seven

Inspiration and Muse

bY THE TIME DONATELLA MARRIED, SHE WAS RAPIDLY BECOMING ever-more indispensable to her big brother. Early on, he entrusted his hip twenty-eight-year-old sister with overseeing the hair and makeup for the runway shows, a task that delighted her—and soon shaped the look of Gianni’s shows. She quickly projected onto the models her own predilection for heavy makeup and teased hairstyles, which helped establish the defining look of 1980s fashion.

“Donatella always had this thing for hair and makeup,” recalled Angelo Azzena, who joined the house in 1976 to work on the ad campaigns and stage the runway shows and would later became one of Donatella’s closest assistants. “She practically lived at the hairdresser. So when she started, it changed. The look became one of a young, modern woman who had the time to do her hair and makeup properly.”1 Gianni also gave her responsibility for the shoes, bags, and jewelry. Under her influence, the accessories became more and more elaborate: high heels made up in silk fabric, with a black and white baroque pattern; or elbow-length gloves with crystals sewn in geometric patterns.

But more important, Donatella filled an indefinable role of muse, sounding board, and first assistant. The position she had served in her brother’s life as they grew up now became central to the expanding Versace business. Gianni found her style of dressing edgy, fresh, and glamorous: skintight leggings in bright colors, leopard-print tops, leather jackets, and stiletto heels or tall cowboy boots. She piled two or three heavy bracelets made of shining gold medallions adorned with medusa heads on her wrists; she wore sparkly, dangling earrings that resembled mini chandeliers. With access to Milan’s best hairstylists and beauty salons, Donatella gradually polished her look. She wasn’t yet the camp goddess she would become in later decades, but she was becoming a walking illustration of the maxim that defined the 1980s: “If you’ve got it, flaunt it.” Her hair became sleeker and blonder, setting off her year-round, sun-baked bronze tan. Her skin was still smooth, so she could often do with little makeup. But when she did wear makeup, she favored heavy eye shadow, liner, and false eyelashes. A personal trainer helped sculpt and trim her body into the buffed look of the gym-crazed 1980s, with toned arms, a taut stomach, and sinewy legs.

From her travels with Gianni, she brought home suitcases full of skin creams and perfumes, so many that she had special shelves built in her bathroom to hold all of her toiletries. The extreme grooming, however, veiled a profound neurosis about her own appearance. Donatella was a serial self-belittler, homing in on every last physical imperfection. She charmed people by betraying a bit of her vulnerability, but her insecurities unbalanced her. She compulsively monitored her appearance in every passing mirror—even stealing glimpses in the reflection of a fork when she was at dinner.

Donatella became Gianni’s shadow in the atelier, constantly trailing behind him, murmuring her opinion of his work. He sought her views on every aspect of his designs, from color schemes to dress choices for the runway. Their conversations came so thick and fast that their ideas melded into one. Donatella had a great knack for sizing up a dress or a pair of pants or a color palette and deciding whether it had that mysterious quality that would make it trendy. When show time came, she had an extraordinary eye for making Gianni’s clothes arresting on the runway, adorning them with the right shoes, jewelry, and makeup.

“Donatella was extremely useful to him,” said Giusy Ferrè, a leading Italian fashion journalist and a close friend of Gianni’s. “She was his passport into the world of women. She was his female alter ego.”2

Donatella was often brutal in her judgments of Gianni’s work, sparking fierce arguments between the two, often in a Calabrian dialect that was indecipherable to the rest of the Versace team. Oftentimes, designers fall into a rut once they find success with a certain style. Donatella’s task was to keep Gianni moving forward; she wouldn’t let him repeat himself or rest on the laurels of previously successful design ideas, no matter how much combustion her nagging caused between them.

“When he raised his voice, the others were scared, but I wasn’t,” Donatella would say more than twenty years later. “I kept on telling him what I thought, because there wasn’t anyone else who would. He risked becoming just another designer with everyone always telling him ‘yes.’ But I pushed him to go further. I saw what the others were doing, which I liked better, and I saw that they were more daring. I said, you’re better than these other ones. If you don’t risk, you won’t go anywhere.”3

She sometimes went behind his back—for instance, instructing his seamstresses to shorten his skirts, which he preferred long. When Gianni would find out, he would be furious. “You don’t understand anything!” Gianni often shouted at her. “You’re going to ruin me!” Another recurring battle was over shoes. Gianni preferred flats for the runway shows, but Donatella saw that they would drain his outfits of verve.

“So we agreed to do half high heels and half flats,” Donatella recounted about one show. But unbeknownst to Gianni, she switched the flats for stilettos the moment before the models stepped out onto the runway. He was once so angry at seeing the girls in high heels that he threw Donatella out of the atelier. Most of the time, though, he realized she was right.

“If Gianni didn’t listen to his sister and decided to go ahead with an idea she didn’t like, he would come to her the next day and say, ‘You were right,’” recalled Azzena. “She had great influence over him.”4

Their fights were so fierce that it took Paul Beck several years to get used to what he described as the “Versace verbal dynamic.”

“I thought somebody was going to kill someone,” he later told a Vanity Fair journalist. “I had to leave the room. And the argument would be over something like where to put the sweaters in the new boutique on Via Montenapoleone.”5

The bond between the siblings grew tighter as they spent long days of intense work together, speaking in such shorthand that it was impossible to say who had come up with a particular idea. Santo, working with a separate team in a different office, was largely cut out of their ménage. He just couldn’t get excited about topics such as the color of a dress or a new cut for a skirt, which riveted his younger sister and brother. Donatella reveled in her role. Even as she entered her thirties, she could continue to play the flighty kid sister. She lost things frequently and stopped driving because she was so distracted. When Gianni traveled, he was always thinking of her, usually bringing back a gift for Donatella as a spontaneous token of his affection for her. Once he bought her a twenty-karat canary yellow diamond ring, the stone as big as a Chuckles jelly candy. She was always on his mind, the first person he called when he was excited about the color of a flower he’d just seen or a new city he was visiting. “If I were to marry, I would look for a girl like Donatella,” he told a journalist.6

Even as he put his sister on a pedestal, Gianni could be terribly hard on Donatella. If he didn’t care for a particular hairstyle or new outfit she wore, he was merciless in his criticism. But at the same time he wouldn’t allow anyone else to speak badly of Donatella, flying into a rage if he heard a friend or employee criticize her.

In the atelier, the employees saw Donatella as a fun-loving peer, not their boss. They addressed her using the informal tu, instead of the formal lei they scrupulously employed when speaking with Gianni. She possessed the candid, disarming warmth common to southerners and had little use for professional boundaries at work. She happily delved into the personal problems of female colleagues, doling out tough-love advice on boyfriends and children, and celebrated their engagements and new babies. She was unhesitatingly generous. Once she lent her own large diamond earrings to a girl who was getting married, so that she could have “something borrowed” for her wedding day. Another employee with a seriously ill child turned up at an appointment with a doctor whom Donatella had recommended and found the bill already paid.

Donatella was fast becoming the life of the Versace party, sucking voluptuously on one Marlboro Red after another until her voice became a husky, smoke-cured purr. Whether in English or Italian, her rapid-fire cadences left the listener feeling a perennial half step behind. She shared the intense energy of her older brothers but had a far shorter attention span and an unnerving, feline jitteriness. She was like a tiny, tightly coiled spring. Her walk was an impatient wiggle, slowed down by her cantilevered heels.

Gianni extolled all women, including his baby sister, treating her more like a child than a peer. He was warm and touchy, flipping the hair of a girlfriend over her shoulder in an intimate gesture or complimenting her on her lipstick. He sized up a woman instantly and had a stream of exuberant suggestions as to what would flatter her most. When he trained his sunny Mediterranean charm on a woman, she felt like a princess.

“He would always say to me, ‘You’re so beautiful!’” recalled Andrea Gottleib, who was a junior assistant in the buying department at B. Altman in the 1970s. “I used to think, here’s this famous designer and he’s telling me how beautiful I am! He used to say, ‘Let me give you this shirt or dress. You would look so wonderful in it.’”7

“It was a wonderful period,” Donatella would recall ruefully. “The 1980s in Milan were a wonderful time. We had so much fun together.”8 By then, Gianni had put together a team of about two dozen young people, many in their first jobs. He often hired people on impulse, asking candidates what their astrological signs were before bringing them on. Santo had found office space for the small group in Via della Spiga 25, taking the entire top floor of the building, which ringed an airy courtyard. (Donatella once proposed lining the balcony with orchids.) The space included a salon where Gianni could hold his runway shows, but it was so cramped that he had to stage as many as three shows to accommodate all the journalists and buyers. At the time, Via della Spiga was still home to a number of old-line Milanese families and small businesses. Just below Gianni’s offices lived an old lady who complained about the ruckus his team made during their late nights preparing for shows and the fact that they commandeered the tiny, rickety elevator for days. Over time, Gianni charmed the lady and she put up with the noise.

In true Italian style, Gianni treated his new employees like an extended family. He loved playing the benevolent boss, giving his favorite employees affectionate nicknames; Bruno became “Brunotto” and Luca was dubbed “Lucotto.” At midmorning and midafternoon, Alba, his cook, served coffee or tea in porcelain cups, with biscuits or slices of homemade cake. At 1 p.m., the entire staff sat down to a family-style lunch at a long, simple table in the dining room, with Gianni proudly presiding at the head of the table. (When an employee disappointed him, however, Gianni often turned cold, ignoring the person in the office for weeks or even months.) Very often Gianni invited a visiting journalist or department store buyer to join them, drawing him or her into convivial chatter about work, family, and gossip. Alba made Tuscan dishes such as sformato di patate, a baked potato dish, or oversized spinach and ricotta ravioli. Dessert was often profiterole or torta di crema, a cream torte.

“When you were working, this wonderful smell of Alba’s cooking floated through the office,” recalled Enrico Genevois, then a young employee who dealt with graphics. “You ate better there than at a restaurant. It was wonderful. There was this sense of family. We all sat around the table laughing and joking.”9

All three Versace siblings had a sweet tooth. Gianni happily tucked in to Alba’s desserts, or the cream puffs made by the sister of his top assistant. But Donatella was very disciplined. “Donatella ate, but if there were spinach ravioli, she might have just one,” said Franco Lussana, a close friend of the family and a longtime Versace employee.10

At Christmas, Gianni threw a holiday party, where his employees dressed up in wild costumes. One year, Lussana, who is about six feet tall, came as Tina Turner. (Donatella had Sergio Rossi, who then made shoes for Versace, whip up an enormous pair of stilettos in his size—a forty-five, or fourteen in American sizes.) Donatella’s main assistant dressed up as Raffaella Carrà, a campy bleached-blond TV star who was a sort of kitsch Italian Bette Midler. Sometimes, Lussana came as Santa Claus, bearing a bag of gifts that Gianni gave to his staff, usually small pieces of jewelry or leather bags. Gianni, who didn’t like to dress up, watched his employees vamp it up and doubled over in laughter with Donatella, while Paul recorded the festivities.

As the demands on Gianni’s creativity rose along with the business, he became a voracious reader, devouring magazines, newspapers, and art books, and plundering them for ideas for new designs. An early favorite was L’abbigliamento nei secoli (Clothing Through the Centuries), a heavy volume with sumptuous images of dress styles around the world throughout history.11 When he left before dawn for a trip, he insisted on stopping to buy a thick pile of publications.

“I saw him page through art books hundreds of pages long and pick out the images that interested him without interrupting our conversation for a minute,” recalled Ferrè, the Italian journalist and friend.12 When he traveled, he scanned passersby, buildings, and landscapes for ideas.

“Anything could be a source of inspiration—a flower bed, an architectural shape, the engraving on a piece of furniture, the floor of a church,” said Patrizia Cucco, Gianni’s personal assistant from 1985 until his death.13

For a single collection of about one hundred pieces, Gianni created thousands of initial sketches on reams of paper. He then talked through the thick pile of ideas with his top two assistants, who reworked the best ones into designs with proper proportions and details. In messy handwriting that exuded impatience, Gianni scribbled notes on the polished sketches with changes he wanted.

The designs then went to modellisti, or pattern cutters, at the factory, who made samples. Good modellisti were invaluable to any designer who aspired to sell large quantities. Skilled ones knew what shapes, fabrics, and sizes worked for mass production and found ways to adapt a designer’s ideas without watering them down. (They also made up the detailed instructions on how the garment should be assembled at the factory, with coded marks to denote the width of seams, the placement of darts, and the size of pockets.) Sometimes, Gianni, anxious to squeeze the best out of his team, surreptitiously gave the same sketch to several modellisti in order to see who came up with the best sample. As his business grew, Gianni began hiring some of the seamstresses who were closing down their own shops in Milan because their older clients had died off and younger women shunned handmade wardrobes. The seamstresses made samples or modified those that came back from the factory, adding embellishments such as embroidery or lace details.

In 1982, Gianni’s experimentation brought him a breakthrough that would be one of the most important innovations in postwar fashion—and a burst of originality that helped forge the quintessential Versace look. Inspired by the material used to make metal gloves that butchers wore, he created an entirely new fabric. Working with a German craftsman, he invented a mesh composed of tiny rings of metal that were interlinked to form swaths of slinky fabric.

Initially, he used the mesh to add some Excalibur-like detail to the padded shoulders of men’s black leather jackets. He wanted to use it for women’s clothes as well, but the fabric was far too heavy. The German supplier tried using different alloys until he came up with a fabric light enough for Gianni to make a slip dress. The garment was still heavy—about fifteen pounds—so the seamstresses had to line its skinny spaghetti straps with leather strips to bear the weight. Backstage before a show, it took two dressers to help the model into it.

But Gianni hounded the supplier until he found a way to make metal mesh fine enough to drape. The fabric gathered in gentle folds and cowls without being bulky, yet was weighty enough to slide over the body, molding to a woman’s curves and glinting against bare skin. The metal mesh was a master study in the sort of contrasts that were becoming Gianni’s signature, combining the alloy’s cool toughness with the suppleness of traditional cloth. To make a dress, Gianni’s seamstresses had to unhook the hundreds of tiny links, using tiny crochet-type hooks, and reattach them according to Gianni’s pattern. The dress was also tough on the wearer: It was cold when a woman first put it on, and the links tended to scratch.

Gianni adored the new fabric, which was like putty in his hands. He used blocks of yellow, green, and silver mesh to create Picasso-inspired patterns and floating Klimt-like gold leaves. For men, he made sleeveless muscle shirts that were an instant hit at gay clubs. The mesh gowns were catnip for Italian celebrities needing red-carpet clothes that photographed well. Metal mesh dresses would feature in every collection Versace presented from 1982 until his death.

Carolyn Mahboubi, who opened a Versace franchise in Los Angeles in 1983, instantly realized how striking the dresses were: “We opened with the leather jackets and the metal mesh dresses. At the time, it was revolutionary. No one had ever done anything like that. I remember there was a Nina Ricci shop near us, and [the French designer] just looked so old compared to Versace.”14

Gianni went on to prod his silk, cotton, and wool suppliers to make their own breakthroughs. Normally, while assembling a new collection, a designer would choose fabrics from samples already available through textile suppliers. Instead, Gianni pushed the mills to devise fabrics that were wholly original. He told silk manufacturers to finish the cloth with heat in order to create rougher textures. One year, he had the silk made in a black-and-white pattern resembling a rhinoceros hide, and then applied opaque gold patches by hand to suggest splashes of mud. Another year, the surface of a black-and-white-striped silk was corroded to create a concertina effect; on the runway, the striped pattern looked like rippling animal skin.

Years of watching his mother cut patterns for clothes gave Gianni the confidence to experiment with new shapes and cuts that would have been clumsy in less skilled hands. In 1987, he showed a bright red strapless cocktail dress, its wide, overlapping bands of silk creating tiers that resembled opulent, slightly uneven wrapped bandages. Some of the bands had an irregularly placed pleat folded into them, throwing a twist into a dress that would otherwise have been unremarkable. The next year, he showed a red wool crepe coat with its right side cut off the shoulder—as if the wearer had shrugged it halfway off. The asymmetry worked because of the immaculate cut and construction of the coat.

As he traveled more and more frequently, he trolled the world’s great museums for images to appropriate for his fashions. Once, he fell in love with Art Deco design and began transposing its sharp geometric shapes to his clothes. One silk sarong had the geometric patterns of an Art Deco design lifted straight from an art book, while a little black dress had brightly colored, Kandinsky-like embroidery. Whatever his inspiration, the innovations he made were revolutionary. The kaleidoscope of new designs, colors, cuts, and fabrics he came up with were like candy for fashionable women who were looking for something new and fun, yet sophisticated.

By the mid-1980s, Gianni was working constantly, maintaining his outside contracts with Genny and Callaghan in order to subsidize the growth of his own brand. To channel all of the new ideas that came to him, he sketched in the evenings, on weekends, and during vacations, rising before dawn to visit the factories to check on samples or to meet with textile suppliers to go over new fabrics. His fashion show schedule was relentless: four shows a year for his own line plus another half a dozen for his contract brands. Despite the heavy workload, he maintained the perfectionism that is indispensable to those who have extraordinary success.

“You could never, ever say, ‘It’s not possible,’” recalled Cucco, his assistant. “That just made him more determined to do it.”15

Passionate by nature, Gianni performed his work with the spirit of someone who was doing what he was born to do—and was proving hugely successful at it. When he had a new idea, he felt as impatient as a child, pestering his team to translate a sketch into a sample. Punctual to a fault, he hounded his suppliers to deliver his fabrics faster. In meetings, his words came so fast and furious that an assistant trailed behind him, taking notes on what he said so that she could explain him afterward to his guests.

He felt an almost compulsive need to check everything that went on at his new company. He stopped unannounced at the shops to check that the clothes were perfectly folded and that the windows looked right. When he arrived, he went straight to the stockroom to see that his bestselling items, such as print shirts and black cashmere sweaters, were available in every size, growing angry at the manager if anything was out of stock.16

Acutely conscious of his image, he sat down with his public relations person to help write press releases. He had his designers make full-color illustrations of his clothes on models complete with faces and sylphlike bodies, using them as elaborate backdrops in his office when television crews arrived for interviews. He assiduously courted fashion editors, sending them free dresses and frequently inviting them to those family-style lunches with his team. Journalists who wrote favorably about his clothes received a large bouquet of flowers the same day, along with a handwritten note of thanks. But negative press reviews stung him badly. Once, a top Italian fashion critic who typically favored Armani in her reviews came for a private look at his collection. As Gianni, keen to impress the woman, took her through the works, the journalist was full of praise. When, a few days later, Gianni opened the newspaper to find her fiercely negative article, he felt bitterly disappointed. “What a bitch!” he said, bursting into tears. “She comes in here and gives me all these compliments and then turns around to write a nasty review.”17

Wanting desperately to break through abroad, Gianni was determined to learn English in order to communicate directly with journalists and department store buyers. He never studied formally but instead picked up phrases from American songs, films, and reviews of his designs in the English-speaking press. As a result, his English was rather picturesque and heavy on fashion-speak. “Darling” was his favorite endearment, while “Ees so booring” was the ultimate put-down for people and things that were, to him, unforgivably passé. He spoke with a thick accent, peppering his sentences with charming mistakes, but he didn’t mind. Once, in 1981, an interviewer asked what had inspired a particular collection. “I tink of the life,” he replied, his brow furrowed, intent on making himself understood. “Dee life today is so speedy. I tink of the woman today. Is so deeferent.”

“His broken English was part of his charm,” said Dawn Mello, who was buying for B. Altman, one of the first U.S. department stores to buy Versace in the 1970s. “He came up with some stock phrases for the store appearances and did this mix of Italian and English.”18 Within a few years, through pure determination, he was able to speak fluently, while still charming interlocutors with the occasional Italian phrase, most often “Basta!” (“Enough!”)

Gianni’s vision of Versace’s future was so grandiose that at times it strained the people he worked with. For instance, franchisees were required to decorate the shops using designs drawn up by Versace-hired architects (who, in turn, paid a fee to the house for each shop they outfitted). Invariably, Gianni pushed for opulent designs that cost the franchisees a fortune.

“If you left it to Gianni, you would have St. Paul’s Cathedral,” said Roberto Devorik, who owned a London Versace franchise in the 1980s. “He wanted everything. Then Santo would be more real.”19

Gianni could be autocratic sometimes, believing that his vision was the right one. He pushed the franchisees to buy items even if they didn’t find them salable. Once Devorik refused to buy some Versace moccasins that sported garish gold medusas, reckoning they would never sell in the understated UK market. “But these shoes are a masterpiece!” Gianni protested, his high-pitched voice rising.

“Gianni, a shoe can never be a masterpiece,” Devorik shot back. “I don’t like them. I find them very nouveau riche. If you want the shoes in the store, you can pay for them yourself.” Gianni, offended and angry, abruptly slammed down the phone.20

In the atelier, Gianni was an implacable perfectionist who drove his staff to their limit. Once, the night before a show, he decided to replace his suits’ fitted skirts with light, diaphanous ones featuring a double layer of organza that had been printed with flower patterns. His seamstresses spent the entire night making twenty skirts—the flower patterns layered precisely to create the right look—for the show the next day.

Gianni had “an almost paranoid need for perfection,” one top assistant said. “He threw his heart and soul into his work and he demanded the most from those of us who worked for him.” Donatella often melted the tension caused by one of Gianni’s outbursts, soothing the hurt feelings he left in his wake. Once, after Gianni brusquely criticized the work of an assistant, Donatella made up for it by buying the upset young man a plane ticket to New York to visit his boyfriend.21

But Gianni knew how much he needed his staff and often tried to make up for the pressure he put on them, too. During the frantic days before a show, he brought his seamstresses tea and biscuits and gave each one a small, colorful bouquet of flowers, along with a personal message of thanks. When he was on vacation, he brought back small, thoughtful gifts for his closest associates.

“He once gave me a silver tray that he found in Egypt and another time it was a caftan from India,” Cucco said. “It was wonderful. It made you feel special, that he had thought of you.”22

At the end of 1985, when the family gathered for Christmas, they had something special to celebrate. By then, the clan had established a tradition of spending the holiday together at Villa Fontanelle, the sumptuous home that Gianni had recently finished restoring. In 1977, Gianni had discovered the villa during one of his frequent trips to Lake Como, the finger-shaped lake thirty miles north of Milan, where many of Versace’s silk manufacturers were located. He’d fallen in love with the lake, with its limpid light and winding one-lane roads. Since the eighteenth century, Lake Como had lured aristocratic and bourgeoisie families looking for summer homes, first from Milan, and later from England, Switzerland, and Germany. Today the cemeteries around the lake contain tombs of the many expatriates who retired to Como.

One day, on a visit to Moltrasio, a tiny town on Lake Como’s western shore, Gianni discovered Villa Fontanelle. He was bewitched by the house’s history. In 1865, an eccentric English nobleman, Charles Currie, built the mansion, where, legend has it, he spent entire days wandering nude in the villa’s sheltered garden. Villa Fontanelle consisted of three structures: a custodian’s house, a dependance (outbuilding), and the main villa, a three-story rectangular structure with a large terrace overlooking the lake and a small dock. Currie dubbed his twenty-seven-room home Villa Fontanelle—or “little fountains”—because of the natural springs bubbling in a grotto on the grounds.

But by the time Gianni saw Villa Fontanelle, the mansion had been largely abandoned, its walls swollen with damp and mold, their elaborate frescoes nearly destroyed, the mosaic floors in total disrepair. The newly rich found Lake Como drab and unexciting, preferring trendier vacation spots in Sardinia and Portofino. Many of the grand villas around the lake were empty husks left to deteriorate by owners who could no longer afford to keep them up.

Gianni didn’t have enough money at the time to acquire Currie’s entire estate, so he started out by buying one piece of it, paying eight hundred million lire ($485,000) for the first small sections. A close friend bought most of the rest. (Years later, Gianni would buy out the friend to own the entire estate.) By the time the family gathered there for Christmas in 1985, Gianni had brought the villa back to life in grand neoclassical style. He hired Queen Elizabeth’s landscaper to claw the gardens back from decades of neglect. He planted yellow and red roses, citrus groves, pink begonias, and boxwoods, and built fountains with water running from the mouth of medusa heads. A swing hung from a large tree that also served as shelter for outdoor lunches. He installed marble bathrooms, restored the frescoed ceilings, and designed an all-pink bedroom for Donatella. Gianni’s renovation of Villa Fontanelle opened the doors to the renaissance of Lake Como, which would once again become a favorite playground of the elite, from Russian oligarchs to Hollywood stars such as George Clooney.

By the mid-1980s, Villa Fontanelle was Gianni’s escape. He and Antonio would drive out to Lake Como, often with prospective sound tracks for his next runway show playing on the car’s stereo system. Gianni adored the mansion and, in turn, it was to be the site of some of the Versace family’s happiest times together. Over the previous few years, on December 8, the Catholic Church’s Feast of the Immaculate Conception and the traditional start of the Italian Christmas season, Gianni began having his favorite gardener erect a twelve-foot Scandinavian fir tree and decorate it with glass Christmas bulbs, ribbons, and lights. He had an eighteenth-century Neapolitan nativity scene set up in the main living room. Just before Christmas, Gianni personally helped arrange the pile of gifts under the tree. Nora and Nino flew up to join the rest of the family, where they played cards together for hours in the library.

Nino, however, never felt comfortable with his son’s opulent lifestyle. Soon after the family began gathering in Como, he approached Gianni one morning. “Gianni, I didn’t sleep well at all last night,” he told him. Gianni, who had given his father his grand two-room bedroom suite, asked him what was wrong. “I just can’t get used to that big room,” his father said. “Don’t you have a smaller one you can give me?” Nino came to visit only reluctantly, always accompanied by Nora. Once, he felt so ill at ease that he slipped off to the airport to fly back to Reggio without telling his children.23

But that Christmas would be a special one. Donatella had recently announced that she was pregnant. Gianni was thrilled at the news, although during the pregnancy, he was privately horrified at his sister’s huge weight gain, her arms and neck ballooning in size. Her condition hardly slowed Donatella down. She gave up neither her Marlboros nor her stilettos, even late in the pregnancy. On June 30, 1986, at a private clinic in Milan, Donatella gave birth to a girl by Cesarean section. Gianni proudly helped choose the name of his new niece: Allegra Donata Beck.