[DosViolines]

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Gianni Versace left 30 percent of his company to Santo, 20 percent to Donatella, and 50 percent to Allegra, who will turn 20 this weekend and is studying drama at Brown University. And so it is that Donatella Versace finds herself from time to time in Providence, Rhode Island.

“I couldn’t picture me in Providence, let alone her!” says Mullen, who attended Brown himself.

“I stay at theez terrible hotel in the mall,” says Donatella, “in the presidential suite ... is not very presidential.” She laughs at the idea, and then so does everyone else. “But now Allegra has bought a house, so I stay there.” Recent pictures in the Italian press show Allegra heartbreakingly shrunken. According to Dona*tella, “she is better now.”

It’s a funny thing about coke, how it’s always the people who are already kind of manic who are the most drawn to it, like they want to see how amped-up they can possibly get without their heads’ blowing off their bodies. (Don’t they ever want to unwind?) There is something a little cokey—but very nontoxic—about Donatella’s vibe even now that she’s sober. She speaks very quickly. She laughs easily. She paces. She is little and coiled: a tight, tiny spring.

A photographer and his assistants are waiting upstairs for Donatella to come out and have her photo taken. She is running late, and she has allotted very little time for them anyway, and everyone is edgy but awed by the surroundings. These were once the king’s quarters. There are giant bowls of pungent lilies; a phalanx of marble heads carved before the birth of Christ; a collection of priceless antique globes; and a series of black-and-white photographs of Gianni, Donatella, and Santo with their relatives in Calabria, the Southern Italian town of their birth. Gianni sits grinning in front, Santo stands smiling behind him, Donatella looks very young, very modest, and very distant. Her nose looks different.

She says she never planned to have such an operatic life—some have greatness thrust upon them. “I knew I was going to work in fashion; I really didn’t think of nothing else,” she says, because her parents were tailors. “But I always thought it was Gianni who would live a grand life, not me. Because I really was not interested. Really I was … when I was at university, that was the happiest time of my life.”

She studied literature and languages in Florence and lived with three friends, one of whom was also named Donatella. “She has dark, dark hair, long, long hair. She had a child when she was 20. They were very, very avant-garde, my friends at that time. It was a very glamorous time! It was very political time, too, a lot of demonstrations against everything. We were into music a lot, we would go to every concert. I hate the Beatles. Hate. Too commercial for me, but I loved the Rolling Stones. I met them twenty years ago, when Jerry Hall start to date Mick.” Donatella dressed like a gypsy and wore black eye makeup and had very little responsibility. “When I was in university, I love my life.”

That was then. Now Donatella must run the kingdom until the Little Princess is ready, and she has a show to put on and a collection to edit and a photo to pose for. But the makeup and the hair take so much time, and they are so crucial, she knows. Nobody wants to see just some person; she cannot appear before her subjects out of full regalia. So she keeps the photographer waiting as someone works on the eyes and someone works on the tresses, and she sends Joseph out with yet more cakes.

“God, it’s always like Mom’s kitchen in here,” says a blonde American called D. J. Coleman, who wears sunglasses inside and is waiting to talk to Donatella about the music for her show. “When I worked for Tom Ford, you couldn’t even say his name. Seriously, if you were at a restaurant and you were talking about him, you had to say, like, ‘Grandpa is doing a lot of red this season.’ ”

Donatella emerges in all black. She always kept a room here as a place to stay when they were working late. “The last two years of Gianni’s life,” says Donatella, “I was going up into his apartment, showing him the work, getting the approval from him, but I ran the company because he wasn’t showing himself. It was like a year and a half I did everything.” On her walls there are two pieces by Julian Schnabel made from ceramic shards, a portrait of Gianni, and another of Allegra and Daniel. “The other way was more convenient for me, when I was next to Gianni, because Gianni was the one with all the responsibility, taking all the criticism. It was a more comfortable position.” She laughs. “Even if he said what was wrong was my fault, that was okay.”

She paces, smoking, lets them take a few shots, and then announces she is going back to her room. “I change clothes,” she tells the photographer. “I am insecure.”

The next evening at the New York Times party in the garden of the Hotel Bulgari, people are gushing sweat and drinking champagne. Paul Beck, Donatella’s ex-*husband, is in a gray shirt soaked through the armpits and the front of the chest. He still works for Versace, as he has for some twenty years, and he is circulating among the fashion press while Donatella prepares for the men’s-show rehearsal. He says hello to Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, who both wear their company’s name on a gold plate on the tail pocket of their jeans. He exchanges greetings with Pharrell Williams, who is in pink sneakers. “He played at my daughter’s birthday party,” Beck explains—Allegra’s 18th, which was just before Donatella went into rehab.

There is something guilelessly flat about Paul Beck—you can imagine him appealing very much to Andy Warhol. Beck grew up on Long Island and rode his Ken-doll looks into a modeling career in Manhattan in the eighties. He worked for Armani before he met Gianni and Donatella, and took on a larger, more familial role in the court of Versace. He was their fit model and then became a kind of consultant; “like the pockets are too deep, that kind of thing,” he explains. “I’d start, like, the personal relationships. We did this T-shirt for Bruce Springsteen when he played the stadium in Torino. There were four different categories of staff with four different colored T-shirts, like acid green, orange, yellow, and black, that said SPRINGSTEEN on the front, VERSACE on the back. At that time, especially in Italy, those things were not happening.” It was a stroke of magic Versace inspiration to posit that fashion could be more than what the rock stars wore: Fashion people could be rock stars themselves. “These guys really did become friends with Gianni,” says Beck, with feeling. “Like Springsteen dedicated a song to us when he was in Torino.”

Beck goes on to a party Vogue is throwing, at which Santo Versace is already chatting with Rupert Everett, who wears head-to-toe gingham. He makes an appearance at a glittering GQ soiree held in Milan’s Humanitaria. Gardenias float in little candlelit pools, and everyone is getting drunk and waiting for Pharrell to perform. Finally, Beck heads to the Milan Stock Exchange, where Donatella is having her rehearsal.

“We are civilized people,” she says. She and Beck want to maintain a sense of family even though they are split. (But then, all the roles in the court of Versace are fluid, shifting.) “In the beginning, it was more difficult. But a while after you separate ... you get over whatever makes you separated.” She laughs. “I don’t think we could work in the same city together, though.”

The show goes off without a hitch. It is unusual for an Italian family company to have a formal dress rehearsal—it isn’t done at Prada or Armani—so Versace shows always have a special polish. Donatella receives plaudits from the press for the collection, and then she flies to L.A. with her ex-*husband for her daughter’s birthday and sits by the pool and wears flip-flops and does not have her hair and makeup done for several days. “It was fabulous, really fabulous,” she says. “Just family and two friends of my daughter.”

Donatella’s family has become a much closer unit since she gave up drugs. “Because I had so much ashame … shame? When I wasn’t sober, I would be a little bit distant. I knew they knew because it was impossible not to. I was there all the time because I was a very present mother, but I realize the intimacy was very difficult with me. I was shy, I have something to hide. I still feel guilty.”

Her children came for a family session while she was in rehab. “They were asking me, ‘What is the number of your children? We want to contact your family because we want them to come here.’ I said no, no, I don’t want to involve my children; there is too much pain in this place, because it really is a place of pain, so much suffering going on. I mean, I hear stories in there … I felt so fortunate in a way. I thought I was going to protect my family, but in fact it was the opposite. They really want to come; they felt, why didn’t you want? You don’t want nothing to do with us? So it was a lot of explanation. I think I never cried so much as when the children left.” She smiles. “So for me to be so open now, so close together, I feel so much joy.”

Paul Beck works out of New York, where Donatella is today, sitting on a sofa in the $10,000-a-night Royal Suite at the Waldorf Towers on Park Avenue. (These rooms are so named because they were once home to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.) She has a new CEO, who has helped her cut down on expenses (no more traveling by private jet, the selling off of Gianni’s Manhattan townhouse and the Miami mansion in front of which he was shot by Andrew Cunanan), but a level of luxury has to be maintained. “We live in a time when you cannot do certain things anymore all the time,” says Donatella. “Every once in a while, okay.”

To look around at the fashionable elite in Manhattan, you might think the Versace aesthetic passé. All the fashion girls have been in flowy, flowery, deconstructed Marni things that look like they were made out of fabulous old pillowcases. Otherwise, they’re wearing sleek, Frenchy bits of elegance designed by Alber Elbaz for Lanvin. Come fall, they will switch to skirts called poufs and bubbles from Balenciaga. In all these cases, the sexuality and the luxury of the clothes are understated, almost evasive. (Your eyes have to swim laps around a Marni top to locate a breast. A simple, shiny Lanvin skirt with a bit of pin-*tucking costs thousands and will be recognized as a status symbol only by the most educated of fashion consumers.)

But in Southern California, as in Southern Italy, louche never went out. And the luxury market is rapidly expanding in places like China and India, where the concept of decadence requires little postmodern reinterpretation. Here in Manhattan—as in *Milan—Donatella has also toned things down: The full-on gilt and Medusa, buckles and baroque of the Gianni era is no more. The flagship boutiques on Fifth Avenue and Via *Monte Napoleone have been redone in black and white, marble and glass. And this men’s collection was more Santa Monica than Palermo. “I think Versace missed that softness—I always told to Gianni that, but you know, he was a big designer,” says Donatella. Her fall looks for women have been hailed as among the most wearable in the company’s history: clean pantsuits and mini-coats in camel and midnight blue, soft wool and softer Astrakhan, a simple pair of $620 jeans with rhinestone V’s on the ***.

“My mother was the strong one, and when my mother die, I took her place,” says Donatella. “I thought of myself as the one who really was able to tell Gianni the truth, because with a big designer, nobody is able. That’s the big threat for a big designer.”

Donatella has found someone to fill that role for her, now that she is herself the big designer, the ruling queen.


“I do for myself.”