IN 1953 MY FATHER BOUGHT A PIECE of abandoned land next to a dilapidated workyard on the island of Giudecca. The owner kept his pigs there to fatten them for salami. Anyone who thought it a suitable place for a hotel would have been considered a madman.
But my father often went there. He stood among the wild undergrowth and looked out at the broad calm lagoon. From where he stood, he could just see the tip of the island of San Giorgio to the left with its pink brick walls framing Palladio’s magnificent architecture. He firmly believed it was a perfect spot for a hotel. Then as the years passed, the difficulty of finding funds gradually dampened his enthusiasm.
One November evening, when Harry’s Bar was half empty, Lord Iveagh, the owner of Arthur Guinness, Son & Co. Ltd., the famous Irish brewery, came to dine. In the course of conversation, my father told him about the piece of land on Giudecca Island and his idea of putting up a hotel there.
“Cipriani,” Lord Iveagh said, “would you show me the place tomorrow?” Lord Iveagh was a grand old man: he was in love with Italy, its landscapes and its history. He had gradually developed a splendid holding in Asolo that also included the villa where the great actress Eleonora Duse had lived.
The next day the weather was awful. Everything was gray, cold, slightly foggy, and damp, but Lord Iveagh was undeterred. When the two men reached Giudecca you could hardly glimpse the lagoon, much less the island of San Giorgio. And it was so muddy no one could even walk around to see the place, except for Lord Iveagh, who, heaven knows why, always wore enormous shoes with studded leather soles. He didn’t say a word as they made their way around the pig run. Nor did my father, who was already regretting the foolishness of having dragged the nobleman all the way there. Then Lord Iveagh turned to my father. “Good,” he said. “Count me in.”
My father could hardly believe his ears.
A company was immediately established. My father provided the site, the name, and his future work, while Lord Iveagh provided the money. Exactly sixteen months later, in 1958, the Hotel Cipriani opened its doors for the first time. The night before the inauguration party, there was still no fountain in the garden. It was hastily dug that very night, and the cement was still wet the next day when it was filled with water and gold fish. The hotel looked like a large Venetian house with three wings, one on the lagoon side, one toward San Giorgio, and the third facing San Marco, and the three wings were so named.
The Hotel Cipriani expressed all of my father’s splendid, intelligent experience. It was the embodiment of luxury service — sincere people providing simple things — the exact opposite of snobbery, which is merely appearance and the semblance of people and things. For example, the hotel laundry ironed sheets of the purest Czech linen so perfectly that I still remember their fantastic crisp feel when I got into bed, on the rare occasions I slept there. The luxurious texture of the pressed linen was so exceptional that it was almost nicer to stay awake, to roll over with your eyes shuton the Scotch wool mattresses that my father opened up and fluffed twice a year.
He always welcomed arriving guests on the shore, and every day he would go around with the German housekeeper to check on an the rooms. The restaurant, of course, continued to require his exacting attention. It was the only eating establishment worthy of competing with Harry’s Bar in all of Venice.
A couple of years later Lord Iveagh asked my father to rebuild a hotel on his property in Asolo, the Hotel Belvedere. So in 1962 the Hotel Villa Cipriani was inaugurated in Asolo, which my father managed but did not own. It was an immediate success, one more healthy offspring of the wonderfully fruitful partnership between Lord Iveagh and my father. Their collaboration soon developed into a solid bond that was broken only by Lord Iveagh’s death in 1967.
Not long afterward, his heirs and the family’s new administrators made it clear to my father that even if he worked for the rest of his life, he could never buyout the share of the Hotel Cipriani that the Guinness company held as a guarantee against the loan my father used to build the hotel. The gentlemen’s agreement between my father and Lord Iveagh that each could buyout the other’s 50 percent share in any of their joint ventures had been buried with the earthly remains of Lord Iveagh, the last truly noble man of his family with one exception: Paul Channon, member of Parliament and nephew on his mother’s side. He too is a true gentleman.
So my father decided to sell his shares in the hotel at Asolo to the Guinness family, shares that represented 50 percent of the enterprise. He sold them in 1968 for the equivalent of $161,290.
Meanwhile Mr. Bernard Norfolk, who had looked after the Guinness family’s interests for more than forty years, was replaced by Colin Bather, an aggressive young manager from the Shell Oil Corporation. Gossip had it that when he left Shell, Mr. Bather’s colleagues at Shell celebrated for three days. The fact remains that not long after his arrival, all of Lord Iveagh’s property in Asolo was put up for sale, not just the hotel but the marvelous villa of Eleonora Duse as well. Officially it was all sold for $130,000.
It didn’t take long for Mr. Bather to convince the board of the Guinness corporation to sell off the Hotel Cipriani on Giudecca as well. There were two possible buyers, one a shipping company called Sea Containers and the other a very rich customer of mine who wanted it at all costs and who matched his rival’s offer. Nevertheless, Mr. Bather preferred Sea Containers, because they promised him a seat on their board of directors. Our customer’s bid included no such offer.
The president of Sea Containers then and now is a man named Jimmy Sherwood, a Texan. Enzo Cecconi, who was the manager of the hotel when it was sold, remembers him because his favorite meal was hamburgers, which he always ate with his hands.
Jimmy has a round face that looks as if it might have been waxed, and his head seems to sit, without the aid of a neck, directly on a body just as round as his face. The best definition I could give of Jimmy Sherwood is Homo ridens (“laughing man”). That is Jimmy to a T. He laughs — most of the time in the key of “eh.” Of course, constant laughter may be common practice among some American tycoons; I’ve seen it often. But you don’t usually expect a laugh in the course of serious conversation about the world’s economic crisis. Jimmy Sherwood manages to laugh about anything, with quite an unsettling effect on anyone in the vicinity.
Moreover, Jimmy lives and acts on the basis of polls and market research. And he is always up on what will happen in the next ten years. When he bought the Hotel Cipriani, market research showed that the age of elegance was coming to an end, and that posh was the new byword.
Posh means furnishings. Posh means épater le bourgeois. Indeed, the more a bourgeois is intimidated by kitsch, the more he is wining to pay for it and, what is more, pay without daring to complain — for fear of looking like a fool. This was about 1968, the year of the revolution of the snobs. Jimmy immediately got in line with the new philosophy, not least because it was quite congenial to him. In no time everything at the hotel changed. And unfortunately, the polls were right: the idea worked.
Architects and decorators were called in. The dining room was judged too banal, so a new one was designed in imitation of the Basilica of San Marco. The bar took on a Caribbean air. And the poolside apartments were decorated after the fashion of the cabins on Kassoghy’s yacht — with television sets that rose magically at the foot of the bed, and mirrors, mirrors everywhere. There were mirrors in which New Jersey druggists could proudly display their tanned faces and bodies and admire the reflection of their heavy gold necklaces and medals.
A round Jacuzzi tub was a must for the bathroom, and there were flowers, plants, trees, and forests everywhere.
The waiters were decked out in gondolier costumes summer and winter.
One July morning not long after the hotel was sold, I had breakfast there with some of my customers. It was hot. It looked as if fatigued gondoliers were rowing aimlessly around the garden. The maître d’ came over to our table, his jacket unbuttoned. He proudly displayed a ghastly studded belt buckle under his protruding belly.
“What’ll you have?” he asked in a tired voice as perspiration streamed down his forehead.
“Nothing from a maître d’ who doesn’t button his jacket,” I replied.
No excuse was forthcoming, simply: “It’s hot!”
“For everyone, or just for you?” I asked.
One of Jimmy’s first decisions had been to replace the excellent Cecconi with a man named Natale Rusconi as manager-director. He chose Rusconi from among the available snobs because Rusconi had a particular way with journalists and PR people; a liking for old recipes modernized to guarantee acidity; and an almost incestuous love of his own ego. I remember him saying with a superior air, “The more they pay, the happier they are.” It was his decision that the restaurant go overboard for the nouvelle cuisine.
Rusconi had been assistant director of the Gritti in the early sixties, under a Swiss director named Fred Laubi, who, in addition to having married an intemperate Ballantyne of the knitwear family, bore a dangerous resemblance to a hot dog. Shortly after he took over the Hotel Cipriani, Rusconi and his pal Laubi convinced a journalist who was living at the hotel at the time to put Harry’s Bar on the “out” side of his “In and Out” column in Town and Country. Henry Sell, the magazine’s editor at large as well as a treasured friend and admirer of Harry’s Bar, immediately fired the misinformed scribe. I knew then that postfascism was around the corner.
Among the hotel’s regular customers, the remarkable people who came every year to spend their vacation in this oasis that is Venice, there was a very old Belgian couple, the Boases. He was the quiet type, and she was classy, full of energy, and imbued with a keen sense of humor. Few women in the world, I think, can match the class of some Belgian women I have known.
They had lunch or dinner at Harry’s Bar every day, but only one meal a day. The other meal they took at the Hotel Cipriani, where they were staying. One day they came in at lunchtime quite upset. Madame Boas was in tears, and he looked stunned. I asked what was the matter. With tears running down her cheeks, she told me that the evening before, after waiting twenty minutes to be served minestrone, she had gone to the table where the manager was dining with some journalists. She teasingly asked why the manager’s table was served before hers. Her tone was bantering and friendly, the tone of an old customer who feels quite at home.
The response came the next morning in a letter from Natale Rusconi himself stating that the management accepted complaints at nine o’clock in the morning in the appropriate forum, namely, the manager’s office, and that in any case the Boases should consider themselves unwelcome at the hotel in future.
I telephoned Jimmy at once and was informed that no one was allowed to interfere with decisions of his manager, Natale Rusconi.
This deplorable story shows how the concept of service can be perverted when love is missing.
Yes, you need love to serve.
The Boases never came back to Venice, but it was a terrible blow for them. They had felt at home at Harry’s Bar, just as they had at the Hotel Cipriani when my father ran the hotel.
I sometimes wonder if the incomparable gift of service, which arises from love and civility, has been lost forever. It would be an irreparable loss.
Another of Jimmy Sherwood’s snob enterprises was the reconstruction of the Orient Express railway train. The purchase of the train carriages, on Mr. Bather’s advice, at first seemed to be a great bargain. The rusty old carriages that still survived in railway depots around Europe cost some thirty thousand dollars each. Once purchased, the finest decorators familiar with the belle epoque style were called in for restoration work.
When the train was ready to go on the tracks, it became clear that the carriage wheels could not stand up to the speed of modern-day locomotives. So after the money spent on restoration, a total of more than four hundred thousand dollars went to the revamping of each carriage.
It is a fascinating train to look at, but there are no bathrooms or air conditioning. There are two toilet bowls for every twenty passengers. But each compartment has an elegant porcelain chamber pot all its own.
One day a customer remarked, “That Orient Express is incredible — I’ve taken it twice,” and then with a wink, “the first time and the last.”
Jimmy was relentless in his pursuit of image and even decided to copy Harry’s Bar. He did it jointly with Mark Birley in London. But the only thing their restaurant has in common with Harry’s Bar are the chairs and the name.
I discovered this when I was invited to London to give my seal of approval to the new enterprise. I suppose the owners wanted to impress me, because a white Rolls-Royce picked me up at the airport. I felt like a groom on his way to his wedding. But if they wanted to impress me, the Rolls was the wrong choice — a Ferrari is my car.
The next day an enormous sky blue Cadillac came to collect me at the Connaught Hotel — just about the only oasis of service left in the world among the hotels I know — to escort me to Mark’s Club, as the restaurant is called, which must have been all of two blocks away. The striking young woman at the wheel looked something like a jaded majorette with white boots and enormous sky blue sunglasses. I honestly don’t remember if her hair was blond or blue like her glasses, it was certainly a pleasant enough experience. Outside the Connaught, I felt obliged to give the hotel porter a knowing wink to dissociate myself from this display of garishness. I felt as if I was on some kind of television soap opera.
Nothing came of the meeting, because I realized the only thing that interested them was using my name. My sister Carla was also invited to act as godmother at the opening, but she too declined the invitation. In the end, the part of godmother fell to the Venetian Afdera Franchetti, Henry Fonda’s ex-wife.