Nothing could burst their bubble, though, and as I fell asleep I resolved to put my own feelings to one side. I was genuinely happy for them after all and it had been a long time since I’d seen Mamma so upbeat. By daybreak I felt better, and when my mother and I went to Neiman Marcus to choose our wedding outfits, I got into the spirit of things. Mamma picked a pretty yellow chiffon dress with blue polka dots and I chose something from Chloé in dusky pink.
Out of all my concerns, however, I hadn’t factored in what happened next. As I went to get out of bed the following morning, I discovered that I literally couldn’t move. The muscles in my neck had seized, causing excruciating pain. I will never know exactly what the problem was—if I’d slept in an awkward position or suffered an emotional seizure of sorts. Either way, in my condition, even the short distance from my bedroom to the kitchen was too painful to contemplate, let alone the thought of sitting in a car for two and a half hours. The last thing I wanted was to spoil their day, so I suggested they carry on to the desert without me.
“No, Patricia, please!” Mamma entreated in a way I’d never heard before. She applied cold compresses and tried to massage the spasm away but nothing worked, so she took me to the local hospital for a cortisone shot, which eased my agony. An hour later, I found myself propped up with pillows in the back of a limo en route to Palm Springs to witness the secret “wedding” of my parents. It was November 30, 1981, twenty-five years after they had first met.
A converted hacienda at the foot of the San Jacinto Mountains, the Ingleside Inn was the perfect spot. In its heyday it had been a favored haunt of Hollywood stars and it still had great charm. We gathered in my parents’ light-filled suite overlooking the palm-fringed lawns and watched as the short ceremony got under way.
Papà looked so handsome in a navy blue suit with a pale yellow flower in his lapel. He was the happiest I had ever seen him and his joy was infectious. Mamma smiled timidly in her pretty frock and seemed remarkably calm. Their love for each other radiated in a way that took me by surprise. My memories of them together in recent years hadn’t been nearly so joyful and it was hard not to forget the tumultuous times they’d had in the past. But in that sunny room, as they held hands and faced each other, the minister began to talk them through their vows, and his words resonated deeply with me. “To have and to hold from this day forward, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health.” Then my father vowed, “I will love and honor you all the days of my life.”
Watching them pledge their troth, I couldn’t help but rejoice. In the space of a few moments all my reservations melted away. The truth was that they had been de facto husband and wife for years, and none knew better than I how much each of them had borne for the sake of the other. Mamma had given up on the prospect of a free and open life. She’d been banished to London after falling pregnant and then couldn’t be seen in public. Even in Berkshire, where she’d hoped for normality, things hadn’t quite gone to plan.
My father had a far easier time of it and was able to dip in and out of our lives as he pleased, but he paid the price by fostering such anxiety and depression in my mother that she was never able to be the woman he’d hoped for. Two decades earlier he’d poured his heart out to her in the most touching love letters, declaring, “I know our destiny is to be together…I love you hopelessly, you have conquered my heart and I belong to you.”
And now, finally, he truly did.
Relationships can be tricky to navigate. Those we have with our parents can be the most complicated and often require compromises once we come to the realization that none of us live in a perfect world and that the people we love are flawed.
If I’d had more communication with my parents when I was younger, I might have understood them a bit better, but with little to compare our relationship to, I assumed that what we had was normal. I might have occasionally hoped for something more whenever I saw my friend Bee with her mother or read about happy families in books, but I never had any great expectations and simply accepted the way things were.
My father’s relationship with his sons was never easy to interpret. So caught up was he in his whirlwind weekend in Palm Springs with his new “bride” that I don’t think he considered the extent of the repercussions if they found out. When they did, his bubble of euphoria was burst.
“The rest of the family knows,” Ruby Hamra, his New York PR supremo, told him on the phone twenty-four hours after he and Mamma had toasted to new beginnings. “Word somehow got out. I’m so sorry.” Their honeymoon was over before it had even started. In spite of every effort to maintain secrecy, my brothers had learned of the ceremony in the California desert via a loose-lipped member of staff at the Rodeo Drive store. The fact that they knew made my mother deeply uncomfortable. Just as with the poison-pen letters, until she discovered the source she worried who might have tipped them off.
Papà cared much more about the aftermath, although I don’t think he had given much thought to what he might tell his sons. Fortunately, he had Ruby, who tried to derail the story by telling them they’d been given the wrong information. Aldo and Bruna, she insisted, had only gone to Palm Springs to celebrate their twenty-fifth anniversary together. “That’s all there is to it,” she assured them.
The good news was that it wouldn’t be in anyone’s interests to inform the press, so the story was unlikely to go public. The bad news was that my indignant brothers went straight to the registry office in search of their parents’ marriage certificate to confirm that it was the only legitimate union. There they discovered what my father knew all along, that their mother’s marital status was legally in question. Unless they reregistered their English marriage, under current Italian law their father could be free to do as he pleased.
Anxious to rectify the situation, someone rushed to England to obtain a copy of the certificate lodged more than fifty years earlier, according to my father. They then apparently escorted a frail seventy-three-year-old Olwen to the registrar in Rome to officially record the document. Her marriage to Aldo was formally recognized at last.
My father was furious that they’d interfered. “They had no right! This was a private matter between their mother and me. They know I would have always taken care of her. This was none of their business!”
Mamma had a nightmarish sense of déjà vu. I was only a baby when Olwen’s emissary knocked on her door asking her to leave Aldo alone. Since then everyone had come to a point of mutual respect and accepted the way things were. She’d hoped that the weekend at the Ingleside Inn would go unnoticed but with her marriage to Papà now out in the open, the sheen was off the occasion.
There was no need for her to worry. Although nothing had changed fundamentally, she could never have anticipated the transformation in my father, which began after his bout of pneumonia and was galvanized by taking his vows. She referred to this as un miracolo. Almost overnight, he became much more attentive and thoughtful, always answering her calls and wanting her to be around as well as seeking her advice. Even after all their years together, they really did feel like newlyweds.
She still felt for his real wife, though. She knew Olwen wasn’t well and that the news of the marriage must have been as upsetting for her as it was for her sons. Mamma made sure my father checked in on her from time to time, especially on Sundays. “Don’t neglect her,” she’d remind him. When he presented Mamma with a gold bracelet one Christmas she suggested he give it to Olwen instead, knowing what it felt like to be the woman left alone at home. “Take her a gift. Spend the afternoon with her. Have some tea,” she’d urge gently. He would dutifully march the thirty minutes to Villa Camilluccia from my mother’s apartment and—after almost certainly pondering the complexities of women—he’d be kind to his first wife in order to keep his second wife happy.
Whenever he’d been to see her he’d hurry back to say, “Bruna, you can’t imagine how Olwen has aged! She can hardly hear me and she barely understands a word I say. It won’t be lon
g now.”
My mother always laughed. “Aldo, you are out of your mind. I’m telling you that woman is going to outlive you. You’ll be gone before her, trust me.”
In his quest to placate the rest of his family, my father took an unexpected step. It had been nearly a year since he had last spoken to Paolo so he invited him to Palm Beach to discuss a truce. A New York judge had recently dismissed the attempted trademark suit but Paolo was still demanding that his Gucci Plus line be allowed to exist. Papà was exasperated but before the year was out he planned to put an end to their feud. Under some pressure, he eventually agreed to most of Paolo’s demands.
He then turned his attention to another relationship that was in trouble. His brother Rodolfo was still angling for a bigger slice of the pie and had hired an attorney to challenge the company’s structure and distribution of dividends. Papà settled the dispute and sanctioned the restructuring, incorporating Gucci Parfums and allowing a flotation on the Italian exchange. The new company was renamed Guccio Gucci SpA (Società per Azioni)—the Italian denomination for publicly traded companies.
With this turn of events, Rodolfo suddenly gained a controlling 50 percent interest in the new entity and his son, Maurizio, was summoned back to Italy to help him oversee operations. My father was left with 40 percent and my brothers 10 percent between them. Papà then gifted a further 11 percent of his US shares to my brothers and gave them voting rights on the board.
At no point in this reorganization was my name ever mentioned, not that I would have expected it to be. Dating back to the time when my aunt Grimalda was forbidden from having a stake in the business, women weren’t welcome in positions of authority. Although my father had hired top female professionals over the years, that tradition lived on. Not that I had ambitions to work at Gucci anyway; I was too busy pursuing my dream to be an actor—a passion that had first been sparked in me when Bee and I used to put on little productions in Berkshire, and was further encouraged at Hurst Lodge and then at Aiglon with my involvement in productions like The Boy Friend. To that end, in 1981 I moved to New York and applied to Juilliard, the prestigious academy for dance, drama, and music.
It was a dream that would never come true. I felt I had the talent, but once I came face-to-face with the teachers and my fellow actors on the day of my audition, I realized I was out of my depth. I’d chosen a monologue from Iphigenia in Aulis—a play by Euripides—and during rehearsals I’d gone over my lines repeatedly, desperately trying to identify with Iphigenia, who begs her father not to sacrifice her as she reminds him of his “smiles and kisses” and time spent sitting on his knee.
I struggled to strike an emotional chord, so my acting coach urged me to draw on personal experience and especially my relationship with my own father. “Imagine it!” he told me. “Your father is standing over you with a knife. What would you say to him?” I read the Greek tragedy many times over and no matter how hard I tried, I simply couldn’t envisage speaking to Papà the same way. We weren’t like that as a family, or at least he wasn’t that way with me. Due to the age difference, he was really more like a grandfather than a father to me, which meant he had difficulty identifying with my life. He also grew up in a generation where men simply didn’t talk about love, loss, or dreams. It dawned on me then that I’d never heard him mention anything about his own mother or father, his childhood escapades, or stories about his sons when they were young.
I was at the whim of someone who rushed through his days, engrossed in his work, and who rarely paused to discuss more mundane matters. Although he was always kind to me, my interactions with him had been fleeting and superficial at best. With my brothers it was a different story. Mamma always told me that he’d raised them in a near-tyrannical manner, permitting no challenges to his command, and I wondered if that was why there was so much resentment and discord. There were so many unanswered questions.
Having always believed I had a good rapport with Papà, I began to question that preconception and for a while I felt as if I didn’t know him at all. Or myself, for that matter. The discovery of this chasm in my emotional life was an epiphany for me, which had massive psychological connotations.
Even though I flunked my audition to get into Juilliard I was still determined to pursue my acting elsewhere despite the fact that my father had enlisted me to attend several more Gucci-related events on his behalf. I signed up for drama classes three times a week at the famed Herbert Berghof Studio but soon realized that—no matter how much I loved the theater—it wouldn’t help. My classmates seemed to eat, sleep, and breathe acting, and in all honesty, I didn’t. My head wasn’t in it and I couldn’t devote time to my craft with the steady, uninterrupted commitment it required.
Instead, I became adept at another role—as my father’s emissary at a variety of high-profile parties. Older than my years, I found it easy to blend in with his business associates as well as movie stars such as Cary Grant or Gregory Peck, who were nothing less than endearing and immediately put me at ease. There was only one time when my youthfulness almost let me down. It was a black-tie gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to launch The Vatican Collections: The Papacy and Art—a collection of 237 sculptures, paintings, and tapestries on loan from the Vatican Museum, including an impressive Caravaggio oil called The Deposition. I’d asked my school friend Enrico to be my escort and have to admit that we had too much champagne that night and were a little tipsy. Fortunately, we pulled ourselves together just in time to be introduced to Nancy Reagan, one of the most powerful women in the world. As tiny as she was, the First Lady exuded a commanding presence indeed.
Another person who left an impression on me was Prince Charles, whom I met at a Gucci-sponsored polo tournament in Windsor Great Park years later. He was playing in the tournament and when his team won I presented him with the cup. He flashed me a smile that almost made me blush. “Delighted to meet you,” he said in that mellifluous voice of his, and then chatted with me in a manner that made me feel as if I were the center of his world for those few moments. It was all a bit surreal.
The more acting classes I missed in New York due to some company engagement, however, the more my ambitions melted away. I came to realize that my life in the theater would have to be sacrificed if I was to remain a part of the family business in the way my father envisaged. The two worlds were galaxies apart. Acting meant uncertainty and rejection, while my father was offering unlimited support and a clear path ahead, full of opportunity. I realized that everything had happened so fast and that I had, in effect, allowed him to take over. Although I’d have liked to pursue a degree, he’d never encouraged me to follow that path. To some extent, though, working alongside him made up for the decision never to further my education. For the first time in my life I had positive mentorship. “Brava, Patricia!” he’d say, and the prouder he was, the better I felt about myself.
The curtain may have fallen on my acting career but I had no regrets about being in New York with my friends, some of whom had moved from Europe—Maria lived in SoHo and Andrea and Enrico would come in from Boston. There was a distinctive uptown-downtown divide back then. I’d spend my days in my father’s domain uptown but otherwise I was always downtown, which was mine. Lower Manhattan felt like a real village with all kinds of people on the streets. The gay scene was exploding and there was a freedom of expression that felt like a revolution. It was so radically different from anything any one of us had experienced before and we could all be whomever we wanted. I liked to dress up in Japanese fashions or eclectic outfits found in vintage stores paired with flamboyant costume jewelry and occasionally a wig if I was in the mood. “I dare you to wear these!” Enrico told me one day when he spotted a pair of nipple clamps in a sex shop. At a society party a few nights later I turned up in some wild outfit with the clamps clasped to the outside.
At a tedious debutante ball on the Upper East Side one night, I gathered a few people and made a suggestion. “Let’s head downtown to Area or Dance
teria on Twenty-First Street! I promise you will love it!” Off we went—the girls still in their gowns and the boys in black tie. Not that anyone was paying attention to what we were wearing in a place where the eclectic mix of attire might include leather-clad Madonna look-alikes with teased hair or people dressed like us. There was nothing quite like New York in the eighties.
Aside from the crazy nightlife, though, one of the best things about being there was being able to spend much more time with my father. We still shared the same restless energy, to the point that Mamma would say, “The two of you make my head spin!” Papà was indefatigable—even I found it hard to keep up with him. I would sit in his office and marvel at how he moved from one meeting to another, taking calls in between without missing a beat. If he had a spare moment we would go downstairs to the shop floor and do the rounds of the various departments, where he pointed out problems with displays to me along the way. It was fascinating to watch the way his mind worked and how he had an instinctive eye for what looked right as well as an innate need to mentor me and teach me all he knew. Being in his presence was all-consuming and every day was a learning experience.
The more he involved me in the business, the more I also came to realize that the name I had carried all my life meant an awful lot to people. Back in London nobody paid much attention but in Manhattan as soon as anyone discovered my link to Gucci they’d look at me differently, almost through me, which made me feel uncomfortable to the point that, if I could avoid it, I wouldn’t tell people who I was. It wasn’t that I was hiding my identity—after all, it was the only one I’d ever known—it was more that while my name undoubtedly opened doors, on occasion it was decidedly inconvenient.
In the Name of Gucci Page 19
