Diane von Furstenberg (25 page)

The clothes were sophisticated, well made, and in good fabrics but had no extraordinary features or special allure to spark much excitement. “You know what people are saying about the boutique? The
scarves
are wonderful,” sniffed one guest at the opening party at Regine’s.

WWD
was more generous. “Standouts in the designer’s so-chic repertoire are seductively cut wool jersey chemises, especially in signature pink with a shapely black hipband, and beaded-collar evening sweaters over easy wool and silk pants.” The paper went on to note, however, that Diane “misses” with dresses that had draped fabric at the derriere and others with “waist-to-floor organza fishtail backs.”

Like other expensive fare offered at Upper East Side boutiques, the clothes reflected the extravagant wealth of the Reagan eighties nouveau riche. But they were a radical departure for a designer who’d made her mark in the seventies selling moderately priced fashion. It was as if the DVF woman, that sexy working girl who slipped off her wrap dress at the end of the day to delight a lover, had morphed into a middle-aged divorcée intent on racking up credit card bills to torment her ex-husband.

DVF couture didn’t mesh with the DVF brand, which stood for affordable glamour. A luxury brand like Chanel, say, has no trouble selling mid-priced items. But rarely is the reverse true. Fashion is aspirational, after all. If a brand’s image is not set from the outset at the high end of the runway, it’s almost impossible to get customers to pay premium prices for high-end goods.

DVF couture was a misguided venture at a time when Diane’s brand could have used some polishing. Her licenses still brought in some income, but the quality of the DVF products had steadily declined, and they were taking her name down with them.

Such items as Queenie panty hose for plus-size women did nothing for the brand’s cool factor. The low point came when comedian Sandra
Bernhard appeared on
Late Night with David Letterman
with a roll of DVF paper towels, which she used to poke fun at the designer who once epitomized New York glamour. “Andy Warhol calls Diane von Furstenberg and says, ‘Let’s go dancing,’” mocked Bernhard as she waved the paper towel roll. “But she says, ‘No. I’ve got to clean up with my Diane von Furstenberg towel paper.’”

MEANWHILE, DIANE’S RELATIONSHIP WITH PAULO
continued to fray. “My mom fell out of love with him,” says Alex. “He wasn’t
doing
anything.” He put on weight. “He’d had a good physique, then he got fat.”

It didn’t help that he also shaved off his beard. “He had no chin. He looked terrible!” Diane says.

The end came on a cool day in October 1984. Diane’s old friend Jerry Brown, who had run unsuccessfully for the United States Senate after having served two terms as governor of California, happened to be in New York and showed up at Diane’s apartment for a casual meal in her kitchen. Paulo, who was present at the meal, felt way out of his league with the famous politician. After Brown left, Paulo did “what men do when they feel inadequate,” Diane says. “He made love to me, and then he fell asleep.”

While Paulo dozed, Diane went off to the thirteenth birthday party of Jade Jagger, daughter of the now divorced Bianca and Mick, and Diane’s goddaughter. One of the guests she met at the party was Alain Elkann, a thirty-four-year-old Italian-French writer living in Paris. Diane was as attracted by Elkann’s bookish air as by his slender elegance, chiseled features, and masses of curly dark hair. There was much to draw them together. Diane had always been an avid reader and loved getting to know writers. Elkann’s ex-wife, Margherita, the only daughter of Fiat chairman Gianni Agnelli, was Egon’s first cousin; Elkann’s three children were second cousins to Alex and Tatiana. “I was just out of a marriage that was tormented and difficult, and it was not the best period in
Diane’s life,” recalls Elkann, who was four years younger than Diane. He had a Hamlet-like brooding intensity and gave off a wounded vibe that appealed to Diane’s need to nurture. Her children had arranged to spend that night with friends, so Diane felt free to go home with Elkann, to the townhouse on Madison Avenue where he was staying.

When Diane returned to her apartment the next morning, “Paulo was very upset,” recalls Diane. He left the apartment but later showed up at her office, where he stole a glance in her diary. Diane had written something about her night with Elkann that made Paulo “very sad, and so we split,” she says.

“I got a call from him. He was on the street with his suitcases and needed a place to stay,” recalls Olivier Gelbsman, who at the time was managing Diane’s Sherry-Netherland boutique. Gelbsman took Paulo in for a few days. The South American was understandably distraught, and Gelbsman “made coffee for him and talked to him.”

Paulo soon left, and eventually he moved back to South America. Diane does not keep in touch with him. “He’s one of the few [lovers] she’s erased,” says Gelbsman.

Lily was so happy to see Paulo go that she lit scented candles throughout Diane’s apartment to get rid of any trace of his “aura.” Elkann was a big improvement, Diane’s family and friends believed, though Andy Warhol ridiculed her for “going the Marilyn Monroe route of marrying one person for the name,” then latching onto a writer “who’ll write books about her.” (In Monroe’s case, the name was Joe DiMaggio and the writer was Arthur Miller.)

Elkann had a reputation for being what the French call an
homme à femmes,
a more elegant rendering of the Anglo “womanizer.” Diane chose to ignore the stories about his many conquests. At last she was in love with someone of her own tribe—European, urban, sophisticated, Jewish. Elkann’s father, a French industrialist, was chairman of Dior and head of the organization that appointed the chief rabbis of Paris. His mother was from a prominent Italian-Jewish banking family.

As her relationship with Elkann deepened, Diane grew exhausted flying back and forth between New York to tend to her couture business and Paris to be with Elkann. The stress took its toll. She lost weight and looked haggard. Her appearance was not helped by her chopping off her hair on impulse one day shortly before meeting Elkann. She so feared her staff’s reaction that she insisted her hairdresser escort her back to her office after the deed was done. Diane’s employees kept a close watch on the boss’s changing hairstyles. Straight hair meant she felt insecure; curly hair meant she felt on top of the world.

Diane’s new hairdo, though, seemed to mark a different state of mind. The little cap of profuse curls made her look older and also gave her an uncanny resemblance to photographs of Edith Piaf. They had the same large, liquid eyes, strong mouth, and sensitive expression. They both looked very French and very sad.

WITHIN A YEAR, DIANE REALIZED
that her couture venture wasn’t going to work. Her heart hadn’t been in it from the start, and she had begun to crave a life of domestic calm in Paris with Elkann. Also, “designing very expensive products that only a few can afford was definitely not something I truly enjoyed,” she said.

With her children away at boarding school—Tatiana would attend schools in London and Switzerland, and Alex would transfer from boarding at Rumsey in Connecticut to Brooks in Massachusetts—Diane sold her lease on the Sherry-Netherland shop to Geoffrey Beene. In her most radical move, she also sold her Fifth Avenue apartment. The buyer was Alain Wertheimer, the grandson of Coco Chanel’s original partner and, with his brother Gerard, the current owner of the Chanel empire.

Her friends were stunned. Real estate “is something so central to New Yorkers. Once you have an apartment, you keep that apartment,” says Fran Lebowitz. “People say, even when their friends get married—‘What? You gave up your apartment? What if you get divorced?’” That Diane would sell her New York apartment for love shows her deep
romanticism, how “she’d jump out a window” for a man, says Lebowitz. “She meets Alain, and five minutes later she’s living with him in Paris.”

In the seventies Diane had been one of the first women to reach national prominence in American fashion. A decade later, the role of superwoman that she’d pioneered—the woman with a briefcase in one hand and a baby on the hip—had become a hard-won ideal. Now Diane seemed to be betraying that ideal by exhibiting a “stand-by-your man” submissiveness and deference.

Financial factors also played into the decision. “There’d been a fuckup in her company, and she meets Alain and thinks, ‘I might as well go live in Paris,’” says a French journalist who saw Diane frequently during this period. “It was a good time to do that because in the eighties the dollar was so strong compared to the franc.”

Still, Diane was madly in love—perhaps more than she’d ever been before. She doted on Elkann, who, her friends say, did not return her devotion. “She suffered,” says Olivier Gelbsman. Elkann “treated her like a saleswoman. I don’t think he understood what she did.”

DIANE’S LOVE NEST WAS AN
eighteenth-century apartment at 12 rue de Seine in the heart of Left Bank literary bohemia. James Joyce, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, and Racine had all lived in the quarter. The classical rooms had high ceilings, spacious proportions, and parquet de Versailles floors that dated to the French Revolution. One side of the apartment faced a cobblestone courtyard; another faced a colorful garden. Inside, Diane installed a huge canopied bed and furniture, paintings, and antiques from her Manhattan home. Her beloved leopard carpets and bright colors, which Elkann loathed, were banished, as was everything Balinese and Paulo-related. Elkann “was very controlling,” says Barry Diller, who didn’t see Diane much during this period.

Diane adjusted her world to fit Elkann’s. To please him, she dressed in flat shoes, pants, wool skirts, and sweaters. She planned her schedule
around his writing. She learned to be quiet when he was working and not make demands. When he was ready to share his writing, she spent hours listening to him read from his work.

Diane’s teenage children were dismayed to see her once again submerge her identity to please a man. They complained that their mother was nothing but “a boring doormat.” Alex moaned that she had no personality; “she always became whoever she was with.” With Elkann, though, she’d gone further than she ever had in changing herself and her life for a man.

When they met, Elkann had just finished his third book, a novel called
Piazza Carignano,
which is based on one of his uncles, who, though Jewish, supported the Italian fascist movement. A prominent theme of the twenty-five well-received novels and nonfiction books Elkann would go on to write by 2014 would be the history of Jews in Italy. He also was the Paris representative for Mondadori, the Italian publishing house. Diane accompanied Elkann to book fairs in Frankfurt, Turin, and Jerusalem. They also spent a lot of time in Capri, where they rented an apartment. Diane took long walks and read the newspaper while Elkann worked.

She met many writers, befriended them, and often invited them to parties at rue de Seine, where the mix was a mélange of accomplished artists, writers, actors, designers, and journalists, though heavy now on the literary side, with a few celebrities such as Marcello Mastroianni and Anouk Aimée thrown in.

Nurturing writers activated Diane’s maternal instincts at a time when her children were away in boarding school. She set aside one of the apartment’s bedrooms as “the literary room” and invited writers to stay for extended periods. The Italian novelist Alberto Moravia lived there for two years while Elkann wrote Moravia’s biography. The American writer Edmund White, who attended parties at the apartment, remembered Moravia as a very old man sitting in a corner like a ghost.
American Psycho
author Bret Easton Ellis spent a couple of months in the apartment, as did James Fox, the author of
White Mischief
.

While living in Diane’s apartment, Fox spent his days writing. “I was there because of that deeply generous, connecting spirit of [Diane’s],” says Fox. “She didn’t know me very well, but decided to help me nonetheless. I knew she’d been a mentor to other writers—to Moravia, for example—so I was flattered. What is so attractive and endearing about Diane . . . is how it comes across that this is purely a gesture on her part which comes from the heart—there would have been no obligation on my part to even thank her.”

Mark Peploe wrote much of his screenplay for
The Sheltering Sky
, based on the Paul Bowles book, at 12, rue de Seine. The poet Frederick Seidel, who finished his collection
My Tokyo
while living with Diane and Alain, described in a poem the sweet, airy atmosphere at the apartment, where he and his colleagues thrived like “hummingbirds on nectar and oxygen.”

Seidel had known Diane since the seventies. “I remember asking her with incredulity [about her strenuous social life], and she said it was part of her job, of creating herself and her business and her brand, of forging the reality of herself,” says Seidel.

Hosting gatherings for an eclectic mix of people was still part of that reality. Evenings at rue de Seine included Diane’s friends from fashion, such as Valentino, new star Christian Lacroix, whose colorful, poufy party dresses were a sensation with American and European socialites, onetime Chanel model Ines de la Fressange, and the young beauties Claudia Schiffer and Elle Macpherson, who in the coming decade would become part of the first generation of supermodels.

Despite the presence of assorted Americans, the dinners had a decidedly European tone—lots of flirting and admiring of female beauty, and no vulgar talk about money and careers. One evening Edmund White violated this Gallic rule of etiquette by asking de la Fressange “what she did,” and the other guests at the table “gasped,” White recalled. De la Fressange, who in 1989 would become the model for the bust of Marianne, the official emblem of the French Republic (and enrage Karl Lagerfeld for daring to do something that got more attention than modeling
for
him
), treated White’s faux pas as a joke. Laughing, she explained lightly that she’d just returned from a trip to India and was planning to open a boutique.