Diane von Furstenberg (19 page)

Diane first visited Studio 54 in May 1977 for a private party Halston threw for Bianca Jagger’s birthday, a much photographed fête (the paparazzi almost outnumbered the one hundred guests). Bianca rode bareback across the immense dance floor on a white pony as the deejay played a disco version of “Happy Birthday.” Her husband, Mick Jagger, danced with Baryshnikov. Colorful balloons swirled down from the ceiling.

From that night on, Diane became a regular at the club. At midnight she’d drive her gleaming Mercedes through the silent caverns of Midtown, then park in a garage and walk toward Eighth Avenue. Lights from the club’s huge art deco sign pierced the inky sky. Rotating beams from police cars parked across the street (in case the partying got out of hand) sprayed the crowd with hot red light.

As one of the Chosen, Diane went to the head of the line, where the velvet ropes opened for her. Then she was inside, dancing to Donna Summer, flirting with handsome strangers, greeting her friends—Calvin, Andy, Truman, Halston, Diana. “I loved the feeling of walking in alone, like a cowboy walking into a saloon, feeling that I was breaking a taboo,” she wrote in her first autobiography.

Her feeling of being a cowboy was apt, as the club had a decidedly gay male vibe. “It was all for the boys; there was nothing going on for the girls,” says a Frenchwoman who frequented Studio 54 when she lived in New York in the seventies. “It was so sad. It was boys’ shit: boys with boys, boys dancing with boys—boys, boys, boys. The people who were having the most fun were the gay boys. Their attitude toward the heterosexuals and the women was, ‘You can watch, if you’re good.’ The girls who liked it were fag hags. I just hated it. At the clubs in Paris, even the gay clubs like the Palace, men made a fuss over you, and you wanted to look pretty because people looked at you. But at Studio 54 it was all about
guys salivating over the waiters with their shorts and bare chests. The women were superfluous. There wasn’t even a veneer of civilization that says, ‘Let’s have a nice time.’ It was very New York, in that everything in New York is agenda-driven. The agenda at Studio 54 was gays getting laid and getting high.”

Diane never ventured to the hidden passages and subterranean rooms, the rubber-lined balcony where couples copulated openly. She wasn’t there to join an orgy or blow her mind on drugs. When the tray of quaaludes held by a bare-chested bartender floated past in the blue dimness, she turned away.

She was there for fun and romance. “The hours between midnight and 2
A.M
. belonged to me,” she wrote. The men she picked up at Studio 54 included a onetime teenage runaway from Buffalo who gave her a switchblade and a dog named Roxanne. The switchblade was confiscated at the airport soon afterward, but she had the dog for sixteen years. Another partner was a college boy who lived with his parents in New Jersey.

She brought her young lovers to her new home, a sixteen-room apartment at 1060 Fifth Avenue that had once been owned by Rodman Rockefeller, Nelson’s son. Flush with new wrap-dress money, she purchased the old WASP-style apartment in December 1976 as a thirtieth birthday present to herself, and moved in in May. The apartment overlooked the Central Park Reservoir and wasn’t far from the home she’d shared with Egon on Park Avenue. But it marked a crucial change from her life as a wife. It was a woman’s apartment, with a mirrored hallway, pink satin upholstery, a lipstick-red phone with push buttons for five lines, floral-patterned carpeting in the public rooms, and leopard carpeting in the bedroom. An emasculated male torso in bronze greeted visitors in the foyer.

Instead of the hard-edged surrealist and pop art favored by Egon, Diane bought sensual French orientalist paintings. In the living room, a dreamy vision of Fortuna, the goddess of chance and good luck, stared out from above the mantel at Andy Warhol’s sultry silkscreen of Diane
on the opposite wall. The master suite had a spa bathroom with a sink big enough for Diane to climb up and sit in, as she often did when she applied her makeup. “The whole apartment had a very opulent, decadent ‘in the harem’ kind of feel,” says Bob Colacello. “It felt like a Parisienne’s version of the Ottoman Empire.”

One August in the 1970s when he was working in New York, André Leon Talley, then the Paris editor of
WWD,
lived in Diane’s apartment in a guest room “way in the back, way beyond the kitchen,” he recalls. Diane and Talley were alone with the servants—her children were either at Cloudwalk or in Europe—and every night they went together to Studio 54. Diane loved to dance, but when she was with Talley, they’d mostly “sit on a banquette and look at people and comment. We were there to be part of the scene,” he says. Diane’s boyfriend that summer was a “very young, very hot-looking [boy], who did something like surfing or swimming. He didn’t stay in the apartment, though he came once or twice for dinner.” Once Diane lent him her Mercedes to drive home, and he totaled the car, though he escaped unhurt.

Diane’s nocturnal uniform at the time was a black bodysuit, Norma Kamali ruffled gypsy skirt, black fishnet stockings, and ankle-strapped silk pumps with a closed toe and skinny heel, by Charles Jourdan, the Manolo Blahnik of his day. “Her closet was full of Kamali and Charles Jourdan,” says Talley. Often, she’d wear rock-crystal bracelets and carry one of the minaudières she’d bought for next to nothing from antique jewelry dealer Fred Leighton. Later, Leighton moved uptown and became famous, but at the time he was still selling out of the back room of a downtown vintage shop.

Diane was often photographed on her evenings out in her Kamali and Jourdan shoes with her legs wound around each other in a double cross known in yoga as eagle pose. “She was very proud of her legs,” says Talley, and crossing them in this serpentine way became “one of her identity moments in her signature look.”

Fashion people talk a lot about “moments”—their parlance for the
instant when an item of clothing or a component of style is elevated to special status in the minds of those who care about such things. Diane had many fabulous “moments”—when Cecil Beaton photographed her in a black taffeta Oscar de la Renta gown at one of the last balls Marie-Hélène de Rothschild hosted at her Paris château; when she posed against a stark white wall with her arm thrown over her head for a Polaroid that became the basis of one of Andy Warhol’s iconic portraits of her; and when she conceived the wrap dress, which was resonating still in the fashion zeitgeist.

DIANE RELISHED BEING A FEMALE
dude, supporting herself in style and sleeping with whomever she liked. “I was playing the games men play,” she wrote. And reversing gender roles “turned out to be fun,” She cultivated the look of elaborate boredom and enjoyed playing that perennial turn-on, the girl who was impossible to get.

Rumors of lesbian affairs swirled around her. They’d begun with the 1973
New York
article about her unconventional marriage and were fueled by rumored spottings of Diane in male disguise at the Anvil, a raunchy gay dive on Fourteenth Street. For a feminist like Diane, who believed that women “are better than men at everything they do,” as she says, and who saw her mission in life as helping other women, it would not be surprising for her to occasionally be attracted to women. Nor would it be surprising for those feelings to spill over from time to time into actual sex. At boarding school in England, Diane had fallen in love with a masculine girl, her friend Deanna, with whom she lived in Spain for a year. The idea of Diane as bisexual fit into her louche public persona and her private conviction that sexuality should be fluid. “My mother doesn’t understand why anyone would define their sexual orientation, because you could fall in love with a person of either gender. If you’re open to everything, if you’re loose,” says Tatiana.

“Have I slept with women? Yes,” says Diane. But, she adds, “I’m definitely not a lesbian.”

She rejoiced at the weddings of her friends, including Marisa Berenson’s 1976 marriage to the American industrialist James Randall, a celebrity-studded extravaganza that was filmed by ABC-TV. Diane told herself she was better off being single. She saw too many of her friends submerge their identities to conform to their husbands’ desires, only to be adrift when the marriages ended.

IN THE MID-SEVENTIES, DIANE SEARCHED
for ways to build on the success of the wrap and grow her business. After a manufacturer who made bedspreads for Sears offered Diane what she called a “huge advance” to put her name on his product, she decided to approach Sears directly about designing an entire line for their home furnishings department, which accounted for more than $1 billion a year in sales. One morning she flew to Chicago to meet with a group of executives, including Charles Moran, the general manager of Sears’s catalogue division.

Diane sashayed into the meeting in the Sears Tower in a clingy, flowered-print dress. “Well, what do you think you could do for us?” asked a dazzled Moran.

“I’m dressing so many women in America that I would welcome the challenge of designing American homes,” Diane answered.

She saw Sears as a chance to make some big money and expand her brand. Today high-low fashion pairings are common—Jason Wu and Target, Karl Lagerfeld and Macy’s, H&M and Lanvin, to name a few—but in the late seventies such match-ups were controversial. Putting one’s name on “cheap stuff,” as Andy Warhol put it, was seen as selling out, and for some designers it became the kiss of death.

In 1982 when Halston announced he would design clothes for JCPenney in a deal that would guarantee him an estimated sixteen million dollars over the course of six years, Bergdorf Goodman, which had helped him start his career and had sold his clothes for a decade, dropped him completely.

Diane’s Sears deal, though, did not interfere with her relationship
with the upper-tier department stores like Bloomingdale’s and Saks, largely because the Sears products did not compete with her fashion and cosmetics lines. Nor was she defensive about offering her designs to a lower-end retailer. “I am not a snob,” she said.

Diane’s Sears line started with sheets—in an uncharacteristically sweet floral pattern—then expanded to towels, curtains, rugs, tableware, and furniture. She hired a team of designers to work on her Sears products, but still met regularly with the Chicago executives, who sometimes traveled to New York to see her. “There she is . . . like Sheena dropped among the dull Midwesterners in their conservative suits,” as Julie Baumgold wrote in
New York.
Diane “sits at the bathmat lecture taking notes on the marketing analysis of shags and saxonies, whispering asides in French to the head of her studio, Olivier Gelbsman.”

Diane’s days passed in a blur of meetings, travel, promotional appearances, and more meetings. She recounted her hectic schedule for Bob Colacello in her second sit-down with
Interview,
in March 1977: “This morning I had breakfast at Bonwit’s for about a hundred women; then after that, I came back here. We’re going to have a product meeting soon; after that . . . from four to six—Tatiana is six today, so she . . . has a birthday party . . . after that I’m working till about eight, and then at eight I’m flying down to Miami . . . yesterday I was in Washington all day; last week I was in Minneapolis and Chicago, the week before in California.”

This time she graced the cover of
Interview
in a portrait taken by her friend Ara Gallant, a former hairdresser who’d made a name photographing supermodels such as Twiggy and Veruschka. The photo had been shot late one night with her hair wet.

For the article, Colacello sat in Diane’s Seventh Avenue office and interviewed her for an hour. Occasionally the conversation would be interrupted by visitors, such as designer Michael Vollbracht and several of her employees. At one point Diane said she liked television, which led Colacello to ask if she found “it difficult at all to design for the masses.” Diane’s reply revealed the uncynical sense of connection to her customers
that underpinned her success. “It’s wrong to think that the mass is dumb and stupid, because it isn’t true,” she said.

Though Diane had reached the top of American life with lavish homes, servants, travel to exotic places, and high-achieving, famous friends, a part of her still identified as an ordinary woman. “Diane understands the person outside the glass, looking in at the magic garden,” Howard Rosenman told the writer Michael Gross.

A year earlier, on January 28, 1976, Diane had landed on the front page of the
Wall Street Journal
in a piece headlined
ONCE UPON A TIME A PRINCESS MADE IT WITH THE HOI POLLOI
. That morning she was on an early-morning flight to Cleveland and found herself sitting next to a man who leered at her long, slender legs and slinky shirtdress. “What’s a pretty girl like you doing reading
The Wall Street Journal
?” he asked.

Diane smiled but said nothing. Even if strangers on airplanes thought her nothing but a flirt-worthy babe,
she
knew who she was. She was Diane von Furstenberg, head of what the
WSJ
called a “fashion empire.”

The story was just a prelude to the wider publicity Diane received two months later when
Newsweek
magazine put her on the cover of its March 22, 1976, issue in a story titled “Rags & Riches.” The magazine had considered devoting the cover to Gerald Ford, who would soon win the Republican presidential primary, but at the last minute decided to go with Diane. “That [wrap] dress was very popular, and she wasn’t bad looking, so we had her photographed,” recalls Edward Kosner, then
Newsweek
editor.

Her notoriety also didn’t hurt. “Part of her reputation at the time was that she was an oddball,” Kosner says. “She was thought of as a little flaky. All that stuff about whether her husband, Egon, was gay, and whether she was a lesbian. She was an outré figure.”

Newsweek
assigned the piece to Linda Bird Francke, who’d written the scandalous 1973
New York
story that revealed the von Furstenbergs’ marriage to be a sham. Though her friends had been chagrined by the piece, Diane liked and respected Francke and felt that in the long run
the journalist had done her a favor by forcing her to face the unpleasant truth of her marriage.