[DosViolines]

source: nymetro.com

PART 1

Summer for the Sun Queen

When Gianni Versace was alive, Donatella Versace was happy in his shadow. But after he died and left her daughter, Allegra, the lion’s share of his company, the shadow got darker. It took her till now to get out from under it.

By Ariel Levy



It’s like a bakery in here. Hot, yes, but also cake everywhere. A colossal chocolate torte, some kind of pear-and-custard thing, and it smells wonderful, but it’s also confusing, like a dream, because the cakes keep coming from one direction and the models keep coming from another. Man after man, boy after boy, in slouchy, sexy, beachy linen, parades out in front of Dona*tella Versace and her staff and the cakes on the ground floor of the Versace headquarters on Via Gesú in Milan.

Upstairs is the apartment once occupied by the slain king Gianni Versace. Donatella, the sister whose hair he dyed blonde, who has been blonde ever since, who has become terrifically famous, iconic even, for her blondeness, among other things, stands with her hands clasped behind her back and says, “Before was very macho, very aggressive. Now much softer.” Her voice sounds smoked. She fingers the leather edging of a pool-blue jacket hanging off a cutlet of a man. “I think the woman’s perspective on the man is very important.”

It is a few days before the men’s show, and Donatella; her stylist, Bill Mullen, who is from New York and wears only black; her assistant Bruce, a long-haired, French surfer god; and a dozen or so junior designers and publicists and tailors are analyzing who will wear what in the show. “I never eat cake,” says a girl in jeans with a tape measure, but she keeps looking at the shiny chocolate round.

Donatella’s recent collections for women have been embraced by the fashion world—nine years after her brother’s murder, she’s finally being given credit for being a real designer. There will be a few looks for women in this show, too—the precollection, they call it—and a spindly blonde comes out on towering silver stilettos decorated with rhinestones the size of nickels. She walks like an arrogant ostrich for several paces, then wipes out and lands with a brutal thud. Everyone gasps. “Okay. The first fall. We fix,” says Donatella, and pulls out a Marlboro from a pack customized with her initials in Gothic script. “Theez can’t happen on the runway.” Donatella lights the cigarette with a Zippo encrusted in black crystals and the golden Versace *Medusa-head insignia. The model squats to scrutinize her heel and you can see her underpants.

Suddenly, someone brings up shakerados! “Who wants?” says Donatella, and within minutes they appear on a silver tray. Heaven: espresso and ice and sugar and vanilla shaken up and poured in dazzling crystal goblets that sweat in the heat. The second they’ve been consumed, Joseph, Donatella’s Filipino manservant, whisks them away.

Then the most beautiful woman in the entire world enters in a dress made of clear plastic and dove-gray silk jersey. “I hate her,” says Donatella. “I ask her every day, ‘How come your *** don’t move?’ ” Which is funny, because Donatella’s own *** absolutely does not move. It is small and encased, taut as a water balloon, in shiny gold silk pants with a slight flare at the bottom. She wears them with platform shoes, a pink pedicure, a skintight side-zipped orange top, and false eyelashes.

All this you expected. The tan skin, the Rapunzel extensions, the chain smoking. The whole freaky, gilded, Jan-from-the-*Muppets visual you’ve seen sandwiched between P. Diddy and Madonna in every magazine in the world.

What’s surprising is that Donatella Versace is warm, maternal, an arm-toucher. She pushes a plate at you. “Please. Eat some cake.”

It has long been Donatella’s role to play hostess in the court of Versace. When Gianni, the Sun King, was alive, he was famously regimented—early to bed, early to rise—and utterly uninterested in alcohol, drugs, partying. It was Donatella’s job to be the warm entertainer, the toasted bronze devil proffering temptation: food, leather, gold, and, until recently, cocaine. Gianni was initially in the dark about his sister’s drug use, and later, when it became both obvious and legendary, he frowned upon it, but in truth it was useful to his empire.

Italian fashion in the eighties—and perhaps the aesthetic of the eighties itself—was defined by two oppositional dynasties: Armani and Versace. The one represented crisp class, the other louche glamour. Cold versus hot, old money versus new, understated elegance versus over-the-top indulgence. The hard-*partying, coke-*snorting, *platinum-blonde Donatella was Gianni’s mascot and muse, a necessary figure to round out the Versace fantasy. “She had always been the person who worked the parties and entertained celebrities,” says Jason Weisenfeld, Versace’s former head of publicity and one of the people who sat Donatella down for an intervention about two years ago before she went to rehab in Arizona. “It was up to Donatella to go out and be the face of the company. A lot of it was Donatella’s creation: She became friends with a whole different world of people who she brought to him.”

At her peak, nobody could top Donatella for all-night, full-on excess—a critical component of eighties mise-en-scène. Everyone knew that there would be coke at the Versace postshow parties (at least after Gianni went to bed), coke backstage (and not just models but supermodels), wildness on their ad shoots (Latin boys in tight white pants, and sometimes tigers). Versace meant whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted it. (Cake! Coke! Shakerados! Who wants?)

“It starts as a celebration,” Donatella says. “You don’t do drugs because they’re not fun … they are a lot of fun. But you know, the celebration gets too often celebrated.”



Like Princess Diana, who poured tea for aggrieved family members after Gianni Versace’s funeral and was herself killed just six weeks later, being struck down in his prime has served to gild Gianni Versace in myth. Fashion people gush about his talent, museums hold exhibitions of his work, and everyone who knew him adopts a glazed look and a reverential tone when they speak of him. But the Sun King’s brilliance seems, at times, to have fried his sister.

Rumor has hardened into accepted wisdom in the fashion world that Gianni arranged Donatella’s marriage to the male model Paul Beck because he wanted an heir for his throne. It is also widely believed that Gianni’s feelings for his sister’s husband were more than platonic. It is certain, at least, that Gianni had a role far more powerful than uncle in the life of Donatella and Beck’s children, particularly for their daughter, Allegra, whom Gianni called “Little Princess” and to whom he left the majority share of his company.

“My cheeldren were his cheeldren,” says Donatella. “He was always with Allegra. Since she was 9 years old only, she would listen to him, she was going to see museum, she knew all the museum in America, in France, in England, and Gianni loved art. She would sit with him and go through art books, and she knew the art of Picasso ... it was adorable. She was such an amazing, special leetle girl.”

Donatella always knew Allegra would someday hold the controlling stake in Versace: It was, she says, a kind of parental incentive the king created for her. “ ‘I want to leave everything to your daughter because I want to make sure you take care of her so well.’ This is what he was telling me. ‘Do such a good job, because everything goes to your daughter.’ ” She did not question the king’s decree: L’Etat, c’est Gianni. “Gianni was amazing,” Donatella says ruefully. “He really was amazing. But if he wasn’t like that, he wouldn’t have reached what he reached in such a short time.”

Though his murder was, of course, a shock, he had already been preparing for his own death. “Gianni was sure he was going to die,” says Dona*tella. “He was sick with cancer in his ear before he was murdered. The last two years of his life, Gianni was hiding, hiding up in his apartment in Via Gesú, because his ear was so big. It was impossible to do a surgery because of the position, because to do a surgery, part of his face was supposed to drop. That’s why the will and everything was done, and I knew everything about, because he thought he was going to die. But then it was declared cured six months before he was murdered. We celebrated; we drink champagne and everything. Six months later, he was killed.”

After the regicide of Gianni Versace in July 1997, Donatella was catapulted into the throne. At the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute gala a few months later, at which an exhibition of Gianni’s work premiered, guests counted the number of times Donatella ran to the bathroom with Kate Moss. “I don’t want to act like a victim, because I hate women who acts like a victim, but I had a lot of responsibility when my brother died,” Donatella says. “He was my best friend. I really loved him. I couldn’t find a reason why he was killed. This was a horrible murder, and this company he created, they were looking at me like, ‘What’s she gonna do? The king is dead.’ ” Donatella lights a cigarette and laughs out a stream of smoke. “So I realize that all the eyes of the world were on top of me, and really, people didn’t believe I was going to pull through. All these people depending on me, their jobs on my shoulders, to live up to Gianni’s dream. I’m going to **** up everything Gianni did?”

It would have been a failure too epic to contemplate; the opera would have become too tragic to sit through. “The thing that killed me the most was to show this strong façade in front of everybody because I wasn’t strong at all. I was going home and crying tears. I also had my cheeldren to be strong for ... Why Uncle Gianni die? Why? Why? Why? Why? It was a lot. It was a lot of things together, my marriage falling apart at the same time.” She doesn’t talk about what happened with Beck except to say, “I have been living with a lot of pain in my life: private problems, family problems. I found an easy way to numb everything ... drugs.”

Now, of course, cigarettes are her last vice, the only remaining fix in a clean new world of light food and heavy exercise. A trainer comes to Donatella’s vast apartment every morning. “But I don’t get this ‘feel better after,’ ” she says. “After I feel tired. I’m waiting, waiting all day to feel better.”

“I like beauty,” Donatella says the following evening, over a plate of prosciutto and a little pile of melon balls. “Hair that moves. I don’t like anything stiff.” She is talking with her team about the way she wants the precollection styled on the runway—everyone eats dinner together, family-style, in a room on the ground floor of the palazzo on Via Gesú.

“Like your hair?” someone suggests.


“Better,” she replies, and everyone laughs.

If you were to go by the Ralph Lauren headquarters, it is unlikely you would find Ralph himself sitting down to supper with his staff, but this is Italy. Donatella likes to see people eat, she likes things familial, she likes to be intimate with the people who work for her. “Dinner was always in her suite, she tells you where to sit, she makes sure everybody eats,” says Jason Weisenfeld wistfully. “We were always very well taken care of.”

When he would travel with her by private jet, for instance, Weisenfeld came to expect that upon arrival at whatever five-star hotel they were staying at, his suitcase would be unpacked, clothes neatly hung on satin hangers, fruit chilled and peeled and waiting in a bowl, every detail art-directed. “Life with Donatella for my first year or so was like a combination of being with a very strict boss and touring with the Rolling Stones,” he says. After the opening of a Gianni Versace retrospective at the Victoria and Albert museum in London in 2002, Weisenfeld recalls going back to her hotel room with about five other staff members and noticing after a while that Donatella had disappeared. “All of a sudden, the doors to the suite swing open, and this ice-cream cart comes in with all these different big, giant silver domes and trays with ice cream on them, and there’s Donatella in her silk robe, high heels, a black mini-stole wrapped around her, and all of her jewelry, saying in her heavy Italian accent, ‘Ice cream for everybody! Get your ice cream! Who wants ice cream?’ So here’s a woman who had just been in front of a hundred camera crews and paparazzi, and she’s doing all this work, and she gets a free couple of hours and all she’s focused on is feeding everybody and making everybody laugh. Donatella is a, you know, she’s an Italian woman. She’s a mother.”

Besides her staff, Donatella is joined for dinner tonight by her older brother, Santo, who wears white linen pants and has a face that looks like it was painted by Pontormo 500 years ago. Santo has been going back and forth to Dubai to work on the new Versace hotel, which will have a *temperature-controlled beach.

“It’s like Disneyland, yes?” says Donatella.


Santo is very grave. “I like very much Dubai seven or eight years ago, but now it’s a very crazy place.” They will bring in barrels of fish to put in the lagoons and ponds.


“Very natural,” says Donatella with a small snort. “Similar to Las Vegas.”


“Las Vegas is not real. Dubai is real,” Santo says.


“I want to go there next week!” says Bill Mullen.


“Pfoof,” says Donatella, and exhales a plume of smoke.