Milking the Moon (41 page)

On the second day she was there, I escorted the Princess Caetani and Isak Dinesen to an exhibition in a very flossy gallery. They were very cool to each other. There was the slight thing that a New England proper lady would have toward a wild Danish lady with that much mascara. And the Danish lady was not certain exactly what coinage was the American-born princess. So they were terribly polite and smiled a lot. In the gallery, the princess immediately went that way around the gallery and the baroness went the other way around the gallery. And I said to William Fense Weaver, “Well, that’s what you would expect. That the Queen of the Northern Monkeys would go in a different direction from the Queen of the Southern Monkeys.” He’s the one that kept that going forever: the Queen of the Northern Monkeys and the Queen of the Southern Monkeys. And they both wanted an entourage of males only.

At that time, I still lived in this little box on the Janiculum Hill, but I did have her for dinner and got a special permit for her to come through the owner’s garden on the other side of the wall rather than climb all those stairs. She was enchanted, of course, with this toy house. I had oysters, champagne, and candied violets, because I had learned that she lived entirely on oysters, champagne, and candied violets. That was her diet. There were four of us for dinner, but I cannot remember who the fourth was. She was always with Clara, her secretary, so she was there. The fourth may have been Michael Batterberry. He was in Rome at that moment, studying painting. He was a Dinesen fan, too, and he flipped when he heard that she was coming to Rome. Most people thought of her as either dead or buried in some castle. They just couldn’t believe she was real.

Then I had arranged these three very elaborate parties for her. They were a day apart to allow everybody to recover and allow me to prepare food. On Monday night we were at this fabulous apartment on the Piazzale Tiburtino. The painter Mitty Lee Brown, from Australia, had taken what had been an old morgue, which no Italian would go near because it’s where all the plague victims were laid out and all that. And she—mad Australian lady—got the priest from next door to come in and fumigate the place with holy water and psalms. She made it gorgeous. It was two stories and quite big. I mean, it was huge. She opened everything up, made everything white. You looked down to the Tiber on one side, and on the other, you went out onto this piazza in front of the little church on the island. When I told her, “Well, Isak Dinesen is coming and I want to give a party. Would you let me give a dinner here?” She said, “Oh, I loved her book. Wow, wow, wow.” So we did this party there. That’s where I had Sir William Walton and his darling little Italian wife. And all the painters, from Prince Henry of Hesse, the grandson to the last king in Italy, to the little boy who had just gotten out of jail that day. He was a street painter and a pickpocket. And I found some old folding fans that were perfectly blank because in Naples they used to manufacture those so young ladies could paint the fans at home. They had beautiful, very white parchment and scented wooden spokes—sandalwood, maybe. I found a few of those, so I was able to give her a fan for each party so she could have everybody sign a spoke. And she had the pickpocket paint his first of all. That shows you how she thinks.

Well, on the way to Mitty Lee’s morgue apartment where all the painters were gathered, we stopped on the bridge to the island right at six o’clock in all of Roman traffic. That was to accomplish our private ceremony. You see, a young man in Denmark who had been to her parties and listened to her stories wrote a book called
The Red Umbrellas.
He published it under his name, but since she was always changing names, and would use one name in one country and one in another, he let it be known that this was her new book. So around the world and back, the book was widely reviewed, always with the question “Is this Isak Dinesen?” you know. The minute I read it, I knew it wasn’t. But some of it was stories she’d invented on the spur of the moment at a party. It really was a plagiarism. And she was furious. It came out like maybe a year before she came to Rome that first time. Well, I knew someone in Reuters who knew something about something and who could get the manuscript from the Danish publisher. So through bribes and unbelievable behind-the-scenes carryings-on, I had gotten the manuscript from the Danish publisher. Whether it was the forger’s original manuscript, whether it was a copy—I don’t know. We had talked a little bit about it when we first met the first day she was in Rome before the private festival began. She said, “I committed an error in a Latin phrase in one of the
Gothic Tales.
He even stole my error. There’s a place in hell for…” I said, “We’re going to do something about him.”

I had told the driver before we started, “We’re going to stop on the bridge only for a minute. We have to throw something in the river. You won’t get in trouble. If anybody says anything, I’ll take care of you, and you’re going to have a nice tip.” He said, “Oh, my God. You’re not doing something illegal?” “No,” I said, “it’s this manuscript.” “Well, go ahead,” he said. “You crazy foreigners.”

That bridge is rather narrow, and it’s one-way. Nothing can pass anything. He stopped right in the middle. All the six o’clock traffic was honking as only Rome can honk. I went into my little carryall bag. I said, “Madame Tanya, I have here the manuscript of
The Red Umbrellas.
Would you like to join me in tossing it into the Tiber?” She roared, and she jumped out like a monkey. I said, “All right. We have to hold it so our hands touch and we make a magic circle.” And I said, “Repeat after me: Rat shit, bat shit, three-toed sloth shit. O Tiber and oblivion, receive this manuscript and its author.” Splash. We watched it float and sink and got back in the car. She was just laughing, laughing, laughing. She said afterwards that was the best part of her visit to Rome. Traffic was tooting for miles. It was not only the joy of throwing the manuscript into the Tiber. It was also the Southern joy of holding up traffic. And two weeks later, the author of
The Red Umbrellas
died.

Wednesday was the evening we performed a marionette play at the theater that Ginny Becker and I did in her apartment in the Palazzo Caetani. It’s called
Tanya
,
Tanya
,
and Clara Too.
Her friends in Denmark called her “Tanne” from childhood. It’s some pet name in Danish, like Boo or Bubba or Cutey. So she’s become Tanya to a lot of other people. Anyway, in the first scene you’re in Denmark and it’s snowing in this little woods. She and Clara drive in in this Baroque sled drawn by two huge butterflies. She says, “It’s cold here.” Then she says, “How I would love to have some fresh wood mushrooms.” Then she is saying, “I’m tired of snow.” And Clara is just sort of hinting, saying, “Well, maybe you should roam.” Then in the next exchange, Clara says, “It must be so nice in Rome. What mushrooms come from just outside of Rome?” It goes on like that. Then suddenly Tanya says, “I know what we’ll do. We’ll go to Rome.” There’s this fanfare and the coach goes off through the snow with these butterflies flapping. The next scene is Piazza Navona in Rome. A Miss Rome, a retired soprano, is there to meet her, and Ginny Becker and myself, and Harlequin and Columbine. Isak Dinesen is throwing out a ladder from this hot-air balloon, but the cardinal hasn’t come in yet. Each time she descends and goes back up, somebody makes a little speech, a little something of welcome. She says, “Where’s the cardinal? I was promised a cardinal. I will not descend until there is a cardinal.” Finally the cardinal comes in late on his bicycle. He says, “Where is she? Where is she?” The soprano says, “I’ll sing a high C,” and she does. Isak Dinesen comes down and gets out, and she and the cardinal walk around. That’s all there is to it. A little divertissement. But she adored it and wanted a copy immediately. That party was all musicians. Pianists and violinists and William Fense Weaver.

Then the Friday night was at Princess Brianna Carafa’s. She didn’t have a piano, so she had to buy one for the party. I mean, you need a new mop for the kitchen, get a mop. Need a piano for the salon, get a piano. That’s just the way she thinks; she’s a princess. She bought a Beckstein grand and had it hauled up to that top-floor apartment. The reason was that Wanani, the Afro-Cuban singer, was going to sing French and Caribbean songs. And Aldo Bellasich, a blond south Italian who was a concert pianist, had found in the British Museum some Albinoni sonatas that had not been played since they were written. And Jeannette Pecorello, a soprano from an Italian family long in Boston, was going to sing. So there were three sections to this musical program. Each musician had three numbers. It wasn’t to take up the whole evening. Three unpublished sonatas, three arias, and then Wanani sang “Babalu.” And that’s when we had the prince of Lampedusa. I had heard that he was going to be visiting Rome, so he was invited to the party. Oh, he was a cutie. He was just a great old gentleman, and he was very deaf. And the conversation between Isak Dinesen and Lampedusa on this sofa—I wish I’d recorded it. It was like a rare monkey and a wild wolf, speaking languages that neither one understood. But each realized who the other was, so they were being charming in unknown tongues. Oh, it was just a wonderful party. Wanani was wearing a white dress, strapless, skintight, with little pearls all over it. This gorgeous antelope body. She was something.

But when Isak Dinesen wrote and said, “If I came back to Rome, would somebody show me as good a time as I had the first time?” that’s when I had a nervous breakdown. Because what could I do? So I did a different kind of thing the second time around. I didn’t do any big parties because it seemed to me it would be an anticlimax. And she had just as good of a time. She said she wanted to see a good hillside castle, so I took her to see the castle of Sermoneta, the Caetani stronghold on the hilltop south of Rome overlooking all the province they’ve owned since before Christ. Later she used that as a setting for “Echoes,” a novella in either
Last Tales
or the book that followed. I took her to see the prison where the Napoleonic soldiers were prisoners and had drawn and written all over the walls. And I took her to see the flower festival at Gensano. Well, coming back, we started a game. She said, “Let’s write a book together.” And I said, “What fun.” She said, “Let’s toss to see who sets the theme.” So we tossed. And I won. I said, “We’ll have to have a monkey in it, or a ghost. And a fascinating lady of European background.” “Oh, yes, yes,” she said. “Well, you write the first chapter, and I’ll write the second.” But of course, by the time we got around to it and reminded each other and all that, she was dead. But that became my novel
Love You Good;
See You Later.
We corresponded until she died. I’d always wanted to go to Denmark, and she’d invited me, but I didn’t have the money to go at that time, although I got there later, after she died. And she’d invited me to come with her to America when she was doing her first visit. For her first trip to America, she not only wanted her little secretary, but she wanted a gallant to go to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and to the weekend with Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe and Carson McCullers. But again, I didn’t have the money to go. That’s one of the times when you really want money in the bank: her first trip to America. I’m sure a lot of people in New York didn’t know how to deal with her. She really was Queen of the Northern Monkeys. I’ve thought since I should have written everybody I know and borrowed the money to be her escort for that. What a dinner that would have been. I’ll go to my grave thinking, What would the conversation have been like?

Shedding a Skin

The French ambassador wanted to do something to honor the tenth anniversary of
Botteghe Oscure.
But since there were still very powerful anti-German feelings among the French, and one of the languages in
Botteghe
was German, he decided to do something in honor of her earlier publication,
Commerce,
which was purely in French. So I worked with the French ambassador in Italy and with these two ladies who’d come from the French Ministry of Fine Arts. We emptied the Napoleonic Museum in Rome and made this exhibition. The idea was to have not just manuscripts but photographs and paintings as well. We also had odd things from people. For example, Paul Valery had a collection of toy soldiers. So the glass case dealing with him had a photograph of him, manuscripts of some of his famous works, and his toy soldiers. Then I took one little room in this museum and tried to make it look like the princess’s little corner at one end of that long room on the top of Palazzo Caetani. So I had a gardening basket full of manuscripts. I had packages of seeds. Seed catalogs. Piles of books. And some of her favorite paintings that I borrowed for the show. I just reproduced her private little sitting room. We had this wonderful opening, and the French ambassador presented her with the Legion d’honneur.

During the moment of all that, a bookshop in Rome did an exhibition of my drawings for Grabbe’s
Wit, Satire, Irony, and Deeper Meaning.
I did those under the name of Dr. S. Willoughby. Well, people began to talk about my show, and the princess was sort of irritated that she had not received an invitation. But she had. And she had been told that I was Dr. S. Willoughby, but she’d forgotten.

Then the French poet René Char, who was her pet, wrote and said that the index for the tenth-anniversary edition was full of errors, principally that there should have been a death date for Peter Matthiessen. Well, he confused Peter Matthiessen, who was very much alive, with F. O. Matthiessen, the uncle of Peter.

Then there was the incident with the bank. For certain things like buying supplies for the office, the princess had said, “You should have an account.” So they made a separate account for me because I sometimes would pay, for example, the proofreaders for the summer when everybody was away. And I would deposit the checks that came for subscriptions into that account. I was so careful about all of that because I didn’t want any part of doing this. The minute you get into money, you’re asking for trouble. So I, who am not good at accounts, was so prissy proper, getting receipts when I paid for postage or whatever. And I had this notebook: what came in, what went out. Well suddenly, the account was overdrawn. And I should have had something like $200 in there from the subscription checks that I’d put in the bank. It looked like I had gone off with some money. Which, of course, I had not. It was only $70 that was overdrawn. It turned out that some silly bank clerk had simply put the subscription checks into the Amministrazióne Caetani account instead of the separate Amministrazióne Caetani Rivista
Botteghe Oscure
account. But I didn’t feel like even defending myself.