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Memories in San Marco

I am seated at one of the outdoor tables in the Caffè Florian at dusk in Venice’s famed San Marco Square. The pigeons are still on their mission to search for fallen breadcrumbs, and a small orchestra, with its accordion, violin, bass, and clarinet soloists, has been serenading Florian’s customers with soulful renditions of the theme from Cinema Paradiso and a lively “Allegro” by Antonio Vivaldi.

It seems as though every piece is taking me back in time to a still-fresh memory from my life of travel and music. The musicians start to play Marcello’s “Adagio,” the same beautiful melody I had recorded in 1979 in London with the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Sir Andrew Davis, years before he had been knighted. I remember carefully writing out the score and making sure I had wound some well-worn bass strings onto my Ramírez guitar so that my fingers would not make too many squeaks while changing fretboard positions. It seems a lifetime ago.

Now the orchestra breaks into Armando Manzanero’s “Ésta Tarde Ví Llover,” and I am back in my beloved San Miguel de Allende, slow dancing with my Mexican teenage boyfriends, in the late sixties. Édith Piaf’s “La Vie en Rose” instantly evokes my penniless student years in Paris; then “Someday My Prince Will Come” leads my mind to wander to the studio sessions in Nashville when I recorded an instrumental version of that song with the legendary country guitarist Chet Atkins. Would my own prince ever come, I wondered, or am I now destined to navigate life’s journey on my own?

It is July, and I have chosen to come to the most romantic of all cities as a birthday treat to myself. Strangely, I do not miss having a companion this particular week and am happy simply living out of one small carry-on tote in my little hotel on a narrow street called Calle degli Specchieri. I have a ticket tomorrow to the famed opera house La Fenice, where I am going to hear a Beethoven symphony, and this morning, after the clanging seven a.m. bells from San Marco’s cathedral awakened me, I called in at the famous open-air market where I touched a velvety octopus and bought a kilo of wild strawberries.

I spent yesterday exploring the Giudecca, having been transported over the blue waters to the island by the Cipriani Hotel’s private launch that I breezed onto as though I were one of their guests. Once moored at the dock, I accepted the outstretched hand offered by a handsome Italian attendant, made my way along the pathway, and settled into the cushiony softness of a couch overlooking the bay, where I was soon sipping a delectable fresh peach cocktail. Later I made sure that one of the ripe peaches, growing in their private orchard, somehow found its way into my handbag. Ah, I had not really changed since 1972 when, along with a fellow student of Maestro Alexandre Lagoya, I had taken the overnight train to this magical city and mischievously swept into our knapsack an orange from a distracted merchant. Was I still that same girl, bubbling with wanderlust and ambition that had taken me around the world? How had I survived all my international adventures, my gypsy lifestyle, my trail of broken hearts, and my recent roller coaster years struggling to reinvent my career?

Today I had lunch in the Hotel Rialto, where thirty years ago my mother and I had stayed after a Mediterranean cruise aboard the Royal Viking Sky, on which I had given a concert. Even though we had no hotel reservations anywhere, I had promised her a couple of nights in Venice and a gondola ride. Luckily, Fortune smiled upon us that evening. Today the hotel café was jammed with tourists, but a young family from Pamplona offered me a seat at their table and, after we started chatting in Spanish, brought me over a caffè macchiato for which they refused to let me pay — ah, Europe, and the spontaneous generosity of random strangers that I well remembered from my youth.

After lunch, I strolled by the Hotel Danieli, where in the nineties I had stayed with my parents before we boarded the Seabourn Pride cruise ship that took us to Istanbul and the Black Sea. At dusk I called in for a drink in Harry’s Bar, that renowned watering hole of the international set where I had once chatted with the famous Colombian artist, Fernando Botero. As evening cast its long shadows along the canals, I passed the bobbing wooden gondolas and took a leisurely stroll along the seafront.

What had lured me back to Venice? Why did I keep returning to this special city? “Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go,” Truman Capote once wrote. Yes, for me Venice had always been a visual and sensual feast, but much like my beloved San Miguel de Allende it was also a familiar place where I felt safe wandering around on my own.

I thought back to the three crazy days in 1998 when I had flown here with my Hungarian videographer, Adam Soch, so he could film me playing Vivaldi’s “Allegro” and Albinoni’s haunting “Adagio.” We were seeking an unusual image for a scene, and in a moment of artistic inspiration I had purchased an inexpensive guitar to float in the Grand Canal. This we did, to the consternation of my fans, who had been horrified to see a fragile classical guitar drifting out to sea. They believed I had tossed one of my instruments along with my music scores into the waves! After fishing it out of the water and drying it off, Adam and I had donated the guitar to a local music school, which had gratefully accepted our gift.

Yesterday Ludovico de Luigi, one of Italy’s most renowned painters and bronze sculptors, someone I had met years ago with my former husband, had invited me into his chaotic, dusty art studio, a place where Tomaso Albinoni had once lived. He later walked with me over the bridge to Campo San Barnaba and the candle-scented church in which the composer of one of my favourite pieces of music was buried.

Venice had been home to so many timeless composers, from Albinoni to Marcello, from Cimarosa to Rossini, and of course to Antonio Vivaldi, who had founded a music school for orphaned girls. How connected I had always felt to this city’s rich musical past.

The Caffè Florian orchestra was now paying homage to Ennio Morricone, one of Italy’s greatest film composers, whose score to The Mission had inspired “Concerto of the Andes,” which I had commissioned from the talented Québécois composer Richard Fortin, who for a decade had been my musical assistant. After that came Bacalov’s magical theme to Il Postino, a film about the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who in 1973 had drawn a little flower in my poetry book and whose cliffside house in Isla Negra I had later visited.

This was followed by Carlos Gardel’s “El Dia que me Quieras,” an Argentinian classic to which I had often danced tango in Miami and once in Buenos Aires. “The Girl from Ipanema” could not help but remind me of my steamy afternoon spent on Ipanema Beach in Rio de Janeiro and the previous unforgettable day when my concert hall had caught on fire!

My Rio memories fade as the orchestra begins to play “La Paloma.” The melodic strains take me back to my rendering of that beautiful song, which I played in Ottawa for the President of Mexico, José López Portillo, who waxed poetic that he had “not been listening to the hands of a guitarist, but the wings of an angel.”

Today a mish-mash of tourists sit drinking aperitifs or having dinner. Visitors have been coming here since 1720, when Caffè Florian first opened. Over the centuries the world’s literati, painters, sculptors, and sightseers have flocked to this particular café in the huge square that Napoleon had called “the world’s greatest living room.” Nijinsky and Diaghilev had lingered here, savouring pastries while observing the Italian officers who paraded past, their black capes catching the breeze. Casanova used to frequent the café in search of beautiful women while Goethe, Marcel Proust, Lord Byron, and Charles Dickens had come to the café to sip coffee, exchange gossip, read the morning papers, and admire the Venetian signorinas.

• • •

While the orchestra in the Florian takes a short break, the strains of “Dark Eyes” floats into San Marco from the orchestra across the piazza, and I am instantly back in the Kremlin where I heard the Soviet Army Chorus perform that classic folk song minutes after I had played “Granada” — this on the very New Year’s Eve when the old Soviet Union had broken apart and Moscow had exploded with the most amazing fireworks I had ever seen.

Now the orchestra’s eclectic menu resumes with “As Time Goes By.” How appropriate, I mused. For me time had indeed flown. Venice was a place that, for some reason, kept drawing me back, and each time it seemed that I was living a different chapter in my life.

• • •

I recalled first arriving here by train from Nice when I was a penniless student; once exploring with my father who was mesmerized by Venice’s beauty; and more than a dozen years ago renting a palazzo on the Grand Canal for three weeks with my elegant, well-travelled then-husband, John B. Simon. How after all of those visits had Venice still maintained its allure? Perhaps it was the evocative picture Ernest Hemingway had first planted in my teenage brain when I read his book Across the River and into the Trees. Perhaps it was those shimmering, watery Canaletto scenes, the early morning mists, the narrow streets, the charming little stone bridges, the striped shirted gondoliers singing “Santa Lucia” for the thousandth time and the vaporetti that churned back and forth along the Grand Canal. Perhaps it was the whispered stories of Venice’s floods, the dreaded acqua alta, the doomsday predictions that her very survival as a city was threatened once the polar caps had melted and the waters of the lagoon flooded the city. Time and death seemed to have haunted these winding streets and plazas since the great cholera epidemic of 1911, which Visconti had immortalized in his cinematic masterpiece of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, using the powerful music of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5.

Tragically Venice, the dream city on the Adriatic, was now threatened by an insidious invasion of cruise ships disgorging hordes of camera-toting tourists who were destroying a way of life for many of the city’s long-time residents. Many of them had been forced to relocate to the mainland as soaring prices had rendered their once simple existence impossible. Was Venice gradually being transformed into a Disneyland theme park? Could this be the last time I would be tempted to return? I certainly hoped not, but part of me wanted to weep, realizing that Venice could never again be the city I had once been fortunate to know.

• • •

The orchestra has switched gears to “Moon River,” and I remember being invited to composer Henry Mancini’s beautiful Bel Air home for a soiree of Chopin and Beethoven. On another occasion, with my former husband, I had sipped hot drinks and huddled with “Hank” and his wife, Ginny, at a World Presidents’ Organization conference in Bruges, Belgium. That chilly autumn evening the locals had re-enacted the noisy and smoky Battle of Waterloo for us. It was a surreal and unforgettable experience.

Now the infectious theme to “Never On Sunday” floats past my ears — one of the masterpieces written by the old Greek composer Manos Hadjidakis. The old maestro had welcomed my mother and me into his apartment one sweltering summer afternoon when we were staying in Athens, and in London I had later recorded one of his pieces, “Mother and Sister,” with the renowned composer and producer Michael Kamen.

The orchestra at the Florian continues their set with “My Way,” written by fellow Canadian songwriter Paul Anka and made famous by my former Beverly Hills neighbour Frank Sinatra. The song seems to have brought this evening’s serenade that I have been internalizing to a perfect conclusion. Yes, I think, I really have lived my life and my music “my way.” Indeed, my first autobiography, which I had now come here to continue writing, was called In My Own Key: My Life in Love and Music.

I wonder if perhaps one day I might be doing it “our way.” Or is this not in the cards for me? Was I destined to walk alone after leaving one by one all the men who had loved me?

Few had lived the colourful adventures I had: from the shores of Great Slave Lake to the penguin-nesting rocks of Patagonia; from the jungles of Nepal and the Great Wall of China to the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and the pyramids at Giza; from the night markets of Calcutta to Hong Kong, Hanoi, and Bangkok, and so many more amazing places. Looking back I realized how privileged I had been, and how “the road less travelled” had always enriched my life.

Who else had been given the chance to perform solo with symphony orchestras from Tokyo to Bogotá to Boston, had been given the opportunity to front two classical “rock bands,” and had now been invited to return to the stage once more and play before millions on television?

Certainly, few had experienced the contrasts of la vie bohème in Paris, the giddy “flower power” and “Summer of Love” days, the hippie psychedelia scene for a year in Mexico, the fantasy lifestyle of my late friends the Baron and Baroness di Portanova in Arabesque, their opulent Acapulco home, and the challenging Canadian wilderness canoe trip I had undertaken in the eighties with my then-fiancé, businessman Joel Bell, with whom I had shared eight years of my life.

Who else had helped design a Beverly Hills mansion, fallen in love with and married one of that city’s most generous and handsome residents, serenaded heads of state, dictators, and kings, hung out with Liberace, appeared three times on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and been conducted by John Williams? Who else had flown by private plane as a guest of Comandante Zero, the former head of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, dated Canada’s charismatic prime minister Pierre Trudeau for eight years yet declined to bear his child, and maintained a platonic friendship and correspondence with the Queen of England’s husband, Prince Philip, for over thirty years?

I had been a lucky lady indeed. How many blessings had I been fortunate to have had showered upon me, and how many more might I hope for?

But what exactly is the price I have paid for this gypsy life? Had my dear father been right with his frequent suggestions that I stop pushing for a career, “drop out,” let go of my ego, and relax into a quieter, bucolic life? Surely that could not be my destiny, at least not in this decade? For as Pierre Trudeau used to say, quoting from a favourite Robert Frost poem, “I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.”

I have chosen to live each day with immense gratitude and appreciation for every small detail — from the cool, tall drink before me and the delicious gelato limone I have just savoured to the incredibly beautiful setting that surrounds me this week. I give thanks for the many friends and supporters I have in Toronto and in my winter retreat in Palm Beach, and for my good health and that of my widowed mother, Eileen, and my sister, Vivien. I also realize, with sadness, that the four men in our family have all left, each in different ways. Even my lovely cat, Muffin, has departed, making the total of our lost males five.

• • •

As an evening sea breeze moves in, the small orchestra concludes with something beautiful — ah yes, the haunting theme from Stanley Myers’s The Deer Hunter, “Cavatina,” which I recorded for my Best of Liona Boyd album in 1982. I see the wistful face of the British film composer, who brought me a bouquet of red roses and tried unsuccessfully to seduce me on the couch in his home in London after I had played him my version of his timeless melody. A few years later I heard that the poor man had died of cancer. Ah life, how ephemeral, how bittersweet, and yet still magically filled with memories and my personal connections to almost every piece of music that has wafted my way while sitting here this evening in San Marco.

But enough nostalgia, it is now time to pick up my life story and go back in time to share with you the events and situations that finally led me to leave California, a place that, for me, was no longer the glittering “Golden State” I had once believed it to be.