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

by Deborah Ball

  The crop of new models that Donatella and other designers venerated were hauntingly thin, far skinnier than the likes of Naomi Campbell or Cindy Crawford. Gianni’s supermodels were undoubtedly lean, but they had breasts and bottoms that gave them a healthy, womanly look. The minimalist wave ushered in a new type of girl—beanpole thin, flat-chested, and hollow-cheeked. By the mid-1990s, newly open countries in the former Soviet bloc became the biggest suppliers of these wraiths. Girls from countries such as Ukraine, Poland, and Lithuania were often so desperate to escape poverty that they were willing to starve themselves to achieve the rickety frames that designers in Milan, Paris, and New York sought.

  While experts are still debating the exact causes of anorexia, they have a rough idea of patterns that contribute to the disease. In retrospect, Allegra was a classic case, even if she was somewhat younger than the norm. Anorexics often set themselves standards that are impossible to achieve, leaving them with a sense of constant inadequacy. Moreover, Allegra was raised among the most beautiful women in the world, establishing in her mind an impossible physical standard for a sensitive preteen girl.

  Then, Gianni’s death—along with the news of her inheritance—arrived just as Allegra was on the brink of puberty, a delicate moment for any young girl. Anorexia is considered a disease of control. The enormous stress the family came under after Gianni’s murder could easily have triggered in Allegra a search for a way to exert control over a situation that must have felt overwhelming. The amount of time and energy an anorexic devotes to food and weight loss can crowd out other emotions, providing a protective barrier against the sort of external problems that Allegra was then facing.

  So when Christmas arrived, Donatella was feeling desperate. Her daughter was alarmingly ill, her marriage was falling apart, and she was struggling in the atelier. She had rallied for that first show in October, but the prospect of carrying the burden season after season was overwhelming. Fashion critics had been gentle with her debut collection, but she knew she was coming up short. Her new hires hadn’t gelled into an effective team with a clear, winning style. She had to create a men’s collection for the first time ever (when Gianni was alive, she had taken little interest in menswear). In December, she decided to cancel the haute couture show in January, marking Versace’s first absence from the Paris calendar since Gianni launched the collection in 1990. Over the Christmas holidays, the first without Gianni, Donatella felt so low that she considered quitting it all. But the idea of failing Gianni haunted her too much. She decided to stick it out.

  During the preparations for the October show, Antonio D’Amico understood that his days at Gianni’s company were numbered. In August, he had retreated with Elton John and his boyfriend, David Furnish, to the star’s sprawling home in the south of France, where they grieved together for Gianni. Elton and David would be Antonio’s main source of support over the years as he recovered from his loss. Elton called Antonio frequently—as many as three times a day—gave him a cocker spaniel puppy to keep him company, and invited him for holidays, birthdays, and concerts.

  Returning to Via Gesù, Antonio soon became persona non grata. He was still responsible for putting together the house’s Istante collection, a lower-priced variant on Versace’s signature line, and that September, he started work on Istante’s October presentation. His team worked in close quarters with Donatella and her group, but she ignored Antonio entirely. With Gianni gone, she had no need to keep up the pretense of civility.

  “Donatella completely erased me from the picture,” Antonio said later. “I tried to speak with her to explain what I was doing with Istante, but she just ignored me.”2

  Gianni’s wish that Antonio have use of the palazzo in Via Gesù, the townhouse in New York, and the villa in Miami also proved to be an enormous point of tension. Donatella wouldn’t countenance the idea of finding Antonio in the Versace homes. Santo was more civil with Antonio that fall, but he, too, found the continued presence of his brother’s boyfriend uncomfortable.

  “You’ve become a source of embarrassment for the family,” Antonio’s lawyer told him after meeting with Versace legal advisers one day. Antonio was a daily reminder of Gianni’s death, and some friends felt Santo and Donatella held him responsible in some way for letting their brother expose himself to danger in Miami.

  Moreover, Gianni’s ham-handed plan to see that Antonio was taken care of began falling apart as soon as the will was read. Gianni, having scribbled out his will without the benefit of legal advice, hadn’t considered the fact that the houses were the property of the company. As a result, his edict giving Antonio use of the houses had no legal standing. The company—along with the houses—now belonged to Donatella, Santo, and Allegra.

  The fact that gay partnerships were not legally recognized in Italy meant that Antonio had no spousal claim to Gianni’s estate. As a result, the moment that Gianni died, Antonio was just another Versace employee, one for whom Gianni had provided in his will. Antonio’s lawyers advised him to reach a settlement with the family to end his employment at the house and vacate the large apartment he’d shared with Gianni in Via Gesù. In January 1998, the lawyers for both sides came to an agreement whereby Antonio received a lump-sum payment as well as a company-owned apartment elsewhere in Milan.

  At the end of that month, Antonio was escorted out of the atelier by a Versace security guard, without a word from Santo or Donatella.3 He asked the family to return some personal items, such as several watches, that Gianni had given him over the years, but they refused.4 Later, when he tried to enter the villa on Lake Como to pay his respects to Gianni’s ashes, which were interred in a grotto there, security guards chased him away.

  After her debut show, Donatella had little time to catch her breath. Although months had passed since Gianni’s sensational death, the public’s fascination with the Versace family—in particular Donatella—hardly waned. The Metropolitan Museum, riding the wave of interest in Gianni’s work, decided to dedicate the annual grand gala its Costume Institute held each December to Versace. The event was a high-water mark in the social tide of Manhattan’s swanky set, drawing a mix of New York socialites, corporate grandees, and celebrities, all pimped out in Oscar-worthy couture. The $2,000 tickets to the bash sold out just days after the Met put them on sale in September, raising an easy $2.3 million.

  That evening, nearly thirty thousand twinkling blue and violet lights adorned a giant tree in the center of the museum’s Great Hall. Centerpieces made of huge bunches of pink peonies sat on tables draped with tablecloths edged in chain mail, a homage to one of Gianni’s great design innovations. Sting staged a miniconcert before an audience that included New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, the photographer David LaChapelle, and actresses Gwyneth Paltrow and Salma Hayek.

  After the gala, Donatella gathered with Kate Moss, Marianne Faithfull, Cher, and other friends at Gianni’s townhouse. The group was sipping champagne in one of the mansion’s grand salons when Kate decided they should stage a sort of Irish wake, each guest singing a tribute to Gianni. Marianne Faithfull went first, warbling an old Irish folk song. When she finished, Kate prodded Cher to go next.

  Cher stood up. Despite a lifetime of notorious plastic surgery, the singer looked mesmerizing, her long, slim figure sheathed in a leather Versace evening gown. She took a breath and began to sing “Danny Boy,” the somber ballad that is often sung at Irish funerals, in a ringing, poignant voice. By the time she had finished, the entire group, including Donatella, was sobbing.5

  For Santo, the months after Gianni’s death were no less painful than they were for his sister. The shock of his younger brother’s death subsided little even as the autumn wore on. He returned from the August holidays a changed man, his tailored Versace suits and lightweight turtleneck sweaters hanging looser on his frame. He looked drawn and tired, suddenly older than his fifty-two years. He struggled to find a way to come to terms with Gianni’s death, but he felt overwhelmed by the grief and pain. Santo kne
w that the shaken company needed his leadership more than it ever had before—thanks not only to the murder of its founder and creative source but also because radical changes in the fashion business threatened to overwhelm the company. But he couldn’t seem to find his old energy or enthusiasm.

  For two decades, Santo had been an energizing force in the Versace headquarters. Like his brother, Santo used to roam into his associates’ offices, cheerfully dropping new projects onto their desks or offering words of praise. During the selling season, he swept through the showroom, turning on the Italian charm with buyers from the big American department stores and owners of Versace franchise shops from Europe and Asia.

  After Gianni’s death, he continued to put in long days, arriving well before much of his team in the morning, offering what support he could to grief-stricken and unnerved Versace employees. “Corraggio! Everything will be fine,” he told them often. “We just have to keep on working.” But his heart wasn’t in it. He appeared distant during meetings and struggled to focus on his work, his usual charisma and high energy drained away. He smiled little and was uncharacteristically withdrawn with even his closest colleagues. A chronic back problem flared up more often now. He delegated more and more work to other Versace executives, asking them to make the trips for store openings and business meetings that he had always handled personally.

  Worse still, Santo’s relationship with his sister was shifting ominously—thanks in part to Gianni’s stinging decision to exclude Santo’s children and elevate Donatella’s daughter as the company’s heir. In public, he put on a brave face about the inheritance. “I have much more than I’ll ever need,” he told journalists. “Besides, Allegra was like a daughter to Gianni—even though he loved his other niece and nephews very much.” But privately, the will opened a wound in Donatella and Santo’s relationship that would fester steadily for years, eventually threatening to consume both the family and the company.

  Santo and Donatella had each been devoted to Gianni, but without him their own rapport was far more tenuous. In the past, if either Santo or Donatella had an issue with the other, each turned to Gianni. Gianni had been able to relate to each of his siblings in different ways. He and his sister shared an extravagant, Technicolor view of life; driving ambition and a prodigious capacity for work united Gianni with his older brother. But Santo and Donatella had little to bring them together. Their ten-year age difference created a sort of generation gap. Santo was more homey, even provincial, in his outlook and personal habits. He kept a strong attachment to Calabria, disdained the limelight, and spoke only Italian, given that his attempts to learn English had been largely a bust. He liked to come to the office by foot each morning, often after walking his children to school and chatting with the other parents on his way from the spacious but hardly grand apartment he and Cristiana had shared for years. He remembered the names of the café owners and shopkeepers he frequented. He relished his role as the provider for his family, diligently socking away the dividends and salary he’d earned at the company over the decades. His children, Antonio and Francesca, venerated their father in true southern Italian style; he, in turn, adored them. When they became teenagers and received cell phones, he would speak with them several times a day.

  If Santo lived in a sober world of black and white, Donatella’s life was incandescent. She felt more at home in Manhattan than Milan and virtually never set foot in Reggio. She spoke English at home with Paul and with her celebrity friends. And as her brother’s fame had grown, so did her streak of megalomania. Her personal car and driver ferried her and her family for even the shortest of distances. She burned through her dividends and salary at a stunning rate, spending huge amounts on hairdressers, clothes, and furnishings for her lavish apartment. But she was also the most generous of the three siblings to close friends and employees.

  After the shock of the will had worn off, Donatella found herself privately satisfied by Gianni’s decision. Gianni had left nothing to Donatella, believing that he was safeguarding his company by bequeathing his 50 percent stake to his niece. Instead, he had unwittingly handed over control to his little sister. For another seven years—until Allegra turned eighteen—Donatella would control her daughter’s share in the company. With Allegra’s 50 percent stake and her own 20 percent share, she could easily outvote Santo at shareholder meetings. Hers would be the last word on management appointments, the company’s strategy, and investment decisions. Santo, with just a 30 percent share, had gone from being the authoritative eldest brother to his kid sister’s minion.

  Meanwhile, Gianni’s decision to leave his art collection to Daniel was later quashed in court. The art collection had been bought by the company, not by Gianni personally, and since it was not part of his own estate, Gianni couldn’t bequeath it to his nephew. Instead, the works of art went to Santo, Donatella, and Allegra as the three principals of the Versace company. Daniel inherited nothing in the end.

  In the immediate aftermath of the murder, Donatella and Santo had put up a united public front against media inquiries into their family and their company. In interviews, Donatella was careful to emphasize that all decisions would be made in concert with Santo. The siblings initially pulled together in their grief, partly because they felt besieged by the media barrage and relentless speculation swirling around Gianni’s death. Within hours after Gianni’s murder, a large U.S. publishing house announced a deal for a racy book on Versace to be written by a freelance journalist who had barely met Gianni. (The book was later canceled.) Reporters in Europe and the United States continued to propagate Frank Monte’s spurious claims about a connection between Gianni and the Calabrian mafia. Santo was especially furious with the media reports. “These people aren’t professionals!” he told friends. “They don’t deserve to clean toilets, much less work as reporters!” Donatella, equally upset, backed Santo in deciding to sue some publications that repeated the mafia claims.

  In turn, Santo extolled his sister to friends and Versace executives, singing her praises as a designer worthy of stepping into Gianni’s shoes. His cheerleading sprang in part from wishful thinking, knowing that the company’s fate was entirely in Donatella’s hands. More important, it grew from Santo’s unshakable belief that, in true southern Italian style, the family was sacred, never more so than when under attack. The memories of his fights with his brother over money—in particular the bitter arguments that drove Gianni to change his will—were painfully fresh in Santo’s mind. “If I had ever known that Gianni was going to die, I would have let him buy all the works of art he wanted,” he lamented to friends. He wasn’t about to do battle with his little sister.

  A surge in sales in the autumn soothed some of Santo’s worries. The murder had raised Versace’s profile and profits to new heights. Indeed, Gianni became even more famous in death than in life, his sensational murder—along with the mafia speculation—making him a household name around the world. Shoppers suddenly wanted anything associated with Gianni, and sales of Versace products—particularly cheaper items such as jeans and perfumes—swelled. The company’s 1997 sales rose 10 percent to 940 billion lire ($540 million). The balance sheet also got a boost from the 35 billion lire ($20 million) the company pocketed from a payout on Gianni’s life insurance policy.

  But while the fashion press treated Donatella’s first runway show gently, department store buyers and Versace shop owners were privately unimpressed. They understood immediately that she was no substitute for Gianni. They’d also heard the stories over the years of Donatella’s heavy drug use and her wild personal life, and they were wary of committing their buying budgets or valuable selling space to the designs of such a volatile personality. They could also see that Santo was struggling, delegating more of the crucial care and feeding of retailers to his team. In short order, most of the buyers would abandon the aggrieved house.

  Despite the fog of grief and pain that enveloped him, Santo was all too aware that the fashion business was hurtling into a period of eno
rmous change that would rewrite the rules of engagement. The luxury goods industry was entering the richest, frothiest market it would ever see. Strong, well-managed companies with deep pockets, pitch-perfect products, and a discipline hitherto rare in the fashion world would reap bonanza profits. But weak companies would struggle mightily to compete in the new high-stakes game.

  At the frontier of this new territory was LVMH and its owner, Bernard Arnault, a Frenchman determined to change the way fashion did business. He was among the first to recognize that luxury goods didn’t have to be stuffy and old and that the yen for stylish, high-quality goods had grown well beyond the traditional audience of the truly rich and was now inspiring middle-class consumers. He saw a fortune to be made if he could leverage the heritage and mystique of European luxury brands while making them modern and fun enough for a mass audience.

  Arnault had gotten his start in 1984 when he bought the then bankrupt Christian Dior. But it was his 1990 acquisition of Louis Vuitton that created an entirely new approach to fashion. The company, which started making traveling trunks for the French bourgeoisie in 1854, still enjoyed a reputation for high-quality leather goods, but it had become overly dependent on its signature chocolate-brown travel bags emblazoned with the gold “LV” logo. To transform Vuitton, Arnault pursued a new strategy of controlling every inch of the business, from the factories that made the bags to the shops that sold them. His approach challenged other brands, which often relied on contracts with third-party craftsmen to make their goods and sold them through franchise shops owned by local entrepreneurs. Instead, LVMH controlled each one of Vuitton’s stores. (The company owned some stores and held long-term leases on the rest.) To support the stores, Arnault found myriad ways to goose Vuitton’s sales, launching a whole raft of products with the classic LV monogram and inventing a slate of new lines. In the mid-1990s, Vuitton proved that accessories could be a gold mine for a fashion brand. Leather bags offered women the instant gratification of feeling fashionable, without the anxiety of trying to squeeze into—or afford—a designer dress or skirt. They also offered millions of women around the world their first chance at owning a bit of European elegance.