by Gay Talese
Among the small crowd of onlookers stood Lorena’s nineteen-year-old brother, Fabrizio, whom I tried, without success, to engage in conversation, and Lorena’s twenty-five-year-old sister, Vanessa, who was actually quite friendly and communicative. A bit more petite than Lorena but equally attractive in her physical appearance and attire, Vanessa told me what I had already learned from speaking with Lorena the previous evening: Vanessa had recently gotten married and was no longer residing at the Gallo household—a decision that Lorena said had riled her parents (and particularly her mother) not only because Vanessa seemed to hardly know the young man but because he was Chinese. His immigrant family currently operated a Chinese restaurant in a nearby northern Virginia community. Neither he nor any of his kinsmen had come to the courthouse on this day, but, after mentioning that I would like to meet them, both Lorena and Vanessa agreed that they would try to arrange it when I next came to Virginia.
32
AS I FLEW BACK TO NEW YORK THAT AFTERNOON THINKING about the Gallo family, and the fact that Lorena now had a Chinese brother-in-law, I was still not exactly sure what I was writing about, but I nevertheless felt that I was part of it. I was both an observer and an exemplar of the ongoing process of American assimilation and conflict, of newcomers influenced by old traditions and fears and often a misconstrued sense of what was relevant and important. How American it was of the Spanish-speaking Gallo parents (recently settled on the outskirts of the nation’s capital) to object to their daughter’s decision to marry a young neighbor of Chinese origin, and how American it was of their daughter to marry him anyway.
I remembered how my convent-educated wife, Nan, had similarly upset her parents decades earlier when she had traveled alone to meet me in Rome, and, after having assured them that we would get married within the chapel of the Trinità dei Monti, overlooking the Piazza di Spagna—a site that had been consecrated by a sixteenth-century Pope and that Nan had extolled as the spiritual center of her Sacred Heart education—we got married instead in a civil ceremony overseen by an Italian Communist magistrate within the city’s principal municipal hall, in the Piazza del Campidoglio.
It had not been my idea to seek a change of venue for the wedding, nor had I even wanted to be married. Prior to the arrival of my bride-to-be in June 1959, I had been dwelling in solitary bliss in a hotel suite near the Borghese Gardens, luxuriating in the fact that my expenses were being paid by the New York Times Magazine after I had persuaded its editor to allow me to write a piece about the city’s famous boulevard, the Via Veneto, where the director Federico Fellini was then filming scenes to be included in his forthcoming movie, La Dolce Vita. I had briefly interviewed him through an interpreter while visiting the set, and I had spoken as well with one of the stars, Marcello Mastroianni, whose suavity and nonchalance on the screen projected a romantic style that I someday hoped to emulate in real life.
After working at the desk in my hotel room every day for two weeks, I finally organized and outlined my material and began to type out the opening pages of the article on my Olivetti portable:
It is said that the most sophisticated street in the world is Rome’s Via Veneto, a tree-lined promenade that is flanked by expensive hotels, sidewalk cafés, and boulevardiers whose eyes miss nothing.
This is the street that has seen everything. Back in the horse-and-chariot age it was part of the lovely gardens in which Messalina, the naughty wife of the Emperor Claudius, held her orgies. The Emperor Aurelian, in 271 A.D., built his famous wall along here—then the barbarians broke through it and plundered the villas, and then came the Saracen, Bourbon, and World War II invaders to sack it some more.
Under this street is a chapel adorned with the skulls of more than 4,000 Capuchins, and nearby is the spot where Raphael used to relax after a hard day at the Vatican. It was here that Pauline Bonaparte’s perfumed carriage passed on its way to her villa; where Benito Mussolini went horseback riding.…
Today sleek Fiats and Alfa-Romeos whiz through the holes in the Aurelian Wall and later this summer travelers from around the globe will come here to sit in the sidewalk cafés, drink, stare—and be stared at. They will slump in chairs under the umbrellas, their legs crossed, their eyes roving, the heads moving from side to side like spectators at a tennis match. Before them will pass some of the world’s richest men and loveliest women. Italian armchair connoisseurs will whistle softly at the women and often compliment them with a “bona” or “bellissima.” …
I finished the three-thousand-word piece on June 1, and two days later, after the editor had accepted it for publication in an early-summer issue, I taxied to the airport to meet Nan and begin what I thought would be a ten-day vacation together in Rome—and not a matrimonial occasion at the altar of the Trinità dei Monti. I later listened with disbelief and anguish as Nan shared her intentions with me, doing so after her luggage had been carried into my suite and while the two of us were having what had begun as a pleasant lunch at Rosati’s sidewalk café.
“You can’t be serious,” I said, or something to that effect—I cannot recall exactly what I said, or what Nan said, other than the fact that, in the most tactful way possible, it was made clear to me that if I wished to continue my two-year-old relationship with this green-eyed beauty who had the temerity to tell her parents that she was marrying me before telling me, my bachelorhood would soon be ending. It also must have occurred to me, though I was then only twenty-seven and relatively inexperienced in les affaires du coeur, that in matters most personally and directly affecting the lives of involved couples—be it the decision to marry, or to have children, or to buy or sell a house, or to sue for divorce—the woman’s will invariably prevails.
Still, I believe that Nan was unhappy with my lack of enthusiasm for the potential joys of wedlock (feelings that I traced back to my claustrophobic upbringing in a home where my parents thought that an ideal marriage was one in which one’s spouse was never out of sight), and so after Nan had visited the Trinità dei Monti and learned that weddings were no longer held there—the only place that represented special meaning to her as a marital site—she suggested that we might as well be married outside the Church. I got the impression, though she never articulated it, that she was now experiencing doubts about my worthiness as a husband (doubts perhaps previously conveyed to her by her mother), and while Nan did not want to leave Rome unmarried, since marrying me had been the expressed purpose of her trip, I think that she was anticipating, at least subconsciously, a happy day in the not-too-distant future when, after she had met the right man, she would marry him properly in front of a priest and in the presence of her family and friends.
The two of us coexisted with recurring feelings of resignation for the rest of the week in the Eternal City, waiting to be contacted by the office of the registrar, where we had applied for a marriage license and had given the chief clerk a fifty-dollar gratuity in the interest of expediency. The clerk himself delivered the license to us at our hotel on June 8, five days after Nan’s arrival, and he also gave us directions to the municipal hall, where we were to appear two days later for the official ceremony.
On the eve of our wedding, Nan and I went to dinner at the Hostaria dell’Orso and ordered a bottle of champagne. Before we had received it, I excused myself from our table to greet one of my favorite authors, Irwin Shaw, who was standing at the bar chatting with a few other men. Shaw, a broad-shouldered, ruddy-faced, gregarious individual in his mid-forties, had played football for Brooklyn College but had achieved fame and fortune as a writer of short stories (I had practically memorized the opening paragraphs of “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses” and “The Eighty-Yard Run”) and such best-selling novels as The Young Lions, which later became a movie starring Marlon Brando. I had recently read in a news column that Shaw’s latest novel, which was set in Rome and was called Two Weeks in Another Town, had just been optioned by Hollywood.
After I had approached him and had congratulated him on his latest accomplishment,
I was pleased to hear that he remembered meeting me years before in Paris, where he kept an apartment and was friendly with a Times colleague of mine, who had introduced us.
“What brings you to Rome?” he asked.
“I came to write about the Via Veneto for the Sunday Times Magazine,” I said, “but a few days ago my girlfriend arrived from New York with my birth certificate! We’ve been dating for two years, and she thinks it’s time we made it official.”
“Who is this woman?” he asked.
“Her name is Nan Ahearn, and she works at Random House,” I said.
“Random House! They’re the best. They’re my publishers.…”
We walked over to my table, and I introduced Nan to Irwin Shaw. Her large green eyes widened, and with a smile and gracious handshake, she complimented him on his work.
“This woman’s got good taste,” he whispered into my ear. “You’re lucky to be marrying her. Who’s the best man?”
“I don’t have one,” I replied.
“Yes, you do,” he said. “You have me.”
The next morning, in front of an ornate building overlooking the Piazza del Campidoglio, which had been designed by Michelangelo, Nan and I were met by Irwin Shaw and two of his closest friends in Italy—a courtly and personable gentleman named Pilade Levi, who was the Rome representative of a Hollywood studio, and Levi’s attractive and equally engaging companion, Carol Guadagni, who headed the Rome office of the William Morris Agency. Shaw had undoubtedly sensed that Nan and I were uneasy about what we were about to do, and so he brought along his friends to lend their support and encouragement—which they did. But in actual fact, once the ceremony had begun, I ceased to think about what had concerned me earlier (that is, the good life would soon be over) and concentrated instead on how amazing it was that Nan would travel so far to be with me, and that the two of us would now be standing together in a huge and magnificent hall, hearing our marital vows being intoned in Italian by a handsome magistrate whose chest was crossed with a tricolored sash and who stood before a high-backed damask chair behind a table draped with a velvet cloth that displayed an emblazoned seal in gold lettering: S.P.Q.R. (the Senate and People of Rome).
After the ceremony, Shaw gave Nan and me a wedding party in a ballroom across the street from the American embassy on the Via Veneto. It was a festive occasion, attended by many people who were then active in the filming of La Dolce Vita, including Federico Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni—which brightened my spirits for about twenty-four hours, or until the following day, when our bridal suite was sizzling with an angry phone call from my bride’s mother in New York.
“But Mummy …” I heard Nan trying to explain, “but Mummy …”
From the drift of their conversation and from what I found out later, my wife’s mother became furious when she learned from the wedding story in that morning’s Times that we had been married by a civil official rather than a priest. It had been a tiny story buried near the bottom of the social page, and I was surprised that Nan’s mother had even noticed it.
Gay Talese Marries Miss Nan I. Ahearn
Miss Nan Irene Ahearn, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas J. Ahearn, Jr., of Rye, N.Y., was married Wednesday in Rome to Gay Talese. He is the son of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph F. Talese of Ocean City, N.J. The ceremony was performed in City Hall on Capitol Hill by City Councilor Renato Ambrosi de Magistris.
Mrs. Talese, a former student at the Rye Country Day School, was graduated from the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Greenwich, Conn., and in 1955 from Manhattanville College. She was presented in 1951 at the Westchester Cotillion. She is with Random House publishers in New York. The bridegroom, a member of the staff of the New York Times, was graduated from the University of Alabama in 1953.
In the interest of reportorial fairness and perhaps the continuation of my marriage, I do not think it is prudent of me to reveal any more information about my private relationship with Nan and her family. And yet since it was I who introduced the subject of my marriage and the irritation that it caused my mother-in-law in particular, I believe that readers are entitled to more of an explanation than I am comfortable about disclosing—accepting as I do my wife’s prerogative to edit and amend whatever I might wish to publish about our marriage, the circumstances that preceded it, and the reactions that it provoked.
My own parents, to be sure, did not reveal what they thought about the marriage. Whatever misgivings they might have had about Nan as their daughter-in-law or about not being invited to the wedding, they kept to themselves. Italian-American couples of their generation were customarily reticent about discussing personal matters that caused them pain or discomfort, no doubt being influenced to some degree by the traditional southern Italian code of silence, known as omertà. Nan’s family, however, being more securely ensconced in the American mainstream—Nan’s banker father was three generations removed from Irish soil, and her mother’s forebears first arrived from England in 1631—were more forthright in expressing their views on just about everything that interested them; and yet this does not provide me with much leeway when it comes to writing about them or my marriage to their daughter. Such topics are tacitly “off the record.” After all, what I know about my in-laws and my wife came to me through circumstances quite different from how I operate as a fact-gathering writer, pursuing people for interviews with the understanding that the information is for public consumption.
If I were a practitioner of fiction, a creator of novels, plays, or short stories, I would have the option of doing what these writers can do whenever they feel compelled to write intimately about themselves and/or individuals whom they are close to—they can change everybody’s names and otherwise falsify the facts in ways that they hope will protect their works from lawsuits or other forms of redress arising from so-called injured parties. And thus what is most truthfully and tellingly conveyed about private life in public literature and other means of communication is categorized and conveyed as “fiction.” But as I have already tried to explain, since I am a fastidious exponent of nonfiction—a reportorial writer who does not want to change names, who avoids using composite characters in narratives, and who makes every effort to adhere to factual accuracy—I am in a quandary here because I suspect that there exists a conflict of interest between my role as a writer and myself as a subject in this section of my story. Therefore I must recuse myself and defer to another writer, Arthur Lubow, who separately interviewed Nan and me on several occasions in 1991 for a Vanity Fair magazine piece that he was researching and that was pegged to the publication in early 1992 of my book Unto the Sons.
In Mr. Lubow’s article, which appeared in the February 1992 issue of Vanity Fair, he wrote:
Talese had never wanted to get married. In 1957, when he was a Times sportswriter, he was introduced to Nan Ahearn, a recent graduate of Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart. Like many well-bred girls in the fifties, she was working at respectable jobs until she found a husband.
In Gay she saw a handsome young man with a passion for books and a single-minded ambition to be a writer. He had little in common with the boys who had escorted her to Princeton games and to the Stork Club and to the Westchester Cotillion, at which she made her debut. Those boys would be lawyers and bankers like her father, a handsome man who wore three-piece suits and consoled himself with alcohol. Her father paid attention only when she talked to him of philosophy or literature. She had majored in those subjects at Manhattanville.
For Gay, this dark-haired young woman with enormous green eyes might have been Judy Jones in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams,” a short story he loved so much that he had typed it out to see how it was constructed. Fitzgerald’s protagonist was, like Gay, a tradesman’s son in a summer resort, for whom the cultured, classy, glamorous Judy Jones was the incarnation of every youthful dream. So for Gay was Nan Ahearn. After an initial date at Toots Shor, during which Nan concluded he was more full of himself than anyone she had ever met, they hit it off.…
In May 1959, the New York Times Magazine dispatched Talese to Rome to write about the Via Veneto. Back in New York, Nan wrote him moony letters until he cabled her to come join him. With great animation, Nan, at fifty-eight still a beautiful, wide-eyed postdeb, tells me what happened next.
“On the way to lunch I went to Alitalia and booked the ticket for the next day,” she remembers. “I called Mummy and Daddy and said, ‘Can I have dinner with you tonight?’ Which was a strange thing to ask. Of course, they said yes. I was just doing it one step at a time. I told them that I had received a cable from Gay asking me to marry him. It was totally untrue, a bald-faced lie. Mummy said, ‘No, you have to be married here with the family.’ I think I wept and carried on. I know I did. My mother said, ‘You don’t know what it’s like to live with a writer. You weren’t brought up for it.’ But my father said, ‘Go cable Gay.’
“The next morning I called Gay’s parents very early and asked would they please send Gay’s baptismal certificate.… That afternoon my mother came in and during lunch we went shopping for my trousseau. There was so much logistics involved that there wasn’t time for reflection. On the plane that night, the man next to me, just making conversation, said, ‘Where are you going?’ I said to Rome. He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘To get married.’ And for the first time, I thought, Holy good night—what have I done?’ ”
When she got off the plane, she saw Gay in the lounge, his dark head buried in his sleeve, the image of dejection. He sensed what was about to happen.…
A civil wedding was arranged by one of Talese’s heroes, Irwin Shaw.…
For a young writer who traced his lineage from Fitzgerald through Shaw, the auguries seemed right. A telephone call from Nan’s mother in Rye to their Rome hotel was the initial upset. Suzanne Ahearn had learned from a Times wedding notice about the civil ceremony. Outraged, she told Nan that a wedding outside the church was invalid. Nan began to cry. Gay grabbed the phone and told his mother-in-law not to interfere.…