Diane von Furstenberg (16 page)

Diane’s success was illustrative of the new democratic forces shaping fashion, and she was not the only American designer getting noticed for making affordable and accessible clothes. Norma Kamali, for one, produced inventive dresses and separates in humble fabrics, including a puffer coat inspired by a sleeping bag she’d curled up in on a camping trip after her divorce. Avant-garde rockers, movie stars, and socialites flocked to Kamali’s second-floor Madison Avenue shop, OMO (for “on my own”), to buy jumpsuits and ruffled evening gowns made from parachute silk, and bloomers, tunics, and skirts cut from sweatshirt fabric.

Diane herself had a closetful of colorful, tiered Kamali skirts. She wore her own clothes during the day, but to go dancing at night, she wore Kamali.

ACROSS AMERICA, STORES SOLD OUT
of the wrap as quickly as the dresses arrived. Many women already had one or two in their closets, but they clamored for more, and Diane felt pressured to constantly produce new variations: sleeveless wraps, short-sleeved wraps, wraps with halters and ruffled necklines, long wraps, short wraps, dressy wraps, casual wraps, wraps with pants. She also pushed to come up with new prints. Soon she added a chain print, art deco prints, and more florals and geometrics.

Meanwhile, Diane’s animal prints were smash hits that fed the wrap’s monster success.
WWD
hailed them on the cover.
People
photographed the designer herself in a leopard-print wrap, and the top department stores ran huge ads promoting the “jungle” designs. “No matter how
many times you’ve seen these feline spots before your eyes, they never have seemed fresher than in Diane’s hands,” gushed a B. Altman ad.

By the end of 1975, Ferretti’s factory was making so many wraps that Diane rented a warehouse at Fortieth Street and Tenth Avenue to store them. “It was exciting just to be in the office,” says Jaine O’Neil, one of the sales staff. “You’d pick up the phone to make appointments with buyers, and everyone was happy to hear from you. The clothes were selling themselves.”

Tasked as she was with recording the company’s mounting profits, Marion Stein, the bookkeeper, had a special place in Diane’s affections. “I am very drunk right now and that is probably why I write this letter and open myself, but I really feel well when I come to the office and a lot of it is because of you,” Diane once wrote to Marion on Eastern Air Lines stationery while traveling. “We all love you a lot!!”

TO MARK HER SUCCESS, IN
1974 Diane commissioned four silkscreen portraits from Andy Warhol at a total cost of forty thousand dollars—twenty-five thousand for the first and five thousand for each additional picture. (Ten years later she would commission a second series of the artist’s portraits.) Being featured in a Warhol silkscreen was an essential status symbol for a New York celebrity in the seventies, in the same way a John Singer Sargent portrait was de rigueur for a society star of the belle époque—it signaled a kind of moneyed cool. Diane had met the pop art king soon after arriving in New York with Egon and saw him frequently at events. “He was always around at her parties,” says Linda Bird Francke.

The commission, though, did nothing to soften Warhol’s attitude toward Diane, which was resentful to the point of hostile. Though Warhol was fascinated by fashion, “Diane’s style wasn’t Andy’s style,” recalls Bob Colacello. “Diane has mass taste. Andy liked Saint Laurent and Halston. Also, Andy could be a little anti-Semitic, to tell you the truth.”

But perhaps the chief reason Warhol resented Diane was her failure
to be caught in his cruel traps. “Andy loved people who were desperate to be famous and who were exhibitionist but who weren’t smart enough to realize what fools they were making of themselves. And Diane would never make a fool of herself,” says Colacello. “Warhol always had his tape recorder going, and he’d say to a woman, ‘Does your husband have a big cock? How many times do you have sex?’ If a woman got into that with him, he’d love it. Then he’d have a good tape. Diane would never fall for that.”

Not that Warhol didn’t try to goad her into humiliating herself. For her first appearance in
Interview,
the magazine he founded in 1969 that featured mostly unedited conversations among celebrities, he paired Diane with the improbably named Victor Hugo, a crazy Venezuelan pseudo artist and Halston lover.

Hugo sometimes showed up at Studio 54 in nothing but a jockstrap. He arranged the sex acts between street hustlers and call boys that Warhol photographed for his series of “torso” paintings in 1979. Halston put Hugo in charge of his store windows on Madison Avenue, and one season Hugo had mannequins with machine guns act out the Patty Hearst bank robbery. Another season the windows featured a birthing scene in which faceless mannequins stood around a hospital bed where a pregnant figure was wrapped in a long cashmere blanket. “This is really sick,” one passerby wrote in chalk across the windows.

For their
Interview
conversation, Victor Hugo asked the questions and Diane answered, as Warhol sat nearby recording it all. The session must have been a disappointment to Warhol, for the Master of Raunch did not push Diane to debase or embarrass herself. Instead, the result was a harmless coffee klatch chat between a princess (P) and a gay gigolo (VH):

VH:
By the way, do you make love every day?

P:
Yes (girlishly).

VH:
Do you think it is a must? It is like a beauty treatment every day?

P:
Well, it is like a bath, you know. If you have a good bath sometimes you can “jump” a day.

VH:
Are you interested in ménage à trois?

P:
No! I like ménage à deux.

In the aftermath of her breakup with Egon, Diane took many lovers. She recorded her conquests in her diary by writing “our bodies met.” (“I was so subtle,” she says now.) Among them were three famous actors, Ryan O’Neal, Warren Beatty, and Richard Gere. She slept with Warren Beatty and Ryan O’Neal in the same weekend when she was staying at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles. “I was having a little thing with Ryan, and Warren was in the hotel,” she says. She’d had “a fantasy” about sleeping with both stars, and so “it just happened.”

Fran Boyar recalls that when Diane’s affair with Warren Beatty was over, she herself “got him.” She continues, “He used to call Diane’s private line, and I was the only one allowed to answer it. So he calls one day, and I ended up meeting him at the Carlyle Hotel. I screwed him a couple of times, then I brought a girlfriend, and we had a three-way.”

Before her movie star conquests, though, and in the immediate aftermath of her breakup with Egon, Diane’s boyfriend was Jas Gawronski, an Italian TV newscaster stationed in New York who was ten years her senior. Gawronski was kind and serious and comfortably European, a member of the international set that often came to Diane’s apartment for parties. She and Gawronski spoke Italian together, and as a young journalist in Italy, he had known Egon and the entire Agnelli clan.

He also understood that ambition did not negate her desire to be loved as a woman. “On the one hand, Diane is very tough. On the other, she’s very sweet,” says Gawronski, who is now retired after serving many years in the European parliament. “She has these two things blended together. Sometimes one side comes up stronger than the other. But I always felt that she had a feeling for helping other women.”

Diane was in the middle of her affair with Gawronski when she
bought her country home in Connecticut. In November 1973 a real estate agent had sent her some pictures of available properties. One turned out to be a beautiful estate rambling over fifty acres of lyrical countryside in New Milford, two hours north of Manhattan. Diane drove up to see it with her mother and Kenny Lane. Called Cloudwalk, it held a main house and four outbuildings erected in the 1920s by Evangeline Johnson, a pharmaceutical heiress and onetime wife of conductor Leopold Stokowski, who’d been a DVF woman before Diane invented the type. Decorated by President Woodrow Wilson for her services in the Red Cross during World War I, Johnson fought a one-woman war in the 1920s against the city of Palm Beach, Florida, which had banned women from appearing in public in skimpy bathing suits. She had stacks of handbills protesting the ban printed up, then buzzed over the beach, tossing them from the cockpit of a propeller plane she’d just learned to fly.

Diane paid two hundred thousand dollars for Cloudwalk and took possession of it on December 31, 1973, her twenty-seventh birthday. For all her city glamour, she loved the peace and beauty of the country, and she worked hard to make Cloudwalk a model of natural delight. She planted a grove of magnolia trees and cleaned up the woods, apple orchards, and fields. She set up the farmhouse for family life, with a well-stocked kitchen, a living room, bedrooms, and bathrooms for her children and her guests. She herself slept in the nearby barn. Though drafty and ramshackle, it was a perfect spot to bring lovers, far from the prying eyes of Tatiana and Alex, with whom she could communicate by intercom—until Alex cut the wires when he was twelve.

The area around Cloudwalk was more New York than New England, with many of Diane’s friends from fashion and society, including Alexander and Tatiana Liberman, Oscar and Françoise de la Renta, John Richardson, Bill Blass, and Henry and Nancy Kissinger (with whom she spent several Thanksgivings), rusticating nearby in their own country homes. Dressed in jeans and no makeup, Diane read and took long, restorative hikes through the fields and woods. On Saturday, the cook’s
night off, she made what her family called “Saturday-night chicken,” one of the few dishes her son says she knows how to prepare.

Though Diane owned her apartment in New York and would later own a Paris flat, she regarded Cloudwalk as her true home. This is where she always returned, after a marathon public appearance tour, after a humiliating business flop, after the end of an affair. It is where she felt and still feels most herself, and where someday she will be laid to rest.

Diane spent her first night at Cloudwalk with Gawronski, eating lamb chops she’d bought from a local supermarket and drinking champagne—it was her birthday
and
New Year’s Eve. “The house was kind of empty, but Diane decorated it to her taste in no time,” Gawronski recalls.

Though the couple didn’t live together in Manhattan, they spent most weekends at Cloudwalk. Gawronski had little interest in clothes, and when Diane’s friends from the fashion world arrived, as they often did to spend a few hours or the day, he’d escape outside with a ladder and a hand saw to trim trees. “I developed a strange passion for it,” he says, and laughs. “I started with the trees closest to the house and worked my way out.”

By the time Diane broke up with him at the end of 1976, Gawronski had trimmed most of Cloudwalk’s trees. “I think she was grateful because they looked so much better,” he says.

ALEX VON FURSTENBERG SAYS HE
and Tatiana had “a typical Upper East Side childhood, except that my mom was super famous and super cool and smoked joints and we traveled the world and people like Mick Jagger came over.” Because Diane was away so much, the children had a lot of freedom—and luxury—with servants and drivers at their disposal. “My driver was the school bus for my friends,” says Alex.

Lily lived with the family for eight months of the year (the rest of the year she mostly lived in Switzerland with Hans Muller). She was like a second mother to her grandchildren. Much of their rearing fell to her. “She was very influential. She taught me finance, which is now
my career,” says Alex. “We used to look at the stock tables together. She also taught me how to play backgammon with the [doubling] cube, so I understood at a very young age when to press my bets and cut my losses. She also was very loving and supportive, and she always taught us to live to the max. The only regrets she had were the things she hadn’t done.”

Lily lived for four o’clock when the children returned from their private schools—Alex from Allen-Stevenson on East Seventy-Eighth Street and Tatiana from Spence on East Ninety-First. Lily “called me her oxygen, and she was
my
salvation,” Tatiana says.

Tatiana was artistic and suffered from Brody disease, a genetic disorder that affects the muscles and prevented her from participating in athletics or even climbing stairs. She felt like an outsider in “this family where everyone was moving so fast and had so much vitality,” she says. Tatiana was fragile like Lily, with whom she shared long, deep, “even mystical” conversations about life—in French. “I felt pressure to make her happy, to entertain her, to connect with her, and I wanted to because I needed her so badly,” says Tatiana.

Lily read to the children every day and pushed them to develop their minds and become trilingual like their parents. “I remember being really little and having a Richard Scarry reader, and it wasn’t good enough to read it in English. Lily also had us learn every word in French and Italian,” says Tatiana.

At the time, Egon was struggling with the menswear business he’d launched in the wake of Diane’s success. Diane had asked her friend Olivier Gelbsman to become Egon’s partner; in fact, Gelbsman recalls, “she wouldn’t let me refuse.” One of his first duties was to accompany Egon on a gay cruise to Guatemala. “It was a deluxe French boat that had been used for classical music cruises,” recalls Gelbsman. “We didn’t have classical music; we had disco. The only women on board were the maids. And we went crazy every night, dancing and getting stoned.”

When the boat docked in Guatemala, Egon took Olivier to a bordello, “a
woman
bordello,” says Gelbsman. Egon “always did the thing
you’d least expect him to do,” even when seeking out sexual adventure, “though on balance, he preferred men.”

Gelbsman believes Egon wanted him as a business partner because he was an “intelligent, good-looking Jew,” like Diane, and Egon hoped Gelbsman would do for him what Diane had done for herself. “Diane had the recipe for success, and the idea was the recipe was good to follow,” says Gelbsman. “Except that it wasn’t exactly transmittable for menswear.” Egon’s shirts, which were sold at high-end stores such as Barneys, were manufactured in Brazil and mimicked Diane’s colorful prints. But the fabric wasn’t as good as Ferretti’s, nor were the shirts made as well as Diane’s dresses. “Egon’s shirts didn’t do too well,” says Gelbsman.