The Villa(37)

Those few pages, still unfinished, call to her, and Mari allows herself a small smile.

“I hope I will, too.”

There were always rumors about just how involved the five young people at Villa Rosato were that summer. Of the five, Noel Gordon was the eldest, and he was only twenty-six. Pierce Sheldon was twenty-three, Johnnie Dorchester a mere twenty, and Mari Godwick and Lara Larchmont were both still teenagers, just nineteen in the summer of 1974. They were also all part of a set that ran fast and loose when it came to sexual partners and mores. Pierce had already left one wife, as had Noel, and both men had been involved with Lara Larchmont at different times.

But it’s also tempting to make things more illicit than they actually were, especially when it comes to rock royalty. It’s equally possible that none of the rumors were true at all, and that the romantic configurations at Villa Rosato were fairly tame. None of the survivors ever indicated differently.

While Noel Gordon and Mari Godwick remained close for the remainder of the former’s short life, Mari never discussed the events of that summer, not even in her private diaries, which her literary agent donated to the University of Edinburgh after her death in 1993. There is only one entry dealing with Noel Gordon, and it is found on a page labeled March 22, 1980. It says simply, “Noel is dead. How can Noel be dead?”

Intriguingly, there was a bit after that that had been scratched out in a flurry of black ink, but X-ray technology done on the diary revealed the words, “It’s not fair that I’m the only one left.”

—The Rock Star, the Writer, and the Murdered Musician: The Strange Saga of Villa Rosato, A. Burton, longformcrime.net

The first thing you notice about Lara Larchmont is how normal she looks.

There’s none of the mystique of a Stevie Nicks, nor the arresting beauty of a Linda Ronstadt. There’s just a dark-haired girl of about medium height with brown eyes and a smile that’s a little crooked, but completely charming. As she welcomes me into her London flat, I think she could be a girl you went to school with, a friend from down the street.

A friend whose debut album has sold well over a million copies, mind you, but other than the poshness of her Belgrave address and the gorgeous furnishings in her flat, you’d have no way of knowing that …

There is only one topic completely off-limits with Larchmont: the events of July 29, 1974. Everyone knows the story. It was one of rock music’s biggest scandals, a dark and lurid tale of sex, drugs, and murder involving one of the most famous men in rock, Noel Gordon—a man Lara was, it was rumored, pregnant by that summer, though given that she very demonstrably does not have a child, who can say how accurate that rumor was?

The murder of Pierce Sheldon reverberated through rock circles, and both Lara and her stepsister, the writer Mari Godwick, were swept up in it. The swift conviction of John Dorchester, a hanger-on and drug dealer who had accompanied Gordon to Italy that summer, did nothing to stem interest in the story, and his suicide in an Umbrian prison just six months after said conviction only fueled more tawdry conspiracies.

Five years later, though, most of that has died down, eclipsed by the success of Mari Godwick’s sensational novel Lilith Rising and Lara’s Aestas.

And it is Aestas that provides me my one chance at getting a hint of Lara’s feelings about Villa Rosato and the summer that saw the gruesome murder of Pierce Sheldon.

I wait to bring it up until nearly the end of the interview when the sun has set outside and the tea we were drinking has been replaced with two vodka tonics.

“Why the title?”

Larchmont’s dark eyes narrow slightly.

“Pardon?” she asks, but I don’t think it’s a question. I think she’s trying to give me a way out. I probably should have taken it, but I press on.

“Aestas means summer in Latin,” I say. “And you wrote these songs in Italy in the summer of 1974.”

It’s the closest I’ll get to mentioning the events that happened at Villa Rosato, and there is something in the way Lara Larchmont looks at me in that moment that makes me feel slightly ashamed—slightly grubby—for even bringing it up.

“I did,” she finally says. “But the title of the album was really inspired by Camus. You know, ‘I found there was, inside me, an invincible summer,’ all that.”

Since she was gracious enough to let me slide in something so personal, I return the favor and don’t press. And honestly, there is something of the invincible summer about Lara Larchmont. Her smiles are easy, her eyes warm, and she seems untouched by all that darkness in a way that the other survivors of Villa Rosato are not. Photographs of Noel Gordon taken just this past summer in Venice reveal a man whose legendary beauty is fading (and whose equally legendary talent is being squandered), and there’s always been a whiff of the tragic around Mari Godwick, despite her literary success.

But Lara Larchmont still walks in the sun.

I mention this later to an acquaintance, a writer who’ll remain nameless but was friendly with Larchmont and her set in the early seventies, and is still a force to be reckoned with in music journalism now.

To my surprise, he disagrees, shaking his head vehemently. “No, that summer ate her the fuck up, too, man. She’s just better at hiding it than the rest of them.”

—“Invincible Summer: The Rise and Rise of Lara Larchmont,”

Rolling Stone, November 1979