Diane von Furstenberg (8 page)

Still, Diane’s ambitions focused increasingly on fashion. In Europe it was easy to find affordable, well-designed clothes in comfortable knit fabrics. Diane herself looked good in these clothes, and she sensed that American women would like them, too. The problem was, they weren’t available in the United States. Diane noticed on her many shopping excursions with Egon that American department store fare tended to be either expensive copies of French designers, hippie bell-bottoms and peasant dresses, or schlocky polyester wear. She greatly admired the colorful, fluid designs of Halston, Giorgio di Sant’Angelo and Stephen Burrows. As “a boy-about-town,” Diane says, Egon knew these designers and gained access for himself and Diane to their studio backrooms. Here Diane saw firsthand how New York fashion was made. Designs by the likes of Halston, Sant’Angelo, and Burrows, however, were expensive and out of reach for most women. Diane sensed an opportunity.

She knew nothing about designing. “What I did know . . . was that the world of fashion was fun, glamorous, very cool and I loved it,” she wrote. She would discover that it was also hard work.

In the spring she returned to Italy. Ferretti had bought another factory, this one a sprawling cement building on the outskirts of Montevarchi, an ancient market town nestled in the Tuscan hills. During the Renaissance rule of the Medicis, Montevarchi flourished as a center of the wool and silk industries. After the unification of Italy in 1870, it became a hub of sartorial manufacturing—first of felt hats, then of shoes and women’s and children’s wear.

Diane struggled to absorb as much as she could about the manufacture of clothes. At night, after the workers had gone home, she stayed behind with the pattern maker and, using whatever remnants of fabric were around, made her first samples. The first garment she designed was a green jersey dress with a seven-meter-long green and red sash.

In May, when his training program at Chase had ended, Egon joined his friend Marc Landeau, who’d just graduated from Columbia Business School, on a two-month tour of Asia. On the way, he stopped in Italy to
visit Diane. They spent a romantic weekend in Rome, and soon afterward Diane discovered she was pregnant. She considered having an abortion, which was illegal in Europe at the time, as in the United States. She’d known girls in Geneva who’d had abortions, though, and she had the name of a doctor who performed the procedure. Lily convinced Diane that she had an obligation to tell Egon of her condition, so Diane sent him a telegram in Hong Kong:

i am sorry to disturb your journey, but it is impossible to decide alone. result of the analysis was positive. i am thinking of the dr. s. solution. i await your decision. love you more than ever. diane.

Landeau recalls the exact moment Egon received the news. “We were in this little hotel early one morning, when a porter came up to the room with the telegram. Egon hesitated only a moment, then rushed out to send a telegram back to Diane.” She’s kept it all her life:

marriage will occur the 15th of July. organize it as rapidly as possible. i rejoice. thinking of you. love and kisses, eduard egon.

“Egon wasn’t the most monogamous of persons,” says Landeau. “But Diane was his girlfriend, and Diane turned him on, and Diane was his family. If he was going to have children with anyone, it was going to be with Diane.”

Afterward, Egon and Landeau went to a French restaurant to celebrate. “There was a very pretty woman sitting next to us with her husband, and Egon said, ‘You know, I’m so excited. I’m getting married, and I’m going to be a father.’ And the woman said, ‘That’s so nice, and look at me; I’m pregnant, too!’ Egon goes over to her and puts his hand on her belly so he can feel her baby’s heartbeat.” Her husband didn’t object. “Egon oozed charm. He could get away with anything,” says Landeau.

His future wife may have been pregnant, but that didn’t interrupt Egon’s trip. As the friends traveled to Bali, Laos, Cambodia, and Japan, Egon worked on the guest list, and whenever they found themselves on an Air France flight, he’d ask a flight attendant to mail the list to Diane when the plane returned to Paris.

Despite Egon’s enthusiasm about the wedding, Diane was embarrassed to be a pregnant bride. She didn’t want anyone to think Egon
had
to marry her. Of course, that’s exactly what people in Egon’s social world believed. “They felt that Diane was on the make and had taken advantage of Egon,” says John Richardson, the art historian and Picasso biographer, who met the couple when they first moved to New York.

With Lily in tow, Diane traveled to Venice, where she ordered a trousseau of tablecloths and sheets with the von Furstenberg monogram from Jesurum, Italy’s most famous manufacturer of handmade lace. She and Lily also visited Diane’s soon-to-be mother-in-law at Morocco d’Venezia, the eighteenth-century villa outside Venice where Clara lived with her second husband, Count Giovanni Nuvoletti, to discuss plans for the wedding, now just six weeks away. The villa was more enchanting than Diane had expected. The stuccoed house had cornflower-blue shutters, a red-tiled roof, and pink roses cascading from window boxes. More roses meandered over the property, perfuming the air.

Clara was in a unique position to be wary of
and
sympathetic to Diane. Her own grandmother, the plain but clever Jane Allen Campbell, had been an American adventuress straight out of a novel by Edith Wharton. Born in 1865 in New Jersey, Jane had tried to find a rich husband in New York. When that failed, she traveled to Rome, where her wealthy aunt lived, and she landed an Italian prince, Carlo Bourbon del Monte, Clara’s maternal grandfather.

Anti-Semitism was not uncommon in the von Furstenbergs’ social set, and to understand the visceral prejudice of many European aristocrats it helps to read Proust. In
Remembrance of Things Past,
the protagonist Swann describes a French prince who was so anti-Semitic that he let
a wing of his chateau burn down rather than borrow fire-fighting equipment from the Jewish Rothschilds next door. The same prince also chose to suffer an agonizing toothache, rather than consult the only available dentist, a Jew.

Clara’s own in-laws from her first marriage, the von Furstenbergs, had been disappointed when Tassilo married
her,
a girl without a title, despite her grandmother’s marriage. Her commoner status compromised the position of their children in the
Almanach de Gotha,
the directory of Europe’s royalty and higher nobility, and ruined their sons’ chances of being received into the Knights of Malta, the oldest surviving order of chivalry. As Alex von Furstenberg points out, however, Tassilo was the younger son, and “in those aristocratic families in Europe, the oldest son gets everything, and the younger sons marry rich people. That’s how it worked.”

Diane insists she never felt the sting of anti-Semitism from Clara. (Diane’s friend Howard Rosenman recounted a purported anti-Semitic incident involving Clara in a
Los Angeles Times
piece five years ago. Diane denies that it ever happened, and Rosenman now backs away from the account.)

Tassilo, though, on several occasions made remarks that could be interpreted as anti-Semitic. At dinner the night before his son’s wedding, he drank too much and kept repeating to the young woman who was seated next to him, “Egon is a prince. He’s so handsome. Why is he marrying this dark, plain little Jewish girl?”

Several years after Diane and Egon married, Tassilo told journalist Linda Bird Francke that “Jews are clever and shrewd,” qualities that his half Jewish grandchildren would “need.”

ON THAT PRE-WEDDING VISIT TO
Venice, while Lily and Clara went over the guest lists, Diane went out to the gardens. Lily adored Egon and didn’t seem concerned that Diane was marrying an Austrian. Clara, too, seemed excited about the wedding. But Diane was unsure if
Clara’s “enthusiasm was genuine,” she recalled. The sun was very hot, the air windless. Strolling through the beds of roses and hydrangeas, past the long avenues of poplars and linden trees that stretched out from the house, Diane felt her heart swell with conviction. She vowed to prove to Egon’s parents that their son had chosen well, that she was a person of value. “I got ambitious when I got pregnant because I wanted to show myself and the world that marrying a prince with Agnelli money was not my goal. My goal was to be independent,” she says.

Diane dreamed of transformation, of success, of perhaps even turning herself into a celebrity. Such things were possible in America. Maybe she would be a famous fashion designer like Halston or Yves Saint Laurent. By sheer will and hard work, by calling forth the drive that had always been in her, she would succeed.

She went back to Ferretti’s factory and told him she was pregnant, getting married, and moving to New York for good.

Diane and Egon were married in a civil ceremony at the town hall of Montfort-l’Amaury, just outside Paris, on July 16, 1969. The bride wore a flower-bedecked picture hat and a long-sleeved white dress designed for her by Dior’s Marc Bohan, with cutouts that revealed layers of pastel petticoats. Since she was pregnant, Diane said, she “felt it wasn’t really appropriate to wear completely all white.”

Because of the von Furstenberg name, the wedding was covered by all the usual publications that paid attention to society nuptials. No one mentioned Diane’s pregnancy, and there were many rapturous descriptions of her appearance.
Vogue
said she looked “Romany romantic,” adding that the nuptials had “a gypsy brilliance.”

Following the ceremony, there was a reception for five hundred guests at the Auberge de la Moutière, “a charming provincial inn considered the countryside version of Maxim’s,” as Diane wrote. “The movie
Tom Jones
had recently come out, and I wanted to replicate the mood and visuals of the country-side feast. My father hired all the singers and musicians from Rasputin, a Russian nightclub in Paris, to perform at the reception.
My father sang and broke a lot of glasses. But there was a shadow over the wedding.”

Tassilo showed up for the ceremony but declined to attend the reception, out of deference to his cousin, the reigning von Furstenberg patriarch. The cousin-patriarch disapproved of the marriage because Diane was Jewish. As Tassilo later told Linda Bird Francke, “Eddie [his nickname for Egon] understood. He sent a girl to my room.” The snub hurt and humiliated Diane and made her even more determined to prove to herself and her in-laws that she was a worthy bride for their son.

After a short honeymoon sailing the fjords of Norway, Diane and Egon went to a little house that Clara had bought them as a wedding present on Sardinia’s Costa Smeralda. The area, which had been developed by the Aga Khan, was a popular anchoring spot for the yachts of jet-setters, including Princess Margaret and her husband, the earl of Snowdon; the king of Greece; and Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. The newlyweds’ house on the sea was round “like a woman,” Diane said, with doors in every room opening onto a terrace. They were joined by a group of friends, including Marisa Berenson and Nona Gordon. The women wore tiny bikinis and diaphanous caftans; the men were tanned and bare-chested. There was a lot of swimming, sunning, drinking, pot smoking, and dabbling in group sex, instigated by Egon, according to Nona Gordon. “I have a vision of them all on the roof of that little house: Talitha and Paul Getty and Arndt von Bohlen and a whole group of people, and they were all fiddling with each other’s
things
,” Gordon recalls.

Though she became a serious cocaine addict, when it came to sex, Gordon was conventional, and she refused to join in. “I was so upset, I rushed off to my room. I was crying, and they were all laughing at me,” she says.

Diane denies that group-sex parties took place at the von Furstenbergs’ house in Sardinia. Still, Gordon says, “orgies were completely normal for Egon.”

He “was like Pan, like Dionysius,” says Bob Colacello. “But he had
so much charm, it never seemed sleazy with him. And it was also the time. All through the seventies into the eighties before AIDS became an issue, people were very carefree and footloose, and things happened rather spontaneously and indiscriminately.”

At the end of the summer, Egon flew to New York, while Diane went to Montevarchi to pick up her dress samples from Ferretti’s factory. In October, six months pregnant, she sailed for Manhattan aboard the Italian liner
Raffaello
. Diane’s New York married life began in a blur of parties, dinners, and shopping excursions. Egon loved buying clothes for his wife, not only as a treat for her but also for practical reasons. He wanted to help Diane learn as much as she could about fashion—he had thoughts of making fashion his career, too. He started a job at the New York investment bank Lazard Frères but would soon give up on a career in banking. “I was never a good analyst,” he said. “I had too much joy of living to be down there [on Wall Street].”

Egon told a reporter that his uncle Gianni Agnelli had given the couple ten couture dresses as a wedding present. According to Egon, Agnelli told him, “Go to Paris, go to Saint Laurent, go to Courrèges.” The idea was that the von Furstenbergs would be inspired by the exquisite clothes.

Unfortunately, the story was untrue. “That’s the kind of thing Egon could have made up,” says Diane. Gianni Agnelli’s wedding present to the newlyweds was a painting by Josef Albers.

As they explored the offerings in New York stores, Egon urged Diane to look closely at the design, fabric, colors, and structure of clothes. In this way, he helped develop her eye and a sense of the American market. For a time, as part of a Lazard program in the business of retail, Egon joined the buying staff of E. J. Korvette, the struggling discount department store. His preferred style, however, remained decidedly old school high-end. “I hated his taste,” says Diane. “Egon liked complicated clothes in luxe fabrics, such as satin duchesse. He didn’t understand why I wanted to do simple little jersey dresses.”

With no formal training in the fashion arts, Diane did not sketch, drape, cut patterns, or sew. When she first apprenticed herself to Ferretti, she did not understand the basic construction of clothes. “I started out an amateur,” she says. She relied on Ferretti’s pattern makers, print designers, and seamstresses to help her realize her vision of a few easy dresses and separates. She would describe what she wanted, and the Ferretti workers would translate her words into clothes. Diane was a quick and avid learner, though, and eventually, as time went by—and she watched the workers drape, pin, snip, and sew—she’d come to know everything there was to know about making fashion.