Striptease

Inspired perhaps by the performance of her mother, Ingrid Bergman in “Joan of Arc,” Isabella Rossellini hears voices. What is more, she writes them down. These transcribed dialogues, often between dead people, make “Some of Me” a far cry from your garden-variety celebrity autobiography. The book is full of loopy non sequiturs: digressions on the mating habits of insects, the embalming products that keep Lenin’s corpse looking perky, even the tapeworm Maria Callas swallowed to lose 80 pounds. Nor has Rossellini’s stream -of -consciousness been reined in by a literal -minded ghostwriter. Rossellini’s only ghosts are the spirits of her beloved departed, who hold forth on subjects ranging from cosmology to cosmetics. “According to Einstein,” an ex-lover explains in one such chat, “if you move at a high enough speed, time slows down until it stops.” From this, Rossellini concludes: “Hallelujah! Lancome, stop lab research on anti-wrinkle cream and just find a way to make us ladies run fast.”

On the whole, however, Rossellini rarely participates in these conversations. Like a little girl who has been taught to defer to grown-ups, she looks on while, for instance, her father, the director Roberto Rossellini, discusses her craft with her ex-husband, director Martin Scorsese. “I use all I have and all at maximum power, loud and bold like rock ‘n’ roll,” Scorsese announces. “I get disturbed by too much flash,” the dead director responds. Soon Mom--the late, great Bergman--has entered the debate. Although Roberto Rossellini’s “Viaggo in Italia” lost money, Bergman says, it was an important film because it influenced Godard and Truffaut. “And you like it too, Martin?” she asks. Without waiting for an answer, she continues: “Many people in Hollywood believed Roberto ruined my career with films like that. I felt I ruined his.”

Rossellini has no illusions about being self-made. She knows she is where she is because of her parents. Even her beauty is often compared to her mother’s. Yet she doesn’t appear to resent them. “Some of Me” is remarkable both for what it is--a quirky memoir--and what it isn’t: “Mommie Dearest.” Like Joan Crawford, Ingrid Bergman had a cleaning fetish, but unlike Crawford, Bergman didn’t clobber her daughter and shout, “No wire hangers!” Rather, she infected Isabella with her obsession. Bergman “was seeking the ‘high’ that cleaning gives,” Rossellini explains. “I know what it feels like. I’m always on the lookout for dust in secret places. . . . If I see it, I can’t stop thinking about it until I get rid of it.”

One reason, perhaps, for Rossellini’s even-tempered account of her family is that she herself has accomplished things; her identity derives from being more than just a member of the tribe. When Christina Crawford and Maria Riva (Marlene Dietrich’s daughter), wrote about their legendary mothers, they were Big Nobodies. Rossellini, by contrast, had made both films and money--especially money, modeling for Lancome. Nor were her early years a nightmare. Although her father was plagued by debt--repo men routinely carted off the family’s furniture--Isabella seems to have emerged from the tumult with a remarkable sense of security. She even weathered scoliosis, a curvature of the spine, that requires painful treatment.

In some ways, however, she appears stuck in childhood. This isn’t merely because of the deferential way she lets her dead elders dominate her book. It’s because the scoliosis, she says, interrupted her education, leaving her with childlike, foreign-sounding English and an inability to spell. Rossellini’s editors have corrected her spelling but preserved her naive syntax, which is, in its own way, charming. It’s hard to accuse a writer of being overly self-involved when she heads a self-reflective section: “Here Starts Boring.” Yet the infantile prose also suggests a refusal to come to grips with adulthood--perhaps an occupational hazard for models. When Rossellini, who was born in 1952, turned 40 and, in the eyes of the modeling world, became a withered crone, Lancome canceled her contract.

Rossellini’s verbal awkwardness is offset by her visual literacy. She is fluent in the language of pictures, and she speaks it with flare. Madonna is not the only cunning chameleon who examined classic photos of mythic beauties and reinvented herself accordingly. In David Lynch’s “Wild at Heart,” to create a character that was both attractive and repulsive, Rossellini styled herself after Frida Kahlo, “who was beautiful and feminine” but also “hairy, a bit like an ape.”

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She transformed herself into Marlene Dietrich for a Donna Karan catalog and, on two unspecified occasions, became plausible replicas of Maria Callas and Anna Magnani. Advertising shots, Rossellini feels, can be about much more than peddling merchandise; they challenge models and photographers to create a seductive reality. “There is no dialogue for a model in a still photo and no story to tell,” she explains, “no arc and evolution of emotion to portray, no other actor to react to, and because of that it sometimes seems to me more mysterious. A great photo has to conjure up an entire reality in one frame without the help of the story, the dialogue, the music that creates so much atmosphere in a film.”

Unfortunately, not every picture in “Some of Me” tells an interesting story. Many are visual correlatives of the babified prose. There are endless cloying shots of animals: a lamb, a litter of Jack Russell terriers, even a mangled teddy bear in a box with a studded doll. (Disappointingly, her infamous pig, Spanky, who “humped the living room furniture every night,” was left out.) By publishing odd photos and funny images she has collected, Rossellini also creates a feeling of intimacy--as if the viewer had been invited to look at the bulletin board in her private office. The requisite pictures of her with two of the high-profile men in her life--Scorsese and Lynch--include props that obscure the men’s faces: Scorsese wears a knight’s helmet and Lynch has his turtle neck pulled up to his ears. Yet playful though those pictures may be, no one forgets why they’re there. A celebrity memoir must pander to fans’ voyeurism for it to move out of the store.

To her credit, Rossellini appears self-conscious about the extent to which her book is a commercially motivated striptease. When asked by journalists what she learned from her bout with scoliosis, she would say, “That health is the most important thing.” Yet she notes, though the answer was “true and correct,” it was also “made for the kind of trash journalism that promotes trash wisdom and trash culture,” and she “blushed” every time she said it. The best parts of “Some of Me” deviate from the trash-culture formula, though not so radically that they will be misunderstood or rejected by fans. In her childlike, idiosyncratic prose, even cliches take on a veneer of originality.

“Some of Me,” Rossellini writes, will be followed by “More of Me,” though what I’d like to see is more of her family--particularly her twin, Ingrid, who has a doctorate in medieval literature. Far from being naive, Ingrid’s syntax, as quoted by Isabella, is seemingly sophisticated. Where Isabella embodies beauty, for example, Ingrid has analyzed it. “The elusiveness of this perfection,” Ingrid begins, involved “the mysterious longing for unattainable dreams. Even Dante longed for Beatrice--he just saw her walking across that bridge,” and--Isabella cuts her off--”he went nuts.” Insofar as it provided a glimpse of sibling rivalry, Isabella’s interruption was interesting. But I wish she had allowed her sister to complete her sentence. Perhaps her next volume will provide a podium for her living relatives, as well as her dead one.