Diane von Furstenberg (29 page)

“I’m not familiar with this buying and selling on television,” Diane admitted, as two models twirled in Silk Assets outfits. Her sophisticated, European face looked hard next to the über perky Treacy, a former local TV reporter. Also, Diane kept pursing her lips and running her fingers through her hair, fashiony mannerisms that looked unfriendly on TV. As the morning progressed, though, she grew more relaxed, telling the audience that “building a wardrobe is like building a circle of friends your whole life.”

The screens of viewers watching at home were dominated by the QVC phone number in bold white next to the words “Diane von Furstenberg Fashions.” A column on the left described the item being shown, for example, a “Silk Jewel Neck Floral Blouse, Retail Value $70.00; QVC PRICE $47.00”—though the retail price was just a hypothetical, reflecting the price at which a traditional retailer might have sold the item.

The first caller, a woman named Anne-Marie, confessed that she was an extra-large, who avoided bright colors. She bought Diane’s palazzo pants in black. “Well, black is perfect then. You can never have enough black,” Diane said. “Wear it in good health.”

When Anne-Marie mentioned that she lived in Brewster, New York,
Diane, whose Cloudwalk was nearby, said they were neighbors. “You must know the Texas Taco where I buy my Mexican. Maybe I’ll see you there in your new silk pants!”

At one point, Diane changed from her purple dress—which at $90 had sold out—into a print shirt and pants. A caller from Baltimore was interested in the shirt, which had a purple background, but wondered if it would go with her hair. “Are you blonde or brunette?” asked Diane. When the woman said she was a redhead, Diane exclaimed, “Even better!” She told the caller that the print was copied from a piece of sixteenth-century Florentine inlaid furniture in her Connecticut house. “Don’t be afraid of bright colors. The basic silk thing you need is black, but bright colors and prints can give you a great lift.”

Barry Diller watched the show from the greenroom backstage, his eyes glued to the computer screen monitoring call-ins. No sooner had Diane glided onto the set than 407 calls came in. Diller began to think this wasn’t such a small thing after all.

By 9:30
AM
the on-air calls had soared to 721—a considerably higher number than typical for a QVC show—and the computer cash register had rung up a quarter of a million dollars in sales. After a short break, Diane returned at ten thirty, dressed in a Silk Assets blouse and pants. She’d now sold one million dollars’ worth of merchandise, and 1,166 callers waited on line. A woman from West Virginia gushed about how much she loved Diane’s wrap dresses, the new Silk Assets style and the original.

Diane demonstrated how to wear the last item offered, a silk scarf emblazoned with her signature. “I’m giving it to all my friends for Christmas,” she told viewers. The pitch failed, however; the scarf didn’t sell well. Still, when the show ended at 11
AM
, Diane had sold out twelve of the seventeen Silk Assets styles featured and run up $1.2 million in sales.

As she headed home, speeding north toward the tall, lighted city in her green Jaguar—a present from Diller—leaving behind the rolling
hills and drab corporate park, Diane’s spirit soared. QVC made her feel confident again.

DILLER’S TALKS WITH NBC HAD
continued through the summer of 1992, but as he studied the state of information technology, owning a network began to seem less attractive than it had when he’d first left Fox. What’s more, seeing Diane’s success on QVC hit home to Diller that cable, with its myriad viewer choices, would continue to leach customers from the networks. There was only one thing for him to do—buy into QVC himself. His new partners were Brian L. Roberts, the president of Comcast Corporation, the nation’s fourth-largest cable company, and John Malone, the CEO of Tele-Communications, Inc., the largest. Diller became head of QVC, and because Diane had introduced him to the channel, Diller gave her 10 percent of his share in the company.

Taking over QVC, Diller says, “was my transition from pure entertainment to pure interactivity. That was a big leap! And I did it as I do all things, without an understanding of risk, without anything except being driven by curiosity and serendipity.”

And foolishness, some people believed. “Diners passing Diller at his regular table in the Grill Room of the Four Seasons had almost embarrassed expressions as, uncharacteristically, [Diller] kept looking around, as if for applause,” Ken Auletta wrote in his 1993
New Yorker
profile of Diller. “Those who knew Diller waved a greeting, but they seemed to be thinking, Barry Diller’s going to run
what
? A home-shopping network? You’ve got to be kidding!”

.

ON HIS FIRST DAY AS
the head of QVC, Diller called Diane and moaned, “Could you please tell me what I’m doing here?”

Soon, though, he stopped whining and started doing what he did best—deal making. What he’d had in mind all along was to use QVC as
a platform to grow beyond the small world of channels into a limitless, interactive universe. He wanted to be as big as Murdoch and Turner. To this end, Diller began a battle to acquire Paramount, the studio he’d once run. Owning Paramount would allow him to start building new cable services and even perhaps create a fifth network. Eventually, though, he lost out to Viacom’s Sumner Redstone. Undaunted, he next tried to buy CBS, but Comcast, which had a majority interest in QVC, killed the deal when Comcast president Brian Roberts realized the cable company would have no say in the network’s programming.

Diller’s frustrations mounted as his ambitions were thwarted. But Diane thrived. She appeared on QVC once a week and experienced some of the exhilaration she’d felt in the seventies from having an unstoppable success. “I’m having fun with this vulgar little thing,” she told her friend Fred Seidel.

“She wasn’t afraid to look like a fool,” Seidel recalls.

On one QVC show broadcast at midnight, Diane sold $750,000 worth of Silk Assets clothes in fifteen minutes, including twelve thousand shirts. On another night, she sold twenty-two hundred pairs of trousers with elasticized waistbands in less than two minutes. They might have been, like Carl Rosen’s dresses, trousers “for the masses with fat asses,” but “sitting in the greenroom and watching all the numbers come up on the computer screen was like being at a horse race,” she recalled.

Through it all, says Diller, he and Diane were “getting back together.” They were photographed by Annie Leibovitz in Diller’s suite at the Waldorf-Astoria Towers for
Vanity Fair
’s 1993 Hall of Fame. The magazine called them “a power couple that have doubled their power. Together, they stroll hand-in-hand down the information superhighway.” Leibovitz snapped them lounging on a couch, Diller in a tuxedo and Diane in a black Valentino couture slip dress with spaghetti straps and jet embroidery. With the money she earned putting QVC viewers into Silk Assets pants with elasticized waists and oversized shirts, she had plenty to spend on French couture.

“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.