City Boy

by Edmund White

  Though George was devout, he didn’t radiate disapproval. Quite the contrary; he lived for every morsel of gossip, which “amused” him. He was as sophisticated as a playboy and as pious as a peasant. He’d sit beside the Cipriani pool in his swimsuit, exposing his hairy chest to the sun, puffing on his cigarette holder, drinking the first of many cocktails, listening to an account of the complicated maneuverings of the Franchin family or the Franchettis, I’m not sure which—in Venice in those days you had to choose one family or the other. The American painter Cy Twombly had married into the Franchettis, who’d once owned the Ca’ d’Oro (now a Venetian museum on the Grand Canal) and who counted among their forebears a composer who’d based an opera on the life of Christopher Columbus. They were Jews ennobled for a gracious loan to one king or another. All of the gay men in town worshipped Christina Franchetti, who was Cuban and stayed up all night reading Stendhal or George F. Kennan or Gyp (the pen name of a turn-of-the-century French society novelist). She’d sleep all day, then at sunset head off to Harry’s Bar for breakfast, then hop a boat to the Cipriani, hoping to encounter a few stragglers still lingering by the pool (like Proust haunting the cafés at midnight after the asthma-causing dust had settled). She had her laundry sent off to London. She sometimes made spaghetti for friends at two in the morning. Her husband, Nanuk, a deaf and unpleasant Franchetti, seldom bothered her, but he had gambled her money away. She had a hard time paying for the necessities of life (rent, food), but she charged the luxuries (Harry’s, the Cipriani, books, couture clothes) to accounts she never settled. She spoke in a thrilling baritone voice and had the slow, exaggerated intonations of an opera diva, and her gay male court was always faithful, regarding her mildly diverting remarks as sidesplitting.

  No one I knew in New York was celibate or devout, nor were any older gay men there receiving alimony. Nor did I know of any bisexual aristocrats. Of course pockets of idle friends gossiped about each other in New York, but with no central, highly visible group of that sort to concentrate on. In New York, society had broken down and splintered. Decade after decade of new rich arrivals and members of café society and well-heeled fund-raisers for charities as well as celebrities from the theater and television had brushed aside the old hierarchy explored by Edith Wharton (which even she had pictured as already dissolving). Too many different social scenes competed in New York for any one of them to seem glamorous. New York “society” events had a cheerlessness because of an insufficient sense of privilege or pleasure or exclusivity and an excess of duty connected to them (all those cancer benefits). Everyone in New York felt he or she should work, even those with enough money not to; idleness wasn’t socially acceptable, and women with tens of millions of dollars ran bookstores or opened thrift shops or attended charity board meetings or started restaurants, for which they’d taken dozens of cordon bleu cooking courses. No one in Europe would become a chef unless his father had been in the trade; certainly no one would do something so repetitious and fatiguing and hot and smelly and financially perilous for “fun.” All these “jobs” meant everyone over fifty went to bed early, at ten—which contradicted the late-night dolce far niente habits of real society. Nor did the very rich mingle with the merely rich in New York. Everyone socialized with people of exactly the same level of wealth, and no one rich on any level received artists and writers. Early to bed and no bohemians had made Jack and Jackie a dull boy and girl. New York publishing, for instance, was full of heiresses. They, too, had to have jobs, and luckily their family money allowed them to take interesting if poorly paid positions. When I’d worked at Time-Life, my researcher would descend at ten in the evening after laboring long hours under a deadline and at the curb find her family driver waiting in the old Lincoln Town Car. The miserable salaries paid in publishing could have been sufficient only to people with great fortunes and private incomes. Publishers had figured out that heiresses had good, expensive educations, low expectations, and so much guilt about their wealth that they were sure to work harder than everyone else.

  New York nightlife catered to the affluent young, the only people who stayed up late, whereas Venice had almost no late gathering places beyond a bar next to the Gritti Palace, Haig’s, where (as David liked to pretend) the “disreputable” people hung out. We’d stop in late at night (in Venice meaning midnight), and David would insist that everyone present was a heroin addict or jewelry thief or committing incest with his druggy, stringy-haired sister in the family palazzo: “There, that’s her in the dirty Ungaro!”

  In New York everyone we knew was a liberal, whereas in Venice we met several genuine and unreconstructed fascists. One particularly drunken evening we were lured back to a grand apartment next to Count Volpe’s house, and there a young father, who was the son of a famous designer, showed old black-and-white movies of Hitler standing and saluting in an open car. The father shouted at his five-year-old, “Clap, darling, clap—our Führer! Wave to the Führer!” At first we thought it must be a joke in bad taste, so bizarre and unexpected a display was it. After a time, realizing it wasn’t a joke, we then had to make our hasty retreat.

  In New York in those days you could assume everyone you would ever meet, on whatever level of society, was left-leaning and certainly tolerant. We knew no Archie Bunkers. One of the curious aspects of New York was that at that time its most illustrious citizens were all imports from the hinterlands or from Europe or Asia, whereas the natives were the rednecks.

  One year when I arrived in Venice, David had already made a conquest of Peggy Guggenheim. John Hohnsbeen had introduced them to each other and they’d instantly become friends. Peggy had for years and years been intensely romantic and sexual, but now she’d put all that behind her. “It’s not dignified,” she told us. Peggy believed she owed her admirers—her observers—a modicum of dignity and as a result was permanently idle. David called her “the laziest girl in town,” but she wasn’t lazy but bored. She had a few occupations but no passions except her dogs, her Lhasa apsos, whom she called her “babies.” And she had one obsession—arranging for her babies, and herself, to be buried in the garden of her palazzo. It was against commune rules to be buried anywhere but in a cemetery, but Peggy was willing to give her entire art collection and her palace to the city of Venice in exchange for having the rules bent in her favor. She eventually succeeded. In her garden she had a Byzantine stone chair, and now she and many of her dogs are buried in the ground that surrounds it.

  Although nothing interested her, she had a sense of her status, which in her eyes was something like the public position of a monarch. When a visiting big shot came to town, Peggy would give him or her a cocktail party and wear her Fortuny gown, which made her look all the dumpier (since it clung to every bump and declivity of her body), but the gown, too, had a historic significance. The dress was beige silk and made of hundreds of tiny pleats. Peggy told us that she would roll it up and tie it in a knot and mail it to London for cleaning. When she turned eighty, she posed for photographers and granted dippy interviews to the press. Smart or dumb, she was still Peggy Guggenheim.

  In her heyday she’d lived with everyone from Samuel Beckett (who according to legend was always so drunk or depressed he refused to get out of bed, prompting Peggy to nickname him Oblomov, after the lazy Russian literary character) to Max Ernst (whom she’d spirited away on a plane to the States, where he quickly dumped her for the younger and more beautiful Dorothea Tanning). She’d been advised in buying art by Read, who’d drawn up a checklist of paintings to be acquired—and this she’d systematically followed. She gave Berenice Abbott her first camera. She’d opened a gallery in New York during the war years (Art of This Century) in which she’d given a first show to Jackson Pollock, whom she also slept with. Right after the war she’d brought Pollock to Venice for the Biennale. At gallery openings she’d wear one abstract earring and one surrealist earring to show—in her loopy way—how impartial she was. Now in Venice she hung all her earrings on the metal bedstead that had been de
signed for her by Alexander Calder. Like Gertrude Stein she’d gone on buying art after those first glory years, and for both Guggenheim and Stein, the later “geniuses” were all duds.

  Peggy had the last private gondola in Venice. She was cheap, however, which meant she didn’t want to hire a normal gondolier who belonged to the union and earned high wages. Instead, every spring she’d look around for a retired gondolier who could be engaged for less and who would fit into her livery, which she didn’t want to modify. I remember that one summer David helped her line up a gondolier who’d conducted funeral boats to San Michele. If, after boarding, Peggy didn’t give him a specific goal, he’d automatically start heading for the funeral island and singing traditional dirges. Perhaps she was cheap because her father (who’d installed the elevators in the Eiffel Tower and who’d died in the sinking of the Titanic) had sold his share of the partnership to his brothers before the discovery of the family copper mines in South America. Peggy had inherited just half a million dollars, which she’d parlayed into a huge estate through her wise art investments. But she’d never been cash rich, not like her cousins.

  In the gondola, she’d have something she wanted to show us—the Cima da Conegliano painting of St. John the Baptist at the Madonna dell’Orto, or the Carpaccio pictures of St. Jerome and his lion frightening the friars at the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni. The gondolier would pull up next to the church and help us out. Red-faced Dutch tourists or camera-armed Americans would watch this strange event with bewildered curiosity. Or Peggy would sit back with her eyes half-closed and listen to David reading to her from Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, which she thought of as “her” novel—since it was about a rich American girl in Venice who’s very nearly exploited by attractive and devious compatriots with too many scruples to be true villains. She’d ask us to read it to her summer after summer, and it was always new to her. She never remembered it from one year to the next. She liked its Venetian setting and imperiled American heiress-heroine, the constant muted skirmishing over sex and money and love.

  Once, when we were being punted along, a young man ran along the fondamenta for five minutes shouting, “Principessa! Principessa!” She dimly nodded toward him. “I think he’s a man who used to work for me in the kitchen.” When I asked her why he called her a princess, she said, “They like titles and are disappointed if one doesn’t have one.”

  Peggy was always patting the back of her right hand with her left. When I asked her why, she said that she had rheumatism and doing this was the only thing that made it feel better.

  Sometimes we’d eat a meager, uninspired meal in her dining room, surrounded by major paintings. It might be a lackluster chicken broth and then pasta in a tomato sauce followed by fruit. John Hohnsbeen had told us that Peggy would count the apples in the pantry every day to make sure the servants weren’t eating more than one each. Conversation was tough sledding, though David was up to any demand and was always lavishing on Peggy his best gossip. She would look wide-eyed at him and say in foghorn tones, “How very amusing.” Or she’d say, “That’s outrageous, I love it.” Of course, Peggy never actually sounded either amused or outraged about anything whatsoever. She’d merely been saying these same words for half a century.

  I once asked her where she’d picked up her strange accent with its hooty vowels, and its bored falling intonations so in contrast to her antiquated adolescent vocabulary of excitement: “How positively thrilling,” she trilled as a dismissive aside. In reply to my impertinent question she explained, “I went to a girls’ school, the Jacoby School, on West Seventy-second Street, which was for rich Jewish girls. We weren’t admitted to any gentile private schools and there weren’t very many of us. But we were very close and we invented this way of talking and so we all spoke this way.”

  Often we’d take her out to dinner at some local restaurant where she could walk with the babies. She had weak ankles but still had good legs, which she showed off with short skirts and sandals.

  She never talked about her feelings or her thoughts, though surely she’d had some, enough to write a funny, insolent autobiography, Out of This Century, in which she said that the day the Nazis marched into Paris she marched into Fernand Léger’s studio and bought a 1919 painting for just three thousand dollars. She had a funny, mashed-in nose, and as a young woman had gone for a nose job to get rid of her large “hook.” The doctor, however, had botched it, and Peggy had decided not to try it again. She accepted her potato nose with typical fatalism.

  We felt that we were living with an extinct volcano, someone who’d been so often aroused and then damped down that she’d been left confused and indifferent. Peggy knew everything about Venice and enjoyed showing us strange facades, memorable little churches. She’d moved there right after the war, when she’d bought her palace for a song. It had just one floor above ground (it had never been finished) and had belonged to the Marchesa Luisa Casati, an art nouveau vamp who’d prowled the terraces with her leashed cheetahs and live snakes. Peggy had filled it with art, then decided to turn it into a museum, where she sometimes sat at the entrance and sold catalogs and tickets. She told us that once a woman asked her if Peggy Guggenheim was still alive and Peggy had said no. As she told us this story, she patted her hand, which unintentionally gave the effect of her reprimanding herself. Out front of the palazzo on the water side she’d installed an equestrian statue of a nude man by Marino Marini. The artist had given the horseman an erect penis that Peggy could unscrew when the cardinal came calling in his boat. Now the penis is soldered in place, I’ve been told. I’ve never been back since her death.

  She gradually became more irritated with John Hohnsbeen for not spending his evenings with her. John had so many friends everywhere and wanted to go out and not be trailed by Peggy and the babies. She pretended that he was leaving the museum unprotected at night against robbers, but it seemed to us that she was mainly lonely—and that almost by reflex she nursed romantic hopes, or at the very least hoped John would go through the motions of courting her.

  Although John lived decades in Paris and Rome, then Venice, he never learned either French or Italian and spoke English to everyone. Peggy could speak several languages, all with a strong accent and in short bursts with the inattention that typified her utterances even in English. She seemed elsewhere most of the time. When people talked to her, she often misunderstood them, or she’d cover her confusion with a habitual widening of her eyes: “Oh, really? How very amusing!” As I was to see with other famous people I came to know later, it didn’t much matter how a “legend” like her behaved. If a friend was bored or alienated and dropped out, the next day there were always new people, attracted by a celebrated name and what amounted to open house.

  Chapter 12

  David and I became closer and closer, perhaps because we shared these Venetian adventures that would have struck our New York friends as slightly glamorous but decidedly irrelevant and snobbish. New Yorkers constituted a kingdom that recognized no equals, no other powers, and took no prisoners. David’s and my friendship was a strange tree to grow in New York, where so many relationships of all types were corrupted by self-interest. The idea of having important friends who could impress others and predispose them in your favor was a typically New York notion. I remember that when I moved to Paris in 1983, my French editor (Ivan Nabokov, the nephew of the writer) wanted to give me a launch party. I thought I should invite the press and the few famous friends I had in Paris. Embarrassed, Ivan explained that in Paris you could have a party for the press and then on another night one for your friends, but you wouldn’t want to mix them. I was stunned by this idea, and when I’d absorbed it, I felt vulgar for not having known it all along. Now, perhaps, Parisians have become almost as cynical as New Yorkers, but then they still had a cult of friendship that made it sacred and nearly invisible to the public. There’s no word in French for “name-dropping,” and arrivisme isn’t really the same as “social climbing.”

&nb
sp; My friendship with David was disinterested—neither of us had anything to gain from knowing each other—or nearly so. He might have paid for some things, but neither of us was ever using the other. David advised me about worldly things and introduced me to people who are still close friends, and once in a while I helped him with the wording of an essay. All the odder that just such a friendship should flourish in a city where people quite openly talked about “networking” and “contacts,” as if anyone moderately clever would devote his time at a party to such admirable activities and not waste it on unprofitable friendships. It was said that you could tell who were someone’s best friends because they were the ones he never saw—only a true friend would accept being endlessly put off. Of course most friendships here in New York are conducted on the telephone (and now, I’ve noticed in supermarkets and movie theaters, on cell phones), and David and I “checked in” with each other three times a day: “My dear, you won’t believe what happened to me on the way home from Mary Ellen’s very dull party!” To be fair, no wonder people social-climb in New York, since it has more genuine social mobility than London or Paris, where clothes, accents, and manners reveal all too much about origins and where there are no more than three degrees of separation between any two people. Everyone already knows every single bad thing about you. In all three cities, people practice what Paul Valéry called the “delirious professions,” those careers that depend on self-assurance and the opinion of others rather than on certifiable skills. The delirious professions, I’d hazard, comprise literature, criticism, design, the visual arts, acting, advertising, all of the media—but not dance, for instance, where you can either do your thirty-two tours jetés without “traveling” downstage, or you can’t. If you can do them, you can dance in any company in the world without further ado. But all the delirious professions, having no agreed-upon standards, require introductions and alliances, protectors and patrons, famous teachers or acclaim by someone reputed. In short, they depend upon that most mercurial of all possessions: reputation. Socially static cities such as Paris have less obvious social frenzy, and the rise of a Rubempré or Rastignac is all the more remarkable because it’s so rare. But in a mobile city such as New York, people’s ambitions are much more pressing and obvious. In New York pushy can be a compliment, aggressive is unqualified high praise. I remember how some Swedish friends of mine laughed when an American engineering firm ran an employment ad saying they were looking for “aggressive” applicants. Or was that “candidates”?