The City of Falling Angels

by John Berendt

“But this whole thing with royalty. Somebody once told me the definition of a snob. You can be a snob upward by associating with people on a level above you or a snob downward by dismissing people below you. Larry has an obsessive, at times scary, commitment to people of title. I mean, scary! I think Larry really believes he was born to the purple. For example, during one of the gala weeks, somebody in the English royal family died, I forget who. I remember Larry saying, ‘The Palace has issued . . . ,’ to me, talking to me, I mean, like I care. ‘The Palace has issued a decree saying that nobody is to go to parties.’ This was right before a Save Venice cocktail party. So I said, ‘But, Larry, you can go to a cocktail party. The decree isn’t meant for you.’ And Larry said, ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that. I mean, my friends. The king of Greece and so on.’ So he was not going to a cocktail party in Venice. He was going to sit home with Barbara Berlingieri because European royalty were not going to cocktail parties. I said to myself, ‘Whoa!’”

  ON THE AFTERNOON OF THE FORMAL BALL, I dropped in to see the Guthries at their red house at the foot of the Accademia Bridge. The interior was furnished with chintz-covered chairs and sofas and looked more like an apartment on the East Side of Manhattan than a Venetian dwelling. Bob and Bea Guthrie were sitting in the living room surveying a large board propped up on an easel and covered with name tags pinned to circles representing tables.

  “Ever seated a dinner party for three hundred and fifty people?” Guthrie asked. “Try doing it when half a dozen people call up at the last minute, saying, ‘We simply must have so-and-so at our table,’ which means you have to do the whole thing all over again.”

  “I suppose it would be especially difficult to do,” I said, “if you were carrying on a really ugly personal feud at the same time.”

  Guthrie was startled by my directness but recovered quickly. “I guess that means you’ve heard,” he said with a laugh.

  “Half of Venice has heard,” I said.

  He looked again at the seating chart. “Well, we’re about done with this—for now. Want to go for a boat ride?”

  We went outside to Guthrie’s motor launch, a Boston Whaler, which was tied up at the edge of a small canal just beyond the gate. Guthrie stood at the wheel and backed out into the Grand Canal, then turned and headed in the direction of the Rialto. He spoke over the noise of the motor.

  “On one level, sure, it’s a quarrel between Larry and me. But it’s really more involved than that. There are fundamental differences between most of our board members and the small group of dissidents who support Larry.

  “Typically, members of our board are people of accomplishment. Save Venice is an avocation for them, not a principal activity in their lives. They enjoy each other’s company, they love Venice, and it gives them satisfaction to help preserve the city. They contribute more to Save Venice in time and money than they get out of it. They’re givers.

  “The dissidents are quite a different breed of cat. They have money but no occupation of importance, no real accomplishments. Save Venice assumes too great an importance in their lives, because they don’t have any other claim to fame. It’s the horse they ride on. They introduce themselves using organizational titles. To prove their importance, they need to take credit for the organization’s accomplishments, even though they do no work themselves. In fact, they refer to the people who put in long hours as ‘the hired help.’ They’re takers.

  “The dissidents use Save Venice to promote their own social lives, which is the only life they really have. They invite their high-flying friends and hoped-for friends to our parties and galas free of charge, and in return they get invited on cruises and to country estates for shooting weekends. These nonpaying guests have become a problem. We’re getting more and more of them, and the dissidents monopolize them. They hire limousines to take them to events in the countryside, while the rest of us travel on buses, and they pass by sitting grandly in the backseat. They arrive late and leave early. They all sit together at tables by themselves, snubbing the paying guests. And they really don’t care how offensive it is to the other people.”

  “I was under the impression,” I said, “that these nonpaying guests provide the sort of glamour that attracts the paying guests.”

  “They do,” said Guthrie, “but that was more important in the early years. Save Venice has become so well known that it’s a draw in its own right. We don’t need those people anymore.”

  We were just then passing the Palazzo Pisani-Moretta, where the ball was to be held that night. Caterers were unloading crates from barges at the water gate. Guthrie gestured toward the palace. “It’s the dissidents who always insist on being seated near the windows when it’s hot or the fireplace when it’s cold. They’re very demanding, exigent people. Hell, I still practice surgery eighteen hours a day. I really don’t need this.”

  “Then why don’t you quit?” I asked.

  “Bea and I were on the verge of doing just that. We had already written our letters of resignation when the charges of financial improprieties starting flying. That was the dissidents’ big mistake, because it meant we couldn’t quit. We could never leave under that sort of cloud. We had to stay and clear our names.”

  A short distance past the Rialto Bridge, we turned in to a side canal. Guthrie cut the speed in half as we negotiated turns and edged past motorboats and gondolas going in the opposite direction. After several minutes, we passed under a small bridge and emerged looking up at the Miracoli. Its satin-soft marble exterior glowed in the afternoon light.

  “This is what it’s all about,” said Guthrie. “We give parties so we can raise money to restore buildings like this one.”

  “I think everybody would agree about that,” I said.

  “Not at all,” said Guthrie. “The dissidents have it the other way around. They think we’re in the restoration business in order to give parties and mingle with royals.”

  When I quoted Bob Guthrie’s words to Larry Lovett later in the day, his reply was emphatic. “That’s absolute nonsense.”

  On the morning of the September board meeting in Venice the week after the gala, both sides arrived at the Monaco Hotel armed with proxies. The Lovett forces were furious from the very start, because Guthrie had refused their request to reschedule the meeting for the afternoon so that three board members who were in New York could vote by telephone. As things stood, it would be 4:00 A.M. in New York when the vote was taken.

  Ten positions on the board were to be filled, and the nominees would be considered one by one. As soon as voting began, the Lovett faction cried foul again. Guthrie had voted a proxy for a man who had resigned from the board months before. When the shouting died down, Guthrie explained that he had persuaded the man to withdraw his resignation, sign a proxy, and allow Guthrie to accept his resignation at the appropriate time. The appropriate time had not yet come. Lovett appealed to Jack Wasserman, who knew the bylaws better than anyone else, because he had helped draft new ones. Wasserman ruled the proxy valid.

  The cry went up again when Guthrie produced signed proxies for two people who had just been voted onto the board as new members only minutes before. Guthrie argued that although the two had signed their proxies when they were not board members, the proxies were not used until they were. Wasserman ruled these proxies legal, too.

  Lovett’s proxies were not wholly above reproach either. One was signed by Countess Anna Maria Cicogna, the daughter of Giuseppe Volpi, Mussolini’s finance minister, and half sister of Giovanni Volpi. She was over ninety, and her mental faculties were known to be failing. Nevertheless, this was the third time in two years that the old woman’s proxy had been obtained for a Save Venice vote. The first time, hers was one of the surprise proxies Barbara Berlingieri had gathered on Lovett’s behalf a year and a half earlier. When asked about it afterward, Countess Cicogna could not recall having signed it and doubted the signature was hers. For the next board meeting, not to be outdone, the Guthries got to her first. They tracked her down in the hospita
l where she was being treated for the flu. But word of it reached Lovett partisans, who rushed to the countess and found her to be just as mystified by this proxy as she had been about the one she had signed for them. So they talked her into writing a letter to Bea Guthrie, asking to see a copy of what she had signed. “As you know I have very little memory left,” Countess Cicogna wrote. “I cannot remember exactly what document I signed at the hospital or to whom I gave my affidavit.” Another year had passed since that letter, and now, despite Countess Cicogna’s rather plaintive admission of mental frailty, she had been persuaded to put her name on yet a third proxy. This time she had signed it for Lovett again, presumably without having any clearer notion what it was, or for whom she was signing it.

  However, even with Countess Cicogna’s proxy, Lovett mustered only twelve votes. Guthrie had seventeen, including the proxy from the man on the verge of resigning, the two from the brand-new members, and the three from the abstainers who were asleep in New York and whose proxies, Wasserman ruled, could be cast for the management. Guthrie won reelection, and the vanquished took out their frustration on Wasserman. They protested that the voting had been rigged and that the whole affair had been a corrupt hostile takeover. Alexis Gregory hurled imprecations in Wasserman’s direction, including the words “sleazy” and “thug.”

  “If you say that again, I’ll deck you,” Wasserman shot back.

  Terry Stanfill, who was reelected to the board over Lovett’s objections, left the room in tears, saying she could never work with people who had spoken of her so harshly.

  At this point, Alexis Gregory leaped to his feet and declared, “We’re all leaving!” He then tendered resignations for himself and eight other directors, surprising virtually everyone in the room, including the directors whose resignations he had just volunteered and who appeared dazed that the endgame had been played so precipitously. A bit uncertainly, they rose to their feet and filed out of the room. They took a motor launch directly to Cip’s, the new quayside restaurant at the Cipriani Hotel, to collect their thoughts, plan strategy, and partake of a long, four-star lunch with a view of St. Mark’s across the water, shimmering in the midday sun.

  All that remained now was for the press to get wind of the walkout and have its fun. The Gazzettino’s headline read, SAVE VENICE: THE ARISTOCRATS FLEE. Its story made it seem as if the quarrel had been a pitched battle between Venetians and Americans, although only four of the nine who quit had been Venetian (one was French, the rest American). “It was a three-hour meeting around the same table but with increasingly divergent positions,” said the Gazzettino, “the Americans taking one side, the Venetian nobles the other. The management of Save Venice was accused of being devoted more to parties than to the restoration of works of art. The departure of a small group of illustrious Venetians split the organization like an apple.”

  According to the Gazzettino, the dissidents accused the management of “using the city as a means of acquiring a position of prestige and as a stage on which to show it off. Save Venice, they claimed, had become a club restricted to ‘jet set society.’”

  “My God! Those are the very things I would say about them!” art historian Roger Rearick, one of the board members who stayed, told the Gazzettino. “Look, it’s always been those people, the ones who quit, who think only about parties and VIP dinners. The truth is they care little about restoration. They left in the hope that they’d destroy Save Venice, but they’ve only fooled themselves. Save Venice will go on without them.”

  By the time the last of the resignations had been submitted, no Venetians remained on the board of Save Venice. In all, fifteen people had left. Larry Lovett was said to be starting his own rival charity, and the dissidents predicted that the doors of Venetian palaces would slam shut on the Guthries and Save Venice. As the New York Times put it, “access to titled Italians was owed to Lawrence Lovett, who was primarily responsible for opening the gates of Venice to Americans deemed socially worthy. But those gates could be closing.”

  If that happened, Save Venice would find itself in a bizarre and highly improbable position—celebrated as the city’s most generous foreign benefactor while at the same time shunned as a loathsome pariah.

  THE FIRST ARRIVALS AT LARRY LOVETT’S DINNER PARTY stepped out onto his terrace just after sunset, in that magical half hour when the soft, dimming light turns the sky and water the same mother-of-pearl pink and palaces along the Grand Canal seem more than ever to be afloat.

  Hubert di Givenchy, his back to the Grand Canal, sat on a cushioned banquette, chatting with New Yorker Nan Kempner. The Rialto Bridge rose dramatically behind them, illuminated against the darkening sky. A waiter with a tray of drinks approached the Marchese Giuseppe Roi just as he was making a lighthearted remark that elicited one of Countess Marina Emo Capodalista’s distinctive, piping peals of laughter. “Guess what!” cried Dodie Rosekrans, clasping Countess Emo’s wrist. The wide-eyed San Francisco socialite and movie-theater heiress had just arrived from a week on the Dalmatian coast. “I’ve bought . . . a monastery!”

  It was early September. A year had passed since the split in Save Venice. Lovett had launched his own charity after all and named it Venetian Heritage. He had gone about selecting a board of directors like a croupier scooping up blue chips, amassing a pile of aristocrats and royals in such quantity that the letterhead of Venetian Heritage read like a page out of Debrett’s. Twenty-one of the fifty names on it had titles: one duke, one marchese, one marchesa, one baroness, the usual counts and countesses, and no fewer than six Highnesses, both Royal and Serene. Save Venice, in contrast, was down to its last titled board member, a baroness. Lovett made gloating reference to that state of affairs in a letter addressed to Save Venice president Paul Wallace, noting that Bob Guthrie’s upcoming Save Venice winter event in New York “is under the patronage of a minor Savoia royalty, presumably as he is now lacking a major English one.”

  Earlier in the summer, Venetian Heritage had played host to its first four-day gala. Lovett had scheduled it in June to coincide with the opening of the Venice Biennale, when the cream of the international art world descended on Venice. The gala, fully subscribed at $4,000 a ticket, had been a triumph, considering the select crowd it had drawn, the ultraprivate doors in Venice that had been thrown open for it, and the money it had raised. Larry Lovett had every reason to be pleased. And he was. Nonetheless, the continued existence of Save Venice rankled him. And Save Venice, as he well knew, was far from dead.

  At the time of the tumultuous split, the next Save Venice Regatta Week Gala had been less than a year away. It was going to become clear very soon whether private Venice would remain as accessible to Save Venice as it had been in the past. The Guthries were about to start reaching out and making calls when the telephone rang. Bea Guthrie picked up.

  “It’s Volpi!” the voice of Count Giovanni Volpi boomed at the other end. He was calling from his villa on the Giudecca. “I hear those clowns are now saying the doors of Venice will slam in your face!”

  “I’ve heard that, too,” said Bea Guthrie, “but I don’t really—”

  “And the reason they give for walking out of Save Venice?” Volpi continued. “Because you were throwing too many parties? This, coming from Venetians who always bitch about their seating—those freeloaders who never pay a penny for anything?” Count Volpi’s famous contempt for his fellow Venetians burned through every syllable. “Venice is like a courtesan who takes the money and gives nothing in return. Stingy, greedy, and cheap! They’re nothing but scavengers! It wasn’t enough that they slandered you all summer, calling you crooks. That kind of viciousness is intolerable. It was a moral lynching! They’re lucky you haven’t seriously sued them for it! And, frankly, I think you should.”

  “Well, Giovanni, it’s been a nightmare. But we—”

  “Listen,” said Volpi. “I’m calling because you’ve asked me in the past if you could use Palazzo Volpi for the Save Venice ball, and I’ve always said no. Well, I’
ve changed my mind. If you think it would help, it would be my pleasure to lend the palace to you next summer for your ball.”

  Palazzo Volpi, a magnificent sixteenth-century, seventy-five-room palace on the Grand Canal, was a palace and a half, actually. It had a courtyard garden and grand halls and salons. The lingering presence of one of Italy’s most dynamic twentieth-century figures—Volpi’s father, Count Giuseppe Volpi, founder of the Venice Film Festival, creator of Mestre and Marghera, Mussolini’s finance minister, “the Last Doge of Venice”—could still be felt throughout: the gilt-and-marble ballroom Volpi had built to commemorate his military victories as the governor of Libya in the 1920s, the full-length oil portrait of Volpi in diplomatic attire, the cannon sitting in the middle of the portego, furniture from the Quirinal Palace in Rome, a signed photograph of King Umberto di Savoia. For years Palazzo Volpi had been the setting for the glamorous Volpi Ball, which was given every September by Giovanni’s mother. But the last Volpi Ball had been forty years ago, and since then the palace had remained largely unused—well maintained but not lived in.