By the time I approached my eighteenth birthday in February 1981, I’d been in London for six months with no real plans to speak of. All I cared about was having fun. I was only half-mindful of my responsibilities or the fact that I might one day be asked to live up to them, a fact that was brought home to me when someone at Gucci suggested that my birthday could be promoted as a PR event. The idea of a debutante ball in Palm Beach and New York horrified me and I immediately told my father so.
“Okay, what would you like to do instead?” he asked.
I opted for a private black-tie dinner at the Savoy in London, where (unbeknownst to me at the time) my grandfather had first found his creative inspiration a hundred years earlier. I could have had any gown I wanted but instead found a 1930s long black sequined dress in a vintage store on the King’s Road in Chelsea. I’ll never forget that night. Regrettably, Mamma wasn’t able to celebrate with me. Her excuse this time was that there would be “too many young people” and she wouldn’t feel comfortable in such a crowd. Papà, on the other hand, enjoyed himself immensely. He loved being with my generation and was only too proud to lead me onto the dance floor for the first waltz. There was one perfect moment toward the end of the evening when he took the microphone, called for a hush, and gave a speech in front of all my friends. As I stood somewhat shyly to one side, I listened to him tell everyone that I made him the “proudest father in the world.”
Two months later, there was another grand party to attend—this time in Palm Beach. Having spent so much time there and in New York, my father had decided to make America his official country of residence. Although Italy would always be his heartland, it was still going through tumultuous times and, for many, was an increasingly dangerous place to be. In contrast, America’s frontier spirit and enterprising culture had truly allowed my father to fly. By registering as a resident of Florida he officially transferred his domicile status there, which meant that from then on he’d be expected to pay stateside income tax.
The decision further galvanized his love of Palm Beach. He had bought the vacant lot next to ours and created a fabulous new home with the help of the architect who’d designed the Gucci Galleria. Even though Papà was still haunted by the ongoing discord in the family and anxious about my brother Paolo in particular, he decided to take his mind off things and throw a housewarming party. He wanted my mother and me at his side for what he hoped would be a new era for us all.
By the time I arrived, preparations were well under way for what the local media described as “the hottest ticket in town.” Dominating the garden was a huge white tent to cater for the two hundred and fifty guests, which included Luciano Pavarotti and the cream of Palm Beach society. While the staff bustled to and fro, Mamma descended into her own private hell. She loathed events like these—especially when she’d be the center of attention—and the idea of having to interact with so many strangers petrified her.
“Parties kill me!” she’d protest. “I can’t bear all the smiling! It’s so fake.” Years later, she told me that she always felt “painfully inadequate” and ill at ease among my father’s circles, as if she didn’t belong. “I never knew if I was saying the right thing or if I looked the part. I felt ten times smaller than those sophisticated women who knew how to put themselves together and engage in conversation. I was the Cinderella.”
She needn’t have worried that night. When she emerged from her bedroom in an ethereal gray chiffon dress, my father and I gasped. “Quanto sei bella!” (How beautiful you are!) he cried, throwing his arms open to embrace her. I also assured her she looked sensational but of course she didn’t believe either of us for one moment and begged us not to tease.
Incredibly, she carried herself like a star all evening—mingling effortlessly with the kind of confidence I’d rarely seen before. Observing her from a distance, I was mesmerized and couldn’t help but wonder how she was managing. I watched her graciously accept kisses from Pavarotti, who was equally entranced. “Bruna! What a delight you are!” he cried, before enfolding us both in his big loving arms. As my father grinned at the playful spectacle with this larger-than-life character, I could see why he and the great tenor had become good friends.
My mother should have won an Oscar for her performance. Only Papà and I knew how much she must have been quaking inside. The only reason she made it through the night, I later discovered, was because a friend of the family had slipped her the first (and last) tranquilizer she ever took, which allowed her to relax and “float” through what I referred to as her “coming-out ball.”
“It was as though I wasn’t even there but I hated the feeling!” she told me. “Never again.”
Probably her worst moment was when my father rose during dinner and insisted that she and I stand to either side of him while he addressed his guests. He was determined to let everybody know how important we were in his life as he pulled us close for photographs. I could tell she wanted the ground to open up and swallow her as all eyes fell upon us when my father started to make a speech. “I’m so happy to welcome you all to our new home, which started as a dream and has become a reality,” he said, his eyes glistening. “And to be with my beautiful wife Bruna and my lovely daughter, Patricia, here in Palm Beach—our favorite place in the world.”
We all smiled into the cameras as the crowd applauded, and in spite of my mother’s embarrassment, it proved to be a night to treasure for always.
The one thing my mother was naturally adept at was dealing with ailments. With her homemade soups and curative rice dishes, she was a real alchemist and had a remedy for just about anything. It was all part of being una mamma Italiana.
When I was a little girl and went through all the usual childhood maladies, she was nothing short of attentive and bordered on obsessive. She’d cover my head in a towel and sit me over a steaming bowl of eucalyptus to clear my sinuses, or dab my chicken pox with calamine lotion, putting me under strict orders not to scratch. She meant well but at times her compulsive manner was a little annoying. “Take this and go to sleep!” was about as close as she came to a good-night wish.
I’m sure she must have been present when I had my tonsils out in Berkshire, and I’m sure she was distraught the time I was rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night with appendicitis at Aiglon, but I must have filed away those memories. These days she still makes a huge fuss at the first signs of a cold, calling each morning to make sure I’m okay. “Come ti senti oggi?” (How do you feel today?) she will typically ask before even saying hello. She was the same way with my father but had little sympathy for anything she deemed to be self-inflicted. Nor did she pay much heed to the fact that my father and I traveled across time zones and were frequently exposed to the afflictions of the outside world. So when Papà developed insomnia, she was cross with him at first, blaming it on jet lag. He’d always been a restless spirit but he generally slept fairly well for someone with such an active mind. When he really couldn’t settle at night my mother—who was no stranger to sleeping disorders herself—started preaching about deep breathing to clear his mind. It rarely worked. She’d wake in the small hours in Palm Beach to find him gone from their bed. Pulling on her dressing gown, she’d wander out into the humid night to discover him watering the lawn barefoot under a star-studded sky.
“Aldo! What are you doing?” she’d cry.
“It’s okay, Bruna. Go back to bed. I’ll be there soon.”
What he didn’t know was that she often stayed watching him, noting that he was so engrossed with his thoughts that he’d stand in the same spot for several minutes at a time, flooding the ground and soaking his bare feet.
Hoping it was only a phase, Mamma knew deep down that the trouble at Gucci was behind his agitation, and no amount of deep breathing could rid him of one particular anxiety. My brother Paolo continued to be a thorn in his side and his antics demanded more and more of my father’s attention. “He’s never satisfied,” Papà would complain in a subdued voice. “He always has
to push for something more. And these lawyers he keeps bringing in! They’re nothing but bad news. Why can’t he be more like his brothers and just get on with business?”
“Can’t they make him stop all this nonsense?” Mamma would ask.
“They’ve tried but it’s no use.”
“Aldo, you must try not to worry too much,” she’d tell him, but she knew that with all the simmering tension it was easier said than done. When she was with me, it was another story. “Paolo’s going to ruin us!” she’d cry with a growing sense of foreboding. “Nothing’s ever enough for him. Your father’s beside himself.”
There were other problems too. My uncle Rodolfo had recently demanded a bigger stake in Gucci Parfums, the company Papà had set up for the benefit of my brothers but had since exceeded all expectations. At the time, Rodolfo had agreed to grant his nephews a 20 percent share in the fledgling operation and chosen not to allocate Maurizio a similar shareholding, as they were still incommunicado. Now that the business was doing so well, he wanted his own percentage increased threefold but my father refused.
The stress began to seriously undermine Papà’s health, though he’d have been the last to admit it. He’d been fit and healthy all his life and rarely took time off work due to illness. But during the summer of 1981, when he was meant to be relaxing in Florida with us, he developed a horrible cough that wouldn’t go away.
“I’ll tell you how you got this,” my mother chided as she fixed him some milk and honey. “It’s all that shuffling in and out late at night. Don’t you know how dangerous it is to go from the heat into an air-conditioned house, and with wet feet?” She feared that his immune system, coupled with his insomnia, was at risk of crashing so she also prepared her “miracle” chicken soup. Dismissing my mother’s concerns, Papà insisted he was well enough to attend a meeting in Miami even though he was short of breath. “I’ll be fine,” he told her grumpily. “It’s only for a few hours.”
“No, Aldo, you mustn’t go!” she insisted, wagging a finger. “I forbid it!”
She nagged him to the point that I sensed his growing irritation and ended up intervening to try to prevent an argument. “Oh, leave him be, Mamma,” I said. “He’s old enough to make his own decisions.”
Undaunted, my mother demanded a second opinion. The doctor she summoned suggested it was the flu and ordered some blood tests. “It’s pneumonia!” she argued. “He needs to go to the hospital.” Ignoring the only qualified medic there, she instructed our driver, Stanley, to take Papà to the local ER immediately. “Go with him, Patricia,” she ordered. “I’ll gather a few of his things and follow on.” It was apparent she wasn’t going to take no for an answer, so we all did as we were told.
Only when I was sitting in the back of the car with my father did my skepticism turn to concern and I recognized she might be onto something. As if he no longer had to pretend that he was okay, he turned ashen and was fighting to catch every breath. By the time we reached the hospital, he succumbed to the doctors’ care like a child. Which was just as well because Mamma was right. They diagnosed viral pneumonia and when it emerged that he was allergic to penicillin they had to wait several crucial hours for a special antibiotic to be flown in.
It was frightening to see how quickly he deteriorated. One minute he’d been arguing with my mother and the next he was virtually unconscious with a high fever. These were life-threatening circumstances for a man seventy-six years of age. For the first time, I realized that I would one day lose him, and the thought shook me. I visited the hospital frequently but my mother never left his side as we waited for the drugs to take effect. She lived on bananas and coffee, and lost five kilograms in as many days. Sitting close by, she noticed that Papà clutched a tiny gold frame of the Madonna and baby Jesus in his hand. He must have picked it up before he left the house, which proved to her that he’d known that he was dangerously ill all along.
“You have your wife to thank,” the doctors told him when he eventually opened his eyes. “If we’d waited another day, it may have been too late.”
They didn’t need to tell him, because during his semi-coma he had “touched the veil,” as he put it. Speaking to Mamma of his out-of-body experience, he was full of wonderment and humility. “I was moving toward a bright light!” he told her tearfully. “It was so peaceful, Bruna! I wasn’t at all afraid.” Squeezing her hand, he said he only forced himself to come back from the brink because he had some “unfinished business” to take care of.
Throughout his delirium, he’d been aware of her constant presence at his side. The near-death experience had crystallized his thoughts and made him aware of how little time he might have left. Everything my mother had been trying to tell him over the years about the importance of a spiritual life suddenly made sense to him. She was right. We all had a higher purpose and it was our responsibility to do right by those who loved us.
Kissing the little gold frame in his hand, his face full of emotion, he told her, “I swear on this Madonna that if I leave this hospital alive, I will make you my wife.”
“Oh, stop it,” my mother scolded. “You can’t make such a vow. You’re already married!” Then she listened, stunned, as he told her something he claimed he’d discovered on a recent visit to a land registry office outside Rome. As far as he could tell, due to an oversight on his part, his marriage to Olwen in 1927 didn’t appear to have been registered in Italy. If this was so, then as far as the local authorities were concerned, he was still officially single.
This meant that their wedding ceremony in Shropshire might have been the only official record of their union. Such a blunder could have been nothing short of calamitous for his sons.
My mother heard him out before placing her hand on his forehead and instructing him to lie back down and go to sleep. She was pleased that he’d shared his news but she knew it didn’t make any difference. He was delirious, she told herself, and his proposal meant little or nothing. The fact remained that Olwen had been his wife for the best part of his life and had borne him three sons. She would never grant him a divorce and my mother respected that. All she wanted was to bring Papà home.
My father was not someone to make such an oath without following through, however. Even if it would only be a token gesture, he wanted to thank my mother for all she’d done for him. There were, he decided, only two people in his life who truly loved him—Mamma and I. Ultimately, we were the ones he could count on. Love and loyalty were all that mattered, he said repeatedly. Love and loyalty.
In his mind, he’d survived thanks only to my mother’s careful nurturing and his faith in God. He fully intended to keep his promise to both. When he called and asked us to fly to Los Angeles for Thanksgiving in November 1981, neither of us suspected he had a secret agenda. “I have a surprise for you,” was all he told my mother, laughing.
She hated surprises and feared the worst. “What are you up to, Aldo?”
“If I tell you it won’t be a surprise, will it?” By the time she arrived at the house in Beverly Hills a few hours ahead of me, he could no longer keep his secret. “We’re getting married!” he cried. “We’re going to the Ingleside Inn in Palm Springs in two days’ time and a minister will marry us the following morning. Everything has been arranged.” She shook her head at the impossibility of it all but he enfolded her in his arms and promised it would be an intimate ceremony, “just us and Gucci’s publicist in Los Angeles—a lady named Gloria Luchenbill.”
Jet-lagged and in a suspended state of disbelief, my mother steadied herself as the significance of his announcement began to sink in. Up until then, all he’d ever said was that Olwen would undoubtedly die before him and then they could be together. In his letters he’d often referred to my mother as mia per sempre (mine forever) and now it appeared that he was no longer prepared to wait for that day to come around. The legalities of the “marriage” would be questionable. The minister in charge of the service was probably as ignorant of the truth as the priest who’d c
hristened me in London. By agreeing to Papà’s proposal, however unrealistic it might be, she’d simply be accepting his commitment to her. Nothing more.
Delighted that this was his heart’s desire, she consented. “Okay, Aldo,” she told him with a smile. “If this is really what you want, then I’m happy to go along with it.”
Gloria Luchenbill and her team had been briefed to ensure that proceedings were kept under wraps. If the other side of the family were to find out they’d be upset, to say the least. By chance, the ceremony took place the day after actress Natalie Wood drowned off the coast of Southern California, so the newspapers had no room for unsubstantiated gossip.
By the time I showed up at the house in Los Angeles he and Mamma had already uncorked the champagne. “Your mother and I are getting married!” he said, speaking the words I’d never expected to hear. As he explained the logistics, I felt numb. Olwen was still his wife and the whole thing felt absurd.
As a questioning teenager, I thought marriage at this stage in their life seemed utterly pointless and unnecessary. Nor would it change my life. Ever since the day my mother had told me that Papà had another family I’d come to understand that he and Mamma weren’t married after all. Olwen was his legal wife and the mother of his sons. I accepted that the same way Mamma did and never longed for them to be husband and wife (other than if it made her less anxious). Nor would it make any difference if they were.
I lay in bed that night twisting and turning as I tried to come to terms with their news, a myriad of conflicting emotions flooding my brain. Whether it had to do with the illicit nature of their affair or because I’d hoped to spend a quiet Thanksgiving with them, I couldn’t be sure, but it felt like yet another example of being asked to simply accept what was presented to me as a fait accompli. Yet again, I was on the outside looking in, feeling neglected and utterly perplexed. No matter how hard I tried or how much wiser I became as I grew older, I would never fully understand their relationship. All I really knew was that I was once more a party to their strange dynamic—the World According to Aldo and Bruna.
In the Name of Gucci Page 18
