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By Root 1154 0

a page or two. He was too busy being debriefed by George Smith, an American industrialist who ran a Goodyear factory in Bergamo and lived in a villa surrounded by German shepherd attack dogs and barbed-wire fences as protection against kidnapping for ransom, which was common in Italy in those days. George, with his cigarette holder, hairy barrel chest, and the handsome face of a society band conductor, was gay but celibate. He had converted to Catholicism and hoped to be made a papal baron; celibacy was not too high a price to pay for such an honor—or for his eternal salvation. His snobbism and his social-climbing form of Catholicism reminded me of Somerset Maugham’s Elliott Templeton in The Razor’s Edge, though George was humbler, less of a termagant than Elliott. His emotions he poured into his relationship with his adopted son, an upright young man of Bergamo whom George was about to marry off to a local heiress. I hitched a ride with George once as he was sped from Mestre to Bergamo in a Mercedes limousine driven by his uniformed chauffeur. I stayed over one day at the barricaded house, illuminated all night by spotlights and patrolled by the attack dogs. I remembered Hervé Guibert’s description of the fading Italian movie star living in a villa protected by German shepherds that obeyed commands only in German (“Auf! Sitz!”), and who kept all her old movies in a refrigerator, extracting one every evening on a rotating basis and watching it as the dogs prowled outside. I visited George’s plant, where I had a delicious three-course lunch in the company cafeteria. In Bergamo, at least, the employees spoke softly, wore clean uniforms, and seemed more like skilled watchmakers than assembly-line workers.

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