Milking the Moon (42 page)

And there were a lot of people who really objected to my closeness with the princess. And with my American impudence. They didn’t understand my friendship with the princess, and they thought I was too full of levity. There was this lady who was a friend of the princess’s, and she thought I was too American and too flibbertigibbet. Which was what the princess wanted. Because she didn’t have any of that quality. She liked a gossipy account of who was at what literary gathering the night before that she wouldn’t dream of going to. You see, I was an American imp for her. That’s why we were friends.

But others were jealous, especially Giorgio Bassani. I know that I had Bassani always working against me. He told her that I led this ghastly life. I was in this nightclub every night and drunk and dah, dah, dah. Of course, I wasn’t. Many Friday and Saturday nights I closed Bricktop’s. But that’s when all those darling Spanish and Portuguese and South Americans were there. And Wanani was singing. Oh, it was a wild and wonderful crowd. But it could not have been more innocent. It was just jolly souls together. But suddenly everything was misinterpreted. I liked to find out about life in that crazy country. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to live on my own. So of course, you can imagine, I was objected to by some of the prissy propers.

Bricktop was a pale mulatto lady from Philadelphia originally, I think. I’m not sure, but her name was something like Elsie Blodgett. But she was known as Bricktop, because even though she was a mulatto, she had this reddish brown kinky hair. And she sang. She had that elegant twenties style. Sometimes she’d talk a song, sometimes she’d sing it. She had a great success in the twenties and had a nightclub in Paris called Bricktop’s. And she had a nightclub under the Via Veneto in Rome. You went into this hotel and down into the basement. That’s where she had this nightclub. There were some cafés right on the Via Veneto which were very international, and you’d see movie stars and famous composers and all the tourists gaping. They were wildly expensive, and I didn’t really like them. For me, there was no other nightclub besides Bricktop’s. There was the diplomatic set, especially from South America and Spain. They were all there because of Wanani. She was part African, part Chinese, but from Cuba. And she was a gazelle—tall and willowy with this long neck and these arms that just unfolded. She couldn’t put on a shoe without being a spirit of elegance. She did these glorious mambo-jambo things, and she sang a lot of old American twenties and thirties songs like “Love for Sale.” But with her accent, it came out “Love per Tail.” “I can give you fascinating love per tail…” She never knew what she was saying. She was a heavenly creature. Later, I introduced her to Fellini, who immediately grabbed her. There is a voice that you hear in the background in
Juliet of the Spirits
saying, “Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah.” That’s Wanani.

Theoretically, the club was supposed to close at midnight or one o’clock. So Bricktop would pull one of those expanding metal gates across the entrance at the legal hour and just let it stay open forever. All the Latin Americans and the Spaniards loved to stay up all night. At nine o’clock in the evening they are just starting, because they sleep long hours in the afternoon. In the summertime they don’t eat before eleven or midnight.

Now one night, I was there with Theodora Keogh and Count Diego DeMasa. Big table at Bricktop’s. Boozing it up and enjoying Wanani’s Latin rhythms. And the count said, “I’ll take you all home in my new car.” And we went roaring down the highway to Naples. He wouldn’t stop. We kept saying, “You can’t do this.” And I said, “The princess expects me at eleven tomorrow morning to look at proofs.” “Oh,” he said, “I’ll tell her I did it.” Well, she loved him, was very devoted to him. He did the Spanish section of
Botteghe.
But anyway, people were saying, “Well, you know, Diego and that Theodora Roosevelt meet Eugene in nightclubs,” and dah, dah, dah. It was really the dreary ones who were always courting the princess. I was not courting the princess. I was enjoying the princess.

So, I had gotten some bad-mouthing. I don’t even know all of it, and I never got the straight of it. But she sent her administrator to say that she no longer wanted my services and would give me passage back to America.

In a way, I was prepared for the abruptness with the princess because I had seen it with so many of her friends. She was like that, you see. All or nothing: that was her style. She would get impatient with people and just turn the faucet off. Years ago when I had first met the princess, I had done a piece in
London
magazine for John Lehmann, a “Letter from Paris,” saying—oh, I don’t know—what Jean-Louis Barrault and Madeline What’s-her-name, his wife, were doing, and then I said, “The Princess Caetani is ringmaster in the rue de Cirque.” Because her apartment in Paris was on Circus Street. I made an image of a circus of her literary meetings. Then I had this ferocious letter from her saying “I didn’t know you thought like that about me.” I wrote back and said, “Well, after all, you do have a circus. You have so-and-so and so-and-so, and for monkeys, you have Alfred Chester and myself.” Well, of course, that made her giggle, so everything was all right. But there were several people she dropped for strange reasons. So when it happened to me, it wasn’t a surprise, and I never even knew all the reasons.

We had no words. I was supposed to go and answer to my sins about no death date for Peter Matthiessen and this, that, and the other. But I had worked so hard on all of that for the tenth-anniversary number and the exhibition for
Commerce
that I thought, Well, this is the swan song. I loved the princess very much, but I was feeling smothered. So then Countess Loynskarenska, a lovely lady and friend of the Caetanis, talked to the princess and said that she thought there was a big error and that a lot of people had bad-mouthed me simply because I was a piece of impudence. She came to convince me to go and talk to the princess. And I said no. You know, sometimes things have to change. And this was the moment, it seemed to me. We’d done the big exhibition. We’d done the tenth-anniversary number. All the proofs were read for the next number. I needed to do some of my own writing. Blah, blah, blah.

And I was so sick of all the problems. Now, I could get along with Gino, this peasant child, who was really a man of fifty. I can always talk to idiot children and animals. But the administrator was a tough military type. He’d been a big fascist military captain. He didn’t approve of me because I was American and I didn’t salute him. And he didn’t approve of the princess publishing this magazine. Not that it was any business of his, but they were all penny-pinchers. He would howl and was always telling the princess to look out for this, look out for that. He was really an upstart country boy, not exactly a peasant. He could read and write, but how he got to be administrator, I don’t know. And he was dipping his hands into a lot of things, apparently, as was learned much later. He had gotten Roffredo to sign papers that ceded certain unimportant vacant fields to him.

And Hubert Howard, the English Lord Howard, whom Marguerite’s daughter had married, also didn’t like the amount of money she spent on
Botteghe Oscure.
His mama was Italian, his papa was English, and he had the worst qualities of both. He would mark the olive oil jars in the kitchen to be sure the servants weren’t taking olive oil out of the olive oil jars. And you know, I think if you are at a certain level, you don’t worry about that sort of thing. But it was always suggested that the princess might have fewer pages, you know. She never said anything. But when Hubert would go away for the summer and before she left for Paris, she would sort of say, “Good. Now we can add twenty more pages to the autumn number.” It was her money. It was not Caetani money. It was Chapin money. But it was always uphill work because the administrator really didn’t like anything to do with
Botteghe Oscure
and the son-in-law wanted to cut it down.

Anyway, I could see that just for thousands of reasons, this was the moment for it to end. Right then and there. And she made the gesture, not I. And the princess was tired. She was getting crankier and crankier, and her eyes were failing. She was going blind, poor darling. Toward the end, especially with poetry, I read a lot aloud to her. I realized that she was getting old and that she wouldn’t be able to do it much longer. In a sense, I was relieved that I didn’t see her decline. She had gone to Europe to study music in 1905, and she would have to have been twenty-something then, so she must have been entering her seventies in 1950-whatever. Or eighty. She might have touched eighty. There were only two numbers published after I left.

Of course, I had many regrets. You know: friendship gone sour. And not through her fault or mine. The hangers-on. But it was just cycles of nature; everything comes to an end. Sometimes I will draw up battle lines over one misplaced comma. Other times, when people have taken offense at something I’ve written, I refuse to defend what I’ve said. I’ve said it. It is there. And I didn’t feel I wanted to go through “Yeah, but you see, gee, you know, gosh.” Because I did my job, and I never wavered in my absolute fidelity to
Botteghe Oscure
and the princess. So I just didn’t want to hear any of the crap.

That’s when I sat down and finished
Love You Good; See You Later,
right there in my little gardener’s cottage on the side of the hill. My French novel. There was this delightful man whose name was René Juilliard. He’d been a big underground chief in World War II in France. He had done underground publications—underground newspapers and bulletins. And he became a publisher after the war. I met him in Rome through the French ladies with whom I’d worked on the exhibition of
Commerce.
He’d read
The Untidy Pilgrim,
and he said, “Even though I’m fluent, I don’t really get some of the expressions in this. Since it is so in the vernacular, it would be practically impossible to translate.” And I said, “I will write you a French novel.” And what is a theme for a French novel? Either a young man with an old mistress or a young girl with an old sugar daddy. And my last line: “Let’s have another drink; we’re not dead yet.”

So I just went on into another world. Totally. It’s not true, you know, that we have only one life to live. We are much more like cats than we know, and we have at least nine lives. They say that every cell in our body is replaced within a seven-year period. We shuffle off skin. The blood renews itself. Every seven years we are different. We shed a skin; we start a new life. And I guess that’s how I look at it.

One Big Cocktail Party

Well, one thing leads to another, say what you will. The
minute I had arrived at Palazzo Caetani, the princess had said, “There is someone who is dying to meet you. She’s read your whatever it was that I published in the magazine.” This lady also happened to live in Palazzo Caetani. So we were introduced, and it was Ginny Becker, who was from Plaquemine, Louisiana. She had been an actress on Broadway and had been taken to Hollywood to play in one of Ernst Lubitsch’s films, the last one he made as a director. Ginny was to play a little French maid. But she came down with tuberculosis and was in hospital in Hollywood for a long time. And she said to her husband, John Becker, “I can’t take another minute of Hollywood. I want to go to Rome.” Well, people with tuberculosis were not supposed to go in or out of anywhere. So they dressed her in ski clothes and bandaged one foot and pretended it was a ski accident and that’s why she was in a wheelchair. And got her onto a plane and into Rome. And John Becker found this apartment in the Palazzo Caetani that nobody but somebody from Chicago, where he was from, and Plaquemine, Louisiana, would want. It had been Cardinal Caetani’s state apartment, where he received and gave audiences and all that. Red damask walls and a portrait of him, very severe, saying: “What is a martini?”

Because Ginny gave wonderful parties. She was a Southern girl. She would always do things in her offhand “Well, we’ll have a little sandwich after.” And a famous restaurant had been brought in with a twenty-course meal and a famous florist. And red damask dinner cloth. You know. Gilt-plated silver. A little sandwich. Then, “Oh,” she’d say, “we’ll have home movies.” And there’d be Marcello Mastroianni and Iris Tree and a widescreen thing in the parlor. The best of all was when she said, “Oh, we’ll have a quick look at Ostia Antica and then we’ll find a place down there somewhere to eat.” This was that famous Roman village that was dug up after the earthquake. So we made the tour and she said, “There’s a little old restaurant around the corner. Let’s lunch there.” Of course, she had sent her butler to turn it into a fancy restaurant and a bar. There was champagne and a damask cloth and two large umbrellas arranged and food like you never imagined. “I’ve heard the food is very good here,” she said. It’s that Southern thing of even though you may have been boiling eggs for three days, it’s nothing really. A little sandwich.

Anyway, Ginny had had made for her little girl, who was about five then, a very pretty marionette theater. The child wasn’t interested. But the child would sit and watch Mama, because Ginny went mad, missing theater. Missing theater, she suddenly was spending all day every day making marionettes. And when she heard about my marionette background, we fell into each other’s arms. She immediately had a much bigger theater made and we began doing, for grown-ups, satirical reviews and all kinds of things. What we liked to do was tape the voices and have them play while we did the marionettes and mechanical effects. We did two or three voices, and then famous people did voices, like Iris Tree, this great lady of the British stage. Alex North, the composer, wrote music. It was just something special. And so we did marionettes and marionettes and marionettes forever and forever. There was the performance we did for Isak Dinesen’s visit to Rome. When Robert Graves was coming to Rome, it was the first time all of his children from both his marriages had been in the same room. So we did
The North Pole Party
for the Graves occasion. We gave a lot of famous performances. Everybody was there, sooner or later. Helena Rubenstein, Christopher Fry; we had an all-star audience for one of our openings.