The Mansions of Limbo (14 page)

Although it was widely touted in the Australian press that the guest list had been made up of a glittering gaggle of international socialites, there wasn’t a recognizable name in the group. “Not a single man, woman, or dog in Venice ever heard of any of these people,” said one longtime resident of the city.

There was a problem with accommodations from the beginning. Lord and Lady Potter and Pitty Pat were housed on an upper floor of the Palazzetto Pisani, and the prince, his best man, and John Lane were housed in a small flat on the ground floor, or water floor, consisting of two tiny rooms. The space was crowded and uncomfortable, and the bathroom facilities were not to the trio’s liking. At a cocktail party held at the Palazzetto, which is owned by the Countess Maria Pia Ferri, another Venetian countess is said to have exclaimed to the bridegroom when he was introduced to her as Prince Giustiniani, “Oh, you must be related to my friend Cecy Giustiniani.” Cecy Giustiniani is the venerable Dowager Countess Giustiniani, and soon telephones were jingling up and down the Grand Canal. People ran to their
Libro d’Oro
, the Italian book of nobility, but no one could find a Prince Giustiniani. Every Venetian with whom I spoke drew attention, often huffily, to the fact that “Prince” is not a Venetian title. “Count” is the title that counts in Venice, as any countess will tell you.

The Dowager Countess Giustiniani vehemently refuted the claim of Lorenzo Montesini that he was Prince Giustiniani, stating that her name had been violated. “The male line of the Venetian Giustinianis ended thirty years ago with the death of my dear husband, the Count Alvise
Giustiniani,” she said. “A Prince Giustiniani does not exist. To claim this is the most monstrous rubbish. This alleged title is false, false, false.” So began the wedding week.

The Palazzetto Pisani soon became a battleground, with a butler carrying notes back and forth between floors. According to reports, the Potter family asked Lorenzo to substantiate his claim to the title before the wedding took place. The relationship with Robert Straub was also in dispute. The family was concerned about a projected newspaper story on Straub which would provide details of his life in Melbourne before he and Lorenzo moved to Sydney. Straub believed that someone considered more suitable was waiting in the wings to replace him as his best man. Lady Potter had reckoned that, once in Venice, Lorenzo would capitulate and Robert would go away, but this was not to be. Lorenzo and Straub and Lane left the Pisani and moved to a pension on the Giudecca Canal, which Lorenzo later described as “a hotel for middle-class English traveling el-cheapo.” In the course of the move, Lorenzo claimed to have lost their passports, and he reported this to Pitty Pat.

The next morning, on the advice of John Lane, Lorenzo got on the telephone and told Lady Potter, not his wife-to-be, that the wedding was off. It then became the sad duty of Lady Potter to inform her daughter, the bride, that the groom was jilting her.

One of the Australian guests told me, “I thought they’d go through with it. After all, it seemed very much a marriage of convenience, all because of the title. It was really a larky thing to do, a combination of an ambitious mother wanting to feel well placed and a financially ambitious groom.” The same guest described running into Lorenzo in the bar of the Hotel Cipriani after the breakup but before he bolted from Venice with his best man. “He
seemed totally devastated by the whole thing. He said, about himself and Pitty Pat, ‘We’d been old friends. It was to have been a marriage of style.’ ”

Evelyn Lambert, the Texas chatelaine of the Villa Lambert in the Veneto outside of Venice, who rented her house to Lady Potter one year, told me, “I called her after the cancellation and she said she was not angry with Lorenzo. Venice thinks the whole thing was a publicity stunt, but I don’t think so. The three men decided this was not going to work. I read in the
Sydney Morning Herald
that I was giving a bridal lunch on Good Friday. Honey, I’m a Catholic by conversion. I don’t give lunch parties on Good Friday. I don’t even
eat
on Good Friday.”

One of Pitty Pat’s cousins acted as family spokesman and made calls to all the guests to inform them that the wedding was off. “The families of both the bride and groom have searched high and low for an answer to an inexplicable riddle and a way to redeem the damage—spiritual, psychological, and material,” he said. “To say the bride and her mother are distraught is understatement. They are utterly devastated. It is as though a bomb had exploded. The groom’s decision and what made him take this step came out of the blue. His family had already handed over generations of jewels and heirlooms to Primrose.

“We had no inkling. No one fully understands the emotional bond between those two men who ran away together. We are trying to trace them. They might be in Timbuktu as far as we know.

“We would love a dialogue with Lorenzo to see exactly why it happened and to put things in perspective. Nothing is irredeemable. If only he had spoken openly with the bride, we would have understood. If at this late stage he were to come forward with regrets, we feel the bride would
still accept him. Primrose is a tough girl, and she is fighting against distress, shame, and a feeling of ridicule. Fortunes have been spent by scores of people on this stylish wedding—return airfares from Melbourne, not to mention presents. But this matters least of all. It is the wounded bride we first have to deal with.”

Many of the people who spoke with both mother and daughter were amazed by their composure. But, after all, in their world appearance is everything. A few days after the fiasco, the Potters and Pitty Pat left Venice and proceeded to Paris, where Lady Potter celebrated her birthday at Maxim’s just as she had planned to right along.

A few days later in Melbourne, the premier of the state of Victoria, in a televised speech from the floor of Parliament House, accused the opposition party of being a mismatched marriage—worse than that of Pitty Pat Dunlop and the prince. The Melbourne newspapers carried the remark on their front pages.

In Sydney the called-off marriage was the most exciting event in years. “We fell about laughing here,” said a friend of both parties. “It was all a publicity stunt to turn them into international figures, and it backfired on them.”

People talked of nothing else. And when they finished talking to one another, they talked to the press, if asked. In an article by Daphne Guinness, Caroline Simpson, a member of the powerful Fairfax family, spoke her mind. “Hasn’t this whole thing been a joke from the beginning?” she asked. “None of us thought it would get to the wedding stage and the church, did we? Dr. Dunlop came to see my mother [Betty Fairfax] this afternoon. They talked for hours. I think he had a lot to do with stopping it. It is really an extraordinary thing for a mother to push a child
in that way.” There was a certain amount of glee in social circles that Lady Potter “had egg all over her face.” “The person I feel sorry for is Ian Potter,” said Sheila Scotter, another social leader, “and his absolutely darling daughter Carolyn Parker Bowles, who
does
move in society circles in London with certain royals, including the monarch.”

On her way back to Sydney via Paris and New York, Primrose Dunlop arranged to go public with her story on Australia’s “60 Minutes” when she returned. The rumor was that she was paid $38,000 by the network, and that she would drop a bombshell on the show.

If the producers of “60 Minutes” really
did
pay Pitty Pat $38,000, they were rooked, for there was no bombshell. Or perhaps, as has been suggested, libel laws being what they are, the bomb was considered inadvisable, and was defused. The interview was benign, even boring. “Everyone here feels cheated by it,” said a friend of Montesini’s. “Such a pathetic amount was produced. Anyway, I heard they only paid her $23,000.”

Pitty Pat was interviewed in the apartment of her mother and stepfather, and viewers had no sense of watching a sad and sympathetic jilted woman. She seemed arch and superior, holding her eyebrows high and looking down her nose at Jeff McMullen, the Morley Safer of Australia’s “60 Minutes,” as if she were granting an audience to a troublesome commoner.

“That’s Mummy and H.M. the Queen,” she said, showing a photograph of Lady Potter in a deep curtsy before Queen Elizabeth.

The only surprise in the program came when McMullen asked, “Were you sexually compatible with the prince?”

“Yes, we were. Wouldn’t you be with someone you were going to marry?”

“Would you take him back?”

“Yeah. He’s a decent guy.”

She said she did not believe that Lorenzo was gay. If something had happened in his past, it was of no concern to either of them. She mentioned the possibility of lurid photographs—that was probably the predicted bombshell—but said she didn’t believe they existed.

“Do you think Lorenzo’s a prince?” asked Jeff McMullen, pointing out that Montesini’s relatives had mocked the title.

“I don’t know,” replied Pitty Pat. “I would like to see his grandmother’s will. She wanted him to take up the title. That’s where it all started.” She added that titles did not matter to her.

She said that she didn’t think Lorenzo had been in it for the money. “Besides,” she said, “my stepfather does not give away his money lightly.” She said that the story had been started by John Laws, the radio announcer, who suggested to Lorenzo while airborne that his title was worth a fortune to the Potters. For that, she said, she felt a great deal of resentment for John Laws.

When asked how she felt about the premier’s mentioning her name in Parliament, she became imperious in her dismissal of him. “How tacky. What a common remark,” she snapped.

She then allowed herself to be talked into telephoning her almost-husband on national television in order to ask him why he had never consulted her about calling off the marriage. The prince-steward was out, on a flight presumably, and she got his answering machine.

“It’s me,” she said, and asked him to call her when he returned. In closing, she told McMullen that the heartache she felt was worse than the embarrassment.

•        •       •

Montesini, in an intimate moment with his friend the Australian journalist Daphne Guinness, gave his account of the fiasco. He claimed that Lady Potter had announced his engagement without his knowledge when he was in Tokyo for Qantas. “I felt trapped by it,” he said, “pushed on by Pitty Pat’s mother into something that got out of hand.” However, he went along with it, “swept into the euphoria of such a grand occasion as a wedding in Venice.”

“I could not see past April 16. I could not think beyond getting to Venice and going to the church. I could not begin to think of the night of the sixteenth, and where I would sleep after the wedding. I even rehearsed going up the aisle and standing in front of father Vincent Kiss and when it came to the bit about ‘Do you take Primrose to be your lawful wedded wife?’ shouting ‘NO!’ and turning round and running out of the church.”

However, he did not mention these inner torments, at least not to his fiancée and her family. According to him, the real reason for the breakup was the Potters’ desire to terminate his friendship with Straub. When asked about the rumor that there had been a wedding settlement of some $2 million, Lorenzo said, “Take a naught off and you’d be nearer the mark, but I haven’t been given a penny.” In Venice, he said, John Lane told him that Lady Potter had changed her will so that he couldn’t get his hands-on the fortune that will eventually be Pitty Pat’s. That, Lorenzo claimed, coupled with the information that Pitty Pat had said that after the sixteenth she would be a princess traveling first-class, made him feel used.

One week later, however, he also went public, in the Australian magazine
Women’s Day
. Whether, like Pitty Pat, he
was getting paid for his revelations is not known. But his statement, like hers, was a party-line exercise in face-saving. “I did not have the money to give her the life-style she would have expected,” he said. “I loved her—and I always will—but as the rumors, all of which are untrue, began to circulate, I realized I was out of my depth and that it would be best to call off the marriage.” He said that he had had a close and satisfying sexual relationship with Primrose, and he described her as sensual. “Every time I looked at her, I was reminded of a Byzantine empress.” He denied that he was gay, and he downplayed the importance of his title. “It must be understood that Prince Giustiniani is a courtesy title only, and there is no way Primrose could use it on her passport, or use it in real life. She understood that completely. We often talked about it and laughed about it.”

He was most grieved, he said, by her appearance on “60 Minutes.” “It was horrendous when, on the program, she tried to ring me and I heard my own voice on my telephone answering machine.”

SPECIAL REPORTING FROM SYDNEY BY DAPHNE GUINNESS

August 1990

A
dnan Khashoggi was never the richest man in the world, ever, but he flaunted the myth that he was with such relentless perseverance and public-relations know-how that most of the world believed him. The power of great wealth is awesome. If you have enough money, you can bamboozle anyone. Even if you can create the
illusion
that you have enough money you can bamboozle anyone, as Adnan Khashoggi did over and over again. He understood high visibility better than the most shameless Hollywood press agent, and he made himself one of the most famous names of our time. Who doesn’t know about his yachts, his planes, his dozen houses, his wives, his hookers, his gifts, his parties, his friendships with movie stars and jet-set members, and his companionship with kings and world leaders? His dazzling existence outshone even that of his prime benefactors in the royal family of Saudi Arabia—a bedazzlement that led to their eventual disaffection for him.