Diane von Furstenberg (22 page)

Savage believes Diane also discussed him with Barry Diller. “They all wanted to make sure that I could get along with Diane without overpowering her, but that also if I felt strongly enough about something, I would tell her.”

In keeping with her ambition to become the world’s next cosmetics queen, Diane moved her offices uptown to New York’s hallowed corner of conspicuous consumption, Fifty-Seventh Street and Fifth Avenue. She leased an entire floor in the art deco Squibb building, across the street from the headquarters of Estée Lauder and within lipstick-throwing distance of those high temples of luxury—Bergdorf Goodman, Tiffany, and the Plaza Hotel.

She decorated the ten-thousand-square-foot space with purple carpets, photos of herself, and framed press clippings. A huge painting of an orchid looking distinctly like a vagina hung prominently in the reception area. Diane’s pink command center featured a photograph of Marilyn Monroe holding a martini glass and looking tipsy, and a plant that Diane spritzed with Evian water, because “it’s a very chic plant.” In a nearby lab, an Italian chemist experimented with beauty formulas while a makeup artist played with colors for Diane’s new cosmetics line, the Color Authority.

The new headquarters held a design studio, where Diane consulted with the licensees who made products under her name. But her heart wasn’t in it. She told a reporter that she was down on fashion, because women had become more interested in their houses and jobs than in clothes. The truth was, in giving up her dress business to Rosen,
she’d
lost interest. She now focused her ambition on beauty and scent.

Savage immediately got to work repackaging Tatiana, which had been Diane’s best-selling beauty product. French sculptor Serge Mansau designed an angled glass bottle for the fragrance, and Diane came up with a new tag line—“for a woman to love and a man to remember.” Savage also reformulated Tatiana’s fragrance components to make it more evocative of a Euro-disco idea of sexy, as Diane told
WWD,
“very velvety, purple and slightly perverse.” Her ambition for Tatiana was the same as it had been for her dresses. “She wanted to be the low of the high,” says Savage—that is, at the lowest price point and still be a luxury brand. They priced Tatiana about four dollars below Chanel No. 5., “and the strategy worked. Tatiana became the number five fragrance in US department stores, and internationally, it sold in forty-five countries. “We did especially well with it in the Middle East, and the Filipinos bought it like no tomorrow,” says Savage.

Producing a hit cosmetics line turned out to be more problematic. Unlike fragrance, cosmetics had to be reinvented every season just like clothes, with new colors, themes, and promotions. Diane felt tremendous
pressure. Her licenses weren’t doing well. After Rosen unloaded the dresses from Diane’s warehouse, he began manufacturing new ones under her name, though in inferior fabric and, despite Diane’s input, inferior style. “They didn’t turn out to be as profitable as we anticipated,” understates Lee Mellis. “They weren’t selling. Part of it was that we didn’t put enough into it. But it just didn’t work.” Still, Puritan held on to the DVF dress license for five years, finally ending it in 1982.

Nor were Diane’s other fashion ventures faring well. In 1979, in the middle of the designer-jeans craze, she put her name to a jeans line. Across the country—in a ritual reminiscent of nineteenth-century fashion victims who corseted themselves to suffocation to get the tiniest waist possible—women were lying on the floor, sucking in their breath, and zippering themselves into glove-snug blue denim with a designer name stitched on the butt. Gloria Vanderbilt alone had sold six million of the tighter version of the old farmers’ Levis. She was soon outdone by Calvin Klein. In 1980 he launched a provocative ad campaign in which fifteen-year-old Brooke Shields purred seductively as she wiggled in her jeans: “You wanna know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.” Soon Klein was selling two million pairs of jeans a month.

Diane’s foray into jeans flopped spectacularly. Though she usually had a genius for striking the right note, a kitschy ad she ran to promote the line in Japan is emblematic of the venture’s misguided nature. It carried a photograph of Diane, her hair frizzing wildly, stretched out catlike in light-blue DVF jeans and red boots, superimposed on a photograph of the Empire State Building.

WHEN THE FASHION GODS ARE
against you, there isn’t much to be done. Still, Diane soldiered on. She continued her manic traveling, much of it for business meetings and appearances at department stores around the nation, but also for high-profile social events. In June 1980 she was in Houston with Barry Diller for the city’s premiere of
Urban Cowboy. WWD
photographed her wearing vintage diamond jewelry,
skin-tight zebra-print pants, leopard cowboy boots, and a vest pinned with a sheriff’s badge reading
DISCO SUCKS
. By the end of the seventies, loathing disco, which was deplored by rock fans and musicians for its hollow escapism, had become a mark of cool.

At the Gaylynn Theater, named after Houston socialite Lynn Wyatt, Diane and Diller sat with Andy Warhol and his entourage. John Travolta, the film’s star, chatted nearby with a pretty girl who turned out to be a “DVF groupie,” Warhol noted in his diary, adding that Diane was so “desperate to be recognized that if one person says, ‘You’re Diane von Furstenberg, I love you,’ she says, ‘Come with me,’ and she makes them follow her around for the rest of the night so she can have a following, and then she gives them presents—she carries lipsticks and compacts with her to give out, and she autographs them.”

Warhol excelled at putting a mean spin on events, but he noticed something that others had also begun to sense—Diane’s presence no longer caused the stir it once did. Her looks hadn’t changed—she was still beautiful and sexy—but she’d stopped being the kind of celebrity who quickened pulses and awakened curiosity. Her moment had passed. The wrap dress was over. She was out of sync with what was hot and in, a bleak spot for any designer.

Egon, meanwhile, was still playing catch-up. He had followed Diane’s career with a mixture of admiration and frustration. There was something poignant about his attempts to emulate her at every step. She launched a home furnishings line; he did, too. She created a fragrance; he produced Prince Egon cologne for men. She wrote a beauty book for women; he published a grooming manual for men,
The Power Look,
in 1978. He often told reporters that
he
had pushed Diane into fashion in the first place. Diane says, “He resented my big, huge success.”

Egon had also launched a line of high-end women’s wear, which he sold, in addition to fur and leather coats, at his eponymous boutique at 800 Madison Avenue. Egon “was really difficult,” says Sally Randall, an art school graduate who worked as a secretary and makeup artist for
Diane in the early eighties. “He would call people up in Diane’s office and ask them to do things for him. He called me. He wanted me to do drawings for an invitation. Egon was nice, but he expected you to say yes to these requests. I asked Diane, ‘What should I do?’ She’d sigh and roll her eyes and say, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ Then she’d get on the phone and tell him no.”

Though by now separated from Egon for almost eight years, Diane had no interest in getting a divorce. “I don’t like to renege on things. I was born Belgian, so I’ll stay Belgian. I was married, so I’ll stay married,” she told an interviewer in November 1981. But Egon had met someone he wanted to marry, a twenty-nine-year-old black-haired beauty from Mississippi named Lynn Marshall. He decided to get remarried around the time “he found out he was [HIV] positive,” says Diane. Marrying Lynn was a way of denying the illness, then at the height of its stigma. He couldn’t fool his children, though, who were in Mexico with Egon at the time of his second marriage. “I think Daddy’s gay,” Alex told Diane.

The divorce (the terms of which have remained private) and Egon’s remarriage did little to change his relationship with Diane. “He loved me, and he was always much closer to me than he was to Lynn,” she says.

From his office on West Fifty-Seventh Street, Egon could see into Diane’s Fifth Avenue showroom. Sometimes during the day they would stick their heads out of their respective windows, wave, and send signals. Egon’s apartment at Eighty-Second Street and Park Avenue was a short walk from Diane’s. They continued to spend many evenings and holidays together with their children. Still, the end of the marriage made Diane feel very alone. Though she had no lack of male companions, she did not feel as deeply connected to her lovers as she had to Egon, the father of her children. They would still have each other, but it would be different; he would not belong to her in the same way.

Starting in the mid-eighties, Egon lived much of the time in Italy, where his dressy line of women’s wear found a small but loyal clientele. Despite the physical distance between them, Diane wanted her children
to maintain a close relationship with Egon, though he sometimes proved a less than responsible father. Once, when Bob Colacello was in Colombia for a film festival, he visited Egon’s aunt, Suni Agnelli, Contessa Rattazzi, who was entertaining Egon and his children in her home in the ancient walled city of Ciudad Amurallada. Egon happened to be out when Colacello arrived, but he found Tatiana and Alex, then about five and six, alone “upstairs huddled on the sofa reading
Hustler,
” the pornography magazine. “Oh, Daddy left this,” they explained.

Egon had dropped them off and gone out somewhere. “I thought it was pretty awful,” says Colacello. When he told Diane about it later during a phone call, “she thought it was pretty awful, too. But she didn’t react by saying, ‘Oh, my God, my crazy, horrible ex-husband.’”

Diane knew that Egon adored the children and that he tried in his fashion to be a good father. He would never consciously do anything to harm them. But he was spoiled and immature and accustomed to being waited on by servants. It probably never occurred to him to put the magazine away.

Tatiana and Alex spent their summers in Europe with Egon. “We’d stay for a month with my grandmother in Capri. She’d rent half of one hotel with all her staff. My dad would park us with her, and he’d stay at another hotel with four or five of his boy toys and pop in to see us,” recalls Alex.

Despite the nannies, cooks, and drivers at their disposal, the children were mostly unsupervised. “Me and Tats were totally independent. I was rolling around Saint-Tropez on a motorcycle at twelve years old,” says Alex.

Diane protected Egon with the children. “I never once heard her criticize him,” says Colacello. “And if the children said something [negative] that someone had said about their father, Diane would say, ‘Your father is the greatest. He’s wonderful.’”

Loyalty is one of the qualities Diane prizes most in herself and others. “She’s unbelievably loyal to her friends, and also to the things she believes in,” says Oscar de la Renta. When Studio 54 owners Steve Rubell
and Ian Schrager were convicted on tax-evasion charges in 1979, Diane was appalled that they testified against some of their associates to win reduced prison time. She told Warhol “she’s not going to go to Studio 54 anymore because she thinks it was wrong of Steve to be naming names,” the artist wrote in his diary.

In any case, by then she’d discovered a new nocturnal haunt, the Mudd Club on White Street in Tribeca. The Mudd Club’s metal chain across the front door had supplanted the velvet rope outside Studio 54 as
the
barricade to breach. The shift signaled a darker ambiance in the club scene, presaging the horror that would soon befall the fashion world with the onslaught of AIDS.

Named after Samuel Mudd, the physician who treated John Wilkes Booth after he assassinated Abraham Lincoln, the Mudd Club had a feel of menace—dark and shadowy with one flickering strobe light, throbbing punk music, and rockers in leather jackets shooting up heroin. Fights sometimes broke out. One night a young, half-Chinese designer marched onto the dance floor and punched another young woman in the face just because, she later explained, she “didn’t like the way [the girl] was dancing.”

Destructive behavior was getting out of hand, and the teenage model Gia Carangi became a prominent victim. Brown-haired, brown-eyed, honey-skinned, and curvy slender, Gia had flawless, natural beauty. “Now people remake themselves,” says Fran Lebowitz. “But there weren’t five million plastic surgeons then. It was the era of unassisted beauty, so there were very few true beauties like Gia. Beauty was rare, and it was very prized.”

Diane met Gia, as she was professionally known, at the Mudd Club one night and thought her the most gorgeous girl she’d ever seen. But what really made Gia irresistible to Diane was the model’s lost-girl quality. If ever there was a young woman who needed to be saved, who needed the guidance of an older, wiser mother figure, it was Gia.

She had grown up in a working-class Philadelphia family. When Gia
was eleven, her mother moved out to live with the man who became her second husband, and Gia and her two brothers saw her infrequently. She was discovered as a teenager, while working at her father’s luncheonette, Hoagie City. Within a year she’d become one of the world’s top models, on the cover of
Cosmopolitan
and
Vogue
and making a hundred thousand dollars a year. But she was a deeply troubled young woman who suffered from severe depression, exacerbated by a heroin habit.

“She was very rough, from a rough background, which was not uncommon for these girls,” recalls Lebowitz. Modeling “generally was not a profession that middle-class girls went into. Their parents wouldn’t have wanted them to, and their parents were right. These girls were available [sexually]. That was one of the points of them. Now [modeling] is different because it’s been professionalized.”

Diane and Gia became friends, and in 1979 Diane hired the young model for an eight-page
Vogue
ad campaign featuring DVF clothes, cosmetics, and treatment products. “I definitely had a big attraction [to her],” Diane says.