CURDLED CREME

AROUND THE FAIR

Vile bodies on the Riviera

Everywhere I went people asked me about AIDS. Paris. Rome. The Emerald Coast. The South of France. On the swiftly silent yacht of the biggest tycoon in Europe. By the midnight blue pool of the richest woman on the Continent. Of course, I was traveling the high road, where bisexuality is so omnipresent that it's taken for granted, so perhaps I should have expected to find this morbid curiosity about the immunological system among the international supersonic set. Still, I did tire of explaining interferon over the spaghetti alia puttanesca, the grilled langouste (the summer vacation dishes of the Costa Smeralda and the Cote d'Azur, respectively). My only revenge—and it was a feeble attempt—was to bring up the exchange rate: to answer disease with dollars. As in, "I got almost 1,600 lire to the dollar today." Or, more meanly, "I hear the franc will be ten to the dollar by the time Mitterrand gets done with it." They may have turned everything into dollars years ago and stashed it all in Switzerland, but there's nothing like the mention of the current occupant of the Elysee to get this group depressed. It all began at a party in Paris, where I stopped for a night on my way south. The hostess, a leatherskirted Frenchwoman so Americanized she's nicknamed Glo-Glo, is the daughter of a late president's late lawyer and the ex-wife of a former tennis champion who went on to become a former nightclub owner. Thanks to her energy, charm, and gossip column, she is the social locomotive of the younger crowd, the forty-year-olds acting thirty, the thirty-year-olds acting twenty, the fifteen-year-olds acting fifty. La jeunesse doree had turned out to honor the former editor of a major minor monthly concerned with society and beefcake in precariously equal proportions. It was an "in" enough bash for that tanker of a woman Christina Onassis to come and hold court in the kitchen, nodding vigorously as the overjeweled, underdressed Argentine next to her praised Pinochet, wished her patria had a godfather as good. In the faux bois, faux marbre, paisley-on-stripe, orange-and-scarlet salon, the pretty young heiress to one-third of a Peruvian tin fortune wondered out loud whether she should start a collection of orientaliste paintings. The exhusband of the daughter of the biggest Greek of all told her that she should. "The nineteenth century is going up," he said, as if we were still in it. A couple of Fiat cousins agreed. As did the thinnest, richest girl in Israel. And her dashing date, the ex-beau of the widow of the late great perfume king. Then the gorgeous poor little rich assistant of a celebrated couturier asked me, "Is it true, darling, that what's his name, the one who makes a fortune on jeans and jockstraps.. .Mon dieu, I'm so bad with names, especially those simple American ones...But is it true, that he's died of AIDS? I'm almost sure I heard it on the BBC."

"You must mean the Brazilian Broadcasting Company. Only they could get it so wrong," I retorted, knowing full well that she, like most of what's left of le gratin, is half South American. "Is it true that Mitterrand has cancer?" I inquired, countering one tacky rumor with another.

"Don't talk to me about Mitterrand," pronounced a debutante fresh from Deauville. "Because of him I might not be able to go to Greece this summer just because I went to Gstaad this winter and New York in May and London in June. But maybe I can work it out if I go on Christina's private yacht to Christina's private island. As it's all for free, I wouldn't be taking any money out of the country, would I?"

"I wouldn't go to Greece if you paid me a million dollars," chimed in a German playboy worth several. "That's where all the gay Americans go to spread AIDS." I left early the next morning for Rome, to catch an afternoon flight to Olbia, the Riverhead of Sardinia. There was just enough time for lunch at Bolognese, the Elaine's al fresco of the Eternal City, with an Italian moviemaker whose cinematic output has ranged from opera to porn, all of it based on classical themes. As he'd been spending so much time lately in Manila with Imelda, he hadn't been to Manhattan in months and was full of questions. All the wrong ones. "Is it true that no one in New York has sex anymore? Everyone in Rome says AIDS is a CIA plot. Nobody goes to Haiti anymore, do they? Not that they ever did."

Sardinia is another story. Everyone goes there. Everyone, that is, "with substantial income," as the Aga Khan, founder of its trademarked resort area, Costa Smeralda, once put it, carefully omitting the limiting article. Then there's Peter Finkbeiner-Zellmann's $130-percopy IN World Guide on what makes Sardinia special: "The water is of the emerald colour which you find only in Bulgari brooches... the pink-powder beaches resemble grated garnets." As I lay sunbathing between a topless Venetian countess and the teenage son of the ex-King of Albania on the upper deck of a huge yacht crossing the precious sea to a merely semiprecious beach, I didn't expect to hear about trouble in paradise. It was the perennial dilemma of aristocratic European snobs: Where to go in August? August, when Portuguese cooks and Swedish clerks vacation en masse; when the entire population of West Germany moves to the Mediterranean; when Finnish hippies roam the Riviera and oily Oklahomans infiltrate even the most privileged preserves, like the Costa Smeralda.

"There's always America," suggested the topless Roman princess tanning on the other side of the son of the ex-King of Albania. "Is Fire Island fun?"

"It used to be," sniffed the topless Venetian countess, who also maintains residences in London, Los Angeles, New York, Rio, Rome, and St. Moritz. "But this year they're giving the houses away. The mosquitoes are carrying AIDS."

AIDS was the last thing on my mind as I sank into the deep velour of a chauffeured Rolls, heading from the Nice airport to St. Jean Cap Ferrat, "the costliest piece of earth on the Mediterranean," as the uniquely angled IN World Guide describes it. Leaving the Spanish maid to unpack for me in the pale blue guest room with the postcard-perfect view of the bay of Beaulieu, I hurried down stone steps and pebble paths, past persimmon trees with white-painted trunks, through a tunnel built, like the house, in the eighteenth century. By the pool, which has been constructed in such a way as to merge optically with the sea below and beyond, I greeted my host, a retired billionaire and his beautiful blond wife, along with a randy Belgian baron usually found roller-skating in Venice, California, this time of year. "I don't go to Los Angeles anymore—since AIDS," he announced before I asked. More guests arrived for lunch: one of the late ex-King of Italy's daughters, intelligent and fragile; the substantial former curator of the former residence of the former royal family of France and his hilarious, to-the-manner-born American wife; a debonair bachelor from Beekman Place, terminally tanned from spending every summer since the Great Depression in the South of France and every winter in the Caribbean.

"We were talking about AIDS before you arrived," our hostess began cheerfully.

"I've noticed it's always the women who bring it up," said Mr. Beekman Place. "They think it's their big chance."

"It used to be you had to be ashamed because of Vietnam to be an American living in Europe. Then it was Jimmy Carter. Now it's AIDS," asserted the former curator's American wife. In French. With a Duchess of Windsor accent.

"Nobody goes to America anymore," interjected the Belgian baron helpfully. "Except on business."

"Not monkey business," laughed our hostess Germanically.

But it was the former curator of the former residence of the former royal family of France who had the last word: "You do know that syphilis originated in America. The Spanish brought it back from the Andes, where they got it from the llamas."

UBIQUITOUS