Elegant Prose

The woman whose face has sold zillions of pots and jars and sticks of beautifying potions and lotions ought to know a thing or two about makeup. Indeed. That’s why she’s taking it off.

Isabella Rossellini, at the mercy of TV makeup artists earlier this day, is wiping her face as she emerges from her hotel bathroom.

“You know sometimes you see disturbed old women that use a lot of makeup that look like masks,” she is saying. “They do make you up like that a bit.”

The sublime Rossellini is back in elegant form and all is right with the world. Her hair is cropped the way it was in her urchin 20s, her full lips are still smudged a deep rose and faint shadow rings her eyelids like tiny thunderclouds. She’s dressed in her trademark mannish regalia, a boxy pearl-gray Agnes B. pantsuit over a wheat-colored Dries Van Noten turtleneck and simple flat sandals by Robert Clergerie.

When she’s tricked up by professional makeup and photo artists, Rossellini earns her due as “one of the most beautiful women in the world,” which makes her laugh. “It’s flattering,” she says, “but you always say, ‘Who’s the person who has seen every woman in the world to call me one of the most beautiful?’ ” Nudged a bit, she admits the tag line has its rewards: “You can get away with a lot.”

But today the model-actress is embodying her own aesthetic ideal, which is to say she is better than perfect--she’s interesting. A tiny chip on a front tooth, once “fixed” with undertaker’s wax for photo shoots, brightens her ready smile. Slight wrinkles etch paths on her 45-year-old face.

“See perfection as standard and imperfection as unique, singular, original,” she writes in her new stream-of-consciousness memoir, “Some of Me” (Random House), before launching into a breathless paean to Audrey Hepburn’s dirty fingernails.

Who knew that such an icon of female perfection was busy embracing her own flaws as she adorned 300 magazine covers around the world? Rossellini’s renegade ideas eventually came back to haunt her, of course. She had the dubious taste to grow older, and when she hit the unseemly age of 42 she was famously fired by Lancome after 14 years of pitching products.

The cosmetics giant gave her the opportunity to bow out with a lie, that she could tell the world it was her choice, that she’d rather devote herself to acting, yadda, yadda. Rossellini did not go softly into the good night, forcing the company to let her go publicly for committing the unpardonable sin of turning middle age. For its part, she writes, Lancome was so repelled by signs of age that the company once ordered photographer Herb Ritts to sweep the desert during a shoot so as not to suggest wrinkles.

“Eternal youth is unstylish and unintelligent,” she writes.

Rossellini can be accused of being neither. And so, while her position made her a model model for hordes of women over 35, she also recognizes the double bind cosmetics companies face: the aspirations of women themselves.

“In the marketing research, there were contradictions,” she says. “People were happy to have somebody in their 40s represent them, and, yet, if they were asked, ‘Would you like to be young or old?’ they would answer, ‘young.’ So at a certain point, my executives felt that a campaign should embody the dream, not the reality.”

Rossellini argued that selling the dream came at a cost--the backlash of resentment from women whose own worst fears were confirmed by the dewy faces of cosmetics ads, which proved they could never measure up. She suggested staying on with Lancome and pairing up with a younger model.

“They decided to get rid of me, and I have to respect freedom above all, don’t I?” she says, falling back into a sofa with a husky laugh. “It’s their company. They decide how to run it.”

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Rossellini never considered herself an accomplice in the beauty industry’s finger-wagging at the face of the average woman. “I know through the marketing research that Lancome did, that women don’t find my beauty intimidating,” unlike that of Elle MacPherson, who appeals more to men, she says. “I think I was very outspoken about beauty that was intimidating or exclusive or too elitist.”

Rossellini has signed on to develop a cosmetics line with the British firm Lancaster, which is scheduled to go on the market in a couple of years. Oh, yes: She will be one of the models promoting it.

If Rossellini, who didn’t start modeling until she was 28, swims against the beauty industry’s tide, she comes by her hubris honestly. Her parents, actress Ingrid Bergman and director Roberto Rossellini, made the heavens shake when their son, Roberto, was born while the actress was still married to her first husband, Petter Lindstrom. Their love affair was denounced from the floor of the U.S. Senate.

The scandal eventually broke Rossellini’s mother, robbing her of an iconic career in Hollywood. “My mother was always like a wounded bird,” Rossellini says. “I think she was permanently scarred by the scandal in America.”

For her “Jewish mother” Italian father, who liked to spend his days in bed, the furor was always an ocean away. The cooler Bergman believed she ruined her husband’s career by forcing him to write films for her because she couldn’t work in Hollywood. Their marriage didn’t survive.

Decades later, Rossellini had her own morals clause to contend with in her Lancome contract, which reminded her of the old Hollywood contracts. The Lancome people were unhappy with her nude appearance in David Lynch’s brutal film “Blue Velvet” and her gamboling with Madonna in the singer’s controversial book, “Sex.”

Rossellini never paid for her independent mindedness with her career the way her mother did, but she still feels the sting of American primness. Like Bergman, she was married to her first husband, director Martin Scorsese, when she became pregnant with her daughter, Elettra, by model Jonathan Wiedemann.

The relationship never rocked the halls of Congress, but pressure from Wiedemann’s family and Lancome persuaded her to divorce Scorsese and marry Wiedemann--briefly, as it turned out--both of which she accomplished in Santo Domingo in the space of half an hour.

“That really has more to do with being European or being an American. America is a much more puritanical society. It’s quite common among Europeans not to get married and to live together,” she says, chalking this up to the fact that Italians were able to divorce only relatively recently. “In America people generally get married and divorced, stay together and split up, stay together and split up.

“I never thought I was going to get married. In fact, I only got married to Americans. Because they asked. Two weeks into dating them.”

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Not all, of course. She alludes discreetly to her despair when Lynch left her. She writes that she called Scorsese in Venice for the small comfort of knowing he would be pleased to hear it. He said he’d known it two weeks before Lynch left, when he kissed her on the lips before the paparazzi at the Cannes Film Festival.

“If David chose to display his love to you in front of the press after the five years you were together, he obviously had something to hide,” Scorsese told her.

Rossellini, whose personal landscape has also included the complicated actor Gary Oldman, bristles if pressed to say more about her private life.

“I don’t think that my father’s essence is in which day he got divorced,” she says. “He’s not the essence of Martin Scorsese and David Lynch. Their essence is their ideas.”

Still, in the book, she tantalizes with an imaginary conversation with her cousin Luciano, who brands the men in her life “monsters” and finds her attraction to them in the passion for order she inherited from her mother, whose greatest joys in life included cleaning house: “You are a ‘creature of order,’ and your destiny will be to fall in love with men of disorder.”

It has also included motherhood. Three and a half years ago, she adopted a second child. Roberto is part African American, because she had requested a child who was nonwhite. Rossellini doesn’t consider herself white.

They live in New York, where Rossellini dates Lincoln Center Artistic Director Gregory Mosher. Also in New York is her fraternal twin, Ingrid, a medieval literature scholar who has taught at Princeton.

“I come from a mixed family, so I’ve always thought of myself as mixed,” she says. “My father was from the deep south of Europe. My mother was from the far north. Then my father was married to an Indian. My brother was married to a black American.

“We look every different shade, from very white blond to very black eyes, black skin. And I always thought I was somewhere in between.”