iN JANUARY OF EVERY YEAR FROM 1960 UNTIL HIS DEATH IN 2008, Richard Blackwell published a list of the worst-dressed celebrities. The list, laced with bitchy put-downs and high-camp commentary, mercilessly skewered the great and the good. The style guru once dubbed Barbra Streisand as “the masculine bride of Frankenstein.” The media, looking for an antidote to so much fawning celebrity coverage, gave Blackwell’s acid-tipped list ample play each year. In January 2003, Donatella Versace landed on Blackwell’s list, alongside Anna Nicole Smith and Princess Anne. Donatella, he wrote, “resembles a flash-fried Venus, stuck in a Miami strip mall. Time to toss the peroxide once and for all.” To the dismay of Versace’s press office, newspapers and magazines eagerly picked up the withering description. It was hardly the image that Donatella wanted to project for herself or for her business.
As a young woman, Donatella had had an alluring prettiness, but by the time she landed on Blackwell’s list, sunlight had leathered her beautiful alabaster skin and plastic surgery had ruined her features, leaving her with an appearance so cartoonish it made her the butt of jokes. The heavy makeup she’d always worn to create a vampish image now looked like a painted mask. With her frozen face, odd-shaped nose, and lips collagen-injected into a “trout pout,” Donatella at forty-seven had become an outlandish camp goddess. Her legendary discipline at the dinner table was also crumbling. Instead of the sculpted physique she’d maintained in her thirties and early forties, rolls of fat now spilled over her waistband. She stopped sporting the ultra-miniskirts she’d worn for thirty years. She doubled up her efforts to lose weight, trying to subsist some days on just Diet Coke, strong espressos, and dozens of Marlboro Reds, stubbing them out distractedly in ashtrays the staff scattered for her throughout Via Gesù. But it didn’t work. When she emerged for her bow at the end of shows, looking dumpy next to a willowy model half her age, her forced smile was an expression of painful self-consciousness.
Ironically, her shocking appearance increased her fame even more. But instead of projecting cool, Donatella was becoming a caricature representing the extremes of the fashion world. Her physical appearance and hard-living style had become so notorious that Saturday Night Live turned it into a recurring spoof. One of the television show’s lead comediennes, Maya Rudolph, played Donatella as a foot-stomping diva, cigarette and glass in hand. Following her everywhere was a clutch of hunky male assistants clad in leather trousers and stripped to the waist, gyrating flamboyantly. “I am Donatella Versace. Welcome to my show where I smoke and look good,” says Rudolph to open the sketch. The real Donatella was a remarkably good sport about Rudolph’s impersonation. She appeared with the comedienne at Radio City Music Hall for the VH1/ Vogue fashion awards, walking onto the stage and deadpanning, “What are you all doing in my bathroom?”
Donatella’s appearance on Blackwell’s list kicked off a year in which she and the company would careen from crisis to crisis. Her life was going off the rails, but she didn’t have the courage to admit it. Inside her cocoon, she could blame everyone but herself for the chaos around her. As her failures piled up for all the world to see, she fell into a vicious cycle. The more things spun out of control, the faster she ran from her problems. Swinging from fits of self-hatred to stubborn displays of megalomania, she was at a loss about how to escape the painful loop. It took bigger and bigger hits of cocaine to maintain this state of denial. But time was running out.
By the spring of 2003, the management of the company was breaking down completely. Executives were tired of fighting with her about her spending and watching the house lurch forward without a strategy for recovery. In short order, the house’s chief operating officer, chief financial officer, and two board members all quit. Versace was rudderless. As a result, it missed the rare opportunities for rescue that came along.
At Versace’s show that March, Ron Frasch, the chief executive of Bergdorf Goodman, was pleasantly surprised with the collection, particularly a series of corsetlike evening dresses that tied up the back and came in soft pastel shades of green and pink. Bergdorf had long stopped carrying Versace, but the store was selling oodles of sexy designs by Cavalli and Dolce & Gabbana. Frasch thought Versace could provide a similar shot of excitement. Given the perilous state of the house, it was an enormous leap of faith on his part. He decided to stage a trunk show, a private viewing of a designer’s collection for a store’s regular clients. If the trunk show did well, Bergdorf would carve out a space for Versace on its selling floor. The store put Versace designs in its windows and featured them in full-page ads in the New York Times under the headline “Very Bergdorf.” At the trunk show, Bergdorf clients snapped up the corset dresses, as well as white moleskin coats, leather bags, and black leather jackets. In all, the store sold $620,000 worth of goods—far less than the $5 million the store pocketed for a Chanel trunk show around the same time, but enough to green-light a permanent space.1
But by then the management vacuum in Milan had paralyzed Versace. When Bergdorf asked for help in designing the space, it couldn’t wrench a decision—or money—out of the house, so it built a simple white box. Requests to Donatella to schedule personal appearances in the store went unanswered. Disastrously, the store received very few of the pieces it ordered. Within a few months, Frasch filled the space with other brands.2 Other retailers took note, and faith in the house sank to a new low.
In June 2003, Versace published the disastrous 2002 accounts. Sales were falling, net debt had risen from 100 million euros in 2001 to 130 million euros a year later, and the house posted a loss of 5.5 million euros. (The payment from Luxottica pushed the operating profit into the black, thus preventing Versace from defaulting on the bond, but it still had a net loss for the year.)
But more embarrassingly, the company’s auditors finally called Donatella on her habit of using the house as a personal bank machine. Corporate auditors are independent watchdogs who have the responsibility of making sure the balance sheet conforms with accounting standards. For several years, they had stayed silent as Donatella’s expenditures grew. But in 2003, they finally objected to a series of costs on the company’s books that were clearly unjustified. They slapped a stern statement on the annual report demanding that Donatella reimburse Versace for her personal expenditures and warning that the house’s soaring costs threatened to destroy the company. Santo had battled with the auditors for weeks, trying to convince them not to attach the note, but the problems were too big for them to ignore. The warning was a serious blow to Versace’s corporate credibility. But Donatella still refused to reimburse the house for the expenditures.
Versace’s creditors were also growing alarmed. In just a year’s time—in July 2004—Versace would have to pay back the 100-million-euro bond, but its finances were clearly falling apart. The search for an outside investor had been fruitless. The management vacancies at the top of the company were hard to fill; fashion’s best executives refused to risk going to work there. When the bond came due, Versace would need to convince its bankers to refinance the loan, but if the company remained in its current state, they would hardly agree. If the banks cut off new financing, Versace could go bankrupt.
Another deadline began to loom as well: Allegra’s eighteenth birthday. The young woman would finally come into her controlling stake on June 30, 2004, just days before the bond came due. Since Gianni’s death, Allegra had been a shadowy presence that haunted the house. She virtually never turned up in the Versace offices, although she did occasionally appear in the front row of her mother’s runway shows. Once, she was seated next to Mariah Carey, whose ample bust spilled voluptuously over the top of a Versace gown, making Allegra appear shockingly thin in contrast. She looked tiny and frail next to the hulking bodyguards who trailed her everywhere she went.
During her rare public appearances, she seemed painfully uncomfortable. She rarely smiled, often wearing a wary, slightly wounded look when photographers jostled for a picture of her. Hawkeyed PR people kept curious journalists from even approaching the girl at the shows. Allegra’s anorexia was an open secret—just a glimpse of her rickety frame said it all—but the Versace press office convinced the media to refrain from writing about the young heiress as long as she was a minor.
But despite her illness, Allegra was growing into that rare creature—a celebrity child who wears her wealth and extravagant upbringing lightly. She was raised among the offspring of the world’s most prominent celebrities, spending birthdays and holidays with the children of Madonna, Demi Moore, Sting, Eric Clapton, and Anna Wintour. As Donatella’s daughter and Gianni’s heir, she had lifelong membership in the rarefied world of the truly rich and famous. She traveled in private jets, learned to swim in the pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel, and spoke several languages; she seemed as comfortable in the celebrity hothouse of Los Angeles as in the Eurotrash circles of Milan or London. When she spoke English, she pronounced her words with a light British lilt that was a product of the expensive expatriate school she attended in Milan.
As a child, there had been something special about Allegra, a poise and self-possession that made adults want to engage her. As she approached adulthood, she still had an aura that generated a great deal of fascination, fed in no small part by her reclusiveness. She could easily have been one of those heirs who grow into spoiled, petulant monsters and wind up in the tabloid gossip columns for their antics. Instead, she was growing into a remarkably unassuming, down-to-earth young woman, the trials of her family life and her illness having matured her beyond her years. She was more diligent than her mother in calling Zia Nora in Reggio, much to the delight of the old lady. With friends, who called her “Allie,” she never sought to be the center of attention or tried to exploit her status. She inherited her mother’s dry wit and sense of irony but not her grandeur or megalomania, and she was the first to joke about her surreal upbringing.
Like Donatella, Allegra wasn’t a classic beauty but possessed a mysterious physical allure. Growing up amid people who spent much of their waking hours critiquing clothes and appearances, she was extremely fashion conscious but not ostentatious. While other girls her age struggled with grooming, makeup, and hairstyles, Allegra had a preternaturally mature sense of how to put herself together. She loved girly, colorful clothes, mixing H&M pieces with Miss Sixty denim or Versace slip skirts. But, despite her good looks—she had pretty, shoulder-length brown hair and dark brown eyes—she shied away from dating even as her peers began to break off into couples. In high school, she became interested in acting, perhaps as an escape from the tensions at home. She had a regal sense of presence that came from growing up in the limelight and being the constant center of attention. Years of dance training made her more graceful and refined in the way she moved, her extreme thinness adding an arresting sense of fragility.
As she headed into her senior year, she applied and was accepted to Brown University, the Ivy League college in Providence, Rhode Island. It was a good fit for Allegra. Brown is a popular destination for celebrity children, from the scions of Hollywood stars such as Susan Sarandon to the likes of John F. Kennedy, Jr., and Amy Carter. The college is the most easygoing of the Ivy Leagues, with few core requirements and the option of taking classes on a pass/fail basis, and the school’s strong performing arts program is a big draw for artistically inclined students such as Allegra.
Until 2003, Allegra’s youth, long absences, and precarious health left Donatella free to exercise her daughter’s share. But as her eighteenth birthday approached, Allegra took more interest, beginning to prepare for the day that she would control her uncle’s company. She started attending shareholder meetings, although she still said little. The enormous damage wrought to Allegra’s inheritance by devaluation of the company became steadily more evident. When Gianni died, the child was worth as much as $1 billion. When she was finally primed to take possession of her inheritance, it had shriveled to a fraction of that amount. The money gleaned from the sale of the Picassos, the Miami mansion, and other of Gianni’s assets had gone up in smoke.
At the same time, Donatella’s spiraling drug use was shredding her relationship with Allegra as well as with Daniel, then thirteen. Her mood swings—laughing one minute, sobbing the next—were terrifying to the children. Other times she screamed at them, and if they tried to reason with her, she refused to listen.3
The confluence of the deadline for the bond and Allegra’s coming of age piled the pressure on Donatella. Allegra would effectively become her boss when the girl became an adult, free to challenge both Donatella’s and Santo’s decisions. How Allegra would exercise her power was a wild card—for Donatella and for the company.
During the spring of 2003, Santo and a clutch of Versace executives made a last-ditch effort to salvage the company and soothe its bankers. They brought in Fabio Massimo Cacciatori, a consultant with an expertise in restructuring, as CEO, to see how the house of Versace might be cleaned up.
When Cacciatori arrived, the company was halfway through the calendar year but its 2003 budget had yet to be completed. From the start, Cacciatori was a misfit at Versace, a company long driven more by the whims of the controlling family than by good management practices. He was the classic consultant called in to conduct a dry-eyed analysis of a troubled business. His approach was de rigueur in other businesses—measuring performance against competitors, looking for areas to cut waste, setting specific budgets for each department—but they were downright bizarre in the fashion world, where the suits are considered second-class citizens. At Versace, no one had ever taken a really close look at how the business was—or should be—run.
Twelve consultants from Cacciatori’s firm set up camp inside the Versace headquarters that summer, sifting through the company’s contracts with suppliers and sales reports for the stores. They interviewed bemused employees on the workings of every department, filling out so-called activity efficiency worksheets that measured the performance of each one. Santo stopped in daily to greet the group and scan the thick reports they were compiling. Cacciatori presented Donatella and Santo with a twenty-page analysis that laid bare just how badly off the company was. The amount of unsold goods was rising alarmingly. Versace’s costs had been increasing 10 percent to 15 percent a year without a clear plan, even as sales fell. Business managers had very loose budgets—if they had any at all. The comparison of Versace’s performance to its best-run rivals was abysmal. The house had a huge staff but very small sales. Companies such as Gucci and Prada had three times the sales per employee that Versace did. Versace’s own shops were money pits; its rivals’ boutiques made seven times as much in sales per square foot of selling space as Versace’s. Within a couple of months, Cacciatori found five million euros’ worth of potential cost cutting.
Cacciatori, with the reluctant assent of Santo and Donatella, fired hundreds of employees, closed the boutique in San Francisco, and shuttered part of Versace’s U.S. headquarters. He saved hundreds of thousands of euros by striking new deals with Versace suppliers, some of whom had taken advantage of the chaos in the company over the years to overcharge them. But the bigger problem was Donatella’s spending. Cacciatori imposed a limit of one hundred thousand euros on any expense that Donatella or Santo could authorize autonomously. If they wanted to spend more—on the runway shows or to remodel a boutique—they needed his okay.
For a while, Donatella, chastened somewhat by the public uproar over the auditors’ note on her spending that spring, fell in line. She gave up the private jets and ran the costs of her runway shows by Cacciatori. But the delicate détente lasted only until the October runway show. Within weeks, their relationship had crumbled. Donatella’s contempt for Cacciatori had grown steadily over his tenure there, as he barged through the company with his passel of consultants in tow. Donatella’s profligate ways were an enormous problem for the house, but her frustration was justified; Cacciatori was the wrong man to correct her course. He came from a world of Excel spreadsheets, financial analysis, and management techniques gleaned from business school case studies. He had no feel for the creative process at a fashion house. He applied cold cost-benefit analysis to the business as if it were a widget maker, failing to understand that designers have to shoot a lot of arrows before they hit the target with a blockbuster bag or dress. Cacciatori saw only the cost of the arrows.
Worse still, Donatella associated Cacciatori’s efforts with Santo and their bitter arguments over her spending. The bean counter’s intrusion in the house only widened the gulf between Via Gesù and the business offices on Via Manzoni. Donatella’s own clique, perhaps worried that the Versace gravy train would grind to a halt, became a Greek chorus that egged her on, feeding her tidbits about Santo’s meetings with Cacciatori and his team. By November, a battle of wills between Donatella and Cacciatori was shaping up, and the CEO could only lose. Donatella resisted his demands to cut back on the samples she ordered for the runway show or to buy cheaper fabric for her samples. “If I want three hundred pairs of shoes for the runway shows, then I’ll have them!” she screamed at him during one heated meeting in the fall. “You can’t stop me.”
A few weeks later, not long before Christmas, Cacciatori went before the board with a plan for further cuts and changes in the strategy for 2004. He proposed cutting Donatella’s and Santo’s salaries—even as he charged Versace three thousand euros a day for his own services—and wanted to sell Via Gesù in order to lighten the company’s debt load. But by then Donatella had had enough.
“What exactly have you accomplished here?” she demanded. “We’re paying you all of this money but I don’t see what it’s for!” She accused him of seeking only to enrich himself at Versace’s expense. A few days later, Donatella fired him. The next day, security guards escorted Cacciatori and his team out of the building.
The year 2004 promised to be an annus horribilis for Versace, the worst of the seven that had passed since Gianni’s death. Donatella was in a free fall. Over the years, she had tried at times to rein in her cocaine use without giving it up entirely, limiting herself to just two or three lines at a time—which was nothing for her.4 But by the start of 2004, her appetite for drugs had deepened along with the company’s troubles. She began mixing cocaine with sedatives such as Halcion, Valium, Ativan, and Rohypnol. She downed handfuls of Excedrin to fight chronic headaches. Cocaine braced her for the marathon hours before a show, but afterward Donatella crashed, sitting on her couch for four or five days, hating herself. She began going on premeditated binges, retreating to her apartment for several days and telling her associates she wasn’t well.5 When she did turn up in the atelier, she was virtually paralyzed. Her team had grown to dread her arrival. She was jittery and restless, fidgeting with her jeweled cigarette case as if it were a worry bead and constantly wiping her nose. When she spoke, she was virtually incomprehensible.
At the end of shows, when Donatella teetered out on her five-inch stilettos for her bow, the audience was rapt, waiting to see if she would make it down the runway. Backstage, she hid in a separate dressing room, her handlers parrying visitors and the media. When she emerged to grant the obligatory round of press interviews on her collection, she wore the pained look of an injured animal. Television journalists struggled to get even a coherent ten-second sound bite out of her, and her makeup artists had to stop the cameras repeatedly to retouch her heavy foundation, which melted with her constantly running nose. After a while, many journalists simply stopped asking to interview her. Employees and friends watched in horror, fearing Donatella was on course for a deadly overdose.
In the midst of the meltdown came an offer that promised to pull the company out of its death spiral. Tom Ford and Domenico De Sole came calling. The pair had recently fallen out with François Pinault, the French billionaire who had saved Gucci from the LVMH takeover bid, and they were leaving the house after an extraordinary ten-year run. Their turnaround of Gucci had earned them each tens of millions of dollars over the years, and they wanted to invest it in another fashion brand. Right away, the new parlor game in the fashion world became guessing what the Dom-Tom Bomb would do next. Would they somehow buy Yves Saint Laurent back from Pinault? Or would they launch a new fashion line under Tom’s name?
But instead they were interested in Versace. At Gucci, Ford and De Sole had gained experience in turning around a fashion house that had been nearly destroyed by the founding family. De Sole’s enormous credibility with retailers around the world could help convince stores to start selling Versace collections again. Ford, with his satyr sensibility and commercial nous, could repair Versace’s tattered image.
Santo was excited about the prospect, seeing the offer as a way to restore Versace to its former glory. He also knew that this was the company’s last chance before the banks closed in. The clock was ticking on the bond, but Versace’s creditors were willing to see how the talks with De Sole and Ford turned out. They preferred to have the company in the hands of new owners rather than stepping in themselves. Donatella, exhausted and seriously depressed, was willing to consider an offer for the first time. She was put off by the idea of sharing the limelight with a designer as famous and successful as Ford but relieved at the idea of handing some of the creative responsibilities over to someone else.
De Sole spent days going through Versace’s catastrophic financial situation, coming up with a rough plan to close foundering stores, fix its sputtering production facilities, and launch an accessories line. But his help would come at a price. He and Ford were willing to take on Versace, but they wouldn’t shell out a dime for a stake in the company. They wanted a share that guaranteed them control of the house, but their equity would come in exchange for their management expertise and reputation in the fashion sector. Santo was furious that De Sole could expect to walk into Versace for free, yet he had little choice but to entertain their offer on their terms. If the duo restored Versace to profitability, he would benefit as well. Much of Santo’s wealth was tied up in his stake in the company; if Versace recovered, his holding—now practically worthless—would increase in value.
But there was a bigger problem. De Sole and Ford agreed that, for their plan to work, Donatella had to go. At her runway show in February 2004, Donatella was a mess. Over the winter she began hearing things and had grown even more paranoid. She was throwing fits in the atelier, accusing her team of sniping about her behind her back; her tantrums left the young designers in tears.6 The collection reflected the chaos in the atelier, a jumble of designs ranging from ladylike twinsets paired with huge Jackie-O sunglasses to black evening dresses with awkward slits. Women’s Wear Daily’s verdict: “The evening clothes, well, let’s just say, oops.” Elizabeth Hurley, who had written Donatella a letter pleading with her to get help for her cocaine habit, sat in the front row with her new fiancé, distraught. After the last models filed backstage, Donatella teetered out. With a woozy smile, she gave a strange thumbs-up to someone in the audience. After that show, Donatella began using cocaine every day, a first for her.7
The night before, Ford had sent his last Gucci collection down the runway in Milan to what would be rave reviews. For months, the fashion press had been churning out glowing retrospectives of his revival of Gucci. He was leaving the brand at the top of his game. On a snowy day in February, De Sole, Ford, and Donatella finally met. Donatella listened as Ford and De Sole explained their plan to raise Versace from the ashes. Afterward, Ford stood up. He launched into a long, emotional monologue about how he had revived Gucci virtually single-handedly. “I am Gucci,” he told Donatella. He then declared he would take on Versace only if he had full control of the brand—with absolutely no interference from Donatella, he told her. He would be the sole head designer.
Donatella was shocked at Ford’s arrogance. She felt disrespected and discarded. Before his speech, she had been willing to consider a scenario where she would let go of some of her responsibilities, but she never dreamed that Ford would banish her entirely. She would be relegated to making anodyne personal appearances in department stores and signing perfume bottles. If Ford had approached her with more tact and sensitivity, she might have considered their offer. But instead he had humiliated her. “Absolutely not!” she said, struggling to remain calm. “Versace is my life. There’s no way I could step aside.” In a fury, she got up and left the room. All contact between the parties was cut off.*
In rejecting the offer from De Sole and Ford, Donatella unwittingly set in motion a chain of events that would finally pry her brother’s house from her grasp. By the spring, the company was as out of control as she was. Staff spent more time gossiping and swapping rumors about the operatic drama unfolding in the family than actually working. Many had been excited at the idea of a takeover by De Sole and Ford and were sorely disappointed when word spread of the disastrous meeting with Donatella. The media’s speculation about what would happen after Allegra’s impending birthday only compounded the intrigue.
After the failure of the De Sole—Ford talks, Santo was deflated and disappointed. His team began searching for a new chief executive, contacting current and former heads of rival fashion houses. But no one would touch the job. They even reached out to Rose Marie Bravo, the former president of Saks who had gained fame for her turnaround of British brand Burberry. She refused to take the call.
Finally, Versace’s creditors came calling. With a heavy heart, Santo sat down with Banca Intesa, Italy’s largest financial institution and the house’s longtime bankers. Intesa owned about 10 million euros of the bond, making it one of the largest holders, and would take the lead in working out what to do with the troubled house. Versace needed to find a way to repay the bond by the July 6, 2004, deadline, but any deal would clearly come at a heavy price. Racing to find a solution, Santo twice delayed the publication of the company’s 2003 accounts—the board normally approved them in April—because he knew Versace was in default. And indeed, the 2003 results were catastrophic: The house would lose 97 million euros for the year. Moreover, the auditors were preparing another note, warning that Donatella owed the company nearly 5 million euros.
While Santo was meeting with bankers, the simmering questions as to what would happen when Allegra turned eighteen were rapidly coming to a head. Given her delicate health, would she choose not to exercise her share? Would she instead allow her mother to continue to manage the holding? Would the tensions that already existed between Allegra and Donatella—then in the grip of severe depression and a debilitating drug habit—rise further over the question of how to manage the teenager’s stake? Versace employees feared that Allegra’s health meant that Donatella would continue to control her daughter’s stake even after Allegra turned eighteen. But little did they know that Allegra had a surprise in store.
At the men’s collection debut in June 2004, Donatella finally hit bottom. Often for her shows, she hired a celebrity band to perform a miniconcert next to the runway. That year, she had chosen Prodigy, a hardcore group that had cut its teeth in the illegal rave scene in the United Kingdom. Prodigy’s lead singer was Keith Flint, a Johnny Rotten—like character with a spiky Mohawk hairstyle and a serious drug habit.
As crews put the last touches on the runway in the courtyard of Via Gesù, Flint stood on the stage for the dress rehearsal while Donatella sat on a sofa nearby, so dazed that her bodyguards had to sit on either side of her to prop her up. Flint, appearing stoned, started singing and dancing wildly. As he danced, he began to strip his clothes off. He then lost his balance and toppled off the stage, buck-naked. He gashed his leg so badly that Versace staff had to call in a doctor to patch him up.
Donatella sat through the spectacle unfazed. At a press conference afterward, she gave rambling, incoherent answers to journalists’ questions. By then, she was barely eating, her stomach in knots from anxiety, and she had grown very thin. When the journalists asked about her weight loss, she parried their questions with a blithe response. “I’ve been on this amazing diet and have been killing myself in the gym, in honor of the Duchess of Windsor’s belief that one can never be too rich or too thin,” she said.8 One longtime Versace executive who witnessed the spectacle tendered his resignation soon afterward.
The runway show the next day was a disaster, a Technicolor display of Versace’s catastrophic situation. Models walked the runway wearing T-shirts bearing the “DV” logo scrawled in neon letters or emblazoned with slogans such as “Why don’t you fuck yourself?” The audience covered their ears to block out Prodigy’s screeching music. Then, Flint suddenly jumped off the stage and began accosting the audience. He ground his pelvis close to one man’s face and licked another woman, before climbing over the shocked attendees, dripping with sweat. The crowd of journalists and department store buyers shouted and tried to wriggle away as he approached.9
Donatella’s conspicuous problems fed the voracious interest in Allegra’s impending eighteenth birthday. Around the time of the men’s show, Donatella and her daughter granted the media a photo op, hoping to sate the Italian newspapers’ appetite for news about the heiress, whose eating problem was starkly obvious. Allegra posed for the paparazzi in a short polka-dot Versace skirt and a dark T-shirt, looking uncomfortable and heartbreakingly thin as she held hands with her mother, both women’s faces portraits of pain.
A week later, Donatella threw Allegra a lavish, public birthday bash at Alcatraz, a cavernous disco that was Milan’s most popular nightspot. The club was decked out in purple and pink, with huge flower bouquets, gilt chairs, and a pyramid of champagne glasses with expensive bubbly rippling down the sides. There was a massive buffet dinner of lobster, an open bar, and gurgling chocolate fountains. Donatella had flown Pharrell Williams, an American hip-hop sensation, over to Milan in a private jet to perform. She had model agencies hold castings to stock the party with male and female models, all outfitted in glitzy Versace clothes. Few of the models even knew Allegra. At midnight, Williams serenaded Allegra with a sassy version of “Happy Birthday” as the caterers rolled out a giant cake with sparklers. Donatella, dressed in a gold gown and heavy jewelry, stumbled to the stage with a flute of champagne and gave a rambling toast to her daughter.
A few days later, Donatella made a trip to Reggio that would change everything. Elton John was giving a concert in her native city. The singer had tried to support Donatella after Gianni’s death, but she started avoiding him when her drug addiction spiraled because she knew he was one of the few people who would call her on her behavior. Ironically, when Elton had decided to get clean many years earlier, Gianni and Donatella had supported him; after rehab, he went straight to Donatella’s vacation home in St. Tropez.10 He then became a crusader, with a mission to help other celebrities kick their drug habits. He famously “kidnapped” Robbie Williams and took him to a rehab clinic in the 1990s and helped Robert Downey, Jr., kick a notorious drug habit.
But even Elton couldn’t bear to watch Donatella self-destruct, and for a time he preferred to avoid her as well.11 After much dithering, Donatella decided to attend Elton’s concert in her hometown. She landed in Calabria on a balmy summer night and headed for her childhood home, where Zia Nora still lived. She hadn’t been to Reggio in years. Entering the familiar house where she had spent so many happy years with her parents and her brothers brought back a rush of memories. The pain of returning home in such a desperate state was overwhelming. When she saw the woman who had been like a mother to her, she broke down, sobbing in Nora’s arms.
After a while, she pulled herself together and headed for Reggio’s soccer stadium, where Elton was due to sing. Crews had built a large, simple stage on the field, flanked by two huge screens and covered in the dark gray carpet that Elton demanded for his shows. Two dressing rooms complete with Versace furnishings had been kitted out, one for Elton and one for Donatella. Before the show, the duo gamely posed for photos backstage, the exhaustion etched clearly on Donatella’s face despite her heavy makeup. A shimmery gold catsuit highlighted her sunken stomach and thin arms.
Elton stepped onto the stage and sat at a black grand piano. He would be singing solo, without any backup band. In his right ear, he wore a quarter-sized gold earring engraved with an image of a medusa head. He opened with “Your Song,” Gianni’s favorite. “I want to dedicate this whole show to my good friend Gianni Versace,” he said, after finishing the tune. The crowd cheered.
Donatella stood in the wings, sobbing and shaking. Elton looked at her and realized that she was ready for a change in her life. He felt he had to take action. As soon as he got back to London, he called Donatella’s top assistant and exploded. “You people are doing nothing but enabling Donatella by protecting her!” he said. “She’s going to die if we don’t do something.” He decided he would go to Milan to confront Donatella himself. He told the assistant that he had only one day free in the next six weeks: June 30, 2004, Allegra’s birthday.
In the meantime, Allegra turned to her father for help. Even after separating from Donatella, Paul often shuttled between New York and Milan to be with both kids, following their schoolwork and taking them on vacations. But when it came to Allegra’s stake in Versace, he let Donatella take command.
As her birthday approached, Allegra decided it was time to take up her rightful role in the company. It was an immensely difficult decision for a high school senior to make. She had always been the quintessential good little girl who submitted to her mother’s wishes. But she was also smart enough to have realized that her inheritance had withered to a fraction of what it was when Gianni left it to her. She understood that it was time for her to step in. But first she needed an adviser, someone independent of both her mother and Santo, who could help her untangle the mess.
She asked Paul for help in finding the right person. Through a Versace associate, her father gathered a short list of white-shoe lawyers in Milan who were renowned both for their business acumen and their discretion in dealing with the intricacies of family-controlled businesses. One of them, Michele Carpinelli, was a leading lawyer in Italian corporate circles, who was well-regarded by top executives at Banca Intesa, having worked with the bank on a number of deals. Carpinelli could very well be the right person to help Allegra take command of her company.
Not long before Allegra’s birthday, Donatella had set up a time to sit down with her daughter to discuss the management of her stake after she turned eighteen. By then Allegra was a determined young woman, not a meek girl. Allegra announced that she intended to begin exercising control of her stake in the house. She would manage the share herself from now on and would hire an adviser to help.
When the news spread that Allegra had engaged Carpinelli, Versace employees and friends of the family, enormously surprised at the young woman’s gumption, were immensely relieved. They recognized that if Donatella continued to call the shots, the company risked ending up bankrupt or being sold to a rival. They admired the teenager’s courage in asserting her role in the company. With Allegra in charge, there was a glimmer of hope.
On the evening of June 30, 2004, two dozen close friends and family members, including Santo, Paul, Daniel, and Donatella, gathered at Via Gesù for a private dinner party to celebrate Allegra’s birthday. Two of Gianni’s best friends, Ingrid Sischy, the editor in chief of Interview Magazine, and her girlfriend, Sandy Brant, CEO of the magazine, were also there. Once everyone was gathered, Donatella made a move to slip away, headed to the bathroom for a line of cocaine to brace herself for the evening ahead.
Just then, Elton John walked into the room. Some guests were delighted, thinking it a surprise visit for Allegra, but Donatella was shocked; she knew she hadn’t invited him. On cue, Elton, Santo, Paul, Allegra, and a couple of close friends led Donatella to another room in the magnificent palazzo, while assistants quietly asked the other guests to leave.
Elton took the lead. He confronted Donatella with her behavior, telling her that she would destroy everything if she didn’t make a change and get clean. “Donatella, we’re not forcing you, but you need to go to rehab,” he told her. “There’s a plane waiting for you.” Late into the night, her friends and family—Allegra in particular—pressed Donatella, recounting how much damage her addiction was causing to the company, her children, and her friends. Overwhelmed, she finally gave in. She changed out of her evening gown, took off her jewelry, and put on a jogging suit. Then she headed to the airport, where she boarded a private plane headed for Arizona.12 For much of the long trip, she sobbed.
At first glance, the Meadows rehab clinic in Wickenburg, Arizona, hardly seems a destination for the rich and famous. Sitting about sixty miles northwest of Phoenix, it is nestled in a picture-perfect southwestern setting on the edge of the Sonoran Desert. Wickenburg, population 6,500, is a proverbial one-horse town, bereft of luxury hotels or fashionable restaurants. With its giant cacti and cottonwood trees, it once claimed itself the “Dude Ranch Capital of the World.” Dry and hot by day, it often enjoys a cool breeze at night, under a sky dotted with countless twinkling stars.
The Meadows was the project of a woman named Pia Mellody, who, in the late 1970s, established an intense treatment plan based on twelve-step programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous. By 2004, the Meadows was offering an array of treatment programs for addictions to drugs, alcohol, sex, and gambling, charging about $35,000 for the typical five-week stint. While Los Angeles and New York claim countless rehab facilities, celebrities looking for privacy chose the Meadows for its remote locale and reputation for discretion. Stars could fly into Phoenix, far from paparazzi, and disappear. The clinic’s staff was trained to be on guard for journalists, with a book holding the details of attempts by media to wheedle information about VIPs. Guards patrolled the compound twenty-four hours a day.
For Donatella, the Meadows was a universe away from her usual five-star standards. The compound consisted of a half-dozen low-rise buildings of brown stucco, surrounded by a high fence. There was a pool, closed in by a high tan-colored railing. Rooms were spartan, a functional cross between a hospital and a dorm room, with narrow single beds, tiny closets, and plain white bathrooms with Dixie-cup dispensers. Flagstone paths edged with low gray and beige stone walls connected the buildings. From the compound, the only view was of stretches of reddish brown desert.
Donatella arrived at the Meadows thinking the doctors would console her about her myriad troubles, but during her intake, she saw that the treatment plan was very different.13 At their arrival, patients had to sign “suicide contracts” pledging not to harm themselves, and nurses collected urine samples to do a drug screen. The staff searched luggage for contraband such as drugs, razors, or sexually explicit literature. Because the clinic has a large sex-addiction treatment program, women weren’t allowed to wear any tight or skimpy clothing, open-toed shoes, or even makeup. Donatella traded in her usual garb of skintight tops and pants for baggy T-shirts with round necks and shapeless pants. Swimming times at the pools were strictly segregated, and if she wanted to swim, she would have to wear a one-piece bathing suit. Versace’s skimpy bikinis were taboo.
New patients received a tote bag of required reading, including several books on codependency by Pia Mellody and John Bradshaw, a therapist who has appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s and Geraldo Rivera’s talk shows. She received a name tag with her photo and her name—simply “Donatella V.”—written in block letters next to her intake number. The badges were color-coded so that the staff would immediately recognize which addiction the patient was suffering from. Patients had to wear the badges around their necks at all times and had to carry pagers so that the staff could reach them wherever they went on campus. After her intake, a nurse led Donatella to her room, which she would share with two other patients. On her chart was her diagnosis: severe depression.
She ate her meals in a communal cafeteria, where patients often stood up to shout slogans they’d learned in therapy, such as “I’m a codependent in recovery.” The pronouncements sparked rounds of applause from fellow patients, who followed with their own slogans. Meals were bland but nutritious, and sugar and caffeine were banned—a hardship for someone used to downing a dozen espressos a day. Patients could smoke only outdoors, under the scorching summer sun, in one of the designated smoking “pits,” which were segregated by sex to discourage fraternizing.
Donatella’s contact with the outside world was minimal. Cell phones were banned. Patients bought calling cards and stood in line to make short calls home on pay phones. Timers on the phones cut off calls after the time allocated, and calls were noted in a log that the doctors would later examine. At night, the nurses checked on patients with small flashlights.
Every day, a nurse asked Donatella to identify her feelings from a printed list. For three weeks, her answer was the same: guilt and shame.14 Every day, Donatella woke at 5:30 a.m., ate breakfast at 5:45 a.m., and started on group therapy. Her schedule was full: several hours of intensive group therapy sessions a day, plus twelve-step meetings, spirituality counseling, art therapy, lectures, and sessions with a psychiatrist. After the meetings, Donatella had to do such “homework” assignments as writing an autobiographical time line recounting her life from birth to the age of nineteen.
At first, Donatella balked at having to air her dirty laundry in front of strangers in group therapy. “Can’t I tell my story in private?” she asked her counselor.15 But the Meadows made no exceptions, not even for VIPs. The other patients, who recognized Donatella in spite of—or because of—her coy, twelve-step-style name tag, sat rapt while she recounted her story.
She went through a therapy boot camp dubbed “Survivors Week,” in which she picked through her life for evidence of the trauma and neglect that were the sources of her problems. During Survivors Week, patients were encouraged to act out their rage; for instance, to beat on chairs that represented their mothers. On the fifth day, other members of the group kissed and hugged one another when they “graduated” from the weeklong intensive therapy.
Around a month after her arrival came Family Week. The staff asked Donatella for her children’s phone numbers. “No, no, no!” she said, recoiling, horrified that her children should see her in such condition. “I don’t want to involve my children.” The staff insisted. Family sessions were a critical part of healing the damage created by years of drug abuse. When Donatella told her children she was against their coming to the Meadows, they were upset. Why don’t you want us to come? they asked her. Why don’t you want to have anything to do with us?16
Donatella relented. A few days later, Allegra and Daniel arrived in Arizona. Allegra had to follow the same dress code as her mother—no revealing clothes, such as shorts or tank tops. She and Daniel were given name tags, and they ate together with Donatella in the communal cafeteria. It was agonizing for their mother, yet she sobbed when they left, happy to end years of hiding her problems from her children.
After several weeks in the facility, Donatella started feeling better. She earned some privileges, and she could indulge a bit—she had a manicurist come in from a salon in town to do her nails. In mid-August, after five weeks in Arizona, a clean and sober Donatella flew to the Caribbean for a vacation with Daniel and Allegra. She left armed with phone numbers for twelve-steps groups that catered to celebrities as well as contact information for other patients—known in Meadows jargon as “peers”—whom she had befriended at the clinic.
Her focus now was on repairing her tattered relationship with her children, particularly Allegra. After their Caribbean vacation, Allegra was due to move to the United States to join the freshman class at Brown. Just as Donatella was determined to heal her relationship with her daughter, Allegra was leaving the nest.
*This account, based on several sources, is disputed by Donatella Versace, who maintains that her role in the company was not an issue in the discussions but that Ford’s offer was turned down because it was not an attractive offer financially.