The Lost Prince Read online

  As I strolled the city on the lookout for fodder for my ET&L column, Pat sometimes accompanied me. One day while crossing Largo Argentina, I pointed out Vidal’s palazzo, and Pat asked, “How’s the divine Gore doing these days?”

  I thought it might help for him to realize he wasn’t alone in his unhappiness. “Gore’s only sixty-one,” I said, “but he tells me he wants nothing more now than to die. He’s fed up with the publishing business.”

  “I know the feeling,” Pat replied.

  “This was at a party at Donald Stewart’s place. Gay and Nan Talese were there, and Gore was upset because Gay accused him of sucking all the air out of the room.”

  “What is it about writers that makes them hate each other? And makes me hate them all?”

  “I don’t hate you, Pat. And I hope you don’t hate me.”

  “Gore has everything a writer could ask for,” he said. “Why the hell does he want to kill himself?”

  “Suicide’s not his style. He says he’ll just keep drinking a bottle of Scotch a day and let nature take its course.”

  “The trouble is Scotch isn’t quick,” Pat said. “And unless you have a cast-iron stomach it stops being fun.”

  “Yes, there must be more interesting ways to make yourself unhappy,” I said.

  “When you find them, let me know.”

  After that, he begged off our walks, and we met mostly in the evening when he was drunk and manic and enticed me into dueling tales about our grisly childhoods. Sometimes Pat “Tastee-Freezed,” as we put it. He laughed so hard alcohol foamed from his nose like soda from a nozzle. This deluded me into assuming that as long as he had a sense of humor all wasn’t lost.

  But one night at dinner he badgered his family to make up its mind: Should they remain in Italy or return to Atlanta at the end of the school year? Lenore voted to stay, and Susannah supported her mother. Everybody else voted for Atlanta.

  As he explained the decision to friends, Pat stressed that he missed his daughters. Joan Geller countered that going “back to America to be with three teenage girls was crazy.” I brought up the letters he had sent me lambasting everything about life in the States. I even risked his ire by observing that by dragging his kids back and forth across the Atlantic, he was replicating the rootless life that he had hated as a child.

  As if falling back on his last line of defense, Pat revealed that he had signed a million-dollar contract for his next novel and was nearly paralyzed that he’d never produce a book worth that much. To complicate matters, Beach Music was another book about the South. He said he felt the need to be on home soil while writing it.

  How could I blame him? Although his departure struck me as a painful defection when I was already dealing with the split between Steve and Joan Geller, I couldn’t begrudge him the adulation that awaited him in the States.

  13

  Gore Vidal had long acted as a combination border-guard and social arbiter in Rome. But with Pat Conroy’s star in ascendancy, the city acquired a second magnetic pole, one that reflected the power shift in the States to the Sunbelt. Corporate execs and correspondents from CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta flocked to Piazza Farnese, as did Hollywood screenwriters and producers eager to bid on the film rights to Pat’s next book. Between Christmas and New Year’s, Nora Ephron and Nick Pileggi swanned into town, and because Pileggi was related to Gay Talese, he called Pat, who put together a lunch at La Maiella, Nora’s favorite restaurant.

  Nick and Nora were sometimes described as the reincarnation of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. But they weren’t the type to get falling-down drunk and dive into fountains. Nor did they trade on beauty and sex appeal. In fact, Nora wrote hilariously about her physical imperfections, launching her career with a threnody about her small breasts and later fretting about the crepey skin at her neck. As a college coed she had been a White House intern during the Kennedy administration, and she quipped that she was mortified that JFK had never made a pass at her. As a humorous self-deprecator, she rivaled Pat Conroy. Even after her novel Heartburn was made into a film starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, she had no inflated notion of herself.

  Nick Pileggi was, if anything, more low-key. Craggy-faced and bespectacled, he had the slightly bemused expression of an English professor, not an investigative reporter who had penetrated the inner sanctum of the Mafia and published Wiseguy, later filmed by Martin Scorsese as Goodfellas. Now Nick was fascinated by terrorism. Recently the PLO had hijacked a plane, separated the passengers with Jewish-sounding names, and threatened to execute them.

  Nora confessed that she wasn’t a conscientious Jew. “You can never have enough butter—that’s my belief. If I have a religion, that’s it,” she had famously wisecracked. But that day at lunch in Rome she swore if terrorists seized her plane and demanded that Jews step forward, she would march with her tribe.

  The following summer, when I flew to the States to promote Money to Burn, the field was so chockablock with books about the Benson murders, my publisher pulled the plug on my publicity tour, stranding me in New York City. Because I couldn’t afford to stay in a hotel until Linda and the boys joined me, I crashed in an un-air-conditioned sweatbox that I vacated early each morning when the owner arrived to work there. Most days I moped around Central Park, searching for a shady bench un-encrusted by pigeon shit and unencumbered by loquacious madmen.

  Then out of the blue—or rather, out of a molten grey sky—Nora Ephron called. The Conroys had alerted her that I was marooned in the city. Since she and Nick were flying to London, I’d be doing them a favor, she said, to babysit their apartment. She instructed me to catch a taxi to the Apthorp.

  Nora hung up before I could betray myself as a rube and ask for the address. But the cabbie knew the building and drove me to Broadway on the Upper West Side to a mock Renaissance palazzo that boasted a massive iron gate and a courtyard that would have suited the Medicis.

  Nora greeted me in tight black stirrup slacks and a loose white tee shirt, looking like a waifish cleaning girl overwhelmed by the chores ahead of her. Max and Jacob, her sons by her second husband, Carl Bernstein, had littered the apartment with toys, socks, underpants, and baseball mitts before hurrying off to visit their father.

  “Don’t mind the mess,” she said. “Just shove stuff aside. I don’t intend to touch a thing.”

  I didn’t believe that, no more than I believed it when she urged me to move in the next morning and sleep in the master bedroom. Nick and Nora and I had spent a total of two hours together.

  I asked what I could do to reciprocate her kindness. She said, “Take me down to the deli and buy me a Popsicle.”

  She chose cherry. I liked lemon-lime. Jostled by pedestrian traffic, we lollygagged on Broadway slurping ice-lollies that melted almost quicker than we could suck them into our mouths. I had no idea what to say except, “Thanks.”

  Like the cashier in the deli, Nora said, “Enjoy.” Then, dropping her Popsicle stick into a trash bin, she added, “Leave the keys with the doorman.”

  I NEVER STARTED OUT TO spend long stretches of my life in strangers’ apartments. I counted on there coming a day when Linda and I could afford to buy a house of our own. But at the age of forty-four, after twenty years of marriage, I feared that we would forever be economic nomads. Still, I tried to look on the bright side and regarded each new place as an opportunity to act like an anthropologist and sift for clues about the owners.

  At the Apthorp, things were just as Nora had promised she’d leave them. In the kitchen sink, breakfast dishes soaked in tepid water. In the bathroom, damp clothes dangled from the shower rod. In the master bedroom, the pillows bore the imprints of Nick’s and Nora’s heads, and in the twisted sheets nestled a little black book, open to Meryl Streep’s phone number. Thumbing through the pages, I spotted listings for Diane Keaton, John Gregory Dunne, and Joan Didion. If I got lonely, maybe I’d invite them over for drinks.

  Although I resisted reading the open letters lying about, I rea
d the contents of the apartment like a book, fascinated by the arc of lives different from my own. Nick and Nora appeared to have spent a fortune to furnish an urban flat as if it were a shabby-chic farmhouse. This was the opposite of what people in Italy did—upgrade rural hovels into sumptuous villas.

  My snooping was interrupted by one of the twentieth century’s most illustrious sleuths. Carl Bernstein rang and right off the bat demanded, “Hey, who the hell is this?”

  I mentioned my name, which meant nothing to him, and explained that I was house-sitting. “Nora didn’t tell me anything about this,” Bernstein said. “How do I know you’re not a burglar?”

  “Call Nora in London.” I recited the phone number she left.

  “If you’re bullshitting me,” Bernstein said, “the cops’ll knock down the door in five minutes.”

  I guess Nora calmed him down. Carl never phoned again. But a garrulous gentleman rousted me out of bed the next day. The instant I answered he recognized that I wasn’t Nick, and rather than threaten me with the police, he began cracking jokes. Like Pat Conroy at his most manic, the guy treated the telephone like a stand-up comic’s mike. I had to interrupt and ask who he was. “Henry Ephron,” he said. “Nora’s father.”

  Drunk dialing from Hollywood, where the sun had yet to rise over the Angeles Crest, Henry was eager for an audience. In me he had found one, and he phoned every morning, as reliable as a wake-up service. I depended on those calls to get my day off to a rollicking start, and as my time at the Apthorp wound down, I told Henry I would miss him.

  “Well, if you’re ever on the West Coast,” he said, “gimme a ring and I’ll buy you a drink.” Then he asked, “What are you going to buy Nick and Nora for a house gift?”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “Wine. Not a bottle, a box.”

  At Zabar’s I chose a selection of Super Tuscan vintages, which I deposited on the dining table, along with a thank-you note that issued an invitation to treat them to dinner. I never heard back from Nick and Nora, and feared I had committed some unforgiveable faux pas. Although I had gathered the underpants and socks off the floor, and washed the dishes in the sink, perhaps I had erred in not ironing the clothes on the shower rod. Or did Nora object to my daily chats with her slightly soused father?

  When I asked Pat Conroy, hoping I hadn’t ruined his friendship with the Ephron/Pileggis, he told me, “Forget it. Letting you live in their place was no big deal to them.” From which I inferred it had been their favor to Pat.

  Speaking long-distance from Atlanta, he confessed he had a case of reverse culture shock. Once again he and Lenore regretted bolting from Rome and planned to spend next summer there—assuming Nan Talese didn’t tie him to a desk until he finished Beach Music, assuming Alan Fleischer didn’t drag him into court again.

  Like a bulldog with a bone, Pat wouldn’t let go of his mad-on at Lenore’s ex-husband. In the spring of 1988, he granted two interviews to the Atlanta Constitution, both of which disclosed that Fleischer had been indicted in DeKalb County, Georgia, for molesting Emily. Maintaining that his stepdaughter had given him permission, he revealed much of what she had confided to him during their sessions in the penthouse on Piazza Farnese.

  Pat contended that he had moved his family to Rome in 1986 to thwart Fleischer’s court-mandated visits. And he had returned to Atlanta because the charges against Fleischer had been dropped to spare Emily the trauma of a trial. This, he said, had convinced Fleischer to quit fighting for custody of his kids.

  None of this was, strictly speaking, true. Without publicly contradicting Pat, the DeKalb County prosecutor notified Fleischer that he was still under indictment and subject to arrest if he returned to Georgia. But Fleischer never abandoned his attempts to gain custody of his children and continued to petition the court for relief.

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1988, determined to make progress on Beach Music, Pat rented an apartment from a Polish woman who had aristocratic pretentions despite her address, which was next to Regina Coeli (Queen of the Heavens) Jail. Every evening, as inmates exercised in the yard, women congregated on a hill behind the prison wall and cried out to their husbands, lovers, and pimps. The chorus of names they shouted put Pat in mind of Gregorian chant, a plea to all the angels and saints to intercede and free their souls. He loved listening to the women and wrote about them in Beach Music, but otherwise did little work in Rome.

  Instead, a passel of his kids and their friends overran the apartment. Then Cliff Graubart and his fiancée pitched up, and Pat and Lenore organized their wedding on the Campidoglio. Droves of Southern novelists and cookbook writers who frequented Cliff’s bookstore in Atlanta attended the ceremony and had to be fed and feted. At a reception on the Conroy’s terrace, Gregory shot a film of the party, complete with footage of Lenore in a slinky black cocktail dress.

  Among the many interruptions to his writing, he received an invitation from Mickey Knox to join Linda and me for a Mexican dinner. Because Mickey was notorious for serving meatless, beanless chili, Pat was inclined to pass on the honor until he learned that Elliott Gould would be there. Gould had been married to Barbra Streisand, who was deeply involved with the film of The Prince of Tides, and Pat hoped to glean a few tips about his feisty ex-wife.

  Gould harbored his own motives for meeting Pat, just as Mickey Knox did for bringing them together. A tireless networker, Mickey survived by sheer chutzpah as a go-between and general fixer. A major source of his income derived from his rent-controlled apartment, which he sublet at an inflated price to actors on location in Rome. Perhaps he had Gould pegged as a future tenant and customer for his personal services. Mickey admitted to me how far he went to keep his houseguests happy. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to get Burt Lancaster blown every night of the week? It’d be one thing if he was willing to pay. But Burt thinks he’s still a star and chicks should go down on him for free.”

  Elliott Gould owned the movie rights to Bernard Malamud’s novel A New Life and pitched the idea of Pat’s doing the screenplay. He praised the cinematic scene in The Great Santini where Ben Meechum beats his father in one-on-one basketball. Pudgy and bearded as an Elder of Zion, Gould said he played the game himself. As a matter of fact, he bragged, he had gone up against Michael Jordan and cleaned the all-star’s clock.

  Although a shameless spinner of tall tales, Pat had his standards and never crossed the line about his basketball exploits. I expected him to tell Gould he was full of shit. Instead he said, “You know, Elliott, I’m the wrong guy for your project. If I remember correctly, A New Life is about a love affair between an English instructor and a faculty wife. Mike Mewshaw’s your man. He taught at the University of Texas.”

  Deftly palming Gould off on me, Pat collected Lenore and departed without a bite of Mickey’s beanless, meatless chili. I stayed on. If there was a chance, no matter how remote, of a movie payday, I needed to listen. The next day I tracked down a copy of A New Life, read it, and as they say in the business, took a meeting with Gould at his hotel. A family of gypsies joined us in his room. They were considerably cleaner and less flamboyantly dressed than Gould, who wore the sort of overalls favored by grease monkeys, a Mr. Goodwrench uniform. His feet were bare, and around his neck was looped a necklace of human teeth—his children’s teeth, he said. As for the gypsies, they had worked as extras on a film with him and he liked to have them around for good luck.

  The beautiful French actress Nathalie Baye swept into the room with a photographer in tow. She and Gould were scheduled to shoot publicity stills, and Baye objected that Elliott wasn’t in costume. He insisted that Mr. Goodwrench was his favorite fashion label. With sour misgivings, Ms. Baye allowed the photographer to pose them on the bed. But rather than embrace her face-to-face, Gould began slobbering on her feet. Whereupon she flounced up screaming, and I bid the gypsies adieu and slipped away.

  Pat expressed no contrition for sticking me with Elliott Gould. “Michael Jordan, my ass,” he fumed. “I can’t believe Barbra
Streisand ever married that asshole.”

  WITH THE CONROYS BACK IN Georgia, the cobblestones in Rome began to quake under our feet. Linda’s mother was diagnosed with early onset dementia and confined to what doctors referred to as a “structured environment.” Because she had no siblings, Linda needed to be near Pittsburgh, not a nine-hour flight away. Hastily, we decided to move to the States at the end of the current school year.

  Then Italian authorities launched a crackdown on foreign tax dodgers, arresting an American lawyer who managed the financial affairs of numerous expats. While he cooled his heels behind bars, the Guardia di Finanza seized his files and audited his clients. To escape the dragnet, people stampeded to the airport. The alternative was to do what Gore Vidal conceded he had done—pay up a $100,000 bribe to bury a potential tax squabble. Lacking Gore’s assets, Linda and I lowered our profile like crocodiles until only our nostrils remained above water. Even so, I was interrogated by both U.S. and Italian auditors, and I realized we were living in Italy on borrowed time.

  DONALD STEWART HAD AN OFFICE near Campo dei Fiori where he edited Playboy International. In the afternoon, while he enjoyed a long lunch at home, he let me write at his desk amid snapshots of prospective Bunnies. Each day as I hiked down from the Gianicolo, through the dense mesh of alleys in Trastevere, across Ponte Sisto and past the blackened statue of Giordano Bruno, who looked as if he had been martyred by fire that very morning, I was conscious of the city sinking into my bloodstream. Now that I knew I’d be leaving, I wanted to carry away a map of Rome in my heart.

  Even as I stored up impressions of Rome, I stoked up memories of Pat Conroy. Though he was no longer present, I clung to him as best I could. If I were an artist, I suppose I would have painted his portrait. But what I had were words, and I cloned him in my new novel, True Crime, without realizing that at the same time he was including me in Beach Music. Both of us borrowed key phrases, anecdotes, and incidents from the other. My book was set in Maryland, much of the action on a marshy island in Chesapeake Bay, which could have been coastal South Carolina. The plot revolved around events that had shaped Pat and me as surely as DNA. A drunken violent father, adolescent devotion to basketball, a college girlfriend who gets pregnant by another guy—every story point of True Crime sprang from conversations that Pat and I had had as we walked the streets of Rome surrounded by lapidary lines carved in Latin on stone. I depicted the narrator’s brother, a burly, wisecracking public defender, as much like Pat as wish fulfillment and my talent would allow.