The City of Falling Angels

by John Berendt

  The high wattage of the assembled gathering was apparent at every turn. The official program for the gala reminded people to bring their numbered tickets to events for reasons of heightened security, “owing to the presence of a number of ambassadors, ministers and other public officials.” At any given function, one spotted the likes of Hubert de Givenchy, Prince Amyn Aga Khan, Evangeline Bruce, Michael York, the American ambassador Maxwell Rabb, and Their Royal Highnesses Prince and Princess Michael of Kent.

  With many of the events underwritten by corporations in the luxury business—Tiffany, Piaget, Escada, Moët & Chandon—Save Venice netted $350,000 that year.

  The Regatta Week Gala became a biannual, four-day event that continued to sell out, even when ticket prices climbed to $3,000 a person. On alternate years, Save Venice sponsored Mediterranean luxury cruises, always inviting historians and art experts to give lectures on board, lead tours, and in general lend the cruise an educational flavor. Gross receipts quickly climbed to a million dollars a year, and Save Venice became responsible for more than half the restoration work undertaken in Venice by all thirty of the private committees combined.

  Save Venice was a harmonious operation throughout the 1980s. The Guthries, along with a small staff, oversaw the day-to-day business operation on the ground floor of their town house, which they made available to Save Venice, rent free, as a headquarters. At Save Venice events, the gregarious Bob Guthrie circulated, introduced himself to people, and did his best to make sure everyone was having a good time. Bea Guthrie devoted considerable energy to the educational aspects of the activities planned for the galas.

  For his part, Larry Lovett recruited titled Europeans, the ultra-rich, and the socially prominent, persuading some to join the board and others to come as honored guests to its various events. As a result of his efforts, press coverage of Save Venice was invariably studded with names preceded by HRH, HSH, HE, Duke, Duchess, Count, Countess, Baron, Baroness, and Marchesa. The romantic allure created by these prefixes drew hundreds of people to Save Venice and its galas and balls.

  In 1990, Lovett was beginning to find his presidential duties too time-consuming, and he asked Guthrie to take over the presidency while he became chairman. Guthrie agreed. By then Venetians had taken Save Venice to their hearts. Lovett continued to play the role of popular host on the social scene, and the Guthries were admired for their tireless efforts, all for the benefit of Venice. Bob Guthrie, in fact, had become a genuine hero, owing to the dashing role he had played in a harrowing and bloody accident involving a marchesa’s face.

  The marchesa was Barbara Berlingieri, one of the aristocrats Larry Lovett had cajoled into joining the board of Save Venice. She had been instrumental in opening the doors of Venetian society and Venetian palaces for Lovett and for Save Venice. And she had, in fact, become vice president of Save Venice as well. Barbara and her husband, Alberto, frequently had Prince and Princess Michael of Kent as houseguests in their palace on the Grand Canal, and the Kents reciprocated. As the Corriere della Sera put it somewhat mockingly, the Berlingieris were practically living at Kensington Palace.

  Barbara Berlingieri was one of the high-style beauties of Venice. She had a classic profile and lively blue eyes. She wore her blond hair pulled back in a bun and tied with a black velvet bow. The Berlingieris’ palace, the Palazzo Treves, was well known for its neoclassical interior and for a pair of huge marble sculptures by Canova, depicting Hector and Ajax, that stood on revolving pedestals in a columned hall built especially to accommodate them.

  One afternoon immediately following a Save Venice four-day gala, Barbara Berlingieri was in her palace when the phone rang in an alcove at the far end of the long center hall. Rushing to answer it, she slipped on the terrazzo floor and fell against a heavy curtain, crashing into the window immediately behind it. The window broke. A large piece of glass sliced through the curtain and slashed her face from just below her left eye to her mouth, cutting down to the cheekbone. With blood gushing, she screamed to her husband, “Call Bob Guthrie!”

  Guthrie was at that moment packing to leave for New York. He rushed over to the Berlingieris’ palace.

  “Barbara was in her bedroom,” he recalled. “There was blood everywhere. Alberto was frantically spraying her face with an adhesive that dries like a cobweb and is meant for sealing small cuts. But this was a gaping wound, and all it did was make a thick white mat on her face with blood under it.”

  Within minutes an ambulance boat picked them up and rushed them at top speed to the hospital at San Giovanni e Paolo. They were met by the head surgeon, who was going to perform the operation. He was not, however, a plastic surgeon.

  “The cut on Barbara’s face had created two serious problems,” Guthrie recalled. “It had severed her smile muscle and had cut through the edge of her upper lip, which we call ‘the vermilion border. ’ If the smile muscles were not sewn together correctly, Barbara would end up with a lopsided smile, one side drawn up, the other flat. And if the edge of the lip were sewn in a straight line, there would be a pucker at the vermilion border. You have to cut a slight jog there, a notch, in order to keep the edge of the lip smooth. But this surgeon had never done it before. Alberto told him who I was and said he wanted me to perform the surgery. The surgeon said unfortunately it would be illegal. I didn’t have a license to practice in Italy or at that hospital, and he couldn’t let me do it. Alberto, who is normally a very mild-mannered man, seized the man by his necktie and said, ‘This is my wife! You will let Dr. Guthrie perform the operation, or else!’ I kept quiet, because I knew the doctor was right. He was a bit shaken, but he said, ‘Well, I see no reason why Dr. Guthrie can’t be in the operating room as an observer.’ So I got into green scrubs and washed my hands, and we went into the operating room. The doctor was about to start the operation when he turned to me and said, ‘Dr. Guthrie, why don’t you demonstrate your technique.’ That sort of invitation was perfectly proper, so I performed the surgery, and it all went very well.”

  After that heroic incident, Venice overflowed with goodwill toward Save Venice and everyone connected with it. Barbara Berlingieri proclaimed that Bob Guthrie had saved her face, indeed saved her life.

  For the next four or five years, matters proceeded smoothly and happily. Given the overall success of the Save Venice projects, neither Guthrie, as president, nor Lovett, as chairman, chose to make an issue of certain irritations that started to crop up.

  Guthrie discovered, for example, that Lovett was making pronouncements and commitments in Venice without informing him and that on occasion he countermanded positions Guthrie had already taken. In addition, because Lovett’s name was at the top of the list of Save Venice board members, he alone received bulletins put out by the Association of Private Committees, the liaison office run by UNESCO. The bulletins contained crucial information relating to restorations in progress by Save Venice and the other committees. Yet for reasons that were never very clear, Lovett, according to Guthrie, would not share them. Guthrie was quietly piqued when Lovett accepted a medal for work done by Save Venice in St. Mark’s Basilica without inviting Guthrie to the award ceremony, or even informing him of it. Likewise, he was annoyed when Lovett put his name on a plaque commemorating the restoration of a baptismal font in the Church of San Giovanni in Bragora and then staged an unveiling ceremony, inviting members of the press and special friends. Bob Guthrie was invited, too, but not until the morning of the event. It was the first time a Save Venice plaque had ever borne the name of a living donor, even though donors frequently earmarked funds for specific works of art, as Lovett had done in this case.

  Lovett, for his part, did not raise objections when Bob Guthrie, after becoming president, began to exhibit autocratic tendencies, speaking for the board as a whole without first canvassing its members, or declaring that he, rather than Lovett, would address an audience at this or that event. Lovett cringed inwardly when Guthrie made overbearing demands of the Venetian authorities—insisting, for exam
ple, that Save Venice be allowed to use oversize motorboats instead of water taxis to ferry large numbers of people on the Grand Canal, even though the use of these boats was prohibited because of traffic congestion and because the waves could damage the foundations of buildings along the canal. (Permission in such cases was usually granted, because of the money Save Venice was spending on the city, but through clenched teeth.)

  For a while, nonetheless, amity prevailed. The turning point came when Bob Guthrie learned that Larry Lovett had been making condescending remarks about him and Bea, referring to them as “the hired help.” That was the moment when Guthrie put his own name above Lovett’s at the top of the list of Save Venice’s board of directors. It was the opening salvo in what would become an increasingly public, and increasingly nasty, battle.

  LARRY LOVETT AND BOB GUTHRIE could not have been more different in temperament or stature.

  Lawrence Dow “Larry” Lovett was a portrait of refinement in speech, manner, dress, and worldly surroundings. As a child, he had hoped to become a concert pianist and had toured South America at seventeen, performing before small audiences, but a debilitating stage fright forced him to give it up. He graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He worked in a succession of executive positions for companies owned by his father—oil tankers and a steamship line—but retired at the age of fifty, opting instead for a life of enjoyment and support of the arts and the cultivation of international society at its highest levels. He achieved his greatest social coup in 1995, when Diana, Princess of Wales, was in Venice for the opening of the British pavilion at the Biennale and came to Lovett’s palace for lunch, trailing the usual swarm of reporters and television cameras.

  Shortly after his triumphant lunch with Diana, Lovett opened his copy of the Save Venice Regatta Week journal and found his name topped by that of Bob Guthrie.

  Randolph H. Guthrie Jr. was a tall man. More to the point, he was massive in the sense that when he was walking, even very slowly, it seemed it might take him several steps to come to a complete stop. The son of a prominent New York lawyer (his father was the Guthrie of Richard Nixon’s law firm—Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie, Alexander and Mitchell), Bob Guthrie was educated at St. Paul’s School until he was expelled for setting off a bomb behind one of the dormitories; he then graduated from Andover, Princeton, and the Harvard Medical School. Guthrie was brilliant, assertive, motivated, highly focused, and possessed of a take-charge personality, which made him a natural leader. The downside was his tendency to handle disagreements in a confrontational, bullying manner, which had led to his departure from more than one corporate board. The slow pace of doing things in Venice vexed him, and more than once he had been heard to say that “Venice would be better off without Venetians” and that “Venetians are the world’s biggest freeloaders.” He was also known on occasion to browbeat and humiliate subordinates in public.

  In a face-to-face meeting with Guthrie, Larry Lovett objected angrily to Guthrie’s reversal of their names. As Guthrie later recounted the conversation, he responded that Lovett had only himself to blame. He had been undermining Guthrie by giving contradictory instructions to the staff and making pronouncements and commitments on behalf of Save Venice without Guthrie’s knowledge. Guthrie warned that he would put his own name at the top of the Save Venice stationery as well if Lovett persisted in this behavior. Lovett threatened to resign if Guthrie did so, and Guthrie relented, feeling he had made his point. He then offered to return the presidency to Lovett, but Lovett said he did not have the time to do the work and did not want the legal responsibility.

  “In that case,” said Guthrie, “you’re not going to have unilateral openings and unveilings, you’re not going to give speeches, and you’re not going to make commitments for Save Venice, or accept medals, or take credit for the work of Save Venice unless I agree to it in advance. I’d be delighted to step aside and let you be the boss again, but as long as I’m it, you’re going to have to toe the line.”

  Lovett glared at Guthrie. “As chairman,” he said, “I do have certain prerogatives!”

  “Actually,” Guthrie replied, “as chairman you have nothing.” Guthrie handed Lovett a copy of the Save Venice bylaws. “Here, take a look at the bylaws. There’s no mention of a chairman anywhere. It’s very clear. The president is the chief executive officer in sole charge of Save Venice. When you chose the title of chairman for yourself—you, who are so enamored of titles—you titled yourself into oblivion. You don’t exist.”

  FEW PEOPLE NOTICED THE CHILL between the two men six months later at the ball in the Rainbow Room the night the Fenice burned. The feud was still a private one.

  However, relations worsened in the months that followed. In Venice, Lovett continued to represent himself as the head of Save Venice. He told Guthrie he would not “demean” himself by informing UNESCO and the other private committees that Guthrie was in fact the CEO. “Quite frankly,” Lovett told Guthrie, “you are not liked in Venice. I am always having to clean up after you.” Guthrie again offered to return the presidency to Lovett, and again Lovett declined. Guthrie began making offhand remarks about Lovett’s uselessness. He was lazy, said Guthrie; he did nothing. Why keep him on as chairman?

  Matters took a more serious turn when, at a board meeting in New York in early 1997, board member Alexis Gregory raised questions about possible financial irregularities on the part of the Guthries. Gregory, an ally of Larry Lovett’s, was the owner of Vendôme Press, an art-book publishing house; his brother was the actor/director Andre Gregory, best known for his film My Dinner with Andre. Alexis Gregory cited Bea Guthrie’s $60,000 expense account (which was given to her in lieu of a salary). He objected to the $50,000 yearly rent on the office in Venice. The office consisted of only two rooms; the rest of the space was a two-story, three-bedroom house used as living quarters by the Guthries. While the Guthries did pay part of the rent, Gregory pointed out that office space could be made available to Save Venice through UNESCO for only $5,000 a year. Larry Lovett accused Guthrie of “a lack of clarity” in his handling of the finances. “If you ask Bob Guthrie anything about financial matters,” said Lovett, “he drops a pile of four hundred pages in front of you and lets you figure it out yourself.”

  The auditors Ernst & Young were brought in to conduct a thorough audit of the books and found that every dollar was accounted for. Meanwhile members of the board searched for ways to settle a dispute that had become, as far as they were concerned, petty, degrading, and deeply embarrassing.

  By mid-1997, however, the split in Save Venice was widening. At the May board meeting, Lovett took Guthrie completely by surprise by arriving with a handful of proxies and dominating the voting for key subcommittees, stacking them with people he perceived as loyal to him. It was the first time proxies had ever been used at a Save Venice board meeting.

  A few weeks after that meeting, Barbara Berlingieri asked Guthrie to come to her palace for tea. She had been complaining for some time that Guthrie had undergone a change of personality since becoming president. “We used to discuss things,” she said. “But now he would say to us, ‘I am the president. I have total power. I tell you what I want, and I don’t need to ask anybody.’ I would say, ‘Bob, why are there thirty board members? We are totally useless.’ He would say, ‘Ah, you don’t understand, because you are Italian’—that was always his excuse—‘because in America the president can decide for himself and doesn’t need to ask or tell.’”

  Guthrie knew very well that the marchesa was Larry Lovett’s closest ally. She was a formidable adversary, far more wily, in fact, than Lovett himself. It was Barbara Berlingieri who had collected the proxies for Lovett. She was a partner with another Venetian woman in a little business called Venezia Privata, which would organize tours and parties and arrange entrée into private palaces. For years she and Lovett had proposed letting the Venice office make all the arrangements for the biannual galas, rather than doing it from headquarters in New York. Guthrie opp
osed the idea, partly because he knew it was a power play and partly because he suspected that the marchesa saw a business opportunity in it for herself.

  Barbara Berlingieri and Bob Guthrie sat in the living room of the Berlingieris’ piano nobile. Barbara came right to the point. “Bob,” she said, “you know we have enough votes right now to throw you off the board.”

  Guthrie looked at her across the tea table. The light coming in through the windows along the Grand Canal illuminated the left side of her face, the side that had been slashed from her cheekbone to her upper lip, opening the wound he had closed so expertly that only the thinnest of hairline scars remained, so slight that no one who did not know it was there would notice it.