Midas touch
Roderick Gilchrist
It was while Natalia from Torino was applying small sheets of 24ct gold on my crumbling visage at the Hotel Cipriani, during what must be the most expensive facial ever invented to part the pampered and wealthy from their money, that I reflected on the changing of the guard at this venerable Venetian institution.
You will be lucky to get change out of €400 for the gold facial from Natalia, one of the white-coated handmaidens at the hotel’s Casanova Wellness Centre (apparently the old roué used to cavort through the gardens here), which promises to put off the ageing process. Yippee!
If it could do that, it was worth the money. Not that I was paying. This was on the house because I had the uncertain honour of being a guinea pig, a kind of golden guinea pig really, the first one ever to receive this treatment.
Natalia was excited. The strips of gold came out of a little polythene bag and were carefully applied to my forehead, cheeks and chin. What do I look like, Nat?
It’s a bit late in life for me to draw parallels with Shirley Eaton in Goldfinger. Anyway I’m the wrong sex. But I hadn’t expected her answer. ‘Tutankhamun,’ she giggled.
I said the idea was to stop me looking old. Tut died 3,300 years ago. I said for €400, given the price of gold, I wanted to keep those 24ct strips. Perhaps Mervyn King would do a deal, but Nat said no they had to be flushed away. This was like lighting cigars with £50 notes, but they probably do that here too.
The gold facial is an innovation of Maurizio Saccani, the Cip’s new general manager. He already has control of the other five-star Orient Express Hotels in Italy: the Caruso, Ravello, the Splendido, Portafino and the Villa San Michele, Florence.
He is a likeable fellow. How could you resist a chap who confesses his secret passion is jazz and he has just paid a fortune to buy a guitar on the internet but is too scared to tell his wife what it cost? Maurizio started here as food and beverage manager 30 years ago. He’s a terrific success story.
Maurizio is excitable. If there is a microphone about, it’s a job to stop him singing. I actually once danced with him, mano a mano, at the Splendido. But that’s another story.
Dr Natalie Rusconi was the manager when Maurizio started and he has only just given way, at 82, to his protégé. I asked him what the hotel was like in 1977, just after James Sherwood bought it from three Guinness sisters who sold in a hurry because they feared the Red Brigade would blow it up.
‘A pile of stones. The garden, where the swimming pool is, was an ugly boatyard with workmen hammering away all day. An American guest took a photo and sent it to me saying how can you charge these prices with a view like this, and he was right.’ The pool, the size of a lake, is so big, he told me, because the Italian workmen mistook the English architect’s measurements in feet for metres.
Rusconi is very dry. I once asked him what he thought of a wine. ‘It has moods,’ he said. ‘It gets elated. It gets depressed. But it comes from a good family.’ He has welcomed everybody here from English aristos in the old days like the Bedfords (‘everyone then drank spirits, never wine’) to Polanski who wrote in the guest book, ‘Look, no girls’. Michael Heseltine had his heart attack at the Cip (he had probably just seen the bill) and there was a bit of a cock-up with Margaret Thatcher, in Venice for a summit.
‘I thought, what can I do to make her feel at home. I put a large framed photo of the Queen by her bed. When she saw it, there was a recoil before she murmured sardonically, “how interesting”. I didn’t know they didn’t get along.’ He also sorted out President D’Estaing, who wanted the French flag flown outside the hotel to be three times the size of that of any other country.
Dr Rusconi began his career filling fountain pens on the reception desk at the Savoy in London. He ended it as the Doge of all hotel bosses, overlording suites that cost up to €6,000 a night (one American heiress just booked 48 straight nights at this price). There will never be another like him. Next time we meet I must ask him what he thinks of gold facials.
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