MAMMA WHO LOVES TOO MUCH

by John Hooper and Joanna Coles

The Guardian 2, Wednesday, March 18, 1998

Like all the best Latin lawyers, Vinicio D'Alessandro has a voice which booms out exasperated indignation. It is a voice that tells you he and his client, who in this case happens to be the world's best-known porn actress, are the last sane beings in a planet abandoned to certifiable lunatics. 'It is one of the guiding principles of our legal system,' he said yesterday, "that judges may only intervene. to restore the natural balance of things. If, for example, you have a child without a mother, then the law intervenes to have him or her adopted. When it is a question of an infant who already has a mother, then the law must not intervene unless he is in actual danger." For five years, the Hungarian-born Ilona Staller - better known as Cicciolina - who lives in Rome, and her ex-husband, the erotic sculptor Jeff Koons, who lives in New York, have been locked in a melodramatic, global tug-of-love. Their son, Ludwig Maximillian, has been spirited away by each of them in turn. Last month, in the latest of several

court rulings, a judge in Rome decided that Cicciolina must, once and for all, give up her son to his father. The order is due to take effect in August and thereafter the former porn star - her lawyer says she is now more of an "erotic actress' will have access to her son for no more than seven days a month. Mr D'Alessandro has until April 6 to submit an appeal to a higher court that might convince the judges to over-turn the ruling. He is not without hope, or support. Up to now, the affair has been a staple of the cheaper sort of Italian gossip magazine. But as a result of the most recent judgment, it has acquired the dimension of a social controversy. Many Italians were astonished that a court - an Italian court - should have decided a mother does not have an automatic right to her child. Forget all those adverts for designer clothes and fragrances - the ones with the naked babies cradled by proud, bronzed, stubble-chinned fathers. In Italy, child-rearing is still almost universally regarded as a matter fo

r la mamma and many Italians find it hard to believe that a papa could be the better parent. Reports of the affair have bristled with incredulity. The mass circulation weekly Oggi noted the psychiatrist's report had favoured Koons even though it was drawn up by a woman. "Why has she done it?, the magazine's reporter asked disbelievingly. "No mother, least of all an Italian one, could think that a child could do without the person who has held it in her womb for nine months. What has La Staller done that is so serious?" The court in its verdict gave several answers to that question. It said that her "continuous absences' had meant Ludwig was effectively being brought up by a "kaleidoscopic assortment of baby sitters - eight in two years, all of them native Hungarian speakers." Among other things, that meant the boy had no real mother tongue. He spoke some Italian, some English and some Hungarian, all of which had held back his ability to form relationships with children of his own age. The court's ruling depi

cted a disturbingly maladjusted child. "Ludwigis a difficult boy: restless, full of fears, despotic and aggressive in his habits and means of expression both with adults and those of his own age.' But the key factor, according to the child psychiatrist who examined him was that Ludwig had a symbiotic-regressive relationship with his mother'. She was "excessively liberal, allowing her son to do anything he wants,' said Dr Marisa Malagoli Togliatti. In the land of pampered bambini and protective mamme, the idea that a mother could be too indulgent is little short of revolutionary. "They say the mother is too permissive, but all mothers are permissive," railed D'Alessandro. "If all the children with permissive mothers were taken away, there wouldn't be any children left with mothers.' He said the interview on which the child psychiatrist had based her crucial report was carried out two years ago and that since then Ludwig had become genuinely bilingual in English and Italian. 'He goes to school one of the most

exclusive schools in Rome, where they are taught in English - and now has a fixed nanny who is Italian.' But if Ludwig Koons-Staller were to be a wholly normal child, it would be little less than a miracle, such has been the to-ing and fro-ing in his brief life. He was born shortly after his mother's celebrated parliamentary career me to an abrupt end in the 2 elections. Cicciolina had been adopted by the libertarian radical party, famed for its headline-grabbing stunts. The porn queen ended up serving for no less than five years as an onorevole or "honourable" (the honorific title accorded to Italian MPs). But after splitting with the Radicals, Cicciolina, whose pseudonym means little cuddly one, decided to run for parliament again. Linking up with-a fellow stripper, Moana Pozzi, sue formed a thoroughly ridiculous Party of Love. Its manifesto called for more sexual freedom in jail, "love parks" where young couples 'could have sex without fear' and legal brothels run by prostitutes' cooperatives. What neithe

r seems to have grasped was that the Radicals' success with Cicciolina had been about something that had nothing to do with sex. It was merely a way of heaping scorn on Italy's corrupt parliament by putting its members on a level with a young woman paid to have sex with strangers in public. In essence, the implication was anything but morally permissive, and not for the first, or last, time in her life, Cicciolina was being used as much as she was using others. She and her friend scored less than 1 -per cent in the elections to both the upper and lower house of parliament. 'We wanted to talk about love, but the voters were not ready," her manager, Riccardo Schicchi, lamented. The blonde Hungarian, who was by then over 40, left politics to have her baby and try again to plough a furrow through the increasingly tough, seamy world of Italian erotic show business. Her marriage was already in ruins. In 1991, in Budapest, she had married Koons, whose graphic porcelain sculptures of himself and his wife making love

made a big impression in that year's New York art season. Some of his larger-than-life works were put on sale for as much as $250,000. Once again,it was a moot point who was using whom, and how much. The bitterness with which the couple divorced was in inverse proportion to their earlier romance. "Had I known my success would be used against me I would never have had a child with Koons;" Cicciolina told one reporter shortly after the first custody battle. "I have no regrets about my choice of career.' But she has plenty of regrets about her choice of husband, telling America's Inside Edition programme that shesuspected Koons was gay,. "He tried to discredit me as a mother. His interest in me was only ever to gain publicity," she snapped. "To put it vulgarly, he has made a lot of money from my tits and ass by selling very explicit photos of us having sex, and this has allowed him to hire top American lawyers in this custody battle." She was also devastated by the prenuptial agreement which she now says she s

igned in the throes of passion and without even bothering to read. It stipulated that she was not eligible for any earnings from Koons's work and that, should there be a child from their liaison, he would not be responsible for maintenance payments. Once they had tied the knot, Koons also turned out to be less than enamoured by his wife's profession, begging her to stop socialising and making her grow out the peroxide in her signature blonde hair. "I think he never loved me,' she says now. She also described a depressing domestic life in which he would watch videos all day while she resorted to talking to the couple's dog for company. The last thing anyone could, have imagined emerging from their brief, commercially lucrative, liaison was a passionate battle for the custody of its offspring. Yet, by December 1993, Cicciolina was announcing that Koons had made off with Ludwig. He had obtained a court order granting him access to the boy, and then taken him back to the US. Koons said he had decided to do so af

ter finding him "confused and disoriented ... his mother away in Ecuador performing in an erotic show.' Cicciolina claimed her ex-husband had defied a court order binding him to ensure the boy remained in Italy. But a New York judge later dismissed charges of abduction. By then, however the former porn star had taken matters - and Ludwig - into her own hands. In June 1994, she admitted to having smuggled the child out of Koons's apartment in New York City's fashionable Upper East Side. "I did what my heart told me to do," she told a radio reporter from hiding in Genoa. Last month's ruling sprang from an action by Koons to get the boy back by more conventional means than he employed five years ago. His lawyer, Mario Guttieres, said yesterday: "The main point is that a psychiatrist and a group of psychological evaluators from the University of' Rome decided Mr Koons had the best personality to look after the child. He's a very particular father. They have an exceptional relationship. And it's not so rare now f

or fathers to take responsibility for the children." Unsurprisingly, his courtroom rival, D'Alessandro, is unconvinced. His reasoning goes to the heart of this odd and tangled story. "Nature must be respected,' he said. "Unless the child is in actual danger - and I have had clients who stubbed out their cigarettes on their babies,nothing can be done while the child is being borne, suckled or weaned. That is what the law says.' But Ludwig is five years old. Of course, said D'Alessandro, he was no longer being weaned in the physical sense. But the word had to be construed in a wider meaning. "What the law is saying is that a child cannot be separated from his mother until such time as he is able to look after himself. For example, until such time as he can go to the toilet without having to be wiped afterwards by his mother; until such time as he can wipe his nose for himself."