Going Off Script

I
was born a celebrity. It was the summer of 1974, a Saturday morning in Naples, Italy, where my father, Eduardo DePandi, was a master tailor and my mother, Anna, was a housewife. My brother, Pasquale, was seven years old and already anointed king of the world, much to the outrage of my five-year-old sister, Monica. I was two weeks overdue, but my mother kept that to herself, determined as she was just to go about her business until I decided to make my entrance, whenever that happened to be. What’s an extra three or four months in the womb, right? Mama DePandi was never one to complain, even when she was swollen like an Oompa Loompa and stuck in our cramped third-floor walkup apartment with no air-conditioning in the torpid August heat.

On Italy’s southern coast, summer weekends are always hot and unhurried, generation after generation following the same
rhythm, and the same rituals. Come Saturday morning, the men and children traditionally head to the beach while the women stay behind to fix a huge picnic feast, which they then lug down to the shore, appearing en masse like an advancing army at lunchtime.

When my mother’s water broke on the beach the morning of my birth, I’m told that she just kept serving her famous frittata. Then, without a word, she suddenly got up and discreetly walked into the sea, hoping to swim off the labor pains. No one had ever seen Anna DePandi go into the water during lunch before. My father hurried in after her.

“Anna, what’s going on?” Babbo called out.

“Nothing, nothing,” she insisted, as if she were suddenly an Olympic medalist preparing to do a few warm-up miles before casually swimming across the sea to Tunisia.

“Are you in labor?” my father demanded.

“No,” she insisted, turning back to the beach and not bothering to mention the contractions. “Let’s eat.” Italians invented comfort food, and our thinking is that there’s nothing a few hundred carbs can’t cure.

Mama kept up the pretense that nothing was wrong as long as she could, but I was hell-bent on joining the party, and the picnic came to a screeching halt as her contractions worsened. I was very nearly born in traffic on the way to the clinic, where a midwife waited to deliver me, contrary to my sister’s account of highly skilled dolphins doing so at sea (a story I fervently believed until I was something like twelve). Maybe the dolphins would have been less shocked than the humans by my size: thirteen pounds! If I hadn’t been her third baby, my poor mother may not have survived, considering that she didn’t have the luxury of an epidural and got nothing more than the equivalent of a single Advil to kill the pain. Not only was I huge, but I came out with a full head of dark hair, too. I basically arrived as a toddler.

I was named after my mother and her older brother, my Uncle Giulio. As a child, I took the lack of a middle name as an open invitation to find my own. I gravitated toward stripper names. Roxy was a recurring favorite. At birth, though, everyone just called me Pacchiana, which loosely translated to “large peasant woman with a red moon face.” Neighbors lined up out the door waiting their turn to come see the giant baby when my parents brought me home, and my mother proudly passed me around for closer inspection. It’s hard to picture this scene now in a Purellified world where we don’t even dare touch a shopping cart at a grocery store without sanitizing it first, but Mama’s approach to building up her newborn’s immune system was more along the lines of “Oh, sure, hold her, sneeze on her, set her on the floor if your arms get tired…” But no one ever did. I was the neighborhood star, and it seemed like no one would ever get enough of me and my chubby cheeks.

Sadly, that initial wave of public interest and adoration lasted for only eighteen months. By then, the only part of me still freakishly large were my feet, which were crammed into big, black orthopedic shoes. Pictures of me back then show this poor, sweet little girl sitting there with her dainty pierced earrings and froufrou dress, with her face nearly obscured by the black clodhoppers sticking out in front of her like skis. It’s not like I was expecting red-soled baby Louboutins, but seriously? Not long ago, I came across one of my old baby photos. I kicked into
Fashion Police
mode and interrogated my mother about this footwear horror, demanding some answers: Were they trying to hide evidence that they were secretly binding my feet in hopes I wouldn’t grow into the size ten I became before I even hit puberty? Did Mama have some torrid fling with a clown when the circus came through town, and was I their secret love child? Mama waved off my indignation, trying to pretend there was nothing unusual about dressing an infant in old man oxfords. I
still don’t buy it. But clearly I was traumatized by it: trying to overcompensate for my large baby hooves no doubt drove me to become the shoe whore I am today.

My fickle local fan base reappeared once my full head of dark baby hair turned into golden corn silk; I was once again a huge hit. A blond kid in southern Italy is very rare. Like, traffic-stopping rare. Vespas are pretty much the only thing with a motor that can navigate the narrow streets of old Naples, and boys and young men would roar around piled three to a scooter. Sometimes they would stop to gape at me and my golden hair while I was on the stoop playing with my doll, and my maternal grandfather, Antonio, would come charging out. “You get away from her! Don’t even look at her!” I was the apple of Nonno’s eye. He adored me, and the feeling was mutual. My very first memory is of standing next to him, while he’s talking to people about how pretty I am, how special, that I am his angel. My grandfather was also my first fashion icon. He was really tall and elegant, and wore a top hat. He just put himself together so beautifully, and carried himself with such pride, even though he was a simple man who worked at a train station food cart. Nonno was my first heartbreak, too. He died suddenly at the age of seventy-five; I was nine years old when I kissed him good-bye forever.

My grandfather was a great man, and I think my mother saw a lot of him in my dad. My father has many of the same qualities, including the sweet temperament that can flare in an instant, turning him into a raging Italian bull. (Different variations of the Vespa boys would discover that years later—stay tuned for a very special episode of
Giuliana Hits Puberty.
) Dad was the oldest of five children born into a struggling family in postwar Italy. His parents would have to hide the bread and ration it out so their hungry kids wouldn’t climb up on the counter and gobble it up.

Young Eduardo loved school but was forced to find a job at ten so he could help support the family. He was put to work in a tailor shop, where he picked up scraps and cleaned. When he didn’t return to class, one of his teachers showed up to confront his father, Pasquale. Eduardo was a really bright boy and a very good student, the teacher explained. He had potential, and his parents were making a big mistake not to give him the education he deserved. “Are you going to help pay the bills?” Pasquale asked the teacher before telling him to mind his own business, and Eduardo started working in the fourth grade. My father is still one of the smartest men I’ve ever known, and his ability to focus so keenly on any challenge before him made him a master tailor at a young age. He had his own shop while still in his twenties, and his exquisite custom work would eventually make him sought after within the powerful circles of Washington, D.C.’s elite. He and my mother, a pretty brunette (at the time) with brown eyes and great curves, met when Anna was just fifteen and Eduardo was twenty. Once they fell in love, it was forever. They’re in their seventies now, married fifty years, and they still dance together and laugh at their private jokes and don’t like to go anywhere without each other. I want my marriage to always be like theirs.

It’s funny, but when people ask me to describe Naples, one of the first images that always pops into my head is of old marble steps riddled with chips and cracks, a fairly common sight in a city tested by the wrath of both man and nature. Maybe the steps got seared into my memory because children just naturally explore the ground beneath them more than adults. The streets were where we played, and the stoops were our vantage point for any neighborhood drama. As a little girl, I couldn’t possibly have grasped what those ruined steps were telling the world, but as a grown woman, I would one day cling to their truth, understanding that Naples was beautiful not despite her scars, but because of them.

There was a coziness to my Italian childhood that I wish Bill and I could replicate for our son, Duke. Everything revolved around the two things Italians treasure most: food and family. What I would give now for those lazy weekend lunches on the beach like the one on the day I was born. As a child, I would watch hungrily as the women unpacked a feast from their baskets and totes. Out would come fresh baguettes and hunks of cheese, fresh tomatoes, bottles of wine and liters of Coke, and, of course, heaping platters of antipasti—slices of fatty salami, small mountains of shaved Parma ham and salty prosciutto, bowls of cured olives and peperoncini, maybe some artichoke hearts and pickled vegetables. The mamas and aunties and grandmothers always brought extra helpings of their signature dishes to share with the extended family. Even now, my mouth waters when I think of the delicious frittata Mama used to make by mixing cold leftover pasta from the night before with eggs and parmesan, then frying it all up in extra-virgin olive oil before wrapping slices of the gooey pasta pie in aluminum foil like a sandwich. I can still taste the warm, tangy cheese and hear the sound of waves crashing in the background as my family laughed and argued and laughed some more, while the women fussed over us all.

I had cousins by the dozen. My uncles Giulio and Michele were the grand adventurers of the family—moving first to London, and later America—but the rest of us saw no point to leaving: Naples was world enough for us, and we held it close. It was as much who we were as where we lived. It seemed like the whole neighborhood was family, either literally or figuratively. My grandparents lived next door. Aunts, uncles, cousins were always coming and going. Apartments were usually so overcrowded—multiple generations living in homes with just one or two bedrooms—that there was no place for the kids to play, really, except outside, and everyone kept a collective eye on
us, especially the nosy, toothless old women who tended to live in the tiny one-room flats on the ground floor of the apartment buildings.

At the end of our block was the baker who delivered the fresh cornettos we would have for breakfast each morning, dunking the custard-filled croissants into cups of hot latte. The fact that I started drinking coffee with milk at four probably explains a lot about why people always think I have so much energy and can balance a million things at once. But hey, wine was on the lunch and dinner table and I was free to drink that, too, so it all evened out. Anyway, after breakfast, we’d go grocery shopping. Like all the other housewives, Mama would lower a basket attached to a rope off the balcony, and one of the little boys who worked for the grocer would scurry over and run back to the store with the list and money tucked inside. He would return with the groceries and change, and we’d hoist the basket back upstairs. The same system worked for the greengrocer. We’d yell
“Fruttiere!”
down to the street, and the fruit vendor would hurry over and take our order. If only I could put together my favorite chicken chopped salad with as little effort today.

The best time of day was late at night, after dinner, when everyone would gather at the nearby Piazza del Plebiscito to socialize over drinks or coffee. The men would smoke cigars, the women, cigarettes. The kids would all run wild, jumping in the fountains and playing hide-and-seek amid the eighteenth-century colonnades while our parents talked. Bedtime was whenever you fell asleep, whether you laid your head against your grandmother’s chest, a café table, or your own pillow. European kids are expected to adapt to the adults’ schedules, not the other way around. We’d be at the piazza till one in the morning. Life was all about family, fun, eating well, and staying up late.

—

S
chool wasn’t a priority, at least in my family. My mother, like my father, had never gone to high school, dropping out in the sixth grade. Anna grew up with four brothers and an older sister. She was especially close to her brothers Giulio and Michele, who were in their early twenties when they went to London to work as casino blackjack dealers, despite the dire warnings from everyone back home that straying so far from the motherland would surely lead to ruin. Far from failing, though, my uncles were just getting started on the road to success. From London, they were recruited to work in the Bahamas at the Britannia Hotel, which had a glamorous, 007-style casino then, with a hint of mystery and suave danger. That was before the place turned into the Atlantis, which is basically a theme park with roulette wheels and waterslides. Giulio married a Brit named Angela, and Michele married a Frenchwoman named Marielle. I always considered them such cool couples; Michele and Marielle were sort of beachy, boho people, while Giulio and Angela were more conservative and ritzy. Giulio got an opportunity to become a partner in an Italian restaurant in Washington, D.C. Tiberio’s became the hottest table in town and spawned multiple spin-offs. At the same time, Michele opened his own popular restaurant, Picolo Mondo, on K Street near the White House. The two feckless brothers with wanderlust were huge success stories. Giulio lived with his young family in a stately mansion with original Warhols on the wall and two Rolls-Royces in the driveway. Michele was raising his family in a more modest house on a lakefront across the Potomac, in a posh Virginia suburb. Both of them loved their sister Anna dearly, and urged her and Eduardo to come to America to chase their own dream.

“Let’s just go for vacation in the summer for two weeks and see what it’s like,” my father suggested one day. My brother, sister, and I were overjoyed by the prospect.

“Are you going to be in Hollywood or New York City?” my cousin Riccardo asked me. We assumed those were the only two cities in America, and that they were right next door to each other.

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