House of Versace: The Untold Story of Genius, Murder, and Survival

by Deborah Ball

  “Nino sometimes told Gianni he had to come help, but there was no way,” Zia Nora remembered. “He would just say no.”

  The constant comparisons to Santo embittered Gianni. His teachers often pointed out the differences between the two brothers. Nino and Franca badly wanted to see their children earn university degrees, which few families in Reggio could yet afford. They were pleased to see Santo grow into a serious young man. Gianni, however, was directionless, a dreamer and a slacker. His parents made their displeasure known.

  “My parents adored Santo because he was the perfect child, the one who studied and always did what he was told, while I was the black sheep,” Gianni said much later. “I was the one who answered back, the one who didn’t study. It weighed on me.”16

  Santo’s athletic prowess, a source of great pride for Nino, also embarrassed Gianni, a skinny kid with little interest in sports. One winter, the family went skiing in the Aspromonte, when Gianni took a violent fall and badly broke his tibia. Emergency surgery left an ugly nine-inch scar that marred his leg so badly that as an adult he would try unsuccessfully to have a plastic surgeon erase it. Worse still, Gianni brought home abysmal grades, frequently failing subjects such as Latin, geography, and math, and scarcely passing the rest of his courses, even art. He constantly cut classes to go to the beach. Franca sometimes drafted her seamstresses to corral her unruly son and get him to school.

  “I can still picture him with two of the seamstresses, dragging Gianni under his arms, his hands covered in chocolate,” said Anna Candela, a close family friend. “They were literally lifting him off the ground.”17

  When he made it to school, he sat in the back of the drab classroom, paying little attention, instead filling notebook after notebook with sketches. Once, his teacher summoned Franca to the school. She showed her Gianni’s notebooks, filled with drawings of women with huge busts and tiny wasplike waists. “Signora, your son is some sort of sex maniac,” the teacher said. The truth was far different, of course. Gianni had a boyish fascination not with women as sex objects but as the divas of the day—namely, the sultry actresses Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren, who starred in the films he avidly watched at the local cinema.

  “Those sketches were a sign of what I would become,” he would say decades later. “But how could I explain that to a teacher in Reggio Calabria in 1956?”

  While Santo was protective of Gianni, he scolded him for wasting his allowance, usually on clothes, magazines, and later, tickets to concerts and the theater. In turn, Gianni tried to squeeze more money out of his older brother.

  One of the few occasions that brought father and son together was the opera. Nino loved opera and often took Gianni with him. Once when his mother dressed him in a gray velvet jacket and black pants to go to the Teatro Cilea in Reggio to see Giuseppe Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, Gianni, sitting next to his father, who was dressed in black, felt like a prince. He found the costumes and the sets dazzling, touching a creative chord that would resonate later.18

  But Gianni did not dream then of being a clothing designer. Instead, he wanted to become a musician—he idolized the American composer George Gershwin—and he pestered his parents to send him to a local high school for the arts. Nino wouldn’t hear of it. He wanted Gianni to earn a surveying degree at a technical high school. As rural areas poured their population into the cities in the south, a building boom was sweeping Reggio, and Nino reckoned that a degree in surveying was a ticket to a secure job. He insisted Gianni enroll at the city’s technical high school, housed in an ugly gray Fascist-era building that was as forbidding as a prison.

  Although the teenage Gianni languished at school, he blossomed in Franca’s atelier. He spent more and more time in his mother’s shop, passing the afternoons sketching or cutting photos out of fashion magazines. During the family’s summer retreats to the mountains, he would disappear for hours, a sketchbook tucked under his arm. When he was about fifteen, his mother started sending him to Messina to deliver garments to be embroidered by a particularly skilled craftswoman there, and to buy fabrics for the shop. He loved rummaging through dozens of thick spools of fabrics, looking for something unique. These short trips across the strait gave him the first taste of life beyond Reggio. The standards of Reggio society and achievement soon felt suffocating. When the time came for Gianni to take the state exam necessary to receive a high school diploma, he simply skipped it and never received the degree, bitterly disappointing his father.

  Moreover, as Gianni advanced through his teenage years, Nino must have also worried about Gianni’s lack of interest in girls, especially as Santo was gaining a reputation as a young lothario. The skinny, shy Gianni seemed a mammone, a mama’s boy, forever tied to Franca’s apron strings. Classmates began to notice that Gianni was different, and some began to avoid him. That only made him more reluctant to attend school.

  According to Angelo Bernabo, a former classmate, “He was certainly a very sensitive person. He had this falsetto voice, a very high-pitched voice, so he was classified as ‘different’ immediately. Some people were afraid that, if they hung out with him, others would jump to the wrong conclusions.”19

  Once, Gianni dressed up as a woman for carnevale. “He was the spitting image of a woman,” a close friend recalled. “We had to go pick him up and I saw him walking down the street in this outfit. I thought, O mio Dio, what if someone sees us!”

  As a teenager, his growing awareness of being gay was a heavy burden for Gianni. In the early 1960s, homosexuality was still deeply taboo in Calabria, where sexual mores remained suffocatingly strict. It was shameful for a family, particularly a Calabrian father, to have a gay son. Italian mothers of the era sometimes protected their gay offspring, but in Calabria they often took the side of the father in ostracizing a homosexual child. Gay men were the target of taunts—they were called ricchiuni, Calabrian dialect for “queer”—and, occasionally, violence. Gianni hid his sexuality, never speaking about it to his parents, or even Santo, who, according to some friends, found his brother’s emerging sexual orientation embarrassing. Nora was the only one to whom he confided his secret, and she, in turn, was extremely protective of the teenager, defending him when Franca or Nino lost their patience with Gianni.

  But any anguish over his sexuality, and his concealment of it, did not stop Gianni from exploring his desires. He started to hang out on an isolated beach just north of Reggio, where a tiny alternative scene bustled. Teenagers smoked pot, women bathed topless, and gay men met up. After high school, Gianni went to Taormina and Catania, two cities on Sicily’s eastern coast that had some gay nightclubs and saunas. When he was alone with one of the few gay friends he’d found in Reggio, he could allow himself some freedom, joking about his sexuality.

  “A gay man in Reggio had problems,” said Bruno De Robertis, who was one of Gianni’s few close gay friends in Calabria. “In Reggio, gay life didn’t exist—there were no bars or clubs. But I could talk with Gianni about everything—about traveling, about sex, about leaving Reggio. It was a subject that brought us together.”20

  By the time he was eighteen, Gianni began to dream of escaping his native city.

  “Reggio was very, very provincial then,” said another close friend. “And there was Gianni, with his ‘problem.’”

  Gianni found refuge in the form of his baby sister. From the start, Donatella was the cocca, or coddled baby, of the family. Nine years younger than Gianni and eleven years younger than Santo, she was the much-cherished replacement for her dead sister, Tinuccia, a living gift to compensate for the great loss of the family’s first daughter. Following Donatella’s birth, Franca and Nino broke with the Calabrian tradition of bestowing family names on their children, instead giving her a name that was derived from dono, or “gift” in Italian. Donatella would benefit not only from her parents’ love for Tina but from the Versaces’ increasing prosperity. By the time Donatella was born, the family had a relatively affluent lifestyle that included three cars and a sm
all beach-side vacation cottage. As a result, everyone spoiled little Donatella. Her cousin Tita Versace has said that “anything Donatella wanted, they made sure she got it.”21

  Franca was extremely attached to Donatella. The loss of her first daughter had shaken Franca deeply, despite her solid, optimistic character. When she gave birth to Donatella, she poured her grief for her eldest child into her love and affection for her youngest one. While she loved her sons, she had yearned for a little girl, and she spoiled Donatella without reserve, taking her shopping and having her seamstresses make her elaborate dresses. In her shop, Franca sometimes emptied the big baskets she used to hold bolts of cloth and plopped Donatella in one, rocking her gently as she worked. As she grew older, Donatella would remain much closer to her mother than to Nino, who would always be a remote figure for the little girl.

  Surrounded as she was by adults, Donatella grew up fast, and Gianni soon made her his accomplice in his teenage rebellion. He would send her to steal the keys to their parents’ car from Nino’s nightstand so that he could go dancing or to a concert, or have her pilfer money from their parents’ wallets when he had spent his entire allowance. She eagerly went along, relishing the attention given her by her big brother.

  “Everything he asked me to do for him was fun for me,” Donatella would recall. “I’ve never found anyone who was as exciting and fun.”22

  Gianni sometimes loaded Donatella into his baby blue Cinquecento to take her with him to the beach, where they spent hours with Gianni’s friends at the Bagno Milea, popular for its three hundred wooden changing rooms, lounge chairs, and purple and white umbrellas. Other times, they headed to the beaches on the Ionic coast, which afforded more hours of sunlight and where young people soaked up the sun from as early as April.

  As she grew up, Donatella played by the rules of Reggio, displaying more focus and ambition than her errant brother. Unlike Gianni, Donatella was a diligent student, particularly in English. But otherwise, the siblings shared similar characteristics. While Santo was more exuberant and garrulous, neither Gianni nor Donatella was very expansive or open to outsiders. Both shy and taciturn by nature, they had a small clutch of close friends and would often shoot strangers a wary, steely look. As one childhood friend described it, “Donatella hated it when there were new people around, or someone she didn’t know, because she couldn’t be herself.”

  Meanwhile, Santo, ever the diligent elder brother, fulfilled his parents’ dreams for their children. He played for Reggio’s semiprofessional basketball team and excelled in high school, where he studied accounting. Around the same time, he began to help with the family’s finances, negotiating the terms of loans and investments with the bank managers.

  “When we were kids, Gianni and I were the clubbers and he was the one who finished his homework and then went to help our mother close the shop,” Donatella once said of her oldest brother. “Gianni and I used to say, Santo is so boring! But we knew we could count on him.”23

  In 1963, after high school, Santo enrolled in the University of Messina—Reggio wouldn’t have its own university until years later—shuttling back and forth across the strait from Sicily to attend classes. At school, he became one of the top leaders of a large left-leaning political group, displaying natural organizational skill at a time when student politics in Italy was stirring with fresh radical ferment. While many students in Italy take seven or eight years to finish their degrees, Santo, ever the methodical student, rushed through in four. In 1968, he became the first in the family to finish college, earning an economics degree with top honors, having produced a 410-page thesis entitled “The Economic Effects of Public Spending on Gross National Product.”

  “There was always Santo, the calm one, Gianni, the enfant terrible and me, Gianni’s accomplice,” Donatella later recalled.24 “Santo was a sort of father figure. Instead, Gianni was my friend.”25 The youthful dynamic among the three siblings would mark their adult relationships with one another, fostering their success in the years ahead—and, thanks to the inevitable dysfunction among them, ultimately leading them close to ruin.

  three

  Breaking Free

  aS GIANNI FLIPPED THROUGH FASHION MAGAZINES IN HIS mother’s workshop and began to dream of a future far from Reggio, he learned that there was just one place in the world where style was determined: Paris. In the 1950s, the entire world of couture was governed by a small group of French designers. Tradition dictated that hopeful young couturiers leave their homeland behind and come to the French capital. But the Parisians were hardly going to admit a brash and untutored young man from the provinces of Italy. The world would have to change before that happened—and it did.

  Though he could not have realized it as a teenager sketching in his mother’s dress shop, Gianni would, throughout his life, contend with a fashion establishment casually intent on keeping out upstarts such as himself. Ultimately, he would be a leader of a movement that would upend the ruling class—and challenge the primacy of Paris itself.

  From the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, it is hard to imagine how thoroughly the fashion burghers of Paris dictated what the civilized world wore. Starting in the late nineteenth century, Paris had been the world’s undisputed fashion capital, home to Coco Chanel, Madeleine Vionnet, and Jean Patou. World War II temporarily shut down the industry, but when the Nazi occupation of France ended in 1944, Paris reasserted itself as the ultimate arbiter of fashion, as Christian Dior, Givenchy, and Balenciaga dictated trends that rippled throughout Europe and the United States. For a well-dressed American or European woman, French high fashion was the only choice. But Parisian haute couture was an expensive, time-consuming process that only idle, rich women could afford—about as far from the vibrant, homey workshop of Franca Versace as a lady could get.

  In practice as well as in principle—from the cutting of the first pattern to the sewing of the final button—French haute couture was the most elite enterprise that existed in twentieth-century business. To gain admittance to a designer’s salon, a woman had to secure an introduction to the house’s vendeuse, or saleswoman, through a friend or relative. In wealthy families, mothers would present their daughters to their vendeuses when the girls came of age. Once a woman became a client, she had to submit to at least three fittings for each outfit. In the workrooms, seamstresses known as petites mains, or little hands, assembled the finished garment, every buttonhole, seam, and pleat finished by hand. If the garment was an evening gown or a particularly elaborate jacket or cocktail dress, it might then be sent out for hand embroidering with precious stones, sequins, feathers, or crystals. A day dress could take a few weeks to make, while an embroidered gown could require months. When the dress was finally ready, men in livery delivered the clothes, packed in enormous cardboard boxes and buried in layers and layers of crinkly tissue paper. Even the most jaded ladies felt a shudder of excitement when a new couture outfit arrived.

  Couture clothes suited that exclusive and exclusionary class of women who closely followed the strict rules for dressing of the 1950s, when a proper lady had different outfits for morning, lunch, and evening. Unsurprisingly, the styles of that decade excelled in their extravagance and, very often, discomfort—as was the case with apparel from Christian Dior. His New Look was the dominant style of the decade, and it featured a fierce, doll-like shape, lavish ballerina skirts, tightly fitted bodices, and molded jackets that required an armature of tight corsets and padding to smooth a woman’s figure into a perfect, wasplike shape. But while undeniably elegant, French couture was anything but youthful—or sexy. In the 1950s, “women didn’t care about looking young,” said Karl Lagerfeld. “An eighteen-year-old wanted to look like a woman with jewellery and a mink coat because this was the fashion.”1 Two decades later, Gianni Versace would be part of a vanguard that would challenge these ingrained notions of the presentation of the body—replacing them with a glorification of youth and sexuality that would transform fashion and force Paris itself in
to its embrace.

  Even though French fashion reigned supreme during Gianni’s youth, Italian style was beginning to blossom at the time. Italy’s clothing design sprang from the country’s tradition of producing beautiful, high-quality fabrics. Centuries ago, Venetian merchants traded silk in Byzantium and Persia. Como’s first silk looms were established in the 1500s, while weavers in Biella were spinning whisper-soft wool by the 1800s. Parisian couture houses had always bought some of their textiles from Italy, but after the war, Italian fabrics became even more popular because they were relatively cheap but of fine quality. Moreover, the Parisian couturiers employed Italian artisans to do skilled handwork, such as embroidery, and bought accessories such as shoes and lingerie from them.

  In the years preceding World War II, Mussolini’s autarky policy crippled the Italian fashion industry, as designers struggled to buy raw materials and cut off exports, particularly to the lucrative American market. But when the conflict ended, Rome-based couture houses flourished. Italy’s upper class had become more accustomed to patronizing the Roman couturiers during the war. When Paris was liberated, the Romans resumed buying French couture patterns, but they increasingly balked at paying the high fees the Parisians charged. By 1955, Paris couture prices had risen about 3,000 percent over prewar levels.2 With their rich fabrics, lower labor costs, and skilled craftsmen, the Roman couturiers quickly discovered they could compete with the French houses, and regional dressmakers like Franca Versace began buying couture patterns there. Italian couturiers soon settled on a style that was much less fussy than the Parisian look, with its abundant flounces, flourishes, and bows. Italian clothes were simpler in line, and used good-quality, soft materials, elegant draping, and vibrant colors to create a fresh, more easygoing look. And the prices—as little as $100 for a day dress—were half those of French frocks, a price that was affordable for Franca’s local clientele.