A Festival Wife – Count Rassi’s - Illustrated by Nesta Morgan
To Henry Dean the task is proving much more trouble than anticipated. On top of that, Henry has promised a shady group of financiers to place a story in Variety about their new film company formed by a shady group of financiers including San Lorenzo's leading citizen, Count Rassi.
Scenario: “Count Pietro Rassi’s luncheons are the peak event of the
festival”… his house, a romantic’s reverie”… “go with a dream”… and this is my picture, in "color".
“To get to Count Rassi's place isn't easy, nor is it obvious. Nothing
about him was. You had to find the right way… and he could put in a
bridge”.
From the “Rocky promontory” “If you’ve taken the right street, it
dead-ends at an arched doorway set in a stone wall with a wrought iron
gate”… “passing through a musty tunnel”… “you step into an enclosed
gondola”… “the conveyance…still functions, a huge fly wheel humming”
gears guests to “an art deco melding”, “across the chasm cut by the
alpine stream”.
“Nora was on the gondola overlooking the gorge for more than an hour, with my director”.
“I want to use this location for my next movie. It could happen on this
thing… and then one goes over the side… Ba-dum! I need to talk to this
Rassi character”…
“You’ve given me my story – very edgy and daring - me read for the
part…a wealth of past experience guiding… technology”, said Nora
“but for all it’s skyward reach, the great structure – failed to move… in the way it was intended”…
“You shouldn’t jump”… “he will write our epitaphs”…
“You see them there just on the rock… above the house… the stranded
gondola”… “They seemed to be having an excellent time. My director was
talking animatedly, waving his arms in the air as if acting out scenes
from his movies”…
It is “always dramatic” “when the wind scoots up the gorge to toy with the gondola”…
They were watched over by Count Rassi.
Count Rassi… “black slicked back hair, slightly bent nose with a long
jaw and high forehead dressed in a well tailored suit” “hands a
doeskin-bound volume of de Lautreamont” a part of his “rare section on
rare erotica” and poured himself a shot of Jack Daniels”… “I want to
show her I can be part of her world too”… his “finger POINTING to the
future”
The Medici Hotel... “Tonight”… I glanced over to see the lights still
on in my director’s room. At that moment… I saw a women… vaulting
nimbly onto the balcony”… and “a man poised… with stiff shoulders and
tilt of the head” holding a flashlight… he was gazing up at… the
hotel”… “Rassi could not possibly have missed the little interlude on
the director’s balcony”…