princess greets them…. with a little final surprise.
[Please note: some of the images are from screenshots of a scene preceding the princess greeting the journalists]
Edward B. Hitchcok, who also addresses a welcome speech to the princess as “head of correspondents”, was a long time American journalist. He served in World War I as a captain, then remained in Europe as a journalist for 20 years. He covered Mussolini’s march to power in 1922 for the Chicago Daily News, and the Munich crisis of 1938 for the Christian Science Monitor from London. He married the opera singer Myrna Sharlow, and they lived in Capri for ten years. He acted as a special counselor to the president of Czechoslovakia Edvard Beneš during the latter’s official trip to the US in 1939. Between 1940 and 1941 he treaded the college lecture circuit. After the war, he was apparently back as a correspondent for the Chicago newspaper — but it should be noted that to this day it is common for foreign correspondents in Italy to be free lancers accredited by different news organizations.
The Chicago Daily News was an afternoon paper published between 1876 and 1978.
A prolific writer, Piero Scanziani was a Swiss citizen who had a brush with fascism in his youth, then moved away from it in 1938 when the anti-Semitic racial laws were introduced in Italy. During the war he was head of the Italian services of the ATS news agency and of the Swiss radio news program. His residence in Bern was for a while the meeting point for many Italian political émigrés. In 1945 he moved to Rome as a correspondent for different Swiss newspapers. He went back to Ticino — the Italian speaking region of Switzerland — in 1971, where he mostly studied oriental mystics and where he died in 2003 at the age of 95.
Scanziani was also a dog lover and a noted expert on canine breeding, who among other things founded and edited the specialized Italian monthly Cani di tutte le razze.
La Suisse, the newspaper mentioned in the movie, was an old Geneva daily that folded in 1994.
Born in Berlin in 1914, Kurt Klinger arrived in Rome a few years before the shooting of the film as a correspondent for the German news agency DPA to cover Italy and especially — as it happens with many Rome correspondents — the Vatican. In 1950 pope Pius XII awarded him a medal for his coverage of the Holy Year, the only one awarded to a non-Catholic journalist (Klinger was evangelical) — as a bio in one his book boasts. He lived in Rome for 14 years, where he covered the 1960 Olympic Games, as well as the brief but revolutionary term of pope John XXIII, about whom he wrote “A Pope Laughs”, a book translated in many languages. In 1958 he became president of the Foreign Press Club in Italy (Associazione della stampa estera in Italia). By the mid sixties he was in Rio de Janeiro, as head of the DPA Brazil bureau — where he also ended up chairing the local Foreign press association from 1970 through 1974.
Maurice Montabré was 63 year old when he kissed Princess Ann’s hand as the actual correspondent for the noted conservative French newspaper Le Figaro, where he published, for example, an obituary for former Italian prime minister Alcide De Gasperi in 1954. Before the war Montabré was a fairly famous cultural journalist and music critic. He interviewed Marcel Proust and Claude Debussy, among others, and wrote for many years on L’Intransigeant, France’s leading evening conservative newspaper of the Twenties, that ceased publication when Germany occupied France in 1940. Right after the war he was press attaché at the French embassy in Rome, when he also wrote two novels. He died in 1963.
The case of Cornelia Agatha Sytske Galema, who went just by the name of Sytske, is quite peculiar. The only woman among the journalists attending the conference, she introduces herself as the correspondent for De Linie, a Dutch Catholic weekly that closed in 1964. She was an art historian and the extensive biographical notes found on a website dedicated to her family history do not mention any journalism she may have done, in contrast to the case of her husband and her elder brother IJsbrand, who joined them in Italy in 1962 as a correspondent for the daily De Telegraaf and Dutch public radio AVRO.
Sytske died in Rome in 1982, she was 68.
Jacques Ferrier introduces himself as correspondent for Ici Paris, a French family weekly founded in 1945, which is nowadays published by the Lagardère Group. Ferrier was a Swiss who — in the following years — would be a correspondent for the Tribune de Genève, and other Swiss titles (see, for example, his story on the Alto Adige/South Tyrol crisis published in 1961 on the Journal et feuille d’avis du Valais, closed in 1968). In 1973 the Mursia Company published his book “La stampa quotidiana nel mondo” (Daily newspapers of the world), a review of the book tells us that its author was also a “teacher”, and that he “travelled a lot for UNESCO and FAO”.
Odd coincidence: Ici Paris, mentioned in “Roman Holiday” as Ferrier’s paper, led its April 14, 1953 issue — almost the very time when the film was being produced — with the headline “Le merveilleux roman d’amour de la Princesse Josephine Charlotte” (Princess Josephine Charlotte’s beautiful love story). A reference to Princess Josephine Charlotte of the Belgian royal family — who happened to be almost the same age, and born in the same city (Brussels) as Audrey Hepburn.
His goatee and glasses make Otto Gross the more recognizable of the group, but he is also the one about whom it is more difficult to find any personal or professional information. Nonetheless, his bit part managed to receive singularly insulting treatment in a German edition of the film. According to Corrado Lampe (son of Fritz Lampe, see below), Gross, the Jew writing for an Israeli newspaper, became in the dubbing “Rossi, from Corriere della Sera” (the largest Italian daily).
His news organization, Davar, was an important Israeli newspaper, owned by Histradut, the trade union federation linked to the Labor party. Founded in 1925, it folded in 1996.
Starting in 1945, when he landed in Rome as a correspondent, Julian Cortés Cavanillas wrote more than seven thousand stories for the big conservative newspaper ABC in Madrid. He lived in the Italian capital 21 years, travelled widely as a roving correspondent — covering events in the UK, Switzerland, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Portugal and Germany among other countries — and he was for a while Secretary General of his paper’s newsroom. He was a monarchist, and he used to hang out with royals (Alfonso XIII, the exiled Spanish king, was his first daughter’s godfather, while Umberto II, the last king of Italy, had the same role for Cavanillas’ third child).
He died in Madrid in 1991, at age 82. His paper published a long essay about him celebrating the centennial of his birth.
Friedrich Lampe, usually called Fritz, arrived in Rome from his native Leipzig in 1939 as a stringer for German titles. He was drafted for the war but was sent back to Rome as an interpreter in a propaganda unit of the German army. When Italy’s armistice with the allies was announced on September 8, 1943, he deserted and hid in an apartment in Rome. After the liberation of the city (June 1944), he reported to the Allied headquarters, married his Italian fiancée, but after three months he was taken prisoner, and spent one year as a POW in a US camp for non-Nazi Germans. Returning to Rome, he worked for the Allied military administration until 1948, then returned to journalism as a correspondent and a stringer. When the film was shot he actually worked for the New York Herald Tribune, and other — mostly English language — newspapers. In the following years he worked for German publications, although not without difficulty, which — according to his son Corrado, the generous source of the above information — had to do with Fritz’s military past as a deserter.
The Herald Tribune, one of the great New York newspapers, closed in 1966. It survived for decades in its European (Paris) edition as the International Herald Tribune and is now The International New York Times.
[At this point in the film the princess/Audrey greets two fake journalists: photographer Irving Radovich, from the fictional CR Photo Service (actor Eddie Albert), and Joe Bradley, from the similarly fictional American News Service, played obviously by Gregory Peck. Then she goes on with the actual ones]
Julio Moriones arrived in Rome in 1939, right after the end of the Spanish civil war, on assignment from the recently created Spanish news agency EFE and writing for other news publications in his country. In 1951, two years before the shooting of the film, he became the Rome correspondent for La Vanguardia, a big daily in Barcelona. He was one of very few foreign journalists — maybe the only one — who was able to report from Italy from the time of Mussolini through the post war decades. For five years he was secretary of the Foreign Press Club, and at one point had also been a press attaché with the Spanish embassy in Rome.
News about him can be found in a full obit page, dedicated to him by his paper when he died on December 1977 at the age of 66.
Stephen House is another character that defies an easy collection of biographical information — raising suspicion that his name was misspelled (could it be Steven? Haus? Hausen?).
As far as the publication is concerned, it most probably refers to the Exchange Telegraph Company, founded in 1875, as business news and quotes service, that evolved into a full-fledged news agency. In the fifties, the company began to limit its coverage, closing its foreign service first, and then the parliamentary and general home news services. Having been owned by different entities in the succeeding years, it is now known as ExTel.
Ferdinando de Aldisio — until now — appears to be the most mysterious of the lot. So confused is the situation, that the American Film Institute lists him as “Ferdinanda”, using the feminine form of the name. But de Aldisio actually existed: his name and occupation (clearly labeled “Journalist”) can be found in the phone directory of a small village near Rome. For a while, he was the editor legally responsible for Piero Scanziani’s dogs monthly (see above).
His brother Eugenio was -the sixties and seventies- correspondent for the French illustrated weekly Paris Match.
Their father Nicola De Aldisio, himself a journalist accredited by French publications, was a long-time member of the Foreign Press Club, and — according to historian Giorgio Fabre — he also “worked for the police”.
The title mentioned by Ferdinando in the movie is even more of a mystery. All available film industry sources refer to it as Agence Press (or, more likely in French Agence Presse), but we weren’t able to find any information about it. Perhaps — as a mere supposition — De Aldisio worked for Agence France Presse, (AFP, the big French news agency founded after the liberation of Paris in 1944), which for unknown reasons preferred not to be mentioned as such.
I counted 12, how do we get to 14?
There were 12 journalists who introduced themselves by their true names, but the final scene included other journalists who played a relatively larger part: three in fact, who from behind the first line shout the “questions”. The first one, with glasses, asks with an American accent: “Does Your Highness believe that Federation would be a possible solution to Europe’s economic problems”? The second one, with black hair, asks a question that allows the princess her allusive exchange with “Joe”: “And what, in the opinion of Your Highness, is the outlook for friendship among nations”? The third question comes from a young man with fair hair: “Which of the cities visited did Your Highness enjoy the most”?
The American Film Institute identifies these parts as “speaking correspondents” (images above),played by the “actors”: Hank Werba, Adam Jennette and Jan Dijgraaf. As far as Jennette is concerned, we can only say that three years before he had played a bit part in the movie “Quo Vadis”. The other two, we actually know who they were.
Werba, born in Brooklyn in 1911, was for a while a press chief for producer Samuel Bronston and in 1953 he was the publicist for the “Roman Holiday” production unit (Wyler, the director, asked more or less known people to play small parts in the film: many true to life Roman aristocrats were hired for the ball scene, while his two daughters played in the Trevi Fountain one). In the sixties, Werba began to work for Variety, and in 1966 he became its Rome bureau chief, serving for 25 years, one of the most knowledgeable journalists about the Italian movie scene. He was American, thus he can only be the first “speaking correspondent”, the only one with an American accent. Plus, the only picture of Werba found on the web looks compatible with the film’s screenshot.
Dijgraaf was born in 1916 in Rotterdam, and we know quite a bit about him because he married Sytske Galema, the Dutch correspondent that in a short while in the movie will be greeted by the princess. Pictures on the Galema family website show that Jan is the third man in our series. Actually, according to the biographer, he was the journalist in the family: when they all moved to Rome after the war, Jan worked as a correspondent for public broadcaster KRO, the daily De Tijd (closed in 1974), and for De Linie — the weekly mentioned by his wife in the movie.
Happy New Year!
Please note:
This is the English version of an original story in Italian.
Frances Hardin helped with editing.
Some of the images are elaborations of original screenshots published by the Cineclap website.
Update January 8, 2016: This article was also published in the Fall 2015 issue of the IJPC Journal (The Image of Journalist in Popular Culture Project of the USC Annenberg School of Communications).
