Self-portrait, Via Appia Antica, Rome, 1950
Introduction
Milton Gendel was waiting by the open door of his apartments in Palazzo Primoli, not far from Piazza Navona, in Rome, when I stopped by for a first visit, in 2011. His slender frame was angled comfortably against the doorframe, the pose of a younger man. He was already ninety-two. During the seven years he had left, I saw him three or four times a year, whenever I was in Rome. We had been introduced by a mutual friend, which in Gendel’s case could have been almost anyone. His range of friends and acquaintances was wide, his capacity for extending it unconstrained. To know Gendel was to achieve one degree of separation from an improbable array of characters. Some are people you’ll have heard of: Diana Cooper, Mark Rothko, Iris Origo, Princess Margaret, André Breton, Robert Motherwell, Anaïs Nin, Gianni Agnelli, Gore Vidal, Martha Gellhorn, Alexander Calder, Muriel Spark … and a thousand more like these. Others are people who have left no public footprint but with whom he was just as happy to spend his time—the ordinary Romans he lived among for seven decades, from his arrival in the city in 1949, at the age of thirty, until his death in 2018, just two months shy of his hundredth birthday.
“Placing” Milton Gendel—defining his life, his work, his context, his role—is not a conventional task. He was a photographer, a critic, a sounding board, a facilitator, a convener, a collector. Asked why he had chosen to spend his life in Rome, he would generally reply that he was “just passing through,” which is what everybody is doing in Rome, whether they know it or not. His various homes in the city were certainly a destination for others passing through—writers and artists, actors and journalists, aristocrats and arrivistes and members of what used to be called the jet set. It was a long twentieth-century moment that will someday have a name, with the ancien régime still palpable in its twilight but so much else upended or made new. Privately, Gendel was a diarist, leaving behind daily entries totaling some ten million words. The diaries cover everything from mundane details of Gendel’s family life to accounts of his travels and observations about books, movies, and the arts. Meticulously, they also memorialize the scene, and the conversation, at numberless intimate gatherings. Gendel was a superb writer, with an ear for the sharp as well as the absurd, a sly sense of humor, and a gift for decisive assessment. (The sex scenes in Zabriskie Point, he writes in one entry, bring to mind “coupling dogs trying to obey the laws of the Stanislavski method.” The painter Balthus, he writes in another, resembles “a lizard with a high IQ” whose slow, deliberate speech “gives even banalities a certain weight.”) At the same time, he was personally unobtrusive. That angled pose in the doorway, watching my approach, captures something of his manner. In a Sargent painting, he might be the shadowy figure in the background, the one you wonder about.
Milton Gendel and Mr. Katz, 61 Washington Square, New York City, 1944
One way to get an immediate feel for the man was to pass through the heavy wooden doors into the suite of rooms that took up most of the piano nobile of the Palazzo Primoli. He had only recently moved in when I arrived—he had lost a previous apartment, in the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj—and was still unpacking, but the walls were already hung with paintings (modern, baroque), and the shelves already sagged with his books. Still unpacked were a lifetime of photographic negatives waiting to be catalogued, and the library recently left to him by Cesare D’Onofrio, the noted historian of Rome. Every horizontal surface—floors, tables, windowsills—held objects collected over a lifetime: Etruscan pottery, Roman marbles, medieval carvings, crèche figures from Naples, bas-reliefs in bronze, commemorative medallions, coins and medals, candlesticks, masks, Judaica. For decades, Gendel made a weekly pilgrimage to the flea market at Porta Portese. On a desk, nestled in a wooden concavity to prevent its rolling, sat a cannonball recovered from the breach of the Aurelian Wall, in 1870, when the forces of Italian reunification overcame the last resistance of Pope Pius IX. In a bedroom, a pair of shoes had been framed and hung on the wall, the soles facing outward. Once, years earlier, Gendel had accidentally walked on some wet white paint; when he put his feet up one evening, his friend Alexander Calder had seen an opportunity and drawn a wiry portrait of Gendel on each surface, one in profile and one full face.
In time, I came to know Gendel’s wife of nearly forty years, the artist Monica Incisa della Rocchetta, and his daughter, Anna Mathias, whose mother, Judy Montagu, Gendel’s second wife, died in 1972. I also came to appreciate, firsthand, Gendel’s peculiar magnetism. He was, as Anna once described him, “his own cultural microclimate.” There was hardly a subject one could mention about which he lacked knowledge—ancient tombs, modern politics, gallery prices, romantic entanglements, Renaissance history, Victorian literature, local genealogy—and yet he was never the first to bring a subject up. He had a way of steering conversations while seeming to be in the passenger seat. Monica Incisa captured some of these qualities in the course of a conversation not long after Gendel’s death.
Milton was very curious—well educated, but extremely curious. Often we would spend time in bed, each of us reading a book, and then we would read to one another and discuss what might be interesting. He knew a lot about lots of things, and had a way of conveying them to you in a deep but amusing way. He was a very good listener. He was not modest—he knew perfectly well what he was—but he was modest in his attitudes. He never spoke over other people, which with Italian men happens very often. He really looked at people, and listened to them. He always waited until you spoke. If you asked him a question, he would take time to think about it. I don’t think I ever heard him say something stupid, which happens even to the best of us. At the same time, though, he was never boring.
Looking back on the century of his life, it is hard to discern anything like an overt strategy. Some people are visibly driven in a particular direction. They conduct their affairs like a high-stakes chess match. Gendel was deliberate and serious about many things, quick to seize opportunities, and sometimes insistent about aesthetic decisions; but following a master plan was not part of the repertoire. He played a helpful role in the careers of hundreds of people, but not in a transactional way, as if gain for himself were the true object. He put immense effort into writing his diary, but it would remain private. He took photographs wherever he went, binding them carefully in volumes of his own design, but exhibited nothing until he was fifty-eight, and even then the exhibition came about by accident, and was someone else’s idea.
Over lunch one day across the street from Palazzo Primoli, Gendel’s longtime friend Barbara Drudi, a scholar and critic, put it this way: “He had a kind of good fortune. He never pushed his destiny. He never searched for success. And something happened anyway.”
* * *
Milton Gendel, the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia, was born in New York City on December 16, 1918. His father, Meyer, owned a garment business; his mother, Anna, was a seamstress. An older brother, Edward, would become a doctor.
Milton always thought of himself as a New Yorker, even after seven decades in Rome. He attended Columbia University as an undergraduate and then, with his friend Robert Motherwell, stayed on to pursue a master’s degree in art history. His mentor, for whom he worked as an assistant, was the legendary art historian Meyer Schapiro. In the late 1930s and early ’40s, the New York art scene had been both fortified and turned upside down by the arrival of the surrealists—airlifted (literally) from war-torn Europe by the collector Peggy Guggenheim—and Milton was soon immersed in this world. The apartment he shared with his girlfriend (later his first wife), Evelyn Wechsler, at 61 Washington Square, became an artistic and social hub.
Summer in New York, age ten
Gendel and Motherwell were invited to join the staff of André Bre-ton’s surrealist magazine VVV. Gendel left an account of those heady years, published as a short monograph, The Margin Moves to the Middle, in 1993:
The dominant personality was Breton, a full-bodied man with a big head banked with wavy hair, who had a deliberate histrionic manner. He would stand up, put one foot forward, and declaim—statements or lines of poetry—accompanying himself with elocutionary gestures. I imagined this repertory as going back to sessions of the States-General during the French Revolution … Peggy Guggenheim’s planeload of protagonists of the arts and intellect had included her second husband, Max Ernst, who was generally silent during Breton’s meetings but visually present. He looked like the American bald eagle on the Great Seal of the United States, flown in somehow from Europe. At the Guggenheim house on the East River, where the VVV group frequently spent their evenings, Ernst sat enthroned in an armchair with a theatrically high back that gave him an odd dimension, as if he had undergone the shrinking process described in Alice in Wonderland. Among the younger “Europeans” was the Chilean Matta Echaurren, who had studied architecture with Le Corbusier in Paris, but then had become a painter. He was the liveliest member of the group, galvanically in movement as he spewed torrents of words.
With Evelyn Wechsler, his first wife, outside the Washington Square apartment, 1944
What brought this life to an end—for Gendel, though not for others in this Greenwich Village circle—was the United States’ entry into the war. Gendel believed he should join the fight, and in 1942 he enlisted in the army. The decision caused a rupture with André Breton, who told him, “Vous voulez participer à cette bêtise, mais je dois dire que ça c’est con” [You want to take part in this stupidity, but I must tell you it’s idiotic].
Joining the army would prove decisive, though not in a predictable way. After attending language school at Yale, Gendel was sent to China, where in 1945 and ’46 he assisted with the repatriation of Japanese soldiers. It was there, with a borrowed Leica, that he began taking photographs, chronicling ordinary life in Chinese cities. Returning to New York, he worked briefly as a writer for Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia—his archivist impulses getting a thorough workout—while applying for a Fulbright scholarship to take him back to China. He won the Fulbright, but by then China’s civil war had culminated in the victory of Mao Zedong’s Communists. Access was no longer possible for an American. Gendel decided to go to Rome instead, where he would study Italian architecture as it had developed in the period after reunification. Gendel had been in Rome once before, when he was twenty, as Europe was spiraling into war. He returned with Evelyn in December 1949.
Gendel held on to everything. I remember seeing the battered filing cabinets at Palazzo Primoli that held his diaries and his correspondence. So it is not surprising that there survives a copy of a letter that Evelyn sent home within weeks of taking up residence in Rome:
We are indefatigable tourists, leaping from monument to ruin to gallery. Weekends we’ve been making excursions to Tivoli (Villas d’Este and Adriana), to Ostia Antica, and to Viterbo, touring the countryside en route, through Caprarola (Palazzo Farnese) and the medieval hill towns, with lots of Etruscan rock tombs on the side. We have by now a considerable collection of small portable treasures looted from every site within a fifty-mile radius of Rome. Also, we got blessed from three feet away by the Pope himself in person on Xmas eve in St. Peter’s, and on the following day we got blessed by a priest in Santa Maria Maggiore, who leaned on a wooden box in the wall to tap us each on the head with a long wand, like a prankish schoolboy.
Not long after their arrival, Evelyn met the novelist and essayist Sybille Bedford—whose ramshackle apartment, near the Spanish Steps, Gendel helped to rewire—and began a long affair. Her marriage to Milton came to an end. Evelyn eventually returned to New York and became a literary agent and book editor. She and Milton remained friends.
* * *
The Fulbright ended in 1951, but Gendel stayed on. He had picked up Italian—a very good, precise Italian, though he always spoke it with an American accent—and was gradually becoming embedded in Rome. His influential architect friend Bruno Zevi had introduced him to Adriano Olivetti, the industrialist and social visionary, and Olivetti took him on as his English-speaking public relations adviser. Gendel also turned his hand to translation, starting with Zevi’s book Saper vedere l’architettura, which would eventually be published in English under the title Architecture as Space. Meanwhile, Gendel was writing for ARTnews about modern painters in Italy such as Alberto Burri and Toti Scialoja; eventually he became the magazine’s official Rome correspondent. Later he wrote a series of books about architectural monuments, like the Colosseum and Hagia Sophia. Throughout his time in Rome, he helped friends by writing bits of text for their exhibitions and introductions for their catalogues.
Vittoria Berla Olivetti with the twins Natalia and Sebastiano, Rome, 1960 (Photograph by Gordian Troeller)
Very early on—in April 1950—Gendel made a connection that would lead to a lifelong friendship: with Countess Anna Laetitia Pecci-Blunt, known as Mimì, an impresario of the arts in Rome both before and after the war and a shrewd collector of paintings, books, and maps. She was a great-niece of Pope Leo XIII, who had baptized her, and a larger-than-life figure who spoke five languages. She maintained a palazzo in Rome, at the foot of the Capitoline Hill, and a seventeenth-century villa outside Lucca—Villa Reale di Marlia, in Capannori, which had once been owned by Napoleon’s sister.
A gallery owner had arranged for an invitation to a reception being held by Pecci-Blunt, and on a wet night Milton and Evelyn made their way to the palazzo. Milton had already begun keeping a diary:
John Deakin, the English photographer, had been preening himself about an invitation to Countess Pecci-Blunt’s. Fabulously rich, you know. Magnificent apartment and collection of modern paintings. Don’t touch my suit, must wear it on Wednesday; must look my best, you know. When my invitation came, I didn’t mention it to Deakin because I wanted the joke of walking into the place and finding him there. It rained the night of the party, and Evelyn had to walk gingerly over the Capitoline Hill to Piazza d’Aracoeli, trying to keep her shoes out of the puddles. Three footmen took our coats in the reception hall, a vast barrel-vaulted room covered with frescoes. Then followed three or four reception rooms, also vast, also frescoed and filled with sofas, heavy tables, soft lamps, flowers, and Renaissance paintings. These rooms were not occupied; the party was concentrated in the last hall, a final barrel-vaulted room full of chattering guests.
Pecci-Blunt’s first words to Gendel were: “Oh yes. I know who you are.” His friendship with Mimì, like those with Peggy Guggenheim and the writer and art expert Tom Hess, helped open doors to what would otherwise have been an impenetrable social world.
Peter Benson Miller, an art historian and a friend of Gendel’s, mounted a major exhibition of his work in 2011 and is in the process of organizing another exhibition. Until 2019, Miller was the Andrew Heiskell Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome. We spoke one afternoon in the academy’s garden, on a bench by an olive tree. Miller brought up “an ease and almost nonchalance” that Gendel possessed, an ability to make friendships that transcended social class or creative field or nationality:
It’s not enough just to meet people. You have to maintain and cultivate relationships, especially in a country like Italy in the ’50s, where people didn’t invite you to their house after meeting on the street. Milton had the kind of character that understood the art of conversation. He knew how to listen. He hardly ever talked about himself. And so he maintained—I don’t know what the right word is—but he maintained a sort of air of mystery that made people want to know more. He understood how to take a back seat so that other people felt important and good about themselves. And he knew how to match people up with each other who in normal daily life would not have otherwise met. He could also think several steps ahead of people. He knew, if they had a project, who could help them.
Gendel was never a professional photographer or a photographer with a capital P. He admired and was influenced by—and wrote about—Henri Cartier-Bresson, but he did not take photographs in order to have them shown in public (though he showed them to his friends), just as he did not keep his diaries for public consumption. He had started traveling with his Rolleiflex camera soon after arriving in Rome—making trips to Sicily and elsewhere—and the camera became an adjunct to his life. He stopped taking pictures only in his last years, because his hands sometimes shook, making even the large glass of whiskey he enjoyed in the evening a challenge.
That Gendel exhibited at all was a fluke. In 1977 his friend Carla Panicali, who headed the prestigious Galleria Marlborough, in Via Gregoriana, faced an unexpected gap in her exhibition schedule—something had fallen through. She persuaded Gendel to show his photographs. A few years later Sophie Consagra, the director of the American Academy in Rome, oversaw a second exhibition. Gendel took photographs for the same reason he kept diaries, in order to remember and record. He was a quintessential observer, led as much by the eye as by the ear. He organized and filed his negatives and contact sheets with care. Once a year he would gather a selection of prints and arrange them on heavy beige cardboard stock, one spread after another, writing names and locations underneath by hand. Then he would bring the loose pages to a bookbinder, along with the leather to use for covering the boards, and have a bound volume created to his specifications.
There was a soft quality to Gendel’s movements, as there was to his picture-taking. In a letter to a friend, written soon after meeting Milton, Judy Montagu described him as moving “like a panther.” He knew when to leave the conversation, take his camera out, quietly snap some pictures, then rejoin the conversation. Monica Incisa described those moments:
He managed to be unobtrusive. First of all, he was always a participant in the group. He wasn’t like, you know, a photographer that you hire and sits apart. He somehow managed to speak and then maybe take a picture and then put the camera down. And he was never noticeable. You knew he was taking pictures but you didn’t think about it. Secondly, he was doing a lot of editing after the fact, so he never would publish or use photographs where the pictures of people, or the composition itself, were not successful. And he always used the best possible picture of a person. His pictures are never aggressive. He was respectful of the things he took pictures of. His pictures have a certain sweetness. He took pictures like the way he spoke.
Judith Venetia Montagu at her Isola Tiberina home, Rome, 1960 (Photograph by Gordian Troeller)
Peter Miller went further, using the language of criticism that Gendel would have understood perfectly but never used about his own work. Indeed, he did not write much about his photography at all. Here’s Miller:
To take the kinds of photographs he took requires a certain distance, because a camera is something that separates, and there is a kind of self-consciousness not only for the person taking the pictures but also for the people being photographed. It adds a barrier in a way. But at the same time that there’s a distance, there also has to be complicity. People in formal situations do not allow themselves to be photographed in the way that he did, in many cases very distinguished people with social codes governing personal relationships. He wouldn’t have felt comfortable taking those pictures and they would not have felt comfortable being photographed if complicity did not exist. It goes back to what made Milton such an alluring character and so effective in his management of a wide network of friendships from vastly different levels of society—his ability to be both inserted and separated. To be a part of the party yet also to look at it with a certain amount of distance.
Anna, Natalia, and Sebastiano, Isola Tiberina, 1972
Inserted and yet separate: the idea speaks to an element of stage setting, at once deliberate and unconscious. The stage setting began with the places Gendel inhabited. The books and paintings and objects were arranged densely in a way that may have looked haphazard—and that in fact felt natural and comfortable—yet required great care. The arrangement seemed designed to provoke conversation. I don’t recall Gendel directing specific attention to anything in his home; he didn’t need to. A visitor’s eye generated ample questions on its own.
In an essay entitled “On the Road / Off the Road,” Marella Caracciolo Chia, a writer and a friend of Gendel’s, described his distinctive habitations over the years. In Washington Square, Milton and Evelyn had painted the wooden floors of their apartment with wavy black and red lines and had adorned the rooms sparely with scavenged or homemade furnishings. “It is our favorite salon,” Anaïs Nin recalled, “because it is roomy, vast, casual, nonchalant. No one ever fusses over you. You can come and go.” In Rome, Gendel lived first in an apartment in a small palazzo on Via di Monserrato, near Palazzo Farnese, then moved to quarters in Piazza Campitelli, on the edge of the old Jewish Ghetto. He kept those lodgings as a studio and office after moving, in the early 1960s, into two floors within Palazzo Pierleoni Caetani, on Isola Tiberina, the slender, ship-like island whose bridges on either side link the Ghetto, on one bank, with Trastevere, on the other. In the diaries, this iconic residence is always referred to simply as “the Isola.”
The filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni used the residence, and Gendel’s bedroom, in his 1960 movie L’Avventura. In the early 1970s, Gendel took a floor in Palazzo Costaguti, on Piazza Mattei, overlooking the famous turtle fountain. His friends Gabriella Drudi and Toti Scialoja— Barbara Drudi’s aunt and uncle—lived upstairs. In 2007 Gendel moved his studio and office to a ground-floor apartment in Palazzo Doria Pamphilj and from there he moved to Palazzo Primoli.
In the last years, he continued to see visitors and to write and was often assisted by his grandson Bartolomeo, who was able to run errands, keep filing up to date, and handle issues with the computer. Gendel would take a bus in the morning to Primoli from the home he shared with Monica in the Ostiense neighborhood of Rome, near the Pyramid of Cestius and the Protestant Cemetery.
Monica described for me the first time she stepped foot inside the Isola apartments, a dwelling she wonderfully referred to as Gendel’s “container”:
I’d never seen anything before that I would walk into and say, This is it! There was a little door, and then you would go up the steps. And then you would come to this big room that had arches, and the arches had iron rods so that it wouldn’t collapse on you. It had a sofa, it had a table made of slabs of marble. But it was not so much the things—the things were good, but not extraordinary. I’ve seen many more extraordinary things in palaces. And yet everything worked together, the spaces and the furniture, in such a way that you were never disturbed by any detail. What was also different was the lighting. Milton knew exactly what to do with light. Lighting on the ceiling makes every room smaller. It comes down cold, and doesn’t work for people or for their surroundings. Milton knew how to place lights in such a way that they complemented the room. The first time I came to the island I was struck by that. And then there was the informality of everything. Some people would sit on the floor, adjusting to the space in a way that was suitable and comfortable and easy. I came from a totally different world where nothing was easy, nothing was suitable, nothing was comfortable. Everything was codified. You did this, you did that. Milton did whatever he liked. It was a revelation.
Marella Caracciolo Chia once described for me what she called Gendel’s natural sprezzatura, if there can be such a thing—a studied carelessness that was simply part of his character.
I practically grew up in Milton’s home, because of his friendship with my parents and my friendship with Anna, and even as a child I appreciated his magical touch. Milton was the architect, the collector, the decorator. He had a knack for finding the most beautiful places to live for next to nothing. In the 1950s and ’60s and ’70s, you could still live in a palazzo for a song. His eclecticism and his eye for the beautiful objects he found at the flea market at Porta Portese were exceptional. At Porta Portese, you never knew quite where everything came from. Milton continually bought new things—even if they were new old things—because they stimulated his imagination and his sense of humor.
A lot of houses in Rome had been untouched for generations—the houses of all the old princely families. Milton’s homes were never finished, always a work in progress. Some things went with him everywhere. There was the famous brass bed, the one that Antonioni used in L’Avventura. And the square marble table with the Latin inscription. And the contemporary artwork—the Toti Scialojas, the Calder shoes, the portraits of himself. The paintings went up, up, up the walls, right up to those high ceilings. So did the books. It was theatrical and exciting—but also comfortable. “Come for a drink,” he would say, and the types of people you found at his home were always surprising. He wrote his life through his houses—there’s an autobiographical narrative that comes through in a very truthful way.
Judy and Milton at the Isola Tiberina home, Rome, 1960
* * *
Milton Gendel’s diaries are centered on people—people stopping by for a drink, people at lunch or dinner or on picnics, people going to the movies or to an exhibition, people encountered on the street, people involved in book projects or magazine assignments, people coming to fix the plumbing or get payment for an overdue bill. Money is intermittently a problem. Personal relationships become complex—in the telling, other people’s relationships mostly, but his own as well.
After the end of his marriage to Evelyn, Milton fell in love with Vittoria Berla Olivetti, who was briefly married to Adriano Olivetti’s son Roberto. Milton and Vittoria had two children, the twins Sebastiano and Natalia, born in 1958.
But when Gendel remarried, in 1962, it was to someone else he had begun seeing: Judith Venetia Montagu, whose British lineage was old and distinguished. (Martha Gellhorn used a fanciful version of this triangle as the grist for her 1961 novel His Own Man, set in Paris, not Rome, and with the bohemian sinologist Ben Eckhardt in the role of a young man torn between two very different women.) Judy Montagu was well-connected and close to Princess Margaret. Other friends included Bindy and Tony Lambton, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Pamela Egremont, John Julius Norwich, and Rory and Romana McEwen. Gendel’s own friendships with such people would continue after Judy’s death in 1972.
In a recent letter, Anna Mathias, Judy and Milton’s daughter, born in 1963, recalled how her parents met:
My father was spotted as a possible beau for my mother by Lady Diana Cooper, who, recently widowed, would go to Rome with Evelyn Waugh. Diana, plotting, invited Milton to stay with her at the Château de Chantilly, in vain, but she persisted and instead took Judy to Rome, to him, in 1957. There my parents met, at a party held by Patrick and Jennie Cross (he ran Reuters and she was Robert Graves’s journalist daughter) on the roof terrace of their apartment in the Palazzo del Grillo, overlooking Trajan’s Market. My mother was no beauty (though my father described her “stony noble features”), and while neither poised nor elegant, her being encompassed a captivating vitality, a reckless generosity, a flashing intelligence and wit, and a fascination with all whom she met. Although rich in terms of both money and a wide range of friends of all nationalities and backgrounds, Judy’s sophistication came more from her eclectic and political family, meteoric success as an officer during the war, and her lack of snobbery. Both grandfathers were Lords, and the ancient house of Stanley—of Bosworth Field and the hockey cup—was grand and remarkable for its eccentrics and iconoclasts. Bertrand Russell, Rosalind Carlisle (the battle-ax temperance chatelaine of Castle Howard), and Judy’s great-uncle Henry, the first Muslim convert of the British peerage, were among my mother’s maternal relations. Her father’s family, the Montagus, were the second Jewish family in Britain to be ennobled, after the Rothschilds. Judy’s father, Edwin Montagu, was a distinguished Liberal politician and Secretary of State for India, whose Montagu-Chelmsford Reform of 1923 advocated independence for India more than two decades before the event. Moreover, it was he who insisted on an addendum to the Balfour Declaration, that no native peoples be displaced should the nation-state of Israel be established. My mother thrived in the war when she and her cousin Mary Churchill served in the antiaircraft batteries of the Auxiliary Territorial Service, but spent many weekends on leave in London with Winston and Clementine Churchill, who played a fundamental part in giving her a haven away from her demanding and acerbic mother. Having come out of the army as a major and a chauffeured instructor of ack-ack guns, my mother spent most of the late 1940s and early ’50s between England and the U.S., where her closest friends included the Cushing Sisters and Joe Alsop. By the time my parents met, my mother—who tended to fall deeply in love—had often had her heart broken or twisted. The letters and crushed orchid from the Earl of Verulam’s younger son, Bruce Grimston, who was shot down in action; the dalliance with Patrick Leigh Fermor; the mysterious engagement to Ray Livingston Murphy, the literary scholar and Yale historian—all took their toll. And although my parents did have happy times and shared a fundamental bond in their fascination with people, my mother’s health was relentlessly poor, and the last years of her life and of their marriage were strained and difficult.
Copyright © 2022 by the Heirs of Milton Gendel
Introduction copyright © 2022 by Cullen Murphy