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third Casey Robinson, the man who adapted the story. Sixty percent won. It's a great show and the opposite of history. At the opening in New York you had to dress up to go and there was a party with Zanuck going as Beistegui*."

Poor Beistegui. "I said looking in front of me at a pigeon following a pigeon with evident loving intentions. "They accused him of snobbery, of vulgar ostentation of wealth but when one has refurbished a building that was falling apart, you logically want to show it to someone, don't you think? In my opinion, the journalists have denigrated him out of spite for not having been admitted to Palazzo Labia. And in order not to give up the piece they invented. Forgetting that the eighteenth-century costume or the Domino was a must, one wrote that we were disguised as redskins or Messalines, he even stuffed an Adam with only a fig leaf into it. For some time now Papa had warned me to be careful of journalists, not to answer their questions. Just imagine that, about the Renata from Across, in an article from Rio Santa Maria Formosa they moved my house to the Grand Canal."

"I was in Havana some time ago..." Bemelmans said in a sad voice. "I called Hemingway to say hello. He always refused a meeting. Even the wife of the consul of Italy, the Marchesa Sanfelice, tried to call him several times: nothing to do. I left without even having been able to shake his hand."

"He was probably busy writing." 

"But I'm a writer too, and I don't think a ten-minute break could jeopardize the success of a book."

He had a very disconsolate expression on his face. I didn't know what to say. I knew that now Papa wrote in the Casa: "I have not been able to go to the Tower after you left." He had finished the story and it was a good story.

* she apparently is referring to Carlos de Beistegui who was "an eccentric French-born Mexican multi-millionaire art collector and interior decorator who was one of the most flamboyant characters of mid-20th-century European life. His ball at the Palazzo Labia in Venice in 1951 is still described as 'the party of the century.' Beistegui was often referred to as 'The Count of Monte Cristo.'"