I’ve often asked myself what sort of woman I’d be today if I hadn’t experimented with such greatly different lifestyles with Paulo and Alain. Would I have been ready all those years ago to stay with Barry? Part of me wishes I had instead of hurting him and losing the years we could have spent together. But another part of me is glad. I’m probably a better wife and partner to Barry now because of it. I needed to try on different versions of myself to see which one fit me best. And after Alain I still wasn’t through.
My personal life was in limbo when I left Paris in 1989 and returned to New York. As usual, Barry was there to listen to me and reassure me, but to some degree we had lost each other and I did not want to hurt him again. I had to find myself first and that was not easy. I divided my time between Cloudwalk, the Carlyle Hotel in New York where I took an apartment, and the Bahamas where I helped my mother to settle into her little white house with blue shutters on the pink sand beach of Harbour Island.
I also renewed old friendships, and had some flirtations, but I really was not happy with myself. As much as I loved Barry’s company—we went everywhere together—I still wasn’t ready to commit. One of the reasons was that I had started a secret relationship with a handsome, mysterious, talented man, the only man who would, in the end, leave me.
I didn’t mean to fall in love with Mark Peploe, nor he, I’m sure, with me. Mark had been a friend for a long time and had written the screenplay for Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor in the guest room when I lived with Alain in Paris. (It won nine Academy Awards in 1988, including Best Adapted Screenplay.) Mark also was “taken”—he lived with a woman I knew and their twelve-year-old daughter in London. It never occurred to me to have an affair with him until he called me one day in New York after I’d returned from Paris—and sparks flew.
It was the stuff of fantasy. Literally. When I was a young girl, I used to write poetry and short stories about love and always thought that stolen moments, the untold, the unasked, the secrecy, defined the most exciting and romantic relationships. And our affair was exactly that. Mark and I had a great relationship; I respected his intellect, he was one of the most handsome men I’d ever met, and he was a great traveling companion. Soon after our affair began he asked me to join him in Sri Lanka where he was scouting sites for Victory, a movie he was going to direct. I barely knew where Sri Lanka was, or that it was the new name for Ceylon. I immediately booked a flight.
I will never forget driving around the island of Serendib, the magical island that gave us the word “serendipity,” with Mark, discovering the rubber and tea plantations, the reclining Buddha, the house of the author Paul Bowles, and the streets of Colombo. We were so far from everything. I was in awe of this elegant, handsome man who knew so much . . . our conversations were endless. They continued in all different landscapes—the streets and cafés of Paris, the trattorias of Rome, the streets of Lisbon, the souks and the harem of Topkapi in Istanbul, the Byzantine caves of Cappadocia, the Sufi mosque of Konya, the Vermillion Cliffs in Utah, and in discovering the artist Mantegna in Mantova. All through these landscapes, we talked and talked about everything. When traveling by car, I would read aloud the traveling adventures of the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, or the passions of the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. Those were our stolen moments, stolen from our everyday lives in anonymous hotels, airports, and rented cars.
Barry knew about Mark and Mark knew about Barry, although I avoided talking much about one to the other. I now realize that Barry was already like my husband and Mark was my secret lover. I could not give up one for the other. I must have been cruel to both, but I did not think I was at the time. Barry was waiting patiently, secure of the outcome. What was really in Mark’s mind, I never knew. I loved our “unspoken relationship,” and wanted it to go on and on, but it didn’t.
I felt great pain when Mark left me for yet another woman, not the mother of his child. I thought he enjoyed the fantasy of our secret relationship as much as I did, but perhaps he’d wanted a more permanent and visible relationship. He never explained, I never asked.
In retrospect, I know that Barry’s existence and my feelings for him had everything to do with my reluctance to commit fully to Mark, Alain, or Paulo. After Mark and I parted, Barry began taking up more and more space in my life, in my bed, and in my heart, and we found a new serenity.
Sailing the oceans, we found a way to design our lives together. Barry had had a love affair with boats ever since I’d taken him with me on Atlantis, the elder Stavros Niarchos’s sublime yacht, when the children were very small and spending the summer with Egon. That time we’d cruised the Amalfi Coast all the way to Greece. It was a revelation for Barry, the beginning of a dream to one day build his own yacht. We took many wonderful trips after that on chartered boats to the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, the Ionian Coast. I had always loved to travel to adventurous places, he needed his luxury and to be connected to his work. On those sailing trips we could do both . . . go on adventurous inland hikes, visit small villages, and yet come back to our floating comfort and communications at night.
We had always talked about our future over the years and we both knew we would end up together. I loved Barry and knew he was absolutely the only one I could marry, but I fought the notion of marriage itself. People often refer to it as “settling down,” and the words are so uninspiring to me. “Settle down” sounds like giving up your spontaneity and independence and that was not what I, or Barry for that matter, were about.
I began to soften when he started talking about marriage out of concern for the children. He wanted to be able to provide for them, he said, and marriage would make it much easier. When Alexandre married Alexandra Miller in 1995 (thus becoming Alex and Alex), Barry gave him a jar of earth as a wedding present to represent a sum of money for the down payment on a house. He was so sincere about caring for my children, I was moved.
My journals in 1999 tracked various family milestones. The birth of Talita, my first grandchild, was, of course, a major milestone. Another was that Tatiana was pregnant. She had wanted a baby so badly that when we went together to visit little Talita, she had gone outside and cried in a phone booth fearing she would never have one. The very next day she met Russell Steinberg, a loving, life-happy comedian. Antonia Steinberg was born one year and twenty-two days after Talita’s birth, the exact same length of time between Tatiana and Alexandre. My diary notes another milestone: I finally paid off my mortgage on Cloudwalk. The last entry was not yet a milestone: “Talking marriage with Barry,” I wrote.
It didn’t happen in 1999. It didn’t happen in 2000, but Barry did not give up hope. “Today, for my birthday Barry gave me a pearl ring that belonged to Marie Bonaparte and a card with a wish to marry,” I wrote in my journal. Another entry was sad. “Lily not well,” I noted, as my mother’s health continued to slip away. Alexandre was in Australia, but the rest of the family, including my brother, Philippe, all gathered at her house in Harbour Island for Easter. Remarkably, she managed to hang on and pull together what strength she had left to fly with me to Los Angeles to be there with Tatiana for the birth of baby Antonia. It was during that flight that I told her I was thinking of maybe marrying Barry, to which she gloriously replied: “He deserves you.”
How I loved my mother for saying that! She did not say I deserved him, she said he deserved me. In those three words was everything—how she valued me, the person I had become, and how she valued him for deserving me. I will never forget that. Not only had she given me her approval for marrying Barry, she was telling me how proud she was of me. She died a few weeks later.
I needed another approval—Egon’s. I called him and said I was considering marrying Barry. “I want your blessing,” I said to him. “You have it, but keep my name,” he answered, laughing.
A week before Barry’s fifty-ninth birthday, as I was looking for a present to give him, I decided to give him myself. “Why don’t we get married on your birthday?” I casually said over th
e phone. “Let me see if I can arrange it,” he answered with no hesitation. “Let me see if I can arrange it” is something he’d taken on from the minute we met . . . and always delivered. Sure enough, he arranged for us to marry at City Hall a week later.
I called the children, I called my brother in Belgium, and I called my friend, the world-famous portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz, to ask her if she could come and take the photos. Philippe flew into New York with his wife, Greta, and daughters, Kelly and Sarah. Tatiana flew in from Los Angeles with Russell and little eight-month-old Antonia strapped to his chest in a baby carrier. Alexandre and his pregnant wife, Alexandra, and twenty-month-old Talita were already in New York. We all met up the morning of the wedding in my design studio, a carriage house on West Twelfth Street, before going down to City Hall. I hadn’t thought about flowers but happened to have met a florist a few nights before who offered to make me a wedding bouquet. I chose lilies of the valley to honor my mother. I made myself a cream jersey dress. I did not feel particularly pretty that day, but I was so happy.
As we left the studio, the DVF girls were screaming good wishes. We were met at City Hall by Annie Leibovitz, who, with great generosity, had answered my call and agreed to act as paparazzi. There were, of course, also real paparazzi, but they were not allowed to come with us into City Hall. We were all laughing, my little family and I. It all felt perfectly natural. Barry had arranged a lunch at some obscure restaurant near City Hall. The restaurant was a bit stiff and gloomy, so we did not stay long, but laughed the whole time, though we all missed my mother.
Long before we decided to marry that day, I had planned a big Aquarius party for that night at the studio on Twelfth Street because my three loves, Barry, Tatiana, and Alex, were all born under the sign of Aquarius. The hundreds of friends who joined us for that Aquarius party were startled and overjoyed to discover that it had turned into a wedding celebration! As a present, Barry gave me twenty-six wedding bands with diamonds . . . “Why twenty-six?” I asked. “For the twenty-six years we were not married,” he answered.
It took me a while to accept that we were married. When I drove out to the country the next day I saw that someone had put a sign in my car that said “Just Married.” I stopped in the middle of the road and turned it over. There was still that rebelliousness in me, and yet when I got to Cloudwalk I was so happy to see Barry already there waiting for me. It was not until quite recently that I actually started referring to Barry as “my husband,” but now I do, and I do it with pride and much love. We so love being together. What we like best is to be quiet and alone. We are definitely soul mates and I am forever thankful to Sue Mengers for introducing me to this glamorous young tycoon thirty-nine years ago and to have seduced him forever.
How can I explain my relationship with Barry? The fullness of it all? It is simply true love. His openness to me, his unconditional acceptance, his deep desire for my happiness and that of the children brings tears to my eyes to think about. Barry has a reputation for being tough, yet he is the gentlest, most loving person I have ever met. We have been in each other’s lives for decades, as lovers, as friends, and now as husband and wife. It is true that, as I did with my father, I took his love for granted. It is true that, as I did to my father, I sometimes rejected him. But it is also true, as it was with my father, that I love him totally and am there for him unconditionally. Love is life is love is Barry.
We spend at least three months a year on Eos, the dream boat Barry finally built. Named for the Greek goddess of dawn, Eos took more than three years to build, three years during which Barry spent at least two hours a day going over every detail, talking to the engineers, talking to the construction people in Germany, involving himself in the outside design, inside decoration, and every detail of everything on board. Launched in 2006, Eos is the most wonderfully comfortable yacht you can imagine, with a dream crew that creates extraordinary itineraries and always finds the best places for us to hike, and a young, talented chef, Jane Coxwell, who I encouraged to write a cookbook that all of my friends love.
We asked our friend, the artist Anh Duong, to do a sculpture for the figurehead of the boat and she asked me to pose for it. So, there I am in front of Eos, sailing the world, literally. With Eos, we’ve been to the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, to Egypt and Jordan. We’ve been to Oman, the Maldives and Borneo, Thailand and Vietnam. We’ve spent weeks in Indonesia and discovered the Pacific islands of Vanuatu, Fiji, and Papua New Guinea. Every morning we take a long swim in a new sea, and every afternoon we hike a new path. We have traveled thousands and thousands of miles this way. And we still keep going, exploring new horizons with our dog, Shannon. I take hundreds of pictures that I download at night on my computer. It is bliss to be on Eos, our floating home.
Traveling the world with the children and the grandchildren is our happiest time: holidays on the sea, the Galapagos or Tahiti, or on land on safari in Africa or skiing. Sometimes we only take the grandchildren. We forget they are grandchildren and we think they are our children. Years have passed and yet it feels the same as our first trip to Colorado and Lake Powell.
The most important thing Barry and I have in common is that we are both self-reliant. The presence in each other’s lives was never a necessity, and therefore always felt like a huge luxury. Barry’s generosity warmed me from the minute I met him and that feeling continues to evolve. He is generous with his heart, with his protection, with everything. “We,” to us, is home, cozy and reassuring. Our love is our home. We are slowly becoming the old couple that crossed Lexington Avenue, guarding each other. “We” is also our family: the children aging, the grandchildren growing—Love is life is love is life.
Recently, as Barry was remodeling our house in Beverly Hills, he sent me this note:
“I’m in the plane after meeting at the house with the construction team. The house is going to be uniquely dazzling. We’re going to have a slate roof and all glass bronze doors and we made your mezzanine room with full glass skylights, and glass sides—a little tree house garden in the sky.
“Hopefully, we’ll add another place to grow old gloriously and glamorously. And in the meantime I’m so proud of what you accomplish every day in building your brand and your legacy . . .
“I love you, my honey.”
And I love you, Barry.
3
BEAUTY
I am at a birthday party in Brussels for my best friend, Mireille, who is turning ten. As if it were yesterday, I remember us children around the dining room table at her elegant Avenue Louise apartment. The large, fancy cake is about to appear when we hear the hurried click click of a woman’s heels in the hallway. Mireille’s mother makes her entrance, dressed smartly in a pin-striped suit, her narrow skirt forcing her to take small steps, her makeup and auburn hair perfectly arranged. She is so glamorous and in charge. “Joyeux anniversaire, ma chérie—happy birthday, darling,” she says to Mireille, kissing her on both cheeks while adjusting her hair. She blows kisses to all of us. The heart-shaped cake is brought in and she watches Mireille blow out the candles, directs the cake cutting, has a piece herself for good luck, talks briefly to each of us, admires our presents, and then, as we go back to Mireille’s room to play, she click clicks back down the hall and out the front door.
I am awed. Though it may have been upsetting to Mireille to have her mother be too busy in her life outside the home to spend but the barest time inside, even for her daughter’s birthday party, I am filled with wonderment at this glamorous, confident, engaged woman. I know vaguely that Mireille’s mother, Tinou Dutry, is a leading businesswoman in Brussels. What I am totally sure of is that I want to be like her when I grow up. Decades later, I realize that my best friend’s mother, a proud pioneer who created Belgium’s organization for women entrepreneurs and who had been a resistance fighter during the war, was one of my early inspirations for the woman I wanted to be.
I felt the same admiration watching my mother get dressed to go out, whether
at night to a party with my father, or by herself during the day. She took great care in what she wore, and her outfit was often punctuated by a hat. Her hair, her makeup, her perfume . . . she looked at herself in the mirror with a smile of complicity and confidence. She had a great figure and wore very tight skirts and dresses. Her heels clicked, too. Where is she going? I wondered. How does she know how to put herself together so well and always look so chic? I couldn’t get enough of it, watching all the shine, the allure, the glamour that was my mother. She, too, was the woman I hoped to be.
I did not like my reflection in my mother’s mirror. I saw a square, pale face. Brown eyes. And short brown, very, very, very densely curled hair made even more so by the humidity and incessant rain in Brussels. Almost all the girls in my class, including Mireille, had straight, blond hair, which they could have cut with big straight bangs. Not me. I felt alien. I looked like someone who’d snuck out of the forest. No one else looked like that.
I obsessed over my curly hair, which even my skillful mother couldn’t deal with. When I returned from two weeks at a summer camp, she got frustrated spending the longest time untangling my hair. She finally succeeded in pulling it into a neat ponytail, braided it, and asked me for my hair clip. I had lost it at camp. After all her effort she got so irritated that she took a pair of scissors and cut the ponytail off. This did not improve what I saw in the mirror. I was miserable and full of shame.
What I did not know until I was told quite recently was that one boy in my kindergarten class loved me because of my hair. He, in fact, so adored my brown curls and my brown eyes that he asked me to marry him—and I evidently accepted! How embarrassing to have forgotten my five-year-old first husband, but I had until a few years ago, when I was invited to Belgium to speak to a group of businesswomen. After my talk, which included my childhood and probably a mention of my frustrations with my loathsome hair, Bea Ercolini, the editor of the Belgian edition of Elle magazine, asked me what school I had gone to, what years, et cetera, and then she connected the dots. “I think I live with the man you ‘married’ in kindergarten,” she told me, smiling.
The Woman I Wanted to Be Page 9
