| This past week, a customer at a gas station in California lived out a common fantasy by winning the lottery—a record-setting jackpot of more than two billion dollars. Eleven years earlier, the New Yorker staff writer Ariel Levy reported on a different type of daydream come true: the journey of Rita Jenrette, a former Texas “tomboy” who had married a prince. By the time of her profile in the magazine, Jenrette and her husband had taken up residence in a forty-thousand-square-foot Italian palazzo, with the princess now officially known as Her Serene Highness the Principessa Rita Boncompagni Ludovisi. In the garden stood a statue by Michelangelo; the second floor boasted “the only painting Caravaggio is known to have executed on a ceiling.” Despite Her Serene Highness’s elevated status and astonishing surroundings, Levy finds her subject still caught up in what she sees as the iniquities of her past: a bad marriage to a congressman, backlash to her appearances in Playboy, an awkward adolescence. As the palazzo undergoes a sensitive renovation, the erstwhile Rita Jenrette struggles with her own self-image, a process that appears at least as complicated as what is happening to her house. “It is only since she met the Prince,” Levy writes, “that Rita feels she’s been recognized for who she really is.” | 
No comments:
Post a Comment