Diane von Furstenberg

by Gioia Diliberto

  When Diane sent Williams to do makeovers at the DVF cosmetics counter at Bloomingdales, Williams had to admit that she’d been fired from a job there and banned from the store a couple of years earlier after she’d been caught shoplifting an Estée Lauder lipstick. “Diane was appalled,” Williams recalls. “She took it like a betrayal, and I understood. I was managing her boutique; I was in charge of all the money! But mostly, she was just hurt and disappointed. There’s a very moralistic side to Diane. She just thought I was too good a person to stoop so low as to shoplift.”

  In fact, at the time she worked for Diane, Williams faced another personal issue—a serious drug problem. She shot up heroin every Friday night—“I only did it once a week; that was my rule,” she says—and she’d arrive at work on Saturday morning after no sleep. But she was young and never seemed to show any ill effects. If Diane knew, she didn’t let on. She decided to trust Williams, and Williams never gave her a reason to doubt the trust. “I was worried about going into Bloomindale’s because I’d been banned, but [one of Diane’s cosmetics executives] told me not to worry. ‘They’re not going to say anything because you’re working for Diane,’ he said.” And he was right.

  During the next several years, Williams traveled across the country to do makeovers and train the sales staff in department stores that sold DVF cosmetics, sometimes with Diane herself. Occasionally, they’d conduct makeup seminars in hotels. “We would do sixty makeovers a day,” Williams recalls. “We’d pick a face in the crowd, and we’d say, ‘Come on, come over here, within seven minutes you’ll look beautiful.’ But we weren’t just selling cosmetics. We were selling feminism. We’d tell women, you shouldn’t be spending more than seven minutes on your makeup, and this is what you need—some mascara, cheek color, and lipstick—because you have more important things to do. Because you can be whatever you want to be.”

  The Adventuress

  Though their marriage was over, Diane and Egon would not divorce until 1983. They remained extremely close, bonded by their children, their shared past, their European roots, and their general delight in each other. “Do I think I could have lived with Egon my whole life?” Diane asks, her voice trailing off. She looks out the tall windows of the downtown building where she lives and works today to the sky beyond, as if searching for the answer in the clouds. The question remains open, but her wistful expression suggests she still misses Egon.

  She spent most holidays with him and their children and, often, her boyfriend of the moment. Egon still bought Diane expensive jewelry, and they sometimes went out together as a couple. One evening in 1974 they arrived together at the Dakota on Seventy-Second Street and Central Park West for a party at the home of real estate developer Gil Shiva and his wife, Susan, the daughter of MCA Entertainment founder Jules Stein. The guest of honor that evening was the new chairman of Paramount Pictures, a thirty-two-year-old wunderkind named Barry Diller. Diane usually delighted in meeting powerhouse men, but when she was introduced to Diller, “she was fairly dismissive of me,” he recalls. Egon wasn’t any more encouraging. He “told me my pants were too short,” Diller says. “Probably they were. I was not a great sophisticate then.”

  Still, several months later Diane invited Diller to a party in her apartment for Hollywood agent Sue Mengers, who represented such stars as Michael Caine, Cher, Barbra Streisand, and Faye Dunaway. “I didn’t want to go,” Diller recalls. “But Sue said, ‘It’s for me, you have to come.’ I arrived very late. It was at eight, and I probably showed up at ten. I thought I’d say hello, be nice to Sue, and leave.”

  Instead, he got involved in a conversation with Diane that changed his life. He doesn’t recall what they talked about, but he felt powerfully drawn to her intelligence and sensuality. When Diane walked him to the door, for “some inexplicable reason, without a plot or anything in my head, I said, ‘I’m going to call you,’” Diller says.

  Diane was fascinated by Hollywood, and she thought Diller would be someone to know. His history had the feel of a movie on fast-forward. Raised in Beverly Hills, the son of a Jewish real estate developer and his gentile wife, Diller had dropped out of UCLA at nineteen to work in the mailroom of the William Morris talent agency, in those days the fastest route to moguldom for a Hollywood-enchanted boy.

  Since its beginnings handling vaudeville acts at the turn of the twentieth century, William Morris had represented some of America’s biggest stars, from Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley to Katharine Hepburn, Frank Sinatra, and Steve McQueen. In the mailroom, newly minted law school graduates and MBAs sorted mail and delivered contracts and scripts for forty dollars a week in the hopes of being tapped as an agent’s assistant, the first step to becoming an agent themselves. “It was very much like West Point or freshman year at Harvard Law School,” agent John Hartman told author David Rensin. Only the best and the brightest survived.

  Diller got around the college degree requirement for most mailroom employees because he’d been recommended by William Morris client Danny Thomas, whose daughter Marlo had been Diller’s classmate at Beverly Hills High School. During his year in the mailroom, Diller observed the power structure at William Morris and studied the interoffice memos that detailed the agency’s deals.

  Soon he was tapped by agent Phil Weltman to become his assistant. A quick study, Diller absorbed everything there was to know about structuring deals. No one had to teach him the art of negotiating. He owned a killer instinct as powerful as Diane’s sense of style.

  Weltman soon promoted Diller to junior agent, but the restless young man did not stay in the job for long. At twenty-four, he left to become assistant to the head of programming at ABC. Later, as the network’s vice-president of prime-time programming, he transformed television with innovations such as the Movie of the Week and the miniseries, including Alex Haley’s slave drama, Roots, which exploded all ratings records. Then he moved to Paramount to concentrate on movies.

  After an initial misstep with Black Sunday, a film about an Arab terrorist attack on a Super Bowl game in Miami that was partially told from the point of view of the terrorists, Diller went on to set industry records for box office receipts with movies such as Saturday Night Fever and Grease.

  Soon after Diane’s party for Mengers, Diller called Diane and explained that he wasn’t sure where to take her to dinner, as he knew nothing about Manhattan restaurants. Diane suggested that he come to her apartment and had her cook prepare a meal. By the end of the evening, Diller says today, he was in love. Already, at least in the gay community, there was talk that Diller was gay, and one of his closest friends says that Diller’s affair with Diane was the first he’d had with a woman. Diane herself says as much, writing in her second memoir that “no one had known [Diller] with a woman before.” Diller started calling Diane every day. When she went to Paris a week later, he continued to call her and one day suggested she cut her trip short to visit him in Los Angeles. Diane agreed.

  When the plane stopped in Montreal, she called her boyfriend, Jas Gawronski, from a phone booth and told him that she was on her way to visit another man. He only later found out it was Diller. The news shocked him because he thought his romance with her was going well. Following a classic pattern for Diane, they remained friends and continued to see each other occasionally.

  Before her plane landed at LAX, Diane locked herself in the teensy bathroom to wash, perfume herself, apply makeup, and, in defiance of the fashion philosophy she’d been preaching, to “feel like a woman, wear a dress,” changed out of her comfortable frock into a blue pin-striped pantsuit, which made her feel “sassy.”

  DILLER PICKED DIANE UP AT the airport in his yellow Jaguar and zipped her off to his house in Coldwater Canyon. A limousine trailed behind with her luggage. The sprawling Mediterranean-style stucco house, which had once been owned by Doris Day and which Diller had admired since visiting it as a boy, had a comfortable, old Hollywood feel and, indeed, had been furnished with props from Paramount movies. Diller had prepared a g
uest room for Diane with fresh flowers, “but I didn’t sleep there that night—or, indeed, ever,” she recalled. She slept in Diller’s bedroom, with him. The first night, however, both of them were so nervous that they each took a Valium and promptly fell asleep.

  “We spent about a week together in the LA house. It was just a big romance,” Diller says. He drove Diane to the airport and when he got home found that “she’d left little notes for me all over my house.”

  Diller went to sleep that night feeling confident that he’d finally found his soul mate. At two in the morning, the ringing phone snapped him awake. It was a call from his mother—his brother, Donald, had been shot dead.

  Donald Diller, who was four years older, had struggled with heroin addiction since his teen years. He’d been arrested several times for drug dealing and once for burglary. At eighteen he’d spent six months in prison for writing a bad check. At the time of his death, he’d recently been released from prison on a drug charge. Police found him in a motel room outside San Diego with a bullet in his forehead, an apparent homicide victim in a drug deal gone wrong.

  The news was shattering. It marked “the end of something,” Diller recalls, but also “the beginning of something.” His brother’s death, he says, “was like a sign, a symbol” that the family he’d grown up with would be replaced by the family he’d form with Diane.

  During the Los Angeles trip, Diane said later, she had fallen “very much in love with Barry, and I was overwhelmed by the way he loved me. Barry totally gave in to me, trusted me blindly, and loved me unconditionally.”

  Diller and Diane began to be seen together at Hollywood premieres and Manhattan parties. They traveled to Japan, where Diane made personal appearances in stores that carried her clothes. In the Philippines, they had a private tour of the presidential palace then occupied by Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos and rode a helicopter to the mountains to visit director Francis Ford Coppola on the set of Apocalypse Now.

  When Diller presented Diane with twenty-nine diamonds in a Band-Aid box for her twenty-ninth birthday in 1975, many friends assumed they were engaged. That didn’t stop the rumors about Diller’s sexuality, or the snarky comments. “I guess the reason [Diller] and Diane are a couple is because she gives him straightness and he gives her powerfulness,” Andy Warhol wrote in his diary after a 1978 Christmas Eve party at Diane’s apartment.

  Diller has refused to discuss his private life. Though he’s been “outed” as a gay man by the gossip press and in mainstream publications such as New York magazine, and in books, including The Operator, Tom King’s biography of Diller’s close friend David Geffen, the press has mostly respected his privacy.

  Diane says she’s baffled by the curiosity about the couple’s private life. “I don’t understand what there is to understand,” she told the writer Andrew Goldman in 2013, during the twelfth year of her marriage to Diller. “This man has been my lover, my friend, and now he’s my husband. I’ve been with him for thirty-five years. At times we were separated, at times we were only friends, at times we were lovers, at times we were husband and wife, that’s our life.”

  Within no time Diller gave up his apartment in New York and lived with Diane and her children whenever he was in town. Once, while a reporter for Vogue interviewed Diane, Tatiana appeared all dressed up for her birthday party. “Go show [Barry],” Diane said.

  “Where is he?” asked Tatiana.

  “In the bedroom,” Diane whispered.

  “In your bedroom,” Tatiana said sternly. “He’s always in your bedroom.”

  They were two moguls in love—rich, good-looking, successful beyond their dreams. Diller had a projection room installed at Cloudwalk and showered Diane’s children with presents. “He was always very generous and sweet,” recalls Alex. “We’d get pinball machines and every licensing product from Paramount that you could imagine, [entry] to every movie. I’d roll into theaters with my friends, VIP style.”

  Life was too good, Diane said. She thought she would just die because it was all so wonderful, it couldn’t continue.

  Diane adored Diller, but that didn’t stop her from having “flirtations” with others. “I slept with other people,” she admits. The couple were often apart due to the demands of their careers. Long-term faithfulness was an ideal that didn’t fit their lives or temperaments.

  Diane says that in her relationship with Diller, as in her romances with other men, she’s never been deeply concerned about what the other person does when he’s not with her. “I don’t ask questions,” she says.

  She admits she’s had moments of being jealous, but her need for independence far surpasses whatever distress she might feel about a lover’s infidelity. “I hate convention,” she says, adding, “I’d much rather be the mistress than the wife.”

  Having bisexual partners is perhaps an ideal way for a woman to maintain her independence, since bisexual men are less likely to want to possess a woman fully and exclusively. The tension between love and independence, the yearning to give herself to a man and the fierce drive to be completely self-sufficient has never resolved itself in Diane. Her mother had raised her to rely first and foremost on herself, to be content with her own company, to be her own best friend, a lesson that she passed on to her own children. “It hasn’t been valuable in my family to have [exclusive] partnerships,” says Tatiana. “The emergence of self has been a far, far greater force.”

  DURING THESE YEARS, DIANE THOUGHT of herself as an aventurière. The word, adventuress in English, connotes a scheming gold digger. But it can also evoke the image of a female risk taker, a woman who takes chances in business and in love. By her mid-twenties, Diane had achieved one of her chief goals—financial independence. She did not need a man for anything but pleasure, companionship, and emotional support. She had a conventionally male attitude toward sex: she would take lovers whenever and wherever it suited her. Diane’s seductiveness became legendary, to the point where observers assumed she was sleeping with every man she was seen talking to at parties.

  In the spring of 1976, in the middle of her affair with Barry Diller, gossip about Diane’s love life focused on California governor Jerry Brown. They made an odd match. Brown was ascetic, Jesuit-educated, and unemotional. Diane was social, Jewish, and flamboyant. She loved clothes, jewelry, cars, and real estate. Brown disdained worldly possessions. He refused to live in the governor’s mansion in Sacramento, occupying instead a small apartment where he slept on a mattress on the floor. Yet he shared with Diane a distinct quirkiness that led Chicago columnist Mike Royko to dub him “Governor Moonbeam.”

  On a warm evening in May 1976, Diane arrived at Brown’s Manhattan hotel to escort him to a fund-raiser for him that she and Barry cohosted. Brown refused to ride in her chauffeur-driven black Mercedes, instead arriving at the event in a dirty, mud-colored Ford supplied by one of his supporters.

  A crowd of 140 prominent New Yorkers filled the elegant East Side townhouse that Guy de Brantes, Diane’s vice president of finance, shared with his wife, Marina. The evening got off to an awkward start. Brown, who never touched alcohol, refused to drink, then when the New York Times editorial page editor, John Oakes, asked him a question, Brown accused the editor of using bad grammar.

  Dustin Hoffman chatted with Bob Evans, who told a joke to Keith Carradine, who flirted with Marlo Thomas. Through it all, Brown looked miserable. “I’m here because I want to be president,” he told Nancy Collins, who covered the event for WWD.

  For a while, Diane kept a picture of Brown near a picture of Barry Diller in her bedroom, and she admitted to People magazine that Jerry Brown “was the first governor who ever kissed me.” He “was so irresistible,” she says today. At a party once Andy Warhol overheard Diane telling Brown “he’d gotten too skinny, that he’d lost his ‘love handles’ and that she’d liked them.” When Warhol asked “Is Jerry a fairy?” Diane looked at him with flashing eyes. “No,” she said. “Jerry’s no fairy!”

  Did they have an affair?
“Yeah, briefly,” says Diane, adding in a typical malapropism that uses a French word in place of an English one, “it was never actually consumed.”

  She couldn’t say the same about her couplings with the men she picked up at Studio 54. Diane had discovered this new nocturnal center of New York decadence a year after the fund-raiser for Jerry Brown. The club had opened on West Fifty-Fourth Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue in a vast, onetime opera house and TV studio that held three thousand people. To the pounding beat of disco music, Studio 54 offered a drug-fueled mix of sex, fashion, and neon cool. You didn’t have to be rich or famous to get past Steve Rubell, the club’s nebbishy co-owner, who often patrolled the velvet ropes guarding the entrance. But you did have to be young and beautiful. And if you weren’t, no manner of begging or bribing would get you in, though humiliation sometimes did. A suburbanite in a polyester suit once got through the door when he allowed Rubell to extinguish a cigarette on his jacket lapel, burning a large hole.

  Diane first visited Studio 54 in May 1977 for a private party Halston threw for Bianca Jagger’s birthday, a much photographed fête (the paparazzi almost outnumbered the one hundred guests). Bianca rode bareback across the immense dance floor on a white pony as the deejay played a disco version of “Happy Birthday.” Her husband, Mick Jagger, danced with Baryshnikov. Colorful balloons swirled down from the ceiling.

  From that night on, Diane became a regular at the club. At midnight she’d drive her gleaming Mercedes through the silent caverns of Midtown, then park in a garage and walk toward Eighth Avenue. Lights from the club’s huge art deco sign pierced the inky sky. Rotating beams from police cars parked across the street (in case the partying got out of hand) sprayed the crowd with hot red light.