Diane von Furstenberg

by Gioia Diliberto

  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.

  Still, Diane did everything she could to support Egon’s business. During the fall collection shows in April 1974, the couple held their second joint show, this one attended by their children. As the girl models paraded in Diane’s shirtwaists and wraps and the boy models in Egon’s shirts, sweaters, and casual pants, Alex, four, and Tatiana, three, sat “quietly in the audience,” the New York Times’s Bernadine Morris noted. “But soon, startled either by the music or the models dancing along the runway with their arms flailing like windmills, the children ran to join Mommy offstage.”

  With the preternatural insight children often display, Alex explained to Morris that his parents were like “Tatiana and me.” They had “the same sort of” brother-sister relationship.

  Diane was the big sister looking out for Egon, protecting him, indulging him. “Egon would come into the showroom with his girlfriends and take the samples off the racks and throw them on the floor like we should pick them up,” says Conrad. “I would get very angry with him, and I had to threaten him a couple of times. He was brought up as a prince, and he felt he could do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted.”

  Though Diane says Egon had plenty of money, his extravagant lifestyle some
times left him with cash-flow problems. One day Diane asked Conrad to loan Egon forty thousand dollars. “If I loan it to him, I’ll never see it again,” Diane said. “If you loan it to him, I’ll make sure he pays you back.” When Conrad demurred, Diane gave him two paintings as security, one by Jean Dubuffet and one by Max Ernst. Egon never repaid Conrad, who eventually sold the Dubuffet for a profit. The Ernst hangs to this day in Conrad’s New York living room.

  A DVF World

  In the 1970s you could don a DVF fur over your DVF dress, toss a DVF scarf around your neck, and pack for a trip with a DVF suitcase. You could wear DVF jewelry and improve your vision or shield your eyes from the sun with DVF glasses. You could carry a DVF handbag, step out in DVF heels worn over your DVF panty hose, tell time on a DVF watch, and go to sleep in a DVF nightgown. (In later years, you could also have surgery in a DVF hospital gown, attended by a nurse in a DVF uniform.)

  According to WWD by the end of 1975, Diane’s name was on twelve products worth about forty million dollars in annual sales. Like many designers, she’d discovered licensing, which had become the hottest way to grow a fashion brand. But it was a risky business that could ruin a hard-won image if a designer slapped her name on too many cheap, tacky products. Walt Disney had started it all in the 1930s by hiring outside companies to produce and distribute Mickey Mouse toys, books, and other kitsch. The practice quickly spread to French fashion, with designers from Dior to Saint Laurent to Pierre Cardin putting their names on almost everything, including stockings, sheets, chocolates, wigs, frying pans, golf clubs, sausage machines, stereos, and inflatable boats.

  Licensing worked like this: Once a contract was signed, the designer was paid either a lump sum or a percentage of projected first-year royalties. Afterward, the designer’s royalties amounted to anywhere from 5 to 10 percent of net wholesale sales. The designer often (but not always) retained control of the quality and style of the products, while the license holder took care of manufacturing and distribution.

  Though American designers were slower to embrace licensing than the French, by the 1970s, John Weitz, Anne Klein, and Bill Blass all had lucrative licensing agreements. No one, though, was making more money from the practice than Halston, who had thirty-one licensing accounts, generating myriad products and four million dollars in annual royalties. Then, in 1973, Halston sold his company to the conglomerate Norton Simon for ten million dollars. The sale made him spectacularly rich, but it was the start of his steep downward slide. He lost the right to control the use of his own name and would never get it back.

  Diane took the cautionary lesson to heart. She knew her trademark was her most valuable asset. She told herself she would never accept a deal, no matter how lucrative, that forced her to give it up. Diane von Furstenberg stood for something. It stood for her. She was the brand. “There’s always an echo with an icon,” says Stefani Greenfield, the creative brand director of DVF Studio. “People are attracted to an icon’s essence,” which they’ve picked up from advertising and the media. So when they buy a feminine, sexy dress by Diane von Furstenberg in bold color and fabulous print, “it’s as if they’re buying a piece of Diane’s energy and confidence,” Greenfield says.

  Diane, however, did not maintain tight control over her licenses. She fell into the trap of signing on with too many mediocre companies whose products, including children’s clothes and stationery, had nothing to do with her core collection of feminine, sassy clothes. “People were offering me deals [right and left], everything was moving so fast, and I was so young,” she says.

  The success of the wrap dress gave Diane the luxury of exploring new directions. She decided what she wanted now was to start a cosmetics business. The idea first came to her during her tryst with Ryan O’Neal at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills. Seeing the pots of makeup in her hotel room bathroom, the Love Story star chided her, “Why do you need all that stuff?” Embarrassed, Diane blurted, because “I’m thinking of buying the company” that made the cosmetics.

  The bluff soon turned into a fierce ambition. She dreamed of joining “the ranks of women like Helena Rubinstein, Elizabeth Arden, and Estée Lauder, who created their own empires,” she wrote. “I loved the legends of these women and rather fancied myself as an up-and-coming one of them.”

  Diane formed a cosmetics division in her company and hired a staff to produce a line of makeup and treatment products. In 1974 she opened her own DVF beauty store, finding an ideal spot in a small, empty shop on Madison Avenue between Sixty-First and Sixty-Second Streets, a few blocks from Halston’s boutique. (Soon, the cosmetics would also be sold in stores that carried Diane’s clothes.) She supervised the renovations, modeling the décor on the house of Guerlain on the Champs-Elysées, everything understated and elegant, with clinical bars and stools where women could sit to test the cosmetics. Diane’s products, packed in beige pots and stored in cabinets painted with images of women representing the four seasons, included lip gloss, lipstick, powder, eyeliner, body shampoo, bath oil, and talcum powder, all moderately priced.

  To celebrate the opening on November 11, 1974, Diane took out a full-page ad in the New York Times, featuring professionally written ad copy and a photograph of her by Francesco Scavullo. She hired a sales staff and makeup artists, including Gigi Williams, a twenty-four-year-old downtown club girl and wife of Andy Warhol assistant Ronnie Cutrone. Williams had a decidedly punk style—she favored boots, chains, studs, and spiky hair. But Diane insisted that Williams wear DVF to work like the other shop assistants. “I thought, ‘Oh, my God, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” recalls Williams. On the day the beauty shop opened, Williams was behind the counter in a DVF shirtdress in a green and black zebra print when an elderly woman with a cloud of white hair walked in wearing the exact same dress. “I was mortified!” she says. Diane gave Williams and the other sales staff two new DVF dresses a month, and eventually Williams learned how to adapt them to her own style. Diane let her express herself by wearing “two dresses at a time, with one like a coat, and crazy belts and cowboy boots,” Williams recalls.

  Diane loved having a cosmetics business, but her dream of becoming the next Estée Lauder never came true. “We never should have gone into cosmetics,” says Dick Conrad. “I should have warned Diane off it. But I was just as infatuated with our success as she was. When you’re a very fast-moving vehicle, as we were, you don’t want to step off. You figure, everything else has worked out so well, this will, too.”

  But Diane couldn’t repeat her wrap-dress success with lip gloss and mascara. “We were going up against armies, and we didn’t even have a squad,” says Conrad. “We were undercapitalized and undermanaged, and we were competing with world-class companies. Because of the clout of our dress business, we got good positioning in the stores, but it was still tough. We started losing a couple million a year.”

  The only bright spot in Diane’s cosmetics line was Tatiana, a fragrance named after her daughter. Since couturier Paul Poiret introduced a signature perfume, Rosine, in 1911, designers have been linking scent to their fashion lines, the most famous example being Coco Chanel’s Chanel No. 5. Introduced in 1921, Chanel No. 5 remains the world’s most popular scent—every thirty seconds a bottle of it is sold somewhere in the world.

  There are many reasons for a designer to get into the fragrance business. Scent is relatively inexpensive to manufacture, and it’s cheaper than designer clothes, so it’s a great way to draw customers to a brand. To formulate Tatiana, Diane turned to Roure Bertrand Dupont in Grasse, France. One of the world’s major creators of fragrances and the supplier of several of Estée Lauder’s perfumes, Roure Bertrand Dupont produced hundreds of scents before Diane approved a fresh floral one that she felt not only smelled sensational but also comported with the bright femininity of her clothes.

  Halston had hired Elsa Peretti to create a bulbous teardrop for his blockbuster eponymous fragrance, but to keep costs down, Diane used an ordinary stock bottle for Tatiana. She also
came up with an ingenious way to promote the scent—a packet of Tatiana was attached to the cleaning instructions of the thousands of dresses she sold each week. Women tried the fragrance, and many turned around and bought a bottle. “We did very well with it. It made money,” says Conrad.

  The sales of the perfume Tatiana enabled Diane to fool herself that her cosmetics business was a wild success. “Diane can’t tolerate anything negative,” says Linda Bird Francke. “Everything has to be up.”

  In 1976, according to WWD, Diane employed one hundred people and her business overall made $133 million—$40 million from her licenses and $93 million in retail sales from her dress, cosmetics, and fine-jewelry divisions. Conrad says the bulk of the millions came from the wrap dress. She paid herself a salary of $100,000, plus $150,000 in annual bonuses, the equivalent of about a million in today’s dollars.

  Though her cosmetics line lost money, Diane would not give up her ambition to transform the faces of American women. In 1976 she published a book, Diane von Furstenberg’s Book of Beauty: How to Become a More Attractive, Confident and Sensual Woman. The advice inside amounted to little more than generic tips on skin care and exercise, but Diane sincerely wanted to help women.

  Her idea of doing cosmetic makeovers sprang from the same desire. Diane wanted to save women from their cosmetic mistakes, show them how to make the most of their looks, ease their anxieties about aging, and, in the process, improve their confidence. “Women would book makeovers on the phone and come into the shop,” Williams explains. “Then Diane and I started doing makeovers by mail. I made a questionnaire. Women would fill out information about their beauty routines. I’d make a face chart, and I’d paint the cosmetics on the face chart with my finger and send it back to them; they’d send it back to me and order the cosmetics.”