In March 1976 I was on the cover of Newsweek. The same Linda Bird Francke who had done the New York magazine article that had ended my marriage with Egon wrote a wonderful seven-page article on my business success. Barry was very proud. That Monday he had a photographer take photos of the magazine on all the newsstands in all the different neighborhoods of New York and made an album for me. I teased him that he left out all the foreign newsstands; my cover ran on every continent. Here we were, two young tycoons, twenty-nine and thirty-four, living a fast life on top of the world!
On the drive to Cloudwalk we often stopped at theaters along the way to study people’s reactions at his sneak previews. The first preview we went to was Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood. Not a big hit. Thankfully, after that, Barry had many blockbusters, such as Marathon Man, Saturday Night Fever, Grease, and Urban Cowboy. I also remember how anxious he was on Sunday mornings tallying the movie numbers that were called in by his VPs of sales. The ashtray beside our bed would fill quickly as the numbers came in from around the country.
The summer of ’77 we decided to take the children on a cross-country drive. We flew to Denver and started out in a rented RV with Barry at the wheel. We were hardly out of the airport and there he was, on the side of the highway, changing a flat tire. We spent four days or so in that camper, which we had named Fantasy 1. We drove from Pike’s Peak to Durango in Colorado and visited Monument Valley on our long way to Lake Powell in Utah, where we’d rented a houseboat that we named Fantasy 2. I was in charge of the food, Barry and Alex were in charge of getting us to the right places, and Tatiana was in charge of making the beds, but after two nights in the RV, we opted to sleep in motels along the way instead.
The houseboat had its own challenges. Barry was stressed because he was afraid that the boat would slip its mooring and go by itself over the dam and down the waterfall, so he stayed wide awake all night. As soon as I heard about the dam, I started having a fit because I thought the dam had something to do with nuclear power. I drove Barry crazy about the nuclear fears I was having while Alexandre and Tatiana amused themselves by killing flies, hundreds of which were swarming in the boat. Lake Powell is beautiful, though, and we managed to have lots of fun during the day.
The last leg of the trip was rafting down the Colorado River, but Barry gave up—driving the RV and the houseboat had worn him out—so he left and took shelter in a hotel in Las Vegas while Tatiana, Alexandre, and I ended up going down the river alone with the two boatmen, brothers, and camping out on the shore. We had a wonderful time on the river all day and sleeping under the stars at night, as I expect the boatmen did, too, with the large supply of booze they had taken along. At the end of the rafting trip, Barry picked us up by helicopter at the Grand Canyon and we all flew home exhausted, dirty, and happy.
At the end of 1977, for my thirtieth birthday, I bought myself a beautiful apartment on the twelfth floor of 1060 Fifth Avenue. It was a very large apartment that had belonged to Rodman Rockefeller and had an amazing view over the reservoir of Central Park, where every night we could watch the most extraordinary sunset. My good friend Oscar de la Renta’s first wife, Françoise, helped me to decorate it in a style that was both lavish and somewhat bohemian. Huge comfortable velvet sofas, upholstered silk fuchsia walls, leopard carpet, and rose print walls for the master bedroom. Barry moved in with us and I built him his own bathroom and dressing room off our bedroom. He was in LA half the time but we all lived very happily together when he came to New York. We gave huge fun parties to celebrate the movies he produced. The children loved Barry and he loved them in return, though like any reasonable person, he cursed at them when they were naughty. Egon appreciated Barry’s involvement and used to joke that the children had “two fathers.”
Barry and I went out a lot when he was in New York, and I would go out alone when he was not there. Sometimes I flirted with other men or boys. It was that time in New York; we were very free. Barry did not ask questions, nor did I for that matter. Our relationship was above that. We loved being together and we loved being apart.
I had a little fling with Richard Gere, who had just finished American Gigolo. Hard to resist. His agent, Ed Limato, was upset with him and told him that seeing me was not a good move for his career as Paramount distributed the film. Barry never said anything but I know he was not happy. Barry was always cool, above anything and anyone. He knew it would pass.
Studio 54 had opened, and was the final stop for any evening in New York. Sometimes, when Barry was in LA, late at night I would put on my cowboy boots, take my car, park in the garage, walk into 54, meet my friends, have a drink, and dance. What I loved best was going in alone, the long entrance, the disco music. I felt like a cowboy walking into a saloon. But the idea of being able to go to 54 alone is what thrilled me the most: again, a man’s life in a woman’s body! It was fun. We all felt very free as we did not know yet about AIDS. I never stayed too late though. I had my children and my mother at home and had to wake up early to go to work.
I kept going back and forth to the factories in Italy and would sometimes stop in Paris on the way, to shop and act like a rich American tourist. I remember having tea in the lobby of the Plaza Athénée with my friend, the tall, flamboyant André Leon Talley, who was the Women’s Wear Daily Paris correspondent at the time. I used to force him to pretend he was an African king.
I had become the woman I wanted to be and I absolutely loved my life. I had two beautiful, healthy children; a wildly successful fashion business; a lot of fun and a wonderful man with whom I shared so much. In 1980, Barry rented a sailboat called Julie Mother and he and I sailed the Caribbean. I was reading a fascinating book The Third Wave by the futurist writer Alvin Toffler. The book predicted that soon we would communicate through computers, that we would have ways to connect to information and in turn send that information around the world. It sounded wild, like science fiction. I was amazed, underlining paragraphs and taking a lot of notes. I remember my fountain pen had turquoise ink, the color of the sea, on which we were sailing . . . I had a feeling the world would change. It did.
The night we came back, I got the call from Hans Muller. My mother was in bad shape. He needed me to come to Switzerland immediately. I jumped on a plane. After spending a few very difficult weeks in the mental ward of the hospital taking care of my mother and watching her fight her demons, I returned to New York, but things had changed. I felt out of place in my own gilded, easy life. Barry was as loving as ever, but I felt off balance. To see my mother so bad, to relive with her the horrors of her past, took a toll on me. I had to escape the excess of my fast-moving life. I took the children and went as far away as I could: the island of Bali.
* * *
“Do your work, then step back. The only path to serenity,” wrote the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu in the sixth century BC. I took that big step back in the summer of 1980 as I walked five miles along a beautiful, peaceful Balinese beach and watched the sun come up on my first day there. New York, Barry, Richard, success—I had run away from it all. That morning, at five a.m., I chanced upon Paulo, a handsome bearded Brazilian with long, curly hair who lived in a bamboo house on the beach and hadn’t worn shoes in ten years. I felt so far away and my life took yet another turn. Paulo smelled delicious, a mixture of the frangipani flowers that decorated his house and cloves from the Gudam Garang cigarettes he smoked. He collected and sold textiles, spoke Bahasa Indonesia, and took me and the children to discover all the temples and mysteries of the island. At first it was a vacation affair, a way to forget the terrible weeks of my mother’s illness . . . another escape. In retrospect, it should have stayed that way, but it didn’t.
I was completely and absolutely infatuated with everything in Bali, including Paulo. I did not think of or wish for a future with him, but I was captivated by the adventure of the unknown. When I returned to New York, there was Barry, looking at me lovingly, searching into my eyes and my heart, being sad. He knew something had changed. I
felt terrible, but my rush of emotions was overruling my reason.
My children were not happy with me when Barry moved out and Paulo joined us in New York. Nor was my mother. What was I doing? Was I really in love with that “jungle man”? Was I going to give up Barry’s unconditional love? Everyone was incredulous. I was defiant. More than being in love with Paulo, I was in love with the disruption that love can cause.
Paulo made his official appearance on the New York scene at a dinner I gave in my Fifth Avenue apartment for Diana Vreeland and her book Allure. He appeared barefoot, wearing a silk shirt over an ikat sarong from the island of Kupang. Eyebrows were raised, but I didn’t care. In fact, I enjoyed it. I was on a mission to be provocative, and craved the adventure of it all.
Paulo was also a constant reminder of Bali, that magical island which had so inspired me with its beauty, its fabrics, and its colors. I created a whole makeup line called Sunset Goddess. I was living the fantasy of being a goddess myself and dedicated a perfume, Volcan d’Amour (Volcano of Love), to my new man. Cloudwalk was soon filled with Indonesian textiles and artifacts and I planted colorful ceremonial flags along the river that are there to this day.
Change followed change when I took the children out of school in New York, moving them permanently to Cloudwalk. I felt a sense of danger in the city. John Lennon had been killed by a deranged fan at the doorway of his building in December 1980, and I was haunted by the kidnapping of Calvin Klein’s eleven-year-old daughter, Marci, for ransom. Thankfully she had been released unharmed, but my anxiety persisted. Alexandre and Tatiana were eleven and ten, too old to be taken to school and young enough to be swayed by the temptations of city life and the pseudosophistication of some of their city friends. I wanted them to connect with nature, to do without the constant activities in New York, and develop their own resources and imaginations. With some amazement, I realized there had been value to my periods of childhood boredom in Belgium.
I also made the move because of me. I was less interested in being a tycooness with a fast life than I was in being a more present mother and a more devoted partner to a man. It was a phase, but it was real. I went to New York on Tuesday mornings and was back at Cloudwalk on Thursday nights. Paulo spent his days building a new barn and the children went to Rumsey Hall, a nearby private school.
My makeover extended to my clothes. I gave up wearing my own dresses, which were then being designed by licensees anyway, and wore only sarongs, then replaced my sexy high heels with sandals in the summer and boots in the winter. I wore exotic jewelry and let my hair go very curly, often with a fresh flower in it. Paulo and I traveled back to Bali and his bamboo house on the beach whenever we could. Often the children came along.
Looking back, I smile at the ways I tailored my personality to merge with those of different men at different times in my life. I think most women consciously change their stripes or at least modify them in their relationships with men, especially during the delicious period of seduction. They become instant football lovers or sailing enthusiasts or political junkies, then taper back to their own personalities when the relationship is either cemented or over. No one I know, however, went to the lengths I did.
My relationship with Paulo lasted four years, as did my wardrobe of sarongs. “Why don’t you wear real clothes?” my mother kept asking. But even she couldn’t envision my next metamorphosis when I left Paulo to become the muse to a writer in Paris.
The summer of 1984, after I sold my cosmetics business to the English pharmaceutical company Beecham, I chartered a sailboat to sail around the Greek islands. The children were young teenagers, their relationship with Paulo was not good, and the mood on board was heavy and unpleasant. My close Brazilian friend Hugo Jereissati, who had first led me to discover Bali, was with us. I remember telling Hugo while we were sunbathing, “My life is going to change again.” It did.
Wool skirts. Buttoned-up sweaters. Flat shoes. They would dominate my wardrobe for the next five years. Alain Elkann, an Italian novelist and journalist, didn’t like the sexy clothes I had just started designing, so, yet again, I changed my stripes for love. My new image startled me every time I looked in the mirror.
I’d met Alain in New York at a fourteenth-birthday party Bianca Jagger was giving for her daughter, my goddaughter Jade. Tatiana and Alex were both home from boarding school, she from England and he from Massachusetts, and we were all in New York that weekend.
Alain was very attractive and we knew a lot of people in common as he had been married to Margherita Agnelli, Egon’s first cousin. “Come with me to Paris,” Alain said soon after we met. I didn’t hesitate. The children were away at school and I couldn’t bear another day in New York. Just as I had found Paulo during my introspection after my mother’s collapse, I found Alain in 1984 during my disenchantment with New York. Life in New York had become all about money—Dynasty and Dallas were the hits on television—and after four years cloistered at Cloudwalk with Paulo, Paris intellectual life was very appealing to me. My work wasn’t really interesting anymore. Though I was working on starting a new business, my heart wasn’t really in it.
What was in my heart was Alain. And Paris. Paulo was very angry and moved to his native Brazil; I moved to a beautiful apartment I rented on rue de Seine between a courtyard and a garden. My friend François Catroux, an interior decorator, helped me to set up a chic and bohemian interior filled with Empire furniture and the pre-Raphaelite paintings from my recently sold Fifth Avenue apartment.
Alain and I entertained a lot: writers, artists, and designers, even though fashion was no longer my priority. Alain had a day job at Mondadori, the publishing house, and wrote novels after work. My all-time favorite writer, Alberto Moravia, stayed with us for weeks at a time. He would write in the morning, and in the afternoons he and I would go to museums, movies, or to Café de Flore for hot chocolate. I could not believe we had become such close friends.
In my new Parisian life I rediscovered my first love, literature, and was living yet another fantasy—having a literary salon and founding a small publishing house, Salvy, where we published in French the great writers Vita Sackville-West, Gregor von Rezzori, and Bret Easton Ellis, among others.
Alain and I also had a lively, loving family life during holidays. He had three children with Margherita Agnelli: John (“Jaki”), Lapo, and Ginevra. Maybe because they were related to my own children, we immediately became a family. We only had the five children on vacations and occasional weekends, but took full advantage of the time. We skied together in Gstaad, swam in Capri where Alain and I rented a small apartment, and sailed up the Nile to discover ancient Egypt. The rest of the time I was with Alain, the perfect writer’s muse, listening to his writings and following his many moods. I ran a perfect intellectual stylish home, with abundant food and fresh flowers at all times. I had long known that writers may live the bohemian life, but they love luxury. I set up a small office on the attic floor and talked to my very reduced New York office daily.
For all that I loved my life in Paris, being with Alain was sometimes difficult. Though I shared his life and interests entirely, he did not share mine. In 1986, I was one of eighty-seven immigrants chosen to receive a Mayor’s Liberty Award for my contribution to the city of New York and the United States. I was very proud and wanted to go to New York for the ceremony and receive my award from Mayor Ed Koch, but Alain did not want me to go, so I didn’t. My mother went for me.
Looking back, I realize how many things I let go for my relationship with Alain. He wanted me to give up my personality and my success and I actually did it with enthusiasm. No one had ever asked me that before. I traded my passion for independence to be “the woman of.” My children were astonished. “Mommy has zero personality,” they used to say, and I smiled. I knew deep down it wasn’t really true, but I was seduced by the role I was embracing of the devoted artist’s woman.
All probably would have continued except I came to realize that Alain was having an affair w
ith my good friend Loulou de la Falaise, muse of Yves Saint Laurent. Loulou was all the things I had given up: glamour, work, success. I was shocked, very sad, and upset at first, but I grew to understand on some level that it was, at least partially, my fault. By altering my personality, I had lost what had attracted Alain to me in the first place. I had become the docile, passive person I thought he wanted only to have him stray toward the same sort of person I had been. I am not one to accept humiliation, however, and instead, I turned the betrayal into a determination to win. By staying cool when I confronted them and exposed the affair, I trusted my calm attitude would diminish the lure of the “forbidden fruit” and eventually destroy it. I was right. The affair soon lost its appeal and ended. Alain and I stayed together a bit more, but I knew it would soon be time to move on.
In retrospect, I would not give up those years in Paris with Alain or the years with Paulo in and out of Bali for anything in the world. No one goes through life with one rigid personality. We are far more complex with various needs and desires that present themselves at different stages of our lives. Because I worked for and achieved financial independence so early in life, I had the unusual luxury of fully living those fantasies, and also having the ability to leave them when the time was right.
Paulo gave me the serenity I needed to heal from my mother’s collapse and a refuge from the frenetic pace of my life in New York. Alain gave me my return to Europe and the world of culture and ideas I craved after closeting myself at Cloudwalk. Alain also gave me three wonderful stepchildren whom I love and have stayed close to. Jaki is now the respected John Elkann who runs Fiat motor company and its subsidiaries, Lapo is a very successful designer and a marketing genius, and Ginevra is a princess, mother of three, film producer, and president of Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli. All three are siblings to Alex and Tatiana and we are a family.
The Woman I Wanted to Be Page 8
