by Deborah Ball
“Please, darling!” he replied. “Don’t worry. You look wonderful.” He then pulled out diamond-encrusted watches he had bought for Elton, Nora, and Princess Diana.
“What are you doing, Gianni?” Nora, who spoke no English, whispered to Gianni in dialect. “I don’t need these things!” Gianni, in high spirits, laughed.
That evening, Elton John held court during dinner, entertaining the guests with jokes and the latest London gossip. “Che bello!” (“How beautiful!”) Nora kept repeating, looking around the opulent room, understanding none of the dinner-table chatter. After the meal, everyone repaired to the living room for coffee, and the evening became more intimate and cozy. Diana sprawled on the floor with Elizabeth Hurley, confiding to the group her pain over the end of her marriage.
“How sad that such a sweet, beautiful woman like Diana feels so alone,” Gianni remarked to Antonio afterward, as they went to their rooms.
The next day, Gianni, Nora, and Antonio were being driven back to London. Gianni, sitting next to his aunt, was silent for a long time. He had been mulling something since his illness, and he’d finally come to a decision.
He turned to Nora and announced that he was changing his will and would be leaving everything to Allegra. The clashes with both his siblings—the fights with Santo about money, the arguments with Donatella about the collections—had eaten away at him over the previous year. He had come to see Allegra as the future of Gianni Versace. Certainly, there was no doubt that he adored the young girl. But the decision to leave his entire fortune—including control of his business—to a child was clearly born of a fit of pique, one he must have known would hurt his siblings terribly. It showed just how deep Gianni’s resentment of Donatella and Santo had become.
“What are you talking about, Gianni?” retorted Nora, clearly surprised. “Why would you leave everything to her? What about Santo?”
“Please! Santo has more money than I do!” Gianni snorted.
Two weeks later, in mid-September, Gianni went to his notary, unbeknownst to Donatella and Santo. Refusing the help of a lawyer, he sat before the notary and wrote out a two-page will in his own hand. When Gianni was done, the notary filed the document away for safekeeping. In one impulsive gesture, Gianni had changed the fate of his siblings and—most of all—the fate of his beloved niece forever, in ways that he couldn’t have possibly imagined.
Later that year, Gianni stumbled badly in his relationship with Diana. With Elton’s help, he convinced her to write the foreword to his latest coffee-table book, Rock and Royalty, with the promise that the proceeds would go to Elton’s AIDS foundation. But when Gianni sent her a copy of the finished book, she was shocked to discover Gianni had interspersed photos of nude models with images of British royalty, including a shot of her own wedding. In another spread, Gianni had outdone himself: He placed a portrait of the three Versace siblings, shot by Lord Snowdon, former husband of Princess Margaret and an official royal photographer, across from a formal shot of Diana with her sons.
An official at the royal palace called a horrified Diana to register the displeasure of her former in-laws. Despite her cool relations with Charles’s family, she was aghast at the idea of embarrassing them.
“Did you see what they did?” Diana lamented to a friend.
“Diana, you’re naïve,” he told her. “You know how Gianni is.”7
Diana pulled out of the London party Gianni was planning to launch the book. He was extremely upset, and immediately sent her three couture gowns as a peace gesture. To have had the princess, dressed in Versace, presenting a Versace book would have been a crowning achievement for him—and priceless publicity for his brand. After her withdrawal, he had little choice but to cancel the party. He was painfully aware that he had also caused a rift between Elton and Diana.
“I wrote her a stiff letter, and she wrote me a very stiff letter back,” Elton said later. “We both sulked. … I phoned her, but she wouldn’t take my calls.”8 The pair wouldn’t speak until they met again in Milan the following summer.
On Sunday, July 6, 1997, the Ritz was buzzing. Under bright blue skies, a red carpet ran like a ribbon from the curb to a set of blue double doors just to the right of the hotel’s grand main entrance, where two obelisks covered with roses sat like sentries. Red velvet ropes held back the crowd of gawkers and paparazzi who always turned up for Gianni’s shows to catch a glimpse of a star or a supermodel. The stars, having stopped for a last-minute fitting at the shop on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, entered the hotel through its back entrance. Versace public relations people guided guests to their chairs in the hotel’s pool area. The space held about 350 guests, but a few years earlier, Gianni’s list had grown so large that the Ritz, concerned about fire regulations, insisted he hold a second show.
That year, a new generation of red-hot designers such as John Galliano and Alexander McQueen threatened to overshadow Gianni with their wild creativity and onstage antics. The previous season, Gianni’s floaty bias-cut gowns seemed downright quaint compared to Galliano’s Masai collars and McQueen’s gilded bare breasts. Now, for the July show, the press was aflutter about what the British duo would come up with next.
During the preparation for the show, Donatella and Gianni had fought bitterly over the models, when Donatella pushed to use Karen Elson as the final model, the girl who wears the wedding dress. Gianni never liked her. “Why are you so pale?” he used to demand of Elson, in Italian. The British girl looked blankly at him. “Why don’t you go get some sun?”9
The night before the show, an odd incident occurred that would trouble Donatella later. She had invited Demi Moore to attend the show and threw a small dinner for her. Afterward, Moore insisted on reading Donatella’s tarot cards. The two women huddled over the deck as Moore turned over each card. As she laid each card out, she saw an unsettling pattern. “I see two brothers,” she told Donatella. “And I see death.” Donatella laughed off the reading at the time.10
The next day, when the lights went up on the runway, Donatella’s influence was clear. The girls wore Goth-type makeup on their pale faces, with fire-red lipstick and black eye shadow that extended up to the brow to create an angry, punched-out look. Wide black leather headbands pulled their hair from their faces. The music was ominous, switching between hard-driving house music and an eerie, chantlike dirge—none of the toe-tapping pop music of previous shows.
At twenty minutes, the show was half the length of those just five years earlier. About sixty of the eighty pieces were all black. It was Gianni’s take on minimalism, with sharp, aggressive tailoring and a brooding air. Day suits had big, almost pointy shoulders and were paired with black patent leather boots. Near the end, he sent out a series of swinging baby-doll dresses in sparkling fabric. Naomi, her hair held back with a silver headband, emerged to close the show as the bride, in a short metal-mesh dress covered in crosses. A giant veil bearing a huge single cross fell to her waist, and she casually dangled a bouquet of white flowers.
Donatella pouted backstage. While she had succeeded in convincing Gianni to use mostly new girls, she hated the collection itself, finding the big shoulders and Byzantine references mired in the early 1990s. Moreover, she had been arguing in favor of dropping Naomi, that archsymbol of Versace’s glamour-puss image, from Gianni’s shows altogether. At the couture show, Donatella felt the supermodel looked wildly out of place amid the wan, flat-chested girls.
Gianni, however, was thrilled, singing and humming in delight. Wearing black tails over a black polo shirt, he kissed each of the girls, giving even Karen Elson a desultory peck on the cheek. His face was covered with smudges of red lipstick, but he looked tired and careworn, with his three-day stubble and a rapidly retreating hairline. His health problems, the battles with his siblings, and the rising stress of managing his company had left him visibly aged. But despite that, Gianni was feeling stronger than he had in years, and reveled in the fact that he’d managed to regain both his health and control of his house.<
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After the show, Gianni and Donatella went to a private dinner with Demi Moore, Leonardo DiCaprio, and a few powerful editors and department store buyers. Ritz workers began dismantling the runway so that guests could use the pool the next morning. Much of his team, exhausted from the late nights and the stress of following Gianni, escaped, happy to crash in their hotel rooms. The next day, as usual, Gianni picked out several couture dresses to send to Diana, before going to the airport to catch the Concorde to New York—and from there to head to Miami.
thirteen
Murder
iT WAS A LITTLE AFTER 3 A.M. ON TUESDAY, JULY 15, 1997. Gianni was wide awake. Outside, the tail end of a storm blew away as late-night revelers made their way home from the restaurants and clubs in the heart of South Beach. Gianni was exhausted, weary from the Paris show, but he couldn’t sleep.1 After arriving in New York from Paris, he and Antonio had spent several days at Gianni’s new townhouse on Sixty-fourth Street near Fifth Avenue. While Gianni gave press interviews on the couture collection and met with Richard Avedon about a new coffee-table book they were working on together, Antonio went to the gym and saw friends. On Thursday evening, they had flown to Miami.
Gianni, now fifty, was looking forward to two weeks of rest at Casa Casuarina. After Miami, he and Antonio would join Elton John at his new villa outside of Nice, in the south of France. Gianni had been pressing Donatella to let him take Allegra to Miami with him, but she had refused. He’d spent the previous couple of days working in the morning and relaxing with friends in the afternoon. After a dinner of rice salad and fruit, Gianni went to the media room, a large salon where he usually worked, and faxed sketches and instructions for the fall collection to his headquarters in Milan.2 At 10 p.m., he was dozing in front of the TV. Antonio gently woke him.3
“Why don’t you go to bed?” he said. “You’re exhausted.” Gianni assented and headed upstairs to his bedroom. It would be the last time Antonio would see Gianni.
By 3:30 a.m., Gianni had risen from his ultra-king-sized mahogany bed. On his nightstand was the June edition of Vanity Fair, carrying the long profile on Donatella. Gianni went downstairs to the media room to make calls to his office in Milan, where it was already 9 a.m. He spoke with Franco Lussana, a longtime friend who was in charge of sourcing fabrics for Gianni’s clothes. Gianni asked him to find a type of jersey that he had in mind for his next collection. After about twenty minutes on the phone, he padded back upstairs to his bedroom for a few more hours’ sleep.
But at 6 a.m., he was awake again. With the first light, he saw that it would be a hot, clear day, a welcome break from the overcast weather they’d had since arriving in Miami. He called Milan again to check that Lussana had found the fabric he was looking for.
“I haven’t had time,” Lussana told Gianni. “I’m running to get a flight to Rome. Donatella wants me to help with the show tonight.”4
Gianni exploded. “Why are you bothering with that?” he said. “Why are you wasting time in Rome? My sister always has to be the princess!”
He immediately called Donatella, grilling her about the Rome show. He made some other calls and then phoned his sister again around 8:15 a.m. This time, Donatella didn’t take the call. Gianni pulled on gray-and-white-checked shorts, a black T-shirt, and black Versace sport sandals, and grabbed his wallet, which held nearly $1,200 in cash as well as a yellowed picture of the Virgin of Medjugorje, and the large key to the tall wrought-iron front gates to the mansion.5 The blind eye of a security camera that had never been turned on watched him as he stepped out onto Ocean Drive. Carlos, his groundskeeper, was coming back with the morning newspapers.
“Good morning, Mr. Versace,” said Carlos, dressed in black shorts and a black shirt with buttons bearing the medusa logo. “I have the newspapers here. Do you want me to go get you something?”
“No, that’s all right,” Gianni replied. “I’ll go myself. I’ll be back in two minutes.”6
Gianni walked south on Ocean Drive, its western side dotted with cafés and open-air restaurants, its seaward side a boardwalk with a grassy park that runs parallel to the beach. It was nearly deserted at that hour, as clubbers slept off the excesses of the night before. Gianni headed for the News Café. The News Café, open twenty-four hours a day, was a fixture on South Beach, its leafy sidewalk patio a popular spot from which to watch South Beach’s beau monde skate by. Club kids and club kittens would meet there to plan a night out at the clubs, and circle back in the wee hours for a nightcap. Around dawn, the manager switched off the blaring rock music and put on softer pop for the early morning coffee-and-newspaper crowd. When he was in South Beach, Gianni stopped by nearly every morning to browse through the scores of American and international newspapers and magazines sold there.
When Gianni arrived, a handful of early birds were lingering over their breakfast. He bought a coffee and perused the racks of magazines. He quickly chose five: a New Yorker magazine with a cover article on gays working at Chrysler, a People magazine featuring Ivana Trump’s divorce, and the latest editions of Vogue, Entertainment Weekly, and the Spanish-language Newsweek. The clerk slipped them into a brown paper bag. At 8:40 a.m., Gianni thanked her and headed back to the mansion.
Andrew Cunanan watched as Gianni made his way down Ocean Drive. Wearing dark knee-length shorts, a loose gray tank top that hung past his waist, and a black baseball hat pulled low on his face, he sat on a grassy rise on the boardwalk, just opposite Casa Casuarina. The area was virtually deserted except for two homeless men sleeping nearby. Cunanan, likely having monitored the Versace mansion, knew that Gianni typically took an early morning walk to buy newspapers alone.
The twenty-seven-year-old had arrived in South Beach on May 12, 1997, and checked into the Normandy Plaza Hotel, a thirty-six-dollars-a-night hotel on the wrong end of Miami Beach, at Collins Avenue and Sixty-ninth Street, four miles north of Casa Casuarina. It was a garish place with a hot-pink exterior, purple trim, and a sign out front advertising “Weekly Rates.” Cunanan gave a false name—Kurt De Mars—and a fictitious home address in Paris. For two months, he had spent his days in a tiny room that contained a small television and a linoleum kitchenette, which he kept neat and tidy. He paid cash, and never bothered to have the phone turned on. He wouldn’t be receiving any calls or visitors.
He had whiled away the days in his room, reading books such as How the Irish Saved Civilization and thick tomes on art history, and flipping through gay porn magazines such as Ram, Urge, Hard, and XXX Showcase.7 He had also bought the June issue of Vanity Fair.8 He declined the staff’s offers of room service, venturing out instead for food at Miami Subs or McDonald’s. Each night at about 10 p.m., Cunanan hit the gay clubs, including the Warsaw Ballroom, Gianni’s favorite haunt, and would stay out until dawn.9
By early July, after two months in Miami Beach, Cunanan was running out of money. A week earlier, he had gone to the Casa de Oro Pawn Shop near the Normandy to pawn a $50 U.S. eagle gold coin. He showed the clerk his passport—with his real name—as identification and gave the Normandy as his address. The clerk handed him $190 in cash.
“You have three months to get the coin back,” the clerk told Cunanan.
“Don’t worry,” Cunanan replied. “I’ll be back before then.”10
That weekend, Cunanan skipped out on his room at the Normandy. He would spend the next few days living out of a red pickup truck parked a few blocks from Gianni’s home. On Friday evening, he went to Twist, a popular gay club that sat a couple of blocks west of Casa Casuarina. There, a bartender took note of Cunanan when he ordered only a glass of water and then bummed a cigarette—classic signs of a hustler or a prostitute.11 After a while, Cunanan struck up a conversation with a young guy named Brad.
“What do you do for a living?” Brad asked.
“I’m a serial killer,” Cunanan replied. When Brad gave him a strange look, Cunanan laughed, saying he was really in investment banking. Later when the two were dancing, Cunanan kept grabbing and rub
bing up against Brad. The pair kissed, but then Cunanan broke away and disappeared into the crowd.12
On Tuesday morning, as the sun grew stronger and burned off the early morning haze, Cunanan waited patiently in front of Casa Casuarina, clutching a black backpack by his side. After he spotted Gianni on the other side of Ocean Drive, approaching the mansion, he got up suddenly, startling a man walking his dog, and pulled a. 40-caliber Taurus handgun out of his backpack, holding it tightly by his right hip. He crossed the street quickly, keeping slightly behind Gianni so that he wouldn’t be noticed. Gianni paused briefly to smile at a blond woman nearby who had clearly recognized him. As Gianni slipped his key into the lock on the iron gates, Cunanan climbed the five smooth marble steps behind him. His raised the gun, stretching his arm out taut until the tip of the barrel just about touched the back of Gianni’s head.13
Andrew Cunanan grew up in Rancho Bernardo, California, a suburban community north of San Diego, the youngest of four children. His mother, MaryAnn, an intensely religious woman, stayed at home to raise Andrew and his siblings, while his father, Modesto Cunanan, a Philippine-born U.S. Navy veteran, worked as a stockbroker. Cunanan was a precocious, gifted child whose parents scrimped to send him to an elite prep school. As a teenager, Cunanan discovered that he was gay and came to terms with it without much evident angst. He developed a flamboyant personality, once turning up at a school event in a red leather jumpsuit, reportedly a gift from a much older man. He relished being the center of attention, tossing off witticisms and flattering friends. In 1987, his graduating high school class voted him “Least Likely to Be Forgotten.” His yearbook quote was “Apres nous le deluge” (“After us, the flood”).14
Cunanan enrolled in college in San Diego, but he grew bored and dropped out after his freshman year. He decided to follow his father to the Philippines, where Modesto had fled to escape allegations of embezzlement. But once he arrived there, Cunanan found his father living in squalid conditions. Disgusted, he immediately returned home. In separation papers filed soon afterward, MaryAnn Cunanan claimed Modesto had left the family destitute and homeless. In the early 1990s, Cunanan drifted to San Francisco and developed various smooth-talking personae that obscured his modest background. By his midtwenties, Cunanan had developed very expensive tastes, sporting luxury watches, Ferragamo shoes, and Armani suits. During one visit to Los Angeles, he spent nearly three thousand dollars to stay a few nights at the Chateau Marmont, a luxury hotel in West Hollywood frequented by celebrities. He carried around a thick wad of cash with him. He would eat only in the best restaurants, often treating friends to lavish sushi or French dinners that would cost more than a thousand dollars, including a generous tip. Once, at dinner with a group of friends, the waiter brought him a wine list and he waved him away, saying, “Just bring me the most expensive bottle you have.”15 In 1996, Cunanan had taken a long trip to Europe, staying in a string of luxury hotels, such as the Grand Hotel in Florence and the Gritti Palace Venice. He also made a stop in Milan, and while there is no evidence he encountered Gianni Versace there, he seemed the kind of man who would frequent the Versace shops worldwide.
