House of Versace: The Untold Story of Genius, Murder, and Survival Read online

  For my parents, Georgina and Lawrence

  For my brothers and their families

  For Fabrizio

  Contents

  one “They’ve Shot Gianni”

  two The Black Sheep

  three Breaking Free

  four Sister, Playmate, Confidante

  five A New Era

  six Rivals and Lovers

  seven Inspiration and Muse

  eight Rock and Royalty

  nine Supermodels, Superstar

  ten Diva

  Photo Insert

  eleven Spoiled by Success

  twelve Conflict

  thirteen Murder

  fourteen Understudy on the Stage

  fifteen Inheritance and Loss

  sixteen Siblings at War

  seventeen Toward Ruin

  eighteen Breaking Down

  nineteen Recovery

  twenty A New Beginning

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  one

  “They’ve Shot Gianni”

  iT WAS MIDAFTERNOON ON JULY 15, 1997, AND A BREATHLESS heat had settled on Rome, making the Eternal City so hot that stiletto heels sank slightly into the melting asphalt, leaving pockmarks on the sidewalk. Piazza di Spagna, with its undulating, double-helix staircase, was a hive of activity. Early that morning, police had cleared the cream-colored marble steps, shooing away the penny-ante artists and the slick Romeos who chatted up pretty tourists, so that television crews could mount bulky cameras and lights onto two makeshift towers.

  The crews were setting up for the next evening’s broadcast of Donna sotto le stelle, or Woman Under the Stars. Donna sotto le stelle was the sort of eye candy that had become a staple of Italian television in the 1980s. Eighteen fashion houses, including Valentino and Fendi, would send their most fabulous evening gowns sashaying down the floodlit Spanish Steps, with the balmy backdrop of Rome adding to the festive air. To add a pinch of drama, the organizers of the show always chose one designer to honor. This year, they’d picked Gianni Versace.

  Gianni’s sister, Donatella, had arrived the evening before at the Hotel De La Ville, a seventeenth-century palazzo turned hotel perched at the top of the steps. As usual, she stayed in the best room—a deluxe eighth-floor penthouse with a wraparound terrace that offered postcard views stretching from the cupola of the Vatican to the Colosseum. The suite boasted a white baby grand piano, bequeathed to the hotel by composer Leonard Bernstein, who had once lived there for six months. Santo, the elder brother of Donatella and Gianni, hated fancy suites and had unpacked his bags in a more modest room at the same hotel.

  That morning, each house had had an hour-long slot to rehearse its models on the Spanish Steps, the trickiest of catwalks, with 135 marble stairs, many worn slippery smooth from centuries of tourist traffic. Dozens of models gingerly tested their descents in the stilettos they would wear the next day. Donatella had the first slot for the rehearsal that morning. The producers knew the ratings dropped soon after the start of the show, as a marathon of pretty models in pretty clothes tired viewers quickly, so they had scheduled the most important designers first. This year, Versace was to open the show. Due to the unwieldy number of designers, the show’s organizers had set a limit of no more than fifteen dresses each. Donatella had ignored the quota and brought thirty-five, confident that the house’s signature glitz would be irresistible to the show’s producers and that no one would complain.

  Moreover, she was bringing Naomi Campbell, the star of supermodels, famous for her perfect body, her showmanship, and her ability to work a dress with grace and swagger. Naomi was too important to attend that morning’s run-through, so another girl had stood in for her. Naomi had arrived in Italy a few days before to take in a quick holiday on the Amalfi coast, and a chauffeured car was ferrying her to Rome for the evening dress rehearsal. Even in a world crowded with million-dollar egos, Naomi was the ultimate diva, thanks as much to her personal antics as to her lithe body. The twenty-seven-year-old superstar’s appetite for gorgeous men, fast cars, and copious amounts of cocaine provided endless fodder for gossip columns. Naomi’s tantrums were legendary: She would throw such a violent fit over lost luggage in London that police officers had to drag her kicking and screaming from the plane. Another time, she threw a cell phone at her maid, leaving a gash that required stitches.

  But with Gianni, Naomi was a different, more tractable creature. She had long been his favorite model—the woman he often had in mind when he designed his gowns. She showed off his frocks in their full glamour, her feline grace a perfect foil for his lissome dresses. Versace had brought her fame as one of the original supermodels, the group of exquisite girls Gianni had launched. He also played the role of the protective big brother, a salve to her skittish, high-strung character. Cementing her bond with the clan, Naomi had become fast friends with Donatella, who often invited her for weekends at the Versace mansion on Lake Como.

  As Naomi made her way to Rome, two conference rooms on the first floor of the Hotel De La Ville had been transformed into a makeshift backstage, overflowing with pre-fashion-show detritus, as makeup artists, hairdressers, and seamstresses wrangled the girls into the highly polished, über-sexy Versace look for the dress rehearsal. Dressed in skinny jeans and devoid of makeup, the girls sat giggling and gossiping, sipping on cans of Diet Coke and chatting as they waited their turns. Some were as young as fourteen and still had pre-pubescent, almost boyish figures. Indeed, aside from the supermodels, many models are surprisingly plain without makeup. They are chameleons that designers can transform into the type of women they want to project that season.

  Against one wall stood a line of vanity tables, outfitted with bright klieg lights and littered with bottles, tubes, and hairpieces. Makeup artists held the girls’ chins firmly, turning their heads left and right to get a good look at their work. The room grew stifling with the sickly smell of hair spray, cigarette smoke, and espresso vapors. Because the show was just a one-night stand and not part of a fashion marathon, the hair and makeup people had a relatively easy time of it. During fashion week, when the girls scurry from show to show, the hair and makeup artists have to rush to remove the fake nails, elaborate hairdos, or full-body bronzing gel that the last designer demanded. A model who works the whole five-week runway season will find her skin, hair, and nails wrecked by the relentless grooming.

  Once made up, the bare-breasted models stripped down to just heels and tiny G-strings, their Brazilian bikini waxes on full display, and waited for dressers to help them wiggle into the clothes without smudging their makeup or leaving stains on the dresses from the greasy lotion they’d applied to their legs to make them shine under the lights. Models often crash-dieted or downed laxatives before a big show, so Versace’s motherly seamstresses, pins hanging from their mouths, stood ready to nip and tuck dresses to make them fit again. Double-sided tape was strapped to the models’ breasts to keep them from popping out of Versace’s signature plunging necklines on stage. Trays of food sat untouched.

  Donatella’s assistants then took Polaroid shots of each woman in her assigned dress, complete with any jewelry and handbags she would wear for the show. The photos were then taped to a rack holding the entire outfit, so that the models wouldn’t forget anything. Donatella was watching a seamstress fit a model into a dress, mulling some last-minute changes to the lineup, when her cell phone rang. Of course, it was Gianni, calling from Miami Beach to pepper her with questions.

  Since the 1970s, Gianni had staged scores of fashion shows and had long since mastered the kind of catwalk or
chestration that Donatella was attempting now. He knew that a runway show—with as many as sixty outfits flying by in fifteen minutes—had to be as tightly choreographed as a ballet, with weeks going into choosing just the right music, lights, and girls. The music must set the tone and establish the pace for the models; the designer must decide which model shows off a particular outfit in its best light; and the order in which the outfits are shown will determine the overall impact of a collection, with the opening and closing pieces being the most important choices. A model normally shows at least two outfits per show, and may have as little as thirty seconds to change, further complicating the task of matching the right girl with the right dress in the right sequence.

  Gianni, hyperaware that a miscalculation of any of these variables can mean the difference between a hit show and a flop, grilled Donatella on what dresses she had decided to show and how each one looked on certain girls. The Rome show, strictly television entertainment, was less critical than the Milan and Paris catwalks, since buyers and the top fashion editors didn’t attend it. Nonetheless, Gianni was still obsessed with the show being perfect and was nervous about how Donatella would handle the event. While Gianni loved his sister profoundly, he didn’t fully trust her judgment.

  When Gianni was diagnosed with a rare type of inner-ear cancer in the summer of 1994, he’d been forced to entrust Donatella with more of the day-to-day responsibility of running the house as he underwent chemotherapy treatments. Donatella and Gianni’s relationship had a tenor that some likened to that of twins, and she had long played the role of Gianni’s sounding board and alter ego in what became one of the greatest collaborations in fashion. Several years earlier, he’d agreed to let her design a new line, Versus, despite the fact that Donatella had no formal design training and couldn’t even sketch. Versus—with rock-chick pieces heavy on the leather and studs that echoed the aesthetic of its designer and prices that were a quarter that of Gianni’s signature line—had gotten reasonably positive reviews. But it was when Gianni fell ill that Donatella—at age forty-two, nine years younger than her brother—truly stepped out of his shadow for the first time. She reveled in the limelight, happily directing Gianni’s team, most of whom had been with him since the birth of his empire. She gave interviews for fawning magazine profiles, including a ten-page spread titled “La Bella Donatella” that had appeared in Vanity Fair. But after Gianni recovered from his cancer treatments, the pair started to clash. Gianni sensed his team was still looking to Donatella for direction, and he resented it. For months, their relationship was prickly.

  By 1997, tensions still simmered. A week before the Rome television show, Donatella and Gianni had been together in Paris for the Versace couture show, which Gianni had spent tens of thousands of francs to stage at the frescoed pool bar at the Ritz, the opulent hotel that sits in Place Vendôme. Several years earlier, when Gianni decided to start presenting a couture show at the Ritz, some in the French establishment were miffed. The Ritz was an institution in Paris, hosting luminaries such as Ernest Hemingway, for whom a bar in the hotel is named, and Coco Chanel, who made a duplex suite in the hotel her home for more than thirty years and who represented the very institution of French fashion that Versace, the brash upstart from southern Italy, was intent on supplanting.

  For Gianni’s July 1997 show at the Ritz, he intended for the models to descend a double staircase to a glass walkway he’d had built over the turquoise pool. Donatella had urged Gianni to use Karen Elson as the final model, the one who wears couture’s traditional pièce de résistance, the wedding dress. Elson was the girl of the moment, her fame ignited earlier that year when photographer Steven Meisel convinced her to shave off her eyebrows and dye her hair bright red for her first cover for Italian Vogue. But the day before the show, Donatella sat in an empty front row, watching Gianni, dressed in a simple pullover sweater and pleated pants, pace up and down over the clear plastic tarp that had been laid over the glass runway to keep it perfectly clean. He bristled as he watched Elson nervously descend the stairs and walk the runway. Gianni didn’t like her lopey, horselike gait, and he raged at Donatella for having suggested the girl in the first place. So he substituted Naomi, who did him proud as she sauntered by in the wedding dress—a baby-doll-like slip of slinky metal mesh adorned with oversized silver crosses. Elson burst into a fit of tears, while Donatella wore a stony look on her face. Gianni’s ruling showed he didn’t trust her with key decisions.

  After the contretemps in Paris, Donatella was determined to retain some degree of autonomy. She was happy to see Gianni skip the Rome show and get an early start on his summer holiday. Gianni had long since stopped coming to Donna sotto le stelle anyway. He hated how he and his rival designers were crammed together into one mind-numbing production, where petty jealousies inevitably erupted. The designers had to share the models hired for the show, and some tried to hog the prettiest women by taking too long to dress them. Giorgio Armani and Valentino had once gotten into a screaming match when Valentino took more than his allocated time to rehearse his models.1 The heat was also a constant problem. The designers showed their latest collections—clothes for fall and winter—and the girls wilted under heavy dresses and fur coats, their elaborate makeup melting. But mostly Gianni didn’t come because he was just plain exhausted. The show at the Ritz had demanded a week of eighteen-hour days as Gianni readied more than one hundred handmade gowns. Much to everyone’s relief, Gianni and Antonio D’Amico, his companion of fifteen years, had flown off to spend a few days in Gianni’s thirty-five-room Miami Beach mansion.

  With Versace as the show’s featured house, it would be Donatella who would close the broadcast, descending the Spanish Steps hand in hand with Naomi—a triumphant moment for a woman who as her brother’s muse had thrived even as she felt confined to his shadow. Donatella recognized that Gianni was the strongest link of the Versace trio, his genius providing the spark that had brought success and its spoils to them all. His presence was the ballast that steadied the lives of all three siblings. And, despite his recent illness, creatively and commercially he was still at the top of his game. By the late 1990s, Gianni had refined and honed his look, eliminating the garishness that had marred some of his earliest designs. He had come to define the have-it-all ethos of the millennium’s final decade. He was now counted among Yves Saint Laurent, Coco Chanel, and Giorgio Armani as one of fashion’s greatest designers.

  It was barely after lunchtime in Rome—and dawn in Miami—when Donatella got Gianni’s first call. He bugged her with questions about how the rehearsal was going, and she grew more and more annoyed. Finally she snapped, “Gianni, you can’t help me from there,” and hung up.2 When he called again a half hour later, she ignored the phone and continued to fit the models.

  A short time later, Santo, the oldest and most businesslike of the Versace siblings, got a call on his cell phone. He figured it was his brother, but instead it was a Versace assistant calling from Milan. “They’ve shot Gianni,” she told him. That was all she knew.

  In that horrible moment, Santo felt a flash of practical anger. Why had his brother gone to Miami, a city notorious for its violence? How many times had he urged Gianni to hire bodyguards? Ever the problem solver in the family, Santo began thinking of how he would get Gianni back to Italy and into a hospital to recover.

  His face grim, he ran to find Donatella, pulling her away from a fitting with a model. “Donatella, vieni qua subito! Come with me!” he shouted in a panicked voice that jolted the models and assistants, who knew Santo to have the coolest head of the three siblings. Donatella, alarmed, trailed behind him. When they were alone, Santo told her, “A lunatic has shot Gianni. But don’t worry. He’s already on the way to the hospital, and they’ll take care of him.”

  Donatella didn’t believe her brother. Immediately she began making calls to Miami. When she reached a Versace assistant who was in touch with the hospital, she screamed hysterically with her premonition that her brother Gianni was dead.
/>   “Yes, Donatella,” said the grim voice on the other end. “Gianni’s dead.”

  Donatella let out a cry that reached the models still rehearsing on the steps outside. Then she fainted. Santo, standing next to her, blanched and began to shake. After a few minutes, he and Emanuela Schmeidler, Versace’s longtime PR chief, managed to carry Donatella up to her suite.

  In her room, she came to and sat slumped on the bed, sobbing with Santo. Suddenly, she shot upright, alarmed with concern that the children would hear the news on the television. An aide ran to the bedroom next door, where Donatella’s children, eleven-year-old Allegra and six-year-old Daniel, had been watching cartoons. It was too late. Italian television was running bulletins with news of Gianni’s death and the kids had seen it. Distraught, they ran to their mother.

  The events that followed would be a blur for Santo and Donatella; both of them were overcome with shock, pain, and grief. It took thirty bodyguards to hustle them through the scrum of photographers outside the Hotel De La Ville; one of them had even tried to climb down the side of the building to steal a photo of the pair in their suite. A paparazzo got a shot of Donatella, hunched in the backseat of a black Mercedes, the pain on her face visible behind giant black sunglasses. The car drove them to Ciampino, Rome’s military airport. Italy’s richest man, Silvio Berlusconi, who would later become the country’s prime minister, had offered to lend the family his private jet to fly them to Miami, but an Italian construction magnate beat him to it, making his private plane immediately available.

  After a ten-hour flight, Donatella and Santo landed at Miami’s airport at 3:30 a.m. and drove straight to Gianni’s mansion on Ocean Drive, in the heart of the South Beach district that the Versace lifestyle had done so much to popularize.3 Madonna had offered to let them stay at her house if they didn’t want to stay at Gianni’s home, but they declined. They would spend the next day and a half at the palazzo Gianni had spent millions to renovate and had loved so much—and which was now the scene of the crime.