Some people murmured that they were lovers. “I would have gone further [than friendship with her], but it just never happened,” says Diane.
Gia wasn’t interested. She “was a very cruisy gay woman, but she liked blondes,” says Stephen Fried, author of her biography, A Thing of Beauty. “Diane would not have been her type. I can tell you from going through Gia’s stuff that there’s not a lot of references to Diane von Furstenberg. If Gia had a crush on Diane, there would have been.”
Diane had better luck with other women who attracted her, though she won’t name names. Gigi Williams, the makeup artist who traveled with Diane in the late seventies and early eighties to promote the designer’s beauty book and cosmetics line, says, “Diane and I always talked about having an affair, but we thought it wouldn’t be a good idea because we worked together.” One weekend when Williams was away, however, her ex-husband cut up her clothes, including a hundred DVF dresses, because he thought Diane and Williams were sleeping together.
When John Fairchild sent a young reporter named Jane F. Lane to interview Diane for W in September 1978, he insisted she ask Diane about “her rumored sexual preference for women,” Lane recalls. “Fairchild always wanted the dirt. When you got back to the office, he wanted to know, ‘Did you bring back the bacon?’”
Lane reported that when she asked Diane, the designer lost “step for the briefest moment, the color rising delicately to her face. She looks shocked, not so much by the question, but that one would think such a thing of her. ‘I cannot,’ she answered with a certain ardor, ‘live without men.’”
Gia’s lack of sexual interest in her did not prevent Diane from trying to help the troubled model. “The impression I got from Diane was that she felt very motherly toward Gia,” says Fried, who interviewed the designer for his book. “I think she realized Gia’s fragility and what danger she was in, which not everyone did at the time.”
After the March 1980 death from lung cancer of Wilhhelmina Cooper, head of the modeling agency that represented Gia, the young model’s need for a mother figure intensified. That summer Calvin Klein had lent Diane his house at the Pines on Fire Island, and Diane invited Gia for a weekend. The model brought one of her girlfriends, Sandy Linter, a blond makeup artist. One afternoon Diane walked into Gia’s bedroom and found her sitting on the floor of her closet in an agitated state. “Later I realized she had probably been shooting heroin,” Diane wrote.
Diane continued to hire Gia as a model from time to time. But as Gia descended further into heroin addiction, they lost touch. The last time Diane saw Gia, she lent her a hundred dollars. She had not been in communication with the model for some time when Gia died of AIDS-related illness in 1986.
By then the disease had ravaged Fashion. The first cases of a mysterious immune-deficiency illness linked to homosexuals had been documented by doctors five years earlier, in 1981. No one knew what caused it. AIDS was veiled in denial, mystery, and fear. Though some victims were intravenous drug users like Gia, the disease in the United States predominantly struck gay men, connecting homosexual sex to death, an association horrific in its suggestions of moral retribution for a group that had only recently thrown off the presumed guilt of their sexual preferences. “The AIDS epidemic was very painful to us as a family, between my mom’s business and my father’s friends,” says Tatiana.
AIDS claimed the lives of famous designers from Halston to Perry Ellis to Willi Smith. Before they would sign a deal with a male designer, many investors began demanding “key man” insurance policies, a form of life insurance in which the beneficiaries are the investors in an enterprise. To get key man insurance, designers often had to submit to AIDS testing. Todd Oldham told the New York Times in 1990 that he’d taken the AIDS test four times to satisfy the worries of potential investors, who “don’t want their money to drop dead in ten years.”
The disease also devastated the rank and file—makeup artists, stylists, hairdressers, photographers, showroom assistants, journalists. Because AIDS struck so many in Fashion, a world where gays thrived, the disease also seemed a rebuke to the industry as a whole, exposing the cruel illusions at its core. Fashion lured with its possibility of perfection. With the right dress, the right shoes, the right handbag, you, too, could achieve the youth and beauty of the models on the runway and in Vogue. But it was a false promise based on a hollow ideal.
By the time the AIDS virus had struck, Diane had dialed back her sexual adventuring, entering into a couple of monogamous relationships in the eighties. But no matter who her boyfriend was at any given time, Egon and Barry remained important presences in her life—Egon, whom she would always honor as the father of her children, and Barry, her soul mate and advisor.
Diane’s romantic relationship with Diller had ended around 1980, after they’d been together a few years. Neither of them can remember the precise date or reason. “The truth is, she left me,” says Diller. “There wasn’t a smoking gun,” though his unwillingness to have a child might have had something to do with it. “We talked about having a child, and I did not want to. I shook at the idea because to me it meant that all adventure would be over. I’d be living in the Valley in a house with a big station wagon and have a boring life. I was immature. I thought, ‘How horrible!’ Of course, I regret it, but it was ridiculously strong in me. And I think that signal somehow sent her away from me. It was a sign to her that I was unworthy, and some months after that, I moved out.”
Diller says he “was a wreck for six months,” but then he and Diane were friends again, “though we’d go for long periods without communicating.”
For emotional support, Diane also had her mother, who continued to live with Diane and her children for several months every year. Whenever Diane’s friends encountered Lily, they marveled anew at how unscathed she seemed by her concentration camp experiences. One evening in April 1978 after a cocktail party at the home of publicist Eleanor Lambert, who lived in Diane’s building at 1060 Fifth Avenue, Diane invited Bob Colacello and Andy Warhol to her apartment for dinner and to watch the TV miniseries Holocaust, starring Meryl Streep. Lily joined the group. “When the concentration camps came on . . . [Lily] said that they made it so much more glamorous than it was when she was there, that all the women had crewcuts and it was a lot more crowded, that where the movie had twenty people there were really 300,000,” Warhol wrote in his diary.
Also present was filmmaker Marina Cicogna, who was the granddaughter of Giuseppe Volpi, Mussolini’s minister of finance. “I remember Andy and I thinking it was odd to be watching it with a Holocaust survivor and someone [whose] family was part of Mussolini’s regime,” recalls Colacello. “It was an awkward situation. And Diane seemed to handle it by talking on the phone all the time. She didn’t seem to be paying any attention to the TV. It was all a little surreal.”
Lily remained determined to protect Diane and her brother, Philippe, from knowing the horrors she’d suffered. “I think my mother had nightmares, but she hid that from us,” says Philippe Halfin. “She pretended always that things were all right. But the deprivation in the camps affected her much more than we thought.”
Tatiana, however, with her artist’s sensitivity to emotional nuance, recognized her grandmother’s depression. “She was literally crippled by her trauma and [in New York] she was very isolated and disconnected from the Jewish community and by the fact that she [mostly] spoke French. She was very fearful,” says Tatiana. She continued to sleep with the light on.
The inevitable crisis occurred in April 1980, thirty-five years after the war ended, when Lily, now fifty-seven, accompanied Hans Muller on a business trip to Berlin. At a restaurant where they had dinner with some of Muller’s clients, the gaggle of German voices pushed Lily into the past. She thought of soldiers in black boots and dank cells and piles of bones and acrid smoke from burning flesh. She said nothing to Muller, but he woke up to find her missing. Soon afterward, he discovered her cowering under the concierge’s desk in the hotel lobby, he
r shoulders scrunched and her knees clutched to her chest. She was trembling and babbling incoherently.
Muller drove Lily to Geneva, where he admitted her to a psychiatric hospital. Diane, Tatiana, and Alexandre arrived the next day and were soon joined by Philippe and Leon Halfin. Diane checked into a hotel with her children. Leaving them in the care of a babysitter, she spent every day with Lily. She’d been unable to sleep since Lily’s breakdown, and listening to her mother’s ravings mingled with the screams of the other patients, Diane felt she was going crazy herself.
Lily “had lost her mind. It was very frightening,” says Philippe. She refused to eat or drink. Diane and Philippe watched her shrink inside her fur coat, which she insisted on wearing in her hospital bed. Then, one day, just as suddenly as she’d collapsed, she came back to life. Lily’s doctors believed that her fierce love for her family had enabled her to pull out of the blackness, to reach inside herself to a core of inner strength. She managed to banish her torment and replace it with tough determination. She was herself again.
Diane and Philippe never found out exactly what had happened to their mother in Berlin, and Lily never discussed it. She went back to telling stories about the inherent goodness of humanity, about “how a bad man, even a German, could not necessarily be all bad,” says Philippe.
Diane tried to put the horror of it behind her, too, which was, of course, what Lily wanted. It was “too awful to contemplate. Even after my mother’s breakdown, I continued to keep the truth at arm’s length,” Diane confessed.
She went back to being DVF, businesswoman, style queen, femme fatale. Jewishness was not a big part of her identity. Then, about a year later, she was given a Woman of Achievement award by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith and found herself in the ballroom of a Manhattan hotel with five hundred chattering Jewish women, their voices whirling up in a deafening clatter. She hurried out to the hallway and phoned her secretary. “Why’d you get me into this?” Diane demanded.
“They’re all customers,” the secretary said.
During the lunch Diane listened to several impassioned speeches about injustice. Actress Blanche Baker, herself the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, who played a young woman raped by German soldiers in the Holocaust miniseries, spoke. Then it was Diane’s turn. She hadn’t planned to say anything deeply personal, but once she was at the podium, the words poured out. “Everyone knows about Diane von Furstenberg’s drive and ambition. Maybe it’s because two years before I was born my mother was in Auschwitz,” she said. A collective gasp pierced the air.
Then Diane burst into tears. Looking out into the vast ballroom, she saw that many of the women in the audience also were crying.
Diane had never before spoken publicly about her mother being a Holocaust survivor. But when she heard herself actually say the words, “It was a major revelation because I realized that it was my heritage, and I hadn’t realized how deeply connected I really felt,” she said.
Lily’s breakdown had shattered Diane and made her reassess her priorities. At thirty-four, she was rich and famous with two beautiful children, scores of interesting friends, and plenty of lovers, most of them casual. These were her “flirtations,” as opposed to her “relationships,” which for her typically endured for three to five years. So far she’d had three of these: with Egon, Jas Gawronski, and Barry Diller.
Around the time of her mother’s breakdown, Diane met Richard Gere at a party at the LA home of producer and talent manager Sandy Gallin. She found the actor “to be shy and tender in spite of the image he tried to project of being tough and a rebel,” she wrote. They began an affair. Gere is possibly the actor Julie Baumgold refered to in her 1981 New York profile of Diane, who thought the designer “too big a package with the homes, the children, the crowded life, her name on everything around the house. Walking into the bathroom and washing his hands with Tatiana body shampoo,” or walking into Bloomingdale’s and seeing “her name and panther-eyed label dangling from rows of underpants” that were manufactured by one of her licensees. It was hard for Diane, as it was for many high-achieving women, to find a man who would not be threatened by her success. Her romance with Gere lasted less than a year. But Diane realized that what she wanted now more than anything was to fall in love again—and be loved in return.
Volcano of Love
While Lily recuperated in a clinic in Geneva, Diane flew to Japan on a business trip, taking her children and Olivier Gelbsman. Reeling from her mother’s breakdown, her failed romance with Gere, and severe overwork, she decided to stop on the way home for a rest in Bali. Decades before Elizabeth Gilbert turned her own search for “balance” on this tiny Hindu island into the best-seller Eat Pray Love, Diane found the answer to her spiritual malaise.
She checked herself, the children, and Gelbsman into the Oberoi Hotel, a luxury seaside resort with thatched villas and vivid gardens surrounded by lush jungle and volcanoes visible on the horizon. One morning, just as the sun was rising from the quiet blue sea, Diane set off for a stroll along the white ribbon of beach that stretched out from the hotel. Suddenly, a shadow crossed her path; she looked up to see a tall, handsome man with a brown beard, a green stone in one earlobe, and a sarong tied around his waist. He looked strong, sexy, and available.
The man was a South American artist who, at thirty years old, was three years her junior. His name was Paulo. He made a living selling traditional Balinese clothing and lived in a bamboo house off the beach. Diane felt an instant connection to Paulo, as if they’d known each other forever, and a powerful physical attraction. At the end of the day, she brought him to meet Gelbsman, who was sunbathing on the beach. “Diane is wearing a big hat, and Paulo is wearing a sarong, and because I’m lying on my back, I can see right up to what’s under it,” recalls Gelbsman. “I said something really terrible but hysterical to Diane like, ‘That’s not for you.’ She became so mad at me she didn’t speak to me for the rest of the trip.”
By then she was smitten. Paulo made her feel like a natural woman, in the words of the Aretha Franklin song, and she invited him to New York. Diane was a stressed-out businesswoman and single mother. She was lonely. At the end of the day, when the streets of New York bustled with commuters in taxis and buses on their way to high-rise apartments and brownstone walk-ups, Paulo would be someone to go home to, someone to eat dinner with, someone to talk to about something besides look books and Passion Pink lipstick.
At first Paulo stayed with Gelbsman in his apartment on Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue. Diane knew that her children had to get used to him before he moved permanently into their lives. To introduce him to her friends, she threw a party. “It was winter, and I remember he was wearing a sarong and a cashmere sweater,” says Gelbsman. “We get to Diane’s and everybody you could imagine is there, including Diana Ross and Diana Vreeland.”
Diane’s friends were mostly appalled that she actually was serious about “this guy she met on the beach,” recalls Fran Lebowitz. “A less romantic person would have left him on the beach. But Diane imports him to New York, and now does this mean we all have to talk to him for two years or however long she keeps him around? He was very rough, and my impression was he was not that smart. I didn’t find him interesting.”
Paulo went back to Bali for a while, then returned to New York, preceded by crates of his possessions. He was coming to stay. Diane took her Mercedes to the airport to pick him up at four thirty one morning. She’d fasted for two days before. “I’m purifying my body so I can feel everything more,” she told Julie Baumgold. “I had become so DVF; I had to get out of DVF. I’m more creative now. I’m seeing everything bigger, freer.”
Paulo had no job in New York other than to be Diane’s companion. Still, he released in her a flood of ideas. She called her new cosmetics line Sunset Goddess and based it on the romantic hues of the sunset over Bali’s Kuta Beach. Before they’d met, she’d been thinking of marketing a new perfume called Deadly Feminine. Now, inspired by her explos
ive meeting with Paulo in the shadow of a Bali volcano, she decided to call the new fragrance Volcan d’Amour. Vulcan, the god of fire, including volcanic conflagrations, was married to Venus, the goddess of love. A perfect match, like she and Paulo. They worked on the scent together.
The perfume’s volcano-shaped glass bottle with the black top was designed by Dakota Jackson, who’d also designed the twelve-foot-wide “cloud” bed in Diane’s New York apartment—it had a headboard covered in pink satin and was lit from behind to resemble the moon in shadow. The bottle was made in Normandy “in a factory that specialized in exotic bottles,” says Gary Savage.
It was packaged in an oversized black box emblazoned with a deep-blue nighttime seascape that had been painted by a Brazilian artist Diane met in Bali. Included in the box was a poem Diane had written for Paulo:
Into my life you came
Bringing peace to my heart
Fire to my body
Love to my soul
In your eyes I see myself
Feeling, reaching, looking
For perfect harmony.
She launched Volcan d’Amour at a breakfast for the press in her office, which had been decorated with thousands of frangipani flown in from Hawaii and arranged in the shape of volcanoes. Reporters dined on apricot pancakes as a band played Indonesian music. Later, models in blue sarongs that had been hand-painted with gold volcanoes at the Denpasar market in Bali spritzed shoppers at Saks with Diane’s new fragrance.
With Tatiana, Diane created a classic bouquet des fleurs. For Volcan d’Amour, she strove for something completely different—an exotic elixir.
The dominant note was a strong, purple violet, like the flowers grown on Mount Etna, where, according to mythology, Vulcan had lived. Unfortunately, the fragrance wasn’t “particularly pleasant,” says Savage. Fashion executive Rose Marie Bravo says, “Everything about it was wrong—the bottle, the scent. It was heavy. It just didn’t work.”
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