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

by Deborah Ball

  Donatella became part of a tight celebrity pack that included Naomi Campbell, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Moss, Madonna, and Ingrid Casares. Before Donatella arrived in South Beach, the staff at Casa Casuarina called around to see which celebrities were in town and what parties were being planned. In 1994, she went to Madonna’s thirty-sixth birthday party at her Brickell Avenue house. Organized by Madonna’s brother Christopher Ciccone, the party featured performances by drag queens and strippers, and culminated in Madonna baring her breasts to her guests and jumping into the pool fully dressed. Donatella danced most of the evening, clad in a gold dress covered with medusa heads.18

  By the time her forty-first birthday rolled around in May 1996, Donatella’s partying was hitting a new peak. That year, Casares threw a party for Donatella’s birthday at Liquid, a club she owned. She invited about 150 guests to the private lounge downstairs from the main club, hired drag queens to make cotton candy and fresh popcorn for the guests, and brought in about a dozen male models, clad only in tight Versace underwear, to carry out a huge sheet cake, festooned with sparklers and emblazoned “Happy Birthday Donatella” in huge letters. One model dangled from a swing mounted from the ceiling and others danced on the bar. Paul and Allegra had come early in the evening, but Paul took the little girl home before the entertainment started.

  Later that evening, Donatella and some friends went to an office upstairs in the club. She had someone there to fix her hair, brushing and touching up her blond extensions. While the hairdresser fussed, Donatella pulled out a slim hard case. She carefully unscrewed the top. Habitual users of cocaine often store their drugs in small containers slightly larger than cigarette lighters, which fit easily into pockets or small purses. Oftentimes, a tiny spoon, which is used to scoop out the cocaine, is attached to the side. When Donatella pulled out her case, her companions were amazed. She had come a long way from Bic pens and rolled-up dollar bills. Attached to the case was a tiny gold spoon with a finely wrought medusa on the handle. Donatella rolled her hair back over her shoulder in a practiced motion and leaned over, deftly scooping out some cocaine from her tiny case. After a while, the group went back downstairs to rejoin the other guests. Donatella arrived back at Casa Casuarina at around 4 a.m.19 Despite the raucous evening, Donatella was always in control, even when she was high. “I never saw her out of control or messy,” said Kevin Crawford, a friend who helped organize her birthday party.20

  Gianni tried hard to ignore his sister’s problem, rarely speaking of it even to his closest confidantes. “My sister is crazy,” he often said, a veiled allusion to her hard-living lifestyle, his tone suggesting that it was a topic he didn’t care to talk about. Despite his reputation as the wild man in fashion, he was a homebody, content to be in bed by 10 p.m. With his natural store of adrenaline, he had never felt the need to turn to drugs for a jolt. His sister’s appetite for dope confounded and frustrated him, and her refusal to stop using cocaine was gradually helping to erode his bond with her.

  But Gianni could hardly deny that Donatella’s penchant for full-on excess was enormously useful to his empire. The more the rumors spread about the wild parties she threw—with the best-looking people, the best drugs, and the best music—the hotter his brand became. Gianni had long relied on her to add louche glamour to his image, with her blaze of diamonds, candy-gloss hair, and poured-on dresses. She had been his mascot and muse since he had dressed her back in Reggio. Now that her high-octane lifestyle was pushing his brand to a heady peak, he was castigating the very behavior that had helped him create the life he now enjoyed.

  Not long after he bought Casa Casuarina, Gianni drafted Bruce Weber, a Versace favorite, to gin up a gauzy testimonial to family life à la Versace for all the world to see. Weber shot Allegra, then six, and Daniel, not yet two, playing on the beach with their buffed parents. Donatella’s tiny black thong bikini showed off her trim and muscled legs and arms and her washboard stomach. In one shot Allegra holds a ballet pose while immersed in the water and in another she dances nude on the beach, her blond hair whipping in the wind while a guitarist plays nearby. In the book, titled South Beach Stories, the shots of the children were interspersed with pictures of drag queens, a male stripper, and male models wearing tight Versace bathing suits, bright silk shirts opened to the navel, and black-leather studded outfits.

  By the time South Beach Stories came out in 1993, Gianni was increasingly channeling his familial devotion onto Allegra. From the time she was a toddler, Allegra was a precocious little girl. Blond with brown eyes, she had a seraphic, intelligent face and a sensitive character. She took up ballet early, and moved with a grace and poise unusual for children her age. Gianni fell madly in love with the little girl, even helping to choose her name. (Her brother, Daniel, who was born in December 1990, was named for the Elton John song.) Much more than just a doting uncle, he called her his principessa and showered her with gifts such as an antique tiara and a ruby necklace.

  Allegra grew up a coddled, exceptional child in the red-hot core of Donatella and Gianni’s celebrity world. Gianni took her to his runway shows and to the dinners afterward, where she chatted with models and celebrities as if they were ordinary family friends. Her uncle’s supermodels, particularly Naomi, were like doting aunts. She hung out with the children of rock stars and world-famous actors. When Sting and his wife were guests, Allegra and their children made cookies together. She shared a desk with the son of Eric Clapton at her grammar school in Milan. For one birthday, Elton John sent her a grand piano, and when he visited he often serenaded the little girl. Donatella hired caretakers who treated Allegra like a fragile doll. She typically sent Allegra for visits to Calabria with an au pair, and on one visit, her old friends and family were horrified when the nanny refused to let them kiss the little girl and tested the temperature of the rooms Allegra stayed in to make sure they weren’t too hot or cold.

  Both mother and uncle happily employed Allegra and Daniel in the Versace promotional machine. The children quickly grew used to being photographed constantly, at Versace events, in glossy publicity photos of models and celebrities, and in advertisements. Allegra and Daniel would become the faces of Gianni’s children’s fragrance. By contrast, Santo scrupulously shielded his children from the public eye. Gianni cared far less for Santo’s children, in part due to his antipathy for Cristiana.

  While she reveled in the public image of glossy motherhood, Donatella was a restless parent. Anxious to escape Gianni’s grip, she spent weeks at a time in the United States for ad campaigns, which were shot four times a year. She had long found Milan suffocating and tedious, while the high energy of New York suited her skittish, restless character—even as her travels separated her from her children. She doted affectionately on the pregnant women in the office, sending elaborate gifts when their children arrived and cooing over baby pictures. But for herself, the impulse to play the doting Italian mamma who clucked over every detail of her children’s lives battled with the temptations that beckoned far away from home.

  Donatella threw birthday parties for Allegra that were the envy of la Milano bene, the lofty circle of the city’s richest families such as the Berlusconis. Organized by Gianni’s top assistants, the party included some fifty children who would be invited for an afternoon at Via Gesù. Gianni often made a special party dress for Allegra. (Annoyed by the presence of other children, he didn’t usually attend the party itself.) Each year, the children’s mothers would receive a custom-made invitation, done in the theme Donatella had chosen for the party. One year the theme was Alice in Wonderland, featuring a full-blown show with live music and actors to entertain the kids. At the end of the party, each child (and his or her caretaker) could pick from a mountain of gifts piled on a table: Versace perfumes, T-shirts, or little purses. Other mothers—gray-flannel, bourgeois ladies who normally turned their nose up at the flashy Donatella—often tagged along with their nannies and the kids to see the spectacle for themselves.

  Just as Donatella treated her
daughter like a doll, so did Gianni dress her like one. He often made outfits for his niece that became the basis for some of the Versace children’s collection. His seamstresses kept Allegra’s measurements in the atelier, although her nanny often brought the little girl in for fittings when she visited Gianni. Donatella sometimes had the seamstresses make identical mother-daughter outfits.

  But the glare of the Versace spotlight seared Allegra’s innocence. While her friends were playing innocent dress-up games, Allegra was being dolled up like a miniature Versace model. She was often made up, complete with mascara and eyeliner, for the house’s events. She wore smaller versions of adult fashion-forward clothes, such as flared pants and chain belts. For one Versace party, Donatella, wearing one of Gianni’s elaborate sadomasochism gowns, dressed her six-year-old daughter in a dress made in leopard-skin print, which made for a jarring mother-daughter tableau. “My mom dressed me in silk to go to elementary school,” Allegra told Harper’s Bazaar years later. “In kindergarten, they sent me home because I couldn’t do finger painting in my dress.”21

  Gianni’s devotion to Allegra had little regard for the needs of a growing girl. He frequently had Donatella take her out of school so that she could accompany him on his trips to Miami and New York, where he took her to museum after museum.

  “My children were his children,” Donatella recalled years later. “Since she was nine years old only, she was going to see museums with him. She knew all the museums in America, in France, in England. She would sit with him and go through art books. … It was adorable.”22

  Meanwhile, Allegra was growing up in a household with contrasting messages regarding food. Donatella was enormously disciplined when it came to her own diet, ordering her chef to cook her own meals using low-fat ingredients, without salt and with very little oil. But while she followed a strict regimen, Donatella embraced the tradition of a country where so much hospitality revolves around eating. At her dinner parties, she was keenly involved in planning the menus and the presentation of the cuisine. She often had her chefs emulate trends she found in hip new restaurants, and guests were presented with their meals elaborately arranged on each plate. “Here, you have to eat!” she often encouraged her guests, pushing dishes at them.

  At the same time, in Italy, la bella figura, or the imperative of looking perfectly turned out, extends to children, so that many Italian mothers dress and groom their kids as painstakingly as if they were adults.

  “Donatella was very demanding with Allegra, about her clothes and how she looked,” recalled an employee who worked for years with the family. “She wanted her to be this glamorous little girl.”

  Allegra was also growing up among the world’s most beautiful women. When Allegra visited her uncle during the days before a show, he encouraged her to emulate the models. “Pretend you’re Marpessa!” Gianni urged her as she cavorted on the runway, referring to a dark-haired beauty who was one of his favorite models.

  By the time Allegra reached the cusp of adolescence, she was a sensitive girl who seemed oddly refined and mature for her age, an exacting perfectionist of a child, concentrating furiously when she drew and excelling in her studies. She took great care in how she dressed and looked, and moved with a self-conscious grace that often struck adults as overly mature. She was an obedient daughter, following Donatella’s edicts without protest.

  Her brother, Daniel, had an easier time of it, although his uncle had made himself a looming presence even before he was born. In 1990, when Donatella found out her second child would arrive around January 18 of the next year, Gianni squawked, “You must be nuts if you’re thinking of having the baby during the men’s shows or the couture shows,” he told her. “I won’t hear of it. The baby has to be born at the latest between Christmas and New Year’s.” So Donatella convinced her doctors to move the Cesarean birth to December 28.23 Gianni loved Daniel, affectionately calling him his “Teddy-boy,” but he grew into a normal little child, playing pickup soccer games with friends.

  Both children had to reckon with the strikingly different parenting habits of their mother and father. Donatella tended to take the kids to five-star hotels and restaurants. Once, when she took Allegra ice skating at the posh Swiss resort of St. Moritz, Donatella wore a black catsuit, a gold ski jacket, and diamond bracelets, and was trailed by several beefy bodyguards.24

  By contrast, Paul was a fun, down-to-earth parent, happy to play Mr. Mom. He had hankered for kids and used to dote on the children of Donatella’s girlfriends. He took the kids to the beach or bike riding or tooling around Lake Como in his boat. When the kids were old enough, they attended an elite British school in Milan, where about half the students were children of foreign parents. (Allegra and Daniel both grew up bilingual in English and Italian.) He was an enthusiastic leader of Daniel’s Boy Scout troop, happy to dress in the corny uniform of shorts and a yellow hat. He would pull up after school in his convertible to pick the kids up and take them for an ice cream, and he never missed Allegra’s dance recitals.

  “I remember how Allegra would light up when she saw her father in the audience,” said another parent. “She was this little girl in this pink tutu. That dance teacher was quite a tough cookie, but it was clear that Allegra was among the best girls there. She loved it.”

  However, as Gianni’s relationships with Santo and Donatella broke down, Allegra increasingly bore the weight of her uncle’s high expectations. Those expectations would come to burden her almost unbearably in the years ahead.

  While Gianni and Donatella reveled in their red-hot lifestyle and the rising notoriety of the Versace brand, Santo remained the grounded, paternal figure of the house, a mix of the down-to-earth parent who cleaned up after his offspring’s grandiose habits and the charismatic leader who goaded his team to beat the previous year’s sales figures. By the mid-1990s, as the Versace business grew, so did Santo’s stature. By then, nearing fifty, he began to look the part of the elder statesman, with his distinguished gray hair and impeccable dark suits with a matching mock turtleneck underneath. But while he was one of Italy’s best-known businessmen by then, Santo largely shunned the limelight except for the obligatory press interviews, happy to continue to play his life’s role as the family’s pragmatic fixer.

  At home, Santo’s personal life had none of the theater of his siblings’ lives. He and Cristiana sent their children, Francesca and Antonio, to Milan’s German-language school, believing the place would instill a Teutonic discipline in them. “If you can learn in German, everything else is easy,” he told friends. Even though he was now a bigwig in Italian business circles, he was happy to walk to work each day from the comfortable rental apartment near the company headquarters that he and his family moved into early in his marriage. Because it was far less grand than Gianni’s apartments in Via Gesù or Donatella’s sprawling home, he virtually never held Versace events there. Aside from a passion for sports, he had few hobbies, preferring to spend weekends and evenings in the office.

  Santo traveled constantly, monitoring the Versace shops. In the showroom in Milan, he ran his finger along the shelves to make sure they were immaculate. He was enormously popular with his staff—he was careful always to knock on a manager’s door before entering his office—even as he pushed them to work long hours. “He used to say, ‘Brava, you did a good job, but now I want you to do this and that,’” recalled one longtime manager. “I used to wonder if I was ever going to get a break. But he was so excited by what was happening that he just pulled you along with him.”

  One winter, during a visit to Beijing for the opening of a new boutique, Santo and his team went to visit the Great Wall. While there, Santo spotted two French tourists clad in Versace jeans. He excitedly approached the pair to compliment them on their outfits, and promptly invited them to Gianni’s next couture show back in Paris. Back in the office in Milan, he extended the paternalist role he played with his siblings to Versace employees. The staff, knowing he was a rabid sports fan, often asked him to
procure tickets for soccer matches at Milan’s giant San Siro Stadium. When employees brought their kids into the headquarters, he invited the children into his office, sitting them at a table near his desk so that they could draw.

  Santo’s exuberance and hyperkinetic energy waned little with age; he restlessly paced his office and spoke at such a rapid clip that guests had to strain to keep up with him. He had an extraordinary memory and grasp of even small details. Even as Gianni’s label soared and became a global name, Santo remained the go-to person for the flood of new projects—boutique openings, licensing agreements, expanding factory space—that came in. He worked harder than ever, often eating dinner in the office and staying at his desk until nearly midnight.

  During the first half of the 1990s, Santo embarked on a new strategy to ride Gianni’s hot image and take the house to a new level. At the time, a new middle-class hunger for luxury goods was growing, creating a huge market for designers who found ways to sell little slices of the dream they served up in ad campaigns and on the runway. Companies such as Gucci, Prada, and Louis Vuitton began making millions not on couture dresses and ten-thousand-dollar traveling trunks but on nylon bags, leather wallets, and perfumes that cost hundreds.

  Indeed, Santo knew that Gianni’s one-of-a-kind couture dresses didn’t make money. Couture in general had been losing millions for decades. (In 1993, Yves Saint Laurent’s couture line was losing more than $5 million a year.25) But it hardly mattered to him. Couture had become a marketing vehicle to sell oodles of less pricey items, including everyday clothes. Indeed, unlike many designers who remain trapped in an ivory tower of designing for a few fashion-forward women, Gianni enthusiastically supported Santo’s sales force. The day after a show, his team put together a large album of photos of the collection, and he tacked stickers on the outfits he wanted Santo’s salespeople to sell the most of, along with sales targets. To Santo’s delight, Gianni pushed his designers to update core items that always sold well—day suits, jackets, pants. His daywear was popular with women who wanted a more feminine uniform than Armani’s androgynous suits. He updated Chanel’s famous day suits by putting black leather straps down the front of a crisp white form-fitting wool suit. He made sure the pattern makers at the factory made them in sizes big enough to fit real women—up to a size twelve. “Loosen them up,” he urged them. “Make it bigger. Not all women are runway models.”26