The House of Gucci

by Sara G Forden

  During the following years, Maurizio also oversaw a much less glamorous but equally important change within Gucci: a review of the company’s thousands of products and styles in order to pare down the numbers.

  “The company had decided it needed to have some internal control of all the products that were being developed and produced for the company,” recalled Rita Cimino, a longtime Gucci employee who oversaw the handbag collections and is still with the firm. Up until that point, the business had evolved around each family member, with no oversight or coordination among the various camps. Rodolfo had his group of staff and suppliers that did what he wanted, Giorgio together with Aldo had theirs, and Roberto, head of the Gucci Accessory Collection, had his own direction. The result became such a diverse mix of products that the only thing they had in common was the Gucci name—far from the concept of stylistic harmony Aldo had pioneered. “I worked side by side with Maurizio to catalog all the products and try to bring some order to it all. Maurizio had very clear ideas about what he thought Gucci luxury products should be,” Cimino added.

  It didn’t take long for Maurizio’s imprint to be noticed. In December 1982, Capital, a leading Milan business monthly, published a cover story about Maurizio, identifying him as the young scion of the fashion dynasty.

  Patrizia was thrilled with the article—it underlined what she already felt. She wanted Maurizio to become a leading figure in the Milan fashion industry.

  “I knew he was weak, but I was not weak,” said Patrizia. “I pushed him so hard he became president of Gucci. I was social, he didn’t like to socialize; I was always out, he was always in the house. I was the representative of Maurizio Gucci, and that was enough. He was like a child, a thing called Gucci that had to be washed and dressed.”

  “The era of Maurizio has begun,” Patrizia repeated to him and anybody else who would listen. She propelled him forward, acting as his behind-the-scenes advisor. Even before Maurizio became known in Milan circles, Patrizia played the role of the celebrity wife, cruising around town in her chauffeur-driven car dressed in her Valentino and Chanel suits. The society pages nicknamed her the “Joan Collins of Monte Napoleone.” Maurizio and Patrizia moved into a luminous penthouse apartment that Rodolfo had bought for them on Galleria Passarella in downtown Milan above the San Babila shopping square. A terrace garden ran entirely around the outside of the penthouse, which she decorated with warm wooden paneling and a ceiling painted to look like a Tiepolo heaven, and furnished with antiques, bronze statues, and Art Deco vases.

  “Patrizia really helped Maurizio,” recalled Nando Miglio. “While he was shy, reserved, and awkward at public functions, she knew how to sparkle,” Miglio said. “Patrizia pushed the accelerator. She wanted Maurizio to become somebody. ‘You have to show everyone you are the best,’ she would tell him.”

  Patrizia persuaded Maurizio to let her design a line of gold jewelry for Gucci called Orocrocodillo. The line featured chunky, stand-alone pieces imprinted with a crocodile-skin pattern and encrusted with precious stones. Patrizia hoped that Orocrocodillo would become for Gucci what the three gold bands of the rolling ring were for Cartier—a signature product that identified the brand. Sold in the Gucci stores, Orocrocodillo was impossibly expensive—some pieces cost as much as twenty-nine million lire (more than $15,000 depending on the exchange rate) each—yet looked like flashy costume jewelry. Gucci’s salespeople just shook their heads, slid the jewelry away in the display cases, and wondered who would ever buy it.

  At the end of April 1983, Gucci inaugurated its new boutique on Via Monte Napoleone across the street from the existing store, which continued to sell luggage and accessories. The new store, in the corner spot occupied today by Les Copains, sold the expanded apparel collection by Luciano Soprani. The company persuaded city traffic authorities to close Milan’s most exclusive shopping street to traffic for the inauguration of the boutique. Tables and chairs and cascades of gardenias filled the sidewalks. The adjacent cross street, Via Baguttino—also closed to traffic—became an impromptu restaurant where white-gloved waiters bore silver trays of oysters and caviar among the guests as the champagne flowed. That day, it was Maurizio who greeted the guests and circulated among the crowd. Rodolfo had been quietly taken to Madonnina, one of the best private clinics in Milan, several weeks earlier.

  Rodolfo left the clinic briefly, accompanied by his nurses, to see the new store shortly before it opened. He walked shakily across the spacious selling floor propped up by Tullia on one side and Luigi on the other, admiring the decor and greeting his employees by name.

  “His clothes were hanging off him, he was so thin,” recalled Liliana Colombo, then assistant to Rodolfo’s secretary, Roberta Cassol.

  Maurizio had given strict instructions that no one should be allowed to visit Rodolfo at the clinic—except for him, his U.S. lawyer, Domenico De Sole; and his close advisor Gian Vittorio Pilone. Pilone, a native of Venice, had established a lucrative accounting business in Milan working for many of the city’s old industrial families. Maurizio trusted him and grew reluctant to make a decision or organize a meeting without Pilone at his side.

  While Maurizio tried to hide from the world the fact that his father was dying, Rodolfo remained mystified at his isolation. Of his Italian employees, only Roberta Cassol and Francesco Gittardi came to see him in the clinic, where Maurizio and Patrizia had delivered two enormous white potted azalea bushes to Rodolfo’s room.

  Rodolfo carried himself elegantly to the end, wearing his silk dressing gowns and scarves around the clinic even during his final days. A flurry of lawyers and accountants came and went as he settled his affairs, yet Rodolfo remained unsettled. He asked repeatedly for his brother Aldo, who had returned to the United States after the Monte Napoleone opening just a week earlier without stopping in to see him. On Saturday, May 7, Rodolfo slipped into a coma. Maurizio and Patrizia rushed to his bedside, but he no longer recognized them. Aldo arrived the next day to find Rodolfo calling his name.

  “Aldo! Aldo! Aldo! Dove sei?” Rodolfo called out. “Where are you?”

  “I’m here, Foffino! I’m here,” cried Aldo, leaning over his younger brother, bringing his face close to Rodolfo’s unseeing eyes. “Tell me, tell me, what can I do for you, little brother, how can I make you feel better?”

  Rodolfo couldn’t answer him. The cancer had run its course. Rodolfo died on May 14, 1983, at the age of seventy-one. The Romanesque basilica of San Babila overflowed with mourners as Rodolfo’s coffin was carried in by four of Rodolfo’s faithful employees, including Luigi and Franco. At the end of the ceremony, Rodolfo’s coffin was taken to Florence for burial in the family tomb. An era had ended—and a new one had begun.

  8

  MAURIZIO TAKES CHARGE

  For Maurizio, aged thirty-five, his father’s death was at once a shock and a liberation. Maurizio had been the sole object of his father’s obsessive, possessive, authoritarian love and Rodolfo had kept him under strict control. Up to the end, their relationship was stiff and formal. Maurizio reluctantly confronted his father or asked him for things—he still went to Luigi Pirovano, Rodolfo’s driver, or Roberta Cassol, Rodolfo’s secretary, when he needed pocket money.

  “I always used to say, Rodolfo gave him the castle, but he didn’t give him the money to maintain it,” said Cassol. “Maurizio was always asking me for spending money because he was afraid to ask his father.”

  Even as a grown man, Maurizio jumped to his feet when his father walked into the room. His only rebellion against Rodolfo had been to marry Patrizia, whom in the end Rodolfo grudgingly accepted. Although he never grew close to his daughter-in-law, they made their peace. Rodolfo could see that she loved Maurizio and that they were happy together and bringing up Alessandra and Allegra in a loving home.

  Rodolfo left Maurizio a multimillion-dollar inheritance: the Saint Moritz estate, luxury apartments in Milan and New York, some $20 million in Swiss bank accounts, and 50 percent of the Gucci empire, which was gene
rating profits hand over fist. Among all the riches of his estate, which at the time was valued at more than 350 billion lire (about $230 million at the time), Rodolfo also left Maurizio a simple, yet symbolic gift, a crocodile-skin wallet with a Gucci insignia from the thirties. Rodolfo’s grandfather, Guccio, had given him the thin black wallet. An antique English shilling was set into the clasp—a souvenir from Guccio’s Savoy days. Now it was Maurizio’s turn to hold the purse strings.

  Holding the purse strings meant making decisions—for the first time in his life, Maurizio was free to make his own choices. However, he lacked experience—Rodolfo had managed everything for him up to then. Furthermore, in Maurizio’s lifetime, the decisions would become more difficult. The lessons Aldo taught him in New York had served his uncle well—but in a different era. Maurizio’s world was far more complex. The luxury goods business was more competitive and the Gucci family battles were more cutthroat.

  “Rodolfo’s biggest mistake was not to trust Maurizio earlier on,” said Maurizio’s advisor, Gian Vittorio Pilone, during an interview in his Milan office shortly before his death in May 1999. “He held the purse strings so tightly and never gave Maurizio a chance to stand on his own two feet.”

  “There were times when Maurizio became overwhelmed at the enormity of the decisions facing him,” added Liliana Colombo, who became his faithful secretary. “Rodolfo had always taken care of everything for him.”

  Before he died, Rodolfo worried that despite his efforts to bring Maurizio up with a sense of values and the meaning of money, he hadn’t succeeded. Lacking the genius business flair of his brother Aldo, he had nevertheless amassed a fortune with the estate in Saint Moritz and an unmarked Swiss bank account. Rodolfo boasted that he had only made deposits to the account and never a withdrawal, but he wasn’t sure that Maurizio had the same fiber. He saw how Maurizio could spend millions at the drop of a hat, how focused he was on the trappings—rather than the substance—of success. Rodolfo also worried Maurizio would be devoured by the bitter family battles.

  “Maurizio was a sweet, sensitive young man,” recalled Pilone. “His father was afraid that his very character left him open to attack.”

  Many of Rodolfo’s advisors recalled that he took them aside in the months before he died and asked them to look out for Maurizio after he was gone—a request that couldn’t have done much to build Maurizio up in their eyes.

  One day when Rodolfo was still active in the business, but already traveling frequently to Verona for his cancer treatments, he spoke with Allan Tuttle, a colleague of De Sole’s at Patton, Boggs & Blow in Washington, D.C. Tuttle, a litigator, had defended Rodolfo, Aldo, and the Gucci company in court against Paolo and knew the family well. He had just arrived on holiday in Venice, which was less than an hour away from Verona. Rodolfo met him there and invited Tuttle to lunch on a cold and rainy day. Tuttle, who had just arrived from hot, sunny Washington, D.C., found himself unprepared. “Rodolfo literally gave me the coat off his back, because I didn’t have one,” he recalled.

  The two men lunched at a local restaurant and then went for a long walk along the winding Venetian canals. Rodolfo described his wedding to Sandra Ravel there years earlier, recalling how the canals were lined with well-wishers tossing flowers on their gondola.

  “He knew he was dying, although he didn’t tell me so,” Tuttle said. “He gave me a little speech about Maurizio and how he was worried about him. He wanted me and Domenico De Sole to look out for him.”

  When he had finished, Rodolfo stepped into a water taxi, waved an elegant hand, and was gone.

  “He was the actor to the end,” Tuttle said. “It was very well staged and very moving.”

  De Sole later got the same speech from Rodolfo. “Rodolfo was scared,” De Sole said. “He could see that Maurizio had no sense of limits.”

  Despite his early mistrust of Patrizia, Rodolfo even confided in his daughter-in-law. “Once he gets money and power, he will change,” Patrizia said Rodolfo told her. “You will find you are married to another man.” She didn’t believe him at the time.

  In the early months after Rodolfo died, Aldo watched Maurizio carefully. He knew that the death of his younger brother could shake up the status quo that they had managed to maintain despite the wars with Paolo. They had divided the company between them according to some simple principles; first, the company must remain in family hands and only the family could decide about how fast to grow, where, and with what products. Second, they had carved up the business into two clearly defined areas—Aldo controlled Gucci America and the retail network while Rodolfo controlled Guccio Gucci and production in Italy. That division of power had been successful; when Rodolfo died, Gucci was generating sales hand over fist. The company controlled twenty directly owned stores in leading capitals around the world, forty-five franchise shops between Japan and the United States, a lucrative duty-free business, and the successful GAC wholesale business. The battles against Paolo had calmed down and Aldo found time to enjoy his status as family patriarch.

  “I was the engine and the rest of the family was the train,” he would later recount with satisfaction. “The engine without the train is worthless and the train without the engine—well, it doesn’t move!”

  Aldo hoped that despite Rodolfo’s death, the Gucci business would continue as it had. He underestimated three things. One, Maurizio’s ambition to take Gucci far beyond the family policies that had made the company successful up to then. Two, his son Paolo’s determination to win the right to do business under his own name. Three, the attitude of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service about tax evasion. Gucci’s old status quo reigned for a scant year.

  Before Rodolfo died, there had been no question but what Maurizio would inherit his 50 percent stake in the business upon his death. Rodolfo used to say openly to staff, friends, and family that Maurizio would inherit everything when he died, “but not a minute before.” He had seen in Aldo’s experience with Paolo the consequences of giving over power too soon. He decided Aldo’s gesture in passing ownership to his sons was premature and destabilizing and vowed not to make the same mistake.

  Rodolfo’s will wasn’t found immediately after his death, but Maurizio, as his only child, was still the legal heir under Italian inheritance law. Several years after Rodolfo died, when Maurizio found himself embroiled in legal problems over the inheritance, a squad of investigators from the Guardia di Finanza, the fiscal police, found the will in the company safe, which they had opened with a blowtorch after being unable to find the key. Rodolfo had penned his wishes in his own flourishing longhand, leaving everything, as expected, to his “unico, adorato figlio,” his sole, adored son. Rodolfo also made provisions for his loyal household staff—in particular for Tullia, Franco, and Luigi.

  At the first family board meeting after Rodolfo’s death, Maurizio, Aldo, Giorgio, and Roberto awkwardly sized each other up. Despite Maurizio’s little speech about wanting to work together for Gucci’s future, the others didn’t take him seriously.

  “Avvocatino!” Aldo said. “Don’t try to fly too high. Take some time to learn.”

  To them it was no surprise that Maurizio had inherited 50 percent, but their mouths dropped open in amazement when he produced the signed share certificates showing that his father had actually signed his shares over to him before he died—saving him some 13 billion lire ($8.5 million) in inheritance taxes. They suspected the signatures had been forged.

  Maurizio, frustrated by his inability to gain his relatives’ support at the meeting, soon after went to see Aldo privately in Rome. He hoped to secure Aldo’s blessing for his plans to modernize Gucci. One of Aldo’s Rome assistants overheard them as Aldo, shaking his head patronizingly, ushered Maurizio out.

  “Hai fatto il furbo, Maurizio, ma quei soldi non te li godrai mai,” she heard Aldo telling him. “You were very clever, Maurizio, but you will never enjoy that money,” he said.

  Maurizio, undaunted by his relatives’ resistance, developed a new
vision for Gucci as a global luxury goods firm with professional, international management; streamlined design, production, and distribution processes; and sophisticated marketing techniques. His model was the French family firm Hermès, which had evolved without sacrificing either its family character or its high-end products. Maurizio wanted Gucci to climb back into the league with Hermès and Louis Vuitton; he feared it was more on a par with Pierre Cardin, the Italian-born French designer who made fashion history by authoring Christian Dior’s best-selling Bar suit before he made licensing his name almost an art form, selling his scrawling signature across everything from cosmetics and chocolate to home appliances.

  Maurizio’s concept for Gucci was good; his problem was how to achieve it. The company had been balkanized around the family members and each one defended his right to do what he perceived as best for Gucci. Even though Maurizio was Gucci’s largest single shareholder with 50 percent, his hands were tied. Facing Maurizio across the boardroom table were Aldo, with 40 percent of Guccio Gucci SpA, and Giorgio, Roberto, and Paolo, with 3.3 percent each. In Gucci America, Aldo had 16.7 percent, while his sons had 11.1 percent each. Maurizio could not do much without their consensus and they had little patience for his ideas. Gucci survived on its past glories and still generated ample profits to support their lifestyles—they saw little need to change things.

  Maurizio pressed forward with his plans anyway, to the extent he could. He relied on Roberta Cassol to help him update Gucci’s staff. Uncomfortable with confrontation, as his father had been, Maurizio asked Cassol to fire many long-term employees he felt were no longer viable in the changing luxury goods industry.