The City of Falling Angels (41 page)
Read The City of Falling Angels Online
Authors: John Berendt
Tags: #History, #Social History, #Europe, #Italy
The roots of this burgeoning quarrel could be traced to the early 1960s, before the two men had ever met, when a retired American army colonel was overheard at a reception in Rome speculating that it might be possible to stabilize the leaning Tower of Pisa by freezing the subsoil under it.
The man doing the talking was Colonel James A. Gray. The person who overheard him was Italy’s superintendent of fine arts and antiquities. The superintendent told the colonel that his idea of freezing the ground under the Tower of Pisa was ingenious and might be attempted if it was found to be viable. Gray went off to do research. Although the tower was eventually stabilized another way, Colonel Gray’s investigations turned him into a passionate advocate for preserving the world’s great art and architecture. Upon making inquiries, he found there was no private, nonprofit organization doing this kind of work, so in 1965 he created one. He called it the International Fund for Monuments, and he ran it from his apartment in the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park in New York. (Twenty years later, much expanded, Colonel Gray’s organization would be renamed the World Monuments Fund.) Gray’s selection of projects was a bit whimsical and far-flung—conservation of the mysterious stone heads on Easter Island and twelfth-century stone churches carved into hillsides in Ethiopia.
Then, on November 4, 1966, a combination of constant rain, strong winds, and seismic rumbling under the Adriatic seabed created exceptionally high tides that caused flooding across northern Italy and put Venice under five feet of water for more than twenty-four hours.
In the immediate aftermath of the flood, most of the attention went to Florence, where the Arno had overflowed its banks by more than twenty feet, killing ninety people and damaging or destroying thousands of works of art. Art lovers around the world formed committees to send aid and assistance. In the United States, the Committee to Rescue Italian Art was established, with Jacqueline Kennedy as its honorary president.
As for Venice, although no one had died and very little art had been damaged, it soon became evident that the situation was fundamentally worse than in Florence. Venice had been built on millions of wooden pilings driven into the muck at the bottom of the lagoon. Over the course of centuries, as the city settled into the earth and the sea level rose, the foundations became unstable. When experts took a closer look at Venice, they discovered that most of its buildings and almost all of its works of art were in desperate condition, owing to two centuries of neglect following the city’s defeat by Napoleon. Paintings all around the city had become soot-blackened, moldy, and brittle. Many of the most important were housed in churches, where they were unprotected from the elements because of holes in the roofs. At the same time, a great many buildings had eroding foundations and crumbling façades. It was a common hazard for chunks of walls, bricks, slabs of marble, cornices, and other decorative elements to come crashing down from on high. The whole eastern wall of the Gesuiti Church was in danger of falling into an adjacent canal. After part of a marble angel fell from a parapet of the ornate but sadly dilapidated Santa Maria della Salute Church, Arrigo Cipriani, the owner of Harry’s Bar, posted a sign outside the church warning, “Beware of Falling Angels.”
Recognizing a threat to the very existence of Venice, Colonel Gray established a “Venice Committee” within his International Fund for Monuments. As the salvage operations in Florence were being completed, Gray enlisted the head of the Committee to Rescue Italian Art, Professor John McAndrew, to be the Venice Committee’s chairman.
McAndrew, an architectural historian, was about to retire from his teaching position at Wellesley College. In an active and varied life, he had served as the architectural curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art after a World War II assignment in Mexico as the State Department’s coordinator of inter-American affairs. He was an expert on Frank Lloyd Wright and Alvar Aalto and had written frequently for scholarly journals.
In the 1970s, McAndrew recruited a group of intellectuals and art patrons for the Venice Committee, among them the Renaissance scholar Sydney J. Freedberg, chairman of Harvard’s Department of Fine Arts; Rollin “Bump” Hadley, director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston; the Swiss art collector Walter Bareiss; and Gladys Delmas, an American philanthropist with a special interest in Venice. At the same time, similar organizations devoted to aiding Venice were being formed in other countries: In Britain it was Venice in Peril; in France, the Comité Français pour la Sauvegarde de Venise; in Sweden, Pro Venezia. Eventually there came to be thirty-three such private, nonprofit committees. The work of all these organizations was coordinated by a liaison office run by UNESCO called the Association of Private Committees.
In its first four years, the Venice Committee initiated more than a dozen important cleaning and restoration projects, starting with the elaborately ornate façade of Ca’ d’Oro, a Gothic palace on the Grand Canal. To show their gratitude for the good works of Save Venice, the Venetian aristocrats did something extraordinary—extraordinary, that is, for Venetians: They invited the Americans into their palaces for cocktails. This seemingly modest gesture marked a social revolution in Venice. Traditionally Venetians invited no one into their homes but family and close friends. It was a virtual taboo to extend invitations beyond that close circle. This new hospitality was a measure of the high regard Venetians had for the Venice Committee; it was also the first of what would become increasing opportunities to gain entry to the magnificent inner sanctums that common tourists would never see.
Before long, however, a clash of personalities developed between the rough-hewn Colonel Gray and the highly sophisticated members of the Venice Committee.
Gray was a no-nonsense man of action, who possessed great charm but lacked social polish. He was an electrical engineer, a paratrooper who had made a hundred drops over Italy during the war, but he had no background in art. He used foul language when it suited him and would tell off-color jokes at inopportune moments.
McAndrew, Hadley, and Bareiss were embarrassed by Gray and began to shy away from him. Gray, in turn, viewed them as a pack of dilettante socialites who attended parties on the Grand Canal and drank prosecco. When the Venice Committee proposed holding a fund-raising party in Boston, Gray rejected the idea as a waste of time. If you wanted to raise money, he said, all you had to do was to sit on the terrace of the Gritti Hotel at five o’clock, drink vodka, and talk to the rich people at the next table, and by the time you got up to leave, you had their check for ten thousand dollars in your pocket, earmarked for the Venice Committee. He had done it himself more than once.
In the opinion of the Venice Committee members, Colonel Gray was simply not their sort. Relations between them became increasingly hostile. Bump Hadley detested Gray and was barely on speaking terms with him. Finally McAndrew suggested to Gray in 1971 that the Venice Committee detach itself from the International Fund for Monuments and become an independent organization, devoted solely to saving the art and architecture of Venice. Gray did not object. “Why don’t you call it Save Venice?” he said.
With McAndrew as chairman and Bump Hadley as president, the Venice Committee transformed itself into Save Venice, Inc. It was a nonprofit organization that consisted of a board of directors but no members. Instead of a membership it would have a mailing list of donors. Over the next decade, Save Venice undertook projects on a modest scale, restoring paintings and sculptures and making emergency repairs to roofs, walls, and floors of buildings. In the late 1970s, Bump Hadley approached Larry Lovett, a friend from his student days at Harvard, and asked him to join the Save Venice board as treasurer.
Larry Lovett was erudite, congenial, and, as an heir to the Piggly Wiggly grocery-chain fortune, rich. Having come to New York from Jacksonville with social aspirations, he had the good fortune to be taken under the wing of Mrs. John Barry Ryan, a doyenne of New York society. He became chairman of the Metropolitan Opera Guild and, later, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. He had already been living several months a year in Venice when Hadley invited him to join the Save Venice board, and he accepted. Then, in 1986, Hadley handed the presidency to Lovett, and Lovett started looking for someone to take his place as treasurer.
Lovett had known Bob and Bea Guthrie for a decade or more. During his tenure as chairman of the Metropolitan Opera Guild, Lovett had worked with Bea Guthrie, who had been a volunteer in the development department in charge of “high-end” giving. Bea Guthrie was a Phipps, a niece of society racehorse owner Ogden Phipps. She had graduated from Smith College summa cum laude in art history. The Guthries, like Lovett, were enthralled by Venice. But Bob Guthrie was a plastic surgeon with a full operating schedule, and he was reluctant to take on the job of treasurer. Lovett eventually talked him into it; then he sent Guthrie the Save Venice books, and Guthrie realized that the organization was in general disarray. And its mailing list was useless. More than half the people on it had moved or were dead. From a list of thousands, Save Venice had only eighty-four active contributors and was collecting, at best, forty to fifty thousand dollars a year. Guthrie told Lovett that Save Venice was effectively dead.
But Lovett had an idea. Every year, at the end of summer, during the Venice Film Festival and the rowing regatta, a contingent of international socialites descended on Venice—Nan Kempner, Deeda Blair, and their friends. Lovett knew many of these people, and he was certain that if Save Venice put on a lavish dinner-dance in a palace on the Grand Canal, they would come to it, and this core group would attract other people eager to be in their company. After much discussion, the idea grew to a four-day gala that would also include tours, recitals, lectures, and, taking advantage of the new willingness among Venetians to open their homes to the city’s benefactors, parties in private palaces.
Energized by the idea of a high-society fund-raising gala in Venice, the board of directors agreed that they should turn Save Venice into something far bigger than anyone had ever thought it could be. Instead of restoring just a few paintings each year, Save Venice would raise much more money and restore entire buildings. They chose the Miracoli Church as their first major project and estimated they would have to raise a million dollars to do it.
The reorganization of Save Venice on this scale would require the services of a professional fund-raiser. Bea Guthrie agreed to become the executive director.
A year later, in 1987, the first Save Venice Regatta Week Gala drew four hundred people who paid a thousand dollars each for the privilege of attending. They were taken on private tours led by Gore Vidal, Erica Jong, and the British historian John Julius Norwich. They had lunches, cocktails, and dinners in five different private palaces. They were admitted to the Doge’s Palace for the unveiling of Save Venice’s most recent restoration, Tintoretto’s monumental
Paradise.
They were taken in gondolas through winding canals to view the newest project, the as-yet-unrestored Miracoli Church. On the final evening, they attended a formal dinner-dance at the Palazzo Pisani-Moretta, where Peter Duchin and his orchestra played dance music on the ground floor and Bobby Short performed an evening of cabaret upstairs.
Paradise.
They were taken in gondolas through winding canals to view the newest project, the as-yet-unrestored Miracoli Church. On the final evening, they attended a formal dinner-dance at the Palazzo Pisani-Moretta, where Peter Duchin and his orchestra played dance music on the ground floor and Bobby Short performed an evening of cabaret upstairs.
The high wattage of the assembled gathering was apparent at every turn. The official program for the gala reminded people to bring their numbered tickets to events for reasons of heightened security, “owing to the presence of a number of ambassadors, ministers and other public officials.” At any given function, one spotted the likes of Hubert de Givenchy, Prince Amyn Aga Khan, Evangeline Bruce, Michael York, the American ambassador Maxwell Rabb, and Their Royal Highnesses Prince and Princess Michael of Kent.
With many of the events underwritten by corporations in the luxury business—Tiffany, Piaget, Escada, Moët & Chandon—Save Venice netted $350,000 that year.
The Regatta Week Gala became a biannual, four-day event that continued to sell out, even when ticket prices climbed to $3,000 a person. On alternate years, Save Venice sponsored Mediterranean luxury cruises, always inviting historians and art experts to give lectures on board, lead tours, and in general lend the cruise an educational flavor. Gross receipts quickly climbed to a million dollars a year, and Save Venice became responsible for more than half the restoration work undertaken in Venice by all thirty of the private committees combined.
Save Venice was a harmonious operation throughout the 1980s. The Guthries, along with a small staff, oversaw the day-to-day business operation on the ground floor of their town house, which they made available to Save Venice, rent free, as a headquarters. At Save Venice events, the gregarious Bob Guthrie circulated, introduced himself to people, and did his best to make sure everyone was having a good time. Bea Guthrie devoted considerable energy to the educational aspects of the activities planned for the galas.
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