Diane von Furstenberg

by Gioia Diliberto

  It saddened Diane that Egon would be taking his new girlfriend, not her, to his mother’s house in Cortina for the Christmas holiday. So convinced was she “that [she’d] lost the love of [her] life” that she consulted a fortune-teller. The seer’s prophecy: Diane would be married and pregnant within six months, though by whom, the fortune-teller didn’t say.

  At the end of December, Diane went to Saint-Moritz with Marisa. “I was making a lot of money as a model, and I wanted Diane to come with me, but she didn’t have the money, so I pulled this wad of cash from my bag and gave it to her,” recalls Marisa.

  In Saint-Moritz they shared a room at the five-star Badrutt’s Palace Hotel, where management gave deeply discounted rates to beautiful young people, whose presence they felt enhanced the atmosphere. “We’d go down to have massages to stay in shape, then we’d come up to the room and order room service and eat everything on the menu. Then, we’d go out to ski, and at night we’d party,” recalls Marisa.

  Egon’s uncle, the married Fiat chairman Gianni Agnelli, was staying at the hotel with a gorgeous Italian actress who was his mistress. “He used Marisa and me as decoys,” to draw attention away from his affair with the actress, says Diane. “If you’re with three girls, it looks [more innocent] than if you’re with one.”

  On New Year’s Day, Egon showed up and took an inexpensive room under the eaves at the hotel. His Italian girlfriend was nowhere in sight, and he confessed to Diane that he still loved her. “We spent the night together, and Egon invited me to New York,” Diane recalls.

  She knew Egon was bisexual, and she accepted it. In the pre-AIDS world of the jeunesse d’oré, sexuality was fluid, in an almost pre-Freudian, nineteenth-century way. “We didn’t think in terms of gay or straight,” says Marisa. “We were just free. I was in love with Helmut Berger. It didn’t bother me that he was bisexual. We adored each other. My grandmother was horrified. But to me it all seemed very natural.”

  There was a certain glamour attached to dating a bisexual man, and a sense of conquest in sparking heterosexual desire. Many of the gay men in Diane’s circle were handsome, sensitive, romantic, caring, and well dressed. They could dance well, and they were enthusiastic lovers. “When they were with you, they were really with you,” says Gigi Williams, a makeup artist who worked for Diane in the seventies and slept with her share of bisexual men. “They weren’t testosterone-driven, misogynistic, or womanizing, like so many straight men,” adds Williams. “They were very empathetic. Anyway, everybody was everything in those days.”

  Excess and flamboyance were celebrated. What damned you was excessive caution and dullness and adherence to bourgeois ideas about proper behavior and sexual categories. This did not mean that people didn’t fall madly, exclusively in love, and that hearts weren’t broken. It meant only that tolerance—or at least its appearance—prevailed.

  Whatever their sexual inclinations, men of Egon’s background were expected to marry and produce an heir. Egon began introducing Diane as his fiancée even before they discussed marriage. And she worked hard to play the part of consort to a prince. “She was not terribly at ease socially, not very self-assured,” recalls the photographer Marina Cicogna, who produced movies in the sixties and seventies. “She was a girl from a good family in Belgium, but she hadn’t been exposed to the world of wealth and glamour that Egon had grown up with.”

  Cicogna first met Diane when Egon brought her to a party Cicogna hosted in Venice during the September 1967 Venice Film Festival. A rich cast of movie stars showed up, including Jane Fonda, Marcello Mastroianni, Elizabeth Taylor, Catherine Deneuve, and Claudia Cardinale. “It was supposed to be a fun, yé-yé sort of party. We’d asked everyone to dress in white and gold,” Cicogna says.

  Most of the women wore the kinds of clothes they’d wear to go dancing at a nightclub—short party dresses or sexy pants outfits. Diane arrived on Egon’s arm dressed like her mother in a black and white Chanel suit with a white blouse and foulard, clutching the chain of a shoulder bag. In a photograph Cicogna took of her that evening, she looks pale and scared.

  DIANE HAD HEARD STORIES ABOUT Manhattan, about its swank eateries and smart hotels, its neon glamour and Wall Street zest. When she told her mother about Egon’s invitation, Lily gave her a plane ticket as a twenty-second birthday present. Lily knew Diane would be staying with Egon and his roommate, Baron Stanislaus Lejeune, at their apartment at York and Eighty-First Street. Diane told her father, however, that she would be living with a girl named Suzanne Lejeune. She knew he’d disapprove of her bunking with a man “and this way he could still write to me [in care of] S. Lejeune,” Diane recalls.

  She left Paris on a cold night in January 1969. As the jumbo jet lifted higher and higher, Diane looked out the window. The tall, twinkling city had flattened out to resemble a swath of black silk spattered with crystals and paillettes. The journey that would change her life had begun.

  New York

  Diane fell in love with New York the moment she stepped from the taxi onto the pavement in front of Egon’s building and got her first whiff of Manhattan air—that heady mix of glamour, power, danger, grittiness, and wealth. This was where she belonged.

  At Egon’s side she entered the recherché world where society and celebrity meet. The old guard in New York admired Gianni Agnelli, the rich and influential head of Fiat, and embraced his charming, handsome nephew. It didn’t hurt that Egon himself was a prince, a title that gave him a magical glow, invoking romance, fairy-tale endings, and an exotic history of palace riches and court intrigues. Since moving to New York, Egon had been invited everywhere—to Park Avenue dinners and grand charity balls, to gallery openings and polo games in Southampton. Now he took Diane with him. She met everyone from Diana Vreeland and Andy Warhol to Brooke Astor, Nan Kempner, and Truman Capote. Painfully aware that she was included on guest lists because she was Egon’s girlfriend, “Diane tried desperately to fit in,” says the writer Bob Colacello, who met her soon after he arrived in New York.

  “Egon introduced me to all these [society] girls who’d take me to lunch at 21 and La Grenouille, and they’d explain to me how ‘if you sit on that side, it’s Siberia,’” and social suicide, “and it all felt so strange,” says Diane.

  The sixties had been a time of freaks and hippies, of political activism and radical chic. Soon the revolutionary spirit, faux and otherwise, would be overtaken by the dawn of the disco decade with its hedonistic brew of style, irresponsibility, indulgence, and glitz. At the fringes was the drug- and sex-soaked demimonde that thrived in the downtown clubs and gay bars. Egon moved effortlessly through the night worlds of New York. “He was in perpetual party mode,” says Colacello.

  Though Egon participated in the training program at Chase Manhattan, his banking career stalled. “He never really made any money,” says his son, Alex. Still, his family money enabled him to live comfortably, and Diane, as his live-in girlfriend, did not have to work.

  The idea of being a kept woman, though, horrified her. It contradicted everything about the life of freedom she craved. It also was an impediment to her most deeply held ambition—to be somebody. Since financial independence, Diane believed, was the first step to this end, she toyed with becoming a model. Francesco Scavullo, a fashion photographer best known for his portraits of celebrities such as Brooke Shields and Burt Reynolds, took pictures of her. But when Diane showed her portfolio to Wilhelmina Cooper, the head of Wilhelmina Models, the prestigious agency that represented Lauren Hutton, Janice Dickinson, and Beverly Johnson, Cooper turned her down flat. At a lissome five feet, seven inches tall (she’d shed the chubbiness of her late-teen years), Diane’s figure was in the modeling ballpark. She also had high, chiseled cheekbones and large, wide-set eyes, which made her extremely photogenic. Her face, though, was too strong and mature-looking for American magazines, which at the time favored softer, less exotically pretty women.

  Still, Diane’s ambitions focused increasingly on fashion. In Europe it was easy to f
ind affordable, well-designed clothes in comfortable knit fabrics. Diane herself looked good in these clothes, and she sensed that American women would like them, too. The problem was, they weren’t available in the United States. Diane noticed on her many shopping excursions with Egon that American department store fare tended to be either expensive copies of French designers, hippie bell-bottoms and peasant dresses, or schlocky polyester wear. She greatly admired the colorful, fluid designs of Halston, Giorgio di Sant’Angelo and Stephen Burrows. As “a boy-about-town,” Diane says, Egon knew these designers and gained access for himself and Diane to their studio backrooms. Here Diane saw firsthand how New York fashion was made. Designs by the likes of Halston, Sant’Angelo, and Burrows, however, were expensive and out of reach for most women. Diane sensed an opportunity.

  She knew nothing about designing. “What I did know . . . was that the world of fashion was fun, glamorous, very cool and I loved it,” she wrote. She would discover that it was also hard work.

  In the spring she returned to Italy. Ferretti had bought another factory, this one a sprawling cement building on the outskirts of Montevarchi, an ancient market town nestled in the Tuscan hills. During the Renaissance rule of the Medicis, Montevarchi flourished as a center of the wool and silk industries. After the unification of Italy in 1870, it became a hub of sartorial manufacturing—first of felt hats, then of shoes and women’s and children’s wear.

  Diane struggled to absorb as much as she could about the manufacture of clothes. At night, after the workers had gone home, she stayed behind with the pattern maker and, using whatever remnants of fabric were around, made her first samples. The first garment she designed was a green jersey dress with a seven-meter-long green and red sash.

  In May, when his training program at Chase had ended, Egon joined his friend Marc Landeau, who’d just graduated from Columbia Business School, on a two-month tour of Asia. On the way, he stopped in Italy to visit Diane. They spent a romantic weekend in Rome, and soon afterward Diane discovered she was pregnant. She considered having an abortion, which was illegal in Europe at the time, as in the United States. She’d known girls in Geneva who’d had abortions, though, and she had the name of a doctor who performed the procedure. Lily convinced Diane that she had an obligation to tell Egon of her condition, so Diane sent him a telegram in Hong Kong:

  i am sorry to disturb your journey, but it is impossible to decide alone. result of the analysis was positive. i am thinking of the dr. s. solution. i await your decision. love you more than ever. diane.

  Landeau recalls the exact moment Egon received the news. “We were in this little hotel early one morning, when a porter came up to the room with the telegram. Egon hesitated only a moment, then rushed out to send a telegram back to Diane.” She’s kept it all her life:

  marriage will occur the 15th of July. organize it as rapidly as possible. i rejoice. thinking of you. love and kisses, eduard egon.

  “Egon wasn’t the most monogamous of persons,” says Landeau. “But Diane was his girlfriend, and Diane turned him on, and Diane was his family. If he was going to have children with anyone, it was going to be with Diane.”

  Afterward, Egon and Landeau went to a French restaurant to celebrate. “There was a very pretty woman sitting next to us with her husband, and Egon said, ‘You know, I’m so excited. I’m getting married, and I’m going to be a father.’ And the woman said, ‘That’s so nice, and look at me; I’m pregnant, too!’ Egon goes over to her and puts his hand on her belly so he can feel her baby’s heartbeat.” Her husband didn’t object. “Egon oozed charm. He could get away with anything,” says Landeau.

  His future wife may have been pregnant, but that didn’t interrupt Egon’s trip. As the friends traveled to Bali, Laos, Cambodia, and Japan, Egon worked on the guest list, and whenever they found themselves on an Air France flight, he’d ask a flight attendant to mail the list to Diane when the plane returned to Paris.

  Despite Egon’s enthusiasm about the wedding, Diane was embarrassed to be a pregnant bride. She didn’t want anyone to think Egon had to marry her. Of course, that’s exactly what people in Egon’s social world believed. “They felt that Diane was on the make and had taken advantage of Egon,” says John Richardson, the art historian and Picasso biographer, who met the couple when they first moved to New York.

  With Lily in tow, Diane traveled to Venice, where she ordered a trousseau of tablecloths and sheets with the von Furstenberg monogram from Jesurum, Italy’s most famous manufacturer of handmade lace. She and Lily also visited Diane’s soon-to-be mother-in-law at Morocco d’Venezia, the eighteenth-century villa outside Venice where Clara lived with her second husband, Count Giovanni Nuvoletti, to discuss plans for the wedding, now just six weeks away. The villa was more enchanting than Diane had expected. The stuccoed house had cornflower-blue shutters, a red-tiled roof, and pink roses cascading from window boxes. More roses meandered over the property, perfuming the air.

  Clara was in a unique position to be wary of and sympathetic to Diane. Her own grandmother, the plain but clever Jane Allen Campbell, had been an American adventuress straight out of a novel by Edith Wharton. Born in 1865 in New Jersey, Jane had tried to find a rich husband in New York. When that failed, she traveled to Rome, where her wealthy aunt lived, and she landed an Italian prince, Carlo Bourbon del Monte, Clara’s maternal grandfather.

  Anti-Semitism was not uncommon in the von Furstenbergs’ social set, and to understand the visceral prejudice of many European aristocrats it helps to read Proust. In Remembrance of Things Past, the protagonist Swann describes a French prince who was so anti-Semitic that he let a wing of his chateau burn down rather than borrow fire-fighting equipment from the Jewish Rothschilds next door. The same prince also chose to suffer an agonizing toothache, rather than consult the only available dentist, a Jew.

  Clara’s own in-laws from her first marriage, the von Furstenbergs, had been disappointed when Tassilo married her, a girl without a title, despite her grandmother’s marriage. Her commoner status compromised the position of their children in the Almanach de Gotha, the directory of Europe’s royalty and higher nobility, and ruined their sons’ chances of being received into the Knights of Malta, the oldest surviving order of chivalry. As Alex von Furstenberg points out, however, Tassilo was the younger son, and “in those aristocratic families in Europe, the oldest son gets everything, and the younger sons marry rich people. That’s how it worked.”

  Diane insists she never felt the sting of anti-Semitism from Clara. (Diane’s friend Howard Rosenman recounted a purported anti-Semitic incident involving Clara in a Los Angeles Times piece five years ago. Diane denies that it ever happened, and Rosenman now backs away from the account.)

  Tassilo, though, on several occasions made remarks that could be interpreted as anti-Semitic. At dinner the night before his son’s wedding, he drank too much and kept repeating to the young woman who was seated next to him, “Egon is a prince. He’s so handsome. Why is he marrying this dark, plain little Jewish girl?”

  Several years after Diane and Egon married, Tassilo told journalist Linda Bird Francke that “Jews are clever and shrewd,” qualities that his half Jewish grandchildren would “need.”

  ON THAT PRE-WEDDING VISIT TO Venice, while Lily and Clara went over the guest lists, Diane went out to the gardens. Lily adored Egon and didn’t seem concerned that Diane was marrying an Austrian. Clara, too, seemed excited about the wedding. But Diane was unsure if Clara’s “enthusiasm was genuine,” she recalled. The sun was very hot, the air windless. Strolling through the beds of roses and hydrangeas, past the long avenues of poplars and linden trees that stretched out from the house, Diane felt her heart swell with conviction. She vowed to prove to Egon’s parents that their son had chosen well, that she was a person of value. “I got ambitious when I got pregnant because I wanted to show myself and the world that marrying a prince with Agnelli money was not my goal. My goal was to be independent,” she says.

  Diane dreamed of
transformation, of success, of perhaps even turning herself into a celebrity. Such things were possible in America. Maybe she would be a famous fashion designer like Halston or Yves Saint Laurent. By sheer will and hard work, by calling forth the drive that had always been in her, she would succeed.

  She went back to Ferretti’s factory and told him she was pregnant, getting married, and moving to New York for good.

  Diane and Egon were married in a civil ceremony at the town hall of Montfort-l’Amaury, just outside Paris, on July 16, 1969. The bride wore a flower-bedecked picture hat and a long-sleeved white dress designed for her by Dior’s Marc Bohan, with cutouts that revealed layers of pastel petticoats. Since she was pregnant, Diane said, she “felt it wasn’t really appropriate to wear completely all white.”

  Because of the von Furstenberg name, the wedding was covered by all the usual publications that paid attention to society nuptials. No one mentioned Diane’s pregnancy, and there were many rapturous descriptions of her appearance. Vogue said she looked “Romany romantic,” adding that the nuptials had “a gypsy brilliance.”

  Following the ceremony, there was a reception for five hundred guests at the Auberge de la Moutière, “a charming provincial inn considered the countryside version of Maxim’s,” as Diane wrote. “The movie Tom Jones had recently come out, and I wanted to replicate the mood and visuals of the country-side feast. My father hired all the singers and musicians from Rasputin, a Russian nightclub in Paris, to perform at the reception. My father sang and broke a lot of glasses. But there was a shadow over the wedding.”

  Tassilo showed up for the ceremony but declined to attend the reception, out of deference to his cousin, the reigning von Furstenberg patriarch. The cousin-patriarch disapproved of the marriage because Diane was Jewish. As Tassilo later told Linda Bird Francke, “Eddie [his nickname for Egon] understood. He sent a girl to my room.” The snub hurt and humiliated Diane and made her even more determined to prove to herself and her in-laws that she was a worthy bride for their son.