T MAGAZINE; Vexed in Venice

Bar hopping with a bunch of gondoliers at Christmas wasn't Joan Juliet Buck's style. When I peered over the Gothic staircase at dawn on my fourth day in Venice to see that the lobby of the Hotel Danieli was under 14 inches of water, I sent up thanks for my very first acqua alta. It meant the bar was out of commission. The bar's armchairs, stools and tables were already stacked all the way up the staircase. Our tribe began each day in the bar at 10: Peter O'Toole; his wife, Sian Phillips; her mother, known to all as Mumgee; their daughters Kate and Pat with their nanny Elizabeth; two writers in love, Harry Craig and Shana Alexander; and Joyce and Jules Buck, my parents. They and the O'Tooles had a movie company called Keep Films, and they were as inseparable in play as in work. The acqua alta receded. Just before noon the furniture was back in the bar, and, sitting with their shoes planted on wet oriental carpets, so were the beaming grown-ups. The kids, the nanny and I held back. Wasn't it kind of chilly down here? I sneezed to make my point. Kate, who was 10, was happy: she'd been allowed to walk along the concierge's desk while the water was still high. I'd gone back to bed and missed the fun. Peter and Sian's Venetian friends arrived, working-class stars of the tourist industry resting between summers: the Danieli's off-duty barman, Gastone de Cal; his pal the gondolier Gino Macropodio; their wives, parents, children and friends. There was a painter who made convincing Guardi oils, which, he swore, he never sold as the real thing. There was an aged gentleman called the Cavaliere, who was writing a cookbook about Venetian food with an exile from American wealth named Buzz Bruning, who had met his young wife, Leslie, as she chaperoned Finch College students through Italy. They lived in a house in the Sestiere di San Polo, where Buzz often cooked for the barman, the gondoliers, the Cavaliere and their families; that Christmas, he was preparing a bigger feast to include the 11 members of the Buck-O'Toole-Craig-Alexander party. The group was some 20 strong by the time we hit the cold wind on the Riva degli Schiavoni, skirted the Doge's palace and headed into the back streets with a single mission: to stand at the counters of small Venetian bars and knock back little glasses of red wine called ombrette and eat little fried and breaded things called cicchete, and then walk up and down bridges and through the gray streets to the next bar, and the next, until lunchtime, which would happen at about 3 p.m. and be an exact replica of what came before, only this time seated and with larger portions of fish. At 22, the three things I disliked most were eating, alcohol and walking. Sometimes there was a long detour through the ghetto, which was as cold as the rest of Venice and had no canals of its own. Ten years earlier, Peter and Sian had explored Venice as Peter prepared to play Shylock at Stratford. Now he was a star, but in the intervals between films and plays after ''Lawrence of Arabia,'' he and Sian came back to Venice to hide among their chosen friends. I had imagined there would be more presents and fewer plebes. Authentic, to me, was a way of tying a belt, not a way of living. I was a bad-tempered, self-conscious, fashiony 22-year-old in from Paris, and it showed. My eyebrows were plucked to a single arched line, my mouth set in a jaded moue. I wore a smock custom-made with scraps of striped cotton cinched tight over a long olive green skirt from Yves Saint Laurent and high-heeled boots that laced to the knee and hurt furiously. I smelled of patchouli, applied from a small vial when nervous, which was frequently. My coat's right lapel was covered with enamel pins advocating revolution and sexual disobedience; the rarer ones were sewn on so no one could steal them at a coat check. I knew the shock value of certain things but did not always get their meanings. I thought I was an adult, but my life had not begun. I worked as an underpaid stylist for the photographer Guy Bourdin, lived in a tiny room on the Rue du Bac, was fascinated by Chairman Mao, knew people who were making the sexual revolution, was in love with three wrong men and had a dealer who sold me just enough hashish every week to make me feel like I belonged. I imagined I was simply moonlighting as the daughter of a cigar-smoking movie producer in handmade suits who spent Christmas in Venice.