In the Name of Gucci Read online

  His plans were almost dashed however when, in early November, torrential rain caused the river Arno to burst its banks. Overwhelmed by a wall of water and mud, as many as a hundred people lost their lives, thousands were left homeless, and the city of the Medicis lost some of its finest works of art. Via della Vigna Nuova, replete with stock due to be moved to the new store in the coming weeks, was quickly deluged. As the waters rose and my father remained helpless in Rome, his sons Paolo and Roberto along with Vasco and several staff waded in heroically and saved what they could by carrying everything up to the second floor. They even managed to lift the furniture before the floodwaters burst through the shuttered doors, filling the shop with six feet of silt and debris.

  All the while, my father was frantically watching the television news and trying to find out what was happening by telephone. When he rang my mother later that day, she had rarely heard him so unnerved. “This is a disaster! I only hope everyone’s safe!” To his enormous relief, he eventually discovered that everyone at Gucci was out of danger and that, thanks to some fast thinking, they had even managed to salvage most of the stock.

  Just as Papà had been raised to compete with his brothers, so he’d brought up his boys, but on this occasion, they’d put aside their rivalries and joined forces. “It can take something like this to bring a family closer together. I’m very proud of them!” he told my mother before leaving Rome on the next train to see what else needed to be done. The people of Florence also pulled together admirably, and helped by volunteers from around the world, including many celebrities, my father’s home city was eventually restored to its former splendor.

  My mother knew that the business was everything to Papà and she understood his need to be so personally involved, but each time he went away, he’d leave her feeling increasingly deserted. As before, she became an insomniac, lying awake worrying about everything from the path she’d taken to where it would eventually lead. Without a job and now with a baby in tow, she felt worthless. Her dependence on him was total—financial, physical, and emotional.

  “I didn’t have the courage to leave,” she told me. “Where would I go? How would we live? What would people say about an unmarried mother? I was trapped.” Swamped by a growing sense of helplessness, she felt she had lost the ability to make the simplest decisions and increasingly relied on Maureen for everything.

  My father did what he could to cheer her up whenever he was in Rome but she became more and more distant, often spending the entire day in bed alone with her thoughts. One sweltering Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1965, when she was especially low, he had a bright idea. It was unbearably hot, so he suggested we all go to Villa Camilluccia and spend the day by the pool.

  “Are you crazy?” my mother snapped, thinking of Olwen, but he assured her his wife was spending the summer in England and had left only a skeleton staff. She took some coaxing to return to the house she’d only ever been to once before for the company summer party, which felt like a distant memory. But, with Maureen’s help, my father eventually got her out of the apartment and up to the villa in the hills with its sprawling lawns and swaying cypress trees.

  How strange it must have felt for my mother to cross the threshold of Aldo and Olwen’s family home. This place represented the other world he lived in, the part of his life that she was never normally allowed to see. No matter how much husband and wife may have grown apart, there was an undeniable sense that she was intruding on a shared intimacy within those walls.

  At two years old, I was too young to remember that day, but when I look at the photograph taken of us sitting by the edge of the pool, I can see how happy my father was and how surprisingly relaxed my mother looked in her swimsuit and silk head scarf. To protect me from the fierce August sun, I was dressed in a little bonnet and a knitted jacket, while Mamma had a tight grip on me to make sure I didn’t accidentally fall into the water. All of my focus, however, seemed to be on Maureen—my very own angel. And so she would prove when, within a few months, my mother simply vanished from my life.

  Years would pass before I found out exactly what had happened and even then the details were patchy. Neither one of my parents was prepared to discuss what represented one of Mamma’s most fragile episodes. “I couldn’t sleep,” was all she said later. “I had too much on my mind. I was living an impossible life.”

  By the time I was three, her doctor diagnosed her as clinically depressed. He urged my father to get her some psychiatric help. Unfortunately, the analyst he sent her to developed a crush on her and began to plot against her association with Papà, Gucci, and materialism in general. Susceptible to suggestion, my mother began to regurgitate some of his rhetoric. “It is you that has made me this way, Aldo!” she accused him. My father was so incensed by what he considered her “brainwashing” that he turned up at one of her sessions to unleash his fury on the therapist. He never allowed my mother to go back but her abrupt removal from the influence of this Svengali was enough to tip her over the edge.

  Barely out of diapers, I had no understanding of what happened next and my mother refuses to talk about it, but she clearly seemed to have suffered a total breakdown. My father certainly feared for her state of mind and was horrified to see the woman he loved unable to function. In the end he had no choice but to follow the doctors’ advice that she spend some time in a clinic for la cura del sonno, or “the sleep cure,” until she made a full recovery. They further insisted she have no contact with the outside world and that she be left alone, at least to begin with. After a spell my father could speak with her on the telephone, they reassured him. My mother went along with the idea, no doubt looking forward to some relief from her personal torment. Knowing Papà, I’m certain that no expense was spared and I do know that she liked the clinic so much that, even after she came home, she’d voluntarily go back to “have a little rest.”

  The whole experience was probably more traumatic for my father, as it represented one of those rare moments in his life when he was powerless to effect the outcome and felt responsible for the state she was in. Mamma said she’d never forget his anguished expression as he prepared to leave her in the clinic. Close to tears, he told her, “I will give you the moon and the stars, Bruna. Tell me what to do to make things better!”

  My recollection of this time in our lives would have been nonexistent were it not for the insight of a hypnotherapist I met in California some forty years later. Retracing my life back to my childhood, he identified a trauma when I was three years old and asked me what had happened. Unable to provide him with an answer, I called my mother, who filled me in and explained that I’d been left alone with Maureen for several months. This episode had contributed to my own feelings of abandonment, my therapist explained, shaping my relationships in more ways than one.

  All Maureen told me at the time was, “Mummy had to go away, Poppet. She’s poorly.” She devoted herself full-time to my well-being, taking me on outings, reading to me, and chattering away to the point where I even started to dream in English. She became the kind of mother I would have wished my own mother to be. That summer she packed me up and took me on a grand adventure—to Sunderland for her sister’s wedding. I didn’t mind one little bit. I was introduced as her “Little Flower” and everyone made an enormous fuss of me, talking in an accent I’d grown accustomed to hearing at home. She was, as she would have said, “right chuffed.”

  My eyes and ears agape, I couldn’t believe the noise and exuberance of Maureen’s enormous family. As an only child, I had mostly grown up without that kind of social interaction and being among such warm, colorful people was a real novelty. Maureen’s friends and family pinched my cheeks, ruffled my hair, and scooped me up in their arms. They swirled me around the room and covered me in kisses. I giggled and shrieked with delight, soaking up all that love like a sponge.

  That weekend was an eye-opener for me. Never before had I been part of a big, happy family, and thanks to Maureen, I would be able to feed off its m
emory for years to come.

  Obsessive behavior is something that we all recognize and can develop in varying degrees over time. It can often start with something small but, if left unchecked, can turn into a compulsion or something worse.

  Although I was much more laid-back as a child, I think that the older I’ve become I have definitely inherited some of my mother’s need for order. Those around me might tell you that I’m a perfectionist, which admittedly can be something of an obsession. I have learned to temper my need to have everything “just so” and learned to be more accepting of the deficiencies and shortcomings in my life. Sadly, this wasn’t always true for my mother.

  By the time she was discharged from her sleep clinic for good, she had a new diagnosis—one of a “guilt complex,” something the textbooks describe as an obsessive disorder in which the sufferer develops a paranoid inability to cope with feelings of shame. They become obsessed with the idea that they’ve done something wrong and that they will always do wrong. They begin to blame themselves for everything.

  My mother’s guilt was visceral and, I think, probably stemmed in part from her Catholic childhood. It was undoubtedly exacerbated by her affair with my father and the need to keep the biggest and most important part of her life secret.

  As a toddler, I was still too young to know what was going on and my routines were completely unaffected by her prognosis. Maureen would take me out for hours at a time to keep me out of her way. As he was based in Rome my father called more often, which I loved because he was always so full of life and ideas. He had recently identified a prime location in the hills of Rome where he planned to develop an apartment building and he thought it would be perfect for Mamma and me. His excitement was short-lived, however. When her doctors made a recommendation for her recovery, it was an announcement that would affect us both.

  “She feels she has been hiding for too long and she cannot do it anymore,” they warned him. “Rome has too many bad memories for her. She needs to be removed from the source of her unhappiness. In another country, another environment, she should flourish and be able to begin a new life.”

  My mother, who had complete faith in their advice, concurred. With her best interests at heart, my father wasted no time in making alternate plans. We would return to London and move into an apartment in our old neighborhood with Nicola Minelli as our live-in companion once again.

  Once we’d settled into London life, Maureen continued to take me out every day so that my mother could rest. We’d stroll to Hyde Park to feed the ducks or hop on and off red double-decker buses to museums and movies. We went to the Tower of London and to Buckingham Palace, where I peered through the railings and asked, “Is the queen there now? Can she see us?” Maureen was an avid reader and soon sparked the same interest in me. I could read and write by the age of three, a fact that impressed everyone. I especially loved the Ladybird books, the Penguin Readers, and the Famous Five stories by Enid Blyton, particularly if they featured family life.

  “What’s it like to have a brother or sister?” I’d ask Maureen, or, “Does everybody’s mummy and daddy live together?” I’d read for hours during the day and then couldn’t wait to finish my book with a flashlight at night. I loved the dance of words and the imaginary worlds and sense of adventure they created in my head.

  My real world was proving to be just as much of an adventure, because within a few months we were on the move again. “Central London is no place to raise our daughter and we have to get her into a good school,” my mother told Papà. “I’d like a little house of my own, with a garden.” With the help of a member of his London staff, he found us a mock Tudor house in the suburb of Hendon, northwest of the city. The neighborhood he picked turned out to be in the center of an Orthodox Jewish community. We had a mezuzah with verses from the Torah screwed to the doorframe and our neighbors were Hasidic Jews with skullcaps and their hair in ringlets. I watched, fascinated, from my bedroom window as religious services were carried out in their garden, where they’d built a small temple, and every Saturday they dressed in their Shabbat best. It was a huge cultural leap from anything we’d known in Rome and although I found it exciting, ultimately I think it only added to my mother’s sense of displacement.

  Nevertheless, she was determined to adapt to her new surroundings and immediately set about making the house her own. Feeding her need for order, she organized the redecoration of every room while I was sent to a small local preparatory school. It was run by a principal named Miss McCartney, a prickly middle-aged spinster who seemed to constantly hover over me. “You can do better than that, Patricia,” she’d say, pushing me in a manner that was, at times, heavy-handed for a four-year-old. I lived in dread of her sharp tongue or being slapped on the back of my head and didn’t understand why she took such a close interest until I realized that my surname represented money and prestige for her little establishment.

  I was a diligent pupil and good at most subjects, especially English. When I got in from school Maureen would sit me at the kitchen table with a glass of milk while I read aloud in a language my mother hadn’t yet mastered, despite her weekly lessons. As I read effortlessly from the Peter and Jane books, I’d look up and always be happy to see her smiling at me.

  Our neighbors must have thought us a strange family—the sorrowful but beautiful young Italian, the redheaded Englishwoman, and a bilingual five-year-old in plaits. Stranger still when I played with the other children in the street and told them merrily, “I have two mummies—one sad and one happy.” After that, I suppose everyone assumed that my mother and Maureen were lesbians.

  Happy Mummy was soon unrecognizable as the woman who’d arrived on our doorstep. Thanks to my mother, Maureen’s spectacles had been replaced by hard contact lenses, her hair was restyled, and her teeth were straightened. Her wardrobe was overhauled with more flattering clothes to show off her figure. Her practical footwear was replaced with more feminine shoes. The change was remarkable. As my mother said, “I always knew there was a swan within! She became quite lovely and was so incredibly good for us. She was our backbone, and she loved you, Patricia, as if you were her own.”

  As a child, I barely noticed Maureen’s transformation. I only saw her good qualities. She was a fountain of knowledge and always listened to my never-ending questions. She became a part of our little family and whenever I needed her I knew I could count on her.

  Maureen was always there for my mother, too. “Take a look at this,” she told her one day, placing a newspaper article in her lap. It was about the violinist Yehudi Menuhin and how he’d discovered salvation from depression through yoga. Within days, Maureen had found my mother a Hindu retreat a few miles away in Hampstead. “Why don’t you try it?”

  Sari Nandi, a yogi from Calcutta who dressed like an English gentleman, came into my mother’s life then and was her next “angel.” Married to a German and with four children, he claimed that race and religion were irrelevant. “God is everywhere and in everything if only we look for him,” he said. A kindly man with vibrant eyes who gave me a book of poetry the first time we met, he soon became my mother’s mentor. “You have spent all these years in silence, Bruna, so now tell me your story.” And for the first time in her life, she did.

  “He was a miracle worker,” she said. “He helped me find freedom from mental anguish.” Try as she might, though, she could never master his yoga techniques and complained, “I just can’t bend that way!” With the enthusiasm of an obsessive, she fully embraced his other teachings and couldn’t wait to share them with my father, even though she appreciated that the pragmatic dottore was unlikely to take much notice. Papà was certainly bemused by her sudden enthusiasm for life on a spiritual plane, but mostly he was relieved she was taking an interest in something. Pleased to find her so uplifted, he took her with him on his next trip to California, where he planned to open a new Gucci store, having already written from New York telling her, “I am counting on your collaboration!”

  The
trouble was, he couldn’t decide where the store should be. In Los Angeles he’d found the streets largely deserted and couldn’t imagine how a retail business could survive without footfall. So he decided to explore San Francisco, the “City by the Bay,” which had been described to him as the most European of American cities. My mother felt quite differently. San Francisco in the late 1960s revolved around the ethos of free love, psychedelic drugs, and a prevailing mood of counterculture. Shaking her head as they wandered streets seeing beatniks in jeans, T-shirts, and Afghan coats, she told him emphatically, “This isn’t right, Aldo. No, not at all. You need to be in Beverly Hills. That’s where all the movie stars are.”

  My father wasn’t accustomed to anyone challenging his plans, especially as his intuition so far had proved spot-on. Mamma may have worked for Gucci but that didn’t mean she understood the first thing about global commerce. On the other hand, her youthful enthusiasm for celebrities endorsing products was infectious and celebrities like Princess Grace had done wonders for business in Italy, so he decided that he should listen to what she had to say.

  On her insistence, they flew to Los Angeles and checked into the Beverly Wilshire—the home away from home for stars like Elvis Presley and actor Warren Beatty. The hotel was situated on the corner of a relatively unassuming street named Rodeo Drive. It was at number 273 that, in 1961, the Swiss-born businessman Fred Hayman opened his luxury boutique named Giorgio Beverly Hills and began a trend. His shop featured a pool table, a bar, and a library for the amusement of husbands whose wives were busy trying on the latest fashions.

  “This is the place, Aldo!” my mother cried as they linked arms and strolled along Rodeo Drive in the sunshine. It wasn’t exactly buzzing and many of the stores offered the kinds of everyday goods and services to be found in a regular neighborhood, but the people were smartly dressed and there wasn’t a hippie in sight. My father promised to think about it.