One thing I'll say about Phyllis McGuire, she's not hard to converse with. Raise any topic-with few exceptions-and she will talk away. She told me that one of the newspapers had called her a motor-mouth.

"Do you want to see everything?" she asked.

"Sure."

She took me through the house and grounds. There are eight acres and two guesthouses. "That's where my sisters stay when they come here to rehea.r.s.e. The rest of the time they live in Arizona. They came to Vegas during the week and went home on weekends while we were getting ready for the comeback. We worked six to eight hours a day. We worked out and did stretching exercises in the mornings and did three hours each afternoon with Jim Hendricks, our pianist. One night I had Altovese and Sammy Davis over to hear the act. Chris and Dorothy each have their own bedroom and television set, and they share the living room and kitchen."

Sister Dorothy is no stranger to romantic headlines herself, having engaged in 1958 in a steamy love affair with fellow Arthur G.o.dfrey singing star Julius La Rosa, which resulted in a public scolding on-air by G.o.dfrey. Although the choirgirl image was tarnished, that affair caused no lessening of the group's popularity.

Behind the main house, we came to a moatlike area where Phyllis's twenty-three swans swim. "Those are the black Australian swans there," she said. "That one is about ready to hatch." Pointing to her tennis court, she said, "That's where Johnny Carson learned how to play tennis. It needs to be swept," she added, shaking her head.

"Someone told me all the flowers in your garden are fake," I said. She laughed and said, "Honey, I keep five gardeners."

In the pool house, noticing a crack in one of the windows, she picked up the telephone and called the main house. "Enice, tell maintenance there's a crack in the window of the pool house. Have him replace it, will you?" A bit farther on, she said, "Over there's my putting green. My waterfalls aren't on today-sorry."

Back in the house, she took me downstairs. "This is my nightclub. It even has a neon sign. The carpet rolls up and it's a dance floor underneath. The dance floor is in the shape of a piano. There have been lots of parties in this room. Over here is a blackjack table. Moe Dalitz gave me this table as a gift. I've taught more people how to play blackjack here at this table."

There is a beauty salon in the house, with several chairs and dryers so that the sisters, or houseguests, can have their hair done at the same time. In the health club, next to the beauty salon, are three changerooms and three ma.s.sage tables next to one another, where three ma.s.seurs can work on three guests at the same time. "The steam room is always ready," she said, peering into a window of the steam room.

Her huge bathtub is part of her bedroom, and her closets are enormous. "This is all Chanel," she said, pointing to one area. "Over there, it's all Galanos, and there in that room is all Pauline Trigere." It was a tour she was used to giving. "This is for my furs. The lynx, ermine, and sable are here. The older furs are over there. I keep a record of everything I wear so that I don't ever repeat with the same people. All my clothes are on a computer. So are all the books in my library, and all the furniture. They're all on video as well."

She picked up a model airplane. "This was my G-II," she said. "It had a sign saying, WELCOME ABOARD THE PHYLLIS SPECIAL. I've decorated the interiors of three planes. Do you feel like lunch?"

"Sure."

The mail had arrived. "Enice, I don't want to see the tabloids. The Searles across the street said there was something in them about us. Don't show me." We sat in the small dining room, and Enice, having given the mail to a secretary, brought in the lunch. "I have the greatest kitchens in the world," Phyllis said. "I don't cook, but I always have great chefs. And some of my maids have been with me for fourteen or seventeen years."

"How many people work for you in this house?" I asked, having noticed several in the background.

She began to count, looking up, looking over at Enice for verification, placing the forefinger of her left hand against the pinkie finger of her right hand, then against the ring finger, then the center finger, then against the other forefinger, and then repeating the process, at the same time reeling off a seemingly endless list of names-maids, cooks, guards, gardeners, drivers, secretaries.

"Twenty-eight," she said finally.

She thinks a great deal about security. "My limo driver carries a gun," she said. "But if they want to get you, they're going to get you. For me, it's the most secure feeling in the world when those steel doors are down."

Phyllis McGuire has a more elaborate lifestyle than most television and nightclub performers of the fifties whose stars have dimmed with time and the fickle musical tastes of the public, and nowhere is her wealth more visible than in her wondrous jewelry. No one who knows about jewels has not heard about her fantastic collection, which ranks among the best in the world, right up there with the famous collections of Elizabeth Taylor, Imelda Marcos, Candy Spelling, Mrs. Marvin Davis, and the fifth Baroness Thyssen. Harry Winston, the great jeweler, once said to her, "If ever there was a lady meant to wear jewels, it's you." She told me, "There was a time when I was purchasing millions of dollars' worth of jewelry. I was one of Harry Winston's best customers." She paused for a moment and then added, "Maybe some Saudis were ahead of me. Jewels really turned me on then, and they still do. I wear the jewels, they don't wear me."

On the day I was in her house, most of her jewels had been put in the vault because she was leaving imminently for a singing engagement with her sisters at the Moulin Rouge in Chicago. But a few were still at hand. "Enice," she called out, "bring in the canaries." The canaries consisted of a forty-two-carat yellow diamond set in a ring, surrounded by smaller diamonds, and some loose yellow diamonds which she was planning to have made into earrings. She examined her stones like a jeweler. "I'm not sure I like the way they put the diamonds around the canary," she said, "but I'm trying it this way." From the same package she pulled a twenty-eight-carat marquise-shaped diamond ring, which she called "one of the babies" because of its small size-small, at least, in comparison with some of her other rings. The canaries brought to mind a fairly recent drama in her life.

In 1979, she said, she took a D-flawless-diamond ring to Harry Winston's to have it cleaned and to have the p.r.o.ngs checked. When the ring was returned to her, it didn't seem to have the same sparkle it had had previously. Even now, a decade later, recounting the story, she held her hand up and examined her ring finger as if she were looking at the ring in question. She said that she had said at the time, "This can't be my ring. It doesn't sparkle the same." She said she had begun to question her own sanity. "I said to Enice, 'Is this my ring, Enice?' and she said, 'I think it is, Miss Phyllis.' But there is a process called cubic zirconia, where a fake diamond can be cut exactly to match a real diamond. I knew that my ring had been switched. I turned in one to be cleaned, and they gave me back another. I sued Winston for $60 million. They countersued me for $100 million." At the time, a spokesman for Winston denied the allegations "absolutely."

"I was only trying to recover my jewels," she continued. "I deposed for three days at Foley Square in New York. I discovered the diamond wasn't mine at Christmas of '79, and the case was settled in '82." She seemed to be finished with her story.

"But what happened?" I asked.

"I'm not allowed to discuss the outcome of the suit. That's part of the agreement," she said, giving a helpless shrug, but neither her smile nor her att.i.tude indicated any discontent with the outcome.

A spokesman for Winston told me the company had no comment to make.

Her conversation is peppered with the names of the very rich and very famous, with whom she has spent most of her time over the last twenty-five years. "I met Imelda Marcos at a party at Adnan Khashoggi's," she told me, and she and her sisters were scheduled to sing at the ninety-fifty birthday party of Armand Hammer, the billionaire philanthropist. Ann-Margret's name came up, and she said, "Let's call her." Ann-Margret was playing at Caesars Palace. She dialed the number. "This is Phyllis McGuire," she said to the telephone operator. "I'd like to speak to Ann-Margret. She's still sleeping? At two o'clock in the afternoon? My G.o.d, she only had one show last night. OK, tell her I called."

"New York is like roots for me," she said. "It was the first big city we saw after Ohio." For years she kept a Park Avenue apartment. Then she bought a town house on one of the most exclusive streets on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. "Do you know where Givenchy is? Two houses behind that." She bought the house, she said, "lock, stock, and barrel, including antiques, china, crystal, and silverware, from a son of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia," who was afraid of being a.s.sa.s.sinated, following the a.s.sa.s.sination of Anwar Sadat in Egypt, and took up residence instead in the Waldorf Towers, where many heads of state, and families of heads of state, stay for purposes of security. Phyllis loved the house dearly but spent only twenty-one days in it in 1987, so when her great friend Meshulam Riklis, the vastly rich ($440 million) financier husband of Pia Zadora, asked if he could buy it, she sold it to him. In order not to be without a nest in New York, she borrowed the Pierre Hotel apartment of another great friend, the vastly rich ($950 million) financier Kirk Kerkorian, and liked it so much that she talked Kerkorian into selling it to her, completely furnished.

"I'm a good businesswoman," she said, a fact that is borne out by most of her acquaintances. "If I weren't performing, I would have to constantly be working at something. I love business."

I didn't have to mention Sam Giancana. She brought him up. "I've had four serious involvements in my life, and one was a marriage. That was only for about ten minutes. Two of the men are still my friends, Simon Srybnik and Dr. Stanley Behrman, the head of oral surgery at New York Hospital. Even after Simon married Judy, and Stanley married Nancy, we stayed friends." She paused before continuing. "And then there was Sam." When she said Sam, she whispered his name. There is no doubt she loved him.

Even William Roemer, the former FBI agent who dogged Sam's life for a decade, says, "Phyllis really loved Sam, and Sam loved her." Phyllis's great friend the Broadway producer Dasha Epstein says, "She disappeared out of our lives when she was going with Sam. She said, 'I know it's difficult for my friends, and I understand.' That was so like Phyllis."

"My life is so much more than that-with Sam," Phyllis said. "That was only a chapter. I'm not ashamed of my past. I was doing what I honestly felt." She sat back in her rose damask Bergere chair and continued. "Sam was the greatest teacher I ever could have had. He was so wise about so many things. Sam is always depicted as unattractive. He wasn't. He was a very nice-looking man. He wasn't flashy. He didn't drive a pink Cadillac, like they used to say. He was a beautiful dresser. Dorothy Kilgallen thought he was my attorney when she met him. The two great losses of my life were my father and Sam."

She is now working on her autobiography to set the record straight. "I've got to get this out. I've got to get on with my life. It's holding me up. I have things to say that haven't been said," she told me. "Like about the late Mayor Daley of Chicago, even if his son is the new mayor." "It's a heavy-duty story," she was quoted in Marilyn Beck's column as saying. "I've been in thirty-four books in the last twelve to fifteen years, and it's time my story was finally told correctly. I don't need a Kitty Kelley doing to me what she did to Sinatra and [what she's doing to] Nancy Reagan."

She denies, for example, the story about the $100,000 marker that Giancana told Moe Dalitz to eat. "I never lost more than $16,000 gambling at any one time," she said. She also discounts many of the stories about her in the book Mafia Princess, written by Sam Giancana's daughter Antoinette. "I tried to stop that book," she said. "It wasn't accurate. Toni got all her information through the Freedom of Information Act. She didn't know any firsthand. She and her father hadn't been close. She used to come and stay here, in the guesthouse."

In 1961, at the height of Phyllis's fame, her affair with Giancana was still not known to the public. The FBI, which tracked Giancana's every move, had chosen not to expose the relationship, understanding that such publicity would be detrimental to McGuire's career. But in the spring of that year, agents bugged their motel room in Phoenix and learned they would be traveling on American Airlines to New York with a stopover at O'Hare Airport in Chicago. The FBI decided to subpoena Phyllis with the proviso that if she cooperated with them by answering their questions in a room within the terminal, they would withdraw the subpoena and she would not have to appear the next day. She knew that if she were to appear, it would become publicly known that she was the mistress of the Mob chief. What the FBI agents asked her to do was cooperate with them in the future by letting them know where Sam was at all times. Phyllis agreed to do what they asked, and they took the subpoena back, but, according to several reliable sources, she didn't keep her promise.

William Roemer's job that day was to keep Giancana occupied while Phyllis was being questioned, and he and Giancana got into a screaming match at the airport, climaxing when Sam said he was going to have his friend Butch Blasi machine-gun him down. Roemer, probably the greatest authority on Sam Giancana, remembers him very differently from the way Phyllis does. His book, Roemer: Man Against the Mob, will be published in October by Donald I. Fine. He told me on the phone from his home in Tucson, "Sam was ugly, balding-wore a wig at the end of his life. Little, slight, dumpy, a deese-dem-dose guy, sc.u.m of the earth, killer, the dregs of society, the worst kind of person. We hated each other. I hated him, and he hated me."

Roemer said that the Mob was extremely upset with Giancana when he was going with Phyllis. They thought he wasn't minding the store. "He fell in love with her and traveled all over the world with her," Roemer said. He agrees that Phyllis, in the tradition of wives, daughters, and lovers of Mob members, knew little of Sam's life away from her. He told me that when Phyllis first thought about writing her book, she called him-Sam's nemesis-to say that she had met a lot of people during her years with Sam but that she didn't actually know who they were or what they had done. Some of them, she said, she knew only by their nicknames, like "Chuckie" (English), "Butch" (Blasi), and "Skinny" (D'Amato)-all figures in the racketeering life of Sam Giancana.

"Did Sam leave any money to Phyllis?"

"n.o.body could ever prove that he left her money," answered Roemer. Although Giancana left an estate valued at only $132,583.16 when he died, that meant nothing. The kind of money that people like Sam Giancana have is not banked or left in the ordinary ways of money management. Roemer said it is possible that Giancana had a hundred million dollars.

"It very definitely hurt our careers for about a year," Phyllis McGuire said about her affair with Giancana. "We were blacklisted on TV, but that ended."

"In your interview with Dorothy Kilgallen, you said you were going to give him up," I said.

"Yes, I know. I said in that interview that I'd never see him again. Well, I did." She shrugged, and then threw out one of the amazing bits of information that flow freely from her tongue. "Kilgallen was murdered," she said. "She didn't commit suicide." Dorothy Kilgallen, who supposedly died of a sleeping-pill overdose in 1964, had in that same year interviewed Jack Ruby, the a.s.sa.s.sin of Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who a.s.sa.s.sinated President Kennedy. "I saw her three days before, dancing at El Morocco with Johnnie Ray. She was murdered. I didn't believe the suicide story then. I don't believe it now. Dorothy was the most beautiful corpse I ever saw."

Although Phyllis McGuire did not mention him in her list of suitors, there has been another romantic involvement since Sam, a bigger-than-life character named Mike Davis, and they are still close friends. The owner of Tiger Oil, Davis is based in Houston, but he is always on the move. Phrases like "my jet" pop up in his conversation, as do such names as Bunker Hunt, of the Texas Hunts, and Adnan Khashoggi, the international arms dealer, currently in hot water, with whom Davis has been a sometime partner. "Tiger Mike," as some people call him, is of Lebanese extraction. He was once the chauffeur of Phyllis's great friend Helen Bonfils, and married Bonfils upon the death of her husband in 1956. Helen Bonfils was reportedly in her late sixties at the time, and Davis was in his late twenties. Bonfils, who took over the running of the Denver Post when her father died, was also involved in producing Broadway shows. She helped finance Davis's start-up in Tiger Oil. Davis's interest in Phyllis began while she was still involved with Giancana. McGuire told me she once pulled him behind a slot machine and warned him, "You better stay away from me. Do you want to end up on the bottom of Lake Mead?"

On several occasions, Frank Sinatra's name came up in our conversation, and I sensed a certain amount of animosity. "We are cautiously friends," she said slowly. "He is the most talented but most contradictory person. He has surrounded himself with an entourage who yes him to death. How can you expand yourself surrounded by yes-men? I've stayed in his house, and he has bored me to death. He tells the sa-a-ame stories he's been telling for years, and all I ever heard were his records, which he played over and over again." She covered her ears as she told this. "I thought to myself, I'll never do that in my house with my records. You never hear my own music played on my system."

She recounted to me a story that I had read in Kitty Kelley's unauthorized biography of Sinatra, His Way. Sinatra, who was making $100,000 a week in Las Vegas, agreed, along with Sammy Davis, Jr., Dean Martin, and Eddie Fisher, to appear for nothing in a club called Villa Venice, which was a front for Giancana. Afterward, Giancana wanted to send a gift to each of them, and Phyllis picked out Sinatra's gift. She suggested sending Steuben crystal, having seen stemware in Sinatra's house that he told her was Steuben. "I say Steuben. Frank said Steubanne. He thought what he had was Steuben, but it wasn't. Steuben always says Steuben on the bottom, but his didn't. I called Gloria, who was Frank's secretary, to see if they should be monogrammed, but she said no to the monogram, because people tended to walk off with anything that had Sinatra's monogram on it. I sent him a service for thirty-martini gla.s.ses, white-wine gla.s.ses, red-wine gla.s.ses, champagne gla.s.ses, and water tumblers. I spent over $7,000 on that gift, and the s...o...b.. never sent a thank-you note."

"Did you get any flak from Sinatra from telling Kitty Kelley the story about the Steuben gla.s.ses?"

"None whatever," she said, shaking her head emphatically. "He knows better. Let me tell you about Frank. He doesn't know how to say, 'I'm sorry,' and he doesn't know how to say, 'Thank you.' He could never admit he made a mistake. I sent my Lear to Houston to pick up Dr. DeBakey when Frank's mother was killed, because they were friends, but he never said thank you for that either."

"Didn't you make a movie with Sinatra?"

"Hmmm," she answered, nodding her head. "Come Blow Your Horn. Everyone said Sam got that movie for me with Frank, which was not true. I played a buyer from Neiman-Marcus, a part that was not in the stage play. He was supposed to kiss me in one scene, and I was wearing my diamond drop earrings." She held up her fingers to indicate a good three inches of diamonds, from the lobes to the shoulders. "When he kissed me, he put his hands over my ears like this." She covered her ears with her hands. "That was the last important picture Frank did."

"Why did you ever stop singing?"

"Oh, we lost our confidence at different times-me less than Dorothy and Christine," said Phyllis. "Dorothy got married. Christine got married. They had guilt trips thinking they should be home with their children."

When she sings, she said, she feels tidal waves of love coming from the audience, "like a full moon when the ocean is active." On the night I flew to Chicago to watch the McGuire Sisters perform at the Moulin Rouge in the new Fairmont Hotel, the room was packed. The crowd was an older crowd, but then, the cover charge was twenty-five dollars per person, on top of drinks and dinner. "People feel they know us," said Phyllis. "They love us. They watched us grow up on TV." Sitting at a front-row table was Irv Kupcinet, the dean of Chicago columnists, and his wife, Essie. "Ladies and gentlemen," came the announcement over the loudspeaker, "the McGuire Sisters!"

And there they were, Dorothy, Christine, and Phyllis, with Phyllis, as always, in the middle. Fake eyelashes, glitter on their blue eyeshadow, honey-colored falls on their honey-colored hair, and peach dresses covered with crystals. When they sang their familiar hits, like "The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane," "Melody of Love," and "Sugartime," which put them on the cover of Life magazine in 1958, they got excited applause of recognition. Phyllis gave the audience their cover charge's worth. She did vocal impersonations of Judy Garland, Louis Armstrong, Ethel Merman, Pearl Bailey, and other stars of her era. And she was right: the audience loved them.

"Where do you sing next?"

"We might make a deal with Steve Wynn for the Mirage," said Phyllis. The Mirage, due to open before the end of the year, is the newest of the hotels on the Vegas Strip. We were sitting at a table in a corner of the bar of the Fairmont, late, after her second show. Her sisters had gone upstairs. She was in a long red dress and wore dark gla.s.ses because she was still wearing her stage makeup.

"I don't fear living, and I don't fear dying," she said. "You only live once, and I'm going to live it to the fullest, until away I go. And I'm going to continue singing as long as somebody wants me."

June 1989

SOCIAL DEATH IN VENICE.

At first it seemed like a re-enactment of the sort of turn-of-the-century match Henry James or Edith Wharton might have written about, the marriage of a New World heiress and an Old World prince, a swap of money and t.i.tle beneficial to both sides. Indeed, as we approach the turn of another century, the allure of grand t.i.tles for socially ambitious mothers with marriageable daughters seems not to have diminished, judging by the remarkable events in Venice during Easter weekend this year. No story by Henry James or Edith Wharton, however, would have ended with headlines such as this: HEIRESS JILTED AS BRIDEGROOM RUNS OFF WITH BEST MAN.

In this version of the tale, the heiress is an Australian named Primrose Dunlop, and the n.o.bleman is the awesomely t.i.tled Prince Lorenzo Giustiniani Montesini, count of the Phanaar, Knight of Saint Sophia, Baron Alexandroff. A poor prince who claims to be "a small link in a chain that goes back to Constantine," Prince Giustiniani, known to his friends as Laurie, is employed as a steward on Qantas Airlines. Lorenzo Montesini, as he was then called, appeared on the social scene of Sydney in 1983, at a charity party at Fairwater, the mansion of Lady Fairfax, the widow of the Australian press lord. Affable, charming, socially adept, Lorenzo soon was in demand as an extra man. "He charmed his way into everyone's house here," one Sydney social figure told me. "He was asked to all the parties, between flights."

When the Egyptian-born Montesini, who is forty-four, chubby, bouncy, elfin, and very short, arrived in Sydney from Melbourne, he came with his longtime companion, Robert Straub, with whom he had served in Vietnam. In Woolloomooloo, a middle-cla.s.s suburb of Sydney, the men converted two rose pink cottages into their home, which they filled with gilded mirrors, Persian carpets, rococo furnishings, and tables covered with framed photographs of well-known people. Montesini described the princely possessions as "family things."

Primrose Dunlop, the woman in question, was not a blushing debutante in her first bloom. Nor was she really an heiress, but merely the stepdaughter of a rich man who has two daughters of his own, who do not care much for their stepsister. Primrose is thirty-six, had been married before, briefly and unhappily, and is called Pitty Pat to distinguish her from her mother, Lady Potter, who is also named Primrose. Pitty Pat has had a variety of jobs over the years: she sold pots and pans in a department store, wrote social columns for two Sydney tabloids, did public-relations work for the British mogul Lord McAlpine, and, most recently, clerked as an eight-dollar-an-hour a.s.sistant to a haberdasher named John Lane, a great friend of her mother's, who sometimes escorted Lady Potter on the endless round of parties and boutique openings that her much older husband did not wish to attend.

Lady Potter, who once raised French poodles and is most often described by her friends as vivacious, became the fourth wife of Sir Ian Potter in 1975. Sleek, stylish, and very well dressed, she speaks in the grand vocal tones of a society lady. Her previous marriage, to Dr. Roger Dunlop, a surgeon, who is the father of Primrose, ended in divorce. Lady Potter, a tireless fund-raiser for charity, with a hardy appet.i.te for publicity and social recognition, had set her sights far beyond Sydney and Melbourne. Described by an English acquaintance who has sat next to her at dinner on several occasions as "an expert dropper of key names meant to establish her credentials," Lady Potter is referred to in the Australian social columns as "the Empress" and is said to revel in her nickname. She is considered by many to be the queen bee of the Sydney-Melbourne social axis, and her public-relations consultant, Barry Everingham, has gone so far as to describe Sir Ian and Lady Potter as the closest thing that Australia has to royalty.

Sir Ian, eighty-eight, is one of Australia's most respected businessmen, but age has caught up with the old man. A number of people I spoke with described him as slightly "gaga." Others said he was amazingly sharp for a man of his age. He played an integral, albeit pa.s.sive, part in the Venetian nuptials, however, because his money was paying for everything. His fortune, which has been estimated at $48 million by some, less by others, was to finance the splendid wedding for the bride, and it was thought by many to be the lure for the groom. Sir Ian has a daughter named Robin from his first marriage, and a daughter named Carolyn Parker Bowles from his second marriage. Mrs. Parker Bowles, who lives in London, is the mother of Sir Ian's two grandsons. "Sir Ian is a self-made man of enormous ability who, until all this, has been very quiet. He is a great Australian," one Australian businessman told me. "The poor man has been dragged into a situation which will appear in his obituary."

Last year Lorenzo Montesini brought out a novel about Sydney society called Cardboard Cantata, which he dedicated to Lady Potter. Since no publisher picked up on it, the book was printed privately. It has been rumored that Lady Potter financed the publication of the four thousand copies, and she gave a launch party for the book, in an art gallery, which attracted three hundred of the city's smartest citizens. It was on the occasion of that party that Lorenzo first aired his previously unsuspected t.i.tles of prince, count, knight, and baron.

The sheer awfulness of Lorenzo Montesini's book was conveyed to me by the editor of an Australian magazine, who said, "I defy you to read it." In an earlier, sn.o.bbier time, it would have been called a shopgirl's book. The three leading characters, who vie with one another for leadership of Sydney society, are named Babylonia Grushman, Cooii Rundle, and Lady Millicent Bosenquet. Another character is described as coming from a "well-to-do but poor family." Despite its social send-off, the book was, predictably, a colossal flop. Stacks of unsold copies gathered dust until the recent publicity created a belated demand and elevated them to the status of collector's items. But the point was not the book, and the literary life was not the prince's ambition. It seemed that it was the book party that led to the plans for a wedding. That night Lady Potter told the press, "I've known Lorenzo for years. He's a dear sweet boy. Ian and I look upon him as family." The steward-author-prince smiled and said, "I have arrived."

From there, things moved quickly. The rose pink cottages became the setting for a round of parties, at which Pitty Pat and Lady Potter were always present. "Unless you entertain, you're dead," said Lorenzo in an early television interview, speaking in his chatty manner, seated on a thronelike chair. "Montesini brought a manservant down from Thailand and dressed him in a King and I costume with the Giustiniani coronet on it," said a friend who attended his parties. Surprisingly, it was Robert Straub, Lorenzo's great friend, who inadvertently brought about the engagement when he jokingly remarked one evening after dinner, "Think about it, Primrose. If you were to marry Lorenzo, you would become a princess." Although the remark was greeted with hoots of laughter, it set the idea in motion.

Soon after that, Lady Potter confirmed in a magazine interview that Lorenzo "telephoned and formally asked for my daughter's hand in marriage.... I said that as long as he makes her happy, the answer's yes." He gave her an engagement ring of aquamarine and diamonds, modernized from a piece handed down to him by his grandmother.

No one loves a party more than Lady Potter, and she saw fit to celebrate the joyous news of her daughter's engagement with two, one in Melbourne and a second in New York, at fashionable Mortimer's, to which she invited some of the most promotable of New York's social names, including Leonard Lauder and Nan Kempner.

The romantic city of Venice was decided on as the location for the wedding. Not only was Giustiniani one of the great t.i.tles of Venice, but Lady Potter had been renting palazzi there for several years and had come to know the small and exclusive English-speaking colony. In preparation, Pitty Pat became a Catholic; she received instruction from Father Vincent Kiss, and she was sponsored by John Lane, her boss and her mother's walker. The Sydney and Melbourne newspapers followed every detail of the arrangements. The date was set for April 16, the day after Easter. The wedding would take place in the Basilica di San Pietro, to which the bride would be oared in one of a flotilla of gondolas, followed by a grand reception and candlelit dinner in the marble hall of the Palazzetto Pisani on the Grand Ca.n.a.l, which the bride's mother had leased for the occasion. Seventy Australian guests were invited to the lavish event.

Despite encouragement from Lady Potter, the affianced couple appeared in public infrequently, giving rise to rumors that theirs was a nonromantic liaison reeking of ulterior motives on both sides. When Montesini and Robert Straub, whose relationship was causing t.i.tters in Lady Potter's circle, showed up at a party to celebrate the opening of a Chanel boutique in Sydney, John Lane, acting for Lady Potter, said to Lorenzo, "Don't be seen in public with that man again." The bride's family was less than enthusiastic when Lorenzo announced that Straub would be his best man. Dissension arose. There were rumors, all unconfirmed, that lurid photographs existed.

Stories persisted in Sydney society that the prince was in it for the money. He himself reported to Pitty Pat that John Laws, one of the highest-paid radio announcers in the world, had told him, while he was pouring champagne for him in the first-cla.s.s cabin on a Qantas flight, that his t.i.tle should be worth at least $2 million to the Potters. Lorenzo was shocked. "People suggest that there is money in this for me. That's utter rubbish," he protested.

Before their departure for Venice, the prince and his princess-to-be posed for pictures and gave an interview for a long article in Good Weekend magazine in the Sydney Morning Herald, and it was that article, with the royal-looking photographs, that began the unraveling of their plans. Previously unknown relations of the prince came out of the woodwork and mocked his pretensions, disputing both the t.i.tle and his right to use it. One cousin, Nelson Trapani, a forty-nine-year-old retired Queensland builder, told the press, "Really, all this speculation about a t.i.tle is a load of bulldust. I'd sooner sit down with a pie and watch the telly."

Nonetheless, the group, which included Father Kiss, who was to perform the ceremony, took off amid whispers that all was not as it was supposed to be, with either the t.i.tle or the romance, or anything else. Dr. Roger Dunlop, Pitty Pat's real-father, was so opposed to his daughter's choice of husband that he boycotted the wedding ceremony.

If Lorenzo was having second thoughts, he nonetheless went along with the plans, flying to Venice with Robert Straub and John Lane, Lady Potter's great friend, who had been a.s.signed the paternal function of giving the bride away, owing to the refusal of her real father and the inability of her stepfather because of his age. The groom-to-be was the only member of the wedding party without a confirmed seat on the plane. He traveled standby economy-cla.s.s at his own expense. A curious twist of alliances occurred during the trip. Lane, who had previously been unfriendly to Montesini and Straub and had warned them at the Chanel opening not to appear together in public, discovered, Lorenzo later said, that "we were really quite nice guys after all and not as bad as we had been painted."

On Good Friday, as Leo Schofield, an Australian journalist, and other guests were boarding their plane in Sydney for the long flight to Venice, they heard that the wedding had been called off.

What had up to then been merely a Sydney-Melbourne gossip-column story quickly turned into international headlines, and Pitty Pat and Lorenzo became, however briefly, household names, more famous in their disaster than they would ever have been in their marriage. "If it was publicity they all wanted," said one friend, "they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams."

Although it was widely touted in the Australian press that the guest list had been made up of a glittering gaggle of international socialites, there wasn't a recognizable name in the group. "Not a single man, woman, or dog in Venice ever heard of any of these people," said one longtime resident of the city.

There was a problem with accommodations from the beginning. Lord and Lady Potter and Pitty Pat were housed on an upper floor of the Palazzetto Pisani, and the prince, his best man, and John Lane were housed in a small flat on the ground floor, or water floor, consisting of two tiny rooms. The s.p.a.ce was crowded and uncomfortable, and the bathroom facilities were not to the trio's liking. At a c.o.c.ktail party held at the Palazzetto, which is owned by the Countess Maria Pia Ferri, another Venetian countess is said to have exclaimed to the bridegroom when he was introduced to her as Prince Giustiniani, "Oh, you must be related to my friend Cecy Giustiniani." Cecy Giustiniani is the venerable Dowager Countess Giustiniani, and soon telephones were jingling up and down the Grand Ca.n.a.l. People ran to their Libro d'Oro, the Italian book of n.o.bility, but no one could find a Prince Giustiniani. Every Venetian with whom I spoke drew attention, often huffily, to the fact that "Prince" is not a Venetian t.i.tle. "Count" is the t.i.tle that counts in Venice, as any countess will tell you.

The Dowager Countess Giustiniani vehemently refuted the claim of Lorenzo Montesini that he was Prince Giustiniani, stating that her name had been violated. "The male line of the Venetian Giustinianis ended thirty years ago with the death of my dear husband, the Count Alvise Giustiniani," she said. "A Prince Giustiniani does not exist. To claim this is the most monstrous rubbish. This alleged t.i.tle is false, false, false." So began the wedding week.

The Palazzetto Pisani soon became a battleground, with a butler carrying notes back and forth between floors. According to reports, the Potter family asked Lorenzo to substantiate his claim to the t.i.tle before the wedding took place. The relationship with Robert Straub was also in dispute. The family was concerned about a projected newspaper story on Straub which would provide details of his life in Melbourne before he and Lorenzo moved to Sydney. Straub believed that someone considered more suitable was waiting in the wings to replace him as his best man. Lady Potter had reckoned that, once in Venice, Lorenzo would capitulate and Robert would go away, but this was not to be. Lorenzo and Straub and Lane left the Pisani and moved to a pension on the Giudecca Ca.n.a.l, which Lorenzo later described as "a hotel for middle-cla.s.s English traveling el-cheapo." In the course of the move, Lorenzo claimed to have lost their pa.s.sports, and he reported this to Pitty Pat.

The next morning, on the advice of John Lane, Lorenzo got on the telephone and told Lady Potter, not his wife-to-be, that the wedding was off. It then became the sad duty of Lady Potter to inform her daughter, the bride, that the groom was jilting her.

One of the Australian guests told me, "I thought they'd go through with it. After all, it seemed very much a marriage of convenience, all because of the t.i.tle. It was really a larky thing to do, a combination of an ambitious mother wanting to feel well placed and a financially ambitious groom." The same guest described running into Lorenzo in the bar of the Hotel Cipriani after the breakup but before he bolted from Venice with his best man. "He seemed totally devastated by the whole thing. He said, about himself and Pitty Pat, 'We'd been old friends. It was to have been a marriage of style.' "

Evelyn Lambert, the Texas chatelaine of the Villa Lambert in the Veneto outside of Venice, who rented her house to Lady Potter one year, told me, "I called her after the cancellation and she said she was not angry with Lorenzo. Venice thinks the whole thing was a publicity stunt, but I don't think so. The three men decided this was not going to work. I read in the Sydney Morning Herald that I was giving a bridal lunch on Good Friday. Honey, I'm a Catholic by conversion. I don't give lunch parties on Good Friday. I don't even eat on Good Friday."

One of Pitty Pat's cousins acted as family spokesman and made calls to all the guests to inform them that the wedding was off. "The families of both the bride and groom have searched high and low for an answer to an inexplicable riddle and a way to redeem the damage-spiritual, psychological, and material," he said. "To say the bride and her mother are distraught is understatement. They are utterly devastated. It is as though a bomb had exploded. The groom's decision and what made him take this step came out of the blue. His family had already handed over generations of jewels and heirlooms to Primrose.

"We had no inkling. No one fully understands the emotional bond between those two men who ran away together. We are trying to trace them. They might be in Timbuktu as far as we know.

"We would love a dialogue with Lorenzo to see exactly why it happened and to put things in perspective. Nothing is irredeemable. If only he had spoken openly with the bride, we would have understood. If at this late stage he were to come forward with regrets, we feel the bride would still accept him. Primrose is a tough girl, and she is fighting against distress, shame, and a feeling of ridicule. Fortunes have been spent by scores of people on this stylish wedding-return airfares from Melbourne, not to mention presents. But this matters least of all. It is the wounded bride we first have to deal with."

Many of the people who spoke with both mother and daughter were amazed by their composure. But, after all, in their world appearance is everything. A few days after the fiasco, the Potters and Pitty Pat left Venice and proceeded to Paris, where Lady Potter celebrated her birthday at Maxim's just as she had planned to right along.

A few days later in Melbourne, the premier of the state of Victoria, in a televised speech from the floor of Parliament House, accused the opposition party of being a mismatched marriage-worse than that of Pitty Pat Dunlop and the prince. The Melbourne newspapers carried the remark on their front pages.

In Sydney the called-off marriage was the most exciting event in years. "We fell about laughing here," said a friend of both parties. "It was all a publicity stunt to turn them into international figures, and it backfired on them."

People talked of nothing else. And when they finished talking to one another, they talked to the press, if asked. In an article by Daphne Guinness, Caroline Simpson, a member of the powerful Fairfax family, spoke her mind. "Hasn't this whole thing been a joke from the beginning?" she asked. "None of us thought it would get to the wedding stage and the church, did we? Dr. Dunlop came to see my mother [Betty Fairfax] this afternoon. They talked for hours. I think he had a lot to do with stopping it. It is really an extraordinary thing for a mother to push a child in that way." There was a certain amount of glee in social circles that Lady Potter "had egg all over her face." "The person I feel sorry for is Ian Potter," said Sheila Scotter, another social leader, "and his absolutely darling daughter Carolyn Parker Bowles, who does move in society circles in London with certain royals, including the monarch."

On her way back to Sydney via Paris and New York, Primrose Dunlop arranged to go public with her story on Australia's "60 Minutes" when she returned. The rumor was that she was paid $38,000 by the network, and that she would drop a bombsh.e.l.l on the show.

If the producers of "60 Minutes" really did pay Pitty Pat $38,000, they were rooked, for there was no bombsh.e.l.l. Or perhaps, as has been suggested, libel laws being what they are, the bomb was considered inadvisable, and was defused. The interview was benign, even boring. "Everyone here feels cheated by it," said a friend of Montesini's. "Such a pathetic amount was produced. Anyway, I heard they only paid her $23,000."

Pitty Pat was interviewed in the apartment of her mother and stepfather, and viewers had no sense of watching a sad and sympathetic jilted woman. She seemed arch and superior, holding her eyebrows high and looking down her nose at Jeff McMullen, the Morley Safer of Australia's "60 Minutes," as if she were granting an audience to a troublesome commoner.

"That's Mummy and H.M. the Queen," she said, showing a photograph of Lady Potter in a deep curtsy before Queen Elizabeth.

The only surprise in the program came when McMullen asked, "Were you s.e.xually compatible with the prince?"

"Yes, we were. Wouldn't you be with someone you were going to marry?"