The Lost Prince Read online

  I HAD BEEN BACK IN Rome a week when Mom phoned with news of his death. She said it made no sense to return for the funeral. In any event, I couldn’t have afforded another transatlantic flight. But she pleaded with me to have a Mass said for Tommy. She figured that a church near the Vatican would offer greater remission for his sins.

  The pastor at Santa Susanna, who had baptized Marco, agreed to dedicate the 10:10 a.m. Mass on September 27, 1982, to the repose of my stepfather’s soul. The church was nearly empty. Linda, Sean, Marco, and I had the front pew to ourselves. This was what came of having nothing but non-believers for friends, I thought. I felt like apologizing to the priest. But then, to my everlasting gratitude, Pat and Lenore, along with Megan, Greg, Emily, and baby Susannah, slid into the pew beside us, and together members of the Mewshaw, Conroy, and Fleischer families launched Tommy Dunn into eternity.

  5

  Linda and I moved that fall from the apartment on Via Carini to one on Via Maurizio Quadrio, three blocks away. The new place, a fifth-floor attico, had two large terraces and plenty of space for Sean to play with his action figures and for Marco to pedal his Big Wheel across the red tiles. I watered the potted oleanders, dwarf palm, and orange tree each evening as the sky turned the color of an intoxicating negroni. The rooftop garden’s largest urn contained an agave plant as lethal as a clutch of swords, and for fear the boys would impale themselves, I barricaded it behind wrought iron chairs.

  On October 10, Palestinians attacked Rome’s synagogue while worshippers emerged after services. Lobbing hand grenades and spraying machine gun fire, they killed a young toddler and wounded thirty-seven others. Susan Levenstein, an American physician who lived on Via del Tempio, witnessed the carnage and dialed the emergency number to report the attack. Then she rushed out and treated the injured until ambulances arrived. Impressed by Dr. Levenstein’s courage and professional sangfroid, Pat named the psychiatrist in The Prince of Tides Susan Lowenstein.

  On the same day as the synagogue attack, a bomb exploded outside the Syrian Embassy. It caused no casualties, and as far as I observed, no great consternation. The U.S. Embassy issued no color-coded alerts, and there was no noticeable diminishment in the numbers of visitors in Rome who contacted us for tips about restaurants and black market currency exchanges.

  AMONG THE NEWCOMERS WAS ANDY KARSCH, a former quarterback of the Brandeis University football team. He never expected this to impress anybody, but it had prompted an invitation from the Kennedy clan to compete in their touch football games. In turn, this led Ted Kennedy to make Andy the Issues and Media Director of his 1980 U.S. presidential campaign. When Kennedy lost the Democratic nomination, Karsch returned to his first love, filmmaking. A friend gave Karsch our number, and he explained that he was in town to produce an independent feature, Stars Over the City, based on a script he co-wrote. He begged for help with everything from laundry to his love life. The latter he hardly needed. He soon wound up with a woman married to a member of the black nobility.

  I introduced him to Pat Conroy, and the two of them eventually joined forces with Barbra Streisand to put together a film of The Prince of Tides that won them Academy Award nominations. Meanwhile Andy introduced the Conroys to Susanna Styron, the daughter of William Styron, the bestselling author of The Confessions of Nat Turner and Sophie’s Choice. As the script supervisor on Andy’s film, Susanna lived in a group apartment with the rest of the production team. But when the lease expired before the movie wrapped, she had to scramble for temporary accommodations and bestowed herself upon Pat and Lenore and their four kids in the flat on Via dei Foraggi. In those days, that’s how things rolled in Rome; one thing seamlessly connected with another.

  When Susanna’s parents checked into the Hassler Hotel, the Conroys invited them over for drinks. To ensure that he had the right liquor on hand, Pat asked Susanna what her father liked. “Scotch,” she said. “And lots of it.”

  The next night Linda and I gave a dinner party for the Styrons, Conroys, and Gellers. It was 1982, the pinnacle of William Styron’s career. The movie of Sophie’s Choice had premiered earlier that year and raised his public profile, which had been high with bookish people since the publication of his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, in 1951. Norman Mailer, seldom generous to his contemporaries, had written “. . . one felt a kind of awe about Styron. He gave promise of becoming a great writer, great not like Hemingway nor even like Faulkner whom he resembled a bit, but perhaps like Hawthorne. And there were minor echoes of Fitzgerald and Malcolm Lowry.”

  A Southerner from Newport News, Virginia, now displaced to rural Roxbury, Connecticut, Styron was the kind of writer Pat Conroy longed to be and would in many respects become, even down to the demons the two men battled. But there was no thought of demons that night as Bill arrived at our apartment in a pink-and-white-striped shirt open at his fleshy, sunburned neck. His wife, Rose, wore an outfit by the Italian designer Krizia. Deeply tanned and attractive, she was outgoing, unlike her husband, who held back a bit in shyness or instinctive reserve.

  Despite his reputation for aloofness, Styron had been a warm supporter of mine since we met in the mid-1960s, when I was a graduate student at the University of Virginia. He had warned me straight off that he loathed academics, and it didn’t help that I intended to do my PhD dissertation on him. But he forgave me when he learned that I also wrote fiction.

  He promised to read the manuscript of my first novel as soon as he finished the final revisions on The Confessions of Nat Turner. Not only did he read this manifestly unpublishable manuscript, he drafted a four-page letter identifying its few merits and its myriad flaws. While he recommended that I shelve the book, he added, “The important thing to me is that you are a writer, with all the fine potential that that simple word implies. Just as important is the fact that you are still very young (24), and have so much opportunity to do the big thing in the fullness of time . . . I would not have gone on at such length about your work if I did not have faith in what will come to you in the future.”

  Even back then when I was ignorant of so much, I recognized I had experienced a miraculous rite of passage. I clung to his encouragement, and whenever I reread Styron’s letter I recalled not just the morale boost it gave me, but what it revealed about him—his kindness, his collegiality, his willingness to assume an obligation to a neophyte for no better motive than that we both, though vastly different in talent, temperament, and accomplishment, were committed to writing.

  If all Bill had ever done for me was write an encouraging letter, I’d be deeply in his debt. But he also nominated me for a Fulbright fellowship to France where, while visiting Paris, he treated me to lunch at La Coupole and taught me how to winkle garlic-drenched snails out of their shells. He introduced me to James Jones, who in turn introduced me to Carlos Fuentes, and all that combined to introduce me to a larger world than I had ever imagined.

  Later, when I taught at the University of Texas, he had read to the student body from an early draft of Sophie’s Choice and he brought Willie Morris along for the ride. Linda and I held a reception at our house in the Hill Country, and I doubt the guest list has ever been equaled in Austin for its literary star power and sheer diversity. Molly Ivins, Ronnie Dugger, William Broyles, James Fallows, William Wittliff, Bud Shrake, David Wevill, and Zulfikar Ghose were all there struggling to be heard over the nasal twang of country and western singer Jerry Jeff Walker, who regaled us with countless choruses of “Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother”—until finally Styron shouted for him to shut up.

  THOUGH NOT AS RAUCOUS AS the party in Texas, the dinner in Rome had its moments. As he hammered back refills of Scotch, Bill said that he used to be a bourbon drinker, but a doctor had persuaded him that Scotch had fewer calories and was healthier. I doubted that anything, even Holy Water, was healthy when consumed in such quantities. But as he topped up his glass with Johnnie Walker Black, Styron swore that he was a teetotaler compared to Gore Vidal. “The guy’s killing himself with alcohol.”


  He and Rose had visited Vidal in Ravello at his sumptuous villa, La Rondinaia. For the Styrons it was a sentimental journey. In the ’50s they had settled as newlyweds on the Amalfi Coast while Bill completed Set This House on Fire. “No young novelist could afford to live there now,” Styron said. “The upkeep on Gore’s place must be a fortune. But of course fags don’t have kids to support and send to college.”

  Steve Geller was eager to discuss the script of Sophie’s Choice and what he judged to be Sydney Pollack’s slick and predictable direction. But Pat changed the subject to the Marines. Styron, who had served two tours of duty in the Corps, had no qualms about stepping out of the spotlight, and Pat seized it, segueing from tales about the Great Santini to accounts of his hilarious humiliations as a young writer. After self-publishing his first book, The Boo, and paying the printer with funds he borrowed from a local bank, he found an agent, Julian Bach, for his second book, The Water Is Wide. When Bach called with the happy news that Houghton Mifflin wanted to publish it, Conroy was nervous about the financial arrangements. “How much?” he asked.

  “Seventy-five hundred dollars,” Bach told him.

  “My stomach dropped,” Pat said. “I really wanted to be published by a famous Boston house. But I couldn’t afford to pay that much, and I didn’t believe any bank in South Carolina would lend me the money. Julian had to explain that Houghton Mifflin meant to pay me.”

  The table exploded in peals of laughter. Heartened, Pat pushed on and spoke about James Dickey, whose creative writing course he had audited at the University of South Carolina. A celebrated poet and author of the bestselling novel Deliverance, Dickey, as Pat characterized him, was a towering egotist, a nasty drunk, and a notorious womanizer. “He was the living embodiment of everything I didn’t want to become—a classroom pasha with a harem of worshipful grad students. I swore to myself—”

  “Mike, tell them about the time Dickey came to UVA,” Linda interrupted.

  “Let Pat finish,” I said. “Anyway, it’s your story. You should tell it.”

  “No, you,” she insisted.

  “Stop teasing us and tell it,” Bill Styron demanded.

  “This was before we were married,” I explained. “Dickey tooled into Charlottesville in an XKE Jag convertible and gave a reading to about a thousand cheering students. But in the middle of ‘The Sheep Child’ he paused to register his disappointment at the paltriness of the crowd. He paused again during ‘Cherry Log Road’ and sang out in praise of himself, ‘Goddamn, I forgot how good this poem is. It deserves to be heard by everybody at the University, not just a handful.’

  “Afterward a group of faculty and grad students gathered at the Colonnade Club to be introduced to the great man. Dickey didn’t pay me a damn bit of attention. With a highball glass in his hand and a leer on his face, he leaned cozy close to Linda, and said in a voice loud enough to be audible to everybody in the room, ‘Honey, why don’t me and you go back to my motel.’

  “Linda, God love her, tried to paraphrase that famous line from Paul Newman. Whenever anyone suggested he was unfaithful to Joanne Woodward, Newman supposedly said, ‘Why would I go out for hamburger when I have steak at home?’ But Linda gave her putdown a sweeter spin. ‘Why would I go out for a Hershey bar when I have mousse au chocolat at home?’

  “In a perfect demonstration of why you play word games with poets at your peril, Dickey shot back, ‘At least a Hershey bar’s hard and has nuts.’”

  Pat choked so hard with laughter, Lenore had to administer the Heimlich maneuver. That ended the party, and as Bill and I waited on the terrace, peering down at Via Maurizio Quadrio for the taxi that would sweep him and Rose back to the Hassler, he said, “I haven’t been up this late or laughed this hard since I was a sophomore in college.”

  SEVERAL YEARS LATER I WAS on the tennis court at the American Academy when Francine du Plessix Gray leaned out of the window of her studio. “Did you hear about Bill Styron?” she shouted. “He had a mental breakdown. Doctors don’t expect him to recover.”

  Although he survived that first onslaught of clinical depression, he suffered a number of relapses and was never the same writer again. He did, however, produce Darkness Visible, a brief memoir about his descent into madness. Each sentence as finely wrought as hammered silver, the book was candid about his obsession with suicide. The theme of self-destruction had been a constant in his work. Now it became apparent how pervasive it was in his personal life.

  Yet Darkness Visible skated over an issue that struck me as central to Styron’s career and to his illness. Like many American authors—Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Steinbeck, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Gore Vidal—Bill was, by any reasonable definition, an alcoholic. Whether he drank because he was depressed or was depressed because he drank amounted to a distinction without a difference. The sad truth was that liquor accelerated his professional and emotional deterioration—a fact which his memoir didn’t acknowledge. In the last twenty-seven years of his life he never published another novel. But he left behind a mash-up of manuscript pages for The Way of the Warrior, a futile effort to create a convincing portrait of an intelligent, deeply cultured Marine Corps officer.

  After Bill’s death in 2006, his youngest child, Alexandra, published an article in The New Yorker that later became a full-length book, Reading My Father. The memoir depicts Bill as cruelly indifferent, when not downright despicable. Before his crack-up in 1985, she writes, he was already a “petty despot,” a man of “cloven-footed madness” who terrorized his children and tormented his wife. Although he didn’t physically assault them, like the Great Santini, he verbally upbraided them, and erupted into rages that frightened the whole family. At Christmas one year he dragged all the gift-wrapping paper onto the front lawn and set it ablaze, bellowing, “Who are you people?”

  His studio behind the main house in Roxbury was strictly off-limits to the kids. He worked late and often woke past noon, badly hungover and belligerent. Rose took refuge in writing poetry and traveling. With his wife gone, Styron sometimes moved his mistress, whoever she happened to be at the moment, into his home with the kids. Alexandra relates an incident when as a baby she fell down the basement stairs and lay there bleeding because her sisters and brother were too scared to wake their father from his sacrosanct nap.

  In the loftier echelons of bourgeois bohemia, authors have always been granted privileges. For a male novelist of Styron’s stature, a certain amount of philandering was predictable. Yet even by the most permissive standard, he went overboard. He once propositioned Kaylie Jones, thirty-five years his junior and the daughter of Bill’s deceased friend, James Jones.

  “My father would turn over in his grave,” Kaylie told him.

  “Let him turn,” Bill said.

  When I interviewed Alexandra Styron about her memoir, she said she had forgiven her father and had no interest in judging him. The process of writing had proved cathartic. When I spoke to her mother, however, Rose laughed and declined to say whether the book had brought her closure.

  This called to mind that long-ago dinner party in Rome with the Styrons, the Gellers, and the Conroys. I have recorded what the writers at the table said. I can’t remember much of what the women contributed, perhaps because they mostly stayed silent. They listened, they smiled, they laughed as the men performed and preened. Even Linda had deferred to me when it came to telling what was, after all, her story about James Dickey.

  I wonder whether Pat Conroy ever reflected on that evening. He yearned to become a literary figure like William Styron, and he did so, it occurs to me, in ways he never would have imagined.

  6

  Writers constantly pitched up in Rome, some on their way to Africa or the Middle East, others for an extended stay. I was always on the lookout for ones who might be good company, and better yet, tennis partners. Mark Helprin was no tennis player, but he arrived in the autumn of 1982 as the Prix de Rome winner at the American Academy, the
esteemed author of two collections of short stories, most of which had appeared in The New Yorker, and a critically acclaimed first novel, Refiner’s Fire. He seemed poised to become seriously famous and rich. The rights to his new novel, Winter’s Tale, had sold at auction to Harcourt Brace Jovanovich for a quarter of a million dollars, then a remarkable sum for serious literature.

  At the Academy where ego gridlock exerted a perennial grip, it wasn’t rare for a fellow to stand out by refusing to fit in. But Mark Helprin was in a category all his own. Disparaging the place as “a shallow think tank,” he kept a calculated distance from that year’s crop of university professors, painters, composers, and architects. A political and social maverick, Helprin was an outspoken conservative and supporter of Israel. He claimed to have served in the Israeli Army and Air Force, and for good measure, in the British Merchant Marines. Because he was only thirty-five and had done a stint at Harvard graduate school, then Oxford, it was a puzzle how he had crammed so much writing, serious study, and military service into such a short period. During the ’96 U.S. presidential campaign, he would go on to draft speeches for Republican candidate Robert Dole and editorials for The Wall Street Journal. Later still, he was made a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

  While this might suggest a policy wonk in a pinstriped suit, Mark favored North Face outdoor wear and climbing boots with cleated soles. Physically he resembled the rightwing commentator George Will—a resemblance enhanced by Mark’s neatly parted hair. But in personality he wasn’t the buttoned-down type. He showed off his mountaineering skill by clambering over the American Academy’s tall iron gate rather than strolling through it. At the Christmas pageant for children, he played the Wicked Witch of the North and rappelled off the roof to stalk Santa, in the person of architect James Sterling, with Poet Laureate Mark Strand in the guise of Mrs. Claus.