Now 75, Dmitri, known to the Italian press as "Lolito", is as tough, vivid and entertaining, fast-talking andAmericanised as his father was elusive, sweet-natured and immemorially Russian.
While London's charitable ball circuit is nowhere near as lavish or ostentatious as New York's, there are other signs of British fund-raising becoming Americanised.
Somewhere between Ellis Island and the car factories of Detroit (or nowadays between the Rio Grande and a bungalow in Riverside) the newcomers are Americanised.