IT WOULD NOT BE AN EXAGGERATION to say that the years right after the war were years of madness. People of every nationality wanted to have fun, to forget, to celebrate peace.
And then there were the troops. English and American officers came to Harry’s Bar every night and drank unbelievable amounts of liquor. The light seemed to have gone out of their glazed eyes, as if they were watching a film with thousands of characters and thousands of situations they could never forget. One evening a group of Australian soldiers decided my father would make a fine rugby ball, and they tossed him from one side of the room to the other as if he were light as a feather. They were not bad fellows. They wanted to have a little fun, and my father, despite himself, was part of it.
But besides playing host to army officers of the various victorious nations after the war, Harry’s Bar continued to attract a wide and distinguished clientele. It was in these years that Harry’s Bar really became what one could call a watering hole to the rich and famous, and many of the celebrities who started coming to us then have contributed as much to the history of Harry’s Bar as those of us who worked there.
One of our most faithful regulars in 1949 and 1950 was Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway had served in Italy during World War I, mostly in the Veneto region, and had covered Italy as a journalist in World War II. He burst into Harry’s Bar for the first time in the fall of 1949. While he was to receive the Nobel Prize four years later, literary history and the press had already made him legendary. He divided his time between Harry’s Bar in Venice and the island of Torcello in the lagoon, where my father owned a small guesthouse.
The locanda, as we all called the little inn, had been offered to us for a modest sum in 1936, and my father had bought it and then left it untouched for several years. He had visited Torcello the first time in 1928, when he took some guests from the Hotel Europa on a gondola excursion around the lagoon. The magic balance between the island’s natural beauty and the artful delicacy of the two little churches enchanted him. A host of writers and painters has tried to capture the magic of Torcello, but the island has eluded them all. It looks as if it is floating very slowly on the tide that lazily moves the water in narrow canals between the grassy banks, and it seems to bear silent and solemn witness to the passage of time.
After the war, my father turned the locanda into an idyllic spot with six beautiful guest rooms, a mixed flower and vegetable garden, and a lovely dining room overlooking the ninth-century church — a magical setting. Hemingway occupied a small apartment there named for Santa Fosca, and in the bar he had his own table in one corner, the way he had one in the 1930s at the Closerie des Lilas in Paris. And it was at locanda that I saw him for the first time, when I was still a student in 1950. I had spent a couple of months on the island that spring poring over the textbooks for my first exam. One morning, when I was in the garden, I raised my head and saw this man with a thick gray beard leaning on the windowsill. I had been told who this distinguished guest was. He waved at me, and I responded with a polite, timid bow. I had not read any of his books at the time, but Aunt Gabriella, my mother’s sister, who ran the hotel with a sweetness all her own, said he was the greatest writer alive. From my own inexperienced and unsophisticated perspective, I was more impressed by the friendly intimacy of his gesture than by the fact that was an important figure. In any case, I became used to seeing Hemingway frequently, for he became part of the Cipriani landscape for quite a while.
People still ask about him. There is a nice photograph of him and my father, the two of them wearing enormous sombreros. My father is smiling in the picture, but Hemingway, with his gray beard, looks lost in a dream before a flood of empty glasses. My father and Hemingway had apparently emptied those glasses, and I remember that it took my father three days to recover from his hangover.
That was the first time he ever drank with a customer. My father had a very clear idea of which side of the bar was for the customer and which for the saloonkeeper. He had several favorite rules he liked to follow, the most important of which was that everyone should know his own place. He used to say that he had no friends, only customers, which was true, and he made a point of never crossing the delicate boundary of friendship with a customer. Over the years, countless customers hoped he would become a friend and invited my father to address them with a tu. He always responded graciously, but he never complied. “Never say tu to a customer,” he warned me once, “because there will be a day when he comes in with an important client, or a big shot friend, or a woman he’s trying to impress, and then he won’t want to be known as the bartender’s buddy.” And he was right.
But Hemingway had such a strong personality that there was no chance to keep him at bay. He simply knocked down barriers that did not suit him, even though he was quite capable of putting up his own walls if someone was not to his taste. But that was rare. His patience was much greater than average. There was a magnanimity about him that at times almost seemed excessive; he filled more pages of his checkbooks than he did novels. That is how generous he was.
He was finishing Across the River and into the Trees at the time, and at a certain point in that novel two main characters have a conversation while they are sitting at Harry’s Bar. The heroine asks the hero if they can talk about something pleasant. He suggests they look around and speak about the people they see, which strikes her as a fine idea. But no spite, he warns, just wit, yours and mine.
And later in the novel, there is this sensitive description:
There was no one in Harry’s except some early morning drinkers that the Colonel did not know, and two men 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 of 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.
Because of pages like that, every now and then someone will say, “Hemingway certainly gave the place good publicity.” If the person has a sense of humor, I reply, “You’ve got it the wrong way around; we gave him good publicity. It is no accident that he got the Nobel Prize after he wrote about Harry’s Bar, not before.”
Hemingway had many good friends in Venice. And aside from his friends, of course, there was a goodly number of snobbish, social-climbing artistic types in search of a little reflected glory. Whenever a cameraman appeared, a group of them would rush to stand next to Hemingway for the photograph. As long as they were a little bit amusing, he let them be.
In fact, I am not convinced that he really was an extrovert at heart. He was just afraid of solitude, and he needed the company of others to keep him distracted. But he was generous in return. My father once told me he knew of a hundred occasions when Hemingway helped young artists.
One of the rare times he lost his calm was when he saw Sinclair Lewis walk into Harry’s Bar. As we found out later, Hemingway had no fondness for the author of Babbitt. Probably the only thing the two men had in common was their passion for liquor. The minute Lewis walked in, Hemingway described in a few choice words his opinion of the man and then turned away. There was a moment of great tension, but nothing happened. Lewis simply ignored the remark and went to a table. He died in Rome a year later.
Between 1949 and 1950 my father decided to keep the locanda on Torcello open for Hemingway even in the winter. The locanda became Hemingway’s home. The writer was still robust and exuberant, and occasionally, if he found someone strong enough, he good-naturedly showed off his old passion for boxing, even stripping to the waist despite the cold weather. And the boxing match, which never had a winner or a loser, was followed by the inevitable drinking match.
All that winter, while Hemingway appeared to spend the day in total freedom, he was in fact implacably rigorous and precise about his work. Every evening at ten, with extremely rare exceptions, he closed up shop and went to his apartment to write. He would order six bottles of a Verona wine, Amarone, which lasted the night. In the morning we would find the empties.
Sometimes he would go out duck hunting in the early morning. The winter of ’49 was an extremely cold one, but without the damp fog that sometimes obscures the lagoon. Occasionally he would leave Venice and drive a monumental convertible to Cortina for the skiing. Friends said he would arrive blue in the face with his beard completely frozen.
As it turned out, that winter he spent in Venice was one of the last great seasons of his life. When he came back again in 1954, he was already a bit sad. He told my father that Gordon’s gin was the world’s best antiseptic. But perhaps even he no longer believed that. His health was failing, and an airplane accident in Africa a few years later was the last straw. When in 1963 he realized that because of his health he could no longer live as he wished, he chose his own way out.
You could hear Orson Welles’s laugh halfway up Calle Vallaresso. He was as big as an armoire, and he always had an appetite to match when he walked through the door of Harry’s Bar. And an even bigger thirst. He immediately ate two plates of shrimp sandwiches and washed them down with two bottles of iced Dom Perignon. And then he would lean back in his chair and look around with a contented air. He was a lion with the whole world but a puppy with his wife, the Italian actress Paola Mori. I watched him one morning at breakfast, after a night carousing without her at the Martini dance hall. His head was lowered, and he didn’t utter a word the whole time she angrily berated him. His grumpiness was only a facçade; he was warm and generous. He was disorganized and often forgot to pay the check.
Once my father sent me to the train station to try to catch up with him as he was leaving town. Welles put a pack of traveler’s checks in my hand, and the train started to pull out. “Tell your father to sign my name,” he shouted from the window. I can still hear his laugh, which he accomplished without removing the cigar from his mouth. It stifled the sound of the wheels until the train left the station.
In later years, I also remember Truman Capote, who always insisted on being served by the same waiter, Angelo Dal Maschio, an outstanding maître d’. He was an exuberant fellow but always consummately professional. “A-angeloo!” Capote would call out in that slightly affected voice as soon as he opened the door to Harry’s Bar. It always had to be Angelo because Capote refused to think about what to order. Angelo ordered the author’s food and drink for him. Whatever Angelo recommended was sure to be marvelous, said Capote.
Behind Truman Capote’s seeming air of vague boredom, his eagle eye took in everything. I was surprised when he wrote with astonishing detail about the sandwiches at Harry’s Bar in a newspaper article while sailing along the Yugoslav coast on Gianni Agnelli’s yacht. According to him, the most interesting and important part of the cruise was the return to Harry’s Bar for shrimp sandwiches.
Harry’s Bar attracted many world celebrities of all kinds, from aristocrats to famous artists.
The Aga Khan was an important customer in the 1950s. A small man, not too rotund, very kind, very sweet, the Aga Khan was always asking everyone else in Harry’s Bar if they were having a good time. Venice is not the ideal city for someone like him, who had difficulty walking, but he loved it nevertheless. The first time he visited he stayed at the Grand Hotel but immediately moved to the Bauer Grünwald; his justification was that it was closer to Harry’s Bar. He could easily go back and forth between Harry’s and the hotel by wheelchair without having to cross any bridges.
He always ordered the same things: beluga caviar to start, then ravioli alla piemontése. And the begum was always by his side. She was the only customer my father spoke of with enthusiasm, and it was clear that he had a secret admiration for her beauty.
Right outside Harry’s Bar, the Chilean millionaire Arturo Lopez, the guano king, anchored his yachts regularly. The yachts exuded wealth but without a trace of ostentation. Lopez would rent an entire floor at the Grand Hotel, where furniture from his Paris apartment would be installed the week before his arrival, but he preferred to sleep on the yacht. He had afternoon tea at the Grand Hotel and dined at Harry’s every evening. There were about twenty people in his entourage, and they had to adjust to the caprices of his mood. If he drank, everyone drank. If he was in the mood for water, it was water for everyone.
He always wore an impeccable dinner jacket and amused himself by touring the tables, asking the customers how they were enjoying their dinner and if they were satisfied with the service. So I would inevitably have to explain to the people, whose curiosity had been aroused, that the extremely polite gentleman who came on like a maître d’ was the owner of the yacht outside the window. His daily tip was always exactly the same amount as his bill.
One evening just after Mr. Lopez had arrived, an old retired gondolier walked into the restaurant. As a way of earning small tips to supplement his pension, he used to stand every evening on the canal in front of Harry’s Bar and help boats approach the shore with an iron hook. That evening the gondolier showed me a ten-thousand-lire bill, a brand-new crisp banknote. He had never seen a bill of that denomination before. It would be worth about a hundred dollars today. Mr. Lopez had just given it to him.
As Mr. Lopez was leaving Harry’s Bar that evening, he said, “Poor fellow, that gondolier, he has cancer and he still has to work!” On the gondolier’s cap was written GANZER, the word in Venetian dialect for a hook man, and Lopez had mistaken it for a sign that the gondolier was suffering from cancer. I nodded in sympathy, and for the rest of Mr. Lopez’s stay in Venice, every night the gondolier happily and uncomprehendingly received ten thousand lire from generous Mr. Lopez.
Of the countless millionaires who visited Harry’s Bar, I remember Barbara Hutton. One of her many husbands was the famous tennis player, Gottfried von Cramm. She had married him in 1955, or rather, she had effect married von Cramm and his entire entourage of some fifty people. She was an unhappy woman and drowned her sorrows in alcohol from morning till night. Von Cramm was homosexual, and his crowd was quite particular. She decided to give a big party at Torcello and asked me to decorate the island with ten thousand balloons. When it came time to pay the bill, she too was extremely generous and did not want to forget a soul; her total tips exceeded the bill itself.
Paying her husband’s bills at the bar, however, was another matter. She would pay them only if I countersigned them.
Venice’s beautiful port has historically attracted yachts and boats of all kinds. Aristotle Onassis’s yacht, the Christina, was bigger than anyone else’s. Onassis was extremely rich, but he was no gentleman, as we all discovered from the indiscretions of Elsa Maxwell, who piloted him around Venice one summer. The famous gossip columnist was intelligent, perfidious, and extremely acute, and she could be very ugly when she talked about the people she knew. It was in Venice, between the yacht and Harry’s Bar, that the romance of Onassis and Maria Callas began.
The locanda on Torcello is the only restaurant that Queen Elizabeth II ever visited in a private capacity. That was in 1960. She came to Italy on an official visit, and after Rome she boarded the royal yacht Britannia at Ancona and sailed to Venice. Her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, had earlier been a customer of Harry’s Bar when he served in the British navy. Two months before the royal visit, we received a letter from the court requesting that we suggest a menu for a lunch the queen would attend. We proposed and sent three, and all three were accepted. They were simple dishes from our kitchen: ravioli, fried fish, pasta and beans, risotto with vegetables.
During the weeks preceding the visit, we became the objects of several relatively veiled attacks from some of our competitors. The one that found the Torcello choice hardest to accept was the management of a major hotel chain whose generous offer of free lodgings had been politely declined by Buckingham Palace.
Despite the queen’s wishes that the restaurant operate normally, the Italian authorities, for obvious security reasons, would not allow any unidentified parties in the restaurant that day. We invited several acquaintances who, while dining at our expense, were delighted to play the part of ordinary customers, as if they were walk-ons for a movie. My father was beaming when the queen told him how pleased she was by the way everything had worked out. She struck me as an extremely simple, reserved woman with a very sweet smile — in marked contrast to the noisy good humor of her husband. As she left the restaurant she walked over to my father and gave him, as a mark of gratitude, a beautiful pair of gold cuff links with the royal crest.
The countess Morosini had the most remarkably selective sense of hearing. “What beautiful eggs, Cipriani,” she called out once as she entered the kitchen at Harry’s Bar. “Look at the color of the fish, and what a joy this cake is!” My father had package after package wrapped up for her to take home. When we cautiously reminded her that there was a small bill to be paid, she replied, “What? I can’t hear you, I don’t understand,” as if she had suddenly gone deaf. But if she was told that someone had left a gift for her, her hearing was perfect.
She often went to the casino; she loved playing cards. And her authoritative air, like her former startling beauty, was commanding and undeniable. Occasionally when the other players had paid to “see” and the hand was over, she would say, as dry as dust, “full house” and expect them to take her word for it. It worked well for her.
Hemingway once asked my father to send the countess a pound of beluga caviar with his compliments. The next day at cocktail time, la Morosini, as everyone in Venice referred to her, walked into Harry’s Bar and ordered a drink. Then she called for my father. “Cipriani,” she said, “I have a pound of caviar. I can’t possibly eat all that. I want to sell it. What will you give me?”
She once sent a friend of hers, who had just married, a beautiful chandelier with her congratulations. The note she got back from him was not quite what she expected. “Thank you very much for the beautiful gift, but when I gave it to you, there were two.”
A few years after the war, an enormous American man with a pleasant, ruddy face and a huge cowboy hat walked into the bar. Harry’s Bar must have been his last stop on a long round of other bars in the city. He was in those rather loud high spirits that come from abundant drinking. He had enormous hands, and you could tell that he was as strong as an ox. With his ten-gallon hat shading his face, he took a seat at the bar, towering over the other customers.
He brought a picturesque touch of color to the scene, but I realized at once that for Princess Aspasia of Greece, who was sitting by herself at a corner table, he incarnated an offensive symbol of bad manners. The princess started giving signs of alarmed disquiet. She shifted in her chair, sighed, and then signaled me over to her.
“Cipriani,” she called out.
I went over to her table.
“Cipriani, have that boor take off his hat.”
Had she asked me to move Everest a couple a feet, it would probably have seemed a more reasonable request.
I tried to reassure her and suggested that wearing a hat at a bar was probably conventional behavior in America. But there was no convincing her. Her purpose in life at that very moment was to get that damned hat off that guy, who, in the meantime, and despite my efforts, had realized that for some reason or other he was the subject of our conversation. He fixed an inquiring eye on the two of us.
“If you don’t tell him, I will,” Her Highness said. So I reluctantly headed for the bar, and I had the oddest sensation that I was growing smaller with every step while the American got bigger and bigger.
“Pardon me,” I said in a hesitant voice, “it makes no difference to me personally, but the lady would like you to remove your hat.”
“Why?” he asked.
I didn’t dream of teaching him manners, so I lied: “The lady is allergic to hats!”
He turned to face the princess, gripped the broad brim of his hat in both hands, and pulled the hat farther down over his eyes. And not content with that, he got up and went over to sit down at her table.
It was a tense moment. But after a second or two of silence — while he looked at her and she felt embarrassed — he broke out in a sonorous laugh and removed his hat. The air suddenly cleared, and the princess laughed as well. The upshot of the whole thing was that they spent the rest of the evening wining and dining at the same table. When they finally walked out of Harry’s Bar, I doubt that hats were even on her mind.
Princess Aspasia’s daughter, Queen Alexandra of Yugoslavia, was the customer who caused us the most worry in those years.
Alexandra was very young when she married King Peter of Yugoslavia, a king without a throne, since he had gone into exile when still a child. After the king’s early death in New York, the queen had become anorexic to spite her mother. When the two women went to restaurants, the daughter insisted on being served first since she was a queen, and her mother was merely a princess. We were all obliged to address her as Your Majesty.
When her mother died, Queen Alexandra made several suicide attempts. But with each attempt, she always made sure that someone took notice in time. Nevertheless, a couple of times she almost succeeded; one of these was at the Hotel Cipriani, the hotel and restaurant my father had founded on the island of Giudecca in 1953. She always took her swim in the hotel pool very early in the morning, so that no one would see her skeletal body. By chance that day my father had to be at the hotel at seven in the morning. Passing by the pool he saw the queen swimming. He summoned the pool attendant and, as if he sensed what might happen, told him: “Keep an eye on the queen today. I have a feeling she might try to drown herself.”
Half an hour later the attendant lost sight of the queen. He went to the edge of the pool and saw her body stretched out at the bottom. He dived into the water and got her out in time. She was so thin that an she had to do was stay motionless and she sank at once.
Another time Alexandra wrote a letter with her last wishes to Count Paul Münster, who lived across the way from her on the Giudecca, and delivered it herself. She handed it to the maid and told her to give it to the count at once. Then she went back home and took thirty sleeping pills. But the maid was unable to deliver the letter, because the count had already set off for an all-day excursion. He only read the letter that evening on his return. They rushed over to her villa and were able to get her to the hospital in time. That one was a very close call.
The last two or three years of her life — this was in the 1980s — her mind no longer worked. Quarantotti Gambini, a lawyer, and I looked after her. She came to Harry’s Bar almost every day for lunch, and I made sure she ate.
Her son made it a point not to come to Venice to see his mother or pay her bills. She lived in her own apartment for a while, but she was finally obliged to move to an extremely respectable hospice. Things did not go well there either. In protest, she would stuff toilet paper in the toilet bowl until it was backed up. The plumbers had to be called several times. Finally — she must have been in her mid-sixties — the administration asked her to leave. I saw her off, with all kinds of advice. A car took her to Switzerland, where we had arranged for some faithful Yugoslavians to place her in a nursing home.
We all thought we would never see her again, but a few days later, to my surprise, she walked into Harry’s Bar. “What on earth had brought her back to Venice?” I asked her. “I had to go to the hairdresser,” she said. She ultimately moved to London spent the last years of her troubled life there.
Despite the fact that her life was a very sad tale, she could be the most charming woman — simple, gay, and full of humor — especially after a couple of cocktails. Perhaps what she missed most of all was a normal life.
Among the strange customers I have seen, there was one who could sleep with his eyes open. That was Count Gozzi, an elderly Venetian nobleman who had bestowed his title on Mrs. Lee, the American woman who owned the Fortuny fabric factory. On her marriage she became Countess Gozzi Lee. She was an extremely energetic woman, but very boring. Listening to her for more than a minute left you helpless. To defend himself from the awful boredom of listening to her, Count Gozzi simply refused to speak English for ten years. When they brought guests to dine at Harry’s Bar, almost always Americans, he looked straight ahead in a self-hypnotic state. I would set a dish in front of him and then give him a gentle nudge to rouse him from his trance. He never woke brusquely. On the contrary, he simply raised his fork and began eating slowly.
As all restaurateurs will attest, our profession makes us vulnerable to all manner of human encounter. I remember another odd customer, an aged Milanese commendatore. In the summer he would appear regularly about seven in the evening for an aperitif. He sat at a tiny table that I always set aside for him in the midst of the bustle of other customers. No sooner was he seated than he would almost immediately fall fast asleep. He usually slept undisturbed about twenty minutes. Then he woke up from his short nap, drank, paid, said thank you, and left. He finally confessed that he suffered from insomnia, and Harry’s Bar was the only place he could sleep in peace.
And who could ever forget the fashion designer Valentina Schlee? She was of Russian descent and made clothes for Greta Garbo. They lived in the same apartment building in New York, and Garbo later became her husband’s lover. Valentina always dressed like Greta Garbo, or rather, Garbo always dressed like her. Valentina always wore large hats to hide her face, even in summer. She was the joy and the sorrow of the cooks at Harry’s Bar and at the Hotel Gritti, where she usually stayed.
She was extremely spoiled, and perhaps a bit mad. She was called the czarina in Venice, because in everyone’s mind she seemed more suited to a czar’s court than to the normal world. Obsessed about dieting, she would order pasta with no seasoning at all. The dish that reached her table, of course, was something on the order of library paste, and she regularly sent it back to the kitchen. When I was the one taking her order I would tell the cook to add just a touch of vegetable oil. Nobody would be able to tell, and the pasta would be excellent. She was fully satisfied and declared that I was the only one who understood her.
She was always escorted by an extremely polite gentleman named Barrett, a victim of her caprices. One evening the waiter failed to follow my orders and served the pasta the way she asked for it. I approached the table and had a glimpse of the pasta, which looked like a ball and was clearly inedible.
“How is the pasta?” I asked, turning to Mr. Barrett.
“It couldn’t be lighter,” Mr. Barrett gave a soothing smile, but started when she kicked him under the table.
Valentina absolutely refused to be served by certain waiters who, according to her, didn’t show the right spirit as they transferred the food from the serving dish to the plates. And she was not altogether wrong. One day when she was in a particularly good humor, she explained that in gastronomy, the most important moment is when the food is served, because it has to sum up all the effort and artistry of everyone involved in getting that dish to the table, from the fisherman or farmer to the truck driver to the wholesaler and finally to the cook. She could not bear a distracted or indifferent air in the ceremony of service.
While theoretically she was right, each time she left, everyone heaved a sigh of relief. In a spirit of solidarity, I would send a bottle of champagne to the staff at the Gritti, to lighten the spirit of those who had served her there. Whether she was essentially good or bad at heart, she certainly had a strong personality.
