J.P. Morgan and Jed Clampett seem rather disparate characters in the history of the United States and its popular culture as do Enrico Caruso and James Bond, but for members of one Italian-American family, these are several of many points in the spheres of finance, politics, and celebrity that their lives have touched over more than a century. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, four cousins, as several millions of their neighbors in Italy, crossed the Atlantic Ocean to seek new, and perhaps better, lives in New York, and eventually, for some family members, in Los Angeles.
Their families - two of the cousins were married - found a country in transition, particularly as the Gilded Age gave way to World War I and the Great Depression, and as art, their calling and livelihood, moved from classical to modern forms. For the cousins, their classical training and work as artists may have eased their transition in a new country as other Italians faced prejudice and economic hurdles as millions from eastern and southern Europe settled in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. Rome remained with Paris as the centers of the artistic world, but the Armory Show, in New York in 1913, gave ample warning that even the classical art of Rome was facing modern challenges.
One cousin died in his early 30s before these trends could have engulfed his work, another cousin worked into the 1950s to maintain his classical flair amid changing art trends, and the third cousin began to change his artistic style before another death too early. His son became a distinctive personality of the modern-art movement. These artists, their families, and their descendents have worked in the visual and performing arts for several decades. They have moved in the spheres of finance, politics, and celebrity, generally on the edge of, rather than in the midst of, fame. Yet their stories are those of the immigrant, especially of the Italian-American; of the challenges of an artist's life and livelihood, of family virtues and vicissitudes, of wartime courage and loss, and of the blessings and burdens of celebrity, even at its edge.
Although all four of the cousins who ventured to the United States around the turn of the twentieth century were Cartainos from Palermo in Sicily, apparent confusion about the pronunciations and similarities of their names led the three male cousins to use other professional names for their artistic careers. Pietro Cartaino di Sciarrino became C.S. Pietro; his brother, Salvatore Paolo Cartaino di Sciarrino, became C.S. Paolo; and their first cousin, Gaetano Salvatore Cartaino, became Salvatore Scarpitta, using the maiden name of his mother. Pietro's wife and first cousin, Stella Cartaino Cartaino, also adopted the use of the name Pietro as did his son with Stella, Salvatore. Paolo's family maintained use of the family name, Cartaino, including Pietro Michael, Pietro's son with paramour Jeanne Bertrand, whom Paolo adopted after Pietro's death. Salvatore Scarpitta's families from two marriages and their descendants have continued use of the Scarpitta name.
Among the members of the Cartaino, Pietro, and Scarpitta families and their stories are:
--C.S. Pietro. Pietro settled permanently in New York in 1908, and within only a few years, the New York Times and other newspapers were describing the young artist as "society's sculptor" of New York(1). Among his subjects from financial circles were J. Pierpont Morgan, Henry Ford, and Alfred G. Vanderbilt. From the political sphere were William Howard Taft and Elihu Root. His portraits also included entertainer Enrico Caruso, conservationists John Muir and John Burroughs, and Gen. William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army.
Pietro was not content just to work in his studio, however. His studio served as a gallery for Ossip L. Linde and other artists, particularly to benefit favorite causes. With Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, he organized the Friends of the Young Artists organization in New York. The organization, headquartered at Pietro's studio on Fifth Avenue in New York, sponsored numerous exhibitions for young artists between 1914 and 1918. After Pietro's death in 1918, Whitney included the work of the organization in the Whitney Studio Club and eventually in her museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Other board members of the organization included 1912 Nobel Peace Peace Prize winner Root and financier Otto Kahn, a leader of the board of the Metropolitan Opera for more than 20 years and a patron of George Gershwin, Arturo Toscanini, Broadway, and Hollywood.
Pietro established a friendship with industrialist Ford as the automotive pioneer was working to organize a peace movement before World War I, and that was only one of Pietro's involvements with peace advocates. Pietro accompanied Ford to the launching of the peace mission in 1915. Pietro's studio on Fifth Avenue became in 1916 the site for a benefit, with the participation of more than 300 artists, to aid those suffering in the war before the United States joined the conflict in 1917. His peace-related works also included busts of Bertha von Suttner, the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize and a friend of Nobel; Root, the former secretary of state who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1912; and William Howard Taft, whose likeness was commissioned for the Peace Palace in the Hague in the Netherlands.
Pietro also worked to participate in the many public art programs of the time. His sculpture, "Mother of the Dead," was among the exhibits at the Panama-Pacific Exhibition in San Francisco in 1915. He also tried in 1915 to use his connections with Taft to compete for the commission for the Abraham Lincoln statue at the Lincoln Memorial, but architect Henry Bacon already had chosen Bacon's long-time collaborator, Daniel Chester French, for the project. Shortly before his death, Pietro participated in the sculpture exhibits of the Fourth Liberty Loan Drive as part of the "Avenue of the Allies" programs on Fifth Avenue in October 1918. Pietro's entry, however, had to be moved to another site because of its size.
Pietro, also participated in the International Exhibition of Modern Art, better known as the Armory Show, in New York in 1913. The exhibit heralded the arrival of modern art in the United States and was the most controversial of the early 20th century. Pietro exhibited the sculpture "Promethean" in the Armory Show.
At the time of his death from the Spanish influenza in 1918, Pietro was working on a monument to commemorate the friendship of the United States and France in Paris. Pietro negotiated with architect Cass Gilbert to design the base for the monument and had received a $50,000 pledge from industrialist Edward Drummond Libbey of Toledo, Ohio, to help fund the $250,000 project. Libbey also was a founder of the Toledo Museum of Art, the site of one of Pietro's sculptures of conservationist John Burroughs.Pietro's stories also include an intimate relationship with a protégé, Jeanne Bertrand, who earned honors as a photographer and as a sculptor, but whose mental illness unsettled her life and her career. Pietro's affair with the French immigrant produced a son, Pietro Michael. Bertrand's mental illness and Pietro's death eventually brought young Pietro Michael into the household of Pietro's brother, Paolo.
--C.S. Paolo. Although he was a prolific artist and four years older than Pietro, Paolo was generally in the shadow of his younger brother during Pietro's life. They shared studios at 403 and 630 Fifth Avenue, now the site of the International Building of Rockefeller Center, but Paolo was the good son, the good father, the good husband and the good brother - a caretaker of family interests. After his brother's death, Paolo owned studios in New York, New Jersey, and continued to produce art when he retired in Tucson, Arizona. His subjects ranged from the president emeritus of Harvard University to Pope Pius XI(2) to Benjamin Newton Duke and Abraham Lincoln for Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee.
After the death of his brother, Paolo decided to deal with the situation involving Bertrand and Pietro Michael. Although he was single, Paolo adopted Pietro Michael. Paolo and the third male cousin continued the family's artistic traditions.
--Salvatore Scarpitta. When Pietro, his wife Stella, and daughter Mariannina returned from a trip to Italy in 1909, their traveling companion was Salvatore, the first cousin of Pietro and brother of Stella. Salvatore was making a return to New York. He had visited his uncle, aunt and cousins during their initial stay in the United States.
The Salvatore who returned in 1909 had a degree in architecture and experience as a teacher. He had an offer of a job from members of a family of U.S. industrialists whom he had met after the devastating 1908 earthquake in Messina, Italy, where he had gone to seek a new job.(3) Salvatore, as his cousins, turned his attention to art, however. He competed for commissions for portraits and public art. While Salvatore succeeded to some degree in New York, his eventual move to Los Angeles brought him more into the public eye. Not only did his work appear in at least two Hollywood movies, The Song of Songs included Salvatore's sculpture of a nude Marlene Dietrich, but his public sculpture adorned buildings ranging from the Los Angeles Stock Exchange to the St. John the Divine church, now a cathedral.
Salvatore's move to Los Angeles at least partially was the result of marital discord. In New York, Salvatore and his wife, Antoinetta, had two children, Maria and Gaetano, later changed to Guy. Antoinetta's decision not to have any more children because of difficulties with the first two births brought an alienation of affection from Salvatore.(4) Salvatore became the lover of Josephine "Nadia" Jarocki, a Polish actress and entertainer, and their son, Sal Jr., was born in 1919. Nadia took her new son to Los Angeles to live with her family, and she demanded that Salvatore make a decision about whether he would stay in New York or come to Los Angeles to live with her and their son, Sal Jr.(5)
Although Salvatore made the decision to move to Los Angeles, he did not abandon his first family. Antoinetta, their children, and her mother moved to Los Angeles to live in a house that Salvatore provided for them. Salvatore brought both his families into the sphere of celebrity of Hollywood.
International politics began to affect the lives of Salvatore's families in the 1930s. In 1932, Salvatore received a commission from an Italian-American organization to produce a bust of Benito Mussolini. Salvatore took his wife, Nadia, and all of his children to Italy as he prepared for the work. The busts of Mussolini eventually went on display in Rome, at the Italian embassy in Washington, D.C., and in Los Angeles.(6) The busts brought praise from Mussolini and a new commission that eventually would lead to circumstances that threatened the lives of Salvatore, Nadia, and their children.
In 1937, Salvatore received a commission from an Italian-American organization to produce a monument to Mussolini. The model for the monument shows Mussolini astride a horse and in full Fascist salute. Son Sal Jr. already was in Italy engaged in art studies in Italy, and Salvatore decided to take Nadia and their daughters, Yvonne and Carmen, with him to Italy as he worked on the monument. Whatever Salvatore's earlier views of Mussolini's politics, the dictator's decision in 1941 to declare war on the Salvatore's adopted country brought an angry response from the sculptor. Salvatore ordered the figure of Mussolini cut from the horse.(7) Efforts of Salvatore to return to the United States, however, faced obstacles because he still held an Italian passport. His family had an opportunity to return to the United States through an exchange program, but his daughters contacted measles, and the last exchange ship left without them.(8)
Salvatore and his family became detainees in an Italy at war with the United States and eventually under the control of Nazi Germany. The family eventually was able to leave Rome and to settle in the more rural town of Scanno, where the mayor provided them with Italian identification papers. The Scarpittas did not just find refuge in Scanno and the neighboring village of Frattura; however, they became part of the Italian resistance movement and helped to operate an "underground railroad" that allowed more than 600 U.S. and British soldiers to escape to Allied lines.(9) Both the U.S. and British governments gave the Scarpitta family commendations after the war. The Scarpittas were able to escape in 1945 to the Allied lines and returned to the family hometown of Palermo, the site of a U.S. Navy base, to live and work until the war ended.
Even before his escape from the Germans, Salvatore's ill health became evident. In Palermo, U.S. Navy doctors urged his expedited return to the United States for cancer treatments. His family soon was able to join him, but he lived only until 1948. In 1953, Ralph Edwards' "This Is Your Life" television program honored the wartime bravery of the Scarpittas and provided something of a family reunion with the appearance of Sal Jr. and his family, who had settled in Italy.(10)
--Salvatore Scarpitta, Jr. Sal Jr. was in Italy when his family arrived for the monument project. He was a student in Rome at the Academy of Fine Arts. When Mussolini declared war on the United States, Sal Jr. also faced detainment, but he was able to seek refuge in Romania, which initially was neutral and where the U.S. consulate had relocated from Italy.(11) Romance, however, apparently convinced Sal Jr. to return to Italy despite the danger of future detainment. He returned to Italy to be with Clotilde Puntieri, a fellow student at the Academy of Fine Arts. Clotilde faced her own dangers in Italy as a Jew and as the daughter of an anti-Fascist lawyer.(12) Sal Jr. and Clotilde eventually joined his family in Scanno, where during their detainment they married in 1943 and celebrated the birth of their first daughter, Nadia, in 1944.
After the detainees eventually were able to reach the Allied lines, Sal Jr. joined the U.S. Navy. He became a "Monuments Man," working in the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section, identifying, restoring, and returning stolen art to its rightful owners. Sal Jr. was even able to salvage the head of the horse from the Mussolini monument, destroyed in an Allied bombing, and return it to his father in the United States.(13)
When the war ended, Sal Jr. continued his artistic pursuits in Italy, but by 1957, he was ready for a change. Art entrepreneur Leo Castelli offered Sal Jr. financial backing to return to New York. With his return, Sal Jr. became part of Castelli's ensemble of artists that included Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. Sal Jr.'s "bandaged" art became part of a portfolio that also included something of an obsession with speed and movement. Along with his stylized racecars and sleds, including a commemoration of Rajo Jac, a pioneering African-American driver, Sal Jr. became active in professional racing itself with the 12-year ownership of a racing team that competed in "sprint racing" at a Pennsylvania track. His race car, adorned with a Leo Castelli Gallery logo, was able to capture a track championship. Several of the racing enthusiasts at the track thought Sal Jr.'s first name was "Art."(14)
Sal Jr.'s personality was volatile, and he noted that he and his father often were at odds about almost everything.(15) During a childhood spat with Salvatore, Sal Jr. tried to escape his father's temper by climbing a tree in their Hollywood neighborhood. Sal Jr.'s facetious comment to a neighbor that he planned to set a tree-sitting record rather than a flagpole-sitting record, a fad of the 1930s, brought something of a media blitz. Among those who joined Sal Jr. in the tree for publicity photographs were Charlie Chaplin and Carole Lombard.(16) Salvatore died before Sal Jr.'s rise in New York and international art circles. Sal Jr. said the real leavening force for him was his half-brother, Guy. In discussing the years of fear of Nazi reprisals in World War II Italy, Sal Jr. said Guy was his true inspiration, even though Guy was removed from the war's front lines as a member of the "Hollywood Commandos.(17)"
--Guy (Gaetano) Scarpitta: As the oldest son in Salvatore's first family, Guy tried to assume responsibility for the financial support of his mother, his sister, and his grandmother. He worked in a variety of jobs to help support his family, and he was working in the international department at Columbia Studios when World War II began(18). Guy enlisted and became part of the film unit headed by Frank Capra that produced training films and propaganda films for U.S. forces. Guy's personnel officer in the unit was Ronald Reagan. At the Hollywood Canteen during the war, Guy met an aspiring actress and singer, Ana Maria Rivera, whose family emigrated from Puerto Rico.(19)
Although Ana Maria had acquired an agent, had completed various screen tests, and was trying to become a singer with Xavier Cugat's orchestra, Guy told her as the whirlwind courtship became more serious that he would not marry her if she remained in show business. She agreed to his wishes, and they married, but the day after their one-day honeymoon, her agent told her that she just needed to return to the studio for another small test and she would have a part in Tyrone Power's next movie. She declined the part due to her vow.(20)
After the war, Guy returned to the studio as an editor. He soon became involved in the new medium of television, first as an editor. He received an Emmy nomination for his editing work on "The Bob Cummings Show." Paul Henning was a producer of that show, and Scarpitta became an associate producer and director with Henning's "The Beverly Hillbillies," "Green Acres," and "Petticoat Junction." Although Guy had inherited the sculpturing talent of his father and other family members, he was a perfectionist whose impatience often resulted in the destruction of his sculpture efforts, including one of Capra.(21) Family members also indicated that despite his television success, Guy was never fully satisfied with the lowbrow level of the entertainment that he produced and directed.(22) His cousin, Salvatore Pietro, also shared some of that artistic discontent.
--Salvatore Pietro. As the son of Pietro and Stella, Salvatore also felt, after the death of his father, a responsibility to help provide for his mother and sisters. He began to teach art lessons, modeling of clay, before he began to produce art himself.(23) After an affair with the five-year-older wife of a boarder in his family's house in New York, Salvatore Pietro, his then wife, and her child relocated to Los Angeles.(24) Although Salvatore Pietro enjoyed financial success in his art enterprises, he never realized the fine-art success that the earlier generation of Cartaino artists had sought and, in varying degrees, achieved.(25) The Salvatore Pietro Studios catered to the celebrities of Hollywood including John Wayne and Cary Grant with decorative arts and contributed to the décor of several casinos in Las Vegas.(26)
Uncle Turido, as he was affectionately known, provided one of the few links between the Pietro side of the Cartaino family and the Scarpitta side of the Cartaino family. Salvatore Pietro and Guy Scarpitta became particularly good friends and enjoyed visits to Las Vegas for amusement rather than Salvatore Pietro's decorative work.(27) Salvatore Pietro's first marriage ended in a hostile divorce. His companion of nearly 20 years, Kathleen, also worked as a business manager for his art enterprises. He retired with a second wife to Ojai, California, where near the end of his life, he again was teaching art lessons.(28)
-- Also in this Cartaino mix were Stella who after the death of Pietro, bore another child, Giuseppe Riccobono (Joseph Goodrich), with a paramour, married for a second time, began to do her own sculpture, and relocated to Los Angeles;(29) and Nadia, who also begin to sculpt after the death of her husband, Salvatore.(30) Earlier in her life as a tightrope walker, Nadia had toured with vaudeville and circus performers in the United States and in Europe, married and divorced an international financier, and acted in a movie with Rudolph Valentino.(31) Salvatore's oldest daughter, Maria, eventually married the nephew of Rudolph Valentino.(32) Family history indicates that Nadia's movie career ended when Salvatore, in a jealous rage, came to one of her movie sets, and the movie's director ordered both to leave. Salvatore apparently was not the only one to have piques of jealousy or anger.(33) Nadia resented Dietrich's nude modeling in Salvatore's studio for two weeks and got into an angry confrontation with Bette Davis after she thought the actress was condescending to her husband. Davis eventually apologized.(34)
-- Carmen Scarpitta, Salvatore's daughter with Nadia, survived detainment in Italy during World War II to return to the United States to attend the University of Southern California. Her acting career took her back to Europe where she appeared in a number of movies, including prominent roles in "La Cage Aux Folles," the homosexual farce; Fredrico Fellini's "Casanova"; and numerous stage productions. Her older sister, Nadia, had a more limited career in movies, but, as Carmen, settled in Italy.(35)
-- Starr Abbott and Lola Scarpitta continue their family's artistic heritage. Starr, a Utah-based artist, is a traditional realist in her painting, and Lola, who lives and works in Los Angeles, in a cynical realist. Starr is the granddaughter of Pietro, and Lola is the daughter of Sal Jr. Starr survived a childhood bout with polio and turned her thoughts to artistic interests,(36) and Lola acknowledged that she did not fully begin her artistic work until her father had stopped making his art.(37)
Their cousins include Brian Pietro, son of Salvatore Pietro, who owns a general store in the Malibu area that serves such regular Hollywood customers as Pierce Brosnan of James Bond fame, but whose own acting career has had limited success; Salvatore Scarpitta, a son of Guy Scarpitta, who after careers in the military, dog training, and education is operating, with his Chinese-born wife, a bed-and-breakfast in Homer, Alaska, and has written a biography of his grandfather, Salvatore Scarpitta; and Carol Cartaino, the daughter of Pietro Michael Cartaino and the editor of a series of self-help books.
All these Cartainos have faced the challenges of the Italian-American experience, but family members did not land in the United States never to return. Family members, between 1890 and 1920, made more than 20 voyages back and forth to Italy. Grandparents visited children and grandchildren. Children and grandchildren went back to visit their Italian relatives. Two of the original cousins, Paolo and Stella, became naturalized citizens; and two, Pietro and Salvatore, did not. Their children and grandchildren born in the United States automatically became citizens. The family's immigrant experiences have not been singularly Italian. Jeanne Bertrand, Pietro's paramour, was an immigrant from France; and Nadia Jarocki, Salvatore's paramour and then wife, was an immigrant from Poland. Her hometown, Kovël, now is part of the Ukraine. Anna Huber, Paolo's wife, was an immigrant from Switzerland; Ana Maria Rivera, Guy's wife, came to the mainland United States from Puerto Rico; and Juxia, Stephen Scarpitta's wife, emigrated from China, via Canada.
The Italian-American heritage, however, raised any number of questions about the appropriate roles of fathers, sons, and women, in general, in their careers. Before Pietro died in 1918, he had left his marriage vows with Stella for a romance with Jeanne Bertrand. Salvatore left his marriage vows with Antoinette to be with Nadia. Pietro's death and Salvatore's departure resulted in their oldest sons, Salvatore and Guy, respectively, working to take responsibility for their families' upkeep. Paolo also maintained the responsibility of the older son as he took responsibility for the rearing of Pietro Michael, Pietro's son with Jeanne. He accompanied his parents on trips to the United States as they reached their seventies and eighties. The parents moved to Summit, New Jersey, to live with Paolo and his family before their deaths.
Achievements for the women of the family apparently faced some cultural pressures. Salvatore and Guy prevented their wives from having careers in entertainment. Although family members, including Sal Jr., praised Salvatore's daughter, Yvonne, as being the best artist of his children, she chose to work as an art educator rather than compete fully in artistic circles.(38) Lola Scarpitta waited until her father, Sal Jr., ceased producing art before she started pursued her own art career.(39) Stella, Antoinetta, and Nadia, however, led their families after the death or departure of their husbands. Sal Jr. faced competition from Pablo Picasso for the affections of his wife, Clotilde.(40) Agatha Cusa, Antoinetta's mother, served as an advisor to several generations of the Cartaino families.(41) A Sicilian heritage also brought external conflicts to the family. This volume will look principally at the lives of C.S. Pietro and his descendants and those conflicts.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, southern and eastern Europeans faced many of the challenges and criticisms that Hispanic immigrants face today. Italians had "invaded" the United States in almost overwhelming numbers. They spoke a different language. They practiced a different religion. Their skin tone was slightly darker than those with British or German ancestry. Those who came from Sicily faced discrimination not only from residents of their new country but also from those from the more northern climes of Italy. While the Italian culture had heroes to celebrate such as explorers, visual artists, and composers, successful assimilation efforts in the first decades of the twentieth century soon collided with the realities of fascism in Italy and the declaration of that home country as an enemy of the United States. In the midst of all this, the Cartainos, as millions of other Italian-American families, worked to survive in a new country, but they also worked to maintain and add to the contributions of their old country to the visual and performing arts. Their personalities, initiative, talents, and determination helped to carry them forward despite the usual stresses of family and society and the travails of international politics. Are the Cartainos fully illustrative of the Italian-American experience? Probably not, but their lives include some fairly amazing stories as they frequently found themselves at least on the edge of fame. This volume primarily will focus on the life of C.S. Pietro, his wife, Stella; his brother, Paolo; and their families.
Chapter 1 Notes
1 Mrs. Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt photo caption, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 15, Nov. 1916: A19. |