Diane von Furstenberg

by Gioia Diliberto

  Customers didn’t like it. Despite Diane’s passion for the new scent, not to mention her frenzied promotion of it, Volcan d’Amour flopped.

  Paulo’s influence stretched everywhere into Diane’s life. Suddenly tropical prints appeared in her sheets for Sears. She decorated her office with a gaggle of carved wooden Balinese geese. Along the river that ran through her property at Cloudwalk, she planted twenty-foot-high Balinese flags in bright crayon colors and covered her furniture in Indonesian batiks. Instead of clingy jersey dresses, fishnets, and stilettoes, Diane now wore sarongs and padded around barefoot, just like Paulo. “Why don’t you wear real clothes?” Lily asked her. Lily never liked Paulo and was dismayed that Diane had submerged her style in his.

  In light of her fierce determination to be independent, the way Diane changed her life around for Paulo shocked her friends. “Diane is the most romantic person I know, and the most willing to change everything around for romance,” says Fran Lebowitz. “And it’s exactly opposite of other aspects of Diane. So that, in this area of life, Diane will jump out of a window, and in every other area of life, she wouldn’t.”

  Diane herself explained it by her deep yearning to lose herself in love and to find relief from the stress of business. She was ready to be submissive to a man, to lead a calmer, more satisfying domestic life.

  For once she wanted to be taken care of. Never mind that it was Diane who paid the bills. Paulo tended to her needs the way no man had before. He spent hours browsing with her in rare bookshops and fabric stores as she hunted for ideas for new prints. He accompanied her on business trips, ironing her clothes in hotel rooms while she showered.

  “He was a nice guy and loyal to her, but he didn’t have a true understanding of what she was doing,” says Savage.

  That didn’t stop him from giving her advice. “He was always around the office,” recalls Sally Randall. “We were happy that he was making her happy, but he was no match for Diane. He always looked like he was ready to hit the beach, even in winter.”

  At the time, “people were dying of AIDS in the fashion industry, in her social circle,” says Tatiana. “I get that she’d want to go in the opposite direction, if just for her safety. Paulo was someone with whom she could start fresh. It was also reassuring because he was quite manly”—that is, his sexual preference was entirely for women.

  Diane’s relationship with Paulo also coincided with her children becoming teenagers and pulling away from her. Alex turned rebellious and started getting into trouble in New York. He was drinking and, he recalls, “taking my skateboard and going to Area [a popular Hudson Street nightclub] at two in the morning. My mom said, ‘That’s it. I’m moving you to Connecticut,’ and my sister had to go along with it.”

  Diane moved the children to Cloudwalk full-time and enrolled them in Rumsey Hall, a local private school that emphasized athletics. Alex, who played every sport, loved it. “I was super successful at Rumsey. I had girlfriends, a motocross bike, and a track at Cloudwalk, and I used to race around with my friends,” he recalls. But Tatiana, who’d been a star student at Spence, the private school in Manhattan, was miserable. She still suffered from the muscle disorder that prevented her from participating in sports, and, she says, “my currency at Rumsey Hall went way down from what it had been at Spence. I didn’t understand the kids in Connecticut, so I just buried myself in my books and I skipped a grade.”

  With Diane’s hectic schedule, her preoccupation with Paulo, and her inclination to suppress unpleasant realities, she failed to see Tatiana’s unhappiness. To make matters worse for the girl, Lily was living in Geneva with Hans and spending time in Brussels with Philippe and Greta, who’d just given birth to the couple’s first child, a daughter, Sarah. “I missed Lily terribly, but I didn’t know how to dial the numbers to call Europe. I was an angry, unfulfilled, really sad adolescent,” Tatiana says.

  Paulo mostly stayed out of the children’s way. He built a cottage on Cloudwalk property—“my mom let him so he’d have something to do,” says Alex—that he used as a retreat. Occasionally, he gave the children presents. Paulo bought Alex his first motocross bike. Still Alex and Tatiana resented him. “Me and Tats thought, ‘The guy isn’t doing anything, and he’s living off Mom,’ so we didn’t have much respect for him,” says Alex.

  One evening when Alex, Tatiana, and Paulo were to drive into the city to meet Diane, Paulo and Alex got into a terrible argument. The children were eager to get to Manhattan, and Paulo seemed to be dawdling, which angered Alex. The row ended with Paulo striking Alex in the jaw. Diane says the blow was more of a slap than a punch, but Alex had recently broken his jaw in a car accident, and he collapsed to the floor in pain. Tatiana called the police. When they arrived, she was waiting for them at the door with her arms crossed over her chest. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she said.

  Diane declined to press charges, much to Tatiana’s disappointment. “You know, [I ] could call People magazine,” she told her mother.

  Diane acknowledges the difficulty of Paulo’s situation. “He was barely thirty; he’d been living alone on the beach in Bali. He was a hippie, really, and I was this huge success.”

  Paulo tried to get along with Alex and Tatiana, and he seemed genuinely fond of them. He kept an eye on them when Diane was working in the city. It was Paulo, in fact, who first noticed Tatiana’s distress and “told me she was unhappy,” says Diane.

  She was just as oblivious to her business troubles. While Diane traveled with Paulo, often to remote Indonesian islands to hunt for exotic textiles, her executives in New York borrowed increasing amounts of cash to keep her company afloat. Since selling her dress division to Carl Rosen, cosmetics and scent had comprised the bulk of Diane’s business, and both required huge infusions of money for advertising and inventory—money Diane didn’t have. Every week Savage and Zinovoy put the financial reports on Diane’s desk, and every week she ignored them.

  One day in 1982, when Diane was in Paris, she got a call from her office in New York: Chemical Bank had refused to loan her business more money unless she signed a personal note of guarantee. “Suddenly all I saw was the loss, the loss of Cloudwalk, the loss of my apartment,” she wrote.

  Back in New York, she met with a banker at Chemical who told her she owed a staggering ten million dollars. “What do you want me to do?” she asked him. “Sell the company?”

  He looked at her with a condescending sneer. “If you can,” he said.

  Diane began negotiations with Beecham, the English pharmaceuticals company. It was a period when she was not close to Barry Diller. “I wasn’t involved,” he says. “I don’t even know if we talked about it.” Things might have gone quicker if she’d had his counsel. In the end, it took three agonizing months for the deal to go through. During this time, Chemical Bank continually pressed Diane for repayment of its loan, and Diane was nearly out of her mind with worry, as she had been when her dress business tanked in the late seventies. She feared she’d lose everything.

  In the end, she sold her cosmetics business to Beecham for twenty-two million dollars in 1983, which left her with twelve million after paying off Chemical Bank. Puritan had stopped manufacturing her dresses the year before and had stopped paying her. With her real estate, jewelry, art, furniture, cars, and cash, she had assets of sixteen million dollars.

  To celebrate the Beecham sale, she bought herself a matching set of eighteenth-century English aquamarine jewelry—necklace, earrings, and brooch—at La Vielle Russie, a pricey antique store in the Sherry-Netherland Hotel on Fifth Avenue. On the way out, she noticed an empty store on the far side of the lobby and, on impulse, decided to rent it.

  Her plan was to sell high-end items, including made-to-measure couture clothes of her own design. She hired Michael Graves, the renowned postmodern architect famous for his small circular windows and squat columns, to design the fourteen-hundred-square-foot duplex space. She invested two million dollars in the project and charged Graves with designing �
��a shrine to Venus, a glorification of women,” she said. She gave Graves a favorite pre-Raphaelite painting to show him the mood she wanted—at once modern and ancient.

  Diane began having second thoughts when she sat next to Andy Warhol at a dinner at the steakhouse Club A. He told her “not to count on a May opening,” as Graves was notorious for dragging out projects. Warhol also warned her that Graves would “probably take her little store and divide it into fifteen rooms with forty columns in each, and then she got scared.”

  Warhol was right about the delay. The shop didn’t open until late fall 1985. To mark the opening, Diane held a party at Regine’s—a gaggle of VIPS from Ted Turner to Diana Ross showed up. Afterward, her guests got a tour. The maple Biedermeier-and-glass display cases on the first floor held cosmetics, jewelry, scarves, and the little 1940s hat with a red rose and veil that Diane had worn with a black pantsuit for a Vogue ad promoting her new venture. A stairway led past trompe l’oeil marble and faux copper latticework to the pink-carpeted custom collection and fitting rooms. The made-to-order clothes designed by Diane were divided into five categories according to “occasion”—Smart Lunch, Vernissage, Party, Hostess, and Gala. Having dressed the average American woman, Diane was now going for the “fairly thin and fairly rich” crowd. The ready-to-wear started at five hundred dollars for a blouse; the couture collection at eighteen hundred for a skirt. One three-thousand-five-hundred-dollar silk and satin evening gown sold to Aretha Franklin. The clothes on the first floor were available in sizes 4 to 12, though Diane would make a size 14 for someone who requested it.

  The clothes were sophisticated, well made, and in good fabrics but had no extraordinary features or special allure to spark much excitement. “You know what people are saying about the boutique? The scarves are wonderful,” sniffed one guest at the opening party at Regine’s.

  WWD was more generous. “Standouts in the designer’s so-chic repertoire are seductively cut wool jersey chemises, especially in signature pink with a shapely black hipband, and beaded-collar evening sweaters over easy wool and silk pants.” The paper went on to note, however, that Diane “misses” with dresses that had draped fabric at the derriere and others with “waist-to-floor organza fishtail backs.”

  Like other expensive fare offered at Upper East Side boutiques, the clothes reflected the extravagant wealth of the Reagan eighties nouveau riche. But they were a radical departure for a designer who’d made her mark in the seventies selling moderately priced fashion. It was as if the DVF woman, that sexy working girl who slipped off her wrap dress at the end of the day to delight a lover, had morphed into a middle-aged divorcée intent on racking up credit card bills to torment her ex-husband.

  DVF couture didn’t mesh with the DVF brand, which stood for affordable glamour. A luxury brand like Chanel, say, has no trouble selling mid-priced items. But rarely is the reverse true. Fashion is aspirational, after all. If a brand’s image is not set from the outset at the high end of the runway, it’s almost impossible to get customers to pay premium prices for high-end goods.

  DVF couture was a misguided venture at a time when Diane’s brand could have used some polishing. Her licenses still brought in some income, but the quality of the DVF products had steadily declined, and they were taking her name down with them.

  Such items as Queenie panty hose for plus-size women did nothing for the brand’s cool factor. The low point came when comedian Sandra Bernhard appeared on Late Night with David Letterman with a roll of DVF paper towels, which she used to poke fun at the designer who once epitomized New York glamour. “Andy Warhol calls Diane von Furstenberg and says, ‘Let’s go dancing,’” mocked Bernhard as she waved the paper towel roll. “But she says, ‘No. I’ve got to clean up with my Diane von Furstenberg towel paper.’”

  MEANWHILE, DIANE’S RELATIONSHIP WITH PAULO continued to fray. “My mom fell out of love with him,” says Alex. “He wasn’t doing anything.” He put on weight. “He’d had a good physique, then he got fat.”

  It didn’t help that he also shaved off his beard. “He had no chin. He looked terrible!” Diane says.

  The end came on a cool day in October 1984. Diane’s old friend Jerry Brown, who had run unsuccessfully for the United States Senate after having served two terms as governor of California, happened to be in New York and showed up at Diane’s apartment for a casual meal in her kitchen. Paulo, who was present at the meal, felt way out of his league with the famous politician. After Brown left, Paulo did “what men do when they feel inadequate,” Diane says. “He made love to me, and then he fell asleep.”

  While Paulo dozed, Diane went off to the thirteenth birthday party of Jade Jagger, daughter of the now divorced Bianca and Mick, and Diane’s goddaughter. One of the guests she met at the party was Alain Elkann, a thirty-four-year-old Italian-French writer living in Paris. Diane was as attracted by Elkann’s bookish air as by his slender elegance, chiseled features, and masses of curly dark hair. There was much to draw them together. Diane had always been an avid reader and loved getting to know writers. Elkann’s ex-wife, Margherita, the only daughter of Fiat chairman Gianni Agnelli, was Egon’s first cousin; Elkann’s three children were second cousins to Alex and Tatiana. “I was just out of a marriage that was tormented and difficult, and it was not the best period in Diane’s life,” recalls Elkann, who was four years younger than Diane. He had a Hamlet-like brooding intensity and gave off a wounded vibe that appealed to Diane’s need to nurture. Her children had arranged to spend that night with friends, so Diane felt free to go home with Elkann, to the townhouse on Madison Avenue where he was staying.

  When Diane returned to her apartment the next morning, “Paulo was very upset,” recalls Diane. He left the apartment but later showed up at her office, where he stole a glance in her diary. Diane had written something about her night with Elkann that made Paulo “very sad, and so we split,” she says.

  “I got a call from him. He was on the street with his suitcases and needed a place to stay,” recalls Olivier Gelbsman, who at the time was managing Diane’s Sherry-Netherland boutique. Gelbsman took Paulo in for a few days. The South American was understandably distraught, and Gelbsman “made coffee for him and talked to him.”

  Paulo soon left, and eventually he moved back to South America. Diane does not keep in touch with him. “He’s one of the few [lovers] she’s erased,” says Gelbsman.

  Lily was so happy to see Paulo go that she lit scented candles throughout Diane’s apartment to get rid of any trace of his “aura.” Elkann was a big improvement, Diane’s family and friends believed, though Andy Warhol ridiculed her for “going the Marilyn Monroe route of marrying one person for the name,” then latching onto a writer “who’ll write books about her.” (In Monroe’s case, the name was Joe DiMaggio and the writer was Arthur Miller.)

  Elkann had a reputation for being what the French call an homme à femmes, a more elegant rendering of the Anglo “womanizer.” Diane chose to ignore the stories about his many conquests. At last she was in love with someone of her own tribe—European, urban, sophisticated, Jewish. Elkann’s father, a French industrialist, was chairman of Dior and head of the organization that appointed the chief rabbis of Paris. His mother was from a prominent Italian-Jewish banking family.

  As her relationship with Elkann deepened, Diane grew exhausted flying back and forth between New York to tend to her couture business and Paris to be with Elkann. The stress took its toll. She lost weight and looked haggard. Her appearance was not helped by her chopping off her hair on impulse one day shortly before meeting Elkann. She so feared her staff’s reaction that she insisted her hairdresser escort her back to her office after the deed was done. Diane’s employees kept a close watch on the boss’s changing hairstyles. Straight hair meant she felt insecure; curly hair meant she felt on top of the world.

  Diane’s new hairdo, though, seemed to mark a different state of mind. The little cap of profuse curls made her look older and also gave her an uncanny resemblance to p
hotographs of Edith Piaf. They had the same large, liquid eyes, strong mouth, and sensitive expression. They both looked very French and very sad.

  WITHIN A YEAR, DIANE REALIZED that her couture venture wasn’t going to work. Her heart hadn’t been in it from the start, and she had begun to crave a life of domestic calm in Paris with Elkann. Also, “designing very expensive products that only a few can afford was definitely not something I truly enjoyed,” she said.

  With her children away at boarding school—Tatiana would attend schools in London and Switzerland, and Alex would transfer from boarding at Rumsey in Connecticut to Brooks in Massachusetts—Diane sold her lease on the Sherry-Netherland shop to Geoffrey Beene. In her most radical move, she also sold her Fifth Avenue apartment. The buyer was Alain Wertheimer, the grandson of Coco Chanel’s original partner and, with his brother Gerard, the current owner of the Chanel empire.

  Her friends were stunned. Real estate “is something so central to New Yorkers. Once you have an apartment, you keep that apartment,” says Fran Lebowitz. “People say, even when their friends get married—‘What? You gave up your apartment? What if you get divorced?’” That Diane would sell her New York apartment for love shows her deep romanticism, how “she’d jump out a window” for a man, says Lebowitz. “She meets Alain, and five minutes later she’s living with him in Paris.”

  In the seventies Diane had been one of the first women to reach national prominence in American fashion. A decade later, the role of superwoman that she’d pioneered—the woman with a briefcase in one hand and a baby on the hip—had become a hard-won ideal. Now Diane seemed to be betraying that ideal by exhibiting a “stand-by-your man” submissiveness and deference.

  Financial factors also played into the decision. “There’d been a fuckup in her company, and she meets Alain and thinks, ‘I might as well go live in Paris,’” says a French journalist who saw Diane frequently during this period. “It was a good time to do that because in the eighties the dollar was so strong compared to the franc.”