City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [72]
Over there was John Hohnsbeen, a handsome guy from Oklahoma with cornflower-blue eyes and lips so full they looked as if they’d burst. He’d been a Martha Graham dancer and his body was still well-knit and powerful. He lived with Peggy Guggenheim and ran the museum here for her. John was an unabashed social climber and had had great success—at his fiftieth birthday party, which I attended, there were four “royals,” including the pretender to the Hapsburg throne.
John looked no more than thirty and said the secret of his youthful appearance was tuberculosis. At twenty he’d been tubercular and sent off to Switzerland for the “sleep cure,” in which the patient was put into an induced coma for long periods for a year. Apparently it not only cured TB, it ensured eternal youth. When, awakened like Sleeping Beauty, he’d returned to New York, his lover, the architect Philip Johnson, designed for him an all-white apartment. John had astonished his old fraternity brothers by striding about in a white silk peignoir with the only touch of color in the whole place being a drop of blood on his handkerchief. John was a born “capon,” a walker for rich and elderly straight women. I remember he used to visit a woman named Mrs. Walker in England who was a great-granddaughter of Johnnie Walker—that same Walker of whiskey fame with the top hat and cane, a Regency rake. John had never worked at any real job. He and Johnson had been lovers for a decade, and after Johnson moved on, he felt so guilty he paid John alimony for years. John had dabbled at being an art dealer at the Curt Valentin Gallery and elsewhere, but he didn’t have much to show for it beyond a good abstract wall sculpture by Hans Arp. I went to bed with John once but I’m afraid I wasn’t aggressive enough to interest him.
When Peggy died in 1979, she left him nothing but a Picasso drawing. Guggenheim curators from New York moved in and found snails crawling up the backs of paintings. John was suddenly out of a job, money, prospects. His wealthy ladies all seemed to have evaporated. He limped back to the States and lived quietly until an unglamorous uncle whom he’d scarcely known suddenly died and left John a small fortune. His Oklahoma family, which he’d always shirked in favor of his ladies, had come through. Finally John was able to summer in Venice again and winter in Key West (later Fort Lauderdale, when it became the gay capital for “silver daddies”). He rented a wonderful ground-floor apartment across from the Palazzo Albrizzi, though soon enough Venice became more and more difficult for him. By his seventies his emphysema had become so bad he could walk no more than ten paces without stopping and gasping—and Venice, a city without cars, requires lots of walking since gondolas cost hundreds of dollars a day to hire. In the end, in a suicidal but I thought rather heroic gesture, he decided to pay a call on a friend in Santa Fe where, everyone warned him, the altitude was so high that he’d never be able to breathe. John, however, wasn’t about to have his social schedule interrupted by mere health. He went, was quickly hospitalized, and did indeed die in Santa Fe.
Besides John, another of David’s and my favorites in Venice was Maria Teresa Rubin, who headed the Save Venice Committee and who’d not long before divorced the composer Ernesto Albrizzi. His older brother Alessandro, the head of the family, who was also a New York decorator, gave us a tour of the Albrizzi palace, starting with the massive beacon in the front hall (some thirty feet high) that had once crowned the ship sailed by the last admiral