by Deborah Ball
In Italy, Donatella and Santo stayed in constant phone contact with police in Miami most of the night, receiving updates on the raid on the houseboat. At 5 a.m. in Miami—11 a.m. in Italy—the police finally told them that a fingerprint analysis proved that the dead body on the boat was that of their brother’s killer. The hunt was over.
But Cunanan’s death did little to quash the increasingly wild rumors as to the true circumstances of Gianni’s murder. The dead dove found next to Gianni was taken as a signature of a mafia hit, reviving talk that the Versaces had connections to Calabrian organized crime families. (An autopsy of the bird showed that it had indeed died after a fragment of one of the bullets that hit Gianni ricocheted off the mansion’s iron gates and struck it in the head.) To Donatella and Santo’s horror, the mafia stories were quickly gaining currency.
“Maybe this assassination will shed some light on Mr. Versace’s business,” Pierre Bergé, Yves Saint Laurent’s business partner, remarked to journalists just hours after the murder. “I have never understood how there could be so many empty [Versace] stores. Perhaps this event will lift a part of the mystery. In a way I am not surprised.”27
Santo was furious at Bergé’s remarks. Then, within days of the murder, Frank Monte, an Australian private investigator, went to the press with an extraordinary claim: In a furtive predawn meeting the year before in Central Park, Gianni had hired him for protection against mafia threats. To prove it, Monte brandished a note from Gianni on Versace corporate letterhead.
Monte claimed that Gianni feared for his life because a former Versace employee—known in the underworld as Guglielmo Gattorini or Johnny the Cat—had stolen company books showing the family was laundering money for the Calabrian mafia, and he was trying to extort money from Gianni for their return. Monte’s claims were near-comical. He later went so far as to allege that Gianni’s siblings might have been involved with the murder and that Cunanan had actually been killed before Gianni, his body frozen and then moved to the houseboat in an elaborate ruse. Despite the outrageousness of his story, the media—hungry for a new angle in the Miami murder—leaped on it. Monte soon had book and film deals.
Later, conspiracy theorists would declare as suspect the family’s rush to cremate Gianni’s body and their successful appeal to have the state of Florida seal Gianni’s autopsy—reviving the question as to whether Gianni had been HIV-positive. When in a book on Cunanan, Orth quoted a Miami Beach police officer as claiming that the autopsy showed Gianni to be HIV-positive, the family released a letter from Gianni’s doctor in Milan denying it.28 Antonio D’Amico also denied that Gianni had the virus. (Cunanan’s autopsy revealed that he was actually HIV-negative, bursting the theory that he killed Gianni because the designer had infected him.)
But it was a series of shady characters associated with the houseboat that most troubled investigators. Inside the boat they had found a fake driver’s license and passport from Sealand, a tiny island off the coast of Britain. Both were in the name of Matthias Ruehl. The police then discovered that Reineck was wanted in Germany for tax fraud. A few days after Cunanan’s death, Reineck told authorities that he wasn’t, in fact, the owner of the houseboat, claiming he’d sold it to Ruehl in early June. Authorities became suspicious and began looking in to the two Germans, but before they could discover much, both Reineck and Ruehl fled to Germany.
In early August, an Italian named Enrico Forti came to the Miami Beach police claiming he was in fact the real owner of the houseboat and producing papers to prove it. Around the same time, FBI officers in Las Vegas received vague reports that Cunanan had frequented the gay bathhouse Reineck owned there, but they never fully substantiated the connection. Soon afterward, Forti was arrested and later convicted in the murder of a wealthy hotelier in Spain. As they dug further, some of the investigators on the case came to suspect that Cunanan had known of the existence of the houseboat through some connection with Forti, Reineck, or Ruehl.
But they were never able to connect Cunanan to Gianni or to the putative owners of the houseboat, despite more than a thousand interviews conducted during their investigation of Cunanan’s crimes. Burned by criticism of their Keystone Kops—like chase for Cunanan, both the FBI and local police were determined to close the case. When the final report came out in December 1997, it concluded that Cunanan’s murder of Gianni was the desperate final act of an unbalanced man. The police found no evidence of a connection to organized crime. In January 1998, the city of Miami Beach ordered the houseboat demolished, happy to be rid of what had become a macabre tourist attraction.
Over the next several years, the Versace family would spend 2.2 billion lire (more than $1 million) in lawyers’ fees to convince a court to quash the book by Monte, the alleged private investigator. (The film—low-budget and little-noticed—was later made.) They also successfully sued at least one major UK newspaper that repeated the claims of mafia connections. But such verdicts were small victories for Santo and Donatella despite a massive police investigation that put to rest the allegations. Though the rumors were unfounded, they could never entirely erase the taint of alleged organized crime connections from the Versace image no matter how many high-priced lawyers they hired.
Given the lack of apparent motive, pop criminal psychologists have long speculated about why Cunanan targeted Gianni. Some claimed he was motivated by a desire to finally become famous, driven by a deranged narcissism that had been building since the first murder in April. After killing three more people, perhaps Cunanan knew he was trapped and decided to go out in a blaze of glory, taking with him a man whom he both idolized and loathed. By the time the caretaker arrived at the door of the blue houseboat, Cunanan had only four bullets left in his gun and must have known from news reports that Miami was swarming with police searching for him. He had little chance at escape.
But in the end, Santo and Donatella would never have the closure of knowing exactly why Cunanan had targeted their brother. Gianni’s killer would take the motivation for the murder to his grave.
fourteen
Understudy on the Stage
aS THE LAST ORGAN PEALS OF THE MEMORIAL SERVICE FADED and the final fashion luminaries and celebrities left the Duomo di Milano to head for the airport, the enormity of their loss washed over Donatella and Santo like a cold wave. Their adult lives had been built around their brother, defined entirely by his talent, fame, and ambition. Ironically, Gianni, Donatella, and Santo had always avoided flying in airplanes together in the belief that the company would be lost if deprived of the trio. But the truth was that Gianni was the only one who counted. His was the last word in family disputes; his opinion was the one that trumped all others in big decisions. The fierce family ties that bound the three actually relied on the force of his outsized personality, with Donatella and Santo dutifully playing the supporting roles assigned them. The company, in turn, was little more than an extension of their family dynamic.
Gianni’s sudden absence left a chasm that would quickly overwhelm his siblings, still reeling from the pain and shock of their brother’s violent death. Santo immediately grasped the gravity of Gianni’s loss, both for the family’s integrity and the company’s fortunes. But the ever-capable elder brother who took care of everything was now facing a problem that even he couldn’t fix.
For Donatella, Gianni’s death meant a brutal end to an extended adolescence. In the last years of Gianni’s life, she’d been agitating for her brother to treat her as an equal instead of like a spoiled kid sister or blithe company mascot. Little did she realize how much Gianni’s personality and talent had shielded her from her own personal defects and demons. As the world’s attention fell on her in the wake of Gianni’s death, Donatella felt like an actress in a film, forced to play the role of the dignified, responsible adult, even as she felt utterly alone and lost.
In the midst of mourning Gianni, Donatella and Santo had to quickly show Versace employees, retailers, and rivals that they were in control of their brother’s compa
ny. In the days between Gianni’s death and the Mass at the Duomo, Santo and Donatella briefly considered hiring an outside designer to replace their brother; they even drew up a short list of names that included Karl Lagerfeld. Very quickly, however, they agreed that Donatella would step into Gianni’s shoes. But even as Versace’s spokeswoman drafted the communiqué announcing the decision, Donatella felt like a fraud.
Donatella realized the immensity of her task the very night of the memorial service. After the Mass, she retreated to her office in Via Gesù with Julie Mannion, an executive at Keeble Cavaco & Duka, Inc., a prominent New York PR firm that for years helped stage the Versace runway shows. Mannion, a veteran who worked with a slate of top houses, helped write out a calendar for each of Versace’s upcoming collections, from the purchase of the fabrics to the ordering of final runway samples.
The calendars drove home to Donatella just how much Gianni had done, even during his illness. A classic control freak, Gianni had checked every press release, every licensed product, and every order for new fabric. Other fashion companies might have split responsibilities into clear divisions and departments, but Gianni had still tried to run Versace as a scrappy one-man show. He liked having a small, tightly knit design team who could come up with shopwindows one day and a new skirt the next. He was the one to decide which ad images to run in the United States or France to coincide with the delivery of a dress or suit he wanted to push that season. He had carried so many details around in his head that his sudden absence created a thousand loose ends Donatella had to tie together—and quickly.
To manage everything, she needed a far larger group than Gianni had relied on. Together she and Mannion made plans to assemble separate teams for the couture, men’s, and women’s lines, as well as for Versus and the other brands. She shied away from using her brother’s designers, perhaps aware that she could never live up to Gianni in their minds, and branded them passé and out of touch. “We need young blood here!” she told an assistant. “I want to work with young people, not all these old fogies.” Many of Gianni’s assistants, already grieving for their charismatic boss and indeed doubtful of his sister’s abilities, were hurt and stung by her words.
Soon after the funeral, Donatella, Paul, and their children fled the ongoing media barrage and flew to Necker Island, the seventy-four-acre private island in the British Virgin Islands owned by UK magnate Richard Branson. The island, which accommodated only twenty-four people at a time at a cost of at least twelve thousand dollars per day, was a popular hideaway among the Versaces’ celebrity friends, including Sting and Princess Diana. Guests slept in Indonesian-style bedrooms under white canopies of mosquito netting. (Meanwhile, Santo retreated with his family to an island in Greece.)
But the sybaritic setting offered Donatella little rest. Throughout the month, Donatella fielded résumés of design candidates and conducted phone interviews. The next runway show, the spring-summer collection, was scheduled for October 9, 1997. Before leaving for Miami, Gianni had worked up some rough sketches and ordered the fabrics—he was going to revisit the Prince of Wales fabrics he’d revolutionized in the 1980s—but most of the collection still had to be completed. Donatella had to have her team in place by the end of August if she hoped to have the collection finished in time for the show.
With a free hand, Donatella could now push Versace in the direction she had fruitlessly championed in battles with Gianni, starting with the hiring of a new team. She filled the atelier with young foreign designers fresh out of such prestigious fashion schools as Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. These edgy young Brits and Americans, many in their early twenties, venerated the now-reigning minimalist look: Prada’s prim dresses, the eccentric clothes by new Belgian designers such as Olivier Theyskens, and the sharply tailored, ultraslim men’s suits by Dior’s new designer Hedi Slimane. For them, Gianni’s designs looked baroque. Very few of them had ever worn his clothes.
Donatella then drafted stylists who were the leading champions of the minimalist wave, ones who had helped stage Prada’s and Jil Sander’s runway shows and had set the same tone in the ad campaigns and editorial shoots they put together for influential magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. She summoned the group to Milan to start work the last Saturday of August. Some of her new assistants turned up in the atelier in the slouchy fashion uniform of the moment—cargo pants, tennis shoes, and quirky T-shirts. Donatella had hired them to co-opt their funky design sense, but she drew a line on their wardrobe choices. “You can’t dress like that here!” she barked at one startled new hire. “Go down to Prada or wherever you want, but get some proper clothes. Don’t come back if you’re not in heels.”
Early that Sunday, Donatella and her new designers arrived in the office to the news that Princess Diana had died during the night in a grisly car crash in Paris, as she was being chased by a pack of paparazzi. The group spent the day huddled around the television watching updates from France and the United Kingdom. On stands in the atelier lay the couture dresses that Gianni had put aside for Diana just six weeks earlier. Versace seamstresses had been applying the finishing touches in order to send them to the princess after her summer holiday. Donatella, badly shaken by the news, faxed Prince Charles a personal note of condolence and made plans to fly to London for the funeral the next weekend. Gianni and Diana, two of the early masters—and targets—of the new media age, had died just weeks apart; the voracious interest in their deaths marked a turning point in the sort of nonstop tabloid television coverage that would soon become routine.
As soon as Donatella’s new group got back to work, the first problems emerged. She and a prominent stylist she had hired were scanning a large board that held stapled swatches of the Prince of Wales fabric that Gianni had chosen. The British stylist twisted his face at Gianni’s choice. “How sad!” he commented wryly. He then took a pair of scissors and began slashing at a sample dress to create a frayed, edgy look.
“But Gianni’s woman is a sexy woman!” Donatella protested. Members of Gianni’s old team, aghast at the stylist’s work, watched as the two debated intensely in English. Later, when one of them cautiously questioned Donatella about whether to follow the stylist’s direction, she said, “Just go ahead and let him do this for the time being. I’ll fix it later.”
But it was already clear that Donatella was wholly unprepared to step into the role of leader of a badly shaken company. In her brother’s house, she had always played the role of the friend, the carefree muse, the accessorizer, the office confidante. Now she had to become the boss, commanding respect and exuding confidence in her decisions. She was painfully aware that everyone—her brother’s loyalists inside the company, the fashion world, Versace’s competitors—was watching her, skeptical that the kid sister could step into her brother’s shoes. At meetings with her designers in the atelier, she looked like a tiny, frightened bird. She spoke in a quiet voice that her team struggled to hear and was so nervous that she trembled at times. Some members of her team had to resist the urge to scoop her up in a hug to comfort her. “She was like a little baby,” recalled one longtime associate. “You just wanted to hug her right there.”1
She struggled to remember what her brother had taught her during his illness, but she was too overwhelmed to think straight. Moreover, she felt trapped. If she fell back on Gianni’s well-worn themes, critics would blast her for resting on her brother’s laurels. Her instinct told her to strike out in a new modern path that would set her apart from Gianni, but she lacked a clear, compelling vision, and if she strayed too far from the classic Gianni look, those same critics would blast her for denying her brother’s legacy. She had excelled as a brilliant sounding board and editor for her brother’s ideas, but she lacked the creativity and ingenuity to conjure up her own ideas from scratch.
As the weeks before her first solo show slipped by, Donatella’s moods varied wildly. Some days she was calm and determined to master her new role, cutting through the myriad de
cisions before her as if felling a line of trees. Other days, she sobbed in the atelier in full view of her staff. In the weeks after Gianni’s death, she’d grown even thinner and her face was drawn and tired.
“At least Gianni had me to help him,” she lamented often. “But who do I have? I don’t have anyone!”
While struggling to gain control of the atelier, Donatella received another serious blow—this one from her late brother. In early September, Luciano Severini, the notary who had drawn up Gianni’s will just a year before, sent letters to Donatella, Santo, and Antonio convening them to his offices near the Duomo. Along with Paul, the trio settled into their seats opposite Severini’s imposing desk. He pulled a brief, handwritten document from a file and began to slowly read it out loud.
“On this date, September 16, 1996, I, Gianni Versace, revoke my last will dated May 11, 1990. I hereby name my niece Allegra my sole heir. I leave to Antonio D’Amico a payment of 50 million lire each month, to be adjusted by inflation after my death. I also leave to Antonio D’Amico the right to live in any of my properties: Via Gesù 12 in Milan, Miami, New York and the house in Via Porta Nuova in Milan, currently owned by Gianni Versace SpA. I leave my art collection to my nephew Daniel Paul Beck.”
When the notary finished reading the brief document, a stunned silence hung in the air. Each of the four looked at one another in shock, struggling for a moment to digest the significance of what Gianni had done. Donatella’s eyes bulged as she speechlessly turned to Paul. Next to her Santo was slack-jawed, fighting for a moment to regain his composure.
