The Woman I Wanted to Be (11 page)

W
ool skirts. Buttoned-up sweaters. Flat shoes. They would dominate my wardrobe for the next five years. Alain Elkann, an Italian novelist and journalist, didn’t like the sexy clothes I had just started designing, so, yet again, I changed my stripes for love. My new image startled me every time I looked in the mirror.

I’d met Alain in New York at a fourteenth-birthday party Bianca Jagger was giving for her daughter, my goddaughter Jade. Tatiana and Alex were both home from boarding school, she from England and he from Massachusetts, and we were all in New York that weekend.

Alain was very attractive and we knew a lot of people in common as he had been married to Margherita Agnelli, Egon’s first cousin. “Come with me to Paris,” Alain said soon after we met. I didn’t hesitate. The children were away at school and I couldn’t bear another day in New York. Just as I had found Paulo during my introspection after my mother’s collapse, I found Alain in 1984 during my disenchantment with New York. Life in New York had become all about money—
Dynasty
and
Dallas
were the hits on television—and after four years cloistered at Cloudwalk with Paulo, Paris intellectual life was very appealing to me. My work wasn’t really interesting anymore. Though I was working on starting a new business, my heart wasn’t really in it.

What was in my heart was Alain. And Paris. Paulo was very angry and moved to his native Brazil; I moved to a beautiful apartment I rented on rue de Seine between a courtyard and a garden. My friend François Catroux, an interior decorator, helped me to set up a chic and
bohemian interior filled with Empire furniture and the pre-Raphaelite paintings from my recently sold Fifth Avenue apartment.

Alain and I entertained a lot: writers, artists, and designers, even though fashion was no longer my priority. Alain had a day job at Mondadori, the publishing house, and wrote novels after work. My all-time favorite writer, Alberto Moravia, stayed with us for weeks at a time. He would write in the morning, and in the afternoons he and I would go to museums, movies, or to Café de Flore for hot chocolate. I could not believe we had become such close friends.

In my new Parisian life I rediscovered my first love, literature, and was living yet another fantasy—having a literary salon and founding a small publishing house, Salvy, where we published in French the great writers Vita Sackville-West, Gregor von Rezzori, and Bret Easton Ellis, among others.

Alain and I also had a lively, loving family life during holidays. He had three children with Margherita Agnelli: John (“Jaki”), Lapo, and Ginevra. Maybe because they were related to my own children, we immediately became a family. We only had the five children on vacations and occasional weekends, but took full advantage of the time. We skied together in Gstaad, swam in Capri where Alain and I rented a small apartment, and sailed up the Nile to discover ancient Egypt. The rest of the time I was with Alain, the perfect writer’s muse, listening to his writings and following his many moods. I ran a perfect intellectual stylish home, with abundant food and fresh flowers at all times. I had long known that writers may live the bohemian life, but they love luxury. I set up a small office on the attic floor and talked to my very reduced New York office daily.

For all that I loved my life in Paris, being with Alain was sometimes difficult. Though I shared his life and interests entirely, he did not share mine. In 1986, I was one of eighty-seven immigrants chosen to receive a Mayor’s
Liberty Award for my contribution to the city of New York and the United States. I was very proud and wanted to go to New York for the ceremony and receive my award from Mayor Ed Koch, but Alain did not want me to go, so I didn’t. My mother went for me.

L
ooking back, I realize how many things I let go for my relationship with Alain. He wanted me to give up my personality and my success and I actually did it with enthusiasm. No one had ever asked me that before. I traded my passion for independence to be “the woman of.” My children were astonished. “Mommy has zero personality,” they used to say, and I smiled. I knew deep down it wasn’t really true, but I was seduced by the role I was embracing of the devoted artist’s woman.

All probably would have continued except I came to realize that Alain was having an affair with my good friend Loulou de la Falaise, muse of Yves Saint Laurent. Loulou was all the things I had given up: glamour, work, success. I was shocked, very sad, and upset at first, but I grew to understand on some level that it was, at least partially, my fault. By altering my personality, I had lost what had attracted Alain to me in the first place. I had become the docile, passive person I thought he wanted only to have him stray toward the same sort of person I had been. I am not one to accept humiliation, however, and instead, I turned the betrayal into a determination to win. By staying cool when I confronted them and exposed the affair, I trusted my calm attitude would diminish the lure of the “forbidden fruit” and eventually destroy it. I was right. The affair soon lost its appeal and ended. Alain and I stayed together a bit more, but I knew it would soon be time to move on.

I
n retrospect, I would not give up those years in Paris with Alain or the years with Paulo in and out of Bali for anything in the world. No one goes through life with one rigid personality. We are far more complex with various needs and desires that present themselves at different stages of our lives. Because I worked for and achieved financial independence so early in life, I had the unusual luxury of fully living those fantasies, and also having the ability to leave them when the time was right.

Paulo gave me the serenity I needed to heal from my mother’s collapse and a refuge from the frenetic pace of my life in New York. Alain gave me my return to Europe and the world of culture and ideas I craved after closeting myself at Cloudwalk. Alain also gave me three wonderful stepchildren whom I love and have stayed close to. Jaki is now the respected John Elkann who runs Fiat motor company and its subsidiaries, Lapo is a very successful designer and a marketing genius, and Ginevra is a princess, mother of three, film producer, and president of Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli. All three are siblings to Alex and Tatiana and we are a family.

I’ve often asked myself what sort of woman I’d be today if I hadn’t experimented with such greatly different lifestyles with Paulo and Alain. Would I have been ready all those years ago to stay with Barry? Part of me wishes I had instead of hurting him and losing the years we could have spent together. But another part of me is glad. I’m probably a better wife and partner to Barry now because of it. I needed to try on different versions of myself to see which one fit me best. And after Alain I still wasn’t through.

My personal life was in limbo when I left Paris in 1989 and returned to New York. As usual, Barry was there to listen to me and reassure me, but to some degree we had lost each other and I did not want to hurt him again. I had to find myself first and that was not
easy. I divided my time between Cloudwalk, the Carlyle Hotel in New York where I took an apartment, and the Bahamas where I helped my mother to settle into her little white house with blue shutters on the pink sand beach of Harbour Island.

I also renewed old friendships, and had some flirtations, but I really was not happy with myself. As much as I loved Barry’s company—we went everywhere together—I still wasn’t ready to commit. One of the reasons was that I had started a secret relationship with a handsome, mysterious, talented man, the only man who would, in the end, leave me.

I didn’t mean to fall in love with Mark Peploe, nor he, I’m sure, with me. Mark had been a friend for a long time and had written the screenplay for Bernardo Bertolucci’s
The Last Emperor
in the guest room when I lived with Alain in Paris. (It won nine Academy Awards in 1988, including Best Adapted Screenplay.) Mark also was “taken”—he lived with a woman I knew and their twelve-year-old daughter in London. It never occurred to me to have an affair with him until he called me one day in New York after I’d returned from Paris—and sparks flew.

It was the stuff of fantasy. Literally. When I was a young girl, I used to write poetry and short stories about love and always thought that stolen moments, the untold, the unasked, the secrecy, defined the most exciting and romantic relationships. And our affair was exactly that. Mark and I had a great relationship; I respected his intellect, he was one of the most handsome men I’d ever met, and he was a great traveling companion. Soon after our affair began he asked me to join him in Sri Lanka where he was scouting sites for
Victory,
a movie he was going to direct. I barely knew where Sri Lanka was, or that it was the new name for Ceylon. I immediately booked a flight.

I will never forget driving around the island of Serendib, the
magical island that gave us the word “serendipity,” with Mark, discovering the rubber and tea plantations, the reclining Buddha, the house of the author Paul Bowles, and the streets of Colombo. We were so far from everything. I was in awe of this elegant, handsome man who knew so much . . . our conversations were endless. They continued in all different landscapes—the streets and cafés of Paris, the trattorias of Rome, the streets of Lisbon, the souks and the harem of Topkapi in Istanbul, the Byzantine caves of Cappadocia, the Sufi mosque of Konya, the Vermillion Cliffs in Utah, and in discovering the artist Mantegna in Mantova. All through these landscapes, we talked and talked about everything. When traveling by car, I would read aloud the traveling adventures of the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, or the passions of the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. Those were our stolen moments, stolen from our everyday lives in anonymous hotels, airports, and rented cars.

Barry knew about Mark and Mark knew about Barry, although I avoided talking much about one to the other. I now realize that Barry was already like my husband and Mark was my secret lover. I could not give up one for the other. I must have been cruel to both, but I did not think I was at the time. Barry was waiting patiently, secure of the outcome. What was really in Mark’s mind, I never knew. I loved our “unspoken relationship,” and wanted it to go on and on, but it didn’t.

I felt great pain when Mark left me for yet another woman, not the mother of his child. I thought he enjoyed the fantasy of our secret relationship as much as I did, but perhaps he’d wanted a more permanent and visible relationship. He never explained, I never asked.

In retrospect, I know that Barry’s existence and my feelings for him had everything to do with my reluctance to commit fully to Mark,
Alain, or Paulo. After Mark and I parted, Barry began taking up more and more space in my life, in my bed, and in my heart, and we found a new serenity.

Sailing the oceans, we found a way to design our lives together. Barry had had a love affair with boats ever since I’d taken him with me on
Atlantis,
the elder Stavros Niarchos’s sublime yacht, when the children were very small and spending the summer with Egon. That time we’d cruised the Amalfi Coast all the way to Greece. It was a revelation for Barry, the beginning of a dream to one day build his own yacht. We took many wonderful trips after that on chartered boats to the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, the Ionian Coast. I had always loved to travel to adventurous places, he needed his luxury and to be connected to his work. On those sailing trips we could do both . . . go on adventurous inland hikes, visit small villages, and yet come back to our floating comfort and communications at night.

We had always talked about our future over the years and we both knew we would end up together. I loved Barry and knew he was absolutely the only one I could marry, but I fought the notion of marriage itself. People often refer to it as “settling down,” and the words are so uninspiring to me. “Settle down” sounds like giving up your spontaneity and independence and that was not what I, or Barry for that matter, were about.

I began to soften when he started talking about marriage out of concern for the children. He wanted to be able to provide for them, he said, and marriage would make it much easier. When Alexandre married Alexandra Miller in 1995 (thus becoming Alex and Alex), Barry gave him a jar of earth as a wedding present to represent a sum of money for the down payment on a house. He was so sincere about caring for my children, I was moved.

M
y journals in 1999 tracked various family milestones. The birth of Talita, my first grandchild, was, of course, a major milestone. Another was that Tatiana was pregnant. She had wanted a baby so badly that when we went together to visit little Talita, she had gone outside and cried in a phone booth fearing she would never have one. The very next day she met Russell Steinberg, a loving, life-happy comedian. Antonia Steinberg was born one year and twenty-two days after Talita’s birth, the exact same length of time between Tatiana and Alexandre. My diary notes another milestone: I finally paid off my mortgage on Cloudwalk. The last entry was not yet a milestone: “Talking marriage with Barry,” I wrote.

It didn’t happen in 1999. It didn’t happen in 2000, but Barry did not give up hope. “Today, for my birthday Barry gave me a pearl ring that belonged to Marie Bonaparte and a card with a wish to marry,” I wrote in my journal. Another entry was sad. “Lily not well,” I noted, as my mother’s health continued to slip away. Alexandre was in Australia, but the rest of the family, including my brother, Philippe, all gathered at her house in Harbour Island for Easter. Remarkably, she managed to hang on and pull together what strength she had left to fly with me to Los Angeles to be there with Tatiana for the birth of baby Antonia. It was during that flight that I told her I was thinking of maybe marrying Barry, to which she gloriously replied: “He deserves you.”

How I loved my mother for saying that! She did not say I deserved him, she said he deserved me. In those three words was everything—how she valued me, the person I had become, and how she valued him for deserving me. I will never forget that. Not only had she given me her approval for marrying Barry, she was telling me how proud she was of me. She died a few weeks later.