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

by Deborah Ball

  Antonio found common cause with Cristiana, Santo’s girlfriend. (She and Santo would marry in 1984, eight months after their first child, Francesca, was born. A son, Antonio, followed in 1986.)

  Gianni had a catty, mean streak when he took a dislike to someone, and Cristiana became a target for his contempt early on. He found his sister-in-law unsophisticated, always recalling that her parents were simple restaurant owners. He also resented the fact that she never felt the need to work. “Donatella works, we all work,” he complained. “Why is Cristiana the only one in the family who thinks she should be the lady of leisure?” He could be childish and petty at times. Once, he covered Cristiana’s face in a family photo and announced, “Here, now that’s a beautiful family!”

  “The triad of Gianni, Santo, and Donatella were untouchable,” Antonio declared years later. “Even if you were on the inside, it was only about those three. There were the three siblings—and then there was Paul, Cristiana, and me.”15

  Soon after Gianni and Antonio met, Paul and Donatella announced their engagement. Gianni was officially happy for the couple, but he had his doubts. One day, as his seamstresses were working on the clothes for the wedding party, he remarked, “I don’t know why we’re going to all this trouble. They’ll split within a couple of years.”

  Paul and Donatella wed on the first day of spring in 1983, in a tiny church in Moltrasio, a town of just 1,700 inhabitants on the western flank of Lake Como. Versace friends and family had flown up from Reggio, while Paul’s relatives arrived from the United States. Ornella Vanoni, an Italian pop star who was a fan of Gianni’s clothes, was Donatella’s maid of honor.

  At the last minute, Gianni had designed a simple dress for Donatella. Made of ivory silk, it wrapped across in the front and tucked into a wide band at the waist, before falling into a full skirt that trailed sumptuously in the back. Donatella had pulled her hair back from her face and let it fall down her back. The only jewelry she wore, aside from her wedding band, were delicate drop earrings. Sitting across from her in the church just as the ceremony was to begin, Gianni noticed that the full skirt of the dress was bunched up and gestured frantically for her to straighten it. But when she bent down, her cleavage fell open. “No! No!” Gianni mouthed furiously, as Donatella tried to reach down without flashing her guests. After the ceremony, a beaming Donatella and Paul, who wore a white tie, white shirt, and dark suit, mixed with guests under an unseasonably warm, sunny day. “Look at how beautiful she is!” Paul kept telling friends and family during the reception.

  Gianni bought the new couple a lavish apartment on Viale Majno, an exclusive neighborhood known for ornate buildings dripping with ivy. He oversaw a splashy top-to-bottom refurbishment, right down to the choice of Paul and Donatella’s matrimonial bed. Over time, Gianni would buy two more apartments to add to the original one, leaving his sister with a massive twenty-one-room home spread over three floors and 4,850 square feet of living space. Now happily settled down, the Versaces looked ready to take on the world.

  seven

  Inspiration and Muse

  bY THE TIME DONATELLA MARRIED, SHE WAS RAPIDLY BECOMING ever-more indispensable to her big brother. Early on, he entrusted his hip twenty-eight-year-old sister with overseeing the hair and makeup for the runway shows, a task that delighted her—and soon shaped the look of Gianni’s shows. She quickly projected onto the models her own predilection for heavy makeup and teased hairstyles, which helped establish the defining look of 1980s fashion.

  “Donatella always had this thing for hair and makeup,” recalled Angelo Azzena, who joined the house in 1976 to work on the ad campaigns and stage the runway shows and would later became one of Donatella’s closest assistants. “She practically lived at the hairdresser. So when she started, it changed. The look became one of a young, modern woman who had the time to do her hair and makeup properly.”1 Gianni also gave her responsibility for the shoes, bags, and jewelry. Under her influence, the accessories became more and more elaborate: high heels made up in silk fabric, with a black and white baroque pattern; or elbow-length gloves with crystals sewn in geometric patterns.

  But more important, Donatella filled an indefinable role of muse, sounding board, and first assistant. The position she had served in her brother’s life as they grew up now became central to the expanding Versace business. Gianni found her style of dressing edgy, fresh, and glamorous: skintight leggings in bright colors, leopard-print tops, leather jackets, and stiletto heels or tall cowboy boots. She piled two or three heavy bracelets made of shining gold medallions adorned with medusa heads on her wrists; she wore sparkly, dangling earrings that resembled mini chandeliers. With access to Milan’s best hairstylists and beauty salons, Donatella gradually polished her look. She wasn’t yet the camp goddess she would become in later decades, but she was becoming a walking illustration of the maxim that defined the 1980s: “If you’ve got it, flaunt it.” Her hair became sleeker and blonder, setting off her year-round, sun-baked bronze tan. Her skin was still smooth, so she could often do with little makeup. But when she did wear makeup, she favored heavy eye shadow, liner, and false eyelashes. A personal trainer helped sculpt and trim her body into the buffed look of the gym-crazed 1980s, with toned arms, a taut stomach, and sinewy legs.

  From her travels with Gianni, she brought home suitcases full of skin creams and perfumes, so many that she had special shelves built in her bathroom to hold all of her toiletries. The extreme grooming, however, veiled a profound neurosis about her own appearance. Donatella was a serial self-belittler, homing in on every last physical imperfection. She charmed people by betraying a bit of her vulnerability, but her insecurities unbalanced her. She compulsively monitored her appearance in every passing mirror—even stealing glimpses in the reflection of a fork when she was at dinner.

  Donatella became Gianni’s shadow in the atelier, constantly trailing behind him, murmuring her opinion of his work. He sought her views on every aspect of his designs, from color schemes to dress choices for the runway. Their conversations came so thick and fast that their ideas melded into one. Donatella had a great knack for sizing up a dress or a pair of pants or a color palette and deciding whether it had that mysterious quality that would make it trendy. When show time came, she had an extraordinary eye for making Gianni’s clothes arresting on the runway, adorning them with the right shoes, jewelry, and makeup.

  “Donatella was extremely useful to him,” said Giusy Ferrè, a leading Italian fashion journalist and a close friend of Gianni’s. “She was his passport into the world of women. She was his female alter ego.”2

  Donatella was often brutal in her judgments of Gianni’s work, sparking fierce arguments between the two, often in a Calabrian dialect that was indecipherable to the rest of the Versace team. Oftentimes, designers fall into a rut once they find success with a certain style. Donatella’s task was to keep Gianni moving forward; she wouldn’t let him repeat himself or rest on the laurels of previously successful design ideas, no matter how much combustion her nagging caused between them.

  “When he raised his voice, the others were scared, but I wasn’t,” Donatella would say more than twenty years later. “I kept on telling him what I thought, because there wasn’t anyone else who would. He risked becoming just another designer with everyone always telling him ‘yes.’ But I pushed him to go further. I saw what the others were doing, which I liked better, and I saw that they were more daring. I said, you’re better than these other ones. If you don’t risk, you won’t go anywhere.”3

  She sometimes went behind his back—for instance, instructing his seamstresses to shorten his skirts, which he preferred long. When Gianni would find out, he would be furious. “You don’t understand anything!” Gianni often shouted at her. “You’re going to ruin me!” Another recurring battle was over shoes. Gianni preferred flats for the runway shows, but Donatella saw that they would drain his outfits of verve.

  “So we agreed to do half high heels and half flats,” Donatella re
counted about one show. But unbeknownst to Gianni, she switched the flats for stilettos the moment before the models stepped out onto the runway. He was once so angry at seeing the girls in high heels that he threw Donatella out of the atelier. Most of the time, though, he realized she was right.

  “If Gianni didn’t listen to his sister and decided to go ahead with an idea she didn’t like, he would come to her the next day and say, ‘You were right,’” recalled Azzena. “She had great influence over him.”4

  Their fights were so fierce that it took Paul Beck several years to get used to what he described as the “Versace verbal dynamic.”

  “I thought somebody was going to kill someone,” he later told a Vanity Fair journalist. “I had to leave the room. And the argument would be over something like where to put the sweaters in the new boutique on Via Montenapoleone.”5

  The bond between the siblings grew tighter as they spent long days of intense work together, speaking in such shorthand that it was impossible to say who had come up with a particular idea. Santo, working with a separate team in a different office, was largely cut out of their ménage. He just couldn’t get excited about topics such as the color of a dress or a new cut for a skirt, which riveted his younger sister and brother. Donatella reveled in her role. Even as she entered her thirties, she could continue to play the flighty kid sister. She lost things frequently and stopped driving because she was so distracted. When Gianni traveled, he was always thinking of her, usually bringing back a gift for Donatella as a spontaneous token of his affection for her. Once he bought her a twenty-karat canary yellow diamond ring, the stone as big as a Chuckles jelly candy. She was always on his mind, the first person he called when he was excited about the color of a flower he’d just seen or a new city he was visiting. “If I were to marry, I would look for a girl like Donatella,” he told a journalist.6

  Even as he put his sister on a pedestal, Gianni could be terribly hard on Donatella. If he didn’t care for a particular hairstyle or new outfit she wore, he was merciless in his criticism. But at the same time he wouldn’t allow anyone else to speak badly of Donatella, flying into a rage if he heard a friend or employee criticize her.

  In the atelier, the employees saw Donatella as a fun-loving peer, not their boss. They addressed her using the informal tu, instead of the formal lei they scrupulously employed when speaking with Gianni. She possessed the candid, disarming warmth common to southerners and had little use for professional boundaries at work. She happily delved into the personal problems of female colleagues, doling out tough-love advice on boyfriends and children, and celebrated their engagements and new babies. She was unhesitatingly generous. Once she lent her own large diamond earrings to a girl who was getting married, so that she could have “something borrowed” for her wedding day. Another employee with a seriously ill child turned up at an appointment with a doctor whom Donatella had recommended and found the bill already paid.

  Donatella was fast becoming the life of the Versace party, sucking voluptuously on one Marlboro Red after another until her voice became a husky, smoke-cured purr. Whether in English or Italian, her rapid-fire cadences left the listener feeling a perennial half step behind. She shared the intense energy of her older brothers but had a far shorter attention span and an unnerving, feline jitteriness. She was like a tiny, tightly coiled spring. Her walk was an impatient wiggle, slowed down by her cantilevered heels.

  Gianni extolled all women, including his baby sister, treating her more like a child than a peer. He was warm and touchy, flipping the hair of a girlfriend over her shoulder in an intimate gesture or complimenting her on her lipstick. He sized up a woman instantly and had a stream of exuberant suggestions as to what would flatter her most. When he trained his sunny Mediterranean charm on a woman, she felt like a princess.

  “He would always say to me, ‘You’re so beautiful!’” recalled Andrea Gottleib, who was a junior assistant in the buying department at B. Altman in the 1970s. “I used to think, here’s this famous designer and he’s telling me how beautiful I am! He used to say, ‘Let me give you this shirt or dress. You would look so wonderful in it.’”7

  “It was a wonderful period,” Donatella would recall ruefully. “The 1980s in Milan were a wonderful time. We had so much fun together.”8 By then, Gianni had put together a team of about two dozen young people, many in their first jobs. He often hired people on impulse, asking candidates what their astrological signs were before bringing them on. Santo had found office space for the small group in Via della Spiga 25, taking the entire top floor of the building, which ringed an airy courtyard. (Donatella once proposed lining the balcony with orchids.) The space included a salon where Gianni could hold his runway shows, but it was so cramped that he had to stage as many as three shows to accommodate all the journalists and buyers. At the time, Via della Spiga was still home to a number of old-line Milanese families and small businesses. Just below Gianni’s offices lived an old lady who complained about the ruckus his team made during their late nights preparing for shows and the fact that they commandeered the tiny, rickety elevator for days. Over time, Gianni charmed the lady and she put up with the noise.

  In true Italian style, Gianni treated his new employees like an extended family. He loved playing the benevolent boss, giving his favorite employees affectionate nicknames; Bruno became “Brunotto” and Luca was dubbed “Lucotto.” At midmorning and midafternoon, Alba, his cook, served coffee or tea in porcelain cups, with biscuits or slices of homemade cake. At 1 p.m., the entire staff sat down to a family-style lunch at a long, simple table in the dining room, with Gianni proudly presiding at the head of the table. (When an employee disappointed him, however, Gianni often turned cold, ignoring the person in the office for weeks or even months.) Very often Gianni invited a visiting journalist or department store buyer to join them, drawing him or her into convivial chatter about work, family, and gossip. Alba made Tuscan dishes such as sformato di patate, a baked potato dish, or oversized spinach and ricotta ravioli. Dessert was often profiterole or torta di crema, a cream torte.

  “When you were working, this wonderful smell of Alba’s cooking floated through the office,” recalled Enrico Genevois, then a young employee who dealt with graphics. “You ate better there than at a restaurant. It was wonderful. There was this sense of family. We all sat around the table laughing and joking.”9

  All three Versace siblings had a sweet tooth. Gianni happily tucked in to Alba’s desserts, or the cream puffs made by the sister of his top assistant. But Donatella was very disciplined. “Donatella ate, but if there were spinach ravioli, she might have just one,” said Franco Lussana, a close friend of the family and a longtime Versace employee.10

  At Christmas, Gianni threw a holiday party, where his employees dressed up in wild costumes. One year, Lussana, who is about six feet tall, came as Tina Turner. (Donatella had Sergio Rossi, who then made shoes for Versace, whip up an enormous pair of stilettos in his size—a forty-five, or fourteen in American sizes.) Donatella’s main assistant dressed up as Raffaella Carrà, a campy bleached-blond TV star who was a sort of kitsch Italian Bette Midler. Sometimes, Lussana came as Santa Claus, bearing a bag of gifts that Gianni gave to his staff, usually small pieces of jewelry or leather bags. Gianni, who didn’t like to dress up, watched his employees vamp it up and doubled over in laughter with Donatella, while Paul recorded the festivities.

  As the demands on Gianni’s creativity rose along with the business, he became a voracious reader, devouring magazines, newspapers, and art books, and plundering them for ideas for new designs. An early favorite was L’abbigliamento nei secoli (Clothing Through the Centuries), a heavy volume with sumptuous images of dress styles around the world throughout history.11 When he left before dawn for a trip, he insisted on stopping to buy a thick pile of publications.

  “I saw him page through art books hundreds of pages long and pick out the images that interested him without interrupting our conversation for a minute,” recalled Ferrè, t
he Italian journalist and friend.12 When he traveled, he scanned passersby, buildings, and landscapes for ideas.

  “Anything could be a source of inspiration—a flower bed, an architectural shape, the engraving on a piece of furniture, the floor of a church,” said Patrizia Cucco, Gianni’s personal assistant from 1985 until his death.13

  For a single collection of about one hundred pieces, Gianni created thousands of initial sketches on reams of paper. He then talked through the thick pile of ideas with his top two assistants, who reworked the best ones into designs with proper proportions and details. In messy handwriting that exuded impatience, Gianni scribbled notes on the polished sketches with changes he wanted.

  The designs then went to modellisti, or pattern cutters, at the factory, who made samples. Good modellisti were invaluable to any designer who aspired to sell large quantities. Skilled ones knew what shapes, fabrics, and sizes worked for mass production and found ways to adapt a designer’s ideas without watering them down. (They also made up the detailed instructions on how the garment should be assembled at the factory, with coded marks to denote the width of seams, the placement of darts, and the size of pockets.) Sometimes, Gianni, anxious to squeeze the best out of his team, surreptitiously gave the same sketch to several modellisti in order to see who came up with the best sample. As his business grew, Gianni began hiring some of the seamstresses who were closing down their own shops in Milan because their older clients had died off and younger women shunned handmade wardrobes. The seamstresses made samples or modified those that came back from the factory, adding embellishments such as embroidery or lace details.