MARIA: Love Child of the Stars

Synopsis

Giovanni intended to keep the secret forever: That he and his wife Restituta in 1965 had adopted a baby named Maria, and that her biological parents were Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni. Stunned at the revelation, Maria throws a few things into her backpack and goes to New York to stay with a friend.

No one doubts the adoption story because it explains everything. From the beginning Maria was different from her sister and brothers and everyone else in the family. She had fair skin, dark blonde hair, and green eyes. The rest of them had swarthy complexions, black hair, and brown eyes. Her temperament and behavior were also unlike anything they’d ever seen.

The family moved from Ischia to America when Maria was 11. She adapted quickly, learning English and speaking it with no discernable accent.

At 19 she fell in love with a suitor named Salvatore. She would have married him, were it not for the fact that she overheard her father and Salvatore discussing the marriage, without first consulting her. Six months later she instead married Carl, a man her father greatly disliked. Subsequently Maria and Carl had two children, Columba and Antonio. After 12 years they all were sleeping in separate rooms.

In April, 1997, Maria and John become lovers.

Giovanni learns of his daughter’s adulterous affair with John. To end it he takes her to Italy and puts her in a monastery in a remote area near Portofino. He believes that in 12 months of ascetic living she’ll come to regret the crime of disgracing the family. Why Italy and not somewhere closer? Because in the US there are laws against involuntary incarceration. In some isolated parts of southern Italy, however, ‘padre podesta’ still obtains today--it means a father may do as he sees fit with his daughter, even if she's an adult.

With the help of Massimo, a photographer from Vogue Italia who was visiting his brother at the monastery, Maria escapes to Milan, where she begins a modeling career. On her way to a fashion shoot her taxi crashes into a van and she receives a blow to her head, which results in total amnesia.

A month later Carl gets a transatlantic call from one of Maria's friends. He flies to Italy, goes to the hospital, shows the doctors his marriage certificate verifying that she's his property, and takes her back to America. Family members gather, try to make Maria remember them. She does not.

Maria’s daughter, Columba, asks John to try to help her mother recover her memory. He sees the situation as a replay of his first courting—a sort of “Love, The Second Time Around.” They meet, and eventually resume their roles as lovers.

Carl, meanwhile, sees Maria’s loss of memory as an opportunity to win his wife back. After all, she does not remember the things that led to the breakup of their marriage. So he, like John, courts her.

Eventually, Maria’s memory returns. Carl and John’s competition beomes intense, and they pressure her to make a decision between them, once and for all. For her, though, it’s a Hobson’s choice; she does not want to hurt Carl, nor does she want to hurt John. She wonders why she can’t have both, as she had before.

Then an aunt breathlessly tells Maria she heard that Giovanni, still determined to stop his daughter from disgracing the family with her adultery, was planning another surprise visit. He intended to take her back to Italy and put her in a monastery where she wouldn’t be able to escape, as she had before.

Maria makes a few calls, then disappears. A few days later she emails John and her children that she is staying in Connecticut with Nina, who happens to be the aunt of that Vogue Italia photographer Massimo. Maria says she needs a lot of time to sort things out.

Finally John, fed up with Maria’s unwillingness to decide, moves to Ischia. He reasons that the separation might give Maria an incentive to finally leave Carl. He begins the book about Maria he’d promised to write. She makes plans to come to the island for a visit, but is prevented from doing so by a series of traumas.

Carl is in The World Trade Center on 9/11 and is missing and presumed dead. But he’s located a week later in a hospital with minor injuries. On her way back from volunteer work for the Red Cross at Ground Zero, Maria is raped. A month and a half later a drugstore pregnancy test comes up positive. With the help of her daughter, Columba, she goes to a clinic for a pill-induced abortion.

Some months later, Maria is diagnosed with cervical dysplasia. Because she’s a “bleeder,” her surgeon says she’ll need a backup supply of blood, and that her parents would be the best donor candidates. This is when her father is forced to admit she had been adopted, and that Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni were her mother and father.

Deeply hurt and confused, Maria goes to New York to stay with Seth, a friend who has connections with Baz Luhrmann’s theatrical production company. She refuses to let anyone in the family know where she is. As a means of distracting her from distress, Seth encourages her to try out for a planned Broadway production of Moulin Rouge, since she has an excellent singing voice and likely can act as well. She wins the part, and is told she’ll be notified later, when rehearsals begin.

Seth persuades Maria to see a psychologist, Dr. Fox, to help her with what clearly is a profound identity crisis. She feels that her entire life has been a betrayal, one lie after another, and she struggles with the pain of being abandoned by Sophia.

Dr. Fox finds Maria the most unusual—and captivating—patient he’s ever had. After several sessions she decides it’s time to go back home and talk to her father. But Dr. Fox insists she’s not ready. He wants her to continue his treatment for a few more weeks, so he can write about this most fascinating case for a professional journal.

Meanwhile, Maria tells John that she wants absolutely nothing to do with the cold, uncaring woman who abandoned her, but she nevertheless wonders if the woman had tried and failed to contact her. She asks John to get in touch with Sophia. He tries for several months, but receives no response to his many attempts to reach the star.

A journalist friend offers to publish an interview with John about the Sophia–Maria connection in Il Golfo, an Ischian newspaper. Very quickly the story spreads across Europe and then to America. Maria expects that soon Sophia will comment, one way or another. But the star continues her silence, neither confirming nor denying the maternity claim.

Giovanni, after six weeks of worrying about Maria’s disappearance, has a heart attack. She flies to Florida to be with him and the rest of the family. The surgery fails, and Giovanni is brain dead. The doctors recommend that he be taken off life support. Maria—feeling extreme guilt for having caused him so much distress—refuses, hoping that he might come out of it. After two months she finally agrees. But Giovanni does not die, he remains in a vegetative state and subsequently is put into a nursing home.

Some months later Francesca, Maria’s sister, persuades her to undergo the cervical dysplasia surgery that had been scheduled earlier. Upon awakening, she’s in a strange dissociative state, in which she’s a woman named Cecile in 18^th Century France. John talks to her on the phone, and she addresses him as Valmont. She repeatedly begs him to come take her back home, because she does not belong in that place. Both Cecile and Valmont are, of course, characters in the movie “Dangerous Liaisons.”

A series of tests reveal that Maria has a small tumor on her brain, which may or may not account for her Cecile-Valmont delusion. They recommend surgery.

A day before the operation Francesca tells John on IM that Maria has disappeared. Her towel and sandals were found abandoned on the beach, and everyone fears she has drowned. The police come to the house, and the story appears on TV.

But it turns out that she had not drowned. Instead Salvatore—her earlier suitor who for years remained a close friend of the family—was not happy with the surgeons who were scheduled to do the operation, so he had taken her to one he felt was better qualified. A week later, Salvatore brings Maria back.

John finds the story too bizarre to believe. He confronts Francesca, who finally admits the story was concocted in the hope of getting him to come back to America. She wanted to put a smile on her sister’s face, and she thought John’s appearance could do it. But, she insisted, the surgery had indeed occurred, and Maria is recovering.

A month later, however, some followup tests show that Maria’s tumor has regrown. Still another surgery is required, and subsequently is successful.

Despite all these traumas, and still with substantial memory loss, Maria goes to Italy to join John. Together on the island they work on her book. She confesses that some of the stories she and Francesca told him earlier were not true.

For instance, Giovanni didn’t become brain dead; rather, he had a relatively minor stroke from which he eventually recovered. She did not undergo a second brain surgery. And so on.

But the adoption is a fact no one doubts, because she looks so much like her biological mother. She was indeed raped in New York, and got pregnant. She really did fall into a dissociative state, and she still has not fully recovered her memory.

Maria tells John she is very sorry, she never meant to hurt him with deception, she just wanted to provide interesting material.

Now, she wonders, will her book have a happy ending?

Sophia is silent. Maria finally realizes with deep sadness that who she is—her identity—must remain a work in progress.