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Manual For A
Life Fantastic
A playboy's guide to the modern world
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By Melik kaylan
Take Giacomo Casanova,
for example. Violinist, philosopher, librarian, playwright, duelist, friend to Voltaire, pioneer of science fiction, prodigious lover of life and of women, we think of him as the definitive playboy. He made an art of his appetites. One applauds him not for the myriad seductions, but for the seductiveness, the style and grace, the air of immanent legend, that made it all possible. Even before his fame he must have carried into the bedroom a whiff of the wide world, its laughter and intrigues and echoes — what we might now call an aura of celebrity.
These days, there are three kinds of playboy: one who is purely a creation of the tabloids, one who lives so
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Greece, 2003
Peter Marangoni day-tripping on a friend's boat in Patmos.
“It's the best thing
in the world,” says Marangoni, who spends time in Greece every August.
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splendidly that the paparazzi happen to notice, and one who lives beyond
the media's ken but burns brightly for those around him. A vulgarian like Donald Trump might illustrate the first. A
vivid example of the second might be the legendary Latin lover Porfirio Rubirosa of the postwar years, who dated Zsa Zsa
Gabor, married Barbara Hutton, and died in his Ferrari. But for my money the third variety comes closest to the platonic
paradigm of the playboy in achieving both discretion and fame organically, by word of mouth, all the while pursuing pleasure
above money and power. Note that in all three cases, he must be a public figure, even if only to his circle of friends —
a broad one always, or he's not the real thing. Like Baudelaire's dandy, who ”should live and sleep in front of a
mirror,“ a playboy lives in the theater of his legend. A fully practicing playboy must, almost despite himself, emanate
charm like perfume, or a distant music. That charm
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| There are three kinds of playboy: one who is purely a creation of the tabloids,
one who lives so splendidly that the paparazzi happen to notice, and one who lives beyond the media's ken but burns brightly .. |
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should carry an open invitation to dissolve into his world — a kind of
contact high — and suggest to us the infinite possibility of escape from the humdrum. In other words, to an important
degree, he lives for others. His is a public service.
Have you ever considered the metaphysics of playboydom? Its phenomenology, epistemology,
hagiography, demonology, and diet? The historical burdens and codes of chivalry that come with the job?
Someone should publish a handbook of true discipline for playboys, one that would help apprentices to graduate and consumers to discern the fakes. Failing that, one can study the example of my friend Peter Marangoni.
An Italian architect with an American mother, now in his mid-50s and based alternately in a
Manhattan loft and a Florentine villa, Peter Marangoni offers a precise embodiment of the bon viveur who qualifies for
playboy in its
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most stringent definitions. He qualifies all the more for never straying into the spotlight
while many around him are born into it. But, first, what are those definitions and why does Peter so amply fit them?
He has a transparent and infectious love of life. One can see clear through to the boy in him who leaped at experience
with a congenital certainty of its joys. That boy is father to the playboy, and his mischief never dims.
Of course, maturity is important. William Wordsworth's description of poetry as ”experience recollected in tranquility“
applies equally to the playboy's performance as a raconteur and boulevardier. He needs the years to build and refine his anecdotes.
The playboy lives once the first time and then again many times in the retelling, where he invites us to join him,
opening a door and letting us walk around in his life. Peter remembers, ”I was on a boat in a quiet cove
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near Capri —
just one other boat in sight. Sunlight. Silence. A perfect girl, sixteen, sunbathed naked and alone on the other boat.
So I just dived off and swam over. I ended up being married to her for a while.“
Age is also important in proving that his reputation endures unextinguished by any possible notorious acts of
caddishness or inelegance down the years. If yachts and houses and hearts are still open to him, then by implication he conducted himself with the requisite honor over time. If even now, to see him in the company of a young beauty does not cast doubt on her taste or savvy, then he remains a true playboy. Of a younger practitioner, one can never be as sure.
Peter has traveled incessantly, and still does. As someone said of the British novelist Christopher Isherwood, “his stories are perfectly timed postcards,” and a playboy's
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| The playboy lives once the first time and then again many times in the retelling,
where he invites us to join him, opening a door and letting us walk around in his life. |
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tales must have the power to illuminate instantly an entire era
through a moment of high living. Peter was a boy during Italy's dolce vita years. In London he met the Beatles at the opening night of
Help. As a teenager he tasted some of London's “Swinging Sixties.” When in New York City, he was a regular at Studio
54 in its heyday. Peter drove to Beirut from Florence in 1974 in an MGB sports car. He rattled through the Iron Curtain into Kosovo, Bulgaria, Romania, then into Turkey and Syria, racking up romances before arriving at the Roman ruins of Baalbek, where, in the mountains, he ran into militiamen — the green fields they were guarding supplied the world with hashish, the renowned “Lebanese Red.” Peter befriended
the great Surrealist poet Louis Aragon, who was there to perform in the last Baalbek festival in the Roman amphitheater. It was the year
before civil war erupted in Lebanon.
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On the way there, Peter stopped in the sleepy Turkish fishing port of Bodrum, now an overgrown resort town where Ahmet Ertegun, the celebrated boss of Atlantic Records and early pollinator of rock music, still keeps a Moroccan-style holiday home. At that time, the jet set would adopt an obscure beauty spot on some remote coast with tolerant natives and make of it their own barefoot idyll.
Bouzios, near Rio, was such a place, as was Bodrum. Peter conducted a romance there
with the blond daughter of a Turkish surgeon general. He kissed her at dusk atop the crusader castle of Bodrum.
A playboy doesn't have to earn a living. That's a defining feature. But he should have an avocation.
Peter worked with the filmmakers Ismail Merchant and James Ivory on and off for some years, advising them on the Florentine settings of
A Room with a View, among other projects. He always practiced choosily — some would say desultorily —
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| A playboy doesn't have to earn a living. That's a defining feature. |
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as an architect.
He built a stone house in a cove on the Turkish coast, opposite the ancient Lycian port of Kas, surrounded by high hills and ancient
ruins. In London he remodeled houses for the Gettys, the Guinnesses and other luminaries. Now he's rehabbing farmhouses in Umbria.
Peter's great moments often involve buildings. He remembers the little private-house-cum-eatery on the hill atop Capri, “right
near the ruins of Tiberius's villa, from whence he ran the Roman Empire. You could sit on the terrace with a view of Naples
and Sorrento. At cliff bottom lay an old shipwreck. I will never forget the taste of their Neapolitan rabbit stew,
freshly killed and the tomatoes homegrown, the breeze coming up, the sound of waves below in the summer heat.
Tiberius would throw his victims off that spot. Not far away one always heard gypsy music which came from a bar
in a little stone house that you couldn't see.”
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These days, as profession has come to equal
identity in globalized metropolitan centers,
the romance of
the independently well-off playboy is fading. Indeed, a life of leisure carries a stigma in workaholic towns
like New York. The effect is that people learn how to consume but forget how to live. Recently, an old friend irritated Peter by accusing him of
“having spent his whole life chasing girls,” which Peter found “offensive and, anyway, not true.“ One could argue
that both sides miss the point. There are now few enough amateur practitioners of the leisurely arts, who take life
as it comes, unembittered by years of climbing and outmaneuvering colleagues. In fact, Peter should embrace his friend's
insult — however untrue — as a measure of virtue. His years of “waste” are a monument to delight for us all
to share in.
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