Diane von Furstenberg (26 page)

The new, domestic Diane often bumped up against her old celebrity self. On New Year’s Eve 1986, Diane’s fortieth birthday, she, Elkann, and their children were in Gstaad, where Diane had rented a house for the Christmas holiday. They skied during the day and that night trooped to Valentino’s chalet for a party. Diane found herself sitting next to Frank Sinatra, who serenaded her with “Happy Birthday” when a cake with lighted candles was brought out at the end of the meal.

In October the previous year, she was welcomed as a fashion celebrity at an event at Rome’s Renaissance Palazzo Venezia to launch the house of Fendi’s first perfume. Standing on the same balcony where Mussolini had declared war, she sipped champagne with Elkann and felt wistful about her old life. At the dinner afterward—in the room that had been Il Duce’s office—she chatted with a group of journalists who’d been invited to cover the fragrance launch, most of whom she knew from the days when they’d covered
her.

That night in Rome, Diane “felt a little pang,” she admitted. “It was so easy for me to talk to my journalist friends. . . . It was a weird feeling. I felt both superior and inferior, attached and detached. On the one hand, I felt quite smug that I’d been there, done that, and moved on. On the other hand, other designers were doing fashion, and I wasn’t.”

Mostly, she was missing an unenlightened moment in New York style, an era of Madonna-inspired bustiers and shredded fishnets and
Working Girl
shoulder pads, big hair, and poufy skirts.

Yet the eighties also saw the increasing importance of brands in America and Europe. The five Fendi sisters, for example, had expanded their family’s venerable fur business into a full-scale fashion empire that produced everything from shoes to luggage to ready-to-wear designed by rising star Karl Lagerfeld, moonlighting from his day job designing couture and ready-to-wear for Chanel.

Diane spent hours on the phone discussing her licenses—which were partially paying for her life in Paris. Her most lucrative license was her home furnishings line for Sears. She also held licenses for inexpensive children’s clothes, stationery, nurses’ uniforms, luggage, eyewear, and a fashion line in Mexico. Twice a month she traveled to Manhattan, where she kept a two-bedroom apartment at the Carlyle Hotel and office space at the Squibb Building on Fifth Avenue. In Paris she made one brief foray into fashion. She designed a small collection of jersey dresses in solid colors with the French designer Hervé Peugnet, the founder of the French fashion house Herve Léger, who was known for his “bandage” dresses made from strips of fabric that molded to the body. Diane showed the collection in her living room. The clothes did well at the popular rue de Passy boutique Victoire and at the department store Printemps. But Diane lost interest after one season. “I didn’t want to get back into a real business,” she said.

For a time, she didn’t feel the need for it. Her life was full of new opportunities. She designed costumes for a Moravia play that was being produced at the Spoleto performing arts festival in Umbria. And in 1986 she started a small publishing company with Gérard-Julien Salvy, who had been the first to publish the work of Bruce Chatwin, author of
In Patagonia,
and Paul Bowles. Salvy, as they would call their publishing house, concentrated on translating British writers, including Vita Sackville-West, Cyril Connolly, and Barbara Pym. Diane worked on some of the translations herself and also spent time writing in her diary. She thought now she might like to be a writer but soon realized that writing was not what she did best—the effort made her feel anxious and insecure. She tried to put these feelings aside, telling herself that love, not work, was her priority now. And for a while she was content with Elkann. “We were a family, and my relationship with Alain was like a marriage. I loved his children, and they became close to mine,” she said.

The rue de Seine apartment was the scene of lively parties when the children arrived for vacation. Elkann’s elementary school-aged
offspring—sons John and Lapo and daughter Ginevra—lived with their mother in Brazil but visited Paris frequently. Both families traveled together on trips to Capri, Egypt, Switzerland (for skiing), and the United States. John Elkann, who today is chairman of Fiat, the car company started by his great-great-grandfather Giovanni Agnelli, recalls Diane as a loving and indulgent stepmother figure. She let him make up his face like a clown from pots of cosmetics left over from her Color Authority line. She organized a birthday party for him and took him to see James Bond movies. Once on a trip to New York, as a treat to delight John and his siblings, she rented a stretch limo to transport them to Cloudwalk. “Fundamentally, what I remember of those years was the feeling of a very close family,” says John.

At his tenth birthday party on rue de Seine, Diane presented John with a photograph that she’d taken of his father and had mounted in a silver frame. “It seems like a strange present for a child, but Diane said, ‘You will be glad to have it someday,’” John recalls. “And I am. I’ve kept it all these years.”

Diane visited Elkann’s parents in Turin and invited them to Paris for holidays that also included Egon’s parents and her own. Elkann’s mother, a religious Jew, grew very fond of Diane “and thought she’d be a perfect life companion for my father,” says John.

There were hints, though, that all was not well. To Alex, the rue de Seine apartment seemed like a stage set, and his mother appeared to be acting the role of writer’s muse. “She had no business, and she had to occupy her time—so she became an intellectual,” he says.

The role felt wrong, like a sleeve set too tightly in an armhole. Diane understands the world through a visual, not a cerebral sense. “That’s her key, her essence,” says Linda Bird Francke.

Though he remains close to Elkann’s children, Alex doesn’t remember this period fondly. “It was annoying because I had to go to Paris, which I hate. It’s a woman’s city. It wasn’t plugged in; I didn’t have my network. I’d say, ‘Mom, I’m a teen. I don’t want to go to Spoleto and Paris!”

In her 1998 autobiography, Diane portrays Elkann as unwilling to allow her any life separate from his. He objected to her leaving his side to travel to the United States for meetings with her licensees. In 1986 when New York Mayor Edward Koch awarded her the Mayor’s Liberty Award, which was given to foreigners who’d made significant contributions to American life, she sent her mother to accept it in her place. “The award was a big deal, but I knew Alain wouldn’t want me to go to the ceremony,” at which dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov and poet Joseph Brodsky were also honored, she recalled. “When I got the telegram from Mayor Koch, rather than being able to enjoy it and show it off . . . I played it down.”

Elkann disputes the contention that he thwarted Diane’s business and personal opportunities. Their relationship, he says, “was so much more poetical than she described it in the book. She learned a lot by being with me in Paris, and also, it was a love story, which she forgets.”

As much as Diane tried to tamp herself down, to live Elkann’s life and make him her priority, he always felt the imbalance of power between them. “I think at a certain moment she was too overwhelming for me—the public success, the big money, the [famous people],” he says. “It was not my world. I was discovering my voice as a writer; my children were very young. I’d been away from Italy; I wanted to go back to Italy. I wanted to be part of the Italian literary world. I wanted to be less protected and more independent.”

At the same time, Diane began to yearn for her old life. She found that a personality cannot be remade like last season’s dresses and that by acting the role of submissive girlfriend, she’d betrayed something deep within her.

Then Diane discovered she was pregnant. She was not overjoyed. Elkann wanted her to have the baby, but Diane was ambivalent. “She’s very family oriented. She liked to have the children and their friends around,” says Elkann. Yet at forty-one, with Alex and Tatiana nearing the end of their teens, she wasn’t sure she wanted to start again raising an infant.

At eight thirty one winter morning when Elkann was out of town,
Diane went to an abortion clinic. She sat in the waiting room, her mind churning, as she struggled to reach a decision. Outside the snow fell softly, dusting the city in ghostly white. For hours Diane stared out the window, watching the day’s slow fade to black. At five thirty the nurse told her the clinic was about to close. Only then did Diane agree to the procedure.

Afterward, when Diane called Elkann to tell him that she’d ended the pregnancy, “he was not happy,” Diane says.

“When a woman can have a man’s child, and she doesn’t, it does something to their love story,” Elkann says.

The relationship might have continued, however, had Elkann soon afterward not embarked on an affair with Diane’s friend Loulou de la Falaise. Elkann had had other flings during their relationship, but his dalliance with de la Falaise broke Diane’s heart.

She’d first met the slender beauty in the seventies when de la Falaise had moved to New York at age twenty-one, following the end of her brief marriage to an Irish nobleman. De la Falaise was immediately taken up by Halston and Andy Warhol and their cliques and then became part of Diane’s inner circle, one of those, like Marisa Berenson, whom Diane kept
“très proche,”
says François Catroux.

De la Falaise had the delicate, pre-Raphaelite looks of a Burne-Jones portrait, “with none of the passive tragic undertones,” as journalist Alicia Drake wrote. She was known for her sparkling blue eyes, raucous laugh, and daring, original style. One day she’d be dressed in a chiffon tunic and harem pants, her short, reddish-blond hair buried under a turban and her frail wrists weighed down with bangles. Another day she’d be in purple bell-bottoms with a wreath of flowers in her hair, and the next in a couture gown of blue mousseline.

But de la Falaise wasn’t just some wispy model girl who liked to dress up. She had brains, talent, charisma, and boundless vitality. Part of her allure was her exotic background, which was as glamorously bohemian as Diane’s was solidly bourgeois. The daughter of a French count and a half-Irish, half-English Schiaparelli model, de la Falaise had been sent off to
boarding school at a young age. After her parents’ divorce, she spent time in foster homes arranged by her father’s family, who had custody of her and her brother.

In New York she modeled and designed fabrics for Halston, including one that depicted rabbits cavorting with erections. Next she turned up in Paris. She met Yves Saint Laurent and his partner, Pierre Bergé, while working as a fashion editor for the British society magazine
Queen,
and she went to work for Saint Laurent as a muse and jewelry designer. She also became the fashion house’s unofficial director of morale, the only person who could cheer up the depressed, dour, drug-addled designer. She had what the French call
légèreté
, “a refusal to accept gravity or to take anything seriously,” as journalist Joan Juliet Buck wrote.

Yet de la Falaise took her job seriously. She showed up for work every day and on time, no matter how late she’d been out the night before. Like Diane, she valued her independence and her ability to support herself. She did not want to be kept by a man. Though de la Falaise shared many of Diane’s feminist beliefs, she did not share Diane’s capacity for empathy. She was “this mad little bohemian creature, full of ideas, full of jokes, hopping around,” according to her mother. But her insouciance verged on cruelty.

One weekend in 1977, de la Falaise went off to Venice with Thadée Klossowski, a son of the painter Balthus and the longtime, live-in boyfriend of her friend and colleague Clara Saint, Saint Laurent’s press director. The couple returned from the weekend engaged. Saint was devastated and did not attend the lavish wedding that Saint Laurent threw for the couple on an island in the Bois de Bologne. But Saint and de la Falaise continued to work together until Saint retired in 1999. De la Falaise stayed on with Saint Laurent through his own retirement in 2002.

At the time de la Falaise took up with Elkann, she was the mother of a three-year-old girl and living with Klossowski, the child’s father, in a grand, high-ceilinged apartment in Montparnasse, where the couple’s massive bed sat in the middle of the living room under a chandelier holding
hundreds of candles. “Loulou fell in love with Alain, but Alain wasn’t in love with her, he was just having an affair,” says François Catroux.

That was no consolation to Diane, who says she remained faithful to Elkann while they lived together (as she had with Paulo until the end). After she discovered a note de la Falaise had written to Elkann, confirming that they were lovers, she walked the streets of Paris mulling over what to do. Later she confronted Elkann and de la Falaise, and Elkann broke off the affair. De la Falaise continued to live with her husband—at her death in 2011 they were still together—and Diane stayed with Elkann. But their relationship was marred by disappointment and mistrust.

Elkann could not forgive her for the abortion. “She could have had a child and she didn’t,” he says. “I’m sure the abortion was difficult for her, but if a woman has an abortion, it weakens the [love] story she’s having with the father of his child,” he says.

Diane had had two abortions after becoming pregnant by Egon following Tatiana’s birth. Yet she seems particularly wistful about this child of Elkann’s who was never born and who “would be twenty-five now,” she says.

After Elkann ended his affair with de la Falaise, “there were others,” Diane says, and her unhappiness grew. “Alain and I have become foreign to each other,” she wrote in her diary in the spring of 1989. At the end of May she was in New York. “Terrible morning with toothache. Feel sad and disappointed. Alain hasn’t called,” she noted in another diary entry.

She suffered a great deal of pain and a high fever and saw a dentist, who pulled the tooth. Afterward, Diane thought, “So goes Alain with the tooth.”

She bought herself a ring, as she always did when she broke up with a man, to symbolize her commitment to herself. She returned to Paris, and as she packed her bags, she dreamed. In her dreams she saw women in dresses—
her dresses—
with a label bearing “DVF” against the soft spot at the nape of their necks. Her heart, scarred by pain and disappointment, swelled. She would go back to work, and she would heal.