The City of Falling Angels

  Word had it that Philip’s parents were less than enthusiastic about his marriage to Jane, who was ten years his senior.

  When they arrived in Venice, Philip had long hair held back on the sides by two bobby pins, and Jane wore “frumpy” clothes and her hair in a bun. Philip was still writing his dissertation, which would take him the better part of twelve years to finish. Meanwhile Jane supported both of them by teaching at the American air base in Aviano, an hour north of Venice.

  At first they knew no one in Venice, but Philip regularly attended St. George’s Church, then the focus of Anglo-American expatriate social life. There he met Sir Ashley Clarke, the former British ambassador to Italy who headed Venice in Peril, the British counterpart of Save Venice. Sir Ashley and Lady Clarke took a liking to the Rylandses, who in turn were attentive and helpful to the Clarkes. Philip became involved with Venice in Peril, and it was reported that he would eventually succeed Sir Ashley. The two collaborated on a small booklet commemorating the restoration of the Madonna dell’Orto Church. Before long, Jane and Philip underwent make-overs: Philip cut his hair respectably short, and Jane began to fashion her hair and clothes in a more up-to-date style.

  As the bright new young couple in town, they were taken up by established expatriates, notably the sculptor Joan FitzGerald, who introduced them around. They met John Hohnsbeen, a friend of Peggy Guggenheim’s since the 1950s. Hohnsbeen in turn introduced them to Peggy, and almost immediately Philip and Jane began to ingratiate themselves. Jane bought Peggy dog food and various supplies at a discount from the PX in Aviano, walked Peggy’s dogs, volunteered for household chores. In short, they made themselves indispensable to Peggy.

  John Hohnsbeen was at first relieved that Philip and Jane were being so helpful to Peggy; it lifted some of the burden from him. For years Hohnsbeen had come to Venice from Easter to November to stay with Peggy and act as the unpaid curator of her collection. After Peggy’s death, he continued his Venetian summers in a rented apartment. It had always been Hohnsbeen’s custom to spend most of the day at the Cipriani pool, which is where I found him having a spartan lunch and chatting with friends among the rich international set. Residents of Venice could, for a stiff fee, enjoy daily pool privileges all summer.

  “I was a houseguest who sang for his supper,” said Hohnsbeen, whose white hair was combed straight across his tanned brow so that he resembled Pablo Picasso. “Peggy and I were sort of a couple. I’d owned a gallery in New York and knew most of the Old Guard of the New York art world. I would hang Peggy’s exhibition at the beginning of the season and take it down at the end, which would involve all sorts of unpleasant duties, like scraping the maggots off the back of the Max Ernst Antipope canvas, because it had been in the surrealist gallery, off the canal, which was very humid. The maggots loved the glue.

  “The first few years with Peggy were marvelous, but then her arteries began to harden, and it was awful. I’d come in late at night and navigate around the artwork—through the Calder, past the Giacometti matchstick people, whose arms got broken all the time but not by me, then turn right, dodging the Pevsner, and into the bedroom. I was with her when she had her first heart attack, and her face went all funny. After that, Peggy kept a fifteen-pound cowbell by her bed, and I’d leave my door open with the understanding that if she clanged, I would leap up and run to her assistance. It was a twenty-four-hour-a-day job.

  “I liked Jane and Philip,” Hohnsbeen went on. “We spent hours together, and Jane’s a terribly good cook. They had won Peggy over, too. It was the frozen corn on the cob that did it. Jane brought it from the PX in Aviano, and it went straight to Peggy’s heart. But people kept telling me, ‘Watch out for Jane Rylands!’”

  “Who told you that?” I asked.

  “Oh, everybody. And then Jane and Philip began to invite Peggy to dinner and not invite me. They wouldn’t say anything about it to me. They’d sneak her out. Peggy was a semi-invalid by then, so it would have been a huge effort for them to pick her up, take her out, and bring her back. Peggy was hard work, and not many people would put up with her. The mischief went on behind my back during the summer. It clicked into high gear when I left in November, and continued until I returned in the spring.”

  By the time Peggy reached her final illness, in the fall of 1979, Philip and Jane Rylands had become her virtual keepers. They had keys to her house. They looked after her affairs. They took her to the hospital in Padua. The day after Peggy died, the director of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Thomas Messer, arrived in Venice to take possession of the premises. He found Philip Rylands in the flooded basement, moving paintings to keep them from getting wet. Needing someone on hand to carry out the orders of the New York office, Messer asked Philip to act as temporary supervisor. Later he appointed Philip permanent administrator. The rise of the Rylandses had begun.

  It was clear from the start that Jane Rylands intended to have a role in the running of the museum, to the irritation of Messer. “On one occasion,” Messer told me, “I was giving instructions to Philip in Jane’s presence, on some probably minor procedural matter, and she blurted out, ‘No! That cannot be done!’ I thought she really had a nerve interfering like that. I became very angry and let her know she was not to consider herself part of the management of the museum. But she dug her heels in and went right on exercising authority that no one had given her. She dominated Philip. I thought he was the most henpecked husband I ever saw.”

  Once the Rylandses had their Guggenheim bona fides firmly in hand, Jane leveraged her position in ways that could only be called brilliant. She took over a lecture series at the Gritti and invited such luminaries as Stephen Spender, Arthur Schlesinger, Peter Quennell, John Julius Norwich, Brendan Gill, Adolph Green, Hugh Casson, and Frank Giles, editor of the Sunday Times of London. She gave dinner parties, and among the people signing her guest book were the speakers at the Gritti and such others as Adnan Khashoggi, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Queen Alexandra of Yugoslavia. “When I looked at her guest book,” said Helen Sheehan, an intern at the Guggenheim in the 1980s, “I realized Jane was putting a lot of energy into making a social life for herself. She used to tell me, ‘One moves forward in society.’”

  With the implied imprimatur of the Guggenheim enhancing her stature and influence, Jane acted informally as an artists’ agent, putting wealthy patrons together with painters and sculptors in Venice. This gave her a certain power among artists in Venice. She asked the American painter Robert Morgan to paint a small portrait of Olga for her, just Olga’s head. When it was finished, the matter of Morgan’s fee came up. Jane proposed a very low fee, little more than an honorarium, pointing out that Morgan’s reputation would be greatly enhanced when people saw his work hanging on her walls.

  On at least one occasion, Jane counseled an artist about his work. “She told me that the Fascists were going to be on the rise in Italy,” said Harald Böhm, “and that I should make my art more figurative, to be in line with the times, I guess. I thought that was very strange.”

  Mary Laura Gibbs was an art historian from Texas who moved to Venice in 1979 and became a good friend of the Rylandses. “Jane does deserve credit for enlivening the intellectual scene in Venice,” she told me. “It seemed to me that early on she saw that life in Venice was actually pretty dull. She looked around and thought, ‘I can be something socially and intellectually here.’ I think she saw the possibility of setting up something like a salon.

  “But there were times she took herself a bit too seriously. I remember quite vividly the time the Prince and Princess of Wales came to Venice. They were scheduled to attend services at the English Church, and members of the congregation were given tickets. I had two. My maid, Patrizia, who was very nice, was eager to go, and I told Jane I was going to let her use my other ticket. Jane flew into a rage and said, ‘No you’re not!’ I said, ‘Excuse me?’ She said, ‘Well, I think it would give offense. Unless giving offense to the prince and princess is what you want to do! Is that what you wan
t to do?’

  “Jane had an odd facility for alienating people. Two camps formed: the anti-Rylands group and the Rylandses themselves. There wasn’t really a pro-Rylands camp.”

  Vincent Cooper, the young American painter, once asked Jane Rylands why so many people disliked her. “I just spark animosity in people,” she told him. “I don’t know why. I’m not very subtle, I guess. No soft soap.” According to Cooper, “Mrs. Rylands had little or no consideration for Olga’s old friends, many of whom had known Pound, too. To her they were merely unworthy and annoying characters who might just walk off with something. I took Mrs. Rylands’s concerns for the preservation of the contents of the house to be genuine.”

  These concerns, though no doubt genuine, would not have been entirely altruistic. At the time, Jane Rylands was about to come into control of Olga’s books and papers, so any theft from Olga would have amounted, in a way, to a theft from Jane Rylands as well.

  On a literary level, Jane valued Philip’s kinship with his uncle, the Cambridge don Dadie Rylands, and, through Dadie, a link to the Bloomsbury group and half of literary England. To honor and proclaim the connection, she commissioned Julian Barrow—an English artist who lived in John Singer Sargent’s studio at 33 Tite Street in London—to paint a portrait of Dadie in his rooms at King’s College. When the painting was finished, Jane asked Barrow to paint Philip into the portrait. Reached on the telephone, Barrow told me he had been appalled and had politely refused. “I told her it would be . . . a distraction.”

  Philip Rylands’s ascension at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection was accompanied by a few grudging comments, mainly complaints that as a student of the Renaissance, he was hardly qualified to oversee a gallery of modern art. There were murmurs also that Jane had maneuvered Philip into a position that had been meant for John Hohnsbeen. But, in fact, according to Messer, Peggy had never indicated any preference at all as to who should run the museum after she died. Not John Hohnsbeen and not Philip Rylands. At the time, Philip’s appointment caused very few ripples.

  When the Olga Rudge imbroglio surfaced almost ten years later, however, the Rylands-Peggy Guggenheim connection came in for something of a reassessment. Some people thought they detected a pattern, a serial courtship of the elderly in Dorsoduro: first Sir Ashley and Lady Clarke, then Peggy, then Olga.

  “Selective gerontophilia” is what Mary Laura Gibbs called it. “Before the Rudge thing,” she said, “I would have defended Jane and Philip against any criticism about their intentions regarding Peggy. They were very good to her, especially Jane. But when it all happened again with Olga Rudge, it made me wonder.” Thinking back on it, Mary Laura Gibbs recalled that at a certain point Olga began to voice displeasure at Jane’s meddling. “Olga would make vaguely negative remarks in passing, like, ‘I’d like to show you a piece of music, but Jane Rylands has taken all of that away.’ She was becoming suspicious and uncomfortable.”

  Once the substance of the foundation was known, friends of Olga’s wrote letters and made phone calls on her behalf. Joan FitzGerald, whose early sponsorship of Jane and Philip had long since turned sour, called the American ambassador in Rome, Maxwell Rabb. Rabb looked into the matter and reported back, “Jane and Philip Rylands seem to have many friends.”

  James Laughlin, the founder of New Directions and Pound’s publisher since the 1930s, tried to pressure Jane Rylands from the other side of the Atlantic. “It was a big deal getting rid of that woman!” he bellowed over the telephone when I reached him at his home in Connecticut. “She had no business doing what she did! It took Donald Gallup thirty-five years of backbreaking work, starting in 1947, to assemble the Pound Archives for the Beinecke Library at Yale. Gallup was the director. He tracked down scraps of paper all over the world, had to deal with five teams of lawyers and endless lawsuits between Pound’s two families over who owned rights to what. Yale received fifteen big boxes of Pound’s papers in 1966 from Mary, but those boxes had to stay in the basement of the Beinecke for seven years unopened until the lawsuits were over and done with. I’ll bet Mrs. Rylands didn’t know anything about all that!

  “Now, let me tell you something else she probably didn’t know: Pound wrote a will in 1940 leaving everything to Mary. Books, property, everything. But because he didn’t file the will with an Italian court at the time he wrote it, it was not technically valid, even though he reiterated his wishes in writing later on. After Pound was released from St. Elizabeths, Dorothy was given sole authority for his legal affairs by the American authorities. Pound could not legally write another will unless Dorothy signed it, and Dorothy simply rejected the 1940 will. She and Omar hired lawyers. Mary had to bow to necessity and hire a lawyer herself; she ended up having to divide the estate with Omar. Then, after all that, along comes this Rylands woman with no Pound credentials whatever. She leaps in with both feet and causes more heartache and expense for a family that’s already suffered for decades over this kind of thing.”

  The pressure that made the difference came from the trustees of the Guggenheim Foundation in New York, the controlling entity. One of the trustees was Jim Sherwood, owner of the Cipriani Hotel.

  “From Jane and Philip’s perspective,” Sherwood told me, “they were saving Olga’s papers. From the point of view of people in Venice, they were trying to steal them. The matter of the Ezra Pound Foundation came up at a board meeting in New York. The trustees were worried that the controversy might break out into the open and become an embarrassment to the museum. Furthermore, Peter Lawson-Johnson, who was the chairman and a cousin of Peggy’s, felt that because of Pound’s anti-Semitism, Jane’s involvement was in dubious taste, in light of her connection to the Guggenheim through Philip. The board told Philip he had to choose between the Ezra Pound Foundation and his continued role at the museum.”

  IT WAS TIME, I THOUGHT, to talk again with Philip and Jane Rylands. I reached Philip by telephone at his Guggenheim office. Given the number of people I had already spoken with on the subject of the foundation, I was not surprised by his reaction to the mere mention of my name.

  “We’re not interested in talking to you!”

  “I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  “I’m not interested in hearing your questions.”

  “About the Ezra Pound Foundation.”

  “I know very little about the Ezra Pound Foundation, and, anyway, we have an agreement with Mary de Rachewiltz not to talk to you about it.”

  “Then, to be fair to you and Jane, I will send you written questions so at least you’ll have an opportunity to respond.”

  “I will view the submission of written questions as an invasion! We are not about to be tried by the press.”

  “That is not my intention.”

  “Anyway, it’s only gossip!”

  “No,” I said, “it’s not gossip.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “It’s history. Because when you attach yourself to famous people, as you and Jane seem to like to do, then you become part of their story.”

  MARY DE RACHEWILTZ WAS SOMEWHAT MORE AGREEABLE when I reached her at Brunnenburg Castle. But she, too, was reluctant to talk about the Ezra Pound Foundation.

  “I felt embarrassed when the Rylands episode happened,” she said. “They were very nice people. Very nice to my mother for many years. They relieved me of worry.”

  “Have you all agreed not to talk to me about the Ezra Pound Foundation?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, “but we are not permitted to talk to anyone about the terms of the settlement with Yale.”

  “Why?”

  “We were obliged to sign statements saying we would keep the terms confidential. Jane Rylands insisted on it. We also had to agree not to bring legal action against Jane, the Ezra Pound Foundation, or Yale, and none of them would sue us.”

  “Did Jane receive any money from Yale?”

  “We were never told. That was part of the arrangement. Jane Rylands doesn’t know our part of the settlement eith
er.”

  “Did you receive any money?”