| Celebrities
at Harry's Bar's |
In the years following the war, the real king of Harry's Bar and Torcello
was Hemingway.
Born in 1899, he was stationed in Italy, mainly in the Veneto region,
during the First World War, and he burst into my life for the first time
in the winter of I949.
He won the Nobel prize four years later, but literary magazines and short
stories had already established him as a legend. He spent his time either
in the restaurant at Torcello or at Harry's. There, he had a small apartment,
named after Santa Fosca, and here he had his own corner table, just as
in the thirties he had had his own table at the Closerie des Lilas, in
Paris. People still ask me about him.
His generosity was almost excessive and his checkbooks ran
to more pages than his novels. At the time he was finishing "Across the
River and into the Trees".
At a certain point in the book, there is a dialogue between the characters
sitting in Harry's Bar.
I have included it because in my opinion it captures a certain atmosphere
perfectly.
"What is there funny we should talk about?"
"Let's look at the people and discuss them."
"That's lovely," she said.
"And we won't do it with malice. Only with our best wit. Yours and mine."
And further on in the same book, he describes another moment with immense
sensibility.
"There was no one in Harry's except some early morning drinkers
that the Colonel didn't know and two men that were doing business at the
back of the bar."
"There were hours at Harry's when it filled with the people that you knew,
with the same rushing regularity as the tide coming in at Mont St. Michel.
Except, the colonel thought, the hours for the tides change each day with
the moon and the hours at Harry's are as the Greenwich Meridian, or the
standard meter in Paris or the good opinion the French military hold of
themselves."
He was, as I have already said, always patient, as long
as such people kept him amused.
In so far as I got to know the man, I have always felt that he wasn't
a real extrovert. I think solitude frightened him and that was why he
always sought the company of others. He certainly always returned the
favor generously. I saw him help young artists hundreds of times.
One of the rare occasions on which I saw him lose his customary calm was
when one of his American colleagues, Sinclair Lewis, the author of "Babbitt",
a man he obviously disliked, came into Harry's.
The only thing the two men had in common was a passion for alcohol. I
was working and didn't catch all of the scene, but this is what happened.
Lewis walked in and when Hemingway saw him, he let fly his opinion of
the other writer in a loud voice and then turned his back on him. I trembled
for a moment, but nothing happened. It must have been January 1950 when
this took place.
A year later, Lewis died in Rome.
That winter, I kept the restaurant on Torcello open specifically for Hemingway,
and for those few months, Torcello was his kingdom. He was still very
strong and tall and if he met anyone of his own build he would indulge
in his lifelong passion for boxing and challenge them to a sparring match,
fighting bare-chested despite the freezing cold. The match would always
end happily, with neither a winner or a loser and a celebratory drinking
session was never lacking.
For more than twenty five years I was privileged to have
Angelo Dal Maschio working as my head waiter.
Now, like the good Cincinnatus he is, he has retired to his house in the
Montello hills, and he only came out of retirement to help us with the
opening of the Casanova at the Palace, in Milan. "Angelo" was always Truman
Capote's first word when he came into Harry's.
It was Angelo he wanted, because Dal Maschio did the customers' thinking
for them. He ordered cocktails and suggested menus.
If Angelo recommended anything, it had to be good.
Truman Capote hid his perceptive glances under a show of studied boredom,
but nothing escaped him.
He wrote about the sandwiches in Harry's Bar in a piece describing a long
journey he made along the Yugoslavian coast. The most interesting part
of the journey, he said, was getting back to Harry's Bar and to its prawn
sandwiches.
Another character was the Chilean billionaire Lopez.
He owed his wealth to the guano that millions of seagulls dropped on his
immense lands.
He would arrive in an enormous yacht and take over a whole floor of the
Grand Hotel, where for a two week stay he would have all the furniture
changed. Once the ganzér on Torcello, the
man whose job it is to help the motorboats dock, came rushing into the
bar waving a ten thousand lira note that Lopez had given him as a tip.
Lopez had misunderstood what was written on the man's cap and thought
he was dying of cancer. Lopez always left as a tip the exact same sum
as the bill.
What he enjoyed most was to do the rounds of the table in the evening,
dressed in an impeccable smoking jacket, asking the other customers with
enviable grace if they had enjoyed their meal and if they were happy with
everything.
| Queen
Elizabeth II of England and the Duke of Edinburgh... |
The restaurant on Torcello is the only place that Queen Elisabeth II of
England went to privately.
That happened in I960. She had come on an official visit to Rome, and
then she sailed to Venice from Ancona on the royal yacht "Britannia".
The Duke of Edinburgh, her husband, had already been one of my clients
at Harry's Bar, when he came to Venice as an officer in the navy and I
was told he always had fond memories of the place.
Two months before her arrival I received a letter from the court asking
me to provide them with a lunch menu. I sent them three and they chose
all of them.
I could have invented menus full of exotic sounding names, but disguising
straightforward dishes with elaborate titles is not a ploy I indulge in.
Instead I included our gnocchi alla parigina,
and amongst other dishes our humble yet ever faithful spaghetti
all'amatriciana, and that was the dish that the Queen chose immediately
and with great enthusiasm.
She was extremely happy with her choice.
The Queen is really quite down to earth and reserved. She has a quiet,
sweet smile, in contrast with the noisy joie de vivre of her husband.
When she left the restaurant she gave me, as a token of her gratitude,
a beautiful pair of golden cufflinks engraved with the royal coat of arms.
In
1936, the artist Georges Braque came into the bar with a number of friends.
He was already well known.
He had a painting wrapped in paper under his arm. "Cipriani", he said
"I haven't got any money, but I want to have a meal with my friends. I
can leave you this painting in exchange."
I certainly didn't want to offend him, but I also didn't want to establish
a relationship with a client that was different from my other customers.
"It doesn't matter", I replied, "order what you like and you can pay me
when you've got the money."
That day I turned down one of the best deals that has ever come my way.
But I don't regret it.
Thousands of artists have come to my bar. Many of them have paid their
bills regularly, others haven't.
The paintings that I own, I have bought myself, and I have never wanted
to mix business with pleasure.
On another evening, about fifteen years ago, when the bar
was completely packed, a young, thickset, unshaven man, in a T shirt,
came in.
He swaggered up to the bar and said to the barman in Venetian dialect,
"Hey boss, give me a beer, but don't think I'm going to pay for it!".
He was clearly worked up and the situation was potentially explosive.
Naturally I couldn't give into him but at the same time I didn't want
to start a brawl.
So, I asked him politely why I should give him a beer for nothing. He
told me his name and explained that anyone going by that name had the
right not to pay.
The man was well known to all the other barmen in the area who were daily
forced to give in to his arrogance. He was the kind of person who had
nothing to lose.
"I'm sorry", I replied, "but I have never heard of you". My words seemed
to take away his self-confidence, time passed and the tension disappeared.
I talked to him for a while and eventually he gave up on the beer and
left.
As he was walking out however he turned to me and said: "Take a good look
at my face, because one day I'll come back here a rich man".
|
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At
the time a photograph of the two of us was passed around. We are both
wearing enormous sombreros, I am laughing, whereas Hemingway, with his
gray beard seems lost in a dream, lost in the sea of empty glasses in
front of him. He was the one who had emptied the glasses. Only once,
many years later, when he came back to Venice after the plane crashes
in Africa, did we ever go on a spree together, and that took me two
days to recover from.
It was the only time I have ever drunk with a client.
I have always believed that the customer's place is on one side of the
bar and the barman's on the other.
If you become too friendly with one person, your other customers can
become a little jealous.
Everyone has their place and there are rules in life which it is wise
to observe. Hemingway had an extremely strong character.
It was impossible to fence him in. He kicked aside any obstacle that
got in his way and was just as capable of constructing others with anyone
he disliked. That was rare though and I always thought he had a lot
more patience than the average man.
People sometimes comment on descriptions like this, by
saying: "Hemingway certainly gave you a lot of good publicity".
If the person has a sense of humor, I usually reply: "No, you've got
it all wrong, it was the bar and I who made him famous. They gave him
the Nobel after he came here, you know, not before".
Hemingway had many close friends in Venice.
Of course, there were also a number of arty snobs who bathed in his
reflected glory and whenever anyone tried to take a photo of the writer
they would run to be at his side.
Hemingway,
may have seemed to live only for the moment, but in fact he was implacably
precise about his work.
Apart from a few very rare occasions, at ten o'clock every evening,
he shut up shop as it were and went back to his apartment to write.
He always ordered six bottles of Amarone, a Veronese wine, to be sent
to his room. The bottles lasted a night and we would always find them
empty in the morning. Hemingway loved Torcello terribly, especially
the sandbanks where he would go hunting in the early morning. The winter
he stayed there was particularly cold, but there were none of the damp
fogs that usually roll over the lagoon at that time of year. Sometimes
he would drive up to Cortina to ski, in his enormous convertible with
the top down.
I have been told he used to arrive with his face bright purple and his
beard frozen.
In Venice he lived one of the last great seasons of his life.
His health was already beginning to decline and the plane crashes in
Africa a few years later were the final blow.
When he realized that he could no longer live as he wished, he chose
the easy way out.
I remember him already sad in 1954. He said that Gordon's Gin was the
best antiseptic in the world, but perhaps he no longer believed it even
then.
You could hear Orson Welles' laugh from half way down
Calle Vallaresso.
As big as a wardrobe, when he came in it was because he was hungry and
thirsty. He would wolf down two plates of sandwiches and then drink
two bottles of iced Dom Perignon, almost in one go. Then he would lounge
back in his armchair and look around with an air of intense satisfaction.
He would pretend to be gruff, but he was really generous and completely
disorganized.
He often forgot to pay the bill and once I even had to go to the station,
where he was boarding a train.
He stuffed a whole wad of travelers' checks into my hand just as the
train began to move. "Sign them in my name, Cipriani" he roared laughing
and his laugh (he could laugh without taking those long cigars out of
his mouth) covered the sounds of the wheels as the train pulled out
of the station.
One
of the great habitués of Harry's in the fifties was the Aga Khan. He
had to be carried here on an armchair with wheels and hence decided
to change hotel so that he could reach the bar without having to cross
a bridge.
He always ate the same thing, caviar to start and ravioli to finish.
He had an imposing appearance but underneath he was down to earth and
extremely cordial.
Begum, probably the most beautiful woman to ever set foot in Harry's
Bar, was always at his side.
The year in which Barbara Hutton married the tennis player
Von Kramm was particularly wild.
She had a following of at least thirty people.
She spent her time drowning the nightmare of a congenital misfortune
in alcohol and this was aggravated by the crowd of hangers-on that constantly
surrounded her. She only ever paid bills that were signed by me.
That year she threw a huge party at Torcello. When she paid the bill,
she remembered everyone, from the parish priest to the chefs. Having
written out checks for everyone she turned to me and said: "Cipriani,
do tell me, is there anyone else that I have put out?".
Onassis had the biggest yacht of all.
Despite his immense wealth, he was never a real gentleman. Elsa Maxwell,
the famous American journalist was his pilot in Venice.
Incredibly intelligent, treacherous and sharp, she always knew exactly
which way the wind was blowing.
| The
man who could sleep with his eyes open... |
One of the strangest clients I have ever had was I think
the only man in the world who could sleep with his eyes open.
He was an aging Venetian count, who had decided to share his title with
an American woman, who was no spring chicken either.
To guard himself against the cloying boredom of having to listen to
her, for over a decade he had constantly refused to speak any English
whatsoever.
When they went out for dinner, inevitably with a group of Americans,
he would stare straight ahead of him in a state of self-hypnosis. I
would put his plate in front of him and then give him a gentle prod.
He never woke up with a start, on the contrary he would automatically
pick up his fork and slowly start eating.
| The
Commendatore from Milan... |
Another character, was a Commendatore from Milan, he would
always come at seven o'clock and order an aperitif in the midst of the
hustle and bustle of a summer evening.
He would sit down and sleep for about twenty minutes with his drink
in front of him and then he would wake up, drink it, pay and leave,
thanking me on the way.
One day he confessed to being an insomniac and added that the bar was
the only place he could get any sleep in.
One evening I was sitting at the cash desk when I remembered
that the next day I needed some money, so I took out a fifty thousand
lira note and put it in my pocket.
A Frenchman who was sitting near me noticed what I had done. He winked
at me and with an air of complicity said, "I saw what you did, you know,
but don't worry I'm a cashier too."
So, for a crime that I hadn't committed, I formed a pact of silence
with a real thief.
I would like to wind up this list of characters by remembering
the American lady, Peggy Guggenheim, the last Venetian dogaressa,
owner of the most incredible collection of contemporary art in the
world (recently donated by her to the city of Venice).
She had a difficult character and we had one or two run-ins, because
it is difficult for two prickly customers (I include myself in this
category) to always walk hand in hand.
All that is water under the bridge now. Ca' Venier dei Leoni, the
curious, truncated palazzo where she lives, was bought on my advice.
Sometimes, while in my motorboat, I pass her on the Grand Canal in
her liveried gondola, rowed by a gondolier in full uniform.
The waves cradle her and she abandons herself to the whole experience,
lying back in a magnificent pose on the rich cushions.
Arrigo Cipriani
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