Papà died later that evening with the love of his life, Bruna Palombo, at his side.
Much later, long after he was lost to us forever, my mother recounted the story of a dream he’d told her about the night before he fell out of bed. It was one of the last things they ever spoke about. “I saw my mother,” he confessed.
“What was she doing?” Mamma asked, fascinated by the meaning of his vision.
Papà smiled. “She was standing at the top of the stairs,” he replied. “I think she was waiting for me….”
Inner peace, that all-pervading sense of contentment and harmony, is an elusive dream and one that has been largely absent from much of my life. And yet it is something we all long for.
There was hardly any peace to be found in the days immediately after my father’s passing. Not for me, and none whatsoever for my mother, whose worst torment was only just beginning. Papà’s funeral on January 21, 1990, brought us little comfort, and our deliberate separation from the rest of his family in the church that day epitomized the unhappy rift.
There was no respite even once the service was over, as we joined a three-hour motorcade that took him on his final journey to the family crypt where my grandparents Aida and Guccio had lain side by side for almost fifty years. Grimalda and Rodolfo were entombed there too, while Vasco had been buried elsewhere. My father had outlived them all. The only notable absentee on that interminable drive to Soffiano outside Florence was Olwen in her wheelchair—the trip would have been too arduous.
I had managed to remain composed all morning but once we arrived at the cemetery gates and made our way through the headstones behind Papà’s coffin, I cried like never before. Never again would he breeze into our lives as he always did, with a ready smile and a kind word. Never again would I feel that energy and vitality—the zest for life that was so uniquely his. He may not have been the greatest father in the world, but he was the only one I had. And in the last five years he had peeled back the layers to show me the real Aldo Gucci, the man my mother and I adored, unconditionally. I was grateful, at least, for that.
Following the rest of the family, who remained several paces ahead, we crammed together at the entrance to the marble mausoleum, surrounded by those I struggled to consider my own. Mamma stood next to me, catatonic. Only once everyone else had shuffled away were we able to move in closer to have a silent moment alone. On a table in a corner I noticed a crucifix above the altar and four candles, plus several faded, framed photographs placed there by relatives over the years. My grandparents were there, along with my aunt and uncle. Most of the great Gucci dynasty was now reduced to dry, crumbling bones.
A few months later I felt compelled to make a pilgrimage back to the cemetery on my own. Reaching into my handbag, I retrieved a photograph and placed it next to the others, completing the tableau of this once-proud family. It was a picture of my father taken at my wedding in Jamaica. He was dressed all in white, his arm outstretched as he pointed toward the ocean and the setting sun. “I miss you, Papà,” I whispered, and kissed the frame, before saying a quiet prayer and heading back to Rome.
On February 19, 1990, exactly one month to the day after he died and just two doors down from the very room in which he had given up his fight, my daughter Victoria had come into this world. With uncanny symmetry, the nurse who tended to my baby and me was the same nun who had closed my father’s eyes.
Victoria was born at a traumatic time of my life and it showed. Gangly and highly strung with a delicate nature, she demanded more care and attention than Alexandra had as a newborn and I spared a thought for Mamma, who hadn’t always found it easy to be the perfect mother. I now had two children to look after, a marriage still in crisis, and countless loose ends to tie up, not to mention my mother, whose grief had developed into full-blown hysteria. I genuinely feared for her sanity. Without the man who had become father, friend, husband, and son all rolled into one, she had nobody to guide her or ease her inner torment. Her guru, Sari Nandi, had recently died, so she felt utterly bereft, looking to the heavens and calling out my father’s name until she cried herself to sleep.
Her only comfort was the fact that Papà still came to her in her dreams.
I consoled her as best I could, but there were more practical matters to attend to. The notaio in charge of my father’s will had summoned me and my brothers to his office in the center of Rome. The document he read to us was dated April 12, 1988—four weeks after Roberto and Giorgio had cashed in their Gucci shares. I was the only one who knew its contents. He began by reading out a list of things my father had left to Olwen, his grandchildren, and to various members of staff. Then he got down to the part everybody was most interested in. Declaring himself to be of sound mind, my father disinherited Paolo completely and appointed me as his “sole and universal heir,” even though such a proclamation was more symbolic than absolute in the eyes of the law.
The change of atmosphere in the room was palpable. Squirming in my seat and staring straight ahead, I wished I were anywhere else but there as I felt half a dozen angry eyes boring into me. My brothers could have been under no illusion that they had been deliberately snubbed. It was an unexpected outcome for everyone. As the only female descendant, no one was more surprised than I when my father handed me his will at the hospital. His decision was final, he said. Besides, his sons had already received their patrimony in the form of shares gifted while he was still alive, plus a lifetime of endowments. He had nothing more to give, apart from the minimum under Italian law—but he did have a few more things to say.
In a farewell read out in a monotone voice by the notaio, he condemned Paolo’s “meanness and humiliation” but then added magnanimously that he forgave all those who had “offended” him. His last wish, he said, was for his family to find “harmony, tolerance and affection with one another, in [his] memory.”
Harmony: defined in a relationship as one “characterized by a lack of conflict or disagreement.” Papà wanted the impossible. He wanted peace.
My brothers, who had first met me as a little girl and who knew that I’d never sought to capitalize on my position or take any part in their power struggles, were clearly incensed. The three men from whom I would become largely estranged forever left that office without so much as a word.
Tellingly, my father’s predictions about the company were to come true. Investcorp would have done well to heed his advice. Within a couple of years Maurizio was ousted after accumulating such massive debts that he pushed it to the brink of bankruptcy. His departure allowed others with vision to slowly return Gucci to its former glory, starting with moving its headquarters back to Florence—its rightful home. In 2011, the latest owners opened the Gucci Museum in Florence, in which my grandfather’s entrepreneurial spirit and my father’s achievements were finally honored.
My brother Giorgio would be the only Gucci of his generation left when Papà was publicly acknowledged as the visionary that he was. In 1995 Maurizio was shot at point-blank range four times by two gunmen hired by his vengeful ex-wife, Patrizia. Dubbed “the Black Widow” by the press, she served a sixteen-year sentence for his murder. Paolo died after being sent to prison for missed alimony payments and Roberto died five years later of cancer. Not even Olwen, who survived my father by several years just as my mother had predicted, would witness the splendid Florentine commemoration of her husband’s legacy. Nor was she interred alongside him in the Soffiano cemetery. Instead she was buried on her son Giorgio’s property on the Argentario coast, where Paolo would also ultimately be buried. Roberto would be laid to rest in the Gucci crypt, where two empty spaces remain to this day.
For a year or possibly more after Papà’s death, my mother’s inner torment continued unabated. It was a time that I prefer to forget and one that she chooses not to remember. Eventually she found her bearings, but more than twenty-five years after he left us, she has never found anyone else to match up to the man who once pursued her so ardently. Only recently has she even been ab
le to talk about her years with him.
“What a story we had, Patrizina!” she’d tell me, her brown eyes bright. “You don’t know the half of it! For a long time I didn’t realize how important I was to him.” Using a Roman expression, she threw up her hands and cried, “Me n’ha fatte tante!” (He put me through the wringer!), adding, “I know he wasn’t a saint but neither was I, and still he loved me. There will never be anyone like Aldo.”
She still keeps my father’s precious Madonna and child on her nightstand and has a few framed photographs of him scattered around her apartment. Although she has her friends, she’s not naturally sociable and prefers to be left to her own devices and look after her affairs. Accustomed to isolation, she enjoys her own company and boasts about the number of days she can spend alone in one stretch. Possibly for the first time in her life, she is serene and has recently declared that having me made all her suffering worthwhile. I certainly appreciate her more than ever before and I speak to her on the telephone almost every day. It took over forty years but we are finally at peace with one another.
Mamma has fully embraced her role as a grandmother with enthusiasm and all my girls love their “Nonna B.” She is also showing us the sense of humor that my father so loved, describing people and situations in her own particular way, using Roman expressions that never fail to make us laugh.
By her own admission, she has settled into her true potential, albeit late. “Your father always insisted that I was clever in my own way. When he knew he was dying he repeated that to me many times, telling me, ‘Brunicchi, you’re going to be okay!’ I didn’t believe him.”
For at least two decades after his death, Papà continued to visit her in her dreams, something that gave her great solace. Then one day, she had a dream so vivid that she will never forget it. My father was dressed in his suit and fedora—just the way she remembered him when he used to rush through the store on Via Condotti. She was standing before him, struggling in vain to open a locked suitcase.
“I don’t have the keys, Aldo!” she complained as she fiddled with the lock. He calmly assured her that he’d given them to her. “No, you didn’t!” she cried in frustration, but he continued to smile knowingly as he waited to see what she would do. When she looked down she saw that the keys had been in her hand all along. Laughing, she looked up at him but he had vanished.
The moment she awoke the next morning, she felt as if a great weight had been lifted. He would appear to her only once more, waving good-bye as he melted away into the distance—his eyes the last thing she could see. He never came to her in her dreams again. From that day forward, she became the strong woman he always knew she could be.
It was that same woman who found the strength to share his letters with me in the summer of 2009, and thus set me on a path to discover the real story behind the headlines. Not that it was easy to coax more information out of her—it never had been. I remember one incident as a child when I was rooting through my mother’s cupboards and stumbled across a photo album of my earlier years. When I opened it with excitement, I found that dozens of pictures had been ripped out, leaving yet more blank spaces in my life.
“Why did you do that, Mamma?” I asked, confused.
“I didn’t like the memories,” she replied flatly. “I didn’t want to remember.” Then she slammed shut the door to her memories once again, too scared to feel because she’d learned in the past that emotions could drag her back to a dark place.
Trying to piece all this together, bit by bit, I continued to gather information and chronicle as many details as I could. Whenever I went to visit her I hoped that there might be something more—something unexpected. Then, on another visit to Rome, there was.
When I arrived at her apartment, Mamma was waiting at the edge of her terrace, eager to buzz me in. Nothing much had changed since my father’s day and every detail was just as I remembered it. She had opened the shutters that would otherwise stay firmly closed to keep the living room cool and protect the furniture from the sun. In spite of her advancing years, even in the bright light she looked as beautiful as ever, with just enough makeup to enhance that still-flawless skin.
Knowing how private she’d always been, I tentatively brought up the subject of my book, longing for her to read certain passages. “I’d really like you to see what I’ve come up with, Mamma,” I told her with a softness born out of our much-improved relationship and a new love in my life.
She smiled. “Maybe, Patricia. One day. But first, I have something to show you.”
Then, just as she had a few years earlier, she rose from her chair, wandered into her bedroom, and emerged with yet another letter. This was the one she hadn’t been ready to let go of at the time.
Sitting at the dining room table, her reading glasses perched on the bridge of her nose, she showed me the single page with its almost unrecognizable handwriting. Clearing her throat, she said, “This was your father’s last letter. It is dated January 18, 1990. It was the finest and the dearest he ever wrote….”
Seeing her falter and realizing that she wasn’t going to be able to read the words he must have written on his deathbed, I took it from her hands. Bracing myself, I sat upright in my chair and began reading it aloud:
To express my feelings, I feel the duty to recognize, and offer my dedication, to the woman who has been a faithful life companion for more than thirty years. The feeling of love and affection I have for Bruna is immeasurable. For what you did for me, thank you Bruna, for your spiritual strength that helped me in all my endeavors. You are an exemplary woman who is modest, and you deserve the respect and admiration of everybody who has ever had the privilege of meeting you. Twenty-six years ago, you gave me a daughter, our Patricia. What a divine gift. She could not be more beautiful because she inherited your best qualities. I can never express enough of the gratitude and joy that you deserve. To my sons, I demand that you observe the moral obligations inspired by a life fully lived in my admiration for Bruna. Giorgio, Paolo and Roberto, I want them to respect Bruna’s qualities. This letter
That was where it ended. My father’s handwriting had simply stopped. A line of blue ink trailed to the bottom of the page and then off the edge.
I looked up at my mother, her eyes glistening.
I was speechless.
My mother quickly brushed away a tear. “The nuns think that may have been the moment he had his brain hemorrhage,” she said. “They gave this to me afterward, with the rest of his belongings. I’d like you to keep this now too.”
Staring incredulously at my father’s frail script, my eyes lingered on the words, which leapt off the page. This was his true last will and testament. This was when he knew that he would die and the moment, I think, when he found his peace. In the last few years of his life, he had seen everything he ever created destroyed. All his purpose was lost. His life became meaningless and I don’t think it was the kind of existence he could have survived for long. In the end, though, he recognized that all that was truly important was Mamma—and I.
Papà wanted my life to be full of gratitude and joy. And, with his help, I realized that it was. He asked for harmony, tolerance, and affection in his memory, and we had finally achieved that. My relationship with my mother was transformed and I loved her to bits. My father was right. She was an “exemplary woman.” Long ago, I was once asked for a happy memory of my mother, and I couldn’t honestly think of one. I know now that my happiest memory of her is probably yet to come.
“Dono divino” was how my father described me. And what a divine gift he had given me with this—a loving message from the grave almost twenty-five years after his death. Half crying, half laughing, I knew then that I had come full circle, as had she. Our journey together wasn’t over by any means, but it had taken us on a new path.
And as usual, my father—the inimitable Aldo Gucci—had the last word.
I would like to express my gratitude to the people who saw me through this book. To my agent, Alan Nevins,
for bringing the project together, and to my editor, Suzanne O’Neill, for her support and input throughout.
To my cowriter, Wendy Holden, for capturing my voice and synthesizing a complex story spanning one hundred years. To my dear friends Enrico, Andrea, and Bee, who provided their own perspective on the rapport with my parents and long-forgotten anecdotes that make me smile.
To Gregory Lee, who has brought so much love and peace into my life and who has been at my side from the outset of this literary adventure, endlessly helping me edit, proofread, and translate.
To my daughters, Alexandra, Victoria, and Isabella, for waiting patiently until the end to finally read about their heritage and tolerating me when I was at my wit’s end with yet another deadline.
And, most important, to my mother, without whose contribution—at times reluctant—and deeply personal insight into the three decades she spent with my father none of this would have been possible.
Last and not least, I salute all those who have been entwined with me, my family, and Gucci over the years and whose names I have omitted.
I hope I’ve made my Papà proud.
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In the Name of Gucci Page 28
