The House of Gucci Page 7

  The death of his mother had traumatized Maurizio. For years afterward, he couldn’t bring himself to say the word Mamma. When he wanted to ask his father about his mother, he referred to her as “quella persona,” or “that person.” Rodolfo, working on an old Moviola in his basement studio, began to piece together all the bits of film he could find to show Maurizio what his mother had been like. He assembled scenes from their old silent films, footage of their wedding in Venice, and family scenes showing Maurizio playing in the Florentine countryside with his mother. Bit by bit, he created a feature-length movie about the Gucci family called Il Cinema nella Mia Vita, or Film in My Life. The movie became Rodolfo’s life’s work, an all-consuming project that he revised and edited continuously over the years.

  One Sunday morning, when Maurizio was nine or ten and attending a private grade school, Rodolfo invited Maurizio’s entire class to the first screening of his film at the Ambasciatori movie house located under the Vittorio Emanuele pedestrian shopping arcade and just a short walk from their apartment. For the first time, Maurizio saw his mother as he had never known her, a glamorous young actress, a romantic young bride, and a happy young mother—his mother. After the screening, he and Rodolfo walked the few blocks back home. As soon as they were inside, Maurizio threw himself on the living room couch, sobbing “Mamma! Mamma! Mamma!” over and over again until he could cry no more.

  As Maurizio grew older, Rodolfo expected him to work in the store after school and on weekends in the Gucci family tradition. Rodolfo apprenticed him to Signore Braghetta, an institution in the Via Monte Napoleone shop, who taught Maurizio how to wrap masterful packages.

  “Braghetta’s packages were beautiful,” recalled Francesco Gittardi, who managed the Milan store at the time. “Even if you only bought a 20,000-lire key chain, you took it home in a package that made it seem like a jewel from Cartier,” he said.

  Rodolfo’s relationship with Maurizio was intense and exclusive, dominated by Rodolfo’s possessiveness. Terrified that Maurizio could be kidnapped, Rodolfo ordered Franco to follow Maurizio in the car even when he went for a bicycle ride. On weekends and holidays, father and son would retreat to the estate Rodolfo had bought up, piece by piece, in Saint Moritz. Over the years, Rodolfo had invested his share of Gucci’s steadily growing proceeds in buying up property on the hill of Suvretta, one of the most exclusive areas of Saint Moritz, until he had assembled an idyllic estate measuring more than two hundred thousand square feet. Gianni Agnelli, chairman of the Fiat automotive group, Herbert von Karajan, and Shah Karim Aga Khan also had vacation homes there—and Agnelli was said to have made several overtures to purchase the choice property from the Gucci family. Rodolfo named the first chalet he built on Suvretta Chesa Murézzan, or “Maurizio’s house” in the local Swiss dialect. Rodolfo personally selected and transported slabs of peach-tinged stones from a nearby valley for the outside walls, where he mounted the family crest high up under the eaves, along with a fleur-de-lis, the symbol of Florence. Chesa Murézzan became Rodolfo and Maurizio’s retreat until Rodolfo built the second house, Chesa D’Ancora, a few years later. Located higher up on the hill with a view of the scenic Engadine valley, Chesa D’Ancora had wooden balconies and exposed wooden beams. Chesa Murézzan was then used for servants’ quarters while its living room became a giant screening room for Rodolfo’s beloved films. Rodolfo kept his eye on a neighboring chalet, a charming wooden house with hand-painted flowers on the shutters in the old style and blue flowers in the front lawn. Built in 1929, L’Oiseau Bleu, as the chalet was called, was the home of the elderly woman who had sold him the Saint Moritz property over the years. Rodolfo had cultivated the old woman over time, stopping in for tea and seemingly endless afternoon chats. He thought L’Oiseau Bleu might be the perfect place to live out his old age.

  Rodolfo tried to teach Maurizio the value of money by withholding it, and gave him limited pocket money. When Maurizio was old enough to drive, Rodolfo bought Maurizio a mustard-yellow Giulia, a popular Alfa Romeo model. A sturdy, high-end car with a powerful motor—for years in Italy it was associated with the national polizia, which commissioned it for their squad cars—it wasn’t the Ferrari Maurizio yearned for. Rodolfo also kept a strict curfew for Maurizio, who was expected home well before midnight on school nights. Intimidated by his father’s autocratic and slightly neurotic personality, Maurizio loathed asking him for anything. He found his truest friend and companion in a man twelve years his senior—Luigi Pirovano, the man whom Rodolfo hired in 1965 to drive him on business trips. Maurizio was just seventeen years old. When he ran out of pocket money, Luigi advanced him the cash he needed; when he racked up parking fines, Luigi paid them; when he wanted to take a girl out on a date, Luigi gave him the car—and fixed it all with Rodolfo.

  As Maurizio progressed in his law studies at Milan’s Catholic University, Rodolfo worried that his son was too trusting and gullible. One day, Rodolfo sat him down for a father-son talk.

  “You must never forget, Maurizio. You are a Gucci. You are different from the rest. There are a lot of women who would like to get their claws into you—and your fortune. Be careful, because there are women who make their careers out of trapping young men like you.”

  Summers, while Maurizio’s peers vacationed at Italian beach resorts, Rodolfo sent Maurizio to New York to work for his uncle Aldo, who was overseeing the expansion of Gucci America. Maurizio himself never gave Rodolfo cause for worry—until the party on Via dei Giardini.

  In the beginning, Maurizio couldn’t bring himself to tell Rodolfo about Patrizia. He had dinner with his father every night as usual. Rodolfo, sensing Maurizio’s impatience, inevitably slowed his pace—dragging out the meal as long as he could while Maurizio fidgeted in agony. The minute Rodolfo finished eating, Maurizio excused himself from the table and rushed off to meet Patrizia, his “pocket-sized Venus,” as one friend called her.

  “Where are you going?” Rodolfo would call out after him.

  “Out with friends,” Maurizio would answer vaguely.

  Rodolfo would descend to his basement screening room to work on his masterpiece. While he watched the old black-and-white film clips over and over again, Maurizio raced to his folletto rosso, or “little red elf,” as he had nicknamed Patrizia because of the red dress she had been wearing the night they met. She called him her “Mau.” They often ate dinner at Santa Lucia, the homestyle trattoria in the center of town that continued to be Maurizio’s favorite restaurant for years. He nibbled halfheartedly at his meal while Patrizia enjoyed the savory, home-cooked pastas and risotti, wondering at his lack of appetite. She discovered only later that Maurizio was eating two dinners—the first at home with his father and the second out with her. Maurizio was swept away by Patrizia, who was only a few months younger, but seemed far more worldly and experienced than he. If he noticed that her dark, seductive looks were the result of hours at the hairdressers and in front of the makeup mirror, he didn’t care. Even when she was a young girl, Patrizia’s style was artificial and overdone. Their friends used to ask themselves what Maurizio saw in her after she removed her false lashes, combed out her teased hair, and stepped down from her high heels—but Maurizio adored everything about her. He asked her to marry him on their second date.

  It took Rodolfo some time to recognize the change that had overcome Maurizio. One day he confronted his son with the telephone bill in hand.

  “Maurizio!” he barked.

  “Si, Papà?” Maurizio answered, startled, from the next room.

  “Are you the one who has been making all these telephone calls?” Rodolfo asked as Maurizio poked his head into his father’s study.

  Maurizio turned red and didn’t answer.

  “Maurizio, answer me. Just look at this telephone bill! It’s outrageous!”

  “Papà,” Maurizio sighed, knowing the moment had come. “I have a girlfriend,” he said, walking into the room. “And I love her. I want to marry her.”

  Patrizia was the daughte
r of Silvana Barbieri, a red-haired woman from a simple background who grew up helping out in her father’s restaurant in Modena, a town in Emilia-Romagna less than two hours south of Milan. Fernando Reggiani, the cofounder of a successful transport business headquartered in Milan, often stopped for lunch or dinner at the family restaurant when he passed through town. Also from Emilia-Romagna, he enjoyed both the hearty regional cooking with which he had grown up and watching the owner’s pretty red-haired daughter as she moved about the tables and rang up checks at the cash register. Even though he was in his mid-fifties and married, Reggiani couldn’t stay away from Silvana, no more than eighteen at the time. She thought he looked like Clark Gable.

  “He courted me assiduously,” recalled Silvana, saying they started an affair that lasted years. She claims that Patrizia, born on December 2, 1948, was actually Reggiani’s daughter, saying that he couldn’t recognize her at the time because of his marriage. In talking about her own childhood, however, Patrizia always referred to Reggiani as her patrigno, or stepfather. Silvana married a local man named Martinelli to give her daughter a last name and followed her Clark Gable to Italy’s business capital.

  “I have been the lover, concubine, and wife of one man, and one man only,” insisted Silvana, who moved herself and Patrizia into a small apartment on Via Toselli in a semi-industrial neighborhood near the headquarters of Reggiani’s trucking business.

  Over the years, Reggiani had made a comfortable fortune with Blort, as his company was called, named for the initials of four founding partners who had pooled their resources before the war to buy their first truck. Although the German army subsequently confiscated Blort’s trucks, Reggiani built the business back up after the war, buying his partners out one at a time until he remained the sole proprietor. He became a respected member of Milan’s business and religious community and a generous contributor to charities, earning him the title of commendatore. Reggiani’s wife died of cancer in February 1956, and by the end of that year, Silvana and Patrizia moved into Reggiani’s comfortable home on Via dei Giardini. Some years later, Reggiani quietly married Silvana and adopted Patrizia.

  Silvana and Patrizia discovered they were not alone in Reggiani’s house. In 1945, Reggiani had adopted the son of a relative who couldn’t care for the boy. Enzo, then thirteen years old, had a troubled and unruly personality and resented the newcomers.

  “Silvana will be your new teacher,” Fernando told the boy.

  “How is she supposed to teach me anything?” Enzo protested to his father. “She is ignorant, she makes mistakes in grammar.”

  Enzo didn’t get along with Patrizia, either; the two children fought constantly and life in the Reggiani household became unbearable. Silvana, who had been brought up in the old school of strict rules and heavy punishments, tried unsuccessfully to control Enzo. She finally went to Reggiani.

  “He isn’t bright, Fernando, he is not doing well in school,” Silvana told him, and he sent Enzo away to boarding school.

  Patrizia, thrilled with her new father and family life, captured Fernando’s heart. He coddled her shamelessly; she called him “Papino” and adored him. When she turned fifteen, he gave her a white mink coat that she flaunted proudly in front of her classmates at the Collegio delle Fanciulle, an exclusive school for girls on the east side of Milan near the city’s music conservatory. For her eighteenth birthday she found a Lancia Fulvia Zagato sports car parked in front of their home wrapped with a giant red ribbon. She teased him, scandalizing him with questions about his faith.

  “Papino, if Christ is supposed to be eternal, then why is it necessary to make wooden statues of him?” she would say as he growled a response. “Papino, at Eastertime that wooden Christ you bend to kiss used to be a tree!” She’d throw her arms around his neck while Reggiani sputtered and fumed.

  “Papino, I’ll come to church with you on Sunday!”

  While Reggiani coddled Patrizia, Silvana groomed her. Silvana had gotten them from Modena to Milan; it was up to Patrizia to take the next step—into the living rooms of the best families in town. Patrizia became the living image of Silvana’s ambition. But the cars, furs, and other status symbols only turned up the gossip among Patrizia’s schoolmates, who whispered loudly about her mother’s simple origins and made fun of Patrizia’s outrageous style. Patrizia cried at home with her mother at night.

  “What do they have that I don’t have?” she asked miserably. Silvana reprimanded her, reminding her that they had left behind another life in the small apartment on Via Toselli.

  “You don’t accomplish anything by crying,” she said. “Life is a battle and you must fight. The only thing that matters is substance. Don’t listen to the evil voices. They don’t know who you are.”

  After Patrizia graduated from high school, she enrolled in a school for translators. She was smart and learned easily but having fun was her main interest. Classmates recalled how she would shimmy into class at 8 A.M., slipping yet another of her ostentatious fur coats off her shoulders to reveal she was still wearing a skimpy, rhinestone-studded cocktail dress from the night before.

  “She went out every night,” said Silvana, shaking her head. “She would come into the living room to say goodbye with her coat clasped tightly across her chest and say, ‘Papà, I’m going out now.’ Fernando would look at his watch and say, ‘OK, but at twelve-fifteen I am locking the door—if you aren’t inside by then, you can sleep on the stairs!’ After she would leave he would look at me and say, ‘You two think I am an idiot, but I know why she had her coat wrapped across her chest like that. You shouldn’t let our daughter go out dressed like that!’ It was always my fault!”

  Although Patrizia hardly seemed to care about her lessons, she easily became fluent in English and French in addition to Italian, making her Papino Reggiani beam at her good grades. At the same time, she became known around Milan for her provocative ways.

  “I first met Patrizia at the wedding of a friend of mine,” recalled a former acquaintance. “She was wearing a beautiful lavender voile dress, only she wasn’t wearing anything underneath it. At the time, it was scandalous!” the friend said. “While Maurizio had received such a strict upbringing from his father, all the boys in our group knew what kind of girl she was. In fact, they used to tell me they knew very well, but Maurizio didn’t want to hear about it. He completely fell for her.”

  Rodolfo was taken aback by Maurizio’s declaration of love for Patrizia.

  “At your age?” thundered Rodolfo. “You are young, you are still in school and you haven’t even begun your training to work in the family firm,” Rodolfo protested as Maurizio listened silently. Rodolfo wanted to groom Maurizio to take charge of Gucci one day. He could see that none of his brother Aldo’s sons was up to the task, something he knew Aldo realized as well.

  “And just who is the lucky one?” Rodolfo asked his son apprehensively. Maurizio told him. The name didn’t mean anything to Rodolfo, who hoped the whole matter would blow over and Maurizio would lose interest in the girl.

  Probably no woman was good enough for Maurizio in Rodolfo’s eyes. For some time, Rodolfo had hoped Maurizio would marry a childhood friend, Marina Palma, who later married Stavros Niarchos and whose parents had a house near Rodolfo’s in Saint Moritz. Marina and Maurizio had played together as children.

  “She was the one person who Rodolfo thought might have been good enough for Maurizio,” recalled Liliana Colombo, who worked first for Rodolfo and later became Maurizio’s loyal secretary. “Rodolfo dreamed that Maurizio would marry Marina because she came from a good family; he knew her father. He wasn’t sure about Patrizia.”

  About six weeks into Maurizio and Patrizia’s relationship, an episode forced tensions out into the open. Patrizia had invited Maurizio to join her for the weekend at Santa Margherita, where her father had a small two-story villa with a flower-filled terrace overlooking the water. Furnished with elegantly carved Venetian pieces, the house was a meeting point for Patrizia and her fr
iends.

  “That house was like a port city,” recalled Silvana. “Nando would bring home the focaccia and I would make trays full of little sandwiches and within a few hours there would be nothing left!”

  But that weekend, Patrizia didn’t care how many people had flocked to the house, she only cared about the one who hadn’t shown up. Patrizia called Maurizio’s home to find out if something had happened, and was surprised when he answered the phone himself.

  “I told my father I wanted to come and he wouldn’t let me,” Maurizio told her sheepishly.

  Patrizia was furious and amazed at his diffidence.

  “You are a grown man! Do you have to ask permission for everything? We are supposed to be in love, yet it’s a crime for you to come swimming with me? Why don’t you just come down for the day?”

  On Sunday Maurizio finally arrived, having promised his father he would be back that evening, but at dinner Patrizia persuaded him to stay the night. When Rodolfo realized Maurizio wasn’t coming home, he called. Silvana answered the phone only to hear Rodolfo storming on the other end of the line. He asked to speak to Patrizia’s father. When Fernando Reggiani came to the phone, Maurizio’s father roared, “I am not happy about what is going on between my son and your daughter. She is distracting Maurizio from his studies.”

  Reggiani tried to calm Rodolfo down, but Maurizio’s father cut him off.

  “Basta! Tell your daughter that she is not permitted to see Maurizio anymore. I know she is only after his money, but she will never have it. Never! Do you understand?”

  Fernando Reggiani wasn’t a man to take abuse lightly and Rodolfo’s attack offended him deeply.

  “You are very rude! You should know that you are not the only one in this world to have money,” Fernando shot back. “My daughter is free to see whom she pleases. I trust her and her feelings, and if she wants to see Maurizio Gucci or anyone else she is free to do so,” he shouted, slamming down the receiver.