Born with Teeth: A Memoir (11 page)

Stark Hesseltine, whose passing I shall mourn until I die, behaved rather irresponsibly on a hot afternoon in Beverly Hills when he accompanied me on a shopping spree and encouraged me to buy a ten-thousand-dollar white mink coat with a dazzling fox collar from an absurdly expensive furrier on Rodeo Drive.

“Why not?” said my agent, who was himself attired in his customary mustard turtleneck and dark Valentino sport coat. “You deserve it. You’ve worked hard, haven’t had a break in over three years—wear it in style, nap in it, see the world, for God’s sake! I hear the upcoming opera season in Venice is supposed to be extraordinary—now, that’s a coat made for a night at the opera!”

My mother did not agree, and as we picked our way around the puddles of autumnal Venice on our way to see
Rigoletto
at La Fenice, she deliberately let go of my arm, saying, “I didn’t know I was going to the opera with
Cher
tonight. When did you change your name to
Cher?
” Ah, she’s back to herself, I said to myself, and half smiled as I led the way across the Ponte di Rialto.

Just five weeks earlier, Mother had visited me in New York and, as was our habit, we had dined one night at Asti, a small family-run Italian restaurant, of the kind endemic to Manhattan’s Lower East Side. It was a large and convivial gathering that evening, with Richard Cushing serving as host, as he so often and so unsparingly did, a vivacious Beth beside him laughing into my brother Joe’s ear, siblings Jenny and Sam in conspiratorial bliss on the other side of the table, and me next to Mother, who sat at the head opposite Cushing.

My father, as usual, was absent. He and my mother never traveled together. This was understood and accepted by all of us.

My mother loved this particular establishment for the singular sweet it offered at the end of the meal, by which I mean, of course, a singing waiter. On this night, it was Oscar who stepped up to the table and, white linen napkin meticulously folded over his left arm, opened his mouth and produced a magnificent a cappella rendition of “Danny Boy.” My eyes traveled from face to face, registering the delight of each person, because “Danny Boy” was clearly intended as a special gift to us, this Irish family so crazy about this Italian restaurant.

When I turned to Mother and saw her face, all pleasure instantly drained from me.

“Danny Boy” had stirred up both the vivid memory of Tessie, and her keenly felt absence, and all of it showed in my mother’s face as she sat and listened to Oscar sing: agony, grief, despair. No tears, there were never tears, my mother didn’t cry, but in that moment her face was fractured with longing and hopelessness, and I made up my mind, then and there, to take her far away and for as long as was needed to stitch that face back to happiness.

So it was that we found ourselves in a city of singular decadence and beauty, skipping over footbridges to make our way to the opening night of
Rigoletto
at La Fenice.

Afterward, sitting at a table in the Piazza San Marco, Mother said, “There’s no point in having an espresso after dinner—as your friend Richard Cushing would say, let’s cut out the middle man and go straight to the
digestivo,
and let’s cut out the glassblowers on Murano and go straight to Florence.” She was longing for the tombs of Santa Croce.

We entered the lobby of the Excelsior Hotel in Florence at night, tired and hungry. To Mother’s chagrin, I was again impersonating Cher and, taking her by the hand, swept through the dining room in my ostentatious fur, past the bar, and into a small anteroom where she could rest and have her
digestivo
in peace.

“Now, Mother,” I said, helping her off with her raincoat (a real find at Goodwill, as I was daily reminded), “just relax and drink your Averna quietly. If anyone approaches you, please resist the impulse to engage, okay? Just until we get our bearings and I get us checked in. I need a minute. Promise?”

Mother sank into the rose damask-covered armchair and said, “Oh, Kitten, don’t be silly. But I wouldn’t mind a tiny panino with my
digestivo,
I’m having a sinking spell.” I stopped by the bar on my way to the lobby and ordered a drink and a sandwich for mother, as requested. Seated at the bar were a number of well-groomed, well-heeled Italian gentlemen, all in postures of repose, exuding entitlement, smoking and drinking and engaged in what sounded, to my uneducated ear, like a sustained and heated argument. I put my head down and walked quickly toward the lobby.

When I returned, twenty minutes later, Mother was no longer reclining in her chair but leaning forward, happily engaged in conversation with a man who was literally kneeling at her feet, cigarette in one hand, drink in the other.

“Kitten!” Mother cried as I approached. “This is Roberto, he’s utterly divine, and if you don’t want him, I’ll take him.”

The stranger was unabashedly grinning at me, to which I
responded with practiced indifference. I sat on the ottoman beside Mother’s chair and beckoned a waiter. The “divine” Roberto leaped to his feet and addressed the waiter with a passionate outpouring of words, hands gesticulating wildly in every direction, at the end of which tirade the waiter looked curiously unmoved and, shrugging his shoulders, mumbled
“Va bene, signor”
and slid out of the room.

It was then that he turned to me and introduced himself as Roberto Meucci, from the house of Sesto Meucci, a Florentine born and bred, and an artist. Although it was clear that he considered his English impeccable, it was, to my ear, liberally seasoned with Italian idioms and eccentricities.

As he spoke, I took him in. A man of medium height, with thick salt-and-pepper hair that continually fell into his hazel eyes, dressed with the casual elegance of his class in a gray mock-necked ribbed sweater pulled over beautifully tailored trousers, which broke perfectly across the tops of exquisitely made Italian shoes.

“Oh my, what heavenly shoes,” I said, to which he immediately responded, “Your mama thinks I am divine, you think my shoes are heavenly, and so I think we need Prosecco to celebrate my sainthood, no?
Ecco, Luigi, bottiglia Prosecco pronto!
” he shouted in the general direction of the bar. He then explained to me that he was very particular about shoes because that is what he did; he designed shoes, beautiful shoes for women.

“My father, Sesto Meucci, started this line of shoes, and now that he is gone, it is my brother Massimo, my sister Gabriella, my mother, and myself. But I am the designer of this line,” he qualified, “and very, very elitist about shoes. Now those, for instance,” he said, pointing to my Ferragamo heels, “tell me that you are
tipa classica,
comfortable and safe. Not a risk taker with shoes, not a connoisseur, so I will have to teach you what to buy and what not to buy.”

I laughed, disarmed. “Shopping isn’t really my thing. Not when there are bookstores to be plundered and tombs to be explored. Mother’s crazy about tombs.”

Roberto handed first Mother and then me a glass of Prosecco. “Ah, tombs! I, too, love the tombs, and I will take you first to Santa Croce, then we will walk over the Ponte Vecchio, and we will eat something in Giardino di Boboli. Joan,” he said, addressing my mother, with whom he was immediately on a first-name basis, “we will go to Palazzo Pitti—the Medici sent everybody, even their children,
especially
their children, to tombs—you’ll like that, no?”

Mother looked at me and said, “He’s dangerous, but he’s got the right idea. I say yes.”

Before I collapsed into my bed that night, Roberto had teased from me our passports, our itinerary, and our plane tickets. He ripped the itinerary to shreds before my eyes, pocketed our tickets and passports, and stated, with unequivocal confidence, that from now on he would be showing us Italy
come i cognoscenti.

La Signora Meucci, Roberto’s mother, was American born, but her years in Italy had done nothing to soften her disposition. On first meeting, she struck me as being singularly unhappy, as if she had fought to overcome a long and debilitating malaise and, having lost the battle, had set her face in rigid disapproval of anything that suggested pleasure. She was an imposing woman, well dressed and magnificently shod, of course, but running through her jet-black hair was a streak of white so startling in juxtaposition to the rest of her head that I found myself mesmerized by it. She looked like an eagle.

It was clear to me, almost from the beginning, that Roberto was the black sheep of the family, whose behavior was tolerated only because of his remarkable expertise, without which the shoe business would cease to exist. His skill as a shoe designer
was outmatched only by his talent as a painter, but this gift was discouraged by his family. La Signora Meucci carefully measured her kindness to her oldest son and doled it out sparingly. Over lunch one afternoon at Harry’s Bar, she pointed a rigid finger at Roberto and said, “When that one was a boy and got out of line, I stuck pins in his tongue.” Theirs was a cold war, unwinnable and bleak, and it occurred to me more than once that Roberto stirred up memories in his mother of another black sheep, his father, Sesto, who was also brilliant at the drafting table but was, I suspected, cruelly disappointing as a husband.

The prodigal son courted me with an intensity and skill I’d never experienced before. Roberto’s extravagant nature appealed to my sense of abandon; it suited the actress to be wooed in this manner, and allowed me to imagine myself free of the girl I had been only months before. While a master at the game of romance, Roberto was almost childlike in his indefatigable urge to conquer, and I, the presumed target, equally tireless in my practiced evasions and silly manipulations. I withheld my favors, which had the desired effect of intensifying Roberto’s attentions, all of which kept the romance at fever pitch.

For weeks, my mother and I were captivated and captured, both, by Roberto’s munificence, his extraordinary capacity to lavish upon us gifts of all kinds, his seemingly inexhaustible resourcefulness. We were driven to Siena to see the tomb of Saint Catherine of Siena; we were taken to Pisa to see the Leaning Tower; we were ensconced in the Hotel Principessa in Santa Margherita Ligure, where Mother, after investigating the suite, quipped, “I see he has consigned me to the servant’s quarters.”

It was tightening, this romantic noose. One night, sitting in the Piazza della Signoria, it started to rain. Neither of us moved. Looking straight ahead, Roberto said,
“Ti voglio molto bene, amore.”

Very softly, I asked him exactly what that meant.

“It means I will meet you at the Hassler Roma in one week, at exactly six o’clock, in the Palm Court Bar, and then you will give me your answer. I will make all of the arrangements.”

My mother was waiting up for me at the Excelsior, sitting on her bed in her pajamas. I told her what had happened and was stunned when she looked out the window and said, “It’s your turn now, isn’t it? It was mine for a long time, but now it’s yours. I’m surprised how hard it is to let go of that. You will be, too, one day.”

This was the first time in my life that Mother had exposed this kind of vulnerability, in revealing the last vestiges of her vanity, and I wasn’t at all sure what to say or how to behave. Mother took my hand and started to lightly play with my fingers, which, for her, signified affection at its most demonstrative.

“Well, Kitty, let’s see this through to the end. I’ll spend the week in Rome with you, but then I’m going home. It’s time. What does she say in
The White Cliffs
? ‘I’ve had enough of lovely, foreign lands,… I’m going home to those who think the way I think, and speak as I do.’ But first, let’s nip downstairs for a nightcap.”

One hour before six o’clock on the following Friday night, in a grand suite at the Hotel Hassler in Rome, I asked my mother to come into my room and talk to me while I dressed. She sat on the bed, hands folded, looking at me as if the curtain were about to go up on a play she had committed to sitting through, but wasn’t at all sure what the critics would say. I was nauseated and clammy as I pulled a white linen skirt over silk hose, buttoned myself into a fitted black velvet jacket, and fastened a string of pearls around my neck. At precisely five minutes before six, I kissed Mother on the cheek, tried to smile, failed, and walked out of the suite.

I saw Roberto before he saw me. Just as he’d promised, he was leaning against the bar, smoking a cigarette, and next to
him was a bottle of champagne chilling in a silver bucket. The atmosphere in the Palm Court was lively, and Roberto himself appeared to be in the middle of an animated conversation with several tables adjoining the bar.

When I entered the room, it was as if the lights had been dimmed. There was a sudden lowering of voices. I walked slowly toward this man I hardly knew, who was waiting for me with such composure, and with every step I took the room became quieter and quieter. He held my gaze with almost defiant green eyes and, unsmiling, stood there in silence until I leaned in to him and said, simply, “Yes.” Roberto pulled a small box from his pocket and, opening it, revealed a band of diamonds, which he slid onto my finger.