Diane von Furstenberg

by Gioia Diliberto

  “Diller is almost a husband,” Diane once told a reporter. Still, she was free to date other men. She never felt entirely comfortable as part of an exclusive couple. “I always fight that,” she says. Even with Alain Elkann, as she was submerging her personality and style to please him, a part of her never surrendered completely. She never gave all of herself. “My deepest, closest relationship has always been with myself,” she says.

  One of her flirtations during this period was Roffredo Gaetani, an Italian sportsman six years her junior, who had the aristocratic charm and movie star looks of a professional playboy. Gaetani sold Ferraris—a car that cost $150,000 used in 1992—in Glen Cove, Long Island, though his avocation was collecting women. His liaisons with a series of jet set beauties had landed him frequently in the gossip columns, most famously when he challenged the actor Mickey Rourke to a boxing match after Rourke insulted model (and Rourke paramour) Carré Otis at a Vogue magazine party. The fight never happened, but Gaetani later said that forever afterward when Rourke “hears my name he quivers like a dog in a storm.”

  Earlier, in the mid-eighties, the writer Taki Theodoracopolus had boxed Roffredo for three rounds in an Upper East Side match organized for the spectacle of it and attended by the cream of international white trash, including Claus von Bülow, who’d recently been acquitted in his second trial on charges that he’d attempted to murder his wife, Sunny, by insulin injection.

  Gaetani had grown up in a palace, the Palazzo Lovatelli, in Rome, and counted two popes among his ancestors. He carried as many names as Egon von Furstenberg—five to be exact: Rofreddo di Laurenzana dell’Aquila d’Aragona Lovatelli. Roffredo, though, had more titles. He was a count, a prince, and a duke. In New York he lived in a Broome Street loft that had a brass bull protruding from the dining room wall and a huge tree trunk that spanned the length of the living room suspended from the ceiling.

  Gaetani and Diane spoke Italian together. They had many friends in common and shared a love of fast cars. But the affair was never more than casual. In the language Diane typically employed when describing her lovers, their “bodies met,” but the union never evolved beyond a “flirtation” into a “relationship.” Gaetani “was around,” recalls Kathy Landau. He would go on to famously squire Ivana Trump a few years later, and then die a playboy’s flamboyant death, in 2005, when he drove off the road while traveling to Argiano, his ancestral castle in Tuscany.

  DIANE’S QVC SUCCESS ENCOURAGED HER to branch out, to get back into cosmetics. She had an idea for a new line of aromatic bath products based on floral scents, and she approached Revlon about manufacturing and distributing the line, which she called Surroundings. When that didn’t work out, she decided to produce the candles, air fresheners, soap, shampoo, and body lotion herself and sell them on QVC. At the same time, she was promoting her new book, The Bath, a celebration of the bathing ritual. (A third book, The Table, which focused on the art of dining, appeared in 1996.) A picture in the September 1993 issue of Vanity Fair showed Diane floating in bubbles in her own cast-iron tub. That same month she introduced Surroundings on QVC in a special broadcast from her country estate that was covered by the New York Times.

  The old tobacco barn that served as Diane’s bedroom and office had been converted into a temporary television studio with blazing lights, tangles of black cables, and an army of assistants.

  “Welcome to my bathroom,” Diane said into the camera while sitting barefoot on the edge of her tub. “Here is where I have my bath. Here is where I complain about life.”

  The blond and bright-eyed QVC host Judy Crowell enthused over Diane’s Spring Hyacinth shampoo and Egyptian Kyphi candles. Outside, a herd of dogs—Diane’s cocker spaniel, Tatiana’s dalmatian, Alex’s Rottweiler, a German shepherd that had once belonged to Paulo, and a couple of mutts—romped around a New England Satellite Systems truck parked in the white-pebbled driveway. Alex, at twenty-three an employee of the New York financial-services firm Allen & Company, hosed down his black Acura sports car, blasting the Rolling Stones from a tape player, as servants bustled about setting the table for dinner under the pergola overlooking the pool. Nearby, the garage had been turned into a control room where a group of QVC executives watched a bank of TV monitors.

  In the end, Surroundings sold only moderately, and Diane concluded that the line was priced too high. For whatever reason, it just didn’t catch on—another example of Diane’s failure with beauty products.

  WITH DILLER, DIANE NEXT CONCEIVED the idea of Q2, a new televised shopping channel that would be devoted to fashion. Q2 would feature moderately priced clothes by celebrity designers and aim for an audience more upscale than QVC’s Fashion Channel, which it would replace. Diller named Diane creative planning director of Q2 and headquartered the new channel closer to Manhattan, in the Silvercup Studios in Queens.

  Diane described her position to reporters as “an ambassador,” whose chief job was to convince her fellow designers to sell on TV. Working the Seventh Avenue circuit and Triangle d’Or luxury district in Paris like a politician, she tried to broker deals with fashion stars from Karl Lagerfeld, Gianni Versace, and Claude Montana to Calvin Klein, Christian Louboutin, and Ralph Lauren. Diane had once ignored a psychic who told her to go into television, because she thought television was boring. Now she found herself in the middle of a retail revolution on TV, proving the psychic right.

  Karl Lagerfeld agreed to appear on Q2 after Diane flew to Paris to discuss it with him. He told WWD he planned to sell a version of the “skin dress,” a body-hugging knit sheath that he’d shown in his previous two collections for Chanel. It stretched to fit a variety of body types and solved the sizing problem inherent in teleshopping of having to buy something without trying it on. In the end, however, the deal fell through.

  Though Q2, which began broadcasting in May 1994, had less brazen puffery and fewer call-ins than QVC, it had the same boxed-in studio set, the same nonstop nattering about products, the same flashing toll-free number, the same tacky vibe as its parent channel. Designers also worried that selling on Q2 would upset their relationships with department stores. In the end, Diane was unable to convince any top designer to sign on.

  The channel also had trouble attracting viewers. One problem was that it was mostly available in geographically middle-American cable systems, not in the upscale markets on the coasts, where most of its targeted audience of yuppies and aspiring yuppies lived. Another problem was that Amazon.com, founded in the same year as Q2, was about to compete for the home shopping audience. Diller’s idea of “shopping for underwear in your underwear” had been inspired. But once modems were a reality, waiting around to buy, say, an outfit offered on a special program scheduled for Thursday made no sense if it was Sunday and you could get it online.

  But Q2’s demise was two years away, and in the spring of 1994 Diane still had great faith in the channel’s future. Ralph Lauren was among the designers she tried to lure, and one day she invited him to lunch. She did not know him well; it was the first time they’d lunched together. After Diane made her Q2 pitch, to which Lauren listened politely but indifferently, the conversation turned to more personal matters.

  Lauren told Diane that several years earlier his world had been shattered when he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. It had all started with an incessant ringing in his ear, accompanied by searing headaches that grew worse. The tumor turned out to be benign, but Lauren had to suffer through many months of worry and pain.

  As Lauren spoke, Diane realized, she had a ringing in her ear, too, and the next day, she made an appointment with an ear specialist. During the exam the doctor noticed a swollen gland in Diane’s neck. He put her on antibiotics, but when the swollen gland didn’t go away, he grew concerned. More tests followed. The initial results were optimistic, and though Diane’s doctors believed there was no rush to remove the growth, she insisted it be excised immediately.

  Diane underwent surgery in May at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center ov
erlooking Central Park. During the operation, Tatiana and Lily sat nervously in the hospital waiting area (Alex was in Hong Kong, according to Diane, but would soon fly to his mother’s side.) When it was over Diane was wheeled into the recovery room. Twenty minutes passed. Then the doctor strode into the waiting room and spoke directly to Tatiana. “It’s cancer,” he said. A malignancy had been found at the base of Diane’s tongue and in the soft palate of her mouth.

  “I had to translate for Lily,” says Tatiana. “Then my mom woke up, and I had to tell her. She sat up straight in her hospital bed and about crawled out of her skin. There was so much fear.”

  After a few days, when the initial shock of the diagnosis wore off, Diane “went into executive mode,” says Tatiana. “She and Barry and my brother, the pragmatic people in our family, came up with a plan, and she made decisions about her treatment.”

  Among the options was radical surgery that would have removed part of Diane’s jawbone and cheek, where any microscopic cancer cells might be lurking. “They wanted to cut half her face off, and she said, ‘Never!’” recalls Tatiana.

  Doctors stood at the side of her bed, read her chart, and chatted. They told Diane they thought they’d “gotten it all,” but there’s never any certainty of that. The fear that they didn’t “get it all,” that some of it, even just one tiny cell, was left behind to grow, tormented Diane.

  Hospitals have a way of making you feel humbled, defeated, not yourself. Diane couldn’t wait to go home, and as soon as she was released, she returned to work. She didn’t talk about her illness to her staff. She didn’t want their fear and pity reflected back to her. It wasn’t that she tried to keep it a secret, but the disease seemed less real if she didn’t talk about it. If she acted as if everything was normal, perhaps it would be.

  Diane’s oncologist prescribed eight weeks of radiation. She considered alternatives and consulted Deepak Chopra, the holistic health guru, who one Friday night at Cloudwalk taught her to meditate. Chopra also invited Diane to the Chopra Center in Carlsbad, California, where Diane prayed, meditated, and took long solitary walks on the beach. By then she’d decided to go ahead with the radiation, and she vowed to face the course with courage and discipline.

  Also with help from Bianca Kermorvant, a Parisian healer to whom Diane was introduced by Marisa Berenson. Kermorvant insists she’s not a psychic, though, she says, “I have these moments when I know things by instinct.” She helps her clients “make the right choices,” by turning her mind to their problems and the vibrations of energy surrounding them. Everyone’s body is like a radio station that emits a frequency, says Kermorvant, and she maintains that a healer can pick up the vibrations and interpret them—even from a great distance. Kermorvant was located in Paris, while Diane was in New York.

  Diane had moments of terror and depression, but ever Lily’s daughter, she never succumbed to despair. Every morning she did her hair and makeup carefully and dressed in bright, cheerful colors. She would not let anyone accompany her to Sloan Kettering, walking from her home to the hospital alone. The route between her apartment at Eighty-Seventh Street, Sloan Kettering on Sixty-Eighth Street, and her office on Fifty-Seventh Street formed a V, which Diane interpreted as a V for Victory. “As I walked, I sang a little French victory song I had made up in which the bad cells were killed and never came back. Even now, when I walk fast, the song comes back to me,” she wrote.

  To pass time in the hospital, as she waited with other cancer patients for her treatment, she read Wild Swans by Jung Chang, a book chosen for its 500 plus-page length—she calculated it would take eight weeks, the duration of her treatment, to complete—and inspiring subject, three generations of women who survived the turbulence of twentieth-century China.

  During the actual treatments, Diane forced herself to think positive thoughts, to concentrate on “the victorious destruction of the bad cells and the strengthening of the good ones.” On the way home she stopped at a health food store and drank a shot of wheat-grass juice. Every afternoon she had a shiatsu massage.

  The radiation burns on her face and back—something that had worried her terribly—turned out to look like a suntan, albeit an uneven one. She temporarily lost her sense of taste, and though it eventually returned, the numbing of her taste buds permanently diminished her already minimal interest in food. “My mom was never a sensual eater. She could care less about this gourmet foodie culture going on now, especially since she’s had cancer,” says Tatiana.

  The most painful side effect Diane experienced was a severe sore throat that made swallowing difficult. Instead of taking the medicine her doctor prescribed to treat it, however, she gargled with sesame oil, as Deepak Chopra had recommended. She healed her mouth blisters, another vexing result of radiation, with powdered Gashu, a rare type of ginger root given to her by her masseur, Eizo.

  Her family and friends stayed close but respected her privacy. The filmmaker Mark Peploe, a longtime friend with whom she’d recently become romantically involved, called her daily from London. Fred Seidel called to bolster her spirits every night before she went to sleep, and he found that the conversation usually ended up with Diane bolstering his. Mort Zuckerman took her to a state dinner at the White House, Bill Clinton’s first as president, in honor of the emperor of Japan. For the occasion, she turned to rising star John Galliano and borrowed the pink satin and chiffon dress that been the masterpiece of a dazzling collection he’d shown in Paris in March. Diane had been present that day, and as she watched the models parade across the leaf-strewn floor of an empty old mansion, she knew she was witnessing a new fashion moment. “Powerful,” Suzy Menkes wrote of the show in the New York Times. “Perhaps the most celebrated fashion event since Dior introduced his New Look,” wrote Michael Specter in The New Yorker.

  Diane had Galliano expand the bodice, which had been worn in the show by the rail-thin model Christy Turlington, and she herself added some chiffon to the already frothy train. It turned out to be “the most uncomfortable dress I’ve ever worn,” Diane wrote. By wearing it, however, she proved to herself and everyone else that despite her illness and though she had no business to speak of outside QVC, she still had the pulse of Fashion. “Diane got the dress and wore it to the White House, and I thought that was very smart,” says André Leon Talley. “She realized that this was something she should embrace, that she’d look good in it; that it was something different, something dramatic. It’s instinct. Intuitiveness. She’s always been able to pick up on the temperature of fashion at a certain time.”

  THROUGHOUT THE SUMMER OF 1994, Diane’s father was dying. Leon Halfin had been suffering from Alzheimer’s for years, but he’d recently taken a turn for the worse. Barry Diller lent Diane the use of his plane for the Fourth of July weekend, when she had a brief reprieve from radiation, and she flew to Brussels to see her father for the last time. He would die three weeks later. “He intensely loved his children and grandchildren,” says Tatiana. “He sent me care packages every week when I was in boarding school. He was a devoted family man,” who would be deeply missed by his family.

  At the time, Diller was in the throes of trying to take over CBS. He pined after the network as a “soul mate” for QVC that would bring him that much closer to having a media empire of his own. By the end of July, however, the deal had fallen through. Comcast, which already owned 15.6 percent of QVC, killed the merger by buying all of QVC for $2.1 billion.

  Six months later Diller resigned as chairman of QVC with his visions for the home shopping channel unfulfilled. Grandiose predictions and frenzied media attention had marked his tenure as QVC chief, but his plan to attract high-quality designers and retailers never got off the ground. Nor was he able to leverage the shopping network to finance bigger deals.

  Diller still saw home shopping as a means to an end—the best way to move toward the cutting edge of multimedia technology, television, and film. No sooner had he resigned from QVC than he took over its rival, Home Shopping Network. Diane foll
owed him. Her Silk Assets line would now be sold on HSN. Considered a B-level QVC associated with selling such low-rent fare as polyester leisure suits pitched by such fourth-rate celebrities as Wheel of Fortune hostess Vanna White, HSN had tapped out its customer base and was losing money—in 1995, $17.7 million in the third quarter alone.

  Around this time Diller bought a controlling stake in Silver King Communications, the tiny TV network that broadcast HSN. Within a year, he’d merged HSN, Silver King, and a production company into a new corporation. As IAC in the new millennium, this corporation would own fifty brands that control online commercial transactions from travel to lending to dating.

  Diller also became astoundingly rich. By 2004, Fortune estimated his wealth from stock options, gains from stock sales, salary, and bonuses at $1.6 billion. In March 2014, Forbes put his wealth at $2.4 billion. He would spend many millions of it to help Diane recharge her brand.

  The Comeback

  Diane’s bout with cancer gave her life a fierce intensity. Like many survivors, she saw this as a positive aspect of what otherwise was a horrific experience. Facing death led her to live at a deeper emotional level than before. As the years passed, she tried to hold on to her profound sense of gratitude and worked hard “to honor” life every day.

  Having cancer also gave her a clear sense of priorities. If she was going to recharge her brand, she had to act now. In August 1995 she restructured her company, naming three new vice presidents and a board of advisors. This “reflects my desire to fully control the DVF brand and establish a full service design and marketing studio,” she told WWD. Her mission was “to create chic, quality products at prices accessible to most.” The focus of the new DVF Studio would be dresses, sold under the simple label “Diane.”