House of Versace: The Untold Story of Genius, Murder, and Survival

by Deborah Ball

  Wartime deprivation, coming on the heels of the Great Depression, fell particularly hard on Calabria, already one of Italy’s poorest regions. The area had scarcely recovered from the 1908 earthquake, and new buildings were often shabby and dilapidated. Some residents were so poor that, when they wore out their clothes, they turned them inside out to get as much use as possible from them. Work was extremely scarce, the economy having ground to a standstill under Mussolini’s autarky—his attempt to render Italy completely self-sufficient by cutting off nearly all trade with the outside world. Families subsisted on fishing, agriculture, and small crafts.

  On December 16, 1944, Santo was born, named after his paternal grandfather. His birth came about four months before Allied troops reached Milan, marking the liberation of Italy. After the war, the Versaces could finally settle into family life during a time of peace. On December 2, 1946, Franca and Nino welcomed a second son, Giovanni Maria—Giovanni for his maternal grandfather the anarchist, and Maria for Nino’s sister. Gianni, as they called him, would inherit his grandfather’s iconoclastic streak.

  When the war ended, Italy was on its knees, emerging from the conflict as one of Europe’s most backward countries. The long land war and frequent Allied bombing had destroyed Italy’s meager industrial base. In Reggio, life was exceedingly simple. Refrigerators hadn’t arrived yet, so the ice man made the rounds in a miniature three-wheeled truck, with large blocks of ice in the back covered in thick wool to keep them from melting. He broke off blocks for five lire, or about two cents, each.

  Few families had cars, and those that did reluctantly traversed the treacherous, single-lane provincial highways that connected Reggio to the rest of Calabria. But by the early 1950s, Italy saw the first signs of the postwar boom that brought living standards a bit closer to those of the United States or the United Kingdom. By the end of the decade, northern companies such as Fiat and Pirelli were churning out cars, tires, and machine tools at full tilt. This sparked a massive new wave of emigration—ever the scourge and the salvation of Italy’s south—as millions of poor southerners flocked to Milan and Turin in search of work in the hulking new factories there. As always, prosperity would not come to Reggio; the Reggini would have to go to it.

  Stories quickly spread through Reggio, not only about the opportunities in the north but also about how northerners mocked these newcomers, who often couldn’t read and who arrived from the countryside with their belongings packed in battered cardboard boxes bound with rough twine. Settling in the north, Calabrians squeezed alongside their brethren from Naples, Sicily, and Puglia into ugly tenement blocks that had been thrown up in the cold, foggy periphery around Milan and Turin. Others moved to Germany, Belgium, or Switzerland to work in coal mines or on construction sites. Very few returned.

  But, even as many abandoned Calabria in the early 1950s, the Versaces managed through hard work to capture a slice of the new economic boom. After the war, Nino had taken over his brother’s coal business, using a scooter to haul the ore up the hill to clients’ homes. When Italians switched from coal heating to gas, Nino started delivering canisters of gas. Then he began to sell the city’s first refrigerators and simple washing machines. The first Cinquecentos, the tiny cars that Fiat sold at just 500,000 lire, or about $250, began to replace scooters and bicycles in Reggio, and Nino and Franca could afford the family’s first car. In 1958, Nino brought home a television, one of the very first in the city. That year, forty friends and relatives crowded into the family’s living room to watch the Sanremo music festival, when Domenico Modugno, a little-known Pugliese performer, sang “Volare” for the first time, a sweet ballad that instilled a sunny new image of Italy the world over. Nino and Franca left the windows open so that the neighbors could listen to the music.4

  During the 1950s, the young family could afford some modest middle-class comforts. They moved into a spacious apartment near the city’s resplendent, cream-colored cathedral, or duomo, with its glittering rose-shaped window. Tinuccia, Santo, and Gianni grew up steeped in the indolent rhythm of Italy’s deep south. After Mass on Sundays, children accompanied their fathers to the Bar Malavenda, an elegant fin de siècle—style café with dark wood and brass fittings, to buy trays of pastries, while old men whiled away the afternoon at the bar, reading La Gazzetta dello Sport or playing cards. During the week, women stopped to chat and gossip under the colorful umbrellas in the open market near the Versace home, where wooden crates overflowed with eggplants, tomatoes, and lemons cut in half to show off their bright yellow pulp. The citrus smell, together with the aroma of fresh fish piled on mountains of chipped ice, mingled with the smell of freshly baked bread, rich espressos, and salty sea air to make for a heady Proustian aroma that Gianni would recall with affection years later. A weekday lunch was a three-hour affair, and Nino came home to eat with the entire family before returning to work.

  “Life in Calabria was poetry then,” Santo Versace would recall five decades later. “Everything was a victory. People had survived the war, hunger, desperation, so they were happy.”5

  Franca’s shop prospered. Large-scale production of clothes was common in the United States by the mid-nineteenth century, but in Italy, what little ready-made clothes were available in the shops were ugly. For most, a woman’s postwar-era wardrobe evoked misery: cork wedge heels, skirts split in the back to make for easier pedaling on a bike, and harsh, square-cut jackets. Franca could offer them something better, even beautiful. While an elite few went to Paris to buy their wardrobes at the French couture houses, most of Italy’s upper crust had their wardrobes made by local dressmakers. A few top dressmakers bought the patterns made in plain cotton from the Paris couture houses to make exact copies of their latest designs. But the fees that houses such as Christian Dior and Balenciaga charged for their patterns were too expensive for most seamstresses, particularly in the provinces. Instead, tailors such as Franca bought patterns from the emerging couture houses in Rome. From the start, even in this modest way, the Versaces would forgo French fashion and embrace the possibility of Italy.

  Gianni Versace had an exceptional mentor in his mother. Franca soon became known as Reggio’s best dressmaker, and the city’s most elegant ladies came to her when they needed a wedding dress for a daughter or a new outfit for an evening at the city’s theater. Although she bought patterns from the couture houses in Rome, she often added her own touches, such as a collar of intricately beaded pearls. She was so skilled that she could cut cloth for a new dress without following a pattern, using just pins to mark the edges—a rare ability. She loved her work and devoted long hours to it—sometimes working through the night to finish a dress.

  Franca particularly loved to make wedding gowns, and indeed a Versace bridal gown was a dream for many Reggio brides, a rare burst of glamour for families of modest means. In turn, weddings were a boon for Franca. In the 1950s, a bride would require not just a wedding dress, but an entire corredo, or the day clothes, evening clothes, overcoats, and even the underwear that a new signora required. Franca sat patiently with excited brides and their mothers, paging through heavy books with photos and sketches to help them choose, telling them what shoes and gloves to buy. On the morning of a wedding she went to the bride’s house to attend to the final details.

  Franca’s children were among the best dressed of the city. For her First Communion, Tinuccia wore a full-length white dress with tiny buttons down the front and a skirt that was a cascade of ruffles. For Santo’s and Gianni’s, Franca made perfectly cut white three-piece morning suits, complete with bow ties and white gloves. A photo from the era shows a prim young Gianni in his pristine white suit, with a shy but determined smile on his face. For carnevale celebrations, the Italian Mardi Gras festival, Franca made the children elaborate costumes—and Gianni was her best model. One year, she dressed him as an eighteenth-century nobleman with knee-length breeches, a rich silk embroidered cape, and cream-colored shoes festooned with large bows. Even as a very young boy, Gianni absorb
ed his mother’s sense of style; when he was in middle school, he would sometimes point out when his friends’ socks clashed with the rest of their clothes.6

  In Reggio, with its ten months of sunshine a year, mild winters slipped into balmy springs; the heat of the summers was relieved by a frequent breeze from the strait. On warm evenings, the Versaces often walked down Corso Garibaldi, where whole families went for postdinner strolls, stopping for dishes of gelato or fruit cocktail. Occasionally, Nino would take Franca dancing on one of the dance floors that were laid down during the summer on the gravelly beach on the lido, where bands played mambos or the sweet hits of a newly carefree Italy. Gianni would sit licking an ice cream, entranced as he watched his parents dance to songs such as “Parlami d’amore Mariù” (“Speak to Me of Love, Mariù”).7 Sunday was dedicated to the extended family, when Versace cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents ate together, joking and chatting in Calabrian dialect. After lunch, Nino gathered the children to solemnly hand out their allowances. Later, he would do the week’s accounts, papers spread out in front of him, as he listened to the city’s soccer team, La Reggina, play its weekly soccer match.

  Nora Macheda, a young relative of Franca’s who was orphaned as a girl, came to live with the family when the children were young. Zia Nora, as she was known to everyone, helped Franca run the house and care for the children. Gianni, Santo, and Tinuccia adored Nora, who was about fifteen years younger than Franca and something of a peer and confidante for the children. A small, wiry woman with black hair cropped short, Nora, who never married, bustled around the kitchen preparing meals for the brood. During the summers, Nora took the children to a rented three-bedroom house high in the hills above Reggio. They joined cousins on Nino’s side of the family, riding their bikes along the dirt paths. Sometimes they went to an American military base nearby, where Gianni and his siblings would watch films in English, understanding not a word but soaking up the glamour of Hollywood.

  But the hard-earned postwar idyll of the Versace family would be cruelly shattered in a way that would affect Gianni profoundly. In May 1953, Tinuccia, then nine, fell ill with peritonitis. Franca sent Gianni and Santo to stay at an uncle’s house while she sat distraught by the girl’s bedside. Gianni, frenetic with worry, soon ran away from his uncle’s house and came home—entering the house to see his sister in a white casket, dressed in her First Communion dress and surrounded by white flowers, in the room where his mother usually sewed. He felt like he couldn’t breathe.8

  Franca, kneeling in front of the casket, convulsed in sobs, motioned for Gianni to come over.

  “Gianni, your sister has gone to heaven,” she said. “You and Santo are all I have now.”

  For the funeral Mass, white horses drew a carriage bearing the casket, a kindle of schoolgirls dressed in First Communion dresses trailing behind it.9

  For months, Franca was inconsolable and unable to work. She spent most of her time closed up in her bedroom crying or at the cemetery, visiting her daughter’s grave. Within a year’s time, however, she grew calmer. One day, she took her younger son aside.

  “Gianni, you’re going to have a little brother or sister,” she told him.

  Donatella was born on May 2, 1955.

  From the time Gianni was a small boy, Franca’s workshop was heaven for him. After school, he stopped at home for a snack prepared by Nora, and headed straight for Franca’s shop, where he would finger the fabrics and gaze fascinated at the patterns that Franca brought back from her trips to the couture houses in Rome. He hid behind the deep red curtain that closed off the bright room where Franca received clients. In the next room were Franca’s seamstresses, surrounded by bolts of cloth and baskets full of pins, buttons, and beads. He watched enthralled during fittings as his mother and an assistant pinned dresses, and garments slowly took shape. He sat on the workshop floor as Franca’s seamstresses laid the fabric out on sheets of paper where the patterns had been traced in white chalk. Pins held the cloth down as the women deftly cut into the fabric. Others in the shop would sew hundreds of tiny multicolored pearls to create the beaded bodice of a wedding gown.

  “Why don’t you go out and play with your friends?” Franca asked Gianni, worried about all the time he spent in the shop.

  “I don’t want to,” Gianni responded. “I want you to show me how you make the clothes.”10

  Before long, he started to use what he was learning. When he was about nine, Gianni started gathering the scraps of silk and wool that fell to the floor and stitching them into puppets, holding his own private shows afterward. At age eleven, he made dresses for a friend’s dolls, staging a play baptism for them. The workshop not only inspired him; its women nurtured him. The dozen seamstresses Franca employed, many of whom traveled each day from the poor, small towns in the hills above Reggio, often had to sleep in the shop during the long days and nights of preparation for a wedding.11 The women fussed endlessly over Gianni. “Vieni qua, Giannino!” they would call to him. “Come here, Giannino!” Gianni loved the attention, looking for any excuse to run errands, buying pins or zippers for the matronly ladies. On hot days in the summer, he went to buy them shaved ice granite.

  “My life was like a Fellini film,” he later told an interviewer. “I grew up surrounded by all women. I was spoiled. I had twenty girlfriends and twenty mothers.”12

  But the main woman in Gianni’s life remained his mother. He was devoted to Franca, in a way surpassing even the maternal adoration typical in Italian boys. He resembled her physically, with his round face, deep-set eyes, and small frame. Franca was an affectionate mother who clearly adored her children, although she could be stern and demanding of them. Willful and determined, Franca had a strong creative streak that might have blossomed more richly in a different time and place. Despite her constrained upbringing in provincial Italy and her limited education, she was remarkably open-minded for her time, having inherited her father’s iconoclastic bent. She had absorbed her family’s socialist ideas—a relative rarity in a region known for strong Fascist sympathies.

  “She wasn’t at all one of those old-fashioned mothers,” recalled a childhood friend of Donatella’s. “You could talk to her about everything.”13

  Franca’s bond with all three of her children was fierce. It is hard to overstate the role of the mother in Italian families; she is a venerated figure even in modern times, particularly in the more traditional south. Italian mothers lavish care and attention on their kids in measures that seem excessive by the standards of northern Europe or America; they constantly cook their children’s favorite meals, ensure their clothes are perfectly laundered and ironed, and fuss over even minor ailments. Sons are an object of particular attention, even when they are grown. Children usually live at home right up until they marry, and even when they move out, they typically see or speak with their mothers every day. And, of course, sometimes such relentless loving attention can turn into undue maternal control of sons and daughters, even as adults.

  By contrast, Gianni struggled in his relationship with his father. While Nino was diligent in providing for his children, he was a solitary, taciturn man, largely leaving it to Franca to bring up the kids. For the young Gianni, whose imagination was already bubbling over with ideas and ambition, Nino lacked verve and flair. His clothing—plain, gray pants, with a shirt that had big pockets for him to hold his pens and notes—appalled his son.

  “His shirt was like his office,” Gianni said later.14

  Nino spent his little free time absorbed in books, particularly classics such as Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad, and Dante’s Divine Comedy. He loved to gather his children in the living room to listen to him recite passages from memory. Though his father was clearly a man possessed of his own classical imagination, Gianni found such sessions unbearably boring. The man himself was intimidating to his younger son.

  “He used to scare me, even when he took me by the hand in the afternoon to go for a walk,” Gianni would recall.15

  Moreover
, Nino clearly favored Santo, who closely resembled his father. The eldest son occupies a place of honor in Italian families; he bears the weight of his parents’ highest expectations. In those straitened and more traditional postwar days, the oldest son shared in the responsibility for caring for the whole family. In this, Santo never disappointed. He became Franca and Nino’s pride and joy. With a long face, dirty-blond hair, and a leaner, more athletic body than Gianni, he was the best-looking of the Versace siblings as well as the most accomplished. He brought home top grades, shared Nino’s love of sport, and enthusiastically assisted his father in business. When Santo turned just six years old, Nino started taking him to his shop to help shovel coal and fill orders for customers. A kilo of coal cost thirty-six lire (about twenty cents) then, and Nino drilled Santo until the boy could multiply any number by thirty-six in his head to tally the price for a customer. Santo loved it; he basked in his father’s approval. On Sunday mornings, when his workers were off, Nino took Santo along to clients’ homes to help him unscrew empty canisters of gas and install full ones. If Santo, a gifted basketball player, had a game and couldn’t go to the shop, Nino drafted Gianni to help instead. But Gianni hated it, grumbling and complaining the whole time. Sometimes he simply defied his father.