For her part, Ariana tried her hand at playwriting. In 1868, before moving to Venice, she wrote a one-act play entitled
The Coming Woman, or the Spirit of ’76.
It was a drawing-room comedy about women’s rights, and over a period of thirty years, it enjoyed great popularity in Boston.
In spite of the intellectuals in their circle, the Curtises struck some people as a bit provincial and narrow-minded. Henry James, who admired the Curtises and considered them good friends, said of Daniel Curtis that he made all-too-frequent comparisons between Venice and Boston, and that he was “doing his best to make the Grand Canal seem like Beacon Street.” James grew weary of Daniel Curtis’s boring stories and bad puns. “One calculates the time when one shall have worked through his anecdotes and come out the other side,” James wrote in a letter. “Perhaps one never does.” Looking through the Curtis diary at the Marciana, I came across several of Daniel’s witticisms, among them:
A[riana] said one morning, “Which shall be washed first, the baby or the tea-things?”
D[aniel] replied, “The baby is a-teething, so wash them all together.”
Patricia noticed that I was looking up at the large painting on the ceiling of the
salone
.
“Believe it or not,” she said, “one of the previous owners covered that painting with tar, because she said she didn’t like faces staring down at her. My great-grandparents put up a scaffolding and had the tar removed. There had also been a plan, years earlier, to detach all the stucco from the walls and the ceiling and ship it to the Victoria and Albert Museum, but they couldn’t get it off without destroying it.”
A tea service had been set at a table in the center of the room. We sat down in armchairs beside it. As I looked around the room, I tried to imagine what it would have been like to grow up in such a place.
“It was magic,” said Patricia. “When we were children, we were taken to school in the gondola. There were always two gondoliers on duty downstairs in the
stanza di gondolieri,
a little room off the courtyard. They wore red-and-white-striped T-shirts, white jackets, a maroon neckerchief tied around the neck, white pants with a maroon sash, and a maroon armband with a silver Curtis-family crest.
“At a certain hour every morning, the gondoliers would dress the gondola. That meant polishing the brass and putting in the upholstery and pillows, which were white and maroon—the Barbaro colors. When my father wanted to go out, he would ring a gong from above to alert the gondoliers that their services would be needed soon. Then, in the evenings, they would undress the gondola upon receiving word that they would no longer be needed.”
Life in the Barbaro, when Patricia Curtis grew up there, was not typical of life elsewhere in Venice at that time, even in other palaces. “It was the 1950s,” Patricia said, “and by then no more than a dozen Venetian families were still using gondolas: the Cinis, the de Cazes, the Berlingieris, the Volpis, and Peggy Guggenheim.”
The Barbaro of Patricia Curtis’s childhood was populated by a dozen servants or more. In addition to the gondoliers, there were two butlers, a majordomo, a cook, an assistant cook, two maids, a nurse, a handyman, and a laundress. The maids wore black-and-white uniforms and shoes called
friulane,
which were like espadrilles and made no sound as they moved around the palace.
“The servants were devoted to my parents,” she said. “Rosa would always insist on waiting up for my mother and father when they dined out. She withheld the house keys from them, offering the excuse that they were far too big and heavy to be tucked into the pocket of a gentleman’s dinner jacket. And when my parents returned home, she would insist on serving them hot lemonade.
“During World War II, the Italian government sequestered the Barbaro, and as ‘enemy aliens’ we were not permitted to live here. But Rosa and Angelo stayed in the palace and looked after it faithfully. We were in Paris when the war broke out, and my father decided to take us directly to New York. We didn’t know if we’d ever see the Barbaro again. The Venetian superintendents came, crated the art, and took it to the Doge’s Palace, where it would be safe. The Japanese military attaché used the
piano nobile
for a headquarters and covered the dining room walls with framed photographs of Japanese war planes in action—including kamikaze planes. But Rosa cleverly hid the silver and other valuables, and Angelo sealed off the entrance to the library on the top floor so convincingly that people who occupied the Barbaro during the war never even knew the room existed.
“When my parents came back to Venice after the war, Rosa proudly took them around the palace to show them that everything had been returned to its prewar condition. She had even taken the photographs of the Japanese warplanes off the dining room walls and stacked them away.”
We left the ballroom through an enfilade of doorways into the master bedroom suite on the corner. These were the royal chambers, majestic in scale and prospect: two tall, balconied windows on the Grand Canal; side windows looking out over a narrow rio along the side of the palace; brocaded walls, and furniture from the time of the Barbaros.
Before I left, Patricia took me through her own apartment one floor above—the apartment that would still be hers even after the
piano nobile
had been sold. It had the same floor plan as the
piano nobile,
minus the ballroom, which gave it a broad, sunny central hall with spacious rooms on both sides and, in all, eight windows on the Grand Canal. The ceilings were lower, the walls were decorated with simple but elegant moldings, and yet by any standard, even for Venice, this was a superb apartment.
At one point, we walked into one of the guest bedrooms, and I became aware that Patricia was watching me for my reaction, now more than before. And immediately I saw why.
On the wall in front of us there was a full-length portrait of a young woman in a strapless white gown. The pose was the first thing that drew my attention. It was almost identical to the exuberant pose of Isabella Stewart Gardner in the famous portrait of her, painted at the Barbaro by Anders Zorn: arms outstretched to the sides as she pushed open a pair of double doors and came sweeping into the
salone
from one of the balconies on the Grand Canal. The brushwork in the painting was reminiscent of Sargent’s style. I was fairly certain this was the portrait that Ralph had mentioned to me.
“Is that you?” I asked.
“Yes. I was wearing my debutante dress.”
“And who painted it?”
“A man named Charles Merrill Mount,” she said. “Do you know him?”
Charles Merrill Mount was a name I did know. For years he had been a prominent Sargent specialist. He had written a biography of Sargent, and his expert opinion was often sought for the authentication of paintings thought to be by Sargent—that is, until it was discovered that he was authenticating Sargents that he himself had painted.
“You mean the Charles Merrill Mount who went to jail?” I said.
“Yes.”
I said that I thought it was pretty impressive to have a portrait of oneself painted by a master forger of Sargent paintings, based on a portrait by Anders Zorn, painted in the same place Zorn had painted his original. As I looked at the portrait, it occurred to me that Charles Merrill Mount had captured Patricia in more than one sense. He had pulled her into the artistic history of the house, back into the late nineteenth century, to the era of Sargent, Henry James, and Isabella Stewart Gardner. I could only guess how strongly she identified with that glorious past through this painting—and whether the white dress had anything to do with her always wearing white.
“There’s another room on this floor that I think might interest you,” she said.
She opened the door to a long, narrow room with a low, vaulted ceiling. Bookcases lined the walls, and between them on three sides rays of sunlight streamed in and fell in pools of amber on the terrazzo floor. Much older and far more decorative than the rest of her apartment, this library was like a slice carved out of the
piano nobile
and brought up here for safekeeping. This was the room that the servant Angelo had sealed off during the Second World War so that nobody who lived in the palace knew it was there. It was a gem of a room, and it would still be hers even when the
piano nobile
was not. No two-to-one vote could take it away.
“One summer,” she said, “when Isabella Stewart Gardner rented the palace from my great-grandparents, she had a houseful of guests, including Henry James, and she ran out of bedrooms. So she put an extra bed up here for James. He loved gazing up at the stucco and the paintings on the ceiling, and he wrote my great-grandmother a letter about it to tell her what she, the owner of the palace, had been missing if she hadn’t slept in this room herself.”
She lifted a piece of paper out of a book and read:“‘Have you ever lived here?—if you haven’t, if you haven’t gazed upward from your couch, in the rosy dawn, or during the postprandial (that is after-luncheon) siesta, at the medallions and arabesques of the ceiling, permit me to say that you don’t know the Barbaro.’”
She slipped the letter back into the book.
“When I was fourteen, my father called us up here after school was finished for the semester—he sat at that desk over there—and handed out books he wanted us to read over the summer. He gave me
The Wings of the Dove.”
“You were fourteen?”
“I’ll admit I found it difficult, but, having read it, I can understand why, for some people, no matter who owns the Barbaro, it will always belong to Milly Theale. In fact,” she said as we started back downstairs, “Milly Theale will be returning to the Barbaro in a few months.”
“How so?” I asked.
“An English film company is coming to make the movie of
The Wings of the Dove.”
Patricia’s mood seemed to brighten at the rightness of it. The Curtises had allowed footage for a dozen or more films to be shot inside the Barbaro, films that had no connection at all with the Barbaro. It seemed fitting that this one, which had everything to do with the Barbaro and the Curtises, would be the last under the ownership of the Curtis family.
I recalled a bit of dialogue from the book that made it all the more poignant, and I wondered if the thought had occurred to Patricia as well: Milly has moved into “Palazzo Leporelli” and has fallen in love with it. She clings to it, never wants to leave. She tells Lord Mark, “I go about here. I don’t get tired of it. I never should—it suits me so. I adore the place. . . . I don’t want in the least to give it up.”
“. . . Should you positively like to live here?”
“I think I should like,” said poor Milly after an instant, “to die here.”
“I’VE SEEN MANY ACTORS, many directors, many film crews come to this house to make movies,” said Daniel Curtis, the son of Patricia and the namesake and great-great-grandson of the Daniel Sargent Curtis who bought Palazzo Barbaro in 1885, “and every time it’s been like being, not exactly stabbed in the back, but scratched badly.”
I had met Daniel Curtis for the first time outside the Barbaro during the filming of
The Wings of the Dove.
Tall, lean, and with a head of dark, curly hair, he was about forty years old and possessed of abundant charm and good looks, for which he had become celebrated in Venice.
“Because it’s either a piece of duct tape on the terrazzo—you know that when they pull it up afterwards the whole bloody thing comes off, and it needs another twenty years of wax to make it as it was before—or it’s something even more calamitous, as happened last year when a scene was being filmed here for
In Love and War.
A technician walked into the
salone
with a ladder over his shoulder and slammed the end of it into an eighteenth-century chandelier. Then, at the sound of the crash, he turned around to see what damage he had done and swung it into a second chandelier. I tell you from my heart, when something like that happens, it is, to me, like a rape of the house.”