Going back to Madrid to complete the school year was a bit of a downer, but during spring break Deanna and I planned a trip through Andalusia. We discovered the beauty of the Alhambra in Grenada and the magic of Sevilla. That trip was the end of my stay in Spain. I decided to continue school in Geneva where my mother was living with Hans. Deanna moved to Andalusia, and we stayed friends for a bit then lost touch.
I called Deanna a few years ago to invite her to the opening of my new boutique in Honolulu where she now lives. We picked up where we left off, as childhood friends do. “Can you believe we are in our sixties?” I said. We laughed at the absurdity of it. I felt the same age I was when I last saw her.
I have always tried to stay in touch with the people that were important in my life and the people that I loved. Once I love, I love forever, and there is nothing more cozy and meaningful than old friends and lovers. I’m so fortunate to have had and have so much love in my life. Without it, I would never be who I am.
I find great happiness in my relationships with old friends, living mirrors that reflect histories of laughter and sorrow, triumphs and failures, births and deaths, on both sides.
My closest, oldest friend is Olivier Gelbsmann, who has known me since I was eighteen. He has followed every step of my life and when we are together we don’t need to speak to know what the other thinks. Olivier worked with me very early on, worked with Egon afterward, and later became an interior decorator. We now work together on DVF décor and home products. Olivier was present when my children were born, and at every important moment of my life. He consoled each of my boyfriends when I left them. Olivier was friends with my mother, my daughter, and now my granddaughters. My friend the Greek artist Konstantin Kakanias, with whom I collaborated on an inspirational comic book, Be the Wonder Woman You Can Be, as well as other projects, has also been friends with four generations of women in my family.
I treasure the memories I share with friends like Olivier and Konstantin. Landscapes change, people come and go, but all the landscapes, all the experiences, all the people weave into your life’s fabric. Love is not just about people you had affairs with. Love is about moments of intimacy, paying attention to others, connecting. As you learn that love is everywhere, you find it everywhere.
Just as I collect books and textiles, I collect memories and friends. I love to remember. It’s not that I dwell in nostalgia, but that I love intimacy. It is the opposite of small talk. It is the closest thing to truth. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” as I learned in Oxford when I studied the English poet John Keats.
I have tried not to lie my whole life. Lies are toxic. They are the beginning of misunderstandings, complications, and unhappiness. To practice truth is not always easy, but as with all practices, it becomes a matter of habit. Truth is cathartic, a way of keeping the trees pruned. The truer you can be the better it is because it simplifies life and love.
* * *
There are many degrees of love, of course. I know now that of all the so many times I’ve been in love, only two men were truly great loves. I married both of them, one toward the beginning of my life, the other much later.
Egon. I cannot begin to describe all I owe to my first husband, Prince Eduard Egon von und zu Fürstenberg. I will be forever thankful to him because he gave me so much. He gave me my children; he gave me his name; he gave me his trust and his encouragement as he believed in me; he shared everything, all of his knowledge and all of his connections as he gave me his love.
I met Egon at a birthday party in Lausanne. I remember his big smile, his childlike face, and his gapped teeth. He had just enrolled at the University of Geneva where I was taking courses. He had also just returned from a few months in a Catholic mission in Burundi, where he had taught children and taken care of leprosy patients. I was impressed. I remember what I was wearing the night I met him because he complimented me on it—pink palazzo pajama pants and an embroidered tunic I had borrowed from my mother’s closet. We were both nineteen.
Egon was the perfect eligible bachelor, an Austro/German prince by his father, and a rich heir from his mother, Clara Agnelli, the eldest child of the Fiat motorcar family. Egon seemed interested in me, maybe because I had already made a lot of friends in Geneva, and he had just arrived. We went out a lot and one Sunday we drove to nearby Megève in the mountains for a day in the snow. The car broke down and Egon went to get help. I remember opening the glove compartment to check his passport. I had never met a prince before and I wanted to see if his title was written on it. (It was not). When Egon came back to the car with a mechanic, the engine started immediately. There was nothing wrong with the car. To this day I remember Egon’s embarrassed face. It was his helplessness that seduced me.
Egon lived in a small, luxurious rental apartment near Lac Léman while I was living at home with my mother and Hans, but we were always together. My mother, who had never acknowledged a boyfriend of mine before, immediately adopted him. They would become very close. Egon had a lot of energy and a great sense of adventure. He was always planning trips and places to discover. He suggested a group of us join a package deal trip to the Far East. I managed to convince my mother to let me go with them only for her to discover when she brought me to the airport that the only passengers going were Egon and me. The others had dropped out. I panicked, worried she wouldn’t let me go alone with Egon, but she did.
We had a great time. India, New Delhi, Agra, and the magnificent Taj Mahal, Thailand and its floating market, Burma and its hundred pagodas, Cambodia and the ruins of Angkor Wat, the making of clothes overnight in Hong Kong. We went sightseeing all day every day as perfect tourists, and at night, we were invited to dine with local people through Egon’s Fiat connection. Egon was the most charming young man in the world. His charisma and enthusiasm were contagious and traveling with him was always full of surprises and serendipity.
In Bangkok we dined with Jim Thompson, a famous American who had settled in Thailand after the war and had organized all the independent silk weavers into the huge business he owned, the Thai Silk Company. Mr. Thompson was wearing a silk shirt and pants and embroidered velvet slippers. He lived in a magnificent old Thai house full of antiques. From the house, we could see the weavers working at night, lit by lanterns, all along the floating market. I remember him telling us he was leaving for a holiday the next day in the jungles of Malaysia. He was never to be seen again. Rumors say that he was a double, triple agent and had been killed.
Another night, in Thailand, I was so mad at Egon—I’d found him in our hotel room having a massage from a beautiful Thai girl—that I’d gone down to the bar. A rather gloomy American man bought me a very strong Thai beer, announced he worked for a defense contractor, then said, “Oh well, the Vietnam War will soon be finished, but it doesn’t matter because there will be a new arms market now in the Middle East.” (Two months later, the 1967 Six-Day War erupted in Israel, Jordan, and Syria.) I was shocked. I had never realized that wars actually meant business for some people. They use research, marketing, sales—everything a normal company does—but for the business of weapons and war. It was a jolt to learn that as soon as defense contractors hear there is a conflict somewhere, they send salesmen and open a new market.
Egon and I went everywhere and discovered everything together. I remember the first time he took me to Villa Bella, his mother’s chalet in Cortina d’Ampezzo in the Italian Alps. I had never been in such an elegant, welcoming, unusual house before. All in wood, it looked like a glorified gingerbread house full of antiques, an unexpected mix of colorful fabrics and quantities of silver and Murano glass. There were many housemaids dressed in Tyrolean fashion and butlers in full gear, yet the household was not stiff. The young ones would go skiing all day and gather with all the others for dinner. Food was abundant and delicious, of course, and the conversation humorous and superficial.
Clara, Egon’s mother, was there with Count Giovanni Nuvoletti, who was to become her second husband a few years later. G
iovanni was a writer and a man of the salon. He was very eloquent and held court, while Clara was light and witty. We were a group of friends from university who had come to Villa Bella for the Christmas holidays, and I shared a room with a beautiful redheaded girl called Sandy. I celebrated my twentieth birthday there, still feeling slightly out of place. By the time I celebrated my twenty-first birthday in that same villa the following year, I had become more comfortable and at ease with the family, the milieu, the lifestyle in general.
Egon took me to the South of France to meet his glamorous uncle Gianni Agnelli on his yacht and to watch the Grand Prix of Monaco, the famous car race. He took me to the film festival at the Lido of Venice and the Volpi Ball on the Canale Grande. I met everyone that was anyone anywhere—aristocrats, courtesans, businesspeople, actors, painters, and all of the Café Society entourage. How would I ever remember all these names, places, all this information, I wondered, taken by the dizziness of it all. It all felt like what Hemingway so eloquently described as a “moveable feast.”
But our experiences were not only about glamour and wealth. Egon was a real traveler, inquisitive, full of energy and curiosity, eager to meet all kinds of people in whatever country we were in, keen to eat into the adventure—sometimes literally. I remember a man he befriended in the old souks of Djerba, Tunisia, who invited us to his house for lunch. We followed him through the narrow twisting alleyways, turning to the left, to the right, and to the left again, having no idea where we were going. We finally arrived in what looked like an abandoned apartment building, climbed the stairs, and arrived in the man’s house, filled with children, some of whom were obviously sick. Food was served and I couldn’t touch it, I felt repulsed, but Egon downed it with grace as if we were at the most elegant home in Paris. I will always remember that day, the lesson it taught me. Egon had an incredible ease about him, which made all people feel good about themselves. He was a true prince.
I’d traveled a lot with my family as a child, but Egon brought it to a different level. He infused in me the same curiosity and sense of adventure, which I carry to this day. I’m always ready to go. I pack lightly. I travel lightly, leaving time for the unknown. Even as a child I loved to travel, through my Tintin books. It was with Tintin that I learned geography and discovered the world first—America, Egypt, Peru, China, the Congo. When I arrive somewhere I have never been before, I always think of Tintin.
But Egon’s most important gift was our children, all the more because I was hesitant about having them, especially Alexandre. He was the unexpected result of a weekend I spent with Egon in Rome in May 1969. I was living in Italy then, working as an intern for a fashion industrialist, Angelo Ferretti. Egon was taking the summer off, having completed his training program at Chase Manhattan Bank in New York, and was on his way to India and the Far East with a friend from school, Marc Landeau, before starting another job at the investment bank Lazard Frères in New York. I was very excited to see him and he, evidently, me. He had organized a big dinner with friends at Tula, a fashionable restaurant off Via Condotti, and I went with him wearing an evening jumpsuit with a plunging décolleté we had bought on sale that afternoon on the Via Gregoriana.
I remember there were paparazzi outside in the streets, but what happened inside was brighter than all of their flashbulbs. Egon gave me a beautiful ring he had designed, a pale sapphire in a big gold setting. To my complete surprise, this dinner was an engagement party. I was very excited, even though I did not totally believe it. Yet that night, in the intimacy of our bedroom, I remember whispering to Egon: “I will give you a son.” Did I really mean it? Or was I only trying to be seductive? In any event, after the weekend, Egon went to India and I went back to Ferretti’s factory.
A few weekends later I went to Monaco with friends to watch the Grand Prix again. Ferretti was in Monaco, too, and offered me a ride back to Milan at the end of the weekend. He drove his Maserati very fast and I thought it was all the high-speed twists and turns in the road that were making me nauseated. I felt even more sick the next day and thought a sauna might make me feel better. It didn’t. Instead I fainted in the middle of Piazza San Babila and remember hearing people saying “She’s dead, she’s dead” and all I could do was move a finger to show them “No, I’m not dead.” What I was, of course, was pregnant. I couldn’t believe my ears when the doctor told me the news.
Here I was, barely twenty-two, and what I wanted most was to be independent. Furthermore, Egon was one of the best “catches” in Europe. Who was going to believe that I had not done it on purpose? I went home to Geneva to see another doctor who told me he could help me end the pregnancy. I was torn.
I went to my mother for advice. She had taken Egon’s gift of a ring more seriously than I had and was horrified at the thought that I could make such a decision on my own. “You are engaged,” she said. “The least you can do is discuss the matter with your fiancé.” Reluctantly, I drafted a telegram to Egon, who was in Hong Kong, offering him the choice. I have kept the telegram of his wonderful reply in my scrapbook. He was clear and definite. “Only one option. Organize marriage in Paris July 15. I rejoice. Thinking of you. Love and kisses, Eduard Egon.”
Suddenly my life was giving me vertigo, though it was a happy dizziness. No time to waste. All the wedding preparations: invitations to be printed, wedding dress to be made, ceremony and party to be arranged, trousseau to be bought. As usual, my mother was a great help. We visited Clara, Egon’s mother, in Venice and planned it all together.
Clara was very supportive, but on Egon’s father’s side, the patriarch of the Furstenberg family was evidently not. Jewish blood in the family was unheard of and there was opposition. I also overheard a slight at the Agnelli house—something I interpreted as a clever, ambitious little bourgeois girl from Belgium getting what she wanted. I felt belittled and hurt and remember walking with a very determined stride around Clara’s garden, caressing my pregnant stomach. It was then I had my first conversation with Alexandre. “We’ll show them,” I said out loud to my unborn child. “We’ll show them who we are!”
The wedding took place on July 16, 1969, the same day that the first American astronauts were sent to the moon, in the countryside outside Paris, in Montfort l’Amaury. My three-month pregnancy did not show at all in the Christian Dior wedding dress its designer Mark Bohan had created for me. The mayor married us at the town hall and there was a huge luncheon reception afterward at the Auberge de la Moutière, a charming inn and restaurant managed by Maxim’s.
The crowd was young, beautiful, and glamorous; the food exquisite; and the entertainment enthusiastic. My father had hired the entire company of fifty musicians and singers from the trendy Russian nightclub Raspoutine. To my embarrassment, he took the microphone, sang in Russian with the Raspoutine musicians, and broke glasses. Everyone else loved it and the wedding party was a huge success. The only nonparticipant was Egon’s father, Tassilo, who had been so pressured by the family’s disapproving patriarch that he came to the ceremony but boycotted the reception, though it barely diminished the celebration or our joy. Egon and I left the guests dancing and singing, and went back to the center of Paris, changed our clothes, and went walking the streets and in an out of the shops of the Faubourg St-Honoré.
For our wedding present his mother gave us a beach house on Sardinia’s beautiful Costa Smeralda, where for the whole month of August we packed a crowd of sixteen friends into three tiny bedrooms. We were all so young and had so much fun.
Our beautiful son, Alexandre Egon, was born six months later on January 25, 1970, in New York. Our equally beautiful daughter, Tatiana Desirée, followed just thirteen months later. Just as Egon insisted that we marry and have Alexandre, he was insistent that I have Tatiana. I’d gotten pregnant again just three months after the very difficult birth of Alexandre by emergency cesarean after sixteen hours of labor. The idea of starting all over again needed some encouragement. Lovely Tatiana was born on February 16, 1971, this time by a scheduled
cesarean. There are no words to describe how grateful I am for Egon’s enthusiasm and support. He played a bigger part in both my children being born than I did, though I played a bigger part afterward.
* * *
Life in New York was lots of fun in the early seventies. Real estate was cheap, so many diverse and creative people could live there. Pop art in the galleries and nudity on Broadway made us feel that everything was new, allowed, and the freedom we felt had just been invented. Prince and Princess von Furstenberg (we had dropped the “und zu”) were the “it” couple in town. Our youth, our looks, and our means put us on every invitation list and in social columns. On any given night, we went out to at least one cocktail party, a dinner, sometimes a ball, and always a stop at some gay bar at the end of the night. We lived on Park Avenue but still felt very European and continued to spend a lot of time there.
We hosted lots of parties for Europeans coming to town. I remember the big party we gave for Yves Saint Laurent and the last-minute dinner we gave for Bernardo Bertolucci, who had just opened Last Tango in Paris. The movie was quite racy and shocking and its talented and handsome director was the hit of New York. Everyone came to our parties—Andy Warhol and his entourage, actors, designers, journalists, and, of course, many Europeans. Life was fast, to say the least, too fast, finally, for me.
The marriage itself had its own stresses. Egon was my husband and my first true love, but our marriage became complicated. He loved to have fun and was very promiscuous, wanting to experiment as much as possible. I tried to embrace his behavior and accept an open marriage; I certainly did not want to judge him. I acted cool and hid my suffering, not wanting to be a victim. But I had two young children to take care of and was starting an equally demanding business. It finally became too hard to manage it all.
The Woman I Wanted to Be Page 6
