Adorable Story #24: the Chronicle of Enrico di Portanova (Part 1)
How Texas oil turned a young man into a legendary bon-vivant
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Baron Enrico di Portanova, also known as Ricky to his friends, lived a life that could easily be mistaken for the plot of an extravagant Hollywood drama.
Early life
Even his date of birth is uncertain.
Ricky claimed to be born as Baron Roy Paul Apruzzo di Portanova in Los Angeles on August 16, 1933.
According to some sources though, Ricky had a penchant for subtracting some years to his age in the attempt to look younger, and he was actually born approximately a decade earlier and most likely on August 16, 1925-261.
He was the first son of the Italian playboy Paolo Apruzzo and the American heiress Lillie Cullen.
Many believed that Ricky was not a Baron from Naples, either. His father Paolo was even said to have declared:
“I am the only man who inherited a title from my son.”
Ricky’s maternal grandfather, Hugh Roy Cullen, was a 100% authentic American capitalist hero though: with just a fifth-grade education, by 1928 he became one of the richest men in the world.
He found oil for the first time near Houston in 1921. Relentlessly, he went on to make three more major finds in the following decade and the press called him the “King of the Wildcatters.”
Cullen’s biggest achievement was finding the mile-deep Tom O’Connor field in Refugio Country, Texas, on the Gulf of Mexico coastal plain: it was one of the biggest oil fields in Texas, worth at the time over 1 billion USD alone.
In 1932, Hugh Roy Cullen formed the Quintana Petroleum Company2 and took his only son and four daughters on a trip to Europe.
Lillie Cullen
Born in 1906, Lillie was the oldest of the four daughters of Hugh Roy Cullen: she was an American heiress who went to travel in Europe in 1932 with her family and fell in love with the handsome (albeit pennyless) Paolo Apruzzo, somewhere between Rome and Naples.
Paolo was an Italian playboy and would-be Hollywood actor in mute cinema, who later in life would call himself a baron: nobody could confirm any actual nobility of his family and no mention of any “Baron di Portanova” can be found in the heraldic registries in Italy.
After falling in love, Paolo and Lillie rushed to marriage in Los Angeles on December 16, 1932, and eight months later, on August 16, 1933, Lillie gave birth to Ricky, their first child: this caused a mortal embarrassment for the very conservative Cullen family.
While Hugh Roy Cullen did not disinherit his daughter, once Ricky was born, contacts between Lillie and the rest of the Cullen family stopped.
Thanks to her father’s genereous monthly allowance, Lillie and her husband initially lived an upper-class life in Los Angeles, where they raised their two sons: Ricky and Ugo.
Just a few years later, Lillie and Paolo divorced: she moved to New York City to live alone in a hotel room, and the sons ended up living in Italy with their father Paolo, who later re-married twice and completely lost contact with his ex-wife and the Cullen family.
Ricky, the older of the boys, grew up in Rome to become, like his father, a handsome man: in his younger years, Ricky travelled often to India, Burma and Ceylon in order buy and smuggle precious stones back to Italy to jumpstart a small jewellery business in Rome.
He showed clear signs of love for adventure and he did the best he could to enjoy the “Dolce Vita” of Rome at the time: he loved beautiful women and even claimed to have once pursued Ava Gardner from Rome to Berlin in a small Fiat and, once arrived in the German capital, had seduced her (not before having somehow put the living room of her flat on fire by accident).
Ugo, his younger brother, was mentally impaired due to schizophrenia and lived a secluded life near Sorrento (south of Naples): he would later become a poet and a painter.
In Houston, Lillie’s three younger sisters had all married average, middle-class men who would all end up working at Quintana Petroleum and eventually became pillars of Houston’s financial and philanthropic communities.
In 1936, Lillie’s only brother, Roy Gustav Cullen was killed on a drilling rig accident: this was a complete shock for Hugh Roy Cullen who began rethinking some of his life choices and started divesting part of his fortune to charities and other philantropic endeavors.
Over the next twenty years he gave away more than 200m USD to the University of Houston, the symphony, and various hospitals around Texas.
Legal Battle
The legal battle that Baron Enrico di Portanova was embroiled in was a remarkable saga that spanned over three decades.
It all started in 1957, once the patriarch Hugh Roy Cullen died, and the Cullen Trust was created in Houston to manage his estate.
At the time, Ricky was living in Rome under the name of Enrico Apruzzo. He was running a small precious stones trading business and a jewellery store in Via Margutta, where he designed and sold rings, brooches and necklaces.
He was far from being wealthy, but being a handsome young man fluent in both English and Italian, Ricky had married the Swedish model Ingrid Gustanson and, thanks to his wife, also subsidised his income by modelling for “fotoromanzi”: these were cartoon romances, illustrated by balloons of dialogue floating over still photographs, which were very popular in post-war Italy.
Sometimes in late 1957, having had no contacts with the American branch of his mother’s family for decades, Ricky found himself all of a sudden with a monthly cheque of 5k USD from the Cullen Trust (approximately 55k USD in today’s value).
He decided to keep his small flat in Rome but immediately relocated to Monte-Carlo for tax reasons and in order to start climbing the social ladder.
In January 1958, barely months after he started receiving the monthly cheque from Houston, Ricky bought from dr. Enrico Wax of the firm Wax & Vitale — a business man from Genoa and personal friend of Enzo Ferrari — a marvellous, custom-built, Ferrari Superamerica.
This was one of the only six ever built by the Maranello carmaker and the single one featuring lightweight aluminium bodywork personally hand-made by Sergio Scaglietti, the man responsible for the bodywork of Enzo Ferrari’s competition race-cars at the time (the other five had a more standard bodywork made by Pinin Farina).
So rare and desired was this car that the only other Ferrari Superamerica circulating in Rome at the time was owned by the legendary Prince Dado Ruspoli.
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