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By Root 1129 0

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.