In the Name of Gucci Read online

  Copyright © 2016 by Patricia Gucci

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  crownpublishing.com

  Crown Archetype and colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Gucci, Patricia.

  Title: In the name of Gucci : a memoir / Patricia Gucci.

  Other titles: Gucci. English

  Description: First Edition. | New York : Crown Archetype, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015037677| ISBN 9780804138932 (hardback) | ISBN 9780804138949 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Gucci (Firm)—History. | Gucci family. | Gucci, Patrizia. | Fashion designers—Italy—Biography. | Clothing trade—Italy—History—20th century. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Rich & Famous. | DESIGN / Fashion. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs.

  Classification: LCC HD9940.I84 G8513 2016 | DDC 338.7/6174692092—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/​2015037677

  ISBN 9780804138932

  eBook ISBN 9780804138949

  Cover design by Christopher Brand

  Cover photograph (front) by Roger Powers_HP/©Houston Chronicle

  All photographs are courtesy of the author unless otherwise credited.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author's Note

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Photo Insert 1

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Photo Insert 2

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  For my mother

  The events portrayed in this book are based on that which I witnessed and experienced, or on what my parents and others told me. Wherever possible, I have tried to verify them independently but I accept that they may not be always as others remember them. In a few instances I have changed names to protect people or avoid causing offense. Any mistakes are my own.

  The day of my father’s funeral, nothing felt solid beneath my feet. The earth had tilted on its axis and I hadn’t yet tilted with it.

  Misshapen by grief and pregnancy, I was twenty-six years old and less than a month away from giving birth to my second child when I watched his coffin carried into the church in Rome. His was the first funeral I had ever attended and the concept of his vital presence being contained inside a wooden box robbed me of what little balance I had left.

  Gripping my pew, I glanced at my mother, Bruna, sitting motionless beside me, her big brown eyes hidden behind huge sunglasses. She was so lost in her own desolation that she could offer me no solace. I felt like an orphan—and not for the first time.

  Truth was that she and Papà had lived in their own special world since long before I pushed my way into it. From the earliest days of their illicit romance in the 1950s, their bond was unfathomably deep. I was the unexpected love child, sent by my father to be born in another country to avoid a scandal.

  Aldo Gucci, the creative visionary behind the famous fashion house, was not a man to be argued with. A trailblazing businessman of extraordinary dynamism, he’d transformed his father’s small Florentine luggage company into a global phenomenon that came to epitomize Italian chic. Then, in a catastrophic turn of events, I witnessed firsthand his heartbreaking downfall and the destruction of a family legacy he had fought so hard to uphold. During the last five years of his life a series of betrayals that brought to mind the tragedy of King Lear culminated in the sale of his business and ultimately led to his demise.

  To me, though, Papà wasn’t someone to be judged or pitied. He was just the handsome daddy with the ready smile and distinctive cologne who flew in and out of our lives with a blast of movement and noise like some exotic bird. Lanky, loose-limbed, and perpetually on the move, he’d arrive in a flurry to fill our still, silent spaces with his energy and laughter. A man like no other, he was human, vulnerable, and deeply flawed. Even though we never saw him often enough or for long enough, for Mamma and me he was the glue that bound us together.

  Now he was gone and we had his funeral to get through. Not only the hour-long church service but also an onerous three-hour journey to the Gucci mausoleum outside Florence. It would be an interminable day after a long and difficult few weeks. Mamma, Papà, and I had been holed up together at the private Catholic clinic waiting for the end—never quite believing it would come.

  As nuns glided silently to and fro, my mother had taken up her position on one side of his bed while I sat on the other. We were the keepers of secrets and the guardians of his truth—the two women who knew the real Aldo Gucci and who loved him anyway.

  The moment my married father first set eyes on “La Bella Bruna” when she went to work as a salesgirl in his Rome store, he lost his head—and his heart. The coy eighteen-year-old was to become my father’s true north and the compass by which he would plot the rest of his life. In the three decades when he crisscrossed the globe to build his empire it was to Bruna that “Dottor” Gucci—as he was often known—always secretly returned for succor and sanctuary. And it was she who clasped his hand as he died.

  The young beauty, whose looks had been compared to those of some of the most famous Italian movie stars of her era, paid a heavy price for being hidden away for all those years. And so—consequently—did I. A reserved child who’d had to grow up fast, I was mystified by my mother’s slow, sorrowful withdrawal from the world and the way she excluded me from their inner sanctum.

  Their remarkable history seemed to have been forgotten at the Chiesa di Santa Chiara on the northwestern fringes of Rome on the morning of his funeral in January 1991. My father’s chauffeur, Franco, drove us in silence to the modern terracotta-colored church. Joining the throng of mourners, we made our bewildered way up the sweeping stone steps and were ushered into pews alongside members of the staff and business associates who’d flown in from all over the world to pay their respects to the famed Gucci patriarch.

  Across the aisle sat my father’s first wife, Olwen, propped up by my three half brothers, Giorgio, Paolo, and Roberto, whose existence I’d been unaware of until I was ten years old. Never before had both families been together under the same roof and the atmosphere was chilling. It was also the first time I’d ever set eyes on their mother. If I’d thought about her at all, I suppose I’d imagined her to be an elegant, elderly Englishwoman, ramrod straight in twinset and pearls. Instead, she was a shrunken little old lady in a wheelchair and her physical and mental frailty at eighty-one shocked me. My mother, stiff with sorrow, didn’t even appear to notice.

  Nor did we register our marked separation from that side of my father’s family. This was our default position. On that bitter mor
ning, in that unattractive building, all I could do was fan my fingers over my unborn child and wonder how we’d survive without my father’s protection from the family storms. He’d been gone for less than a week and although my mother still saw him every night in her dreams, we both felt utterly adrift.

  True to form, Papà had set his affairs in order long before he slipped into his final, fatal coma. He had organized his own funeral before entrusting the arrangements to his most devoted staff. It was to be a simple service with no flowers and few eulogies.

  Eager to pay tribute to my mother, he’d penned his own obituary to be issued upon his death. Aldo Gucci, he wrote, left behind his wife Bruna Palombo and his companion Olwen Price. Some of the Italian newspapers faithfully printed the distinction between the two women just as my father had intended.

  The New York Times, however, did not. Published two days after he died, its obituary quoted President John F. Kennedy’s description of him as “the first Italian ambassador of fashion.” The article ended with the sentence “Mr. Gucci is survived by his wife, the former Olwen Price, and three sons, Roberto, Giorgio and Paolo.”

  There was no mention of my mother, or of me.

  It was a glaring omission, probably stage-managed by the other side of the family, but there was nothing we could do about it. Nor were we able to counter any of the other unwelcome things written about my father after his death. Legally, and for a long time, I was obliged to remain as invisible as others would have me and forbidden from divulging anything.

  Until now.

  Twenty-five years on, this is the untold story—my father’s, my mother’s, and that of the global empire he created that ultimately shaped all of our lives.

  It is now mine to tell.

  The years after my father died weren’t easy for my mother and me. Our relationship had always been rocky but we were both consumed by our own problems and his absence only made it worse.

  Bereft of the man who’d become a father figure, friend, husband, and son all rolled into one, my mother was overcome by grief and fear. She felt rudderless without the force that had been driving us forward. Whenever I tried to comfort her, she pushed me away, and I became too busy to try again. My marriage was crumbling, I had a new baby, and it fell to me to deal with the lawyers for my father’s estate. There was no time to grieve. Unable to guide my mother, I was powerless as she struggled to accept the loss that, for a while, rendered her completely incoherent.

  Her helplessness effectively shut down all channels of communication between us at a time when I needed her most. For the next few years we hardly connected at all. By the time I was in my forties I was counting the cost of two failed marriages and the toll they had taken on my three daughters. For reasons I hadn’t yet understood, I seemed to attract the wrong kind of man and suffered immensely as a result. True love—the kind my parents shared during their long and complex relationship—had eluded me.

  Thankfully, I had some wonderful friends, but they could only support me so much. Prayer and meditation helped, but I realized that part of the problem was that I didn’t feel grounded. I had never met my grandparents and I barely knew my brothers. I had only really come to know my father properly in the last phase of his life, and my mother remained a mystery to me. The more I delved into my own psyche, I began to appreciate that my misguided choices seemed to stem from my fractured childhood and dysfunctional family relationships. In order to move forward, I needed to go back to my roots and reconcile with my past.

  Eventually, it occurred to me that it might help to write a book about my father. I wanted to chronicle our lives with him as we experienced it—as a record for my family. I hoped to give my children a unique and truthful memento, not one sensationalized by others. Most important, I believed that he deserved his rightful place in history, not only for his role in establishing Gucci but as a pioneer of the iconic “Made in Italy” label throughout the world.

  What I didn’t expect was that my research would lead me back to my mother. After years of estrangement, I could finally begin to understand their unique bond and give her the credit she deserved.

  My epiphany began in 2009 when I visited her in Rome. After a lamentable lapse of six months interspersed only with twice-weekly telephone calls, I sat with her and began to talk. Hoping to learn from her own long journey of self-discovery, I spoke about my experiences of the previous few months, including my travels and visits to spiritual retreats. She understood that I was still trying to find myself.

  “I’ve met many interesting people and a few of them have made me realize just how many blanks there are in my childhood memories,” I told her, treading softly. “In fact, there’s just one big black hole. I appreciate that I never asked, but I know so little about you and Papà and your life when you were younger and I’d love to know more.”

  I could tell from my mother’s body language that she was uncomfortable with the direction I was going in and would rather not speak about such matters. Every time I’d tried in the past, she’d pushed me away, saying that she didn’t remember or—more tellingly—that she didn’t want to. Her habit of bottling things up, never explaining anything, and keeping me in the dark was a pattern that had been repeated my entire life, so I feared that nothing much would change.

  Sure enough, after looking askance at me she shrugged her shoulders and asked, “What good will it do after all this time?”

  “Well, I thought opening up might help you too,” I replied. “I know that you’ve never felt understood.”

  She looked at me for a moment in silence. When she stood abruptly and went to her bedroom I thought I’d gone too far and that our conversation was over. But something I said that day must have resonated, because she returned with a leather pouch bearing the distinctive Gucci insignia. Handing it to me, she said, “Your father wrote me many letters. I kept them all. Here, I want to give them to you.”

  Until that moment in that sun-filled apartment, I had no idea that Papà had penned a single note to my mother. He lived his life at a gallop and I couldn’t imagine when he’d have had time to write her so many lettere d’amore.

  Wisely, I held my tongue, unzipped the pouch, and pulled out a bundle of letters, some on blue airmail paper, some on hotel stationery, some typed or written in my father’s distinctive hand, all of them in Italian. The treasured archive of their courtship years between 1958 and 1961 was interspersed with telegrams from overseas. Why had she kept these for over fifty years?

  Quickly flicking through them, my eyes settled on a sentence—“My treasure, my love, don’t leave me! Do not destroy the very best part of my life…do not push me away; this feeling is not just infatuation but a vast and boundless love.”

  I could hardly believe what I was reading. My mother watched me for a moment as I sifted through them and then she rose to make some tea. “They are such beautiful letters,” she said softly from the doorway. “Your father had a wonderful way with words. It was one of the things that first attracted me to him.”

  “Will you read them with me?” I asked, but she raised her hand and shook her head.

  “I can’t. I remember how they made me feel all those years ago. That is enough.”

  My eyes filling with tears, I realized she had just handed me a priceless legacy. Two decades after his death, she’d opened a window to their secret life together—my first glimpse into what had been a mystery for so long.

  “But these are incredible, Mamma!” I exclaimed.

  “Yes,” she added. “It was a kind of fiaba [fairy tale]—but not necessarily one with a happy ending.”

  Her gift marked the start of my quest to piece together the jigsaw of my parents’ lives, and ultimately of my own. My father’s words sparked a thousand questions, many of which she agreed to answer over the next few years. Subsequent research took me on an intriguing journey back to my Florentine and Roman origins, which has enlightened me on many levels.

  So much has been written about the “saga�
� of the House of Gucci, with far too much emphasis given to my father’s fall from grace and the bitter family relationships that led to scandal, divorce, and even murder. So little has been said about what a great man he was or how much he loved my mother.

  Through the power of his words, I discovered him as a passionate and sensitive person, in sharp contrast with his public reputation as the ruthless chairman who ruled with an iron fist. Mostly, I gained a whole new perspective on the unorthodox love story between my parents in the golden age of la dolce vita. This has been a deeply insightful experience for me after a somewhat scattered childhood. I have come to appreciate not only my father’s trials and tribulations but also the sacrifices my mother made as a young woman destined to become the mistress and lifelong companion of an unsung hero of modern Italy.

  In the course of my pilgrimage, she has finally felt able to open up and show me the unseen Aldo Gucci—glimpses of whom I witnessed for myself only at the end of his life. “There was another side to him,” she insists. “A side that only I knew. That was the real Aldo.”

  And in revealing him to me, she has allowed me to see her through his eyes for the first time.

  As someone who grew up in England and who thinks of herself as mostly British in spite of Italian parentage, it has always seemed fitting to me that the story of Gucci began in London more than a century ago.

  My paternal grandfather was christened Guccio Giovanbattista Giacinto Dario Maria Gucci, which I’m sure would have been too much of a mouthful when he arrived at the service entrance of the Savoy Hotel overlooking London’s river Thames in 1897. The lithe teenager from Tuscany who’d grown up in a small town twenty-five miles west of Florence had run away to seek his fortune at sixteen. After making his way to the coast, he earned his passage to England stoking coal on a steam freighter. His uncle’s straw-hat business in Florence, which employed his father, was in dire straits and would soon be taken over, leaving the family penniless.