Gary turned out to be the actor Gary Cooper, who tried to convince Pino to go to Hollywood for a screen test. Hem turned out to be Ernest Hemingway, who drank a lot and said little. Cooper ended up being a longtime friend of Pino’s. Hemingway did not.
When the ski team returned to Italy, Pino wasn’t with them. He went to Los Angeles but never took the screen test. The idea of millions of people scrutinizing his every move was unappealing, and he doubted he could remember lines.
Instead, through his friendship with Alberto Ascari, he got a job at International Motors in Beverly Hills, selling Ferraris and other luxury sports cars. Pino’s fluent English, his understanding of high-performance cars, and his love of fun made him a natural.
His favorite sales tactic was to take one of his Ferraris and park it at a lunch stand across the street from Warner Bros. He met James Dean that way, and claimed to have warned the young actor away from the Porsche he wanted to buy, telling Dean he wasn’t ready for the power of it. He was crushed when Dean didn’t listen.
At International Motors, Pino worked with mechanics Dan Gurney, Richie Ginther, and Phil Hill, local Santa Monica boys who became Formula 1 drivers. In 1952, Hill started racing for Ferrari after Pino introduced him to Alberto Ascari at Le Mans. Like Ascari, Hill would go on to become world champion.
In the winters, Pino traveled to Mammoth Mountain in the central Sierra Nevada and joined the ski school there. On the slopes, teaching, he found his greatest happiness and passion in life. He taught skiing as a form of joyful fun and creative adventure. Dave McCoy, Mammoth’s founder, said seeing Pino on skis in deep powder snow was “like watching a dream.”
Pino was soon so popular that the only way to hire him was privately, which led to his friendship with Lance Reventlow, the son of Barbara Hutton—the Poor Little Rich Girl—and to a blind date with Patricia McDowell, the heiress to a newspaper fortune her family made with the Los Angeles Daily Journal, the San Diego Times, and the San Bernardino Sun.
After a whirlwind courtship, Pino and Patricia married, bought a home in Beverly Hills, and led a jet-set life, splitting time between California and Italy. Pino no longer sold Ferraris. He owned them and raced them on sports car circuits. He skied. He mountain climbed. He lived a vigorous life and was genuinely happy, day after day, for years.
Pino and Patricia had three children, Michael, Bruce, and Jamie. He doted on the children and taught them to ski and love the mountains. And he was always the life of the party that seemed to trail Pino no matter where they were in the world.
But every once in a while, late at night, often outside, he’d have memories of Anna and General Leyers, and they would all fill him once again with melancholy, confusion, and loss.
In the 1960s, when Pino was in his midthirties, he and Patricia began to fight. He thought she drank too much. She thought he paid too much attention to other women, and chided him for never making much of himself beyond being a world-class ski instructor.
In that toxic environment, Pino thought more and more of Anna, and grew ever more restless at the thought that he might never know a love as deep and as true again in his lifetime. He felt caged and with it the overwhelming need to walk, to move, to roam, to search.
A year of travel ended in Pino’s asking his wife for a divorce. He’d met an exotic, stunningly beautiful young woman named Yvonne Winsser, who was related to the Suharto family in Indonesia. Pino was smitten the moment they met. The divorce and remarriage hit Pino’s first family hard. Patricia descended into alcoholism. Pino sent the boys off to a Swiss boarding school. They were angry with him for years.
When Pino’s parents died, he inherited a third of the family business, which caused a rift between him and his sister. Cicci resented the fact that while he’d been off living a life in pursuit of happiness, she’d been working to build the Lella brand, and that he was now taking a third of the profits for doing next to nothing.
The money gave Pino even more freedom, but for many years that desire to roam wasn’t there. He and Yvonne had two children, Jogi and Elena. And he tried to be a better father to his older kids, with whom he reconciled.
After Mimo’s death, however, the old restlessness returned. And he started having dreams and nightmares of Anna. Pino took off on a trip that was supposed to begin in Paris, on a Pan Am jet bound for New York. But Carletto Beltramini, who was based in Paris, talked Pino into delaying his departure by a day so they could catch up. Pino did, only to learn that his original flight, Pan Am Flight 103, went down over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing everyone aboard.
Pino was gone for months that time, traveling, looking, and not really understanding what he was searching for. When he returned, after thirteen years of marriage, Yvonne decided that while she loved him, she couldn’t live with him anymore. Oddly, though divorced, they stayed the best of friends.
Pino aged. He watched his children grow and his bank account dwindle, but he remained in remarkably good spirits through his sixties. He skied. He wrote about motor sports for several Italian publications. He had interesting friends and girlfriends. He never once spoke of Anna, or General Leyers, or Father Re, or Casa Alpina, or what he’d done in the war.
A researcher from the Altruistic Personality and Prosocial Behavior Institute at California’s Humboldt State University approached Pino in the 1980s. She was doing a study on people who had risked their lives to save others. She said she’d gotten his name through Yad Vashem, which was a surprise to Pino. He’d never been contacted by anyone regarding his activities with Father Re.
Pino spoke with the young woman briefly, but her study’s focus upset him, brought up memories of Anna that led him to end the interview with a promise to fill out her detailed questionnaire and return it to her. He never did.
Pino maintained his silence until the late 1990s, when he had a chance meeting in northern Italy with Robert Dehlendorf, a successful American who’d owned, among other things, a small ski area in California. Dehlendorf was retired and staying on Lake Maggiore.
The two men, roughly the same age, bonded. They ate. They talked. They laughed. Late the third night, Dehlendorf asked, “What was the war like for you, Pino?”
Pino got a faraway look in his eye, and after a long hesitation, said, “I’ve never told anyone about my war, Bob. But someone very wise once told me that by opening our hearts, revealing our scars, we are made human and flawed and whole. I guess I’m ready to be whole.”
Long into the night, fragments of the tale spilled out. Dehlendorf was stunned. How was it possible that so little of the story had ever been told?