As for the firing of his wife, Lesa, Count Marcello acknowledged the right of management to dismiss an employee, but he objected to the manner in which it was done.
“You may not be aware,” he said, “that in Venice the termination of a work relationship that has lasted for six years, with no notice, invariably implies dishonesty by the person involved. This is what has been done to Lesa, and this is what I resent.
“To be Venetian,” Marcello went on, “and to know how to live in Venice is an art. It is our way of living, so different from the rest of the world. Venice is built not only of stone but of a very thin web of words, spoken and remembered, of stories and legends, of eyewitness accounts and hearsay. To work and operate in Venice means first of all to understand its differences and its fragile equilibrium. In Venice we move delicately and in silence. And with great subtlety. We are a very Byzantine people, and that is certainly not easy to understand.”
Marcello cast a glance at his audience. Except for the two or three who were able to follow his Italian, they were reading along, and the mood was uniformly solemn. The board members of Save Venice, who thought of themselves as benefactors of Venice, knowledgeable and sophisticated in the ways of their adopted city, were receiving a dressing-down, as if they were no better than an unruly mob of litterbug tourists.
“I must tell you how the recent turmoil in Save Venice has been perceived in Venice. It is seen as evidence that a few members of the board do not consider Save Venice an association of friends who do good work for Venice but rather as a means to gain personal prestige and power. We Venetians regard our city with the same ancient civic sense with which we have built, governed, and loved it for centuries, and it is very painful to see it being used in this manner.
“As much as we are truly grateful for Save Venice’s remarkable generosity in the past, we Venetians are loath to accept help from those who have so little respect for us.”
Almost as an afterthought, Marcello concluded his remarks with the comment, “What course of action the board should now take is for you to decide, but I certainly feel that Dr. Guthrie should be stripped of all powers.”
Upon his return to Venice, Marcello showed me his speech. It was a long speech, rambling at times, but unrelenting in its expression of restrained outrage.
“And how did they react?” I asked.
“Some shook their heads and said, ‘Finally!’ But others were angry. One man said to me in Italian, ‘You have some nerve coming here and talking like that.’ And I said, ‘You know, when it’s necessary to say such things, it’s necessary also to have some nerve.”
I handed the speech back to him. “Strong stuff,” I said, “but you once told me that Venetians always mean the opposite of what they say.”
Count Marcello smiled. “True, and when I told you that, I meant the opposite of what I said.”
THE BATTLE LINES WERE DRAWN. Bob Guthrie’s three-year term as a member of the board was due to expire four months later at the September 1998 board meeting in Venice. He would then have to stand for reelection and would need a majority vote of the twenty-nine board members to retain a seat on the board. Anything less would, in effect, throw him out of Save Venice altogether.
As the summer wore on, the board members discussed the crisis among themselves, and it became apparent that in addition to the power struggle between Guthrie and Lovett, there was a subterranean issue that only now came to the surface. Certain members sympathetic to Lovett had begun to feel that Save Venice had lost its aura of exclusivity, that the Guthries had taken control of the invitation list with the result that many of the people buying tickets and showing up at parties and galas were . . . “not our sort.” It was an echo of the social divide that had split Colonel Gray’s old Venice Committee in the early 1970s and ended with a walkout and the creation of Save Venice.
One board member who would have been the first to admit that he might not be the Lovett “sort,” was Jack Wasserman, a New York international-trade lawyer who was an associate of corporate-takeover specialist Carl Icahn. Wasserman’s attachment to Venice had grown out of his fascination, since college, with the life and poetry of Lord Byron. Wasserman was president of the Lord Byron Society of America and owned a major collection of Byron first editions. Although deeply devoted to Byron and Byron scholarship, he was by no means an academic. “Byron was useful when I came to Italy for the first time on a student ship forty years ago,” he said. “The first two lines of Byron’s poetry got you laid every night.”
Wasserman was having a late lunch at a corner table in Harry’s Bar when I joined him. He introduced me to a well-behaved black standard poodle sitting under the table, nursing a bowl of water. The poodle had been named after the British war secretary who had been Lord Byron’s friend, traveling companion, and executor, John Cam Hobhouse.
“Save Venice was my first exposure to so-called high society,” said Wasserman. “My wife and I had been going to the galas for years and meeting these fancy, type-A people. Or at least looking at them. So when they asked me to be on the board, because they didn’t have a lawyer and they were growing very fast and legal questions were always coming up, I said, ‘Sure.’ I mean, I’m very impressed with myself! I’m on the board with Oscar de la Renta. That’s very impressive people, I gotta admit.
“But these two guys, Larry and Bob, from my perspective—Larry is very glamorous, a wonderful social individual, and a very seductive man. You know, when you’re in Larry’s presence, you’re always in a little bit of awe. He seems to have this halo around him. Bob doesn’t have that. But Bob’s background, his style of living, is so extraordinary that you always listen carefully to what he says.
“Bob and Bea Guthrie work from six o’clock in the morning till midnight, like dogs. Dogs! They’ll talk to anybody. People call up: ‘I don’t like my table, I didn’t like where I was sitting last night.’ Bob and Bea take care of it. Happy to do it, no problem. Larry doesn’t work on Save Venice on a daily basis. He doesn’t work on a monthly basis. That isn’t his function. His function is to be Mr. Glamorous and, you know, get this fancy crowd to come to the party, so three hundred other people will pay to be in the same room with them. That’s his job, and God knows it’s valuable. But he doesn’t work at the parties, not the way Bob does. Larry’s aloof.
Aloof!
It’s like talking to God! I mean, he always shows up, dressed to the nines, in the back of his private motorboat with some princess or something. He gets out and pronounces himself pleased that things are going well, and then he gets back in his boat with the princess, and off he goes. It’s wonderful to watch. It’s imperial. I mean, I’m in awe. It’s like being with the fucking doge.
“But this whole thing with royalty. Somebody once told me the definition of a snob. You can be a snob upward by associating with people on a level above you or a snob downward by dismissing people below you. Larry has an obsessive, at times scary, commitment to people of title. I mean, scary! I think Larry really believes he was born to the purple. For example, during one of the gala weeks, somebody in the English royal family died, I forget who. I remember Larry saying, ‘The Palace has issued . . . ,’ to me, talking to
me,
I mean, like I care. ‘The Palace has issued a decree saying that nobody is to go to parties.’ This was right before a Save Venice cocktail party. So I said, ‘But, Larry, you can go to a cocktail party. The decree isn’t meant for you.’ And Larry said, ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that. I mean, my friends. The king of Greece and so on.’ So he was not going to a cocktail party in Venice. He was going to sit home with Barbara Berlingieri because European royalty were not going to cocktail parties. I said to myself, ‘Whoa!’”
ON THE AFTERNOON OF THE FORMAL BALL, I dropped in to see the Guthries at their red house at the foot of the Accademia Bridge. The interior was furnished with chintz-covered chairs and sofas and looked more like an apartment on the East Side of Manhattan than a Venetian dwelling. Bob and Bea Guthrie were sitting in the living room surveying a large board propped up on an easel and covered with name tags pinned to circles representing tables.
“Ever seated a dinner party for three hundred and fifty people?” Guthrie asked. “Try doing it when half a dozen people call up at the last minute, saying, ‘We simply must have so-and-so at our table,’ which means you have to do the whole thing all over again.”
“I suppose it would be especially difficult to do,” I said, “if you were carrying on a really ugly personal feud at the same time.”
Guthrie was startled by my directness but recovered quickly. “I guess that means you’ve heard,” he said with a laugh.
“Half of Venice has heard,” I said.
He looked again at the seating chart. “Well, we’re about done with this—for now. Want to go for a boat ride?”
We went outside to Guthrie’s motor launch, a Boston Whaler, which was tied up at the edge of a small canal just beyond the gate. Guthrie stood at the wheel and backed out into the Grand Canal, then turned and headed in the direction of the Rialto. He spoke over the noise of the motor.
“On one level, sure, it’s a quarrel between Larry and me. But it’s really more involved than that. There are fundamental differences between most of our board members and the small group of dissidents who support Larry.
“Typically, members of our board are people of accomplishment. Save Venice is an avocation for them, not a principal activity in their lives. They enjoy each other’s company, they love Venice, and it gives them satisfaction to help preserve the city. They contribute more to Save Venice in time and money than they get out of it. They’re givers.
“The dissidents are quite a different breed of cat. They have money but no occupation of importance, no real accomplishments. Save Venice assumes too great an importance in their lives, because they don’t have any other claim to fame. It’s the horse they ride on. They introduce themselves using organizational titles. To prove their importance, they need to take credit for the organization’s accomplishments, even though they do no work themselves. In fact, they refer to the people who put in long hours as ‘the hired help.’ They’re takers.
“The dissidents use Save Venice to promote their own social lives, which is the only life they really have. They invite their high-flying friends and hoped-for friends to our parties and galas free of charge, and in return they get invited on cruises and to country estates for shooting weekends. These nonpaying guests have become a problem. We’re getting more and more of them, and the dissidents monopolize them. They hire limousines to take them to events in the countryside, while the rest of us travel on buses, and they pass by sitting grandly in the backseat. They arrive late and leave early. They all sit together at tables by themselves, snubbing the paying guests. And they really don’t care how offensive it is to the other people.”
“I was under the impression,” I said, “that these nonpaying guests provide the sort of glamour that attracts the paying guests.”
“They do,” said Guthrie, “but that was more important in the early years. Save Venice has become so well known that it’s a draw in its own right. We don’t need those people anymore.”
We were just then passing the Palazzo Pisani-Moretta, where the ball was to be held that night. Caterers were unloading crates from barges at the water gate. Guthrie gestured toward the palace. “It’s the dissidents who always insist on being seated near the windows when it’s hot or the fireplace when it’s cold. They’re very demanding, exigent people. Hell, I still practice surgery eighteen hours a day. I really don’t need this.”
“Then why don’t you quit?” I asked.
“Bea and I were on the verge of doing just that. We had already written our letters of resignation when the charges of financial improprieties starting flying. That was the dissidents’ big mistake, because it meant we couldn’t quit. We could never leave under that sort of cloud. We had to stay and clear our names.”
A short distance past the Rialto Bridge, we turned in to a side canal. Guthrie cut the speed in half as we negotiated turns and edged past motorboats and gondolas going in the opposite direction. After several minutes, we passed under a small bridge and emerged looking up at the Miracoli. Its satin-soft marble exterior glowed in the afternoon light.