((NOTE:This story I’m about to share with you happened during my usual 14 minute drive to work. But, in full throttle tangent-mania, it takes us a couple decades back to Rome where I spent weeks at a time working for two different networks…including that momentous trip for CBS’s 48 Hours and that search for the Pope’s Yoo Hoo stash (Yes! THAT Yoo Hoo) on the Pope’s Alitalia plane. And even further back to my very first overseas trip in high school… which took me to The Eternal City. Where I realized just a couple years back a colleague and friend, Lynn, to be the best traveling companion. And truly, its where my inner Mary Claude was born.))

by BRIAN O’KEEFE

DATELINE: HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA

My LYFT driver was a tad late and as I got in the car I soon realized he was Italian.

“Ciao, bello”, came instinctively to my lips. I love speaking Italian. I studied it in high school for at least two years, taught by a guy named McLarney who’s Italian was absolutely phonetically and technically perfect. He spoke what I call “Marilyn Horne Opera Italian”: letter perfect and musical to the ear. He even brought us once to visit Dame Marilyn backstage at the Met on a field trip. And, I kid you not..I bumped into her on a bridge in Venice while I was on a field trip to Italy in high school, my very first trip abroad. She invited me for tea at her hotel lobby. As for me, I spoke Floral Park Memorial Italian and after 3 pm every day I spent hours in my Italian home…the nearby Drago household where Italian was spoken when the grandparents were around , but Carolann and her brother Charles and I really only perfected the curse words. But that Italian home was a magical comfy refuge from a childhood at home that had some stressors. (For another blog, another book, perhaps.)

But back to my Italian speaking driver, Paride. Meeting Italian born peeps in LA is like finding Puerto Ricans. There are like four Puerto Ricans in LA and I personally know all four of them. Excited, hearing a voice from Rome, I challenged myself to only speak Italian until I got to work. A destra..sinistra al fondo left, right….straight ahead… It was not that hard. But it was fun. I got to say my favorite phrases: “pezzo di gesso” English: piece of chalk. And …” dove vai cosi in fretta?” English: Where are you going in such a hurry. I blurt that one out whenever I meet an Italian! Our Italian monologue with my Tourettes’ style blurting of vocabulary words like “piece of chalk”……came to an abrupt halt when I mentioned my favorite old Rome hotel…”The Inghilterra” translated to English: England! Where I really thought my inner Mary Claude was born. How fitting. But it was like an earthquake in our vehicle.

“Are you serious?”, my driver Paride asked. “That was my father’s hotel!” His father owned and ran the Inghilterra for decades. But there was more to this story….I could feel it immediately.

The Inghilterra was a moderate luxury hotel with the tiniest lobby but classy touches…much more than fine marble…and it had something very few comfortable hotels have in Rome: the most incredible location. Save maybe the Royalty Row of incredible luxury hotels atop the Spanish Steps. Stepless and therefore less panting, guests at the Inghilterra found themselves just off Via Veneto two short blocks from those steps in central historic Rome. You could go broke just dozens of feet away in the chicest and coolest of shops. I remember feeling incredibly lucky to be there when we first produced a 48 Hours Vatican show, way back….even before the Papal Flight 48.

That first Rome Vatican trip was a pretty historic trip. For researchers at CBS News, that is. It was a big deal. Researchers never traveled overseas. We were union and the overtime would be killer. But the cameramen were union, too. So Andrew Heyward…and Jeff Fager…toddler producers back then!!!… (and eventually former head and now current head of CBS News) did something really, really cool. They sent me to Rome. A network first– for a WGA Researcher. It may have been the First Blessing in my Lucky Triple Seven career. Or maybe the First Blessing was when NBC producer and supermentor Pat Lynch handed Walter Cronkite my resume with the 516 358 N E W S phone number… cherry on top. Walter got it to Andrew and well…. the rest is …mystory….my story.

In beautiful Rome, I remember our bureau was just a block or so away from the Inghilterra. . “Cheeee Beeeee Essssssss” is how they answered the phone. A very young legend Peter Schweitzer ran the bureau. I couldn’t decide if Peter made Rome so cool in the late 80’s or if Rome made him that cool. Better dressed than most, Peter was the suavest, schmooziest host and journalist in town. The labor fakers and the grittiest of top notch journos respected him. He knew how to imbibe and ingest the fruits of laboring in a city known for its entertaining. Legend claimed he dated Sharon Stone before big fame collided with her. But he knew Rome and the Vatican like the back of his hand. He most likely chose The Inghilterra as our home away from New York and probably knew my driver Paride’s father, who sold the hotel in 1986.

“I worked in the hotel until my father sold it… even sleeping at night off of the lobby”, he told me. But our magical discussion was now taking us to a very deep dark place. As we drove by the famous Forest Lawn Cemetery Paride dropped a bomb: “My father no longer speaks to me..I haven’t seen him in more than 20 years.” ..a sentence that hung between us as Paride’s lip quivered and my heart sunk….slightly. I politely and gingerly enquired why. I’m always on a need to know basis.

The reason why demonstrates truth is better than fiction. His father disinherited him, cut him off for running off to America and marrying an Asian woman he met while working at the hotel for his father. It seems that not marrying an Italian girl, was the major offense, but I don’t know for sure. His father gave him an ultimatum: Stay in America for three months and return home to Italy without her. Paride didn’t. And at the end of the fourth month, as warned, the sale papers of the hotel sale inheritance (a Wells Fargo trailer load of money no doubt) were mailed. A third of the money went to his sister, a third to the father and a third to the mother: NOTHING (“Zero” in Italian and English) for Paride. Zilch. Nada.

Why the twenty five year hostility? How many times he repeated the following phrase told me all I needed to figure out this puzzle. I am the oldest of five children and hence, an unofficial fortune teller, psychologist, counselor and well, you know: a know it all!

Paride’s dramatic sentence: “He slapped me across the face IN FRONT OF MY WIFE!!” In the remaining three or four minutes as we sat in front of my ABC office building he uttered maybe three times that phrase, accentuating the “front of my wife” part. So I had to ask, “was the front of your wife part the reason why you still don’t speak?” “Yes,” admitted Paride. I couldn’t let go: “So if he pulled you into another room and slapped you across the face privately there would be less of a stalemate.” As I expected: “Yes,” he said.

“Its time to go back to Rome,” I said. He is no longer married to the woman. But even still, all these years later I told him that his father cut him off for leaving HIM. Anger comes directly from fear. I expertly theorized ( in my head, but out loud, too) that his only ITALIAN SON was leaving him to America, with a new love he met in his hotel, no less….leaving a heartsick, stubborn Dad, retired and alone with mom and sister. You clearly were proud of his hotelier career and there must be deep respect between you before it was eroded by blame, hurt and deep anger, I shared. A rift created by a romance and a trans oceanic plane. Twenty five years later, it didn’t matter anymore.

“You are right,” sniffled the machismo son of a machismo Italian septuagenarian. “Reach out…but don’t call or write…just go…Go back to Rome…go see him before its too late, ” I said.
“Maybe I will.” We shook hands.

As he drove away, I thought the beauty and magic of Rome will set it right. I hope.