The Woman I Wanted to Be (22 page)

For all that we loved working on the color line and the attention and success that greeted it, as we had been advised, it was Tatiana, in a new bottle custom designed by sculptor Serge Mansau, that was making the money and we expanded the fragrance into a whole line of bath products.

I also started to conceive of a new perfume. I wanted something very special with a strong scent, a unique bottle, and a passionate message. I called it Volcan d’Amour (Volcano of Love). Since it had been inspired by my Bali days with Paulo, I dedicated it to him.

I went all out with that fragrance, commissioning a magician-turned-designer friend, Dakota Jackson, to create a unique and expensive bottle, and commissioning another friend, Brazilian artist Antonio Peticov, to design the box it came in. Bloomingdale’s and
Saks fought for the launch, which was an over-the-top event I staged in my office with pyramids of fresh frangipani I’d shipped from Hawaii to symbolize the offerings to the volcanoes of Bali. From the office we descended Fifth Avenue to Saks, where I dressed the models in blue sarongs I had designed and had had hand-painted with gold volcanoes at the Denpasar market.

What was I thinking? Yes, the company was doing very well. By 1981 we had gross sales of $40 million, but our expenses were enormous. The payroll for over three hundred employees was $1 million a month!

I began to feel tense about meeting that payroll and about the ever-growing inventory of bottles and tops and boxes. The sleepless nights I’d experienced from the panic of failure in 1977 were returning in 1982 because of the speed of our success. As the demand grew, I had to invest more and more money in inventory and a support system of staff and marketing. I was worried we were growing too rapidly again.

I know now, of course, that I should have read the huge, heavy financial reports that Gary Savage and Shep Zinovoy dutifully gave me every week, but I didn’t. In my mind, they were in charge of the company’s finances. I was the creative end of the operation.

Money, in fact, was the furthest thing from my mind as I explored the islands of Indonesia with Paolo to come up with promotional material for Volcan d’Amour. I trusted the men in New York to manage the money. I had no idea how overextended we were.

The end came as rapidly as that snowy January day when all my dresses suddenly went on sale. This time I was in Paris with Paulo when I got a call from Shep to tell me that I had to come back to sign a personal note of guarantee, and that Chemical Bank was refusing to lend any more money until I did. A personal note? That could mean
the loss of Cloudwalk, the loss of my apartment. No way was I going to risk that.

The enormity of the crisis became clear when I got back. Ten million dollars!—that’s how much the company owed the bank. I had no idea that we had been borrowing so much money to cover our operating expenses. I’d never read the financial printouts. The only way out was to sell the company. “If you can,” the wretched little banker said.

It took months for me to negotiate a deal that could release me from the bank: a sale to Beecham, the big English pharmaceutical company that had started the process of accumulating small cosmetics companies to become a player in the industry. In New York, I felt the bank closing in as I poured my efforts and even more resources into the newly launched fragrance, Volcan d’Amour. But in London, I remember feeling so grown up in my suite at Claridge’s hotel, talking with the chairman of Beecham about the future of my business.

To this day, Claridge’s is my favorite hotel in the world and I was flattered when they asked me to redecorate a few suites for them in 2010 and make them sexy, luxurious, and glamorous. They were very happy with the result, and the suites have been booked solid ever since. When I see my photo hanging in their lobby, with Winston Churchill and Jackie Kennedy, I am immediately reminded how important I felt staying there, in spite of my panic over the looming debt back home.

T
he agreement I finally reached with Beecham was a great one. They raised their original offer to $22 million, plus royalties and a large annual consulting fee. I was ecstatic. The nasty banker got his money and I was still $12 million ahead. “Celebration,” I wrote in my diary. “I feel free, rich and relieved.” But I also felt sad. I’d sold something that really had spirit and was really strong. But I’d had no choice.

And so it was that the first phase of my business life—the American Dream—began to wind down. I’d accomplished more than I could ever have imagined and was extremely proud of the products I’d created. I’d built two companies and sold two companies. I’d more than achieved my goal of financial independence. I could retire, travel the world, and my children would always be secure.

On the one hand, it was liberating. I was thirty-six and for the first time in thirteen years I didn’t have the pressure of running a company, and I was excited about that. On the other hand, I felt empty. What I realized later is that I had very little say in the design, quality, and most importantly distribution of the many licensed products. Little by little, the simple dress I’d made had disappeared. In the hands of Carl Rosen, his company Puritan, and the 1980s, the dresses were given shoulder pads and lost their identity as I had lost control. My name was on so many products, but I wasn’t designing anymore; I had lost my creative outlet.

I missed that and realized how powerfully I missed it soon after the sale to Beecham when I went to A La Vieille Russie, a wonderful antique store in the Sherry-Netherland hotel, to buy myself a celebratory gift of jewelry. (I often buy jewelry to mark special moments. It signifies a commitment to myself—a ring, for example, when I break up with a man.) This time, while I was buying a beautiful set of aquamarine jewelry, I saw an empty shop for rent across the lobby. I decided to take it and, voilà. Briefly, at least, the American Dream was reignited.

My instincts told me that the elegant Sherry-Netherland on the corner of Fifty-Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue was a perfect location for a very upscale collection I could create for the extravagant eighties. The Carters had left the cloth-coat White House. The Reagans had moved in, complete with Mrs. Reagan’s furs and designer clothes.
Millions of people were watching
Dynasty
and
Dallas
on television, and fashion and style changed enormously. The big hairdo and the big shoulder pads were in, as was Donald Trump and a lot of new money. It was not the New York I had fallen in love with, but I thought I could capitalize on the new extravagance and create something new of my own.

I commissioned the well-known architect Michael Graves to design what would be his first retail store. It seems crazy to me now that while he was converting the shop into a beautiful space I didn’t even know what clothes I was going to put in it! Once again my impulsiveness had taken over. There wasn’t a business plan at all, just a vision of creating couture-like clothes in exquisite fabrics. I thought an expensive, high-end line would strengthen the value of my name, and therefore help the other licensed products over which I had no control.

I hired a talented young Frenchman, Stephan Janson, to help me design this new line and Olivier Gelbsmann to manage the store. I called both the store and the new line by my first name only, Diane, and the first collection was exquisite. We used the most precious and expensive fabrics—silks from Italy, laces from France, cashmere from Scotland—and created elegant ball gowns and other eveningwear. I had lots of money from the Beecham sale, so I didn’t need to skimp on anything, including the advertising introducing Diane in 1984. Image is all-important in couture. The clothes have to project high fashion, elegance, and be aspirational, so I hired Helmut Newton, the famous German photographer known for his strong erotic photographs, to shoot the campaign. I had always dreamt of being photographed by him and he loved the idea of using me as a model. We shot in an art deco mansion in the South of France and had a great time. They were beautiful images, which I treasure to this day—me in various Diane ball gowns and in my favorite, a black tuxedo with a veil over my eyes.

The early signs about Diane were very encouraging. An expensive ball gown of pink silk and black lace was bought over the phone and so were the rich tuxedos and evening pajamas. Brooke Shields, Bianca Jagger, and Ivana Trump were among my early enthusiastic customers. It all felt exciting.

The clothes were well made, beautiful, and absolutely right for the time, but looking back, I didn’t really like that period in fashion. Nothing felt right. New York of the mideighties was not the same New York that had seduced me in the early seventies, and my personal life was also changing. My children had gone off to boarding schools and, emotionally, I needed something new.

Alain Elkann landed in my life at that very moment—an intelligent, attractive, needy artist in search of his own identity as a writer, as a man, and as a father to his three children. Rather than being excited about building yet another business, I was drawn to being Alain’s muse and his partner in life.

I was drawn by the change in Europe, as well. There was the promise of a unified Europe that excited me. I bought lots of blue European Union flags with their twelve stars and displayed them all over my apartment. Newly elected French president François Mitterrand was an intellectual and the whole mood of Paris had become very seductive to me. I packed up, neglecting the fledgling business, and moved to Paris.

A little bit of New York came with me; my assistant, Ellen, who had been with me since she was nineteen, had just married a Frenchman and moved to Paris at the same time. Having each other made us feel a little less homesick.

And homesick I was. I never anticipated the huge identity crisis I would have, both personally and in my own sense of style. I had arrived in Paris with my beautiful newly designed clothes, but Alain didn’t
like them. That was when he bought me flat shoes and had me order tweed blazers from his tailor in Milan. A woman’s style and what she wears reflects a lot of who she is, and I slowly became confused and insecure. I’d had my hair cut very, very short in frustration after the end of my relationship with Paulo, which required frequent visits to the hairdresser, something I’d not done for years. For the first time I began to feel older and started weekly facials. Even though I was in Paris, the epicenter of fashion, I turned my back on fashion and everything I had built. The new line and the Sherry-Netherland store in New York made no sense to me anymore. Soon after my move I closed it all down and sold my Fifth Avenue apartment.

I missed my children and wrote to them daily, while making myself a pleasant life in Paris. I spent my time with writers, and took great pleasure and pride in establishing Salvy, a small publishing company. That was a great plus during this very odd but instructive period in my life. I loved having a literary salon in my apartment and being a publisher, but as a woman I was learning who I didn’t want to be.

5

THE COMEBACK KID

I
wish I could say I quickly regained my confident, intuitive self when I left Paris in 1990 for New York, but it isn’t true. I was quite lost. My business, what was left of it, was in tatters. The licenses had been sold and resold, and my designs had lost their point of view. My line of cosmetics had vanished in a series of mergers and acquisitions and the only survivor, the light, sexy fragrance I’d named after my daughter, was unrecognizable: Tatiana had been turned purple by its new owner, Revlon, and they had changed the scent.

Not only had I lost my brand, I felt I had lost my identity. I had not realized how much my sense of self had been linked to my work. I did not know who I was anymore. My children were both at Brown University and had blossomed into wonderful young adults. I was very proud of them. I was not proud of me.

What a fool I’d been. By altering my personality, I had now lost myself. By naïvely signing away my name on the licenses without any restrictions and by neglecting my business duties to satisfy my man,
the brand had lost its character and much of its value. My income from the royalties had dropped by around 75 percent. When I visited some of the few remaining licensees in their offices, they paid little attention to my design suggestions or to me. In their eyes, I had become irrelevant. I was just someone who’d designed some hot dresses a while back and they couldn’t wait for me to leave them alone.

At twenty-five, I was a wunderkind. At forty, I was a has-been. I started straightening my hair again. I hated what the licensees made so I could no longer wear the clothes that bore my name. After the easy jersey dresses, the sarongs of the Bali period, and the tweed jackets of my Paris life, my new personal uniform was couture jackets from YSL with tight Alaïa skirts or narrow Romeo Gigli pants. Trying to feel of the moment, I ordered lavish couture clothes from Christian Lacroix, the talented new French designer: dresses with big pouf skirts and embellished jackets. Those clothes were beautiful and relevant to the time, but not to me. I barely wore them.

I thought my insecurity showed on the outside, but evidently it didn’t. Anh Duong, the artist who was modeling for Christian Lacroix at the time and later became a close friend, remembers seeing me for the first time at his haute couture house in Paris. “I was struck by how beautiful you were trying on Christian’s clothes,” she told me recently. I could not believe she said that. I remember feeling particularly desperate that day and far from beautiful. It proved to me once more that “the woman across the room” may appear perfect, yet does not always feel it. I certainly didn’t. Though I spend so much time now telling young women to be their own best friends and that happiness is confidence, I was not practicing what I preached during that lost period of my professional life. I wasn’t sure who I was.

I made a few false starts trying to get back to work. I signed yet another unfortunate license deal in 1990 to design a line of dresses,
this time with a moderately priced company. The struggling company wanted to upgrade its image and was counting on my name to do it. The chairman had a beautiful smile and blue eyes and he convinced me with his enthusiasm. I went ahead because at least it would get me back into the stores. It did, for a very short time. The company declared bankruptcy the day the DVF division was to launch its second season. By then I had invested a lot of time in developing these new dresses and I quite liked them, so without thinking twice, I told the team I’d been working with at the licensee’s office to move the dresses into my office and come work for me. Impulsive for sure, and short-lived. We delivered one more season but I was not equipped nor did I have the desire to rebuild a wholesale business.