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Summary
Summary
An expansive yet intimate story of desire, artistic ambition, and fidelity, set in the glamorous literary and film circles of 1950s Italy
In July of 1953, at a glittering party thrown by Truman Capote in Portofino, Italy, Tennessee Williams and his longtime lover Frank Merlo meet Anja Blomgren, a mysterious young Swedish beauty and aspiring actress. Their encounter will go on to alter all of their lives.
Ten years later, Frank revisits the tempestuous events of that fateful summer from his deathbed in Manhattan, where he waits anxiously for Tennessee to visit him one final time. Anja, now legendary film icon Anja Bloom, lives as a recluse in present-day America, until a young man connected to the events of 1953 lures her reluctantly back into the spotlight after he discovers she possesses the only copy of an unknown play--Tennessee's last.
What keeps two people together and what breaks them apart? Can we save someone else if we can't save ourselves? With emotional clarity and grace, Leading Men seamlessly weaves fact and fiction to navigate the tensions between public figures and their private lives. In an ultimately heartbreaking story about the burdens of fame and the complex negotiations of life in the shadows of greatness, Castellani creates an unforgettable leading lady in Anja Bloom and reveals the hidden machinery of one of the great literary love stories of the twentieth-century.
Author Notes
Christopher Castellani is the son of Italian immigrants and a native of Wilmington, Delaware. He is the artistic director of Grub Street, a non-profit creative writing center in Boston. He is the author of two previous critically acclaimed novels, A Kiss from Maddalena, winner of the Massachusetts Book Award in 2004 and The Saint of Lost Things.
Castellani is on the faculty of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. He was educated at Swarthmore College, received his Masters in English Literature from Tufts University and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Boston University.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Castellani's spectacular fourth novel (after 2013's All This Talk of Love) imagines the relationships between Tennessee Williams, his lover Frank Merlo, and a young actress named Anja Bloom, whom they take under their wing. In 1953 Italy, Tenn and Frank make the acquaintance of faltering writer Jack Burns, an alcoholic who's emotionally abusive to his doting lover, Sandro Nencini. Frank finds a foil in Sandro, who recognizes Frank's devotion and loneliness as Tenn writes, ignores him, and has brief dalliances with other men. While Tenn's also inspired by Frank to write plays and helps him pursue his dream of acting, Sandro's dedication goes largely unappreciated. Frank is beloved by Anja, a 17-year-old who flees her mother and finds fame with director Martin Hovland. The '50s scenes are interspersed with chapters set a decade later as Frank lays dying in a cancer ward, having been all but abandoned by Tenn, and a present-day period when Sandro's college-aged son Sandrino befriends Anja. Anja reveals that Tenn wrote an awful final play in which he didn't do Frank justice; she waffles as Sandro tries to convince her to produce it instead of destroying it. Castellani's novel hits the trifecta of being moving, beautifully written, and a bona fide page-turner. This is a wonderful examination of artists and the people who love them and change their work in large and imperceptible ways. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Inspired by the real-life relationship between Tennessee Williams and Frank Merlo, Castellani's (All This Talk of Love, 2013) fourth novel opens in Portofino, 1953. At a party thrown by Truman Capote, Tenn and Frank meet intriguing young Anja. They convince her to follow them back to Rome, where they'll set her on the path to becoming a star. Castellani unravels three threads: those auspicious, sun-soaked days in Italy; Frank in a Manhattan cancer ward, 10 years later; and present-day Anja, a reclusive widow hiding from her fame. Characterizations and mood drive this novel. While historical details about Tenn, his work, and his world bolster the story, it primarily belongs to Frank: a life preserver in person form, who never quite knows when to put his own interests first. When a new friend reminds Anja of her past life, she, like the author, grows determined to bring her old friends to life through art. With imagination and feeling, Castellani reconjures history to reveal the intricate dynamics loving and passionate, selfless and devastating among artists and those who nurture them.--Annie Bostrom Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
of the fever dreams that punctuate the oeuvre of Tennessee Williams, the most powerfully weird, for me, has got to be the scene in "Suddenly Last Summer" when Sebastian Venable is eaten alive by cannibal children. Narrated in the play by Sebastian's cousin, Catharine Hoily, and surreally staged in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's film adaptation, the scene depicts a gang of "frightfully thin and dark naked children that looked like a pack of plucked birds" pursuing the effete Sebastian through the Spanish beach town of Cabeza de Lobo. Bashing together tin cans flattened out into cymbals, the children overtake and descend upon Sebastian, whom they proceed to devour, tearing or cutting "parts of him away with their hands or knives or maybe those jagged tin cans they made music with" and stuffing them "into those gobbling fierce little empty black mouths of theirs" until all that remains is a heap of flesh that Catharine compares to "a big white-paper-wrapped bunch of red roses." Like so much of Williams's work, the episode occupies that liminal zone in which, in the 1950s, what could not be spoken could be implied: in this case, that Sebastian Venable, like so many gay men of his time, regularly paid poor youths for sex, a form of sexual consumerism for which their literal consumption of him serves as a sort of inverse analogy. As far as I have been able to determine, Sebastian Venable's death has no basis in Williams's life other than the one that Christopher Castellani has invented for it in "Leading Men," his audacious new novel about Williams and his relationship with Frank Merlo, the ItalianAmerican lover to whom he dedicated "The Rose Tattoo." A work of "alternativehistory fiction" (to quote Publishers Weekly), "Leading Men" takes, as its starting point, a vacancy: As Castellani explains in an afterword, Williams's diaries contain no entries for the period between July 28 or 29 and Aug. 7,1953, a lacuna that coincides both with a famous party Truman Capote threw in Portofino (Williams, then living in Rome, was invited but told a friend he wasn't going since Capote wouldn't let him bring his bulldog) and with the mysterious death of the American novelist John Horne Burns, author of "The Gallery," in the Livornese village of Cecina. The concurrence of these events, combined with an enticingly brief reference, in a letter Capote wrote to David O. Selznick from Portofino, to a "Swedish mother and daughter who share a fisherman between them," provides Castellani with the germ of his novel, in which not just Williams and Merlo but Burns and his Italian boyfriend, Sandro Nencini, decide at the last minute to go to Capote's party, where they meet one another and also the aforementioned Swedish mother and daughter, Bitte and Anja Blomgren. It is on the day after the party that these six characters make the expedition to the fictitious Testa del Lupo (the Italian translation of Cabeza de Lobo, or "Wolf's Head"), a creepy cliffside sculpture garden where they are attacked - and the women almost raped - by a mob of nearly naked boys with "bony little bodies" making a "racket" of "weird drumming" and chanting "a nightmarish cacophony of nonsense." Unlike Cabeza de Lobo, the only person to die at Testa di Lupo is one of the attacking boys; all the principals are rescued in the nick of time. The episode forms the spine of "Leading Men" and provides Castellani, in his alternative history, with a ready-made, if entirely made-up, biographical point of origin for the scene of Sebastian Venable's murder. Yet the events of the summer of 1953, recounted in close third-person from Frank Merlo's point of view, are only half the story. The rest takes place six decades later. Anja Blomgren - now Anja Bloom, a famously imperious Swedish actress who bears more than a passing resemblance to Liv Ullmann - is living in splendidly Bergmanesque isolation in an unnamed Northeastern city when she receives a visit from Sandrino Nencini, the son and namesake of John Horne Burns's lover. An intimacy ensues, at the culmination of which Anja shares with Sandrino and his boyfriend, Trevor, a heretofore unknown Williams play, "Call It Joy," of which she has the only copy and which is included in its entirety in the novel. At their urging, she agrees to stage the play in the Provincetown bar where Williams and Merlo met. In its construction, "Leading Men" is as intricately designed as a Lego kit. The pieces from which the novel is built snap together into a whole so redoubtably sound that by the time I finished reading it I almost believed John Horne Burns really had met Tennessee Williams in Portofino, that Anja Bloom really existed and that " Call It Joy" really was written by Williams rather than cannibalized from a "flawed short story" left over from Castellani's days as an M.F.A. student. Engineering may be the aspect of novel writing that deserves the most praise and gets the least, and Castellani is a first-rate engineer. At its best, his novel not only exults in the historical synchronicities and proximities he has discovered but catches the reader up in its rapture. I only wish he had been bold enough to go further. Instead, as if abashed by the shadow Williams casts over him, too often he undermines his own inventions, withdrawing into excesses of explanation, banal writing and self-contradiction just when he ought to go for broke. This is especially the case in those passages where, hewing close to Merlo's point of view, he tries to describe Williams's creative process, and stoops to a level of prose from which his acerbic protagonist would recoil. ("The tunnel in which Tenn lived was cluttered with calamities and ailments and heartbreaks strung together with the colored lights of poetry.") More problematically, when the time comes to carry through on his boldest inventions, the Testa del Lupo episode and "Call It Joy," Castellani lets Williams get the better of him. Asked by Anja about Testa del Lupo, Williams dismisses its significance, telling her that "Suddenly Last Summer" was "the detritus of my psychotherapy, the slime that leaked from my head when they shrunk it. It was a way of making sense of my time in Barcelona, not Portofino." This is, as it happens, the standard interpretation of the play - yet if Castellani wished to let it stand, why put in Testa del Lupo, and call it Testa del Lupo, in the first place? A worse misstep, I think, is his decision to incorporate "Call It Joy" into the novel, only to have his characters trash it. ("I kept waiting to feel something," Trevor says of the play. "For the first few pages, I almost did, but then, as it went on and on, I just wanted the guy to shut up and die already.") On one level, the vigorous drubbing that "Call It Joy" receives might be read as an attempt by Castellani to insulate himself against accusations of self-aggrandizement (or as an oblique invitation to readers to reassure him that the play isn't really as bad as all that). And yet, in the novel, "Call It Joy" isn't Castellani's play; it's Tennessee Williams's play. As a result, fraught questions about appropriation, biography and the legitimacy of "alternative history" are spotlit, distracting attention from the narrative itself and the often moving stories that it comprises. About halfway through "Leading Men," Sandrino and Trevor, in an effort to persuade Anja to let them read "Call It Joy," suggest that they hold a séance. The idea is to rouse the spirit of the dead Williams and ask him if he wants the play produced; yet, to their disappointment, he refuses to materialize. Were I an occultist, I might suggest that Williams's recalcitrance reflects his disinclination to take part in a novel that both attributes to him a play he never wrote and, in the case of one he did, supplants a hothouse cultivar as uncanny and unsettling as Sebastian Venable's Venus flytrap with an overdetermined myth of real-life origin. If Williams haunts "Leading Men," it's not as its guiding spirit but as its guilty conscience. An invented biographical point of origin for the murder scene in 'Suddenly Last Summer.' DAVID LEAVITT'S new novel, "This Was Once the Future," will be published next year. He teaches at the University of Florida.
Kirkus Review
To the spate of novels investigating the lives of famous artists and their relationships with the people who loved them most, add this intriguing take on Tennessee Williams and his lover of 15 years, Frank Merlo.Nicknamed the Horse by Williams for his stocky build, Merlo was a man from a working-class Italian family in New Jersey who rose to elite echelons of society through his relationship with Williams, becoming friends with, among others, Anna Magnani and Truman Capote (whom neither he nor Williams cherished). Castellani's Merlo, with a heart that's "big and simple and practical," is the focus here. Merlo is fulfilled by his work for Williamsarranging the details of the scatterbrained playwright's lifebut also plagued by doubts about his own purpose ("If Frank could not be the fountain, he could at least feel the spray," Castellani writes). In portions of the novel set in 1953, Castellani imagines that the couple meets a glamorous Swedish mother and daughter, "these fierce and delicate greyhounds, with their taut slender necks," the younger of whom, Anja Bloom, they take under their wings. She will become an international star known for her work in art house cinema, but her fame won't soften her "haunted and hard" heart. Castellani (The Art of Perspective, 2016) shuttles between 1953, when Williams was collaborating with Paul Bowles to write the screenplay for Luchino Visconti's Senso, and now, when Bloom's star has faded but she is still in possession of Williams' (imaginary) last creation, a terrible one-act play, Call It Joy, that he wrote to assuage his guilt for not visiting Merlo in the hospital in 1963 as he was dying of lung cancer. Will Bloom allow the play to be performed? In an ambitious act of ventriloquism, Castellani includes the entire script of the play here. There are only a few missteps in the novel; it is not clear, for example, why anyone would fall in love with the petty and cantankerous writer John Horne Burns.Humane, witty, and bold, this novel imagines the life of a loving but tortured couple. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
A literary alternate history, this new work from Castellani (All This Talk of Love) deftly combines fact and fiction to reimagine the relationship between playwright Tennessee Williams and his longtime lover Frank Merlo. It centers on their fictional 1953 trip to Portofino, Italy, to attend a party hosted by writer Truman Capote. There they meet American novelist John Horne Burns and a young Swedish woman, Anja Blomgren, whom Williams and Merlo take on as their project, introducing her to luminaries of the film industry. (In real life, Williams was in Italy at the time, working on the script of Luchiano Visconti's Senso.) Anja soon meets a Bergman-like Scandinavian director, and her acting career is underway. The chapters alternate among the Italian trip; Frank's dying in a New York hospital ten years later, hoping for a reconciliation with Williams; and elderly screen legend Anja Bloom, who is staging Williams's final play in a Provincetown, MA, bar in the 1990s. VERDICT This is a tale of love and loneliness, the personal costs of genius and its attendant fame, and of the ultimate, inconsolable pain of loss. In its depiction of Americans in Europe, its closest literary cousin might be F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night.-Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1. the little horse Truman was throwing a party in Portofino, and Frank wanted to go. The invitation came in mid-July, slipped between parentheses in the long, gossipy paragraphs of his letter to Tenn, as if daring him to acknowledge it. Frank read the letter in Tenn's absence. He'd been stuck for weeks in their stuffy fourth-floor apartment on Via Firenze, waiting for him to get back from Spain, while, on the loud streets below, the real Romans escaped for the mountains. He replied to Truman with a brief telegram, and then he called the finest hotel in town, the Splendido, to book a room. He auditioned various linen jackets and swim trunks and hats in the mirror above the dresser, mended two pairs of Tenn's socks, and walked their silks down to the cleaners. When Tenn returned home to find their bags lined up in the hall, packed for another trip, he didn't protest. He was sweet on Frank again after three weeks apart. A drive in the Jag up the coast of Liguria, far from the melting heart of the centro, could only make things sweeter. They took one last walk through the Villa Borghese. They followed two boys, the dark one Tenn's, the blond for Frank, down the Spanish steps and out the eastern side to the Corso, pulled along by the smoothness of their elbows. Not a hint of saggy skin on Tenn's boy, his long arms tanned by lazy days on the beach at Ostia, or on Frank's, a Swiss. Who could say where the Swiss got that scar, new and pink across the knob of the elbow, or where he spent his own empty afternoons? Who could say he was a Swiss at all and not from some disappointing place, like Minnesota? Who could say the scar didn't come from an iron fence he'd tumbled over, running from a cuckold in Lugano, his wife in the doorway clutching her robe and pleading for mercy? They could say, Frank and Tenn, walking at a safe distance behind the boys, as they liked so very much to do evenings after dinner those summers they lived in Rome, inventing lives for the Italians, inventing lives for themselves. It's what Tenn was famous for. It was one of the many happy ways they passed their time together. They brought back the dark one, Mario, to Via Firenze. A Sicilian, like Frank, it turned out, but at least he wasn't American. As he hastily slipped on his espadrilles, color rising in his cheeks, Frank said to him, you've just slept with one of the world's greatest writers, and because Mario had heard of Tennessee Williams, he stayed for the coffee and pastries Frank brought onto the terrace. Soon Mario grew tiresome, as they all did, talking of his mother, who expected him home, who worried-there was always a mother-and they watched with relief as he and his tight elbows descended the stairs. He wasn't the first Mario, of course. Over the years, they forgot their names, but not their scars or their attitudes or the stories they told as they lay between them late into the night. Sometimes, on their evening walks, the streets sultry and flickering with shadows, they'd spot one of the Marios in a piazza with his pack of friends, laughing, his arm slung over a girl's shoulder. If the Mario noticed them, he'd turn his face away or shoot back a look of defiance and shame and fear, which enlarged them. They left Rome like this, big as elephants, the heat and storms behind them, the top down on the Jag, for Portofino. Frank slept most of the way, his head on Tenn's lap, and then again on the skiff from Rapallo, though Tenn kept nudging him awake to point out the houses on the cliffs. You like the orange? he asked. The yellow? No, that blue, up top! I'm shopping, Frankie. Any of these can be ours. Truman had rented an apartment a few steps from the harbor, above the Delfino Restaurant, which Frank and Tenn passed on their way up the hill to the Splendido. Tenn paid the boat guy to carry their luggage, and, when the hill got too steep, Frank grabbed the heavy case with the typewriter. He didn't like it when another guy did work for him that he could do himself, a guy who would have been him if he'd never left Jersey. The Splendido was first a monastero, the boat guy told them, and now look at it, che spettacolo, the place Clark Gable drinks his brandy to a view. Tenn went straight to the desk as usual and Frank arranged their dress shirts on hangers and brought their shoes down for shining and stole another hour for a nap. He'd never felt so tired in the middle of the afternoon, and he chalked it up to being thirty, but it's possible-no doctor was ever able to tell him for sure one way or the other-that the trouble had already started in his lungs. When he woke, Tenn offered him a pill. Tenn had as many pills as Italy had houses on the water. But Frank wasn't taking pills, not then. Instead he smoked another cigarette and paid the boat guy to drive him over the mountain to Paraggi Beach, where he swam to find his strength and clear his head. They didn't like Truman much, but Frank didn't hate him the way Tenn did. Or maybe Tenn didn't hate Truman. It was hard to know for sure with Tenn. It was a job in itself keeping track of who he was angry with, and who was jealous of him, whose parties he was looking forward to and whose they'd have to make up some excuse to get out of. Frank's official job was as Tenn's secretary, but even his secretary didn't have a reason for being in Portofino other than to stop by Truman's party, and he didn't know when they'd be leaving. There wasn't much Frank knew in the summer of 1953, least of all how long he and Tenn might last. In those years, there was no such thing as early, late, or on time. They went from place to place on a magic carpet. Dropped here, dropped there. Women in electric dresses, men in monkey suits and bow ties made of white silk. Cognac, cigars, wine. The sky turquoise even when it was gray. Because Tenn had no mind-and little use-for schedules and logistics and coordinates, he needed Frank to organize the day they woke, and the coming days, and even the days before. The dinner they'd had in London, Tenn swore on Mother Edwina's grave they'd had in Chicago. The party for the premiere of Sweet Bird of Youth in Philadelphia he remembered as the one in New Haven for Camino Real. The life of Tennessee Williams was a memory play in which memory was a jumble. It was bodies he remembered, bodies they remembered together. His body and Frank's, the Southern Gentleman and the Little Horse. The bodies of all the Marios, from Key West to Marrakech. When it came to matters of the body, Frank and Tenn trusted each other like soldiers. At the Delfino, Frank lost track of him the first minute. Tenn couldn't walk into a room without someone sweeping him up and into a crowd. How many times had Frank stood at the edge of the crowd as if on a shore, watching him drift farther and farther out, his head bobbing on the waves, glancing back just once to meet his eyes. How many times had Frank found himself in an overflowing room like this one, greeting guests as they arrived, recognizing their faces from movies and the backstages of theaters. How many times had these people walked in, looked around, saw Frank, saw nobody, spotted a somebody over his shoulder, and then headed upstairs. A brass band started up. Frank danced with a French girl whose uncle watched from the bar. Girls liked to dance with Frank, and he with them; he had a way with a spin and a twirl and a catch and a bow, and this French girl, she could follow. That wasn't always the case with girls, even the fancy brought-up girls, but dancing with the clomping ones-the Clydesdales, he called them-even that was better than dancing with a guy, which he and Tenn never did anyway, not with each other at least, not even in Provincetown. He saw the world like that a lot then: what he did with Tenn, what he'd done with girls. He had his hands all over the Frenchy-Martine-until he noticed the uncle giving him the stink-eye. He let her spin into some other man's arms. He brought a whiskey over to the uncle, not bad looking himself once he relaxed and the stink left his eye, and they got to talking. They'd both been at Guadalcanal. They traded stories loud over the music. When it became clear to the uncle that there was no money in Frank for his precious Martine, he took off in a cloud of leathery cologne. It was then and there that Frank first saw Jack Burns. Frank knew a drunk when he saw one. In a few years, he'd have good reasons to become one himself, to crave that slow blurry kill. That night, he craved only a cigarette and the sea air, but for the air he had to get past the drunk slouched against the doorway of the Delfino. From across the room, in the low smoky light, with the band playing "Lazzarella," he might have mistaken the man for handsome, but as he walked toward him from the bar, into clearer focus came his pink, bloated face, his world-hating mouth, his body heavy and lifeless as a sandbag. Frank stopped, looked him in the eyes, and asked if maybe he'd come to the wrong place. "This isn't Portofino?" A man appeared behind him and put his hand on his shoulder, to steady him or claim him or both. "We are here for the party upstairs," the man said to Frank in Italian. "It is privato." "This is the party, downstairs and upstairs," Frank said in English, using his hands for emphasis. He spoke enough of his parents' native language to converse with the man, but there was no reason to make the effort. "Not as privato as you might expect." Whatever the Italian then whispered into the drunk's ear had no effect on his scowl. "We drove from Firenze," he said to Frank. He put out his hand. "I am called Sandro. This is John Horne Burns. The novelist." In just a single night in Portofino, Frank had met Rex Harrison the actor, kissed the cheek of Daisy Fellowes the heiress, eyed the not-so-secret boyfriend of Arturo Lopez-Willshaw the Chilean magnate, and posed for Cecil Beaton the photographer. He had never heard of John Horne Burns the novelist. From the looks of him, Frank doubted anyone else had, either. Truman's parties drew all sorts of hangers-on, parasites, and wannabes, even in this remote little cove at the tip of the peninsula. "Nice to meet you, John Horne Burns the Novelist," Frank said, more out of politeness to Sandro than affection for the surly fellow. "Jack," he said. Frank looked around for Tenn. If he was already upstairs, he wouldn't be down for hours. Upstairs was where the glitter was. The most glitter was hidden behind the closed doors of bedrooms. He and Tenn had once spent an entire party on Maureen Stapleton's king-size bed, the three of them sprawled on the coverlet with their shoes still on passing around a liter of vodka, while her party clinked and boomed on the other side of the door and the glitter-hungry mob banged and shouted to be let in. "The Gallery," Sandro said. "The great war novel. A great work of American fiction. And two just-as-great novels since." "Quit it," said Jack. "Great," said Frank. "He is modesto," Sandro said. "He is working now on his great fourth novel. I force him this weekend to take a break. I say, go to the party of Truman Capote. We meet him in Firenze in June and last week receive the telegram with this address. Everyone in Italy knows his book, so I say, we take the car and drive to see the little man with the funny voice. Our first time in questo bel posto." "This place is lousy with writers," Frank said to Jack. "You'll be in good company. Clare Luce is over there. Jack Dunphy." He paused. "Tennessee Williams." At those glittering names Jack merely rolled his eyes and swayed. "We going in or not?" he said, and headed for the bar. Sandro turned to Frank. "Please forgive," he said. "He has trouble with his book. He is a great man." Then he rushed to the great man's side. To get an uncluttered view of the water, Frank followed the stone sidewalk around the bend of the harbor. White yachts crammed the shallow cove, their lights blazing, tinny music pouring from their radios onto their crowded decks. In Portofino in midsummer, Truman's was not the only invitation to be had. It was even possible that these people standing along the railings talking and dancing in pairs had never heard of Truman Capote or Tennessee Williams, not to mention John Horne Burns; that they'd never gone to the theater or finished a book or attended the symphony; that they were rich without culture. Frank would rather be poor. He might rather be dead. A dark-haired woman waved to him from one of the swankier yachts farther out, and for the delicious moment he mistook her for Anna Magnani, he brightened; he lifted his arm to wave back; but she wasn't Anna at all, of course, just another overflowing signora in an evening dress and a smile too big for her face. They'd just left Anna in Rome, and even she in her fierceness didn't pick up and leave without a plan unless she had a new lover, and if she had a new lover she'd have made sure Frank knew. Frank missed Anna. He could talk to her and she would at least make a show of listening before she brought the subject back to herself. In Rome, she called their apartment every morning first thing. "Ciao ciao," she'd say, already in a hurry. "What's the program, ragazzi?" Frank often forgot she was an actress in the big time and not one of his sisters in Peterstown, busting out of her brassiere and squeezing his face with her hands when she needed to get a point through his thick skull. The buildings in the harbor glowed like giant jewel boxes, pink and yellow and orange. The archways along the curve shone down their own lights, making little stages where people stood on their tiptoes staring back at the boats for a glimpse of the rich and famous. Frank could have rooms in one of the jewel boxes if he wanted. Did he want jewel box rooms? Did he want to stay here, stay anywhere? What was the program? Excerpted from Leading Men: A Novel by Christopher Castellani All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.