bY HIS THIRTIETH BIRTHDAY IN 1976, GIANNI VERSACE HAD achieved a level of success that Franca—or Nino—had never expected for him. His contracts paid him the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year—an impressive sum at the time for the fashion industry. Yet, he was still just one of many Italian designers creating for commercial houses. Moreover, little in the style of his clothes made him hugely distinctive. Still a journeyman, one of the many fashion folk thriving in the fast, mercurial, and uncharted territory of Milanese fashion—which itself was still an outlying province in the world of fashion—Gianni had to find his own vision if he wanted to become a designing force.
Early on, Gianni’s search for a stylish new ideal settled on his little sister. Even when she was a little girl, Gianni saw her as his emerging muse. By the time Donatella was about eleven and Gianni was twenty, he had already started to make her over in his image of a modern, free-spirited woman. Gianni convinced the preteen to have highlights put in her light brown hair. He brought her to a young hairdresser who was a close friend of Gianni’s. As Donatella got older, her brother kept pushing her to go lighter and lighter. “At 14, I was a little blonde,” she recalled. “At 16, I was platinum. Gianni was delighted. My mother was not.”1
Growing up, Donatella wasn’t the prettiest young woman in Reggio; her best feature was a smooth alabaster complexion that tanned easily. Like most Calabrian women, Donatella was petite—no more than five foot three—but she had the thick hands and chunky legs characteristic of many southerners. Starting in her girlhood and continuing through the rest of her life, she hated her stubby legs, and as a teenager she took to wearing towering heels. Egged on by Gianni, Donatella got up at 6 a.m. to style her hair and apply heavy makeup before going to school. Her big brother then helped sneak her out of the house to avoid Franca’s wrath should she see her adolescent daughter made up like Cleopatra.2
“I was terrified of my mother—much more than my father,” Donatella would relate years later. “She was the one who would say something about what I was wearing, not my father. She could give me this look. But at the same time, she was a very open-minded person.”3
Like most Calabrian teenagers, she lived at the beach. Starting in the spring, she and her girlfriends spent hours on the wide, sandy shores on the Ionic coast, roasting under the southern sun without even an umbrella or lounge chair. Sometimes, just hours before heading to the beach, she would buy fabric at a shop, take it to her mother’s seamstresses, and ask them to whip up a bikini for her. The seamstresses would, of course, comply; from her parents to their employees to her two brothers, everyone in young Donatella’s life would spoil her straight through her adolescence. For instance, as a teenager, Donatella developed a love for face and body creams that would nearly become an obsession as an adult. She often stopped at a local profumeria near her house and stocked up on the latest potions, with little regard for the cost. “Santo will come by to pay the bill,” she told the shop owner. Without fail, her older brother duly complied.
For his part, when he still lived in Reggio, Gianni treated Donatella like an adult, taking her to discos and concerts on the beach when she was not yet a teen. While Donatella’s girlfriends were rarely allowed to go to nightclubs as young women, Franca gave in because she knew Gianni would be with her. On many evenings, Donatella and Gianni would stay up late talking in the living room, and then go out, not to return until nearly dawn.
“They would go out for a walk after dinner and wouldn’t come home until 4 a.m.,” Zia Nora remembered. “I was so worried. I used to stay up and wait for them.”4 Franca, too, would worry, concerned about the risks involved in growing up too fast—risks that Gianni made real.
“He had me do things that were impossible at my age,” Donatella recalled. “By the time I was twelve or thirteen, I was already an adult. My mother was furious.”5
For Gianni, Donatella was not just an inspiring and vivacious female but a useful companion around town. His growing bond with his little sister helped ease the problem of being gay in Reggio. While he never spoke of his homosexuality with Santo, he confided most things to Donatella, and his emergent sexual orientation was obvious to her. He was happy to take her with him everywhere because the presence of a girl helped draw attention away from the fact that he was always hanging out with other young men. He was feeling more and more suffocated in Reggio, and Donatella, who was maturing into a hip teenager, was like oxygen to him. As confidante, muse, and alter ego, Donatella would flourish in her brother’s company for more than a decade before she would start to chafe at the confines of that intimacy. During those early years in Reggio, it was as if Donatella “had come from Gianni, like a rib taken from his side,” according to one journalist. “She was the gay man’s version of a trophy wife—a trophy sister.”6
From its beginning, their bond left little space for outsiders; the intimacy between them came at a cost to their relationships with others. That pattern was established early. At fifteen, Donatella started dating Enzo Crupi, a local boy with black curly hair and a short, compact physique who was five years her senior. Gianni took an instant dislike to Enzo, who was from a modest family background and was sometimes churlish with Donatella, and he nagged his sister to dump him. He found an ally in Franca, who cared little for Enzo herself. Franca began to push Donatella to consider going to college far away from Reggio, to free her daughter not just from Enzo but from Gianni’s fast-living influence.
“My mother couldn’t wait until Gianni moved away because she thought he was ruining me,” Donatella said. “I didn’t get along with kids my own age, because I was so used to hanging out with people older than me.”7
Like Gianni, Donatella found delight and meaning in the Elle di Francesca Versace—not because she wanted to design, but because the boutique was her personal treasure trove. The shop sat right across from the family’s new home, on Via Tommaso Gulli, a side street that ran between the Piazza del Duomo and the boardwalk. The airy eight-room apartment had ten-foot ceilings and thick walls that kept out the noise and the heat. After finishing her studies in a small room off the kitchen, Donatella often went down to the shop, which became a natural hangout for her and her friends. She spent hours there, trying on the new clothes, fixing her makeup in the mirrors, and chatting with the shopgirls and her mother’s clients.
But thanks to Gianni, Donatella was not limited to sporting the sort of clothes favored by the ladies of Reggio. On his buying trips to Rome and Milan—and later London and Paris—Gianni picked out clothes that he thought would suit his little sister. While she wasn’t tall, she was very thin—an Italian size thirty-eight, or an American size four—and could pull off daring outfits. He filled his suitcases with clothes for Donatella that were far more fashionable—long knit skirts that fell to the ankle or high leather boots—than anything other teenage girls in Reggio could dream of wearing. By the time she was about twenty, Donatella was already wearing clothes by Kenzo, a Japanese designer working in Paris who was known for his avant-garde styles. Once, Gianni bought the two of them full-length leather coats that made them stand out like Manhattanites in their one-horse town.
Even by the more liberal standards of the 1970s, Donatella drew stares in Reggio for the outré look that Gianni molded for her. He sometimes sketched outfits for her and brought them to his mother’s seamstresses to make.
“Gianni always treated me like an adult, never my age,” Donatella told one journalist. “He once made me a miniskirt in patent leather, black, and a bright-yellow top, with patent-leather boots and blond hair to here. I was so young. We were lying about my age, telling everyone I was older.”8
While Donatella was shy and wary around outsiders, she was warm and generous with people close to her. She grew close to some of the girls who worked in her mother’s shop, who confided their personal problems to her. Donatella was also remarkably generous. If a shopgirl admired something Donatella was wearing, she often gave it to her. When one of the employees got engaged, Franca always let her choose any bridal gown from the boutique, including dresses by couturiers such as Yves Saint Laurent. Donatella would happily fuss over the girls for weeks, helping them choose their bridal outfits, shoes, and jewelry, and like her mother with her clients, she would come to their homes the morning of the wedding to help with makeup and button them into their gowns.
Gianni also transmuted to his sister his own yearning for a life beyond the confines of Reggio. Franca, too, was eager that her daughter not suffer under the same constraints that had choked off her own options a generation earlier. Donatella was clearly not designed or inclined to be a wild child of Calabria who would later settle down into matrimony and domesticity. She felt—and her mother and brother agreed—that she was destined for greater things. Unlike her brother, though, Donatella had no clear idea of what those greater things might entail.
A year after Gianni left for the north, Donatella also left Reggio, going to the University of Florence to study languages, focusing on Spanish and English. She settled on Tuscany because two girlfriends planned to enroll in school there—and possibly because it offered the chance to be close to her big brother. One girl, Mariella, lasted only a month before returning to Reggio. The other girl was also named Donatella, but had long, jet-black hair and dark, sensual looks.
Donatella’s student days in Florence would be the happiest time of her life, free as she was of the confines and mores of Reggio. She had responsibility for nothing but her own fun, and she took advantage of her freedom. In the mid-1970s, Italian campuses were erupting in riots and demonstrations over workers’ rights, the war in Vietnam, and America’s nuclear politics, and it was a time of enormous change for women, as divorce and abortion were legalized and more women began to work outside the home—wrenching changes for a still-traditional Catholic country. While at the university, Donatella took little interest in politics, preferring a carefree life of discos, concerts, and hanging out with friends in one of the many student bars and birrerie (pubs) the city offered. She hated the Beatles, finding them too commercial, preferring instead the Rolling Stones; Mick Jagger was her favorite singer. She wore her blond hair parted simply in the middle, falling straight to just above her shoulders. Already a heavy smoker, she dressed like a gypsy, wore heavy eye makeup, and hung out with the trendiest students on campus. “My friends were very, very avant-garde at that time,” she recalled proudly.9
She and her friend Donatella Benedetto shared a room in a stately apartment on a side street between the covered market at San Lorenzo and Florence’s Duomo, the green, pink, and cream cathedral with its distinctive brick dome designed by Filippo Brunelleschi. The two girls spent little time studying, managing to cram successfully for their exams in just a few days. Otherwise, they were happily footloose. They called their parents once a week from public phone booths, feeding the machine with gettoni, rough-hewn, bronze-colored tokens that cost two hundred lire (about ten cents) each.
“The food at the university cafeteria was terrible, so as soon as our parents sent us money, we went to a restaurant,” Benedetto recalled. “We found this wonderful place that made these thick Florentine steaks. Whenever the parents of any of our friends came, we immediately got them to take us out to eat.” The two young women loved to visit the Officina Profumo Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella, a thirteenth-century pharmacy-turned-beauty-shop, to buy jar after jar of face creams.
The roommates often swapped tops and sweaters, but not pants, because Donatella Versace had a tiny waist, much smaller than her friend’s. She never forgot the style tips her brother had taught her; while her friends dressed in jeans and casual shoes, Donatella always wore stilettos, deftly navigating the cobblestone streets of Florence. Even the slippers she wore at home had high heels.
Even though Donatella was nearly twenty by this time, Franca fretted about her daughter’s distance from home and often made the long trip north to check on her, sleeping on a cot in the girls’ room. She always arrived bearing a gift for each girl, often a sweater or a scarf from her boutique. To Franca, Donatella remained the precious daughter she had been since the day she was born, conceived to replace the one so tragically taken from her. She spoiled her adult child just as she had when she was a girl, bustling around their small room, picking up the clothes that were left strewn around and doing her daughter’s laundry. “Look at what a mess your clothes are!” she scolded Donatella. But then she took the girls and their friends out for dinner.
The students spent several months at a time in Florence, when classes were in session, but then returned to Reggio for long stretches when they didn’t have to attend classes, in order to save money. Donatella’s parents had bought her a car, but the girls often took the overnight train to shuttle back and forth to Florence, a twelve-hour trip. Absentminded, they usually forgot to book a sleeping berth and often spent the night on the floor of the grimy trains, elbow to elbow with other Calabrian émigrés returning home from the industrial Italian north for a holiday.
“We didn’t care,” Benedetto would say more than thirty years later. “We spent the whole night laughing and talking. Donatella had this wonderful sense of humor. I remember the two of us laughing together all the time. We had just so much fun.”
Fun was their main area of concentration while attending university. Neither girl gave much thought to what they would do after graduating. Most Italian students who gain a degree in languages go on to teach high school, but Donatella never intended to follow such a dull path. Given her passion for concerts and music, she dreamed of finding work in public relations or even show business. At the worst, she could always help run her mother’s boutique.
She held on to one important link to her life in Calabria: She continued to date Enzo, even as she shuttled back and forth to Florence. But Enzo had made it clear that he wouldn’t leave Reggio. And Gianni, always jealous of Donatella’s attentions toward Enzo and ever eager for a companion and muse, was steadily pulling her into his buzzing new world of international fashion, with all its lures and promises.
Despite his early success, Gianni was still unsure of himself. He was juggling several contracts and longed for a sounding board. Donatella was just twenty, whereas Gianni was near thirty, and he needed her youthful, female perspective. She would be his one-person research department, or the sort of blithe, vibrant woman Gianni ached to dress. Most important, he knew that if he was to achieve his dream of becoming an independent designer, he had to capture the energy that Donatella represented—and spin it into truly original clothing.
As soon as Donatella moved to Florence in 1973, Gianni began pestering her to make the three-hour train ride to Milan so that he could show her his designs. Whenever he had to go to Ancona to make the final changes for the Genny collection at the factory there, he had her meet him in Bologna to take the train together to the factory. (On the train, Gianni often ran into Gianfranco Ferré, another rising star who was shuttling to a factory in Bologna. The two men would become friends.) When Gianni staged his shows, the two Donatellas went to Milan to help prepare, bunking together in his apartment.
“I began coming every weekend,” Donatella Versace remembered. “And then the weekends got longer and longer. Gianni used to say, ‘Stay another day!’ Even if Gianni was very talented, he could be very insecure. He wanted my opinion.”
Franca was not pleased. She worried that Gianni was hijacking Donatella’s future, and she pestered her daughter not to go to Milan to see her brother so often. She wanted Donatella to choose her own path—whatever that might be—instead of blindly following her big brother.
“Have you done that exam yet? Have you finished that paper?” she asked Donatella. “You’re living Gianni’s life! You should be living your own life.” She scolded Gianni for monopolizing Donatella and distracting her from her studies, and warned him to leave her alone. But Gianni thought Donatella was wasting her time in school. “Why do you study so much?” Gianni asked her, annoyed. He saw his sister’s future in Milan, at his side.
Donatella had a different angel on each shoulder, each one entreating her to choose a life that contradicted the other’s urging. “I had my mother on one side, and then I had Gianni saying, ‘Come on, stay one more day!’” Donatella remembered. “Sometimes I wouldn’t tell her that I’d gone to see Gianni. I was between a rock and a hard place.”10
Her path would, in a sense, be chosen for her when one of those two angels went silent. In June 1978, Donatella was just weeks away from completing her degree, busy finishing the thesis that is required at Italian universities. The evening before she was to defend her thesis, she called her mother, who had been admitted to the clinic in Modena the week before to undergo a new treatment. Zia Nora had come to keep the young student company and tidy up after her. Donatella was distraught to hear how weak Franca sounded on the phone.
“Mama, I’m coming to see you tomorrow,” she told her.
“No, you have to stay and defend your thesis,” Franca said weakly. “I don’t want you to come.”
Even as she urged Donatella to stay in Florence, Franca knew that she had little time left. She worried about Donatella, who remained a bambina in Franca’s eyes. A week earlier, when Santo was driving Franca to the clinic, she gravely made her son pledge that, in case she died, he would take care of a particular matter.
“Santo, everything that I have must go to the baby,” she told him. “I want you to promise me that you’ll take care of it.” Franca worried that her daughter, who had both the blithe spirit and the vulnerability of a spoiled child, would be adrift without a steady hand to guide her.
After speaking with her mother, Donatella rescheduled her thesis defense and rushed to Modena. But she was too late. Franca died on June 27, 1978, at the age of fifty-eight. None of her children had made it to the clinic in time to say good-bye.
Donatella never returned to Florence. “At that point, I hated university,” she said. “I felt that it was the thing that had kept me from her.”11
Franca died without a will, which under Italian law meant that her estate would automatically be divided among all three of her children and Nino. Santo went to Gianni and his father and told them of the conversation with Franca. They immediately acceded to their mother’s bidding, and Santo hired a lawyer to draw up papers whereby he and Gianni would renounce their portion of Franca’s inheritance. As a result, Donatella, ever the baby of the family, inherited the boutique that Gianni and his mother had worked so hard to establish.12
For Gianni, Franca’s death was devastating. “I had learned to love her with absolute abandon once I was an adult, when I could truly appreciate her strength,” he said later.13 Having lost his staunchest support, he channeled that devotion to Donatella.
For some time, Gianni had been urging Donatella to join him permanently in Milan, arguing that to return to Reggio—and Enzo—would smother her. Donatella was more attached to Reggio than to Gianni, but losing her mother at twenty-three left her devastated and adrift—just as Franca had feared. The young woman had never been close to her father, and Gianni offered a ready refuge while she grieved.
“Donatella still needed her mother at that age,” said cousin Tita Versace. “It was very difficult for her.”14
She was, however, motivated not just by grief but by glamour. Years of hearing the stories of Gianni’s travels, and the small bit of high life she’d already tasted when tagging along with him, were now irresistible to her. Gianni had taken her with him to New York occasionally, and the city had entranced her. (Both siblings had to overcome an early fear of flying.) On his trips there, he had gone with friends to Studio 54, the legendary disco that was the symbol of 1970s debauchery. Later, in the early 1980s, he would also take her to the Saint, the dazzling gay disco on the site of the 1960s concert hall the Fillmore East, complete with a ceiling on which lights revealed a universe of constellations.
“Gianni used to drag Donatella with us and she was a kid then,” a friend recalled. “The mix of Studio 54 and the Saint was like visiting either hell or paradise, depending on how you saw it.”
To Gianni’s delight, Donatella finally decided to move to Milan, settling into her brother’s spare bedroom on Via Melegari. The apartment sat in Milan’s toniest neighborhood, home to the city’s old industrial families. Around the corner lived the Invernizzi family, a wealthy Milan clan whose home was a miniature Versailles, with its lush gardens, lily pad ponds, and strutting pink flamingos. Even though his apartment was a rental, Gianni spent a fortune refitting it in lavish Art Deco style. His expansive lifestyle was already expensive, the young designer showing the penchant for heavy spending that would split the three siblings in the decades ahead—and nearly prove to be the undoing of their family business. But in 1978, the apartment was for Gianni and Donatella both refuge and stage set.
Donatella arrived on Gianni’s doorstep, reeling from her mother’s death. The loss of Franca had shaken both of them deeply and brought them even closer. Gianni felt enormously protective of his baby sister, as if he replaced the presence of a wife and his mother with Donatella. Moreover, having Donatella by his side in Milan was like an anchor for Gianni, particularly amid the stress and strain of racing to snap up the opportunities that were coming to him. He was ever the Calabrian son, needing his family close by to feel grounded.
Donatella, in turn, found comfort in Gianni’s new world, a place where she could continue to be the flighty kid sister for many years to come. Their bond became inextricable and codependent. Each was instantly able to read the other’s moods and thoughts. Over the next few years, they happily spent virtually every waking hour together, living together, working together, taking their meals together. But Gianni’s impulse to protect and indulge Donatella meant that she never had to grow up. As Gianni grew richer and more successful, Donatella acquired the brittleness of a spoiled child, one who was wholly unprepared to face the responsibilities and hard choices of adulthood.
The apartment on Via Melegari was relatively spacious, with two bedrooms and about 1,400 square feet of living space. The decision to live together was more than a matter of sharing living quarters, a city, or even the profession of fashion. The fates of brother and sister would be irrevocably linked for the remainder of their lives.
Yet, even as they settled into life in Milan, Calabria kept pulling the Versaces home. Soon after Franca’s death, Gianni made a return visit. One day, Nino didn’t turn up for lunch. Santo and Gianni grew more and more worried as the afternoon wore on without any word from their father. Then Gianni understood. “You know where we’ll find him?” Gianni said to his brother. “At the cemetery.”
The brothers drove up to the cemetery, which sat on a hill behind the city. It was a hot day, but a breeze was drifting in from the sea. They found Nino sitting disconsolately on a stool in front of the family’s gray marble tomb.
“He looked lost, abandoned, as if he had aged a hundred years,” recalled Gianni later. Gianni, in tears, embraced his father. In one gesture, years of tensions between father and son melted away. Without the buffer of Franca, the pair would have to form a new bond. After a while, they returned home together. Over a coffee granita, Gianni managed to make his father laugh a little. They spent the afternoon in the cool of their darkened living room, saying little. As Gianni would say years later, “In the end, I realized that the little that he was able to give me was actually enough.”