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

by Deborah Ball

  That summer, Santo made a decision that would profoundly affect the company’s fate years later. He signed the papers to launch a bond for 100 million euros to be repaid in July 2004. Bonds usually require a borrower to maintain a healthy balance sheet for the life of the loan. If the borrower’s financial health declines, the bondholders can demand their money back anytime. In Versace’s case, the house pledged to keep its operating profit above net financial payments, or the cost of servicing its debt. When Santo agreed to the bond, he never suspected that the company would have trouble meeting the requirements; in twenty years, Versace had never had trouble paying off its debt. In signing the deal for the bond, Santo was trying to bring some order to the company’s financial situation by consolidating its debt. He could hardly have imagined that by agreeing to the bond, he was hanging a stone around the company’s neck.

  Donatella decided to see off the 1990s—a decade that had brought her the greatest highs of her life along with the most unimaginable lows—in grand style. During the summer, she and Santo put Casa Casuarina up for sale, anxious to free themselves of the constant reminder of the moment their world came crashing down. But before bidding farewell to Miami Beach, Donatella wanted to throw one last son et lumière bash.

  For her final New Year’s Eve in Casa Casuarina, Donatella assembled the sort of guest list that only a Versace party could draw. Even the most jaded celebrity couldn’t resist the idea of ringing in the new millennium at the infamous Versace mansion. In deference to her brother, Donatella had the staff hang a sign on the front gate with an arrow directing guests to an entrance around the back. Inside the high walls, music thumped over the elaborate stereo system, with a group of live musicians drumming on bongos to hype the beat. Jennifer Lopez arrived on the arm of her new manager, Benny Medina, while Gwyneth Paltrow and Madonna huddled together in the garden over flutes of champagne. Trailing behind Madonna was her new British boyfriend, Guy Ritchie. Underwater lights in the pool, with its riot of colorful mosaic tiles, gave off a sensual glow.

  The glittering crowd and picture-perfect setting once would have sent Donatella’s adrenaline surging. But tonight, she simply couldn’t conjure up the blithe delight that South Beach had always brought her before Gianni’s death. That jet-set whirl of dinners, discos, and divertissement was forever over. Languid vacations spent lounging by the pool with her brother, as Allegra and Daniel splashed happily beside them, seemed almost beyond the grasp of memory, erased by two and a half years of near-constant woe. Hopeful gatecrashers used to gather outside Gianni’s front gate, straining for a glimpse of the star designer or one of his celebrity friends. Now, the spot had become a macabre tourist attraction, as dough-faced vacationers snapped one another’s picture on the marble steps where Gianni had lay dying.

  Miami Beach had also changed. Gianni’s presence had helped make South Beach a symbol of a roaring decade. His killing brought the decade-long party to an abrupt halt. Six years after Gianni first threw open the doors to his grandiose house, his baby sister’s bash was a farewell party. Soon after, Madonna would put her own house up for sale as well, ending her disco days, with its drag queens and cone-shaped bras, and migrating to London to join Ritchie for a new life as a wannabe European sophisticate.

  Wearing a glittery silver dress and clutching her pack of Marlboro Reds, Donatella was ever the practiced host, ushering friends into Gianni’s elaborately tiled garden and leaning in close to divulge tidbits of juicy gossip. She orbited from one constellation of guests to another, bussing each one Italian-style on both cheeks and squealing over new designer dresses. The crowd of beautiful people danced and gawked and drank under the watchful eyes of a flank of security guards.

  But behind the veil of ebullience, Donatella was deeply weary. She had little to celebrate this New Year’s Eve. The fights with Santo, the searing reviews, and the precarious health of her daughter had all taken a heavy toll that year. “I’m so depressed,” she confided somberly to Rupert Everett, one of her closest celebrity friends, pausing a moment before putting her party face back on to greet a new guest.8

  As the garden filled with revelers, Donatella and Everett closeted themselves in a bathroom, a Versace bodyguard posted outside as they got stoned together. They emerged briefly to join Donatella’s guests for the countdown to midnight before disappearing again.9 The day after the party, Donatella left Casa Casuarina, never to return.

  seventeen

  Toward Ruin

  fOR GIORGIO ARMANI, OCTOBER 18, 2000, WAS AN ENCHANTED evening. The Guggenheim Museum in New York was launching a retrospective of his work and for one night, the Italian designer was the toast of Manhattan. The opening party for the show featured a roll call of famous Armani devotees. Lauren Bacall, Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer, Glenn Close, Richard Gere, and others served up gushing comments for waiting reporters, testifying to how Armani had rescued them from fashion ignominy. The parade of A-list celebrities climbed the museum’s famous rotunda, amid scores of Armani’s signature designs hanging on walls.

  The Guggenheim party was the high point of a year that had been one long victory lap for Armani. At sixty-six, he was celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of his brand, and the fashion world was only too happy to toast him again and again. Publication after publication—Vanity Fair, Vogue, the New Yorker, InStyle—ran sunny articles about Armani, complete with ruminative interviews with the master himself.

  The cloying coverage neglected to report that many department store buyers and magazine editors privately thought that Armani’s collections had long lost much of their freshness. Next to the pyrotechnics of John Galliano or the sex-on-a-stick collections that Tom Ford served up twice a year, Armani’s designs verged on dowdy. Many whispered that Armani had more money than ideas, and there was some truth to the charge. Sensing this, Armani railed against the hot new talent in interviews with the press, branding them little more than slick marketers who had cheapened fashion.

  But the millions of shoppers who wanted a bit of Italian chic, yet felt intimidated by the groovy young designers, trusted Armani. In turn, he had deftly slapped his name on a range of mass-market products—from underwear to jeans to home furnishings—without debasing his brand. As a result, his company had prospered enormously in the 1990s. By 2000, his annual sales were 1 billion euros, more than enough to let him indulge in some vanity projects: a new $30 million corporate headquarters in Milan and a huge $73 million, three-floor flagship store near Via Montenapoleone.

  Halfway through his seventh decade, Armani was hardly slowing down. The sharp planes of his face that had made him a heartthrob in his youth had softened into the mellowed look of a distinguished, Continental gentleman. Daily sessions with a personal trainer left him as trim and fit as a man twenty years his junior. Posing next to fresh-faced celebrities less than half his age, he played the part of the smooth elder statesman, with his snow-white hair and cobalt blue eyes.

  But even as he griped about the changes in the fashion world, he couldn’t entirely ignore them. His executives urged him to think about how to safeguard the company’s future after his retirement or death. Avid investment bankers lined up to court him, each regaling him with the mouthwatering valuations he could command if he sold. Some reckoned that if a damp squib such as Fendi could fetch $1 billion, the house of Armani could possibly demand at least four times that. He could finally relax, they told him, and enjoy his island vacation home in Pantelleria.

  LVMH and Gucci were the only two houses rich enough to afford Armani, and both courted the designer intently. For many months in 2000, Bernard Arnault pressed for an audience with the designer, eventually securing an afternoon cup of tea and a front-row seat to an Armani runway show. Armani reveled in the attention. For much of the year, he very publicly dithered about whether to accept the offers dangling before him. He also considered listing the house on the stock market in an IPO, just as Santo Versace had planned to do several years earlier.

  For Santo, the incessan
t coverage of Armani’s year-long anniversary bash and the stratospheric valuations bandied about for his old rival were painful reminders of what Versace could have become. He watched as Armani and other houses took advantage of the boom years. Across town, Prada was planning its own stock market listing, with talk of valuations for the house of up to $8 billion. Meanwhile, Versace was mired in family intrigue, watching the richest luxury goods market the business had ever seen go by. Santo’s vision of seeing Versace listed on the stock market was a distant dream.

  In January 2001, as the coverage of his silver anniversary finally ebbed, Armani made his choice. He was put off by the commercial culture of Tom Ford’s Gucci but feared his house would become just a cog in the wheel at LVMH. Even billions of dollars in cash didn’t sway him. He already had more money than he could spend, he told friends. Unable to imagine life without his work, he decided to turn down both De Sole and Arnault.

  Nine months later, on a perfect autumn day in New York, fashion week was just gearing up. Armani was in town for a series of publicity events, as was Tom Ford, who was putting the final touches on plans for a party the following evening to open a redesigned Yves Saint Laurent flagship store on Madison Avenue. The bash, coming less than a year after Ford’s debut collection for the French couture house, was the week’s hot ticket.

  But on the morning of September 11, 2001, the fashion week reverie was shattered when terrorists plunged two airliners into the towers at the World Trade Center. With the city seized by fear and chaos, the organizers of fashion week abruptly called off the shows. New York City police commandeered the runway spaces to set up makeshift morgues. Coltish young models fled Manhattan by bus and by train without bothering to contact their agents.

  The shock to a business that thrives on frivolity and fun came fast and hard. Retailers halved their buying budgets and powerful department stores such as Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman even canceled orders for fall fashions that had already been shipped from Europe. In some U.S. cities, Gucci took down billboard ads featuring an out-all-night party girl with her hand provocatively plunged down the front of her pants. Much of London’s fashion week, which follows right after New York’s, was scotched. Milan and Paris decided to go ahead with their shows, but few retailers were willing to make the trip. Celebrities who had been booked for the shows months earlier also refused to board planes.

  For those who did make the trip, the shows in Milan had a funereal air. Fashionistas had to run their designer leather bags through metal detectors to get into the shows. The marble lobby of the Four Seasons was conspicuously empty of the designer swag the houses usually delivered for their best guests. Even the catwalk photographers, normally full of whistles and catcalls for the prettiest models, were quiet.

  But Donatella wasn’t going to let the gloom and doom ruin her fashion week. Although other houses canceled virtually all parties until Christmas, she was going ahead with a huge bash she had been planning for months—a celebration of the recent marriage of Jennifer Lopez to Cris Judd, a former dancer who had directed one of her music videos. Even by Donatella’s standards, the party was breathtaking. She’d originally planned to hold it at Via Gesù, but after the terrorist attacks she moved it all to the Versace villa on Lake Como because it was easier to secure. After Donatella’s runway show, which closed the somber fashion week, a fleet of cars ferried more than 150 fashion editors, models, and local socialites—virtually none of whom knew J.Lo personally—out to the lake. About a hundred security guards watched over the guests as they filled the house and gardens.

  Villa Fontanelle was a sumptuous sight that evening. More than three thousand yellow roses and one thousand white candles lined the length of the driveway and spilled into the mansion and throughout the gardens. Workers had erected a three-story-high glass enclosure over the terrace. Floodlights beamed over the lake to foil any paparazzi hoping to get an unauthorized photo of the golden couple by shooting from a boat. Violinists wearing black, hedonistic masks sat on marble plinths, serenading guests who sipped Cristal champagne and loaded their plates with caviar, butter-soft prosciutto, and potato gnocchi.

  Just before 11 p.m., Lopez, wearing a jade silk plunge-neck jumpsuit and an enormous diamond ring, arrived with her new husband, trailed by Donatella, clad in a floor-length leopard-print dress. Under a full moon, the newlyweds obligingly cut into a giant cake, elaborately decorated with white, green, and yellow icing, and fed each other small slices as photographers snapped away. They settled on a plush red sofa and canoodled some more for the benefit of the cameras.

  “During hard times, it’s important to continue celebrating life’s beautiful moments,” Donatella told reporters who queried her on why she didn’t cancel the party. “Nothing is more beautiful or full of promise than a marriage.”1 Eight months later, Jennifer Lopez filed for divorce.

  If the terrorist attacks were a serious trial for the most self-confident designers, they were nearly Donatella’s undoing. Her ongoing psychodrama both titillated and horrified the fashion world. Rivals had once happily trafficked in gossip about her outrageousness, swapping stories about her spending, her celebrity friends, and her parties. But as her predicament visibly worsened, they simply felt sorry for Gianni’s kid sister. No one wanted to see a storied brand such as Versace simply wither away.

  The atelier was descending into chaos. Donatella began sleeping until lunchtime and often didn’t turn up at Via Gesù until midafternoon. Her secretary learned not to schedule appointments before 2 p.m., but even then Donatella often canceled at the last minute. She withdrew more and more, leaving her personal assistants to run interference with staff members, journalists, and friends. When she did turn up in the atelier, she was extremely moody, foul-tempered one day and sunny the next.

  Oftentimes, she was so befuddled that members of her team who spoke no Italian couldn’t make sense of her garbled English. During long meetings with Versace executives, she escaped to the bathroom halfway through. When she returned, she was so confused that the managers had to start the meetings virtually from scratch. The atmosphere in the atelier became increasingly strained, her group afraid to provoke her whenever she turned up. Their respect for her deteriorated as her behavior grew more erratic. She phoned one employee in the middle of the night raving about something she wanted them to do. Wild stories about how many grams of cocaine Donatella snorted each day flew through Via Gesù.

  Her design team, stretched woefully thin, was working all hours. With Donatella absent for long stretches, they came to rely more and more on the hired stylists to make decisions on how to put together the collections—only to have their boss swoop back in at the last minute, change her mind, and demand wholesale alterations just days before a show.

  Sensing that she was losing control of the atelier, Donatella grew increasingly paranoid. She grilled her assistants to find out what the design team was saying about her. In Los Angeles, she once suddenly decided she had to see her team’s work. Two assistants flew out the next day from Milan to show her the boards—the sketches of the designs the team was working on. After an eleven-hour flight, the pair arrived at the thousand-dollar-a-night Beverly Hills Hotel on Sunset Boulevard where Donatella always stayed. But when they called over to her villa, Donatella’s personal assistant answered the phone. “She’s not feeling well,” he told them. “She can’t see you. I think you should just go back to Milan.” The next day, the designers packed up and flew home.

  The stress and heavy drug use sent her sense of style veering wildly off course. At one point, one of her assistants came up with a new logo consisting of her initials, DV, written in forbidding Goth lettering. The rest of her team and the Versace sales managers were horrified, but Donatella loved it. It soon turned up on men’s clothing and some women’s bags. She had slipcovers made with the logo to cover the health warnings on her packages of Marlboros and had “I Love DV” emblazoned on T-shirts. Versace’s medusa logo was also mushrooming. “Make it more Versace!” sh
e told her team when they showed her a sample. At a loss, the overworked group piled medusa heads willy-nilly onto clothes and bags, slapping them on everything from belts to the rivets on purses to the bridge of platform shoes.

  Without a strong hand to guide them, the various lines took off in different directions. The women’s collection was alternatively sweet and romantic or hard-edged. The men’s line had largely fallen apart as the team put studs, zips, and the Goth DV logo on the clothes in a clumsy effort to appeal to a younger crowd. Elsewhere, the Versus team was making teenybopper clothes that looked cheap and fit terribly. And with virtually no one watching in the Milan atelier, the companies that made other licensed products such as jeans and sportswear churned out whatever they liked.

  Meanwhile, Donatella’s personal life was hardly less fraught. She found little solace in men and rarely dated, preferring to be alone. To be sure, her heavy drug use, the stress of Allegra’s illness, and the troubles in the atelier were hardly ideal ingredients for a healthy relationship. She joked wryly about her single status with friends and associates. “What I need is someone like Prince,” she quipped. “He would be the perfect man for me!”