Maurizio happily moved in the furniture he had been collecting. Two marble obelisks stood on the landing of the grand staircase, while a pair of prancing bronze centaurs graced the entryway, standing on either side of the door. His favorite piece—an antique billiard table dating from the mid-1800s—went in the last living room down the corridor to the right. It had expressive carved masks leering out from the rounded wooden legs and came with an original set of twin couches that stood against the walls. When workmen prepared to fit the room with custom paneling and bookshelves, to their surprise they discovered an elaborate carved plaster ceiling with a maze motif hidden under modern dropped panels. Maurizio agreed to restore the ceiling to its original state. When it came time to fill the yards of custom shelving, Maurizio—who had little time for reading himself—ordered old books by the pound.
Furnishing the Corso Venezia apartment put Russo on a collision course with Paola, who had worked as an interior designer and wanted to have her say. Each resented the other’s influence over Maurizio.
Paola was subtle; Russo made no secret of the way he felt about her. A typical scene occurred one morning while the renovations were under way. Russo arrived at the apartment and called out at the top of his lungs, “E’ arrivata la troia?” “Has the whore arrived yet?”
His assistant, Sergio Bassi, ran into the room, eyes wide behind round designer glasses, hushing him in vain. “Shhhhh! Toto! She’s upstairs, she probably heard you!”
Russo didn’t care. He had won a promise from Maurizio that Paola was limited to decorating the children’s quarters upstairs and a game room downstairs.
“She was not allowed on our floor,” recalled Bassi. “When Paola came into the picture, it changed the relationship between Maurizio and Toto, and in the end they fought bitterly. Toto was very Neapolitan, very possessive. He would pick fights with Paola and throw jealous fits.”
Maurizio had asked Paola to transform a long, empty hall adjacent to the marble stairway off the main courtyard into a game and party room. It became Maurizio’s personal playground.
“He was really a child at heart,” Paola said years later. “His eyes would just light up at the thought of that room; he had all sorts of ideas for it.”
The front of the room became a game hall, complete with video games, a pinball machine from the 1950s, and Maurizio’s favorite toy, a virtual Formula One racing car driving game complete with helmet, steering wheel, and programmed courses. Farther back, Paola made the TV room look like a minicinema with velvet curtains, three rows of real movie theater seats, and a giant television screen. At the back of the long room she created a western saloon—Maurizio’s inspiration.
“I had never done anything western before,” Paola said, throwing up her hands with a smile, “so I got out the books and started doing research.” She ordered a curved wooden bar, leather-topped bar stools, and studded leather couches. A trompe l’oeil desert with canyons, cacti, and rising smoke signals crept along the walls, and a painted cowboy swaggered fore and aft on the swinging wooden doors. Before the rest of the house was finished Maurizio and Paola inaugurated the game room with a costume party, to which the guests came dressed as cowboys and Indians.
Paola took particular care with the children’s rooms upstairs, knowing how much it meant to Maurizio to have his daughters stay with them. For Alessandra and Allegra, she picked out girlish canopy beds and coordinating floral prints and wallpaper in beige, green, and rose. For Charly she chose more boyish colors and wallpaper with a cheerful book motif, since, she joked, he didn’t love real books. The children had the entire second floor to themselves, including a den where they could entertain their friends, a small kitchen if they wanted to prepare a meal, a guest room, and a separate entrance so they could come and go as they pleased. Since Maurizio and Paola had moved into the apartment a year earlier, Charly had been the lone occupant of the children’s suite; Alessandra and Allegra hadn’t spent a single night in those dainty canopy beds.
As work on the house progressed, the tension between Toto and Maurizio over Paola finally exploded.
“The final showdown came when their two secretaries got together to do an inventory,” recalled Bassi. “Toto’s secretary told Liliana that Maurizio owed Toto a billion lire. Liliana said she was crazy, that Toto owed Maurizio money.” Things got so bad that the two men stopped talking to each other. Paola had won.
Rumors circulated in Milan that Toto’s cocaine habit was getting the better of him. Friends and clients once eager to be connected with him began to distance themselves. He lived apart from his wife and daughter, who were also in Milan, but he never sought a divorce. Later he developed health problems and underwent heart surgery to have three valves replaced. His doctors diagnosed him with endocarditis—la morte bianca—an infection common among cocaine users that attacks the lining of the heart. But affecting him more than his heart problems was impotence, another consequence of cocaine use.
“Toto was a true Don Giovanni,” said Bassi. “He had a special magnetism over women, and probably over men as well. He could never accept the fact that he couldn’t perform sexually anymore.”
Toto’s body was found in a Milan hotel room, a haunt to which he would habitually disappear for two-and three-day orgies. But this time, Russo had checked in alone. Hotel personnel tracing rivers of water gushing down from his room found him slumped over the sink, dead of a heart attack. To his friends, it looked like suicide.
Maurizio attended Toto’s funeral and accompanied the coffin to Santa Margherita, the seaside resort where he was buried. During the final rites, the pallbearers discovered that Toto’s coffin was bigger than his tomb and had to be refitted.
“Even in death you are over the top,” thought Maurizio, smiling sadly at the memory of his friend and shaking his head. Another friend of theirs had died two months earlier. Maurizio turned to the small group of mourners and said, “Who knows who will be the third?”
AS PAOLA GAINED IMPORTANCE IN HIS LIFE, Maurizio tried to cut the ties still linking him to Patrizia. Though he made generous monthly deposits into her Milan bank account—averaging between 180 and 160 million lire, ($100,000) each month—he forbade her to use the houses in Saint Moritz. He and Paola wanted to redecorate all three of those homes and turn L’Oiseau Bleu into their own retreat, designating the other two houses for the children, guests, servants, and entertaining. Patrizia went crazy. She considered L’Oiseau Bleu hers and pressured him to deed the small chalet to her and the other two to Alessandra and Allegra. The thought of Maurizio being there with Paola enraged her and she even threatened to burn the house down, going so far as to ask one of the servants to prepare two tanks of gasoline and leave them by the side of the house.
“Just put them near the house and I’ll take care of the rest,” she ordered the caretaker of the estate. When he didn’t comply, Patrizia turned to one of her psychics, who went to work with potions and spells.
When Maurizio next came up to Saint Moritz, an intense wave of discomfort and unease overcame him as he entered the house. Ignoring the feeling, he unpacked and tried to settle in for the weekend, but the sense of rejection was so overwhelming that he left the same night and drove three hours back to Milan. The next day he called his psychic, Antonietta Cuomo, and explained the problem. A few days later, Cuomo went to Saint Moritz and lit candles in the house, freeing it of something she said “wasn’t right.” She later did the same for his apartments in Lugano and New York. Unrelenting, Patrizia held midnight séances in the kitchen of Galleria Passarella, so frightening the servants that they rushed to Piazza San Fedele to tell Maurizio of the strange events they had witnessed.
Through Gucci employees still loyal to her, Patrizia followed Maurizio’s business moves, becoming convinced that he wasn’t capable of running the company. One employee wrote her a letter, pleading with her to intervene.
“Signora Patrizia,” the letter said. “He has become unrecognizable. We do not know how we are going to go
forward. There is disorientation and insecurity. When we try to talk to him, we find a wall of indifference. A cold smile. Help us! Take the situation in hand!”
Through her spies—which included mutual friends as well as Adriana, Maurizio and Paola’s cook—Patrizia knew all about the lavish restructuring of Corso Venezia, the Creole, the new Ferrari Testarossa in the garage, and about the private planes Maurizio chartered around the world. As his financial situation worsened, his payments to her grew erratic and she too found herself unable to pay all of her own bills. The grocer and the pharmacist stopped giving her credit. As her bank accounts ran short, she called Maurizio’s secretary, Liliana, who learned a complex dance to keep Maurizio’s creditors alternately satisfied or at bay.
“As the end of each month would come around, I used to worry how I was going to find enough money for Patrizia,” Liliana recalled, saying she juggled Maurizio’s creditors and prepared the money for Patrizia in installments. “I’ll just bring you part of it tomorrow, and I’ll try to get you the rest by the end of the week,” Liliana would say, always gracious and accommodating.
“What?” Patrizia would cry indignantly. “He is spending money right and left on Corso Venezia and he can’t find the money for his daughters?”
“No, no, signora, they’ve stopped the work on Corso Venezia,” Liliana feigned.
“Okay, I’ll wait,” Patrizia groused. “If we must make sacrifices, we must.”
One month, Maurizio became so desperate to find the money for Patrizia that his driver, Luigi, brought him 8 million lire, or about $6,500, he had taken from his son’s piggy bank.
The fall of 1991, after Maurizio had confessed his personal problems to Franchini, he had asked Patrizia for a divorce. Paola, also with Franchini’s help, asked her husband for a divorce, and she and Maurizio planned to move to Corso Venezia together. Patrizia felt everything she had achieved was slipping through her hands. Burning with rage and jealousy, Patrizia derided Paola as a superficial woman, hungry for money and status, who adeptly took advantage of Maurizio and ran down his fortune. Some thought she could have been describing herself.
Patrizia “had an almost obsessive fixation with his assets,” recalled Piero Giuseppe Parodi, one of Maurizio’s lawyers, whom Patrizia started calling regularly to determine her rights. “She felt she had a right to his assets—not on a legal basis, but on a romantic basis. She felt the boat was hers…the chalet in Saint Moritz…and she felt Gucci’s success was due in large part to her advice. She was also very concerned about what she felt was his inability to run the company. She felt her husband was unable to control his spending in a normal way and she lived in a constant state of anxiety about his assets, which she felt belonged to her. She was concerned about the implications for herself and for her daughters.”
Patrizia focused on Maurizio as the source of all her pain and suffering and vowed to destroy him before he destroyed the two girls.
“She wanted to see him on his knees,” said Maddalena Anselmi, a friend of Patrizia’s. “She wanted him to come crawling back to her.” Patrizia gave up on the séances, spells, and strange powders.
“If it’s the last thing I do, I want to see him dead,” Patrizia said to her housekeeper, Alda Rizzi, while they were talking in her bedroom one day. “Why don’t you ask your boyfriend if he can’t find somebody to help me out?” Patrizia insistently repeated her requests until Rizzi and her boyfriend went to Maurizio in November 1991. He taped their report and handed the cassette over to Franchini.
Patrizia’s headaches began that same fall. When she wasn’t out shopping or ranting about Maurizio, Patrizia closed herself in her darkened bedroom for hours, incapacitated by the pain. At night, the headaches kept her awake. Her mother and daughters grew worried.
“Mamma,” said fifteen-year-old Alessandra one day. “I am tired of seeing you suffer. I am calling the doctor.”
On May 19, 1992, Patrizia checked into Madonnina, a leading private clinic in Milan, the same one where Rodolfo Gucci had been treated for prostate cancer. Her doctors diagnosed a large tumor on the front left side of her brain. They had to operate immediately, they told her. Her chances of survival were not high.
“I felt my world was falling apart,” Patrizia said. “I knew the tumor had been caused by him, by all the stress he had caused me. At one point I looked down at my hat and it was full of my own hair, hair that had fallen out of my head. I had a crisis. I wanted to destroy everything.”
She turned bitterly to her diary.
“BASTA!” she wrote in large, angry letters across the page. “It isn’t possible that a person like Maurizio Gucci can live his life among 60-meter yachts, private planes, and luxury apartments and Ferrari Testarossas without being judged as a low, base individual. Tuesday I was diagnosed with a tumor that is pressing on my brain, while Dr. Infuso looked at the X rays in dismay, fearing it is inoperable. Here I am, alone, with two daughters aged fifteen and eleven and an apprehensive mother, herself a widow, and a delinquent husband who has abandoned us because his continuous failures have made him realize that what is left of his assets suffices only for himself.”
The next morning, worry gripped the faces of Alessandra and Patrizia’s mother, Silvana, as they went to Maurizio’s office in Piazza San Fedele to tell him the news. Behind the closed door of his office, Maurizio’s secretary Liliana heard their low voices, then watched a shaken Maurizio usher them out, his face grave.
“Patrizia has been diagnosed with a brain tumor the size of a billiard ball,” he told Liliana in a strained, low voice after Silvana and Alessandra had left. “Now I understand why she has been so aggressive,” he said softly.
Silvana had asked Maurizio if he could take care of the two girls while she cared for Patrizia—he had told her it would be difficult; Corso Venezia wasn’t ready yet, and he had no place for them to stay in his bachelor apartment. Furthermore, things were coming to a head with Investcorp and he traveled often. He said he would be happy to have lunch with them whenever he could. Patrizia felt even more disillusioned when she heard his response.
The morning of May 26, Patrizia lay on a hospital gurney, her dark hair completely shorn for the operation. She had kissed her daughters and squeezed her mother’s hand; but until the orderlies wheeled her away, she kept a constant lookout for Maurizio. He didn’t appear.
“There I was—I didn’t know if I was going to come out of that room alive and he didn’t even bother to show up,” said Patrizia later. “Even though we were separated, I was still the mother of his daughters.”
When Patrizia woke up in an anesthetic haze several hours later, she strained to focus on the faces around her bed. She saw her mother, Alessandra, and Allegra, but once again, Maurizio wasn’t there. She didn’t know that Silvana and the doctors had discouraged him from coming, for fear his presence would upset her.
Unable to concentrate, Maurizio had spent the entire morning pacing in his office. He finally told Liliana he was going out to send flowers to Patrizia. When she offered to order them, he declined. He knew exactly the orchids she loved, and wanted to pick them out himself. As he walked up Via Manzoni to Redaelli, the florist of the fashion set and the same shop where Tom Ford and Richard Buckley had bought the bouquet for Dawn Mello, Maurizio pondered what to write on the accompanying note. Afraid Patrizia might misinterpret any words, he finally decided to simply sign his own name: MAURIZIO GUCCI. When the flowers arrived in Patrizia’s hospital room, she threw them angrily on the table, leaving them there unopened. The orchids Maurizio had so carefully selected were the same ones she had planted in front of L’Oiseau Bleu—a cruel reminder that she was no longer welcome there. When Patrizia came home a week later to more orchids and a note from Maurizio that said “get well soon,” she burst into tears and threw herself on the bed.
“That disgraziato didn’t even come to see me!” she cried.
Patrizia, who had been given only a few months to live, spurred her lawyers into action. They impou
nded her first divorce agreement with Maurizio, arguing that because of her illness she had been mentally unfit at the time she agreed to the terms, which had awarded her the Galleria Passarella apartment, one of the two Olympic Tower apartments, a lump sum of 4 billion lire (more than $3 million at the time), two weeks of paid vacation at a leading hotel in Saint Moritz for her and the girls, and 20 million lire, or about $16,000, a month for the girls. They renegotiated a new agreement with far more generous provisions, including 1.1 million Swiss francs a year, or about $846,000; a one-time payment in 1994 of 650,000 Swiss francs, or about $550,000; free use during her lifetime of the penthouse apartment in Galleria Passarella, which would be deeded to Alessandra and Allegra; and for Silvana, Patrizia’s mother, an apartment in Monte Carlo and 1 million Swiss francs, slightly less than $850,000.
The tumor, initially feared to be malignant, was later diagnosed as benign. As Patrizia recuperated, she regained her energy and strength by thinking about her revenge on Maurizio Gucci.
“Vendetta,” she wrote in her diary on June 2, quoting from Italian feminist writer Barbara Alberti. “I forgot that vendetta is not just for the downtrodden but also for the angels. Get your revenge because you are right. Be uncompromising because you have been offended. Superiority does not mean letting it all go but finding the best way to humiliate him and free yourself.” A few days later she penned: “As soon as I am fit to talk to the press, if my doctors allow it, I want everyone to know who you really are. I will go on television, I will persecute you until death, until I have ruined you.” She spit her fury out in a cassette tape and had it hand-delivered to Maurizio.
Dear Maurizio, am I mistaken, or did you lose your mother as a young boy? Naturally, you did not know what it meant to have a father either, especially seeing how easy it was to weasel out of your responsibility to your daughters and my mother the day of my operation, without which they gave me a month to live…. I want to tell you that you are a monster, a monster that belongs on the front pages of all the papers, because I want everyone to know what you are really like. I will go on television, I will go to America, I will make them talk about you….
The House of Gucci Page 31