Diane von Furstenberg (30 page)

But Q2’s demise was two years away, and in the spring of 1994 Diane still had great faith in the channel’s future. Ralph Lauren was among the designers she tried to lure, and one day she invited him to lunch. She did not know him well; it was the first time they’d lunched together. After Diane made her Q2 pitch, to which Lauren listened politely but indifferently, the conversation turned to more personal matters.

Lauren told Diane that several years earlier his world had been shattered when he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. It had all started with an incessant ringing in his ear, accompanied by searing headaches that grew worse. The tumor turned out to be benign, but Lauren had to suffer through many months of worry and pain.

As Lauren spoke, Diane realized,
she
had a ringing in her ear, too, and the next day, she made an appointment with an ear specialist. During the exam the doctor noticed a swollen gland in Diane’s neck. He put her on antibiotics, but when the swollen gland didn’t go away, he grew
concerned. More tests followed. The initial results were optimistic, and though Diane’s doctors believed there was no rush to remove the growth, she insisted it be excised immediately.

Diane underwent surgery in May at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center overlooking Central Park. During the operation, Tatiana and Lily sat nervously in the hospital waiting area (Alex was in Hong Kong, according to Diane, but would soon fly to his mother’s side.) When it was over Diane was wheeled into the recovery room. Twenty minutes passed. Then the doctor strode into the waiting room and spoke directly to Tatiana. “It’s cancer,” he said. A malignancy had been found at the base of Diane’s tongue and in the soft palate of her mouth.

“I had to translate for Lily,” says Tatiana. “Then my mom woke up, and I had to tell
her.
She sat up straight in her hospital bed and about crawled out of her skin. There was so much fear.”

After a few days, when the initial shock of the diagnosis wore off, Diane “went into executive mode,” says Tatiana. “She and Barry and my brother, the pragmatic people in our family, came up with a plan, and she made decisions about her treatment.”

Among the options was radical surgery that would have removed part of Diane’s jawbone and cheek, where any microscopic cancer cells might be lurking. “They wanted to cut half her face off, and she said, ‘Never!’” recalls Tatiana.

Doctors stood at the side of her bed, read her chart, and chatted. They told Diane they thought they’d “gotten it all,” but there’s never any certainty of that. The fear that they didn’t “get it all,” that some of it, even just one tiny cell, was left behind to grow, tormented Diane.

Hospitals have a way of making you feel humbled, defeated, not yourself. Diane couldn’t wait to go home, and as soon as she was released, she returned to work. She didn’t talk about her illness to her staff. She didn’t want their fear and pity reflected back to her. It wasn’t that she tried to keep it a secret, but the disease seemed less real if she didn’t talk about it. If she acted as if everything was normal, perhaps it would be.

Diane’s oncologist prescribed eight weeks of radiation. She considered alternatives and consulted Deepak Chopra, the holistic health guru, who one Friday night at Cloudwalk taught her to meditate. Chopra also invited Diane to the Chopra Center in Carlsbad, California, where Diane prayed, meditated, and took long solitary walks on the beach. By then she’d decided to go ahead with the radiation, and she vowed to face the course with courage and discipline.

Also with help from Bianca Kermorvant, a Parisian healer to whom Diane was introduced by Marisa Berenson. Kermorvant insists she’s not a psychic, though, she says, “I have these moments when I know things by instinct.” She helps her clients “make the right choices,” by turning her mind to their problems and the vibrations of energy surrounding them. Everyone’s body is like a radio station that emits a frequency, says Kermorvant, and she maintains that a healer can pick up the vibrations and interpret them—even from a great distance. Kermorvant was located in Paris, while Diane was in New York.

Diane had moments of terror and depression, but ever Lily’s daughter, she never succumbed to despair. Every morning she did her hair and makeup carefully and dressed in bright, cheerful colors. She would not let anyone accompany her to Sloan Kettering, walking from her home to the hospital alone. The route between her apartment at Eighty-Seventh Street, Sloan Kettering on Sixty-Eighth Street, and her office on Fifty-Seventh Street formed a
V,
which Diane interpreted as a
V
for Victory. “As I walked, I sang a little French victory song I had made up in which the bad cells were killed and never came back. Even now, when I walk fast, the song comes back to me,” she wrote.

To pass time in the hospital, as she waited with other cancer patients for her treatment, she read
Wild Swans
by Jung Chang, a book chosen for its 500 plus-page length—she calculated it would take eight weeks, the duration of her treatment, to complete—and inspiring subject, three generations of women who survived the turbulence of twentieth-century China.

During the actual treatments, Diane forced herself to think positive
thoughts, to concentrate on “the victorious destruction of the bad cells and the strengthening of the good ones.” On the way home she stopped at a health food store and drank a shot of wheat-grass juice. Every afternoon she had a shiatsu massage.

The radiation burns on her face and back—something that had worried her terribly—turned out to look like a suntan, albeit an uneven one. She temporarily lost her sense of taste, and though it eventually returned, the numbing of her taste buds permanently diminished her already minimal interest in food. “My mom was never a sensual eater. She could care less about this gourmet foodie culture going on now, especially since she’s had cancer,” says Tatiana.

The most painful side effect Diane experienced was a severe sore throat that made swallowing difficult. Instead of taking the medicine her doctor prescribed to treat it, however, she gargled with sesame oil, as Deepak Chopra had recommended. She healed her mouth blisters, another vexing result of radiation, with powdered Gashu, a rare type of ginger root given to her by her masseur, Eizo.

Her family and friends stayed close but respected her privacy. The filmmaker Mark Peploe, a longtime friend with whom she’d recently become romantically involved, called her daily from London. Fred Seidel called to bolster her spirits every night before she went to sleep, and he found that the conversation usually ended up with Diane bolstering
his.
Mort Zuckerman took her to a state dinner at the White House, Bill Clinton’s first as president, in honor of the emperor of Japan. For the occasion, she turned to rising star John Galliano and borrowed the pink satin and chiffon dress that been the masterpiece of a dazzling collection he’d shown in Paris in March. Diane had been present that day, and as she watched the models parade across the leaf-strewn floor of an empty old mansion, she knew she was witnessing a new fashion
moment
. “Powerful,” Suzy Menkes wrote of the show in the
New York Times.
“Perhaps the most celebrated fashion event since Dior introduced his New Look,” wrote Michael Specter in
The New Yorker.

Diane had Galliano expand the bodice, which had been worn in the show by the rail-thin model Christy Turlington, and she herself added some chiffon to the already frothy train. It turned out to be “the most uncomfortable dress I’ve ever worn,” Diane wrote. By wearing it, however, she proved to herself and everyone else that despite her illness and though she had no business to speak of outside QVC, she still had the pulse of Fashion. “Diane got the dress and wore it to the White House, and I thought that was very smart,” says André Leon Talley. “She realized that this was something she should embrace, that she’d look good in it; that it was something different, something dramatic. It’s instinct. Intuitiveness. She’s always been able to pick up on the temperature of fashion at a certain time.”

THROUGHOUT THE SUMMER OF 1994,
Diane’s father was dying. Leon Halfin had been suffering from Alzheimer’s for years, but he’d recently taken a turn for the worse. Barry Diller lent Diane the use of his plane for the Fourth of July weekend, when she had a brief reprieve from radiation, and she flew to Brussels to see her father for the last time. He would die three weeks later. “He intensely loved his children and grandchildren,” says Tatiana. “He sent me care packages every week when I was in boarding school. He was a devoted family man,” who would be deeply missed by his family.

At the time, Diller was in the throes of trying to take over CBS. He pined after the network as a “soul mate” for QVC that would bring him that much closer to having a media empire of his own. By the end of July, however, the deal had fallen through. Comcast, which already owned 15.6 percent of QVC, killed the merger by buying all of QVC for $2.1 billion.

Six months later Diller resigned as chairman of QVC with his visions for the home shopping channel unfulfilled. Grandiose predictions and frenzied media attention had marked his tenure as QVC chief, but his plan to attract high-quality designers and retailers never got off the
ground. Nor was he able to leverage the shopping network to finance bigger deals.

Diller still saw home shopping as a means to an end—the best way to move toward the cutting edge of multimedia technology, television, and film. No sooner had he resigned from QVC than he took over its rival, Home Shopping Network. Diane followed him. Her Silk Assets line would now be sold on HSN. Considered a B-level QVC associated with selling such low-rent fare as polyester leisure suits pitched by such fourth-rate celebrities as
Wheel of Fortune
hostess Vanna White, HSN had tapped out its customer base and was losing money—in 1995, $17.7 million in the third quarter alone.

Around this time Diller bought a controlling stake in Silver King Communications, the tiny TV network that broadcast HSN. Within a year, he’d merged HSN, Silver King, and a production company into a new corporation. As IAC in the new millennium, this corporation would own fifty brands that control online commercial transactions from travel to lending to dating.

Diller also became astoundingly rich. By 2004,
Fortune
estimated his wealth from stock options, gains from stock sales, salary, and bonuses at $1.6 billion. In March 2014,
Forbes
put his wealth at $2.4 billion. He would spend many millions of it to help Diane recharge her brand.

The Comeback

D
iane’s bout with cancer gave her life a fierce intensity. Like many survivors, she saw this as a positive aspect of what otherwise was a horrific experience. Facing death led her to live at a deeper emotional level than before. As the years passed, she tried to hold on to her profound sense of gratitude and worked hard “to honor” life every day.

Having cancer also gave her a clear sense of priorities. If she was going to recharge her brand, she had to act
now.
In August 1995 she restructured her company, naming three new vice presidents and a board of advisors. This “reflects my desire to fully control the DVF brand and establish a full service design and marketing studio,” she told
WWD.
Her mission was “to create chic, quality products at prices accessible to most.” The focus of the new DVF Studio would be dresses, sold under the simple label “Diane.”

Signaling her new beginning, she moved to West Twelfth Street in the Meatpacking District, a remote riverfront neighborhood between Washington Street and the gray waters of the Hudson. In the 1930s, the
“high line,” the elevated freight tracks that ran along Manhattan’s Lower West Side, had brought animal bodies here from midwestern slaughterhouses to be turned into steaks and chops. In the decades since, the area’s dark, forgotten location made it a hub for gays, transvestites, and prostitutes of all persuasions. In 1997 you could still see men in wigs and stilettoes stepping over pieces of uncooked beef splayed on the cobblestones. But the drag queens and old meat-packing businesses, with their bloody carcasses hanging on hooks under tin sheds, were rapidly dwindling, replaced by hipsters and chic restaurants, galleries and boutiques. Still, the location was so far from the center of New York fashion, it “seemed like the end of the earth,” says Alexandra von Furstenberg, who married Diane’s son, Alexandre, in 1995. “We were all like, ‘What is she thinking?’” It smelled bad. It was gloomy and dangerous.

“Everyone told her, ‘You’ll kill your business; no one will go there,” says Kathy Landau. But Diane found a comforting beauty in the neighborhood’s angled streets, low stoops, and dour old warehouses. They reminded her of Brussels and her childhood home.

She bought two nineteenth-century buildings, one of which had been used as a stable for New York Police Department horses, for four million dollars and spent many millions more renovating them into a dramatic design studio, office, and home. The conjoined buildings housed a great open space on the ground floor with a system of moving walls that could be closed or opened for parties and fashion shows. Upper floors held a design studio, administrative offices, and an apartment for Diane decorated with zebra-patterned chairs, sisal rugs, mounds of pillows, and Balinese carvings acquired during her Paulo period. The renovation kept the buildings’ original brick walls, plank floors, and cast-iron columns while incorporating a huge skylight over a twenty-five-foot atrium, a small pool at the bottom of a spiral staircase, and a roof terrace with a greenhouse.

To help fund the renovation and the rebirth of her fashion business, Diane made a deal with Avon, the door-to-door cosmetics company,
which was trying to expand its customer base by offering fashion through its catalogs. Diane was still producing her Silk Assets line for HSN, which brought in some money. But now in addition Avon gave her a guarantee of one million dollars a year plus royalties on anticipated sales of more than forty million to design a moderately priced fashion line for them. She called it the Color Authority, resurrecting the name of her old cosmetics company.