By Peter Popham
Sunday Jun 1 2008

THE news was buried deep inside the local news section of La Repubblica. None of the other papers even bothered with it: Cicciolina to go to jail.

In the postage-stamp-sized photo, the tiny, peroxide-blonde diva whose career has traced the history of Italy over the past 30 years clutched a Victorian doll, smiling the same too-broad, too-bright smile she has flashed at a thousand film cameras, the hard flat charcoal eyebrows crammed down over her cerulean eyes.

Far bigger was the photo of "Jeff Lynn Koons" as the paper styled him, Cicciolina's ex-husband, the father of her only child, Ludwig, and the reason she may, if the sentence is upheld on appeal, go to prison.

The sentence was handed down to Cicciolina for her failure to honour their custody agreement and preventing Koons from seeing their son. In the photo, Koons grins, wearing a pinstriped suit before the giant steel balloon-dog sculpture that stood for months last year outside Palazzo Grassi on Venice's Grand Canal.

It's a strange parable of the age, this long fight and its bitter conclusion: two grotesques of the age, she with her absurd political career just behind her, he with his look of a travelling brush salesman, manufacturing huge, knowing pieces of kitsch and persuading the art world to pay ever-more-swollen sums for them.

They met in 1987, and getting together seemed a brilliant career move for both of them: she was 35, ready to crown her career as Italy's most celebrated porn star with a magnificently improbable liaison; while he, connoisseur of post-modern artworks of jaw-dropping vulgarity, who always played, like Warhol and Gilbert and George, with the idea of knitting life and art in a seamless robe, now had a partner whose life, like his own work, was all on the outside.

The couple married in 1990, separated in 1992 and divorced six years later. She mournfully describes him watching videos all day while she was reduced to conversing with the dog. A son resulted however, young Ludwig. When they split, both claimed custody. A bitter and very expensive legal battle ensued, lasting 14 years and finishing with a jail sentence for the woman who, as an Italian MP, once advocated sex for prisoners. No one doubts that there will be an appeal.

La Cicciolina, which means approximately "cuddles", was born Ilona Staller in November 1952, "after a long stormy night" as she records on her website, in the poor section of Budapest where, exactly 50 years later, she would stand unsuccessfully for election as a Hungarian MP.

Her destiny, she told Italy's L'Espresso magazine last year, "was written in the stars. I have had a very unusual relationship with sex since I was a child. I was curious about it, I enjoyed it, it made me feel powerful".

Coming of age in the late Sixties, when unbridled sex and female emancipation were considered synonymous, Staller was born at the right time -- though not the right place, amid the repression and puritanism of the Warsaw Pact. But communism, too, had its lighter side.

"As a girl I worked as a waitress in a hotel in Budapest," she recalled, "and the secret service approached me and asked me to seduce foreign guests. I had to go in their rooms, make them talk, then photograph the papers I found in their bags. At the age of 18 I was agent Katicabogar [the Hungarian for ladybird], spy and comfort girl to Arab businessmen and American politicians."

It's not surprising she was picked for the work: photographs of her as a teenager show a striking beauty with a long straight nose and severe blue eyes, blonde hair swept back behind her ears.

In the course of her work she met an Italian travel agent, married him, and vaulted gracefully over the Iron Curtain, moving to Rome. The marriage, which may only have been for immigration purposes, quickly fell apart, but with her exotic looks, Staller soon found work as an advertising model for leading Italian brands. Then, in 1973, the sexually precocious Hungarian ladybird stumbled on the man who was to change everything.

Riccardo Schicchi, who had been kicked out of high school for spying on the girls' toilets, was a photographer looking for a lucky break, and in an Italy still beset by clericalism and in the clammy grip of Christian Democracy, the two of them set about causing trouble.

"He was a kid without a lira to his name, with a broken down old Peugeot which sometimes I had to push to get it going," she recalls. Together they launched a midnight programme on a station called Radio Luna with the unblushing title 'Voulez-vous Coucher avec Moi?' It was a sex-chat show, a revolutionary idea at the time, featuring live contributions from listeners, and it took off. Staller came up with the term "cicciolina", an affectionate diminutive of the word for "fatty", thus "cuddleable" or "pinchable", as a nickname for her genitals. When it caught on, she took to applying it promiscuously to all the dirty-minded men who called in. Finally the name stuck to her, "La Cicciolina", she of the pinchable pudenda, and a brand was born.

The pair of them began systematically dismantling Italy's taboos, publishing photographs of the model in sexy poses, staging the first appearance of a totally nude woman in an Italian public place (La Cicciolina, naturally, in a discotheque), the first naked breast to make it on to national television, then, in 1979, Italy's first soft-core porno film. Within five years, soft had turned hard, but the star remained the same.

Today, La Cicciolina describes it as a natural and also enjoyable progression. "From when I was an adolescent I realised I was so sexy that every man wanted only and immediately to possess me: without sentiment, just out of libido. I don't regret any of it.

She regretted none of it -- but, at other times, she seems to regret the whole thing. "I repeat, I regret nothing -- but I believe that I was never loved," she says.

No white knight ever showed up. Instead, in 1987, as she reached the far boundaries of what Italy would accept, a political grouping known as the Radical Party stepped in to make an honest woman of her.

The Radical Party was as much a child of the Sixties as La Cicciolina herself, exasperated with the vice-like grip in which the Catholic Church continued to hold the country, but equally contemptuous of the grey, Stalinistic verities of the other great alternative, the Communist Party. The Radicals, led by fat and flamboyant Marco Pannella, famous for being repeatedly arrested for smoking joints in public places, was for all those modern Scandinavian sort of things that the Church wouldn't countenance -- abortion, contraception, dope, divorce and (why the hell not?) pornography, too.

In the most brilliant publicity coup of its short history, the party adopted Ilona Staller, and, although she was placed way down the list of candidates, she received enough personal preferences -- 20,000, second only to the party leader Pannella -- to sweep into parliament, and history.

Staller is proud of what she achieved as an MP. "I was an MP in the Italian parliament from 1987 to 1992," she says, "and I fought the fight for sexual freedom, the fight against every form of censorship, for sex inside prison and sexual information in schools, for education about Aids..." In other words she began to take herself seriously. She had lived a life which, in any other age, would have led to ignominy and disgrace. But now, thanks to the Radical Party, it all made perfect sense: she was a missionary for a new society.

For five years she put the Radical Party on the map. In 1992 she tried to make it on her own, forming the "Party of Love" with her old photographer/manager Schicchi and Moana Pozzi, Italy's other legendary porn star.

But Staller was no natural politician, and the Party of Love was no party. It failed to pick up more than a handful of votes, and died.

Respectability in another guise came hammering at her door: holy matrimony. True, Jeff Koons may have seemed scarcely more plausible as a husband than, say, Michael Jackson, but he was famous, artistic, and in his oddball way, he seemed to idolise her.

The way Koons tells it, he had decided to turn himself into a porn star so he could have his image plastered across billboards.

It sounds wacky but, hey, this was 1989. He had been immersing himself in men's magazines as preparation for a previous project, and had seen and liked a photo of Staller in Stern magazine, in a mesh dress. Then, one day at an autostrada service station in Italy, he saw her picture again, this time in a pornographic magazine. The picture had an Eastern European setting.

"I'd never seen erotic images based in Eastern European culture," he said. "They tend to have strange, surrealistic fantasy backgrounds. So I was very attracted to the sets, but I was also very attracted to Ilona." He arranged to do some photo sessions with her, based on The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden by Masaccio, which would be posed as imaginary advertisements for a non-existent porno film. "When we started doing these sessions," he said, "she started flirting with me, and before I knew it we had developed a relationship."

The art that sprouted from their marriage, Made in Heaven, was like nothing he has done before or since, a collection of paintings, photographs and glass sculptures showing the two of them having sex, Staller wearing only white stockings, the pair framed with flowers.

This latest and most exalted form of exploitation over and done with, there was nothing left but to examine the bank accounts and plot the next move. There was nothing left to share.

Koons stared at his videos, Staller chatted to the dog -- then in 1992 out popped Ludwig. They were living in the US, but when Ludwig was 13 months, Staller upped and carried him back home to Italy. And so began the custody battle that has gone back and forth for the past 14 years.

After the couple divorced, the court awarded custody to Koons, judging Ilona "too permissive, incapable of giving an example", while Koons had shown himself "an affectionate and responsible father". On appeal, the verdict was reversed, custody awarded to La Cicciolina, but with visiting rights for Koons -- rights that Ilona Staller, according to Koons's lawyer, has never respected. "Ludwig doesn't want to see you," she would say. Or: "Leave Ludwig and me in peace, we have rebuilt our lives together."

In March, Staller sued Koons in New York State Court, claiming that he owed her €1.5m in child support. When an Italian court awarded her custody of Ludwig, it ordered Koons to pay €1,500 per month, but she said he had failed to do so.

- Peter Popham

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