Reward of Patience

As an old newshand, Michael Chinigo, Rome bureau chief of Hearst's International News Service, knows that news beats do not always go to the reporter who runs fastest after the fire engine. Just as often they are gathered by a man who has the gift for friendship and the patience to wait.

From the start of the Ingrid Bergman-Roberto Rossellini affair, patient, friendly Mike Chinigo (pronounced Kinigo), an Albanian-born U.S. citizen, had cultivated the confidence of the excitable Italian film director. He was helped by the fact that he speaks fluent Italian, picked up at home, polished (after Yale) at the University of Rome, and perfected as a war correspondent in Sicily and Italy. Chinigo got Rossellini to cast him as the concentration camp boss in Stromboli, quietly picked up stray quotes from Ingrid during breaks in the shooting. His stories were invariably sympathetic. Last week Chinigo's friendship for the newlyweds paid off.

When the Rossellini baby was born last February in the guarded seclusion of Rome's Villa Margherita Clinic, eager-beaver U.S. and Italian photographers fell all over each other in the rush for an exclusive picture of mother & child. Enthusiastic bidders priced their interest at 5,000,000 lire ($8,000), and newsmen tried every imaginable method of invading the clinic, from offering bribes to the nuns on duty to scaling walls and pretending that their own wives were in the maternity division. But nobody got the picture.

Last week, in the Manhattan office of Sid Mautner, boss of International News Photos, the phone rang. It was Mike Chinigo calling from Rome. Said he: "Well, I have it!" Replied Mautner: "You have what?" Said Chinigo: "The first pictures of the Bergman baby." On their way to Manhattan by air, explained Chinigo, were eleven exclusive 35-mm. pictures.

The 100 I.N.P. subscribers in the U.S., including the Hearstpapers, gave the warm, candid photographs a big splash. Taken by talented Papa Rossellini himself, they showed a lovely Bergman in short hairdo and maternal mood, a generally solemn-eyed baby. (But in one six-picture sequence, four-month-old Renato obligingly worked himself up to a bellylaugh under his father's skilled direction.) When Editor Mautner heard what Bureau Chief Chinigo had paid for the pictures, he redoubled his congratulations. The price: not one thin lira.

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