A Prince in America

By Alessandro Tasca di Cutò

A Prince in America

Descended from two viceroys of Sicily, Prince Alessandro Tasca di Cutò, cousin of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, author of The Leopard, was born in 1906 into one of Sicily’s most illustrious princely families. The early years of Alessandro’s life saw fabulous baroque palaces and perpetual grand tours of Europe with servants in tow. However, his father, a womanizing Socialist politician known as ‘The Red Prince’, steadily devoured the family’s considerable fortune to realize his ideals.
Alessandro emigrated to New York and worked as a car mechanic, a bootlegger’s driver, a cashier for the Saratoga racetrack and a runner on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange during the Wall Street crash of 1929.
After the outbreak of WW2, Alessandro returned to Rome and was assigned to the Ministry of Propaganda where he met Ezra Pound. Alessandro was later interned in an English-run POW camp in Padula in Southern Italy.
After the war Tasca, thanks to his language ability and ‘fix-it’ skills, was hired to work in the film industry to ease Anglo-American productions through the horrors of Italian bureaucracy. In 1946 he met Orson Welles who was to become a lifelong friend. Over the next forty years he worked on several of Welles’ films both in Europe and later on in America. Alessandro returned to the United States in the 1970s working in Hollywood well into the 1980s. Tasca worked with some of the great names of international cinema over his long career: John Huston, Joe Losey, De Sica, Pasolini, Antonioni, Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren, Humphrey Bogart, Peter Ustinov, Gina Lollobrigida, and many others.
Tasca’s singular adaptability was observed by the distinguished Italian writer, Luigi Barzini of The Italians fame, who dubbed Tasca the ‘bourgeois’ prince in an essay on Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa.
Tasca’s irreverent humour and remarkable ability to thrive anywhere results in a highly entertaining personal and social memoir that evokes the captivatingly varied worlds and characters of Belle Époque Europe, the 1929 Wall Street crash, World War Two Rome and of course the movie business and some its most illustrious icons.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alessandro Tasca di Cutò
• Release date: Jul 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465945648

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A Prince in America

Alessandro Tasca di Cutò

Copyright Alessandro Tasca di Cutò 2011

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PART ONE

SICILY, FRANCE AND ITALY

CHAPTER ONE

CHILDHOOD

There is some doubt as to the exact day I was born. Like everything else in our family, vital data were vague at best. Had there been a soothsayer, he may have read a portent of my life to come. There is no doubt that I was born in July. As to the hour, a few deductions on my part, coupled with tales from Grandmère, maids and other minions have induced me to establish that the event took place in the late afternoon.

I say this because Palermo, being almost tropical in the summer, is very hot in the daytime and grows cool as soon as the sun reaches the horizon. In residences like our palazzo with three-foot thick walls, the custom was to keep all windows with both inside and outside shutters tightly closed during the day and only open them in the late afternoon and throughout the night. I was born on a Saturday, the day before an election in which my father was running for Parliament. Naturally everyone was rushing around electioneering, including our family doctor. By everyone, I mean everyone useful to the Socialist Party. This meant that only women were left in the palazzo with mother. Contrary to the doctor’s assurance that the baby wasn’t due for several days, Mother went into labour.

No father, no doctors. Servants were sent to scour the city. Mother, just for the hell of it, decided to give up her Polish stoicism and, as the pains increased in intensity and frequency, let everyone know it loud and clear. All the windows were wide open, ergo my late afternoon theory. Little by little a crowd gathered under Mother’s windows.

The scene upstairs became hectic. I can just imagine the various Giuseppinas and Marias running around wailing like banshees and tearing their hair out. In the middle of all this stood Fanfan. She was a Frenchwoman, the wife of Antonio, Father’s valet. When the need arose, she also substituted as cook. I like to think that she stood by with a set of butcher’s knives. And so I was born. My destiny was signed: I had to take matters in hand. Fanfan intervened with one of her small paring knives and cut the umbilical cord. It seems that at this point I courteously turned on my back and exposed my sex for all to rejoice.

Meanwhile Father had arrived and, seeing the crowd assembled in front of the palazzo, looked them over and decided that among them a fat woman with a big flowery hat was a midwife. Without further ado, like a true leader, he propelled her upstairs to Mother’s maternity room. The spectacle that greeted Father’s unfortunate victim was one of serenity. Mother, having rid herself of her burden, was relaxed and smiling beatifically. I, on the other hand, was probably screaming my head off. Fanfan, being very clean, had no doubt by then wiped her knife; Grandmère was attempting to calm me, and the general assembly was gurgling with pride that it was a maschio, a boy.

The palazzo where I was born had belonged to my grandfather’s family, the Mastrogiovanni Tasca. I pride myself that I can trace my ancestry straight back to Angerio, the founder of our clan. Angerio was a Norman conqueror who settled in Sicily in 1064 after having given the once over to Britain and Northern Italy and found both places equally damp, foggy and uninviting. The straight back is of course a figure of speech as we had our quota of left-hand mésaillances and doubtful off-spring. My grandmother on Father’s side was the only legitimate daughter of Alessandro Filangeri, Prince of Cutò. After having had six or seven children out of wedlock he married his mistress of many years. She had been a soprano at La Scala in Milan where she sang from 1830 to 1834.

I don’t really know what happened when my grandfather took her to Sicily. She was from a solid, middle-class Milanese family and probably grew tired of producing bastards. Finally, the old Prince married her and she then had another daughter, my grandmother Giovanna, who was thus born as legitimate as a papal bull. She inherited all her father’s titles, as some titles in Sicily granted succession to women when there were no male heirs. I always felt like a usurper whenever I went to Santa Margherita and met other Filangeri, who, had Great Granpappy been strictly honourable and married sooner, would have been the princes. Such is life. Father, being Giovanna’s legitimate son, in turn inherited all the titles. My sister Gioia was only a potential candidate for a year and a half before I entered the scene on, as my birth certificate states, 24 July, or 2l July as my certificate of baptism says. Both agree on the year: 1906

My full name is Alessandro Lucio Augusto Mastrogiovanni Tasca Filangeri di Cutò, since Father inherited all the names and titles of his mother, the only legitimate daughter of the Prince di Cutò.

Palazzo Tasca, where I was born, was on Via Lincoln in Palermo. It was a large structure consisting of a main building of three floors and an attic, forming a quadrilateral with a courtyard in the middle. The ground floor was made up of stables, kitchens (the food being sent up to the dining room by a dumb waiter), storerooms and servant accommodation, such as the porter’s lodge and a flat for the coachman and his large family. My grandfather often had as many as a hundred dinner guests. Mother and Father’s entertaining was on a more limited scale, although naturally I was never present as Gioia and I had our meals with our nannies or governess in our own dining room with a footman serving. Other servants were lodged in the attic. I don’t know how many servants we had in all besides Antonio who was the maestro di casa cum private valet to my father. There were several uniformed servants, one of whom was always on duty when Mother and Father came in late. I remember this because once when I had been taken to the opera to see La Fanciulla del West and we returned there was a servant on duty. Antonio told me that in my grandfather’s time there were forty people, male and female, working downstairs in the kitchen, stables, laundry, gardens and so on. The palazzo had quite a large garden for a house in the city. Zia Maria raised chickens in her part.

Mother had a couple of personal maids, my sister Gioia’s governess had a maid, Vincenzina, and there were laundresses, stiratrici (girls who ironed) and so on. On the first floor Zia (Aunt) Maria had an apartment which she shared with my grandfather Lucio Tasca d’Almerita who had married Giovanna, Princess of Cutò. Of Lucio I remember a distinguished white-haired gentleman who sat in a wheelchair with a plaid rug over his knees. When I was taken to see him, I would kiss his hand. We lived on what was known as the piano nobile, the first floor with high ceilings, three ballrooms (one turned into a bedroom by Mother) and half a dozen smaller drawing rooms. There was also a long, large, glass-enclosed gallery connecting the two back wings of the main building. Of course my recollection of our part of the palazzo may be exaggerated by the fact that to a small boy everything looks bigger and more glamorous than it does to adult eyes but I have since found an article by Matilde Serao, a famous journalist, who wrote in the paper she founded in Naples, Il Mattino, of an interview with my grandmother Giovanna di Cutò in 1911: ‘I remember that majestic Palazzo Tasca, where the frescoes and pale marbles and the ancient golds framed the most beautiful atmosphere of art and luxury.’

There were two other smaller buildings, which being of different height resulted in an up-and-down trek if you went from one end to the other. Father had his apartment at the top of one of the smaller buildings with a modern bathroom which had a gas water-heater. Mother had a large old bathroom which had been adapted to this use. It was actually a passage that ran from the front to the back of the palazzo, so that when used as a bathroom both doors at each end were closed. This meant that if you had to get to the other side of the palazzo, you had to go through all the smaller drawing rooms, one of which was in a Moorish style, one of the large ballrooms, the glass gallery, a couple of secondary rooms, including the ironing room, and, finally, the room of the closets where Mother’s large collection of clothes was stored.

Mother’s bathroom had a monumental marble bathtub with a seat cut into it. At the time it seemed miles deep to me, but it was in effect quite a tub. Its main drawback was that the water was heated by a wood fire on the floor above, so that by the time the trickle of hot water reached the bath, it was barely lukewarm. But it really didn’t matter much as most winters were spent travelling. In the summer, to combat Palermo’s intense heat, Mother’s room had an ingenious air-cooling system. A stack of ice, one meter thick and four feet high, was placed on a table in the middle of the room. On all four sides four electric fans were placed on étagères and blew onto the column of ice giving a constant cool breeze.

After Zia Maria died and the only will that was found left her share of the estate to Father, he moved down to her apartment and took a section of it for himself. Father loved a lot of light and, as by that time the number of servants was considerably reduced and there was therefore no longer someone on night duty, he had an electric circuit system installed. This was activated by a switch at the small pedestrian door cut in to the portone (main front door). With this device the courtyard entrance, the downstairs hall entrance, the stairs and the rooms leading to his section of the apartment and the apartment itself were lit. Another switch by his bed turned off all the lights, except for the ones that were in his flat.

In the kitchen Pietrino the chef reigned supreme: how many minions he had under him I really don’t know. Certainly not as many as when my grandfather was active. Pietrino was devoted to Father and when Father sold his share of the piano nobile to his nephew Filippo, Pietrino was part of the deal. He was devastated. Pietrino had some rather strange theories: one was that to mix a salad dressing properly you had to fill your mouth with the right amount of oil, vinegar, lemon, salt, pepper and whatever else makes a good salad dressing, swish it around in your mouth and then splash it onto the salad. However, such was his contempt for my cousin and his wife that one day, when Gioia and I were watching him in his kitchen preparing a lunch for his new masters and some guests, we saw him spit great globs into the pan of seafood which fried instantly. I wonder if he ever did it to us.

There was another Palazzo Tasca on Via Garibaldi in Palermo, but that one was inherited by my grandfather Lucio’s brother Giuseppe who was the younger. It was quite grand and with it he inherited the lands which now belong to my cousin Giuseppe Tasca, among which the vineyard called Regaleali. These properties went to the younger brother because Father’s mother, the wife of Lucio the eldest son, had inherited the fabulous Filangeri di Cutò estates from her father and these in turn went to my father and his sisters. Among these estates was the Palazzo Cutò in Palermo, a stupendous baroque one which is now being restored by the Sicilian region. I don’t know at what point Father lost it but I don’t believe we ever lived in it.

Santa Margherita Belice and the large estate around it was a Filangeri di Cutò fief. Magnificent as it was, it paled in significance when compared to the largest of the fiefdoms of my great grandfather, aptly named the Principe di Cutò. It was further inland in the eastern-central part of Sicily and extended for 120,000 hectares, or 300,000 acres. They included the river Cutò which skirts Bronte with Nelson’s castle and a huge forest. Grandmère told me it took half an hour to cross it by train. I will grant that this piece of intelligence is not very impressive as the speed of trains at that time was not exactly comparable to the TGV.

Next to our palazzo at Santa Margherita was a beautiful baroque church connected to the palazzo by a high passage. In the church itself there was a loggia protected from indiscreet eyes by a screen. I remember going to mass in my pyjamas. Father once told me that the local bandits used to go to church when preparing an attack, praying and promising the Madonna a share of the loot if the coup went well.

But most beautiful of our family palazzos was the Villa Cutò in Bagheria. We never called any of our residences palazzo, but simply casa. Bagheria, however, which was a most impressive baroque building with huge staircases and ballrooms, was always known as the Villa because it was in the country for summer use. It too is now being restored by the regional and town government. Whenever the family moved from one place to another, the bulk of the servants would follow.

We also had a smaller, very pretty palazzo across from the cathedral in Palermo. I don’t believe any of the family ever lived there. I visited it a few times as in a large hall next to the entrance stood the magnificent Cutò carriage, now displayed at the Palazzo Reale in Palermo. Father said he wanted to sell it to an American film company, but I don’t believe he ever did anything about it. He probably lost it along with the little palazzo which he had inherited from Zia Maria.

Father had six sisters. The eldest, Beatrice, Princess of Lampedusa was the mother of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, author of The Leopard. Beatrice had a share of the Palazzo Cutò in Santa Margherita Belice. She and Giuseppe spent many summers there and he used it as the source for Donnafugata in The Leopardand described it in his memoir. As it was, Giuseppe, although not writing a roman à clef, did use his family environment and the host of uncles, aunts and cousins as characters in his book.

Tancredi was moulded on a distant cousin, Giò Mazzarino, who was adopted by Giuseppe. I have been told there are some echoes of my father and his advanced views in Tancredi: his youthful enthusiasm for the coming new regime of the Piedmontese liberators as some may call them, led by Garibaldi and the house of Savoy – in my opinion the one a mercenary adventurer and other a dynasty of petit-bourgeois carpet-baggers from whom Sicily got only exploitation. The son of Prince Salina in The Leopard who is browned off and leaves Palermo to go to England, could be a nod to me, the only difference being that I went to America.

Giuseppe and I had little contact, the ten-year age difference being so much more significant when you are young. Nonetheless, Zia Beatrice and Giuseppe were the last people besides Grandmère I saw in Rome before going to Naples to embark for America in 1927.

Father’s other sisters were: Teresa, Baroness Piccolo, mother of Lucio Piccolo, a highly esteemed poet; Giulia, Countess Trigona, who was lady-in-waiting to the Queen of Italy (much to Father’s disgust) and was, in 1912, murdered by her lover in a lurid scandal. I was only six years old at the time. My Piccolo cousins were quite extraordinary in their way. Lucio, besides being one of the outstanding poets of his day was a monster of erudition. He was fluent in ancient Greek and Latin and had a formidable literary culture. But with all of it he had a puckish spirit and a great sense of humour. Like his brother and sister, he loved animals, especially dogs. The road police of their district had been instructed to bring all stray dogs to their property. At their villa there were kennels and wire enclosed spaces, at times housing dozens of foundlings. A few had the run of the house. The villa, now a museum, still has a large dog cemetery where each pet has his own tombstone.

Casimiro, Lucio’s eldest brother, was a first-class painter and photographer. Giovanna, a botanist, ran the estate and the house after the death of her mother Teresa. The staff in the kitchen consisted of four, headed by an elderly chef. However, just in case they desired a little snack as a safety measure against starvation, the richly decorated dining room, with its beautiful furniture and outstanding porcelain, also had a modern refrigerator next to the massive dining table. It would have been incongruous anywhere else, but not at Villa Piccolo. My aunt Teresa, a capable woman, was also a unique character. Once she sent a message to cousin Filippo in Palermo, saying that she would like to see him. He got into his small car and drove the hundred odd miles to Capo d’Orlando, relishing the idea of splendid meals and days of ease. Once at the villa, always shuttered, he rang the bell to announce his arrival. A servant opened the door, nodded and shut it. A few minutes later, the shutters at one of the windows were opened. Zia Teresa appeared, smiled broadly and said, ‘Filippo, how nice to see you,’ and shut the window. That was it.

But perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Piccolo brothers was their passionate belief in the existence of elves, pixies, gnomes, the afterlife and its manifestations in everyday life. Lucio corresponded with Yeats and they compared notes on the similarities and differences between Irish and Sicilian inhabitants of the supernatural and folklore worlds. An early twinship between Sligo and Capo d’Orlando. In the case of the Piccolo, it was not, however a case of folklore. They would assure you that the spirit of one of their departed dogs was hovering about in the far right- corner or their main drawing room. If anyone goes to the Piccolo museum in Capo d’Orlando they will find Casimiro’s aquarelles of fantastic beings. He never gave any of them away and told me, without a doubt in his mind, that al his creatures had been drawn from life.

Another sister, Nicoletta, married Filippo Cianciafara and was killed in the terrible Messina earthquake in 1908, along with some 77,000 others. It seems that at the time Mother, Father and their friend, the flamboyant entrepreneur Ignazio Florio, sped to Messina and started digging through the rubble that had once been her home. Suddenly Mother saw a wall collapsing near the two men and rushed over to pull them away before it crashed down on them. My aunt’s body was never found.

My father’s fifth sister, Zia Maria, remained single all her life. She and her first cousin Lucio Tasca had fallen in love at a young age but the family promptly packed him off abroad. He was later to marry. Maria dedicated her life to the adoration of Father and would die of an overdose of sleeping tablets.

There was another sister, Pia who died at the age of eight when a cupboard she was trying to climb into collapsed and crushed her to death. I remember a life-size painting of her in one of Zia Maria’s drawing rooms. She was pretty little girl but shamefully I must admit that I always found the idea of being crushed by a cupboard funny. It has to be said that the Cutò girls had it rough: only two of them died peacefully in their beds.

Although Father was a socialist member of parliament of the district and strictly anti-Mafia, he was also the Prince and therefore respected. Grandmère (my mother’s mother) told me that the first time she visited Santa Margherita, her carriage was escorted by four mounted Carabinieri (military police) from the railway station to the Palazzo. All went well but the next day, the local representatives of Santa Margherita went to see Father and told him that they were deeply offended that his mother-in-law had required a police escort. If it was a matter of fearing an attack by ‘foreigners’ i.e. anyone not of the Santa Margherita Belice district, they would gladly provide an escort.

And so it was. The next time Grandmère visited Santa Margherita she arrived at night with a full moon. At the station she saw no-one, but as the carriage started climbing up towards the house, she glimpsed in the fields flanking the road men on horseback wearing wide black capes and large black hats, galloping and taking the dry walls of the Sicilian countryside with big leaps. This procedure was carried out whenever anyone in the family came or went.

Father was an extraordinary character. As a small child I stood in awe of him and always felt inadequate in his presence. Father and Mother were God-like creatures, whom early in life I decided I could never fathom. Mother liked me, rather as one would a frisky puppy. However, she did object to my stepping on her elegant shoe, and of course, in my determination to avoid them and gain favour with her, I regularly managed to do exactly that. Father wasn’t quite sure if I was a cretin. Early in life I developed a love of sports, an activity he considered fit only for morons. My real mother-father-mentor-friend was to be my grandmother, Grandmère. She, like Mother, was Polish, and it was she who was to shape my life from the day I was born and throughout my youth.

Father’s sustained fight against the Mafia and incidentally against members of his own family, was at times epic. He was first elected Mayor of Palermo when he was nineteen but Giolitti, the then Prime Minister, cancelled the election and earned the life-long enmity of Father. Father had founded a paper called La Battaglia, in which he attacked the politicians and leaders who protected the Mafia. He had documented proof of what he published. One night the offices of La Battaglia were broken into, the safe rifled and all the documentation stolen.

The next day Father was sued for defamation of character by those he had named in his articles. At the trial he was found guilty and given six months in prison. All his supporters and friends rallied to help him. Ignazio Florio offered him the use of his yacht until an appeal could be worked out. But Father would have none of that. He said, quite rightly, that six months in prison assured him the election to the Chamber of Deputies in Rome. Our family doctor told me some years later ‘You don’t have to feel sorry for your Father.’ It seems that before reporting to serve his sentence, Father went to the Ucciardone (the Palermo penitentiary) and met the warden. He proceeded to pick three cells, had doors made to connect them, plumbing and a water heater installed in one to serve as his bathroom, turned one into a study and the third was his bedroom. He then had furniture, draperies and other furnishings brought from the Palazzo. Only when everything was in order and comfortable did he start serving his sentence. Every afternoon during those six months, rich and poor, in carriages or on foot, circled around the Ucciardone showing their solidarity. When he came out, he had been elected a Member of Parliament and remained so for sixteen years. He withdrew only with the advent of fascism.

My father was a dreamer and once, years later, my sister Gioia and I found in an attic of Palazzo Tasca a musty old trunk full of old Greek uniforms dating back to when Father went to Greece to fight the Turks. This would have been when I was five or six years old. I can give no details about the campaign as he never mentioned it. As a politician he was a strange combination. He was a convinced and sincere Socialist but would get enraged when his adversaries snickered at the Red Prince with all his titles and wealth. On the other hand, he made a distinction between his comrades, the police and his family. Once, when an over-eager compagno at a rally slapped Mother on the shoulder calling her compagna, Father put a stop to any further fraternising with a glacial: ‘No, she is the Princess di Cutò.’ Equally, when a police commissioner addressed him as compagno, when arresting him at some unauthorised parade, he said ‘I am compagno to my comrades; to you I am the Principe di Cutò.’

If politics was his great passion, women were certainly no second choice. He was handsome. He was rich. He was a political cyclone. He was a man whom women fell for easily and it must be said that he made