In the New Yorker, E. B. White parodied the book’s style under the title Across the Street and into the Grill’:
This is my last and best and true and only meal, thought Mr. Pirnie as he descended at noon and swung east on the beat-up sidewalk of Forty-fifth Street. Just ahead of him was the girl from the reception desk. I am a little fleshed up around the crook of the elbow, thought Pirnie, but I commute good.
I’m told that the son of Baron Franchetti still lives in the family palazzo in Venice, and that is where we head for now.
Anyone driving into Venice these days knows that it is a journey bereft of visual delights. It can look sensational from a plane, or from the top of the old tower on the island of Torcello, or even from the steps of the railway station, but if you’re in a car you must be prepared to be pushed around the industrial extremities and squeezed over the bridge from Mestre and into the hell of the multi-storey car park at Piazzale Roma, before you catch a glimpse of anything remotely resembling a canal, Grand or otherwise.
On this our first night we make a bee-line, as Hemingway used to, for Harry’s Bar.
Now bars can be good or bad but they are always a hundred times better if you know the barman and he knows you. When Ernest Hemingway entered Harry’s he was doubtless received by Harry himself, shown to his favourite seat (‘They were at their table in the far corner of the bar, where the Colonel had both his flanks covered’) and served a double martini without ever having to ask. From those days come the classic Harry’s Bar stories, such as that of the elderly customer who, having waited an hour for a table, sat down, heaved a sigh of relief, and declared, ‘Now I can die.’
Harry’s Bar today is merely busy, full of people trying to be Hemingway. Drinks are pre-mixed and served with a dash of boredom. The room itself is small and, when full, is like an overcrowded cabin on a 1950s liner.
Harry’s Bar has become a global brand - a clock on the wall shows ‘Harry’s Bar time’ in Venice, Buenos Aires and New York, and there is a book for sale called Legends of Harry’s Bar. And that’s maybe the problem. Harry’s Bar was a legend. Now it’s a legend that knows it’s a legend, and that’s very different.
Breakfast at the Gritti Palace. Or, more accurately, breakfast-time at the Gritti Palace. Guests at this most exclusive of Venetian hotels are filling their faces in the dining-room whilst we, who have feasted more economically at our hostelry opposite the station, are setting up to shoot on the terrace.
Someone shows me a copy of Il Gazzettino, one of two Venetian morning papers, which carries a report of our filming activities up in Fossalta. The Italian language bathes our mundane efforts in a Dante-esque glow. I come out as ‘Il cinquanta-cinquenne attore Inglese’. It may only mean ‘fifty-five-year-old English actor’, but it makes me sound like the Renaissance.
We are here to recreate the true story of Hemingway sitting on this very terrace forty-five years ago, reading newspaper reports of his death after a plane crash in Africa. I put down Il Gazzettino and pick up a copy of the New York Daily Mirror for 25 January 1954 with the banner headline: ‘Hemingway Wife, Killed In Air Crash’.
He wasn’t killed but he was badly hurt, sustaining injuries to his skull, shoulder, spine, liver and kidneys. As soon as he was well enough to travel he took a boat to Europe and, for the second time in his life, found himself recovering from serious injury in Italy.
Once installed in the best room in the Gritti Palace - first-floor, on the corner, with balconies - he set about his treatment with a vengeance. The treatment consisted of a little luxury and a lot of champagne. But though Hemingway was an expert at recovery, his friend A. E. Hotchner, summoned to see him at the Gritti, could see that this time, things were different.
When I came into his room he was sitting in a chair by the windows, reading, the inevitable white tennis visor (ordered by the dozen from Abercrombie & Fitch) shading his eyes … What was shocking to me now was how he had aged in the intervening five months … some of the aura of massiveness seemed to have gone out of him.
It didn’t stop Hemingway playing baseball with friends in his room. The ball, a pair of tightly rolled woollen socks, was hit so hard that it smashed clean through one of the windows and out into the street. According to Hotchner, the manager pointed out that no one had ever played baseball in any of the rooms throughout the 300-year-old history of the Gritti. For this reason he had decided ‘to reduce Signor Hemingway’s bill by ten per cent’.
Baron Franchetti, the man who can tell me more about Hemingway’s return to Italy, has agreed to see me. The address is as it should be, a palazzo overlooking the Grand Canal.
Though it has turned cold, and there are ominous reports of the worst winter weather for a decade heading this way, the Venetian sunlight, low and strong, highlights the delicate details on the buildings as we head up the Grand Canal. I’ve always found Venice absurdly theatrical and today it’s more like a stage-set than ever. Above us, figures in eighteenth-century tricorn hats, black cloaks and snow-white face masks are crossing the Accademia Bridge. This is the first day of the two-week carnival, an ancient festival that disappeared for 200 years, before being revived in 1975. Those in full costume are, sadly, a small minority compared to those wearing anoraks, sweat pants and floppy jester hats bought outside the station.
The palace of the Franchettis is approached via a narrow courtyard from which rises the world’s smallest elevator, which disgorges the occupant into a cramped passageway, which gives on to a long, gloomy room at the far end of which is a pair of glassed doors which open on to a huge and dazzling panorama of the Grand Canal.
Alberto Franchetti is a slim, slope-shouldered man around my own age. The word languid could have been coined for him. He speaks softly and moves with a feline grace and an unmistakably aristocratic lack of urgency.
I ask him what I should call him. Should it be Signor Franchetti, or perhaps Alberto? He purses his lips gently, as if acknowledging some distant, unspecific pain.
‘Perhaps, Barone?’ he suggests.
After this opening skirmish he is courteous and helpful. He lights a cigarette and we stand on the balcony and talk about Venice until it’s too cold and we have to come in. The Grand Canal has changed, he says, registering distaste. Not one of the hundred or so palazzos along it is still occupied by the family who built it. It’s noisy with all the boats and the continuous activity. His mother was the last person to keep her bedroom on the Grand Canal side of the palazzo.
Aware of the short time we have, I try to deflect him from the plight of the nobility and in the direction of Hemingway. He recalls him with faint amusement, protesting regularly that he was only ten at the time.
Hemingway was ‘very informal, very American’, he tells me. He wore clothes that seemed marvellously exotic to a European war baby, albeit a nobleman’s son, flying-jackets and big fur-lined boots and check shirts. He would be totally at ease with the servants and throw his arms round any pretty girl in a way which was unheard-of in structured Italian society.
‘He drove around in a limousine. A big Buick! In that time, no one in Italy, not even Giovanni Agnelli [the head of Fiat] drove around in a limousine.’
The Barone pauses, leans forward, extinguishes his cigarette and speaks with soft intensity.
‘He lived the legend, you see, he lived the legend.’
After an hour together we not only part on Michael and Alberto terms but he has invited us to come to the last duck-shoot of the season and see for ourselves what Hemingway liked so much about this particularly Venetian activity. He impresses upon me that duck-shooting is a serious business, with rituals and traditions stretching back five centuries. Its rules and regulations are essentially feudal, rural and zealously observed. Shooting takes place at dawn but the preparations begin the night before. I am given an address, driving instructions, and warned to bring very warm clothing, and a jacket and tie. Oh, and no girlfriends, it’s male only.