63 - Looking back at Venice ... and Paul Newman

 

Newman circa 1975 (Spokeo photo)

     By the advent of my thirties, I had resided and traveled in several countries on both sides of the Atlantic; I was beginning to speak a semblance of fluent French, and had acquired an interest and a certain experience in art and theatre.  YET,  in many areas I remained extraordinarily green.   In some ways I was like the most Ozarkian hillbilly, just slightly camouflaged behind a more urbane mask.

I remember on my first trip to Venice, I was traveling alone, and had reserved my hotel through a travel agency.   It was a small, unexceptional hotel among thousands.  Though I have long since forgotten its name, I did at least know that much when I arrived at St. Mark's Square.  I knew the hotel was in the neighborhood, but hadn't the minimal savvy to even note its complete address.  

 

Pigeons on St Mark's Square 1976

  To be fair with myself, I had understood the address to be "St. Mark's."   However, I had only the name of the hotel, but no street number.   I didn't understand that St Mark's denoted a whole, vast neighborhood, far larger than all of Aberdeen, and not a precise street.
 

As I had a horror of being taken for a tourist (as if I would have ever been taken for anything other in a city of which there is little else), I didn't carry a map.   So with  neither the full address nor a street map, I proceeded --suitcase in hand-- to spend the next hour or more meandering around, in and out of every little side street off the mind-bogglingly enormous Piazza San Marco. 
  

If my memory is to be relied upon,  I think at some point when I was just about to drop from exhaustion and/or divulge my true identity as a TOURIST by asking help in English, I suddenly saw my hotel in the distance.  The only really crazy part of this story is that at the time I don't think I found anything particularly peculiar in my behavior.  It is today that I look back on it in dismay, and am grateful that I somehow, gradually got my act together a bit better in the decades that followed.

Paris 1976, Gare de Lyon.  Ready to embark

 on the Simplon Express for a first trip to Venice

While dragging my suitcase through the narrow streets around Venice's major piazza, I made an unexpected sighting: the actor Paul Newman.  He was strolling around Saint Mark's with a young woman who I later learned was his daughter.  

I did NOT ask Paul Newman if he knew where my hotel might be located.  I didn't ask him anything, though I certainly could have, as the international superstar was nonchalantly wandering about, anonymously, totally unimpeded by any sign of fan recognition.   That is, no one except me seemed to be paying him the slightest attention.  

The world of movie stars is a volatile one,  however.  After I checked into my  hotel, and went back out into the neighborhood to look around, I again spotted P.N.   This time, everything had dramatically changed.  In the span of about a half hour, he was now surrounded by a really enormous crowd.  Virtually unable to take a step, it was only thanks to a hefty contingent of local carabinieri  that he was separated from the growing mob, and escorted back to his hotel.

For the record, his hotel was the Gritti.    I had never heard of it then, and for a number of years afterwards I always associated The Gritti with Paul Newman.

* * * * *

Ever since the Paul Newman connection, I dreamed of one day staying at the Gritti, myself.  And of course I did.  It was not too many years later, I found a special off-season rate for a back room and took it for just one night before catching a train for Rome.  It was the time the hotel was flooded (see musing No. 31 "Fire, Water, and a Bloody Fall"), but that was only one of the inconveniences from that trip.  There was also a 24-hour transportation strike, and the following day all trains out of Venice were cancelled.  

I had no choice but to stay another night, and unfortunately an additional 24 hours at The Gritti --promotional special or not-- was financially out of the question.  So I had to move myself down the street to one of the city's  more modest and least expensive hotels, The Do Possi.  I don't know how it is now, but at the time the only thing to recommend it was the price.  It was a depressing comedown after my night at the Gritti.   

 I learned one thing that trip:  when you have to go from one extreme to the other, it's a lot better to do it the other way around!   

October 2013, on the Academia bridge ... 35 years later (photo Brenda P.)

That's all folks ... It's the end of the season

Another season of hotel musings now comes to an end.  I hope there will be other musings in the future, but for the moment I'm not quite sure.   I'll take a  break, and in the Autumn I'll see where my creative juices lead me.  

In the meantime, many thanks to all who have followed my posts these last two years.  Some of my old friends and a few new ones met out there in cyberland have been particularly loyal and supportive.   It's been a rewarding and sometimes cathartic experience.   I hope this will just be an au revoir!

 

Your input is welcomed:  frank.pleasants@libertysurf.fr

CROSS REFERENCING … a look at other postings

The Gritti Palace was also featured in blog No. 10 "Danny, the Night Porter", No. 17 "Celebrating the Holidays Away From Home",  No. 23 "Mrs. X at The Gritti", No. 31 "Fire, Water and a Bloody Fall", and No. 48 "Back to Venice ..." (to access, click on titles).

62 - Those who never (officially) checked out ...

       Or Death in a Hotel  

     Death is never a very joyful subject, and not one hotels generally much care to discuss.  They do have to be prepared, however, because it is something they are likely to have to deal with sooner or later.

     When it does occur, staff are trained to react with maximum discretion.   Many larger hotels have special hallways and back stairways to accommodate the comings and goings of funeral-related activities.  As nothing is more of a downer than a sheet-covered gurney pushed through the lobby, hotels will usually do whatever is necessary to keep reminders of death out of sight.

     Here is a little potpourri of hotel obituaries.   The only thing these celebrities had in common is that they all breathed their last breath in a hotel. 
 

* * * *

The actor James Gandolfini (whom Brenda and I had seen on Broadway the year before) died of a heart attack in room 440 at the Boscolo  Hotel Exedra in Rome last summer. The 51-year-old star of “The Sopranos” was en route to my old stomping grounds in Sicily to receive an acting award at the Taormina Film Festival.

 The Boscolo Hotel Exedra  in Rome was the site of the heart

 attack that killed actor James Gandolfini (Getty Images)

* * * *

Poet and author Dylan Thomas succumbed to alcoholism in November of 1953 at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City. It was just two days after having told the desk clerk : “I've just just had 18 straight whiskeys, I think that's my record.”

Playwright Tennessee Williams died in the more upmarket Hotel Elysée in 1983 in a similarly advanced state of alcoholism.  The official cause was that he choked to death on the cap from a bottle of eye drops.

* * * *

Singer Whitney Houston, was discovered dead in the bathtub of room 434 at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills in 2012. Death was attributed to accidental drowning, but hey! just between you and me, drugs were definitely involved!

Hendrix 1968 (Bing)

Houston's was but the most recent of a rock history of high profile drug-related hotel demises.  Rock legend Janis Joplin checked out not far away at the Landmark Motor Hotel just off Sunset Strip in Hollywood. She was only 27 when she died there in 1970 of a heroin overdose.

Jimi Hendrix succumbed to a fatal overdose of sleeping pills in London's Samarkand Hotel one month earlier. Both deaths were ruled accidental.

* * * *

Wilde (Google)

  Oscar Wilde, who was surprisingly only 46, died of cerebral meningitis at the Hotel Alsace in Paris in 1900.  His last words were reported to be: “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death... and one of us has got to go!” (See Musing No. 58, Rue des Beaux Arts: Oscar Wilde, David Hockney and Francis Bacon, for more).

* * * *

    

Chanel at home at The Ritz (Vogue)

  It was 1971.  At the ripe old age of 87, Coco Chanel, the French fashion designer credited with inventing “the little black dress”, died of natural causes in her suite at the Paris Ritz where she had resided since 1934.  One of her most important rivals in the years between the wars, Jean Patou, was found dead across town at the Hotel George V some three decades earlier. 

Patou 1932 (Le Monde)

   Patou's name hasn't retained quite the luster of Chanel's in the intervening years, but both of their couture houses have continued long after their deaths. Patou had the last word, of sorts, when his creation “Joy” was voted “perfume of the century” by an international perfume association in 2000, narrowly beating out “Chanel No. 5.”

* * * *

German composer Richard Wagner died at the Palazzo Vendramin Calergi in 1883 while wintering in the now defunct Venetian hotel with his family. He was purported to be composing a new opera when he lost consciousness.  Wagner's grand hotel death later inspired Thomas Mann's much adapted novella “Death in Venice.”

* * * *

Posthumous Harriman bio

   Pamela Churchill Harriman, the British-born socialite cum political activist who became a highly effective and popular U.S. Ambassador to France during the Clinton administration, suffered a fatal stroke while swimming in the Ritz pool in 1995. Then-President Jacques Chirac, who had a close friendship with the glamorous diplomat, awarded and placed the cross of the Légion d'honneur on her coffin before it boarded Air Force One for the U.S.A.

Covergirl Thatcher

Her compatriot Margaret Thatcher had already retired from active politics before Harriman was named ambassador. She began a long descent into illness soon after being pushed out of office by her own party in 1990. 

Two of her oldest friends were David and Frederick Barclay, the brothers who owned the London Ritz.   After being diagnosed with Alzheimers, Mrs. Thatcher continued to live in her London home for a number of years. But in her declining months, following bladder surgery, the Barclays insisted that she move into a suite at the Ritz where she was tended by her own caregivers as well as the hotel staff.    It was there that she died in April of 2013 of a stroke while reading in bed.

Mrs. Thatcher's home at the Ritz.  In her last weeks, she was sometimes able to lunch at the hotelrestaurant where diners and staff often applauded when she entered with her caregiver.

* * * *

This hotel necrology is far from exhaustive, I have selected but a few of the better known examples.  When you get right down to it, I suppose the luxurious surroundings mattered little.   Dying in a grand hotel is still dying, but for some it may have made the final exit just a tad more comfortable.

 

SIDEBAR: A Luxurious Exit

Marie McDill in her garden back home in Vermont (NY Times)

     When Marie McDill was diagnosed with a fast-spreading terminal cancer, she had one wish: to go out in style! 

No stranger to elegant living, the seventy-year-old New England widow always had a soft spot for her favorite NYC hotel, The Carlyle.  So, she put her affairs in order, said goodby to her friends in Vermont, and moved into the iconic Madison Avenue hostelry.

With the support and complicity of her three children, she had booked herself into an eighth-floor suite just ten days after receiving the grim medical prognosis.   Marie McDill died peacefully in her sleep ten weeks later.

The family hired two hospice attendants from Brooklyn to care for Mrs. McDill:  Rose and her sister Shirley rotated shifts on a 24-hour basis.  In the evenings, Rose would sing spirituals for her patient-friend.

"She would put her head back and close her eyes and ask me to sing 'Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.'  She'd say, 'Give me the long version, Rose.' "   Rose, who took the subway from her East New York apartment to stay in the Carlyle with Mrs. McDill, later shared her memories with The New York Times.

“It was like low class to high class, going in there,” she said. “I would call her my queen, my majesty, and she called me her princess. And you know, she treated me like one.”

 

McDill in younger days (NY Times)

  Even as she was dying, she would walk with Rose or Shirley into nearby Central Park most afternoons.  Evenings, she would sit on a sofa in the back of Bemelmans Bar, frequently sending requests for her favorite Cole Porter tunes to the hotel's resident pianist, Loston Harris.  

Mrs. McDill's children organized a memorial service at St. Bartholomew's Church on Park Avenue.  It was a sophisticated and poignant and very un-funeral-like affair.  Loston Harris played "Just One Of Those Things" and "I've Got You Under My Skin."  The hospice care sisters were also there, and Rose sang "Swing Low ..." once again.   There was a colorful sprinkling of the green uniform worn by doormen, elevator operators and bellhops from her last New York residence.

The service was well attended, but Marie McDill would have undoubtedly been most pleased of all by the large turnout of her friends among the staff of the Carlyle.  

 


Your input is welcomed:  frank.pleasants@libertysurf.fr