The Mansions of Limbo (21 page)

At dinner we sat at five place-carded tables of eight, and she held her table in thrall, all the while chain-smoking cigarettes. The fifth baroness is steeped in the lore of her husband’s family and, like him, is an expert storyteller. She told one story about Heini’s stepmother, the beautiful Baroness Maud von Thyssen, who during her marriage to Baron Heinrich Thyssen, fell madly in love with twenty-six-year-old Prince Alexis Mdivani, “one of the marrying Mdivani brothers,” as they were called. Alexis had just negotiated a lucrative divorce from the American heiress Barbara Hutton. The lovers rendezvoused in a remote village in Spain. After the tryst, Maud had to return to Paris, and the prince drove her to her train at breakneck speed in the Rolls-Royce that Hutton had given him. “There was a terrible crash,” the baroness said. “Mdivani was killed. Maud’s beautiful face was half-destroyed. Heini’s father divorced her.” At that point a waiter accidentally dropped a dozen dinner plates on the stone floor, with a crash that brought the room to silence. The baroness looked over, shrugged, and returned to her conversation with the same aplomb that her husband demonstrated at his table across the room. Why let a few broken plates ruin a good party?

A stranger to art before her marriage, the baroness has become deeply involved in her husband’s collection, and if
she is not as conversant as he on the subject of old masters, she has made herself more conversant than you or I—knowledgeable enough to be the main force behind her husband’s selection of Spain, over England, West Germany, the United States, Japan, and France, as the resting place for his treasure. Many people consider the choice odd, since the baron himself has no real connection with Spain and no long-standing friendships there. It is the baroness’s dream, however, according to one Spanish Tita watcher, to live in Spain and to be accepted by people who once neglected and even snubbed her.

There are pictures everywhere in the villa. Up a secondary stairway, outside the men’s lavatory, hangs an Edvard Munch, and in every corridor is a profusion of pictures, around any one of which the average millionaire might build an entire room. The bar in the family sitting room is a seven-part coromandel screen, broken up to conceal a refrigerator, an icemaker, glasses, and liquor bottles. Walking through a drawing room that the baron and baroness almost never go into, we passed a Bonnard portrait of Misia Sert, and in a formal dining room so infrequently entered that the light switch didn’t work—a room too large for intimate groups but not large enough for big groups from museums—hung a pair of Canalettos.

“Would you like to see our bedroom?” the baroness asked her guests.

Is the pope Catholic? Of course we wanted to see the bedroom, which contains three Pissarros, a Renoir, a Toulouse-Lautrec, a Winslow Homer, a Manet, and more that I don’t remember. The pictures in the villa are quite different from the pictures that hang in the galleries of the museum next door—the Titians, the Tintorettos, the Carpaccio, the Goyas, and the El Grecos, which the baron would show the group the next day.

“Do you move these pictures with you to your other houses?” someone asked her.

“No, we have others.”

Their bedroom, in contrast to most of the Mongiardino-decorated rooms, is soft and feminine, done in pale colors. It opens into Heini’s enormous bathroom, which has a tub the size of a small pool, and into Tita’s sitting room, which has an early Gauguin over the daybed and a Corot. Although it was October, the perpetual calendar on a side table still indicated June. The Thyssen-Bornemisza family crest is embossed on the message pad next to every telephone in the villa; the motto reads,
“Vertu surpasse richesse”
—Virtue surpasses riches.

The baroness opened the doors of closet after closet full of clothes. “Most of my clothes are still in Marbella,” she said. She is dressed mostly by the Paris couturiers Balmain and Scherrer. When her schedule makes it impossible for her to attend the couture showings in Paris, the designers send her videotapes of their collections and she chooses from them.

“What’s it like to live this way?” she was asked.

“It took me some time to get used to all this beauty,” said the baroness quite modestly. “At first I was in shock.”

“How long did it take before you got used to this kind of life?” I asked her.

“About two days,” she answered, and burst out laughing at her joke.

Her native language is Spanish, which the baron does not speak well. His native languages are Dutch, Hungarian, and German, which the baroness does not speak well. When they are alone together, they speak sometimes in French and sometimes in English, heavily accented English,
his Teutonic-sounding, hers with a very Latin inflection. “But,” said the baroness, “if we have been with French friends, we continue in French for a day or so.”

Their life is planned months in advance, mostly around art openings, for loans from their collection are constantly traveling from country to country and exhibition to exhibition. In their family sitting room, there are the inevitable silver-framed photographs of them, together or alone, with the Reagans, the Gorbachevs, the pope, and the president and matronly First Lady of Portugal, with whom Tita posed in a miniskirt six inches above the knee. They entertain at lunch. They entertain at dinner. They are forever on the move. The baroness knew as we talked in Lugano that seven weeks from that day she would be giving a party at L’Orangerie in Los Angeles (“Liza Minnelli can’t come,” she said to her husband. “Betsy Bloomingdale can”), and that the night before they would be dining in Palm Springs with Sir James Hanson, the British financier, and that they would be lunching the day after their party with Niki Bautzer, the widow of the Hollywood show-biz lawyer Greg Bautzer, at the Bistro Garden in Beverly Hills.

The baron is considered a prime kidnapping target. In all the houses there is closed-circuit surveillance with electrically operated doors. And bodyguards. And dogs. The bodyguards are American, part of a security force that handles only three international clients. The bodyguard I became acquainted with was a cross between Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood. He packed two weapons beneath his suit, a pistol in a holster and what appeared to be a sawed-off machine gun tucked into the back of his trousers. He is with the baron all the time. “We never stay anywhere for longer than a week,” he told me.

There are people who knew Tita before her marriage to Baron Thyssen who will tell you that she’s changed, but, in
all fairness, to enter the life she has entered and
not
change would be difficult for almost anyone. In addition to the Villa Favorita in Lugano, they have a new house on the outskirts of Madrid that rivals in movie-star luxe and size the Aaron Spelling mansion in California, as well as houses in Barcelona and Marbella and a house on the Costa Brava that was hers before they married; a town house on Chester Square in London; a house in St. Moritz and what she called a “small palace—tiny, really,” in Paris, which they just purchased from the late Christina Onassis’s last husband; a house in Jamaica; a suite at the Pierre Hotel in New York; and probably more that I did not hear about. Of course, there is a private plane for their constant peregrinations from house to house and art opening to art opening, and somewhere a yacht, which they occasionally use, and there are the servants who travel and the servants who stay put, plus the ever-present security guards.

The people who say that Tita Cervera has changed are the same people who say, with a roll of the eyes, “Have you met Mama yet?” By Mama, they mean Carmen Fernández de la Guerra, Tita’s mother, whom I did not meet. She is, from all reports, not unlike the mother of Robin Givens, a strong and determined woman who plays a major part in her daughter’s life. The Cerveras were originally a family of extremely modest means from Valladolid, a small city several hours from Madrid. Tita has always been, and continues to be, a devoted daughter. In the period before she met Thyssen, she was at an extremely low ebb in her life, with a child to support and no money. At her mother’s insistence, she went to Sardinia in the hopes of meeting a rich man. That she connected with one of the richest men in the world, and then married him, must have surpassed even Carmen’s wildest dreams. The baron, who was at first amused by his mother-in-law, is said now to want to spend
less and less time with her. Although Carmen is headquartered mostly in Barcelona and Marbella, where she is frequently photographed for the Spanish magazines, her influence is such that recently she tried to keep her son-in-law from bringing Alexander, his fourteen-year-old son by Denise, into the Thyssens’ house in London for fear that the boy, through his mother, would put an evil spell on the house. In fact, Tita and her mother are both worried about having evil spells put on them, and they have been known to ask Brazilian friends to bring them sandalwood twigs to ward off hexes.

Tita’s own son, Borja, born out of wedlock by an unnamed father, was adopted by Baron Thyssen even before their marriage. The child was given the name Bornemisza and baptized with great style in the Lady Chapel of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, with the American billionairess Ann Getty for his godmother and the Duke de Badajoz, the King of Spain’s brother-in-law, for his godfather. Since his mother’s marriage to the baron, he has been given the full last name, Thyssen-Bornemisza. The eight-year-old Borja was nowhere in sight during my visit. The baroness said, “He used to live in Lugano. He is now going to live in Madrid.”

The Duke de Badajoz has been the most influential figure in Spain in working with the Thyssens to bring their art collection to his country. Along with the Duchess of Marlborough and the late automobile tycoon Henry Ford, the duke was a witness when the Thyssens were married three and a half years ago at Daylesford, a magnificent English estate that the baron had purchased sixteen years earlier from the late press lord Viscount Rothermere. Although Daylesford was Thyssen’s favorite house after the Villa Favorita, the estate has since been sold, for a reputed $16 million. The new baroness felt they spent too little
time there to justify keeping such a large establishment, and preferred a house in Madrid, where they would be spending more and more of their time. According to one Spanish lady, Tita is also pushing her husband to sell the Villa Favorita.

The baroness was happily married for eight years to the late Lex Barker, who gained international fame as one of the successors to Johnny Weissmuller in the Tarzan films. She was Barker’s fifth wife, too. “He dropped dead on Fifty-ninth and Lex on his way to lunch at Gino’s,” the baroness said. “Greg Bautzer phoned me in Geneva with the news.” Barker had formerly been married to the fifties film star Lana Turner, and in the last year he has been accused by Turner’s daughter, Cheryl Crane, in her memoir,
Detour
, of having repeatedly abused her sexually when she was ten years old. Crane gained her own measure of international fame several years after the alleged child abuse by stabbing to death her mother’s lover, gangster Johnny Stompanato. Baroness Thyssen is fiercely loyal to the memory of her late husband, and she decried Crane’s book. “I was so mad at that book,” she said. “I was furious. I wanted to sue, but my lawyers told me you cannot sue over someone who’s dead. If you’re married to a man, you know very well if he likes little girls or not. Women fell down in front of Lex. He liked me. He liked women, not little girls, believe me. That woman is destroying the memory of Lex. I am trying to restore Lex’s image.”

The baroness is more reticent about discussing her second husband, Espartaco Santoni, a Spanish-Venezuelan movie producer and nightclub owner who now lives in Los Angeles. “We were only married a year,” she said. During that marriage she acted in two films, one with Curt Jurgens and Peter Graves and the other with Lee Van Cleef. “In
both those films I was killed for being unfaithful,” she told me, laughing.

She said that the time she spent acting was the happiest period of her life, but she ended her acting career when that marriage ended. Now she paints, and she feels the same inner satisfaction doing it that she once felt acting. An acquaintance described her paintings to me as “colorful, light, and tropical, the kind you see on guest-room walls.” But painting is only an occasional occupation, for her peripatetic life does not allow for a commitment to it. It is what she does in Jamaica. They spend two weeks a year at the house in Jamaica, called Alligator Head, which Baron Thyssen has owned since the fifties. There they relax completely, and the baroness paints. “I always say to my guests, ‘If you have any problems, go talk to the butler or the maid, not me. I came here to relax and paint.’ ”

“That’s a Van Gogh behind you,” said the baroness.

“An early one,” said the baron.

There was also a Van Gogh to the right of me and another one to the left. We were at lunch in the small family dining alcove of the Villa Favorita with the photographer Helmut Newton.

In the center of the table were pink and yellow flowers from the Thyssen-Bornemisza gardens and greenhouse. The flowers are changed for each meal, and arranged by the head gardener of the “six or eight, I can’t remember” gardeners on the grounds. Lunch was served by the butler and a footman, both in dark coats and white gloves. The butler, Giorgio Pusiol, is one of the servants who travel. “Don’t you think he’s chic?” asked the baroness when he left the room. The footman went from place to place shaving white
truffles onto the saffron rice that accompanied our osso buco.

The baron and baroness were both most agreeable to all of Helmut Newton’s suggestions for photographing them, even when he asked them to change into evening clothes in the middle of the day and pretend lunch was dinner. The baroness began the meal wearing a strand of perfect pearls, the size of large grapes, later changed to her sapphires, both blue and yellow, the baron’s latest gift to her, and then to her rubies, and with each set came a different dress from Balmain or Scherrer. “Change of colors, I see,” said the baron as he leaned over to examine one necklace.

Suddenly, surprisingly, from out of nowhere, as coffee was being served, the baroness turned to me and said, “Have you ever heard of Franco Rappetti?”