The City of Falling Angels

by John Berendt

  “How do you mean ‘in private’?” I asked.

  “One-to-one,” she said. “If a third person is present, then it’s no longer private. It’s public, and the superintendent, being only human, would be embarrassed.”

  Normally Save Venice selected restoration projects from a list drawn up by the superintendencies, but in the case of the Miracoli Church, Save Venice had originated the idea itself. It had not been on any of the usual lists. The church had become black with oily grime, inside and out. Save Venice proposed using experimental methods to restore it, and the superintendent of monuments was at first very much opposed. He wanted to conduct an exhaustive study of the whole building before allowing any work to start, and that could have taken decades. Finally Save Venice suggested proceeding in stages: open up a small portion of the walls, see what they found, and continue, or not, from there. The superintendent agreed, and the project went forward.

  Save Venice had hoped to be finished in two years, by 1989, in time for the five-hundredth anniversary of the church. But even Save Venice’s own experts insisted on preliminary research that consumed two years by itself. Technicians analyzed samples of every structural substance in the building, made scale drawings with the aid of laser measurements, took soundings of the walls, and recorded humidity and temperature levels throughout.

  When they detached the first marble panels from the brick walls, they discovered that salt from the canals had seeped up through the porous bricks and permeated the marble. The marble slabs had become 14 percent salt. Many of them were on the point of exploding. Each piece of marble had to be removed and desalinated by soaking for months in specially built steel tanks filled with circulating distilled water.

  The restoration had taken ten years, not two, and the cost had ballooned from an estimated $1 million to $4 million. But none of that mattered now. The completed Miracoli was already being hailed as a masterpiece of restoration and a model of cooperation all around. The project had been the most ambitious ever undertaken by any of the thirty private committees that were doing restorations in Venice. The spectacular results had occasioned an outpouring of goodwill toward Save Venice. Members of the prestigious Ateneo Veneto, the supreme council of the Venetian intellectual community, had voted to present their highest honor, the Pietro Torta Prize, to Save Venice and its chairman, Lawrence Dow Lovett.

  Lesa Marcello had spoken with Lovett earlier in the day to let him know that the award had been confirmed. Lovett, a native of Jacksonville, Florida, had endeared himself to Venetians by buying a nineteenth-century palace on the Grand Canal, restoring it, and taking up residence in it. The palace was sumptuously furnished and had a spectacular view of the Rialto Bridge from its broad terrace, the largest terrace on the Grand Canal. Lovett frequently gave elegant dinner parties for twenty or more, catered by Harry’s Bar and served by a squadron of white-gloved waiters.

  Countess Marcello also sent word of the Torta Prize to the president of Save Venice, Randolph “Bob” Guthrie, who lived in New York. Guthrie was a well-known plastic surgeon, one of two doctors who had invented the standard procedure for reconstructive breast surgery. He and his wife, Bea, lived in an Upper East Side Manhattan town house; their ground floor served as the headquarters of Save Venice.

  Lesa Marcello was in high spirits as she walked back from the Miracoli to the Save Venice office. She knew that, in her own way, she had contributed to the success of the Miracoli restoration. At the office, she found a fax waiting for her. It was from Bob Guthrie. She read the first line. Then she read it again. “The news that the Torta Prize has singled out an individual,” Guthrie had written, “is shocking.”

  She continued reading with a sinking heart. “Please tell the head of the prize committee that the restoration of the Miracoli was the result of efforts by a great many people in Save Venice and that his committee’s proposal to single out one individual is not acceptable to the Board of Save Venice. The award, if given, must go to Save Venice as a whole. Otherwise, Save Venice will formally request that the prize for its work not be given at all.”

  Without ever mentioning Larry Lovett by name in the letter, Guthrie told Lesa to inform the committee that “the person” they had selected to receive the award had not been the chief executive officer (in other words, the president) of Save Venice for nearly ten years and that, in any case, it would be presumptuous for one person to accept a prize for the work of so many others.

  Guthrie’s letter was blunt, peremptory, and unyielding. He closed by telling Lesa that unless the prize-committee members changed their minds, she was not to give them any information, photographs, or documents, or to cooperate with them in any way. “I want there to be no mistake in Venice about how we feel.”

  The reasons behind Bob Guthrie’s fax were many and complicated, as Countess Marcello was well aware. But for the moment, the letter meant only one thing: that a panel of distinguished Venetians had voted to honor Save Venice and its chairman, Larry Lovett, with their most coveted award, and Bob Guthrie, the president of Save Venice, was prepared to fling it back in their faces.

  TENSION WITHIN SAVE VENICE, between the chairman and the president, had been mounting for the last two years, since 1995. The first outward sign of it was so slight that few people even noticed: Bob Guthrie’s name, as president, had appeared for the first time above Larry Lovett’s at the top of a list of the Save Venice board of directors in a glossy journal put out by Save Venice and edited by Bob Guthrie. This sudden reversal of the pecking order had come as an unpleasant surprise to Lovett.

  The roots of this burgeoning quarrel could be traced to the early 1960s, before the two men had ever met, when a retired American army colonel was overheard at a reception in Rome speculating that it might be possible to stabilize the leaning Tower of Pisa by freezing the subsoil under it.

  The man doing the talking was Colonel James A. Gray. The person who overheard him was Italy’s superintendent of fine arts and antiquities. The superintendent told the colonel that his idea of freezing the ground under the Tower of Pisa was ingenious and might be attempted if it was found to be viable. Gray went off to do research. Although the tower was eventually stabilized another way, Colonel Gray’s investigations turned him into a passionate advocate for preserving the world’s great art and architecture. Upon making inquiries, he found there was no private, nonprofit organization doing this kind of work, so in 1965 he created one. He called it the International Fund for Monuments, and he ran it from his apartment in the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park in New York. (Twenty years later, much expanded, Colonel Gray’s organization would be renamed the World Monuments Fund.) Gray’s selection of projects was a bit whimsical and far-flung—conservation of the mysterious stone heads on Easter Island and twelfth-century stone churches carved into hillsides in Ethiopia.

  Then, on November 4, 1966, a combination of constant rain, strong winds, and seismic rumbling under the Adriatic seabed created exceptionally high tides that caused flooding across northern Italy and put Venice under five feet of water for more than twenty-four hours.

  In the immediate aftermath of the flood, most of the attention went to Florence, where the Arno had overflowed its banks by more than twenty feet, killing ninety people and damaging or destroying thousands of works of art. Art lovers around the world formed committees to send aid and assistance. In the United States, the Committee to Rescue Italian Art was established, with Jacqueline Kennedy as its honorary president.

  As for Venice, although no one had died and very little art had been damaged, it soon became evident that the situation was fundamentally worse than in Florence. Venice had been built on millions of wooden pilings driven into the muck at the bottom of the lagoon. Over the course of centuries, as the city settled into the earth and the sea level rose, the foundations became unstable. When experts took a closer look at Venice, they discovered that most of its buildings and almost all of its works of art were in desperate condition, owing to two centuries of neglect f
ollowing the city’s defeat by Napoleon. Paintings all around the city had become soot-blackened, moldy, and brittle. Many of the most important were housed in churches, where they were unprotected from the elements because of holes in the roofs. At the same time, a great many buildings had eroding foundations and crumbling façades. It was a common hazard for chunks of walls, bricks, slabs of marble, cornices, and other decorative elements to come crashing down from on high. The whole eastern wall of the Gesuiti Church was in danger of falling into an adjacent canal. After part of a marble angel fell from a parapet of the ornate but sadly dilapidated Santa Maria della Salute Church, Arrigo Cipriani, the owner of Harry’s Bar, posted a sign outside the church warning, “Beware of Falling Angels.”

  Recognizing a threat to the very existence of Venice, Colonel Gray established a “Venice Committee” within his International Fund for Monuments. As the salvage operations in Florence were being completed, Gray enlisted the head of the Committee to Rescue Italian Art, Professor John McAndrew, to be the Venice Committee’s chairman.

  McAndrew, an architectural historian, was about to retire from his teaching position at Wellesley College. In an active and varied life, he had served as the architectural curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art after a World War II assignment in Mexico as the State Department’s coordinator of inter-American affairs. He was an expert on Frank Lloyd Wright and Alvar Aalto and had written frequently for scholarly journals.

  In the 1970s, McAndrew recruited a group of intellectuals and art patrons for the Venice Committee, among them the Renaissance scholar Sydney J. Freedberg, chairman of Harvard’s Department of Fine Arts; Rollin “Bump” Hadley, director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston; the Swiss art collector Walter Bareiss; and Gladys Delmas, an American philanthropist with a special interest in Venice. At the same time, similar organizations devoted to aiding Venice were being formed in other countries: In Britain it was Venice in Peril; in France, the Comité Français pour la Sauvegarde de Venise; in Sweden, Pro Venezia. Eventually there came to be thirty-three such private, nonprofit committees. The work of all these organizations was coordinated by a liaison office run by UNESCO called the Association of Private Committees.

  In its first four years, the Venice Committee initiated more than a dozen important cleaning and restoration projects, starting with the elaborately ornate façade of Ca’ d’Oro, a Gothic palace on the Grand Canal. To show their gratitude for the good works of Save Venice, the Venetian aristocrats did something extraordinary—extraordinary, that is, for Venetians: They invited the Americans into their palaces for cocktails. This seemingly modest gesture marked a social revolution in Venice. Traditionally Venetians invited no one into their homes but family and close friends. It was a virtual taboo to extend invitations beyond that close circle. This new hospitality was a measure of the high regard Venetians had for the Venice Committee; it was also the first of what would become increasing opportunities to gain entry to the magnificent inner sanctums that common tourists would never see.

  Before long, however, a clash of personalities developed between the rough-hewn Colonel Gray and the highly sophisticated members of the Venice Committee.

  Gray was a no-nonsense man of action, who possessed great charm but lacked social polish. He was an electrical engineer, a paratrooper who had made a hundred drops over Italy during the war, but he had no background in art. He used foul language when it suited him and would tell off-color jokes at inopportune moments.

  McAndrew, Hadley, and Bareiss were embarrassed by Gray and began to shy away from him. Gray, in turn, viewed them as a pack of dilettante socialites who attended parties on the Grand Canal and drank prosecco. When the Venice Committee proposed holding a fund-raising party in Boston, Gray rejected the idea as a waste of time. If you wanted to raise money, he said, all you had to do was to sit on the terrace of the Gritti Hotel at five o’clock, drink vodka, and talk to the rich people at the next table, and by the time you got up to leave, you had their check for ten thousand dollars in your pocket, earmarked for the Venice Committee. He had done it himself more than once.

  In the opinion of the Venice Committee members, Colonel Gray was simply not their sort. Relations between them became increasingly hostile. Bump Hadley detested Gray and was barely on speaking terms with him. Finally McAndrew suggested to Gray in 1971 that the Venice Committee detach itself from the International Fund for Monuments and become an independent organization, devoted solely to saving the art and architecture of Venice. Gray did not object. “Why don’t you call it Save Venice?” he said.

  With McAndrew as chairman and Bump Hadley as president, the Venice Committee transformed itself into Save Venice, Inc. It was a nonprofit organization that consisted of a board of directors but no members. Instead of a membership it would have a mailing list of donors. Over the next decade, Save Venice undertook projects on a modest scale, restoring paintings and sculptures and making emergency repairs to roofs, walls, and floors of buildings. In the late 1970s, Bump Hadley approached Larry Lovett, a friend from his student days at Harvard, and asked him to join the Save Venice board as treasurer.

  Larry Lovett was erudite, congenial, and, as an heir to the Piggly Wiggly grocery-chain fortune, rich. Having come to New York from Jacksonville with social aspirations, he had the good fortune to be taken under the wing of Mrs. John Barry Ryan, a doyenne of New York society. He became chairman of the Metropolitan Opera Guild and, later, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. He had already been living several months a year in Venice when Hadley invited him to join the Save Venice board, and he accepted. Then, in 1986, Hadley handed the presidency to Lovett, and Lovett started looking for someone to take his place as treasurer.

  Lovett had known Bob and Bea Guthrie for a decade or more. During his tenure as chairman of the Metropolitan Opera Guild, Lovett had worked with Bea Guthrie, who had been a volunteer in the development department in charge of “high-end” giving. Bea Guthrie was a Phipps, a niece of society racehorse owner Ogden Phipps. She had graduated from Smith College summa cum laude in art history. The Guthries, like Lovett, were enthralled by Venice. But Bob Guthrie was a plastic surgeon with a full operating schedule, and he was reluctant to take on the job of treasurer. Lovett eventually talked him into it; then he sent Guthrie the Save Venice books, and Guthrie realized that the organization was in general disarray. And its mailing list was useless. More than half the people on it had moved or were dead. From a list of thousands, Save Venice had only eighty-four active contributors and was collecting, at best, forty to fifty thousand dollars a year. Guthrie told Lovett that Save Venice was effectively dead.

  But Lovett had an idea. Every year, at the end of summer, during the Venice Film Festival and the rowing regatta, a contingent of international socialites descended on Venice—Nan Kempner, Deeda Blair, and their friends. Lovett knew many of these people, and he was certain that if Save Venice put on a lavish dinner-dance in a palace on the Grand Canal, they would come to it, and this core group would attract other people eager to be in their company. After much discussion, the idea grew to a four-day gala that would also include tours, recitals, lectures, and, taking advantage of the new willingness among Venetians to open their homes to the city’s benefactors, parties in private palaces.

  Energized by the idea of a high-society fund-raising gala in Venice, the board of directors agreed that they should turn Save Venice into something far bigger than anyone had ever thought it could be. Instead of restoring just a few paintings each year, Save Venice would raise much more money and restore entire buildings. They chose the Miracoli Church as their first major project and estimated they would have to raise a million dollars to do it.

  The reorganization of Save Venice on this scale would require the services of a professional fund-raiser. Bea Guthrie agreed to become the executive director.

  A year later, in 1987, the first Save Venice Regatta Week Gala drew four hundred people who paid a thousand dollars each for the privilege of
attending. They were taken on private tours led by Gore Vidal, Erica Jong, and the British historian John Julius Norwich. They had lunches, cocktails, and dinners in five different private palaces. They were admitted to the Doge’s Palace for the unveiling of Save Venice’s most recent restoration, Tintoretto’s monumental Paradise. They were taken in gondolas through winding canals to view the newest project, the as-yet-unrestored Miracoli Church. On the final evening, they attended a formal dinner-dance at the Palazzo Pisani-Moretta, where Peter Duchin and his orchestra played dance music on the ground floor and Bobby Short performed an evening of cabaret upstairs.