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

by Deborah Ball

  Worse still, Donatella associated Cacciatori’s efforts with Santo and their bitter arguments over her spending. The bean counter’s intrusion in the house only widened the gulf between Via Gesù and the business offices on Via Manzoni. Donatella’s own clique, perhaps worried that the Versace gravy train would grind to a halt, became a Greek chorus that egged her on, feeding her tidbits about Santo’s meetings with Cacciatori and his team. By November, a battle of wills between Donatella and Cacciatori was shaping up, and the CEO could only lose. Donatella resisted his demands to cut back on the samples she ordered for the runway show or to buy cheaper fabric for her samples. “If I want three hundred pairs of shoes for the runway shows, then I’ll have them!” she screamed at him during one heated meeting in the fall. “You can’t stop me.”

  A few weeks later, not long before Christmas, Cacciatori went before the board with a plan for further cuts and changes in the strategy for 2004. He proposed cutting Donatella’s and Santo’s salaries—even as he charged Versace three thousand euros a day for his own services—and wanted to sell Via Gesù in order to lighten the company’s debt load. But by then Donatella had had enough.

  “What exactly have you accomplished here?” she demanded. “We’re paying you all of this money but I don’t see what it’s for!” She accused him of seeking only to enrich himself at Versace’s expense. A few days later, Donatella fired him. The next day, security guards escorted Cacciatori and his team out of the building.

  The year 2004 promised to be an annus horribilis for Versace, the worst of the seven that had passed since Gianni’s death. Donatella was in a free fall. Over the years, she had tried at times to rein in her cocaine use without giving it up entirely, limiting herself to just two or three lines at a time—which was nothing for her.4 But by the start of 2004, her appetite for drugs had deepened along with the company’s troubles. She began mixing cocaine with sedatives such as Halcion, Valium, Ativan, and Rohypnol. She downed handfuls of Excedrin to fight chronic headaches. Cocaine braced her for the marathon hours before a show, but afterward Donatella crashed, sitting on her couch for four or five days, hating herself. She began going on premeditated binges, retreating to her apartment for several days and telling her associates she wasn’t well.5 When she did turn up in the atelier, she was virtually paralyzed. Her team had grown to dread her arrival. She was jittery and restless, fidgeting with her jeweled cigarette case as if it were a worry bead and constantly wiping her nose. When she spoke, she was virtually incomprehensible.

  At the end of shows, when Donatella teetered out on her five-inch stilettos for her bow, the audience was rapt, waiting to see if she would make it down the runway. Backstage, she hid in a separate dressing room, her handlers parrying visitors and the media. When she emerged to grant the obligatory round of press interviews on her collection, she wore the pained look of an injured animal. Television journalists struggled to get even a coherent ten-second sound bite out of her, and her makeup artists had to stop the cameras repeatedly to retouch her heavy foundation, which melted with her constantly running nose. After a while, many journalists simply stopped asking to interview her. Employees and friends watched in horror, fearing Donatella was on course for a deadly overdose.

  In the midst of the meltdown came an offer that promised to pull the company out of its death spiral. Tom Ford and Domenico De Sole came calling. The pair had recently fallen out with François Pinault, the French billionaire who had saved Gucci from the LVMH takeover bid, and they were leaving the house after an extraordinary ten-year run. Their turnaround of Gucci had earned them each tens of millions of dollars over the years, and they wanted to invest it in another fashion brand. Right away, the new parlor game in the fashion world became guessing what the Dom-Tom Bomb would do next. Would they somehow buy Yves Saint Laurent back from Pinault? Or would they launch a new fashion line under Tom’s name?

  But instead they were interested in Versace. At Gucci, Ford and De Sole had gained experience in turning around a fashion house that had been nearly destroyed by the founding family. De Sole’s enormous credibility with retailers around the world could help convince stores to start selling Versace collections again. Ford, with his satyr sensibility and commercial nous, could repair Versace’s tattered image.

  Santo was excited about the prospect, seeing the offer as a way to restore Versace to its former glory. He also knew that this was the company’s last chance before the banks closed in. The clock was ticking on the bond, but Versace’s creditors were willing to see how the talks with De Sole and Ford turned out. They preferred to have the company in the hands of new owners rather than stepping in themselves. Donatella, exhausted and seriously depressed, was willing to consider an offer for the first time. She was put off by the idea of sharing the limelight with a designer as famous and successful as Ford but relieved at the idea of handing some of the creative responsibilities over to someone else.

  De Sole spent days going through Versace’s catastrophic financial situation, coming up with a rough plan to close foundering stores, fix its sputtering production facilities, and launch an accessories line. But his help would come at a price. He and Ford were willing to take on Versace, but they wouldn’t shell out a dime for a stake in the company. They wanted a share that guaranteed them control of the house, but their equity would come in exchange for their management expertise and reputation in the fashion sector. Santo was furious that De Sole could expect to walk into Versace for free, yet he had little choice but to entertain their offer on their terms. If the duo restored Versace to profitability, he would benefit as well. Much of Santo’s wealth was tied up in his stake in the company; if Versace recovered, his holding—now practically worthless—would increase in value.

  But there was a bigger problem. De Sole and Ford agreed that, for their plan to work, Donatella had to go. At her runway show in February 2004, Donatella was a mess. Over the winter she began hearing things and had grown even more paranoid. She was throwing fits in the atelier, accusing her team of sniping about her behind her back; her tantrums left the young designers in tears.6 The collection reflected the chaos in the atelier, a jumble of designs ranging from ladylike twinsets paired with huge Jackie-O sunglasses to black evening dresses with awkward slits. Women’s Wear Daily’s verdict: “The evening clothes, well, let’s just say, oops.” Elizabeth Hurley, who had written Donatella a letter pleading with her to get help for her cocaine habit, sat in the front row with her new fiancé, distraught. After the last models filed backstage, Donatella teetered out. With a woozy smile, she gave a strange thumbs-up to someone in the audience. After that show, Donatella began using cocaine every day, a first for her.7

  The night before, Ford had sent his last Gucci collection down the runway in Milan to what would be rave reviews. For months, the fashion press had been churning out glowing retrospectives of his revival of Gucci. He was leaving the brand at the top of his game. On a snowy day in February, De Sole, Ford, and Donatella finally met. Donatella listened as Ford and De Sole explained their plan to raise Versace from the ashes. Afterward, Ford stood up. He launched into a long, emotional monologue about how he had revived Gucci virtually single-handedly. “I am Gucci,” he told Donatella. He then declared he would take on Versace only if he had full control of the brand—with absolutely no interference from Donatella, he told her. He would be the sole head designer.

  Donatella was shocked at Ford’s arrogance. She felt disrespected and discarded. Before his speech, she had been willing to consider a scenario where she would let go of some of her responsibilities, but she never dreamed that Ford would banish her entirely. She would be relegated to making anodyne personal appearances in department stores and signing perfume bottles. If Ford had approached her with more tact and sensitivity, she might have considered their offer. But instead he had humiliated her. “Absolutely not!” she said, struggling to remain calm. “Versace is my life. There’s no way I could step aside.” In a fury, she got up and left the room. All contact b
etween the parties was cut off.*

  In rejecting the offer from De Sole and Ford, Donatella unwittingly set in motion a chain of events that would finally pry her brother’s house from her grasp. By the spring, the company was as out of control as she was. Staff spent more time gossiping and swapping rumors about the operatic drama unfolding in the family than actually working. Many had been excited at the idea of a takeover by De Sole and Ford and were sorely disappointed when word spread of the disastrous meeting with Donatella. The media’s speculation about what would happen after Allegra’s impending birthday only compounded the intrigue.

  After the failure of the De Sole—Ford talks, Santo was deflated and disappointed. His team began searching for a new chief executive, contacting current and former heads of rival fashion houses. But no one would touch the job. They even reached out to Rose Marie Bravo, the former president of Saks who had gained fame for her turnaround of British brand Burberry. She refused to take the call.

  Finally, Versace’s creditors came calling. With a heavy heart, Santo sat down with Banca Intesa, Italy’s largest financial institution and the house’s longtime bankers. Intesa owned about 10 million euros of the bond, making it one of the largest holders, and would take the lead in working out what to do with the troubled house. Versace needed to find a way to repay the bond by the July 6, 2004, deadline, but any deal would clearly come at a heavy price. Racing to find a solution, Santo twice delayed the publication of the company’s 2003 accounts—the board normally approved them in April—because he knew Versace was in default. And indeed, the 2003 results were catastrophic: The house would lose 97 million euros for the year. Moreover, the auditors were preparing another note, warning that Donatella owed the company nearly 5 million euros.

  While Santo was meeting with bankers, the simmering questions as to what would happen when Allegra turned eighteen were rapidly coming to a head. Given her delicate health, would she choose not to exercise her share? Would she instead allow her mother to continue to manage the holding? Would the tensions that already existed between Allegra and Donatella—then in the grip of severe depression and a debilitating drug habit—rise further over the question of how to manage the teenager’s stake? Versace employees feared that Allegra’s health meant that Donatella would continue to control her daughter’s stake even after Allegra turned eighteen. But little did they know that Allegra had a surprise in store.

  At the men’s collection debut in June 2004, Donatella finally hit bottom. Often for her shows, she hired a celebrity band to perform a miniconcert next to the runway. That year, she had chosen Prodigy, a hardcore group that had cut its teeth in the illegal rave scene in the United Kingdom. Prodigy’s lead singer was Keith Flint, a Johnny Rotten—like character with a spiky Mohawk hairstyle and a serious drug habit.

  As crews put the last touches on the runway in the courtyard of Via Gesù, Flint stood on the stage for the dress rehearsal while Donatella sat on a sofa nearby, so dazed that her bodyguards had to sit on either side of her to prop her up. Flint, appearing stoned, started singing and dancing wildly. As he danced, he began to strip his clothes off. He then lost his balance and toppled off the stage, buck-naked. He gashed his leg so badly that Versace staff had to call in a doctor to patch him up.

  Donatella sat through the spectacle unfazed. At a press conference afterward, she gave rambling, incoherent answers to journalists’ questions. By then, she was barely eating, her stomach in knots from anxiety, and she had grown very thin. When the journalists asked about her weight loss, she parried their questions with a blithe response. “I’ve been on this amazing diet and have been killing myself in the gym, in honor of the Duchess of Windsor’s belief that one can never be too rich or too thin,” she said.8 One longtime Versace executive who witnessed the spectacle tendered his resignation soon afterward.

  The runway show the next day was a disaster, a Technicolor display of Versace’s catastrophic situation. Models walked the runway wearing T-shirts bearing the “DV” logo scrawled in neon letters or emblazoned with slogans such as “Why don’t you fuck yourself?” The audience covered their ears to block out Prodigy’s screeching music. Then, Flint suddenly jumped off the stage and began accosting the audience. He ground his pelvis close to one man’s face and licked another woman, before climbing over the shocked attendees, dripping with sweat. The crowd of journalists and department store buyers shouted and tried to wriggle away as he approached.9

  Donatella’s conspicuous problems fed the voracious interest in Allegra’s impending eighteenth birthday. Around the time of the men’s show, Donatella and her daughter granted the media a photo op, hoping to sate the Italian newspapers’ appetite for news about the heiress, whose eating problem was starkly obvious. Allegra posed for the paparazzi in a short polka-dot Versace skirt and a dark T-shirt, looking uncomfortable and heartbreakingly thin as she held hands with her mother, both women’s faces portraits of pain.

  A week later, Donatella threw Allegra a lavish, public birthday bash at Alcatraz, a cavernous disco that was Milan’s most popular nightspot. The club was decked out in purple and pink, with huge flower bouquets, gilt chairs, and a pyramid of champagne glasses with expensive bubbly rippling down the sides. There was a massive buffet dinner of lobster, an open bar, and gurgling chocolate fountains. Donatella had flown Pharrell Williams, an American hip-hop sensation, over to Milan in a private jet to perform. She had model agencies hold castings to stock the party with male and female models, all outfitted in glitzy Versace clothes. Few of the models even knew Allegra. At midnight, Williams serenaded Allegra with a sassy version of “Happy Birthday” as the caterers rolled out a giant cake with sparklers. Donatella, dressed in a gold gown and heavy jewelry, stumbled to the stage with a flute of champagne and gave a rambling toast to her daughter.

  A few days later, Donatella made a trip to Reggio that would change everything. Elton John was giving a concert in her native city. The singer had tried to support Donatella after Gianni’s death, but she started avoiding him when her drug addiction spiraled because she knew he was one of the few people who would call her on her behavior. Ironically, when Elton had decided to get clean many years earlier, Gianni and Donatella had supported him; after rehab, he went straight to Donatella’s vacation home in St. Tropez.10 He then became a crusader, with a mission to help other celebrities kick their drug habits. He famously “kidnapped” Robbie Williams and took him to a rehab clinic in the 1990s and helped Robert Downey, Jr., kick a notorious drug habit.

  But even Elton couldn’t bear to watch Donatella self-destruct, and for a time he preferred to avoid her as well.11 After much dithering, Donatella decided to attend Elton’s concert in her hometown. She landed in Calabria on a balmy summer night and headed for her childhood home, where Zia Nora still lived. She hadn’t been to Reggio in years. Entering the familiar house where she had spent so many happy years with her parents and her brothers brought back a rush of memories. The pain of returning home in such a desperate state was overwhelming. When she saw the woman who had been like a mother to her, she broke down, sobbing in Nora’s arms.

  After a while, she pulled herself together and headed for Reggio’s soccer stadium, where Elton was due to sing. Crews had built a large, simple stage on the field, flanked by two huge screens and covered in the dark gray carpet that Elton demanded for his shows. Two dressing rooms complete with Versace furnishings had been kitted out, one for Elton and one for Donatella. Before the show, the duo gamely posed for photos backstage, the exhaustion etched clearly on Donatella’s face despite her heavy makeup. A shimmery gold catsuit highlighted her sunken stomach and thin arms.

  Elton stepped onto the stage and sat at a black grand piano. He would be singing solo, without any backup band. In his right ear, he wore a quarter-sized gold earring engraved with an image of a medusa head. He opened with “Your Song,” Gianni’s favorite. “I want to dedicate this whole show to my good friend Gianni Versace,” he said, after finishing the tune. The crowd cheere
d.

  Donatella stood in the wings, sobbing and shaking. Elton looked at her and realized that she was ready for a change in her life. He felt he had to take action. As soon as he got back to London, he called Donatella’s top assistant and exploded. “You people are doing nothing but enabling Donatella by protecting her!” he said. “She’s going to die if we don’t do something.” He decided he would go to Milan to confront Donatella himself. He told the assistant that he had only one day free in the next six weeks: June 30, 2004, Allegra’s birthday.

  In the meantime, Allegra turned to her father for help. Even after separating from Donatella, Paul often shuttled between New York and Milan to be with both kids, following their schoolwork and taking them on vacations. But when it came to Allegra’s stake in Versace, he let Donatella take command.

  As her birthday approached, Allegra decided it was time to take up her rightful role in the company. It was an immensely difficult decision for a high school senior to make. She had always been the quintessential good little girl who submitted to her mother’s wishes. But she was also smart enough to have realized that her inheritance had withered to a fraction of what it was when Gianni left it to her. She understood that it was time for her to step in. But first she needed an adviser, someone independent of both her mother and Santo, who could help her untangle the mess.

  She asked Paul for help in finding the right person. Through a Versace associate, her father gathered a short list of white-shoe lawyers in Milan who were renowned both for their business acumen and their discretion in dealing with the intricacies of family-controlled businesses. One of them, Michele Carpinelli, was a leading lawyer in Italian corporate circles, who was well-regarded by top executives at Banca Intesa, having worked with the bank on a number of deals. Carpinelli could very well be the right person to help Allegra take command of her company.