We'll See: the Life, Death, and Resurrection of the Choreographer of Calcata

Paul was dying. At lunch. In Rome, just around the corner from the Trevi Fountain. Which didn’t seem like worst place in the world to spend the last moments of one’s life. Ten minutes earlier, the waiter had put a bowl of spaghetti alle vongole in front of Paul, the steam from the pasta and mussels fogging up his glasses. So much so we didn’t notice he was suddenly slumped over and passed out, his face inches above the bowl. But now, laid out flat on the cobblestones five feet from our table where he could get medical attention, my friend Pancho, my then-wife Jessie, and I (along with Paul’s little dog, Jack) could only stand there and watch as the waiters flagged over some paramedics they’d called a few minutes earlier. “It’s Paul Steffen,” whispered a waiter into an ear of one of the paramedics, who then nodded in acknowledgement.

Paul Steffen was eighty-six years, two weeks, and three days old, to be exact. I always knew the day of his death would come, probably sooner than later, and I guess in a perverse way it was fitting that he’d die over lunch.

Which is the meal I’ll always associate with Paul. I was living in Calcata, a hippie-and-artist-laden medieval hill town about an hour north of the Italian capital. Paul, along with his longtime friend, Pancho, who was 56 at the time, and a chef, mosaic artist and former dancer, had lived in the village since the early 1980s.

They became two of my first (and best) friends when I moved to the village to work on my first book. Because there were no restaurants open in Calcata on Tuesdays, we had a weekly ritual of driving out of the village on that day to have lunch somewhere.

It was exciting for me because I’d get to see new places around central Italy: sometimes we’d go up to Viterbo, an off-the-radar city that was clad in gothic architecture and surrounded by giant, thick walls; sometimes we’d dine on the shores of Lake Bracciano, about 20 minutes away; sometimes we’d eat in Rome.

The author, Jessie, and Paul celebrating a birthday at the truckstop restaurant

But my favorite was always the truckstop. A truckstop on the outskirts of the medieval hill town Civita Castellano that happened to serve some of the best food I’d eaten in Italy. The food wasn’t going to win any awards. It was simple, as is the wont of Italian cuisine. But there was something about the atmosphere that helped prod along the palate into convincing me that this was some seriously good stuff. Scientists have studied how surrounding and environment can shape the taste of food. And somehow the salt-of-the-earth vibe and the fact that it was a truckstop in the middle of nowhere made this place very special. .

It was also the experience of dining there with Paul and Pancho. Would eating there ever be the same without Paul? Pancho, Paul, and I would go to the truckstop restaurant, known as Osteria de L’Aquila–located out on the Via Flaminia toward the A1 autostrada–and have a three-course lunch, antipasti, primi, and secondi, along with two or three bottles of wine. Sometimes Pancho and Paul would revive a decades-long argument—the nature of reality, raising dogs, circumcision—that would get so heated, I’d slink down and look around to see what kind of attention we were bringing to our table.

Paul and the author dining at La Torre in Viterbo

Other times, I’d tell Paul about some dilemma I was having in life. He’d listen to me and often conclude by saying two sage words: we’ll see. Which, as I interpreted it, was a Buddhist-like way of saying: don’t get stuck in a moment (of anxiety or fear, for example) because all situations, attitudes, beliefs, relationships, feelings, etc. are constantly in flux; they’re impermanent and will change, like everything does in the universe. Even your feelings about this situation you’re preoccupied with will be different in a few days, and even more so in a few weeks. So, don’t grasp on to it. Let it work itself out with time. And it always did.

Sometimes, if I was lucky, Paul would talk about his extraordinary 20th-century life. After all, as I watched the paramedics try to resurrect him on the cobblestones outside the restaurant in Rome, I thought: this was no ordinary man dying in front of me. Paul trained with the legendary dancer Lester Horton. His career as a dancer and choreographer was kick-started in Hollywood when he began dancing in films beside Rita Hayworth. He apparently had a brief fling with Ms. Hayworth. “But it was her husband, I really wanted to be with,” Paul told me on more than one occasion, usually after we’d uncorked a few bottles of wine. The husband in question was none other than Orson Welles. In the late forties, his friend, film director (and eventual name namer) Elia Kazan told him that this commie-hating Senator McCarthy guy in Washington didn’t bode well for them. Paul wasn’t a Communist, but he was gay and liberal, which for that time pretty much made him a Communist anyway. Kazan’s advice to the young up-and-coming dancer: Get the hell out of this place.

So, in the early 1950s, he moved to Paris where he’d hung out regularly with Jean-Paul Sarte and Simone de Beauvoir at their regular table at Café de Flore. He was good friends with Lena Horne, who asked him to help bring her son out of the closet. Filmmaker Jean Cocteau even gave him an apartment just off of the Champs-Élysées. After moving to Rome in the 1960s, he quickly fell in with the Via Veneto crowd, carousing with Federico Fellini and Marcelo Mastrioanni, among others in the La Dolce Vita circle. He would go on to become the choreographer for Italy’s then-only TV channel, RAI. It’s hard to imagine a dancer achieving household name status–the closest might be Barishnikov, I suppose–but in Italy, Paul was it. Paul taught dancing as well. And, naturally, he did things his way. Unlike nearly every dance instructor before him, Paul didn’t think it was necessary to first learn ballet. This was revolutionary and it allowed for people to become professional dancers who either started later in life—such as Pancho—or whose upbringing (for cultural or financial reasons) didn’t expose them to ballet at an early age. He thus helped launch the careers of many dancers who wouldn’t have normally received the opportunity.

Though still famous with people of a certain age, Paul’s star has long faded. Not at the truckstop, though. People would greet Paul warmly there. Or maybe it was because we went there so much.

If somehow you’d just materialized at a table at L’Aquila, the truckstop restaurant, you’d never realize you were cavorting with truckers until you sauntered outside to see the lorries fueling up. It had an exterior shaded in white and yellow and an interior bathed–like nearly all restaurants in Italy–in fluorescent lighting and a TV always screaming in the background, L’Aquila didn’t try to reinvent anything. After all, this is Italy. Instead, the carbonara and amatriciana, for example, tasted fresh. Flavors seemed amplified, as if the nonna cooking back in the kitchen was sprinkling culinary steroids in every dish. Arugula was often of the wild variety (which was so naturally peppery, you’d want to sneeze).

Pancho, Paul, my then-wife Jessie, and I would settle in for a long lunch. Several bottles of wine would be consumed as well. We once celebrated Paul’s birthday there. Pancho brought a box of condoms and blew them up like balloons. In between forkfuls of pasta, we batted around the condom-balloons and no one in the restaurant cared.

But at the restaurant in Rome, the day Paul passed out in front of his spaghetti alle vongole, we hadn’t even gotten through the primo course. And it didn’t seem like we were going to. Paul was dying. Or at least we thought so. A few minutes later, however, he was awake. Then he was sitting up. A few minutes after that, we resumed eating. And after lunch, we went on a crawl through Rome’s wine bars. Paul Steffen went from nearly dead to drunk in a matter of hours. Not a bad way to live. Paul eventually did die a year later. Sadly, not in a restaurant but in a hospital like most people.

On my next trip to Italy, I made a point to ask Pancho if we could go to L’Aquila. Sadly, the best truckstop restaurant in Italy (if not Europe or the planet) now appears to be closed. So, I settled for Pancho’s restaurant in Calcata, where the two of us ate three courses, imbibed wine, and talked about our problems and anxieties in life. And then we reminded each other of Paul’s favorite phrase:

We’ll see.