The Woman I Wanted to Be (12 page)

I needed another approval—Egon’s. I called him and said I was
considering marrying Barry. “I want your blessing,” I said to him. “You have it, but keep my name,” he answered, laughing.

A week before Barry’s fifty-ninth birthday, as I was looking for a present to give him, I decided to give him myself. “Why don’t we get married on your birthday?” I casually said over the phone. “Let me see if I can arrange it,” he answered with no hesitation. “Let me see if I can arrange it” is something he’d taken on from the minute we met . . . and always delivered. Sure enough, he arranged for us to marry at City Hall a week later.

I called the children, I called my brother in Belgium, and I called my friend, the world-famous portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz, to ask her if she could come and take the photos. Philippe flew into New York with his wife, Greta, and daughters, Kelly and Sarah. Tatiana flew in from Los Angeles with Russell and little eight-month-old Antonia strapped to his chest in a baby carrier. Alexandre and his pregnant wife, Alexandra, and twenty-month-old Talita were already in New York. We all met up the morning of the wedding in my design studio, a carriage house on West Twelfth Street, before going down to City Hall. I hadn’t thought about flowers but happened to have met a florist a few nights before who offered to make me a wedding bouquet. I chose lilies of the valley to honor my mother. I made myself a cream jersey dress. I did not feel particularly pretty that day, but I was so happy.

As we left the studio, the DVF girls were screaming good wishes. We were met at City Hall by Annie Leibovitz, who, with great generosity, had answered my call and agreed to act as paparazzi. There were, of course, also real paparazzi, but they were not allowed to come with us into City Hall. We were all laughing, my little family and I. It all felt perfectly natural. Barry had arranged a lunch at some obscure
restaurant near City Hall. The restaurant was a bit stiff and gloomy, so we did not stay long, but laughed the whole time, though we all missed my mother.

Long before we decided to marry that day, I had planned a big Aquarius party for that night at the studio on Twelfth Street because my three loves, Barry, Tatiana, and Alex, were all born under the sign of Aquarius. The hundreds of friends who joined us for that Aquarius party were startled and overjoyed to discover that it had turned into a wedding celebration! As a present, Barry gave me twenty-six wedding bands with diamonds . . . “Why twenty-six?” I asked. “For the twenty-six years we were not married,” he answered.

It took me a while to accept that we were married. When I drove out to the country the next day I saw that someone had put a sign in my car that said “Just Married.” I stopped in the middle of the road and turned it over. There was still that rebelliousness in me, and yet when I got to Cloudwalk I was so happy to see Barry already there waiting for me. It was not until quite recently that I actually started referring to Barry as “my husband,” but now I do, and I do it with pride and much love. We so love being together. What we like best is to be quiet and alone. We are definitely soul mates and I am forever thankful to Sue Mengers for introducing me to this glamorous young tycoon thirty-nine years ago and to have seduced him forever.

How can I explain my relationship with Barry? The fullness of it all? It is simply true love. His openness to me, his unconditional acceptance, his deep desire for my happiness and that of the children brings tears to my eyes to think about. Barry has a reputation for being tough, yet he is the gentlest, most loving person I have ever met. We have been in each other’s lives for decades, as lovers, as friends, and now as husband and wife. It is true that, as I did with my father, I took his love for granted. It is true that, as I did to my father, I sometimes
rejected him. But it is also true, as it was with my father, that I love him totally and am there for him unconditionally. Love is life is love is Barry.

We spend at least three months a year on
Eos
, the dream boat Barry finally built. Named for the Greek goddess of dawn,
Eos
took more than three years to build, three years during which Barry spent at least two hours a day going over every detail, talking to the engineers, talking to the construction people in Germany, involving himself in the outside design, inside decoration, and every detail of everything on board. Launched in 2006,
Eos
is the most wonderfully comfortable yacht you can imagine, with a dream crew that creates extraordinary itineraries and always finds the best places for us to hike, and a young, talented chef, Jane Coxwell, who I encouraged to write a cookbook that all of my friends love.

We asked our friend, the artist Anh Duong, to do a sculpture for the figurehead of the boat and she asked me to pose for it. So, there I am in front of
Eos
, sailing the world, literally. With
Eos
, we’ve been to the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, to Egypt and Jordan. We’ve been to Oman, the Maldives and Borneo, Thailand and Vietnam. We’ve spent weeks in Indonesia and discovered the Pacific islands of Vanuatu, Fiji, and Papua New Guinea. Every morning we take a long swim in a new sea, and every afternoon we hike a new path. We have traveled thousands and thousands of miles this way. And we still keep going, exploring new horizons with our dog, Shannon. I take hundreds of pictures that I download at night on my computer. It is bliss to be on
Eos
, our floating home.

Traveling the world with the children and the grandchildren is our happiest time: holidays on the sea, the Galapagos or Tahiti, or on land on safari in Africa or skiing. Sometimes we only take the grandchildren. We forget they are grandchildren and we think they are our
children. Years have passed and yet it feels the same as our first trip to Colorado and Lake Powell.

The most important thing Barry and I have in common is that we are both self-reliant. The presence in each other’s lives was never a necessity, and therefore always felt like a huge luxury. Barry’s generosity warmed me from the minute I met him and that feeling continues to evolve. He is generous with his heart, with his protection, with everything. “We,” to us, is home, cozy and reassuring. Our love is our home. We are slowly becoming the old couple that crossed Lexington Avenue, guarding each other. “We” is also our family: the children aging, the grandchildren growing—Love is life is love is life.

R
ecently, as Barry was remodeling our house in Beverly Hills, he sent me this note:

“I’m in the plane after meeting at the house with the construction team. The house is going to be uniquely dazzling. We’re going to have a slate roof and all glass bronze doors and we made your mezzanine room with full glass skylights, and glass sides—a little tree house garden in the sky.

“Hopefully, we’ll add another place to grow old gloriously and glamorously. And in the meantime I’m so proud of what you accomplish every day in building your brand and your legacy . . .

“I love you, my honey.”

And I love you, Barry.

3

BEAUTY

I
am at a birthday party in Brussels for my best friend, Mireille, who is turning ten. As if it were yesterday, I remember us children around the dining room table at her elegant Avenue Louise apartment. The large, fancy cake is about to appear when we hear the hurried click click of a woman’s heels in the hallway. Mireille’s mother makes her entrance, dressed smartly in a pin-striped suit, her narrow skirt forcing her to take small steps, her makeup and auburn hair perfectly arranged. She is so glamorous and in charge. “
Joyeux anniversaire, ma chérie
—happy birthday, darling,” she says to Mireille, kissing her on both cheeks while adjusting her hair. She blows kisses to all of us. The heart-shaped cake is brought in and she watches Mireille blow out the candles, directs the cake cutting, has a piece herself for good luck, talks briefly to each of us, admires our presents, and then, as we go back to Mireille’s room to play, she click clicks back down the hall and out the front door.

I am awed. Though it may have been upsetting to Mireille to have
her mother be too busy in her life outside the home to spend but the barest time inside, even for her daughter’s birthday party, I am filled with wonderment at this glamorous, confident, engaged woman. I know vaguely that Mireille’s mother, Tinou Dutry, is a leading businesswoman in Brussels. What I am totally sure of is that I want to be like her when I grow up. Decades later, I realize that my best friend’s mother, a proud pioneer who created Belgium’s organization for women entrepreneurs and who had been a resistance fighter during the war, was one of my early inspirations for the woman I wanted to be.

I felt the same admiration watching my mother get dressed to go out, whether at night to a party with my father, or by herself during the day. She took great care in what she wore, and her outfit was often punctuated by a hat. Her hair, her makeup, her perfume . . . she looked at herself in the mirror with a smile of complicity and confidence. She had a great figure and wore very tight skirts and dresses. Her heels clicked, too. Where is she going? I wondered. How does she know how to put herself together so well and always look so chic? I couldn’t get enough of it, watching all the shine, the allure, the glamour that was my mother. She, too, was the woman I hoped to be.

I
did not like my reflection in my mother’s mirror. I saw a square, pale face. Brown eyes. And short brown, very, very, very densely curled hair made even more so by the humidity and incessant rain in Brussels. Almost all the girls in my class, including Mireille, had straight, blond hair, which they could have cut with big straight bangs. Not me. I felt alien. I looked like someone who’d snuck out of the forest. No one else looked like that.

I obsessed over my curly hair, which even my skillful mother couldn’t deal with. When I returned from two weeks at a summer
camp, she got frustrated spending the longest time untangling my hair. She finally succeeded in pulling it into a neat ponytail, braided it, and asked me for my hair clip. I had lost it at camp. After all her effort she got so irritated that she took a pair of scissors and cut the ponytail off. This did not improve what I saw in the mirror. I was miserable and full of shame.

What I did not know until I was told quite recently was that one boy in my kindergarten class loved me
because
of my hair. He, in fact, so adored my brown curls and my brown eyes that he asked me to marry him—and I evidently accepted! How embarrassing to have forgotten my five-year-old first husband, but I had until a few years ago, when I was invited to Belgium to speak to a group of businesswomen. After my talk, which included my childhood and probably a mention of my frustrations with my loathsome hair, Bea Ercolini, the editor of the Belgian edition of
Elle
magazine, asked me what school I had gone to, what years, et cetera, and then she connected the dots. “I think I live with the man you ‘married’ in kindergarten,” she told me, smiling.

“What is the name of this gentleman?” I asked skeptically. “Didier van Bruyssel,” she answered. Suddenly, it all started to come back to me. Some of it, anyway. I didn’t remember Didier specifically, but I did remember the sound of his name and how, as a child, I had carefully practiced writing my signature with our combined names, Diane van Bruyssel, over and over. I was astonished that Bea had figured out that I was the little girl her partner had told her about. It showed how much she loved him, how carefully she had listened to his childhood stories. It also showed what an unexpected impact I had had on this five-year-old boy in kindergarten.

The point of all this is not to document my first seduction, but how wrong I was to be sad about not having straight blond hair. While I had been desperate to look the same as the other girls, Didier
loved me because I was different. When finally we met after five decades, he told me that he had had no idea that “la petite Diane” with the curly hair had become Diane von Furstenberg, but as a little girl I had such an impact on him that he’d continued to look for Mediterranean-looking women with wavy hair. While I’d thought I was such an odd duck, he personified the familiar idiom “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

I wrestled with my curls for years and years, watching the weather and seeing humidity as the enemy, wearing scarves, falls, and straightening my hair with all kinds of tools. I ironed it on an ironing board at times, and had it blown out by hairdressers all over the world, convinced that straight hair was the key to beauty and happiness.

It was not until I was almost thirty that I discovered my curls could be an asset. The realization came about after my friend Ara Gallant, a very talented makeup artist/hair stylist turned photographer, was hired to photograph me for the cover of
Interview
in March 1976. Ara was a creature of the night, so it was no surprise that we shot in a studio well after midnight. Ara knew how to make anyone look sexy. He took scissors and made jagged cuts in the black bodysuit I was wearing. After shooting a few rolls, he started to spray my long and very straight hair with water. I was horrified! “Don’t worry,” he said. “We already have the cover, but I want to photograph you with wet hair.” He shot me as my hair was drying into its true curls. A few days later, when I saw the two options for the cover, there was no question as to which one was better . . . The next day I let my hair dry naturally and it was the first time I wore my curls with pride and enjoyed being me. My “new” look was confirmed at a birthday party at Studio 54 for Mick Jagger’s then wife, Bianca, who rode around the stage on a white horse at midnight as we all sang happy birthday. “You look like Hedy Lamarr,” the
dashing designer Halston told me, referring to a movie star of the 1930s. I was not sure at the time who Hedy Lamarr was, but I knew it was a compliment. My curly hair had become an asset. I felt confident and free.

That confidence didn’t stay with me all the time. My hair became a barometer for my self-esteem, and in the early nineties I started to straighten my hair again. Those were not great years. I was yet again in search of myself and was a bit insecure. As I regained confidence, I let the curls come back. I learned how to master them, how to use them and let them be a part of the true me. I even started to welcome humidity because it adds so much volume to curly hair.