Warning: This article deals with content of a sexual nature
She’s the adult film star who was elected to the Italian parliament and married the artist Jeff Koons. Now, Ilona Staller (aka Cicciolina) has written a memoir. Sex, politics, money and men - nothing is off limits.
Ilona Staller may be 73 but her dress sense has not budged much since her heyday in the Eighties, when the former porn star famously campaigned in favour of contraception, sex education and free love in Italy, a country still steeped in the doctrines of the Catholic church. We meet at her assistant’s house in Rome on a freezing cold day. When she walks in, the woman better known by her stage name Cicciolina cheerfully announces that she is underdressed for the weather.
In typically dramatic fashion, the former porn diva, wife and muse to artist Jeff Koons, not to mention Italian MP, who bared her breasts on live television and on the campaign trail and whose naked stunts would stop the capital’s traffic, unzips her jacket to reveal a mesh halterneck top - and no bra.
She is promoting Memorie, a limited-edition glossy collection of photos documenting her extraordinary life, and hints that a biopic is in the works to remind the world how her career in pornography and then in parliament was a catalyst for Italy’s raucous, highly sexualised Eighties and changed the country for ever. It also got her noticed by Koons, at the time America’s highest-paid contemporary artist, who proposed to her in St Mark’s Square, Venice, and sought inspiration in her sexuality.
“You need your own ideas. I like people who are not sheep,” Staller says, accepting a cup of rose tea from her assistant.
To consummate their marriage, Koons - better known for his giant childlike inflatables, topiary puppies and kitsch figurines - produced Made in Heaven, a notorious series of paintings, photographs and glass sculptures showing the couple having sex in various positions. “As painters use their brush to paint, she uses her sexual organs to create a universal language,” Koons said of Staller at the time, which was perhaps fortuitous, since she had very little English and he had no Italian. “We are a contemporary Adam and Eve,” he claimed, adding, “I love the way Ilona can participate in pornography, then return to a state of absolute purity.”
As Staller notes in Memorie, “I officially became a work of art.”
‘I am not just a porno diva’
She is still as striking as she was in 1987, when Koons first saw a picture of her in Stern magazine. Back then her blue eyes, long white-blonde hair and porcelain skin captured in colour-saturated photographs, gave her a doll-like quality. As she talks about the book, Koons and her career, Staller can still turn it on, apologising as she adjusts a fake eyelash. She is by turns charming, amusing and uninhibited - “Size does not count. It’s foreplay that is far more important,” she tells me.
She is also not to be underestimated. Four years ago, the organisers of a chess tournament invited her to play four Italian champions in four simultaneous matches. Staller defeated all but one of them - a scene recalling the Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit, where protagonist Beth Harmon takes on an entire chess club. “It’s all about concentration and logic,” Staller said at the time. “An artist needs to be able to do everything - I am not just a porno diva.”
The native Hungarian, whose stepfather was an employee of the interior ministry and whose mother was a midwife, learnt chess during a happy middle-class childhood in Budapest where she also took violin, ballet, piano and modern dance. “But I was more into going to the disco,” she once admitted. She was already modelling at the age of 12. It wasn’t long before she discovered the drive that would make her famous, whether it was through X-rated films or inside the Palazzo Montecitorio, the seat of the Italian parliament - sex.
“Since I was a girl I have had a beautiful relationship with my body. I looked at myself in the mirror. I touched myself,” she recalls. Working as a waitress in a hotel when she was 18, she was spotted by Communist government officials and hired to spy on foreign guests. She says she was not explicitly asked to have sex with them, but adds “it was up to me” to find out their secrets and she sometimes ended up in the bath with them. “It was wonderful. I was a beautiful girl with blue eyes. I was like a nymph.”
By 1971 she had escaped the Iron Curtain and moved to Italy, thanks to a short-lived marriage to an Italian travel agent. She found work as a singer and model and realised she had found her dream home. “Italy was different then. It had a smile. People sang in the street; the restaurants were full.” She also found an outlet for her sensuous side by hosting an erotic radio phone-in, Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?.
The new book documents her move into film as she adopted her trademark look of white suspenders, a headband made of flowers, overdrawn eyebrows and heavy lipstick to give her a Joker-like, lascivious grin. It was the start of a pornographic screen career that involved having on-set sex with 1,000 partners by her calculations.
A radical departure
In 1986 she asked Marco Pannella, the chain-smoking and frequently hunger-striking head of Italy’s Radical Party, if she could stand as one of his candidates.
Cynics thought it was a publicity stunt but soon Staller was on the campaign trail, often appearing topless, as she fought for more sex education in schools, sex permits in prisons and “love parks” for young couples living with their parents and forced to have sex in cramped Fiat 500s.
Her political slogan was, “Down with nuclear energy, up with sexual energy,” and she was often accompanied on the stump by a young man dressed as Jesus, complete with a crown of thorns. “I was an anthem to joy, to transgression,” says Staller, who was elected to parliament in 1987 for five years after winning 20,000 votes. During her term she famously offered to sleep with Saddam Hussein to promote peace in the Middle East.
For some she was at best a joke; for others a feminist icon who used her sexuality as a tool and poked fun at the political boys’ club. Certainly some of her ideas - including legalising same-sex marriage and animal rights - were ahead of their time. To reach parliament, Staller rode a wave of sexualisation in Italian society as millions tuned in to watch scantily clad girls on TV shows, and porn stars like Cicciolina became household names. So why was Italy’s Eighties more sex-soaked than Britain’s? One factor was the party atmosphere caused by the winding down of two decades of politically driven terrorism - the so-called Years of Lead. With divorce only legalised following a referendum in 1974 and abortion in 1978, Italy was also playing catch-up on the sexual revolution. And as the Catholic church and the ruling Christian Democrats continued to resist change, the country needed to kick that much harder against conservatism, and Cicciolina was there to do it.
The film director Federico Fellini, who built a career mashing up sexual fantasy, religion and dogged convention, could only admit with admiration as Staller entered parliament that he had been out-Fellinied. In an interview reprinted in Memorie he states, “She has completely overtaken me.”
Despite her burgeoning political career, Staller continued to perform her onstage erotic act, shrugging off her record of about 50 arrests for indecency. “I was on stage in Belgium wearing a small thong and a veil. You could see but you couldn’t see. The police arrived and put me in a cell… I said, ‘I am not a delinquent; I am a member of parliament,’ ” she recalls.
In 1992, Staller gave birth to a son, Ludwig, by Koons, but if the marriage was her bid for domestic bliss, it went off the rails soon after when she separated from the artist, later complaining he watched videos all day while she could only rely on their dog for company. When Koons flew back to the US with Ludwig, Staller followed them and grabbed her son, sparking a long custody battle, during which clips of her having intercourse with a snake were shown at one New York court hearing.
Koons may have once said, “Ilona is able to completely free me from any sense of guilt or shame,” but in court his lawyers sought to depict her as morally unfit to be a mother. “To have a family based on Protestant values was important to me,” Koons told the court. Staller managed to hold on to Ludwig after a stout defence from Luca Di Carlo, a renegade Italian lawyer whose nickname, “the Devil’s Advocate”, derived from his defence of the Colombian drug-dealing Escobar family.
Sex and sleaze
Retreating from politics and porn to focus on raising her son in Rome, Staller became a bystander as Italy’s sexualised TV went into overdrive with legendary shows like Colpo Grosso, which mixed a quiz-show format with striptease. The show was the brainchild of emerging media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, who made a fortune and went on to become prime minister in 1994 and then again in 2001 and 2008.
But what had started as a celebration of sex and rebellion in a new-found atmosphere of freedom in the Eighties was fast turning sleazy by the late Nineties, as Berlusconi packed his shows with semi-naked women and took them back to his place afterwards. It was only a matter of time before Berlusconi’s long-suffering wife called time on their marriage, leaving him single and able to ramp up his basement bunga-bunga parties before he was eventually forced to resign in 2011.
Staller denies she helped spawn a monster. “Any politician can do what they like in their private life,” she says of Berlusconi. She may be slightly swayed by her first-hand experience of the tycoon. Back in 1974, Berlusconi saw her picture in a magazine, tracked her down and whisked her away to a Greek island. “He was a real gentleman, intelligent and handsome. I didn’t ask him if he was married.”
By the time Berlusconi was riding high in Italian politics, Staller was doing what many mothers do and blocking her son’s access to porn online. “My problem was I had not spoken to him about being a porno diva but other mums at school were talking about me. So he found out,” she says. Hitting his teens, Ludwig got in trouble for alleged drug dealing, according to Staller’s lawyer Di Carlo, who was hired by Staller and Koons to clear his name, marking a moment of reconciliation between the estranged parents.
Now 32, Ludwig is based in New York, working as an artist alongside his father, who is reckoned to be the world’s richest living artist, with an estimated fortune of US$400 million ($704m) and a New York mansion. Last year, his Moon Phases mini sculptures were sent up with a rocket to become the first work of art to land on the moon.
In the more down-to-earth setting of La Storta, the suburb of Rome that Staller calls home and where she lives with her 22 cats, she claims she is due years of support payments from Koons worth €8,000 ($15,000) a month that were awarded in court. “I’ve had nada,” she says. Royalties from her films, which are now free to watch online, are non-existent. She survives on her state pension and an extra pension that is awarded to MPs regardless of how long they spend in office. The €3,100 ($5,700) a month that yielded was slashed to €1,000 ($1,800) by Italy’s anti-establishment Five Star Movement in 2019.
To keep earning she has been on reality shows, starting with the British show The Farm alongside the late ventriloquist Keith Harris, whom Staller describes as “molto simpatico”. Since then she has spent freezing nights in South Africa for a Hungarian version of I’m a Celebrity and lost 12kg after surviving on handfuls of rice in the Caribbean while participating in an Italian version. Memorie will set Cicciolina fans back €100 ($185), although she does promise to sign every copy with a kiss.
Before she steps out into the cold, our conversation turns again to her sexual appetite. Earlier she’d told me, with her disarming frankness, “I have become more selective while my sexual appetite has not diminished. So certainly I masturbate a lot; it’s part of nature, not a taboo.”
This time - on dating men in her seventies - she’s (slightly) more coy. “I still like having sex with male and female friends, but I continue to search for the ideal man.”
And what does her ideal man have to be like? “Sweet, loving, able to make love well - and intelligent,” she replies.
Written by: Tom Kington
© The Times of London