aS THE LAST ORGAN PEALS OF THE MEMORIAL SERVICE FADED and the final fashion luminaries and celebrities left the Duomo di Milano to head for the airport, the enormity of their loss washed over Donatella and Santo like a cold wave. Their adult lives had been built around their brother, defined entirely by his talent, fame, and ambition. Ironically, Gianni, Donatella, and Santo had always avoided flying in airplanes together in the belief that the company would be lost if deprived of the trio. But the truth was that Gianni was the only one who counted. His was the last word in family disputes; his opinion was the one that trumped all others in big decisions. The fierce family ties that bound the three actually relied on the force of his outsized personality, with Donatella and Santo dutifully playing the supporting roles assigned them. The company, in turn, was little more than an extension of their family dynamic.
Gianni’s sudden absence left a chasm that would quickly overwhelm his siblings, still reeling from the pain and shock of their brother’s violent death. Santo immediately grasped the gravity of Gianni’s loss, both for the family’s integrity and the company’s fortunes. But the ever-capable elder brother who took care of everything was now facing a problem that even he couldn’t fix.
For Donatella, Gianni’s death meant a brutal end to an extended adolescence. In the last years of Gianni’s life, she’d been agitating for her brother to treat her as an equal instead of like a spoiled kid sister or blithe company mascot. Little did she realize how much Gianni’s personality and talent had shielded her from her own personal defects and demons. As the world’s attention fell on her in the wake of Gianni’s death, Donatella felt like an actress in a film, forced to play the role of the dignified, responsible adult, even as she felt utterly alone and lost.
In the midst of mourning Gianni, Donatella and Santo had to quickly show Versace employees, retailers, and rivals that they were in control of their brother’s company. In the days between Gianni’s death and the Mass at the Duomo, Santo and Donatella briefly considered hiring an outside designer to replace their brother; they even drew up a short list of names that included Karl Lagerfeld. Very quickly, however, they agreed that Donatella would step into Gianni’s shoes. But even as Versace’s spokeswoman drafted the communiqué announcing the decision, Donatella felt like a fraud.
Donatella realized the immensity of her task the very night of the memorial service. After the Mass, she retreated to her office in Via Gesù with Julie Mannion, an executive at Keeble Cavaco & Duka, Inc., a prominent New York PR firm that for years helped stage the Versace runway shows. Mannion, a veteran who worked with a slate of top houses, helped write out a calendar for each of Versace’s upcoming collections, from the purchase of the fabrics to the ordering of final runway samples.
The calendars drove home to Donatella just how much Gianni had done, even during his illness. A classic control freak, Gianni had checked every press release, every licensed product, and every order for new fabric. Other fashion companies might have split responsibilities into clear divisions and departments, but Gianni had still tried to run Versace as a scrappy one-man show. He liked having a small, tightly knit design team who could come up with shopwindows one day and a new skirt the next. He was the one to decide which ad images to run in the United States or France to coincide with the delivery of a dress or suit he wanted to push that season. He had carried so many details around in his head that his sudden absence created a thousand loose ends Donatella had to tie together—and quickly.
To manage everything, she needed a far larger group than Gianni had relied on. Together she and Mannion made plans to assemble separate teams for the couture, men’s, and women’s lines, as well as for Versus and the other brands. She shied away from using her brother’s designers, perhaps aware that she could never live up to Gianni in their minds, and branded them passé and out of touch. “We need young blood here!” she told an assistant. “I want to work with young people, not all these old fogies.” Many of Gianni’s assistants, already grieving for their charismatic boss and indeed doubtful of his sister’s abilities, were hurt and stung by her words.
Soon after the funeral, Donatella, Paul, and their children fled the ongoing media barrage and flew to Necker Island, the seventy-four-acre private island in the British Virgin Islands owned by UK magnate Richard Branson. The island, which accommodated only twenty-four people at a time at a cost of at least twelve thousand dollars per day, was a popular hideaway among the Versaces’ celebrity friends, including Sting and Princess Diana. Guests slept in Indonesian-style bedrooms under white canopies of mosquito netting. (Meanwhile, Santo retreated with his family to an island in Greece.)
But the sybaritic setting offered Donatella little rest. Throughout the month, Donatella fielded résumés of design candidates and conducted phone interviews. The next runway show, the spring-summer collection, was scheduled for October 9, 1997. Before leaving for Miami, Gianni had worked up some rough sketches and ordered the fabrics—he was going to revisit the Prince of Wales fabrics he’d revolutionized in the 1980s—but most of the collection still had to be completed. Donatella had to have her team in place by the end of August if she hoped to have the collection finished in time for the show.
With a free hand, Donatella could now push Versace in the direction she had fruitlessly championed in battles with Gianni, starting with the hiring of a new team. She filled the atelier with young foreign designers fresh out of such prestigious fashion schools as Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. These edgy young Brits and Americans, many in their early twenties, venerated the now-reigning minimalist look: Prada’s prim dresses, the eccentric clothes by new Belgian designers such as Olivier Theyskens, and the sharply tailored, ultraslim men’s suits by Dior’s new designer Hedi Slimane. For them, Gianni’s designs looked baroque. Very few of them had ever worn his clothes.
Donatella then drafted stylists who were the leading champions of the minimalist wave, ones who had helped stage Prada’s and Jil Sander’s runway shows and had set the same tone in the ad campaigns and editorial shoots they put together for influential magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. She summoned the group to Milan to start work the last Saturday of August. Some of her new assistants turned up in the atelier in the slouchy fashion uniform of the moment—cargo pants, tennis shoes, and quirky T-shirts. Donatella had hired them to co-opt their funky design sense, but she drew a line on their wardrobe choices. “You can’t dress like that here!” she barked at one startled new hire. “Go down to Prada or wherever you want, but get some proper clothes. Don’t come back if you’re not in heels.”
Early that Sunday, Donatella and her new designers arrived in the office to the news that Princess Diana had died during the night in a grisly car crash in Paris, as she was being chased by a pack of paparazzi. The group spent the day huddled around the television watching updates from France and the United Kingdom. On stands in the atelier lay the couture dresses that Gianni had put aside for Diana just six weeks earlier. Versace seamstresses had been applying the finishing touches in order to send them to the princess after her summer holiday. Donatella, badly shaken by the news, faxed Prince Charles a personal note of condolence and made plans to fly to London for the funeral the next weekend. Gianni and Diana, two of the early masters—and targets—of the new media age, had died just weeks apart; the voracious interest in their deaths marked a turning point in the sort of nonstop tabloid television coverage that would soon become routine.
As soon as Donatella’s new group got back to work, the first problems emerged. She and a prominent stylist she had hired were scanning a large board that held stapled swatches of the Prince of Wales fabric that Gianni had chosen. The British stylist twisted his face at Gianni’s choice. “How sad!” he commented wryly. He then took a pair of scissors and began slashing at a sample dress to create a frayed, edgy look.
“But Gianni’s woman is a sexy woman!” Donatella protested. Members of Gianni’s old team, aghast at the stylist’s work, watched as the two debated intensely in English. Later, when one of them cautiously questioned Donatella about whether to follow the stylist’s direction, she said, “Just go ahead and let him do this for the time being. I’ll fix it later.”
But it was already clear that Donatella was wholly unprepared to step into the role of leader of a badly shaken company. In her brother’s house, she had always played the role of the friend, the carefree muse, the accessorizer, the office confidante. Now she had to become the boss, commanding respect and exuding confidence in her decisions. She was painfully aware that everyone—her brother’s loyalists inside the company, the fashion world, Versace’s competitors—was watching her, skeptical that the kid sister could step into her brother’s shoes. At meetings with her designers in the atelier, she looked like a tiny, frightened bird. She spoke in a quiet voice that her team struggled to hear and was so nervous that she trembled at times. Some members of her team had to resist the urge to scoop her up in a hug to comfort her. “She was like a little baby,” recalled one longtime associate. “You just wanted to hug her right there.”1
She struggled to remember what her brother had taught her during his illness, but she was too overwhelmed to think straight. Moreover, she felt trapped. If she fell back on Gianni’s well-worn themes, critics would blast her for resting on her brother’s laurels. Her instinct told her to strike out in a new modern path that would set her apart from Gianni, but she lacked a clear, compelling vision, and if she strayed too far from the classic Gianni look, those same critics would blast her for denying her brother’s legacy. She had excelled as a brilliant sounding board and editor for her brother’s ideas, but she lacked the creativity and ingenuity to conjure up her own ideas from scratch.
As the weeks before her first solo show slipped by, Donatella’s moods varied wildly. Some days she was calm and determined to master her new role, cutting through the myriad decisions before her as if felling a line of trees. Other days, she sobbed in the atelier in full view of her staff. In the weeks after Gianni’s death, she’d grown even thinner and her face was drawn and tired.
“At least Gianni had me to help him,” she lamented often. “But who do I have? I don’t have anyone!”
While struggling to gain control of the atelier, Donatella received another serious blow—this one from her late brother. In early September, Luciano Severini, the notary who had drawn up Gianni’s will just a year before, sent letters to Donatella, Santo, and Antonio convening them to his offices near the Duomo. Along with Paul, the trio settled into their seats opposite Severini’s imposing desk. He pulled a brief, handwritten document from a file and began to slowly read it out loud.
“On this date, September 16, 1996, I, Gianni Versace, revoke my last will dated May 11, 1990. I hereby name my niece Allegra my sole heir. I leave to Antonio D’Amico a payment of 50 million lire each month, to be adjusted by inflation after my death. I also leave to Antonio D’Amico the right to live in any of my properties: Via Gesù 12 in Milan, Miami, New York and the house in Via Porta Nuova in Milan, currently owned by Gianni Versace SpA. I leave my art collection to my nephew Daniel Paul Beck.”
When the notary finished reading the brief document, a stunned silence hung in the air. Each of the four looked at one another in shock, struggling for a moment to digest the significance of what Gianni had done. Donatella’s eyes bulged as she speechlessly turned to Paul. Next to her Santo was slack-jawed, fighting for a moment to regain his composure.
Gianni had left absolutely nothing to his siblings—not a single share in the company, no personal token of affection. He had not even mentioned them. Moreover, he had entirely ignored Santo’s children, betraying an indifference to Francesca and Antonio that stung his brother badly. The year before, Santo had agreed to sell Gianni a 5 percent stake in the company on the condition that Gianni would leave the holding to Santo’s son, Antonio, in his will. But at a family lunch a few weeks before Gianni left for Miami, Santo was furious to hear that his younger brother still hadn’t made the change to his will.
“Gianni, what are you waiting for?” Santo demanded. “Just get it done!”
“I know, I know,” Gianni replied. “I promise to do it as soon as I get back from Miami. Don’t worry.”2
His brother flew to Miami with the 1996 will still in place. His siblings would always wonder what else he might have changed had he fixed the appointment with the notary before that tragic trip. Instead, his rash decision to leave half of an empire worth as much as $2 billion to a delicate eleven-year-old girl still stood. In that moment of anger at his siblings, he had convinced himself that he was protecting his company by bestowing his stake on Allegra. He never considered the impact his decision would have on the people who had worked for him for so long, on his two siblings, or on Allegra herself. He could hardly have imagined that a single, handwritten document, scribbled in anger, would set his company and his family on a path to near destruction.
Santo was the first to break the silence in the notary’s office. While he was the quickest of the four to grasp the significance of what Gianni had done, he put a brave face on the news, determined as ever to maintain family unity. “If these were Gianni’s wishes, we’ll respect them,” he said in a somber tone.3
Donatella, recovering her composure, abruptly asked Severini for a copy of her own will and left the room without a word to the others. She was still reeling from the news that Gianni had snubbed her entirely—but had left virtually his entire fortune and control of his company to her young daughter.
Antonio stood up slowly, still absorbing Gianni’s generous effort to take care of him after his death with the use of his magnificent houses and a monthly stipend that would keep him in comfort. But Donatella’s brusque exit reminded Antonio that without Gianni there to protect him, he would have to bear the full brunt of Donatella’s animus toward him. In the weeks after Gianni’s death, she had virtually ignored him, leaving Antonio with the feeling that Gianni’s family held him responsible in some way for their brother’s violent death. After fifteen years of vacations, birthday parties, and Christmases together, he realized that his days as a member of the Versace clan were over.
Santo confirmed that feeling. “I think you had better find yourself a lawyer,” he told Antonio in a clipped tone, before walking briskly away.
On a gray, overcast afternoon in early September 1997, a parade of celebrities, most of them scrupulously dressed in Versace, ascended the grand marble staircase of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The day before, museum workers had mounted a white awning with side flaps over the entire staircase to shield the notables from the phalanx of reporters and photographers that would gather out front on Fifth Avenue. New York City police officers stood by to keep the media at bay. Since the death of Princess Diana the week before, paparazzi had become the bane of celebrities, and some of these famous people had attended her funeral the previous weekend.
Inside the museum’s Temple of Dendur, the soaring glassed-in atrium that was a favorite setting for the city’s glitziest parties, a memorial service for Gianni was getting under way. Robert Isabell, Manhattan’s premier party planner, had decked the space out with masses of white flowers. In a press release, Versace’s PR office declared the event off-limits to the media, saying it was a private memorial for just “family and friends.” But privacy was an alien concept at the house of Versace. Donatella’s PR chief admitted a journalist from Condé Nast’s ever-compliant Women’s Wear Daily, who could be trusted to write a flattering account of the service and duly drop names of Versace’s A-list “friends”: Whitney Houston, Jon Bon Jovi, Ralph Lauren, Tom Ford, Donald Trump, Courtney Love, and Woody Allen.
One celebrity after another stood to pay tribute to Gianni. Madonna read a poem she had composed herself. Anna Wintour, famous for her chilly reserve, choked up as she recalled the monthly faxes Gianni sent her with punctilious comments on each issue of Vogue.
“It’s hard for me to believe that I’ll never talk to him on the phone again,” Elton John told the group. The singer then sat down at a piano to sing “Live Like Horses,” one of Gianni’s favorite songs.
Then Donatella stood to make her first public appearance since the funeral in Milan. It was her official debut as the face of Versace. Her short speech moved many guests to tears. “Each time Gianni asked me to do what back then seemed like these impossible things, I’d tell him I couldn’t do it,” she recalled, speaking nervously in her thick Italian accent. “I’d tell him I couldn’t do it, and he’d tell me I could. I did it. He was always the most exciting person I knew. He was my best friend.”
After the memorial, Donatella invited a clutch of stars back to Gianni’s townhouse. The New York home had been Gianni’s final toy. The previous October, when the renovations were finally complete, Gianni threw the party of the season, gathering A-listers such as John Kennedy, Jr., Richard Gere, and Hugh Grant to inaugurate his new home. Gianni happily played tour guide of the house, which showcased an art collection that included a portrait of Gianni by Andy Warhol and important works by Roy Lichtenstein and Jean-Michel Basquiat. But those paled in comparison to Gianni’s stunning new collection of twenty-five Picassos, which glowed in the light of dozens of candles. It was the collection that had sparked the brutal argument with Santo just a year before.
That carefree October evening, during which Donatella had played the witty consort to Gianni’s glittering court, seemed a distant memory. Now a small circle of guests, including Madonna, her brother Christopher Ciccone, Lisa Marie Presley, Luciano Pavarotti, and Courtney Love, gathered with Donatella in the townhouse’s secluded garden. She changed out of the black outfit she’d worn for her speech and into tight white jeans and a matching T-shirt and made subdued small talk with her celebrity friends.
Just after 10 p.m., Madonna, who prefers to be in bed by 11 p.m., left the townhouse. As soon as she was gone, her brother Christopher Ciccone and Love went into one of Gianni’s guest bedrooms—where Love pulled out a large packet of coke. They expertly cut the powder into neat lines and began snorting it. Madonna, who hated drugs, frequently berated her brother for his cocaine habit, but Ciccone and Donatella often shared hits together while out clubbing in Miami Beach. Shortly afterward, Donatella came upon the scene and beckoned Ciccone and Love into a sitting room nearby, where she joined in. But the coke hardly seemed to lift her mood.
“Chreestopher, Chreestopher, play ‘Candle in the Wind’ for me,” she pleaded. He got up and slipped a CD into the expensive stereo system. That week, the song had soared to the top of the charts after Elton John reworked his classic ballad to honor Princess Diana at her funeral. For Donatella, the sad song, originally a paean to Marilyn Monroe and her early death, might have been a fitting tribute to her brother. When the song ended, she begged Christopher to play it again and again.4
When Donatella returned to Milan, just a month remained before the show. Feeling entirely adrift, she told herself over and over that even Versace’s fiercest detractors wouldn’t have the heart to trash her debut collection—yet she couldn’t shake the pressure of having the world’s eyes on her. “You have to hold on,” she told herself every morning. “You can’t fall apart.”5
The show, as usual, would be staged in the courtyard of Via Gesù. Ever since Gianni’s death, Donatella had become fixated on security and told her assistants to ensure that guards had completely secured the building. Afraid of being overwhelmed by the crush of well-wishers after the show, she ordered her press office to limit the number of backstage passes they issued; she personally vetted the list of the guests who received them.
On the day of the dress rehearsal, an unseasonable heat settled on Milan, which compounded the fatigue the team felt after weeks of marathon days. Donatella had taken particular care in choosing the models, falling back on the role that she felt most comfortable with. She assembled a mix of new girls such as Stella Tennant and Karen Elson—the mannequin Gianni had so disliked at the July couture show—and traditional Versace models such as Naomi Campbell and Linda Evangelista. As Donatella oversaw the last-minute run-through, a white butterfly floated among her team. It seemed to linger, refusing to go away.
“That’s my brother,” Donatella repeated, as if she could conjure up his presence by wishing it. “That’s Gianni. It’s his spirit.”
On the day of the show, Donatella presided over the standard press conference that walked the fashion journalists through the themes of the collection they would see that evening. Clad in black, she lit one cigarette after another as she nervously reeled off her inspiration.
“These are clothes for a woman who is sweet and tough at the same time, someone who can survive life’s catastrophes with dignity and stand on her own two feet,” she said as if reciting from a script. She then took a slow drag on her cigarette and her voice nearly broke as she continued. “I’m terrified,” she admitted to the clutch of journalists, many of whom had known her brother for years. “Gianni is irreplaceable. I would like to be judged for what I am doing, not compared to him. If you compare me to him, I can only fall short.”6
That evening, under a giant tent set up in the courtyard at Via Gesù, the lights dimmed briefly and the music surged, signaling the audience to take their seats. Gianni’s old rivals had all turned out to support his little sister, although the effect was only to ratchet up the pressure on Donatella. Giorgio Armani, Donna Karan, Karl Lagerfeld, and Miuccia Prada took their places in the front row, ready to scrutinize Gianni’s little sister’s work. Demi Moore, Peter Gabriel, Cher, Boy George, and Rupert Everett sat nearby.
Laser lights burst from the screen and “Candy Perfume Girl,” a new, unreleased single by Madonna, boomed over the speakers. Neon squiggles in white, green, and blue shot along the runway. Naomi and Kate Moss sauntered out first, a bright spotlight following them down the length of the runway. The first dresses were funky variations on the traditional Prince of Wales fabric. Donatella had used the gray check pattern in halter dresses, silk chiffon camisoles, and as ribbons running through silk evening gowns. Then followed a mishmash of themes and ideas, from bright red pantsuits to a bold blue dress with a galaxy motif drawn in pink to rubberized silk dresses that looked as if they’d been poured onto the models. Girls in bright green bikinis followed others clad in tiny pink hot pants.
While some individual pieces clicked, the collection as a whole fell woefully short of Gianni’s work. It was scattershot and confused, a muddle of references to Gianni’s winning themes and the street-inspired look Donatella had pushed at Versus. Donatella was groping for a way to update her brother’s label, to make it more hip and relevant. She had brought in the new young designers and the powerful stylists to help her find a fresh look—without losing the Versace DNA. But without a clear vision of her own, she was buffeted by the jumble of ideas her team pitched her while feeling pressure from legacy Versace employees to stick to Gianni’s familiar tracks.
At the end of the twenty-minute parade, Donatella came out for her bow. She wore a simple black sheath with a deep slit up the left side. She had on very little makeup and her ironed hair looked slightly rough, her extensions imperfectly done. The audience jumped to their feet as she made her way to the end of the runway with the reluctance of a pirate walking a plank. She kept her eyes fixed on the ground, ignoring the models around her, her face contorted as she struggled to control herself. After a rushed bow, she retreated back up the runway, her face buried in her hands.
Once safely backstage, she nearly collapsed, sobbing in the arms of her assistants. For fifteen minutes, she stood visibly shaking as her assistants and thirty seamstresses formed a circle around her, clapping and stomping their congratulations. The VIP guests began streaming in. Armani, accompanied personally by a grim-faced Santo, was among the first to break through the crowd, hugging Donatella and kissing her wet cheeks. “I miss my brother so much,” she told him. “I’ve never felt so overwhelmed in all my life.”
House music continued to pound over the sound system as the television cameras jostled hard for a shot of Donatella and Santo with the VIPs. Reporters scrambled to extract a verdict on the show from the rival designers. “Very interesting, very interesting,” Lagerfeld murmured cryptically as he pulled away from the reporters.
“It looked very good,” said Miuccia Prada encouragingly. “Donatella must and can improve, but you can see how hard she worked.”7
Gianni loomed in absence. Both brother and sister recognized it that day.
“My phone doesn’t ring like it used to,” Donatella told the journalists. “Gianni used to call me for anything, even to describe to me the color of the roses that had bloomed in his garden that morning.”
Santo stood nearby, pale and drawn. “How I miss Gianni’s phone calls,” he told one reporter. “I even miss our fights about whether he could buy another Picasso. We were side by side for fifty years. And now he is gone.”8