no one was there after I pushed the swinging door open. Room after room, there was no sign of my mother or Mara.
When later they returned, chatting busily as they unpacked the groceries from their shopping trip, both women hardly seemed to notice me. That disturbed me almost as much as my fantasy of a Viscontiesque melodrama. How could my mother be being so friendly with Mara after catching us naked and guilty? I was more mortified than I had been upstairs in bed.
We returned to New York and that was that. There was no follow-up, romantic, punitive, or otherwise. It was like nothing had happened. A lesson in love. While it wasn’t the greatest sex in the world, in my book it was a perfectly fine start; I was pleased to have broken the ice.
I vowed, however, that when I had my first girlfriend things would be a little more romantic than doing it while my brother watched. I got my chance a little more than a year later when I met Marie. Like so many other things, she came through the agency—her mother was a literary scout for a Dutch publishing company. When we started dating, I showed Marie the town. I would travel into Manhattan, pick her up at her Upper West Side apartment, and then together we’d head to one of the places I’d noted from Ledig’s agenda of drink meetings when he came to town. I took her to the Grill Room at the Four Seasons and the Oak Bar at the Plaza because I knew that if the place was classy enough, they wouldn’t card a thirteen-year-old who looked more like seventeen, and his fifteen-year-old girlfriend who looked just that. Out of all our haunts, our favorite was Top of the Sixes, a restaurant on the very top floor of 666 Fifth Avenue.
Walking into the restaurant’s steely office building between 52nd and 53rd Streets felt important in itself. Isamu Noguchi’s sculpture Landscape of the Cloud, fluid and lithe lines in the ceiling followed by a floor-to-ceiling waterfall, 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