City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [122]
I can remember sitting beside Janet Hobhouse, the novelist, when Trilling looked up and said, “Who is this young man entering the room like a prince out of a Turgenev novel?” It was Vladimir de Marsano, my pal from Venice. “In fact he is a half-Serb, half-Italian aristocrat,” I said, “and he’s going to be in one of my novels.” Vladimir came over with his wonderful slightly crooked smile and unflinching but kind eyes and the slight asymmetry of his pugilist’s nose, as if the head of a classical statue had been copied in wax and then squeezed ever so slightly to one side. Mainly he was a high-spirited but impeccably well-mannered kid, and he did carry himself with the elegance and lightness of a Slavic prince. He had a way of standing close, as if he understood that with every quarter inch of increased proximity he was jacking up his magnetism exponentially. He knew everyone wanted to kiss him. He didn’t want to kiss people back, but he did like having that kind of power over us.
He had a tougher, bigger blond man with him, a South African student. It seemed they were devoting most of their time to the disco of the moment, Studio 54. I’d never gone there but apparently the owner, Steve Rubell, let in both beautiful nobodies and celebrities of any sort. In New York Vladimir must have been a beautiful nobody, though to old Venetians such as David and me he was mythical. Vladimir jokingly complained that he and his blond beast of a friend were so inseparable that people imagined they must be lovers. He seemed genuinely proud of the imputation—and perhaps of the reality.
Studio 54 had a giant, smiling man in the moon up above the dancers slowly shoveling a spoon of cocaine toward his nose, over and over. This was still when many acquaintances assured me that cocaine was harmless and not addictive. People joked that it was the perfect yuppie drug since it made your head clearer and inspired you to want to work even more.
Dick Sennett’s salon was far from the Studio, though no less exclusive in its way. Dick was an ambitious if hit-and-miss cook, and he could often be found concocting a complicated dish out of the latest cookbook—something he would serve informally.
But no one paid much attention to the food or the liberal lashings of plonk. It was all a plush background for the startling mondaine reality in the frame: the good talk and the promise of even better talk. Dick knew not to quiz the great about their Subjects, their Accomplishments, but rather to tease them about their secret Vices, their hidden Charms, their unheralded powers of Seduction. He was always grabbing the hoary hand of a grizzled Oxford don and saying, “Oh, what a naughty pussycat you are! Aren’t you? Aren’t you? Such evil, evil naughty thoughts—and Deeds! Yes, Deeds, Mr. Pussy-Boy. Okay, everyone, à table, à table, and remember: Paws up!” No one quite knew what paws up meant, but it sounded like a cross between an eating-club slogan and a half-forgotten piece of nursery (or else Masonic) mummery. All these lonely intellectuals, their eyes hollowed out from years of reading microfiches and medieval script, their voices hoarse from gabbling to themselves over tinned beans and Bovril in unheated Rooms, were now being stroked and feted and fed. They were like feral cats being tickled behind the ears for the first time. They were purring, though still looking around anxiously for the next boot in the rear, the next nasty review by a rival in the Times Literary Supplement. Nor did Dick invite just the old and famous. He knew they needed young and lovely nobodies to make a fuss over them. Given the average age in the room, anyone under fifty counted as young.
Dick was what the French call a mythomane, which