The cast and crew of
The Wings of the Dove
came to Palazzo Barbaro, made their movie, and left. Crowds watched from the Accademia Bridge and Campo San Vio, fascinated as two mist-making machines on boats moored in the Grand Canal turned a sunny summer day into a drizzly winter afternoon and as a cherry picker mounted on a barge lifted a cameraman high in the air to shoot a scene with Milly Theale and Kate Croy (played by Alison Elliott and Helena Bonham Carter) looking out from a balcony on the
piano nobile.
The director of photography used coral filters to give the scenes shot in Venice a warm golden glow, in contrast to the London scenes, which were shot with a cold blue motif. Inside the Barbaro, set designers draped bolts of dark velvet with gold threads over the furniture to create the chiaroscuro effect of a Sargent painting. In two months of shooting, the film crew caused no more harm to the Barbaro than the usual wear and tear, and advance word had it that the movie was very good.
When the filming was over, prospective buyers once again trooped through the palace, taking the measure of the
piano nobile.
Jim Sherwood was one of them. In addition to owning ‘21’ and the Cipriani, Sherwood was the proprietor of a luxury empire that included the Orient-Express Railroad and a worldwide chain of thirty deluxe hotels. Sherwood’s catered dinners at the Barbaro had long since come to an end when he received a call from Patricia.
“Patricia asked me if I had any interest in buying the
piano nobile,
” Sherwood told me one afternoon as we sat on the terrace of the Cipriani. “I wanted to go over and have a close look at it, but she was out of town, so I had to ask Ralph to take me through instead. Patricia warned me he’d object to the idea. I received a letter from him enclosing a form that I was supposed to sign with a print of the big toe of my right foot. The return address was ‘Mission Control, Spaceship Barbaro.’ I ignored it, and a few days later a second letter arrived in an envelope covered with blood. The message said, in effect, ‘Well, even though you haven’t given us an imprint of your toe, you can come and look at the property.’ He was pleasant enough when we met with him.
“My thought was that we might create apartments on the
piano nobile
and advertise them as ‘A Night in a Venetian Palazzo on the Grand Canal.’ It would have been the only accommodation like it in Venice. I had a study done and found we could make six apartments, but with the asking price and the vast expense of restoration and repair, I concluded it wouldn’t pay off.”
Finally a buyer emerged in the person of Ivano Beggio, the owner of Aprilia, the second-largest maker of motorcycles in Europe. “Ivano Beggio is the new spiritual custodian of Palazzo Barbaro,” crowed Ralph Curtis. Patricia was depressed. Daniel was angry.
After the Beggio deal was done, I encountered Daniel again as he was walking over the Accademia Bridge with his girlfriend. He invited me to join them in his apartment in the Barbaro for a glass of wine.
High up in the baroque side of the palace, the apartment had windows running the length of its western wall, admitting a bright, warm afternoon sun. Daniel poured two glasses of white wine while his girlfriend made a cup of tea for herself.
“When the
piano nobile
was sold,” he said, “I tell you, I felt so bad. Because I grew up in this house. It was at a time when we still had gondoliers and when my grandfather was still alive. Sometimes I dream of the cuddles and the love that my grandfather transmitted to me when I was six, seven, eight years old, because I still carry them inside me, together with the smell of whiskey that always came out with his words as he was telling me enchanting stories at night about fishermen and sailors.”
Daniel spoke fluent, heavily accented English. His father, a Venetian named Gianni Pellegrini, was Patricia Curtis’s first husband; they were divorced when Daniel was four. Daniel often used the surname Curtis.
“When I was a teenager, I used to lie on the floor of the
salone
and look at the plaster figures on the ceiling, the
stucchi.
If I looked long enough, faces and masks would begin to emerge, sometimes ugly, sometimes smiling, but always fantastic and always in the same corner, particularly with the change of light, because the
salone
was filled with light.
“But best of all, when I was eighteen, I had the palace all to myself. My stepfather was very busy setting up a new business in Malaysia, so my mother had to go there frequently, and when she was away, I had the run of the palace. The maids cooked my meals, and there was a majordomo living downstairs who was always drunk. He was called Giovanni, and he had a great many bottles of wine under his bed. As you can imagine, I had a lot of girlfriends who were attracted by the big house, and I became a bit of a play-boy in those days.”
Just as Venetians had considered his mother to be the owner of the Barbaro, Daniel Curtis had been regarded as the heir apparent. To some degree, he shared that view.
“Selling the house—selling the
piano nobile—
has been a trauma for my mother,” he said. “She is the sort of person who, like me, even though she lives among millions of beautiful things, if by accident she breaks a single glass, she is devastated. You know? And for us, selling the
piano nobile
was like breaking every beautiful thing in the house.”
He smoked a cigarette and leaned forward in his chair, elbows on his knees, as he spoke with intense feeling about the Barbaro.
“But my Aunt Lisa and my Uncle Ralph outvoted my mother, and that meant the end of the Curtis
piano nobile.
Then they had to divide all the
soprammobili—
the ornaments, the ancient boxes, glass bowls, ashtrays, all sorts of nice things. And, believe me, when you’re dealing with a
piano nobile
of ten thousand square feet there’s a hell of a lot of
soprammobili.
And they had to be divided fast, and nobody could call an antique dealer to get an estimate of the value. They put all the objects on the floor of the big dining room in three rows, and they made all of the rows equal. Then, once they all agreed that the rows were more or less the same, they drew lots to see who got which row. And afterwards, when everybody’s standing around and thinking, ‘Well, what did I get?’ I see my aunt go from her row to one of the other rows and take something from that row and put it in her own row, and then she puts something from her row into the other row. I said nothing. I stood there silently, thinking, ‘What an aunt I have.’
“I tell you, if I had had the power I should have had, this house would never have been sold. But I could not say anything. As we say,
‘Non ho voce in capitolo,’
I had no voice in the matter. Because in this family, the Curtis family, the decisions have to be made by the leadership, not by the full membership. And the leadership is my mother and her husband; my Aunt Lisa,
la comtesse,
and her husband,
le comte,
and my Uncle Ralph and his fucking space astronauts and Monkeyface. But—”
He suddenly stood up, the better to make his point.
“There is a difference,” he said, “between me and all the other Curtises—the five generations of Curtises in Venice, starting with my great-great-grandfather, Daniel Sargent Curtis. Do you know what it is? I am the only Venetian! In five generations, I am the only Curtis with any Venetian blood. My father was a genuine Venetian, born and raised in Venice.”
He walked to the window and looked down into the courtyard. Then he turned around and leaned against the windowsill.
“Do you know what it is to be a Venetian? Venetians are very tough, they are very quarrelsome. They argue seriously for honor, and the vocabulary of the ancient dialect is very earthy. Venetians have expressions that are so incredibly vulgar they cannot possibly be taken literally, because if you took them literally, you would have to kill the person who said it to you.
“But what Venetians have that is very good is that they don’t get excited about whether you are a king, a queen, the president, or
la comtesse
or
le comte
. Venetians are very democratic. They are all brothers. They all help each other. And it is the same for me, because I am Venetian. To me the baker is my brother. But for my mother and my aunt and my uncle, the baker is the baker.
“I love this house as a Venetian, not just as a Curtis. It is part of me. If a piece of it breaks off, I save it. I have everything of this house. Look!”
He went over to a cabinet between two windows and started pulling drawers open, one after another. They were filled with broken pieces of marble, Istrian stone, bricks, shards of old glass, and iron ornaments.
He picked up a small, irregular piece of reddish stone.
“This stone broke off the step at the top of the stairs outside my door.” He picked up a brick. “This was dislodged from a chimney during a storm, and this piece of iron came from an old window grille. Everything about this house is sacred to me.
“One day, I swear to you, I will buy Palazzo Barbaro from Ivano Beggio. I will get back every piece of the palace that was sold to him. He’s a very smart businessman. He got a great deal, and he knows it. He will probably demand twice what he paid for it. Fine. I will earn the money, I will find it, I will borrow it from rich friends. And why not? It would not be the first time someone named Daniel Curtis bought the Palazzo Barbaro.”
{9}
THE LAST CANTO
ON HIS FIRST VISIT AS A HOUSEGUEST at Palazzo Barbaro, Henry James was met at the water entrance by white-gloved servants, who led him from his gondola onto the carpeted steps of the landing dock and up the courtyard stairs to the
piano nobile.
He was enchanted by all of it: the luxury, the polish, the reminders of the distant past “twinkling in the multitudinous candles.” But even as he gazed at the Barbaro’s painted walls and sculpted ceilings, James had in mind a very different sort of palace.
At the time, June of 1887, he was deep in thought about a dilapidated ruin on a lonely canal in a melancholy, rarely visited part of town. The once-grand interior of this other palace was shabby, dusty, and tarnished. Its walled garden had become an overgrown tangle of weeds and vines. Two impoverished spinster ladies lived in the palace, rarely went out, saw no one.
James told nobody about this other, derelict palace or its two lonely inhabitants, because they were fictional. They were characters in a short novel he was just then composing
—The Aspern Papers,
the other of his two masterful novels set in Venice. In the mornings, he would go to the Barbaro’s breakfast room, sit down at the Chinese lacquered desk beneath the “pompous Tiepolo ceiling,” and write a few pages. During his five-week stay at the Barbaro, he put the finishing touches on the manuscript and sent it off to his publisher.
James had come upon the idea for his story during a sojourn in Florence earlier in the year. A friend had told him of a recent discovery: Lord Byron’s former mistress, Claire Clairmont—the half sister of Mary Shelley and the mother of Byron’s illegitimate daughter, Allegra—was living in obscurity in Florence. She was by then well into her eighties and a virtual shut-in, tended only by her middle-aged niece. A Boston art critic and devotee of Shelley’s named Captain Silsbee suspected that Claire Clairmont might have a collection of letters from Byron and Shelley, and he came to Florence to seek her out. He rented rooms from Miss Clairmont, “hoping,” as James recorded in his notebook, “that the old lady in view of her age and failing condition would die while he was there, so that he might then put his hand upon the documents.” When Claire Clairmont did, in fact, die while Captain Silsbee was a tenant in her palace, he approached her niece and revealed his desire of obtaining the letters. In reply the niece said, “I will give you all the letters if you marry me.” Silsbee fled.
The story fascinated James. He suspected that it might make the basis for a good novel. “Certainly,” he wrote in his journal, “there is a little subject there: the picture of the two faded, queer, poor, and discredited old English women—living on into a strange generation, in their musty corner of a foreign town with these illustrious letters their most precious possession. Then the plot of the Shelley fanatic—his watchings and waitings . . .”
In fictionalizing the story, James moved it to Venice in order to, as he put it, “cover my tracks” and at the same time take advantage of the city’s aura of mystery and its sense of a lingering past. He also altered the characters, creating an American Byron (Jeffrey Aspern) and an American Claire Clairmont (Juliana Bordereau). The covetous Captain Silsbee became the nameless narrator of
The Aspern Papers,
an American publisher, who worships the long-dead Jeffrey Aspern and comes to Venice hoping to gain possession of Aspern’s love letters.