The Woman I Wanted to Be (6 page)

Could I have become the woman I wanted to be without having children? I certainly would not have been the same person. In fact, it’s
very hard, impossible really, for me to imagine what my life would have been without them. We actually grew up together. I was twenty-four when I had them both, barely a grown-up myself. I wasn’t old enough to have yearned for children, yet suddenly there they were and my responsibility. I loved them with an intensity I’d never felt before. They were a part of me forever.

I was helped enormously by their two amazing grandmothers, both of whom were very present in my children’s lives. My mother came to live with us in New York for months during the school year and struck her own loving relationship with them. Egon’s mother, Clara Agnelli Nuvoletti, was just as attentive. The children spent almost every vacation with her, either on the island of Capri, at her house outside Venice, or in the mountain chalet in Cortina. My mother had become a very good friend of Clara’s, and often she went along so my children had two fantastic grandmothers with them.

How wonderful it was, especially for Tatiana. Alexandre started going off on various adventures like glacier skiing and sailing, but Tatiana preferred staying with her grandmothers. She learned French from my mother and Italian and cooking from Clara. Her second husband, Giovanni Nuvoletti, was the president of the culinary academy of Italy and Clara wrote several cookbooks. Tatiana became an excellent cook and often cooks for us now. She also had long philosophical discussions with both of her grandmothers about love and the meaning of life. Clara would make her laugh with the gossip of her very privileged life and my mother would remind her of the challenges of adversity.

Unlike me, the grandmothers had nothing but time, which was wonderful for the children and wonderful for me. They had such a strong and very important influence: They were teachers, role models, active participants, and, above all, loving family members. Both had
memories to share, both had great senses of humor, and both were great storytellers.

I
n a house with three women—my mother, Tatiana, and me—Alexandre was always considered the man of the house. He was the one we trained to be counted on. Now that he is a grown man, he has become all the things I had wished him to be. He watches over our assets and has become very valuable to the growth of DVF. Tatiana also became an important protector of the family: a specialist in diagnosing illnesses and best at giving advice. Now they both watch over Barry and me. We all sit on the board of DVF and we share the Diller–von Furstenberg Family Foundation. My children are the bookends that support me. We talk on the phone every day, sometimes more than once. “I love you,” “I love you, too,” we end each conversation.

If I have one regret in my life, it is that I didn’t pay more attention to Tatiana when, in fact, she was the one who needed it more. In contrast to Alexandre, who was quite a wild boy and reduced me to pleading tears when he became a very fast teenage driver, Tatiana was such a good girl and caused so few problems that I took her for granted. This was a mistake. I didn’t realize until much later that because she so rarely did anything to draw attention to herself, she felt I cared less about her than I did her brother. That brought an ache to my heart because I love them both with equal intensity, but I could see how she felt that way. Alexandre did get more of my attention because Tatiana didn’t seem to need it. I was completely wrong.

From the time she could walk, Tatiana’s legs seemed quite stiff. She could certainly get around all right, but she was never able to run. Her condition grew more noticeable when she began school and had difficulty with sports. I took her to several orthopedists, who checked
her bones and looked to see if she had scoliosis, but they said there was nothing the matter with her, that her muscles were just stiffer than others and she would probably grow out of it. She didn’t. Instead she hid her suffering from all of us for years until one day in her early twenties when she tried to run across Park Avenue and collapsed on the pavement. What a wrenching sight she was with two black eyes and a hugely swollen lip because she couldn’t raise her arms in time to block her fall. Tatiana had just completed her master’s degree in psychology at the time and remembered a reference to neuromuscular disorders. A neurologist at Columbia Presbyterian finally gave her a diagnosis: myotonia, a genetic muscular disorder that delays the muscles from relaxing after any exercise, especially in cold weather.

“Why didn’t your mother know this before?” the doctor asked in wonderment, a question that stabbed my heart. We’d been going to orthopedists, who were concerned only with her bones.

I felt awful for her and angry at myself. When we’d first tried to address her condition she was at Spence School in New York, where she and the other girls in the Lower School had to walk up and down nine flights of stairs several times a day. What agony it must have been for her, but I didn’t know about it because she never complained. Her suffering only increased when I moved the children to Cloudwalk, our house in Connecticut, when she was in the fifth grade, and the school there stressed athletics. Tatiana struggled and struggled, thinking her disability was all in her head—one doctor had told her flat out there was nothing wrong with her—but still, she didn’t complain. Like my mother, Tatiana refused to think of herself as a victim.

I will never forgive myself for not realizing or understanding the scope of her disability, how it made her feel different from the other children and was a source of great physical and emotional pain. We have since had many long, long conversations about it, and I
discovered that, just as I hadn’t wanted to upset my mother, she didn’t want to worry me when she was growing up. She saw the pressure and stress I was under with my business (she and Alexandre always called my business my “third child”) and she didn’t want to add any more pressure on me.

In 2014, Tatiana learned she does not have myotonia, but rather Brody disease, also a genetic condition that affects the muscles, including the muscle of the heart, which further explains her difficulty to keep pace with others. It brought home again how difficult it has been for her all her life. I wish she had told me. But maybe she did and I just did not hear it. I have kept a little note from her that she wrote to me as a very small child. It is on the bulletin board in my office in Cloudwalk. I cherished that note because I thought it was so sweet. It said “Mommy, you really know nothing about me.” How awful I feel today when I look at this note that I thought was so sweet, and neither she nor I understood that it was a cry for help.

Tatiana may not be able to move as fast as everyone else, but her intelligence, her imagination, her heart, and her talent are so immense that she will continue to realize all of her dreams.

Tatiana always got the best grades in school—she was summa cum laude at her school in Connecticut—and did so well that she skipped the seventh grade. She always did her brother’s homework as well as her own and held it over him for years, constantly reminding Alexandre: “I did your homework for you. I did your applications for you and I did your thesis for you,” but she also admits that now she’s getting paid back by Alexandre through his financial skills.

Tatiana never much liked the schools she went to so she just kept on jumping–– from day school in Connecticut, to a year at boarding school in Switzerland, another in England, and then to Brown University at the age of sixteen. She graduated in just over three years. I
was so very, very proud of her. I went to her graduation along with my mother and Mila, my housekeeper from France who had been very close to Tatiana, and was touched beyond measure when she presented me with a bouquet of flowers in gratitude for all I’d done for her. But even better than the flowers, I loved watching her huge smile and incredible beauty on that victorious day. Alexandre went to Brown, too, and graduated a year after Tatiana (though he is a year older) so both my children are better educated than I am.

I feel more and more connected to both children as the years go by. I can usually feel when something is wrong and when they need me. For me it is always “us,” never “I.” And that will never change. I look at them now, and love them, respect them, and admire them. Alex, an exceptional father, lover of life, and brilliant businessman and asset manager. Tatiana, a wonderful mother, a certified teacher and therapist, and a successful screenwriter and director. Her first feature film,
Tanner Hall,
which she cowrote, directed, and produced with her friend Francesca Gregorini, was the winner of the 2011 GENART Film Festival Audience Award, and launched Rooney Mara from her first starring role to a Best Actress Oscar nomination for
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

I
like to joke that the children are my best samples, but those samples are definitely not for sale. As I look at them as adults and almost-beginning-to-age adults, it is possible for me to claim both success and failure in the kind of mother I was. I couldn’t do that at the beginning of their lives, and certainly not during their teenage years when my constant prayer was to get them through it alive. But now I can enjoy the harvest from the seeds planted so many years ago and relax a little—though not too much.

T
he greatest thing about becoming a grandparent is watching your children being parents. For the first time you realize that they actually heard the things you told them throughout their childhoods. I see it in the way they make their children independent, the way they give them freedom, push them to make their own decisions, love and support them.

Just as my mother annoyed me with endless advice, I am sure I annoyed my children passing on that advice and a lot of my own, but it has paid off with my grandchildren. Alexandre’s oldest child, Talita, the firstborn and now a teenager, is very much like her father, so I have a tendency to be both demanding and to take her for granted. She is beautiful and very bright, a great debater, a talented painter, and has an old soul. We love to talk about everything—the business of DVF, my mother’s experience during the war, politics—everything. When she was nine I took her with me to Florence where I was preparing a fashion show in the private garden of a beautiful mansion. “Do you want to come with me and be my assistant?” I asked her. “I’m going to be working so you will have to work, too.” “Yes, yes,” she said, and she took part in all the magic of preparing a fashion show—watching the sets being made, casting the models, doing the fittings, choosing the final looks. We had a delightful and unforgettable week, stealing time out during the day to go to museums and at night to watch romantic comedies set in Europe like
Funny Face
and
Sabrina
from the Audrey Hepburn collection I had brought along.

When Talita’s younger brother Tassilo was ten, Barry and I took him to the 2012 Olympics in London. At first I was a bit concerned what I would do alone with a little boy, but we ended up having a great time watching basketball and volleyball and laughing all the way. Tassilo is named for Egon’s father, Prince Tassilo Egon Maximilian—and he was born very much a little prince, a little American prince. I don’t
really know what I mean by that, but that’s the way we all look at him. He is cool, cute, and very kind, an excellent athlete and a good student. “I like to chill” is the way he describes himself.

Antonia, Tatiana’s daughter, is a star. I think of her as the militant in the family, the political person, an A student, compassionate, a good painter, a born performer, and an amazing musician. She can hear a song and immediately play it on the piano. She impressed everyone at one of the DVF Christmas talent shows when, at the age of eleven, she performed an Adele song, not as a child but as a true artist. She is also wonderfully strong and centered. I got an indignant email from her after I sent a “Happy International Women’s Day” email. “Shouldn’t it be women’s and girls’ day?” she emailed me. “Aren’t we women, too?”

Antonia, who, like me and her mother, went to boarding school in England, is great company. I have spent wonderful days alone with her in New York, London, Paris, and Shanghai, where we stole a day to visit the small towns outside the city known for their gorgeous gardens.

Barry and I spend every Christmas and New Year’s holiday with the grandchildren, sometimes on our boat, other times on a land adventure. Since my birthday is on New Year’s Eve, I always get a surprise from them: a collage, a song they have written, or a birthday cake in bed, as I remember from a wonderful New Year’s holiday in Patagonia, Chile. And letters. We always exchange New Year’s letters full of love and good wishes.

All grandparents think their grandchildren are amazing and I am biased, no doubt. As I write, I am recently blessed with a fourth grandchild, Leon (named for my father). It is Alexandre’s third child and his first with AK, as we call his beautiful love and life companion, Alison Kay. I look forward to having a special relationship with little Leon as I have with the others.

I
have loved a lot and have been in love many, many times. Perhaps I’ve been in love so often because I asked little in return or maybe because I was just in love with being in love. For me, falling in love wasn’t a need—it was an adventure. My father so filled me with love that I didn’t think I needed, or wanted, much back. That emotional independence made some men feel insecure and frustrated, and others relieved. Not that I was never like every girl, dependent or jealous at times, waiting for “the” phone call or behaving stupidly. Of course I did, many, many times.

The first time I remember being in love was with a boy in Brussels who had absolutely no interest in me. His name was Charlie Bouchonville. I would see him in the NR4 tramway coming home from school. He had green eyes and a beauty spot at the end of his left eye, wore a suede jacket, and was very stylish. I was still a little girl, flat chested and all. I don’t think he ever knew I existed, but I fantasized about him for a long time, and when I went to boarding school I boasted about a relationship with him that had never existed.