ushered us to the elevator where we traveled forty stories up to the top of the skyscraper. Top of the Sixes, or rather its view, was popular. The place was filled with couples on dates, and it wasn’t unusual to cheer a proposal of marriage on any given night. I ordered the good stuff—champagne—in a romantic gesture that Marie rewarded me for with a marathon make-out session.
I had a big summer planned for the two of us. Her father had moved to Georgia after splitting from Marie’s mother, who had to travel a lot for her work as a literary scout. All of that added up to a lot of alone time at her apartment.
That was where we were one warm June afternoon, tucked away in the back of the rambling West Side apartment, when things got a little heavier than usual. We hadn’t yet slept together, but we seemed to be heading there when her mother suddenly appeared in the door. Whether we were so engrossed in what we were doing or the apartment was just so big we didn’t hear the front door open, Marie and I were caught completely off guard—and naked.
As her mother screamed in Dutch at the top of her lungs, we both ran into the bathroom and locked the door. Unfortunately, I left my clothes outside. There was a lot of yelling back and forth in a language I didn’t understand until Marie finally brokered an agreement where we could have the dignity of putting our clothes on without the presence of her mother. And then I left, quickly.
I called the next day, but, understandably, her mother wouldn’t let me talk to her. When I tried back a couple of days later, I learned that Marie had been sent to Georgia. My summer of bliss was canceled.
After mourning the loss as much as any thirteen-year-old could, I moved onward and upward to a girl way out of my league. Benedetta Barzini—the daughter of Luigi Barzini, Jr., author of the giant best seller The Italians, and Giannalisa Feltrinelli, mother of her stepbrother Giangiacomo—was not just Italian royalty. She was a top model.
Luigi and Giangiacomo had a relationship based on mutual hatred. After his mother, the richest widow in Italy, married his new stepfather, Giangiacomo experienced unimaginable punishments, including being locked in a cellar for days with only bread and water (the experience caused a lifelong case of claustrophobia). His mother, Giannalisa, was no pussycat herself; she enrolled her son in the Italian Fascist Youth Movement and once scared her chauffeur by felling a deer with a shot from her gun taken from the backseat of her Rolls-Royce.
Despite the bad blood, I met Benedetta through my father’s connections to Giangiacomo after she arrived in New York to start her career as a model. Although named one of the “100 Great Beauties of the World” in Harper’s Bazaar for her black, almond-shaped eyes and mile-long neck, Benedetta was friendly enough. She was so approachable that I found the courage to ask her out, and for some reason beyond my comprehension, she said yes. I instinctively knew Top of the Sixes wasn’t going to cut it. Champagne was like water for this girl. I had to take her to a real New York City pad.
Not long after I started my business exporting books to Germany for sale by Bertelsmann, I found myself with money that I didn’t know what to do with. So I rented a pied-à-terre in Manhattan. It was a rent-controlled apartment for $45 a month on 73rd Street between Second and Third avenues. The deal was good, but the place was a wreck. I spent many weekends not sleeping there but fixing it up so it’d be habitable in case I ever did want to spend the night.
I finished painting and even bought a little furniture by the time Benedetta agreed to come over for an aperitif. Her slender arm linked through mine, we battled a chilly October wind coming off the East River. Each gust heightened my anticipation of walking into my modest yet cozy lair. I hadn’t been there in about a month and, in my memory, the apartment had grown into a cross between James Bond’s place and the sex den of The Apartment.
I opened the door cockily and walked straight into a fog machine. Benedetta protectively touched her hair. The place was filled with more steam than a sauna. While renovating the apartment over the summer, I had disconnected the radiator to paint behind it and apparently forgotten to reconnect it. Steam had been pouring out for a week, causing the paint to bubble and peel. The cheap furniture hadn’t fared much better. My pied-à-terre was a worse wreck than what I had started with.
We laughed off the whole incident and went elsewhere. But that was the end of Benedetta . . . and the apartment. The Italian beauty started hanging out at the Factory and moved on to an Andy Warhol acolyte. As for my bachelor pad, two weeks after its meltdown, the landlord called to buy me out of my lease, which I agreed to do because I just couldn’t face repainting it.
I had a confidence with women that well surpassed my age (the stewardess whom I met outside my building in Queens was pretty pissed off to find out, after a summer romance, that not only was I fourteen but I also lived with my parents). Like with business dealings, I assumed an air of maturity that had no correlation to experience. But girls were nothing like the numbers that popped into my head in neat rows. They were confusing but wonderful. I loved women, and I loved sex. However, it was never about flings or conquests. I considered it an honor when someone was willing to offer to me the emotional and psychological discoveries that came through the physical. My gratitude for this intimate female acceptance knew no bounds.
I wanted to be devoted to a woman, but this was the sixties and I was fifteen, so that goal was not easily achieved. The first to give me any kind of shot at boyfriend status was a lovely girl named Hanna. I had met her at Austen Riggs, a famed psychiatric facility. The perfect place to meet your first girlfriend.
I found myself wandering around the bucolic grounds of the open treatment center on account of my friendship with a young writer, David Berelson, whom I met through my father when he sold his coming-of-age prep school novel, Roars of Laughter. David was a complicated character. He had a lot of very strong opinions, all of which stemmed from either the New York Times or Johnny Carson. Anyone who dared to differ was considered a complete idiot. One had to forgive his foibles, considering his stepfather had murdered his mother and then killed himself while a seven-year-old David slept in his bed.
David’s stepfather, Sheldon Dick, had been many things—literary agent, polo player, and photographer—but he could never escape his main title: heir to the A. B. Dick Company fortune. Even while traveling through the most destitute regions of the country to take photographs on behalf of the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression, Sheldon, whose father founded the world’s largest manufacturer of mimeograph equipment, “worried about the fact that he was a checkbook.”
Later, he made a documentary on mining, but his biggest moment came in the spring of 1950 when Sheldon shot his third wife and David’s mother, Elizabeth, and then telephoned the state police barracks to say, “We have just killed ourselves. Send an officer right away to the Sheldon Dicks.”
Needless to say, David was scarred. But an inheritance of several million dollars meant that when he cracked up, he could easily afford the extremely expensive therapeutic program at Austen Riggs. He had already left when I agreed to make the relatively short drive from my parents’ weekend place in Colrain to the stately facility in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he was visiting his girlfriend.
As I entered the institution’s white mansion, affectionately known by its residents and staff as “The Inn,” I quickly understood this was no mental hospital. This looked like the right place for James Taylor to kick heroin and Judy Garland to recuperate from a nervous breakdown. There was a formal dining room with iced tea in an urn in case your lithium made you parched, and the living room boasted enough square footage for twelve couches and a grand piano. It was the kind of place with chintz drapes, tennis courts, deck chairs, and a grand curving stair-case that descended into the central hall.
That’s where I first saw Hanna. We didn’t speak but the image of her walking up the sweeping staircase, a serious and hesitant face lightened
