The Woman I Wanted to Be (7 page)

The first boy I kissed was Italian. His name was Vanni, short for Giovanni, and we kissed in the tearoom of the Hotel Rouge in Milano Marittima where my mother, brother, and I were spending a holiday on the Adriatic coast of Italy. I was fourteen. Vanni was a very, very sexy boy, who must have been more than eighteen because he was proudly driving a little yellow Alfa Romeo. We would meet after lunch in the tearoom of the hotel and kiss. My mother would send Philippe as a spy and he would just sit there. Philippe and I were sharing a bedroom and one night Vanni snuck up to our room while my brother was sleeping. I felt very grown up in the midst of our whispers and tiptoeing around the room, but I disappointed Vanni. He wanted to do more than I was willing to do, so our lovely flirtation stayed pretty much at the kissing level. We wrote letters to each other for
a while afterward, which was perfect for my Italian. I learned Italian writing love letters.

My first serious boyfriend was called Sohrab. He was born in Iran and was studying architecture in Oxford. He had a beautiful smile, drove a turquoise Volkswagen, and was very nice to me. I had just arrived at Stroud Court, a boarding school for girls outside Oxford. School had not started but I had come early, as had Danae, a Greek girl from Athens who became my best friend that year. Danae and I went to see an exhibition of Henry Moore sculptures at the Ashmolean Museum, and afterward we went for tea across the street at the Randolph Hotel. There we met these two cute Persian boys, Sohrab and Shidan, and we immediately became great friends.

Our school allowed us to go out on Wednesday afternoons, all day Saturday, and Sunday afternoons. The next Wednesday, Sohrab took me to the movies to see
Dr. No,
the first James Bond. I could hardly follow the dialogue because my English was not very good, but I had a wonderful afternoon. Sohrab was kind and thoughtful. My parents were going through an unpleasant divorce, and the letters I received from home made me feel powerless and sad. Sohrab consoled me and took me to eat Indian food. I had never been in a restaurant with a boy before and it felt very special.

Later we would go to his room on Banbury Road. All he had was a large desk by the window and a big bed. It was very cold and humid and every hour he would put a sixpence coin into the heater to keep it going. His bed was cozy and so was he. We kissed a lot. I was a virgin and was still wearing little girl cotton underwear, which I felt embarrassed about. I wanted to pretend I was older and sophisticated but I did not really want to have sex. We broke up for a while and then started seeing each other again. By then I had bought silk underwear. I was sixteen. He became my first lover, kind and attentive. He made
me happy. Many, many years later I found out that I, too, was his first lover. He was twenty-one.

The following summer, I was on holiday in Riccione, Italy, with my father and brother. Sohrab and Shidan drove from England to see me on their way to Iran, where they were going to sell the little turquoise Volkswagen for a profit before going back to Oxford. They did not stay long, barely an afternoon. To this day, my brother, who was still a child, remembers and doesn’t understand what happened next. One day I was clearly in love with Sohrab, keeping his framed photo by my bed in my hotel room. The next day, I met Lucio on the beach. He became my next boyfriend.

Lucio was a very handsome twenty-two-year-old who looked like the Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni. We fell in love. He was passionate and experienced. He would hold my arm firmly and take me into the pine forest behind the beach. He would make love to me endlessly, making me feel like a real woman. During the day I was a normal seventeen-year-old girl having a nice holiday with her father and brother, but at night I had a secret life, a grown-up woman having a very sexy love affair. Lucio was very much in love and so was I.

We kept up a passionate correspondence for a long time and every now and then would manage to meet. Once, in Milan, where I had accompanied my father on a business trip, we locked ourselves in a hotel room near the railroad station for the entire day. Another time I went to Crevalcore near Bologna where he lived. Taking advantage of the fact that my mother was on a trip with Hans, I left boarding school early and took a detour to Italy on the way home to Geneva. I met his family, who had a small handbag factory. They organized a dinner for me in a local restaurant and I slept in a tiny hotel near his home. Later on he came twice to visit me while I was studying in Spain. Our passionate encounters remain a wild memory.

Two years ago I received a sad letter from Lucio’s wife. He had died and she had found letters from me and some photographs. Would I like to have them? “Of course,” I said, and to my delight I received a huge box with hundreds of love letters I had sent him as well as photos, menus, and train tickets. He had kept them all.

In England after the holiday I became infatuated with a French girl at my school. Her name was Deanna. She was very shy and masculine and she intrigued me. We became very close. We went on together to the University of Madrid where there were so many anti-Franco riots and so many strikes that we hardly ever went to class as the university was almost always closed. We shared a grim little room in a pensione for girls on the Calle de la Libertad in the center of Madrid. To get into our pensione at night, we had to clap and the Serrano, who held the keys for the block, would open our building’s door and let us in. We made friends at the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras where we took Estudios Hispánicos classes. We watched flamencos at night and went to bullfights on Sundays. Madrid was a repressed city at the time, still wounded from the civil war. The mood was dark and I was bored.

My life took a different turn during the Christmas holiday that year. My mother, Hans, his son Martin, my brother, and I went to celebrate the holidays in Gstaad in the Swiss Alps. We were staying at the Hôtel du Parc having a dull time when suddenly, one afternoon in the village, I bumped into my best friend from Pensionnat Cuche, my boarding school in Lausanne. Isabel was from Venezuela, a bit older than I, beautiful and sophisticated. It was Isabel who had taught me how to French-kiss, practicing on mirrors. She lived with her mother and sister in Paris; her father, Juan Liscano, was a famous writer and intellectual in Caracas.

The encounter with Isabel changed the course of my life because
that night she took me to a party and I made my official entry into the jet set world. The party was at the chalet of the Shorto family, a Brazilian/English lady and her five gorgeous children. The music was loud, people were dancing samba, smoking, drinking, laughing, and speaking many languages at the same time. Everyone seemed to know each other. I had never experienced that atmosphere before. They took me in immediately. I became part of the group and stayed on with Isabel after my family went back home to Geneva.

In Gstaad I met an “older man” in his midthirties who took a liking to me and never left my side for a week. His name was Vlady Blatnik. He lived in Venezuela where he had a successful shoe business. Vlady took me to dinner parties and we went skiing together every day. For New Year’s Eve, my birthday, he bought me a Pucci printed silk top with black silk pants and matching black silk boots. This was my first designer outfit. That night I turned nineteen and even though I did not feel as beautiful or glamorous as the other women in the room, I thought life had finally begun!

Going back to Madrid to complete the school year was a bit of a downer, but during spring break Deanna and I planned a trip through Andalusia. We discovered the beauty of the Alhambra in Grenada and the magic of Sevilla. That trip was the end of my stay in Spain. I decided to continue school in Geneva where my mother was living with Hans. Deanna moved to Andalusia, and we stayed friends for a bit then lost touch.

I called Deanna a few years ago to invite her to the opening of my new boutique in Honolulu where she now lives. We picked up where we left off, as childhood friends do. “Can you believe we are in our sixties?” I said. We laughed at the absurdity of it. I felt the same age I was when I last saw her.

I have always tried to stay in touch with the people that were important in my life and the people that I loved. Once I love, I love forever, and there is nothing more cozy and meaningful than old friends and lovers. I’m so fortunate to have had and have so much love in my life. Without it, I would never be who I am.

I find great happiness in my relationships with old friends, living mirrors that reflect histories of laughter and sorrow, triumphs and failures, births and deaths, on both sides.

My closest, oldest friend is Olivier Gelbsmann, who has known me since I was eighteen. He has followed every step of my life and when we are together we don’t need to speak to know what the other thinks. Olivier worked with me very early on, worked with Egon afterward, and later became an interior decorator. We now work together on DVF décor and home products. Olivier was present when my children were born, and at every important moment of my life. He consoled each of my boyfriends when I left them. Olivier was friends with my mother, my daughter, and now my granddaughters. My friend the Greek artist Konstantin Kakanias, with whom I collaborated on an inspirational comic book,
Be the Wonder Woman You Can Be,
as well as other projects, has also been friends with four generations of women in my family.

I treasure the memories I share with friends like Olivier and Konstantin. Landscapes change, people come and go, but all the landscapes, all the experiences, all the people weave into your life’s fabric. Love is not just about people you had affairs with. Love is about moments of intimacy, paying attention to others, connecting. As you learn that love is everywhere, you find it everywhere.

Just as I collect books and textiles, I collect memories and friends. I love to remember. It’s not that I dwell in nostalgia, but that I love intimacy. It is the opposite of small talk. It is the closest thing to truth.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” as I learned in Oxford when I studied the English poet John Keats.

I have tried not to lie my whole life. Lies are toxic. They are the beginning of misunderstandings, complications, and unhappiness. To practice truth is not always easy, but as with all practices, it becomes a matter of habit. Truth is cathartic, a way of keeping the trees pruned. The truer you can be the better it is because it simplifies life and love.

T
here are many degrees of love, of course. I know now that of all the so many times I’ve been in love, only two men were truly great loves. I married both of them, one toward the beginning of my life, the other much later.

Egon. I cannot begin to describe all I owe to my first husband, Prince Eduard Egon von und zu Fürstenberg. I will be forever thankful to him because he gave me so much. He gave me my children; he gave me his name; he gave me his trust and his encouragement as he believed in me; he shared everything, all of his knowledge and all of his connections as he gave me his love.

I met Egon at a birthday party in Lausanne. I remember his big smile, his childlike face, and his gapped teeth. He had just enrolled at the University of Geneva where I was taking courses. He had also just returned from a few months in a Catholic mission in Burundi, where he had taught children and taken care of leprosy patients. I was impressed. I remember what I was wearing the night I met him because he complimented me on it—pink palazzo pajama pants and an embroidered tunic I had borrowed from my mother’s closet. We were both nineteen.

Egon was the perfect eligible bachelor, an Austro/German prince by his father, and a rich heir from his mother, Clara Agnelli, the eldest
child of the Fiat motorcar family. Egon seemed interested in me, maybe because I had already made a lot of friends in Geneva, and he had just arrived. We went out a lot and one Sunday we drove to nearby Megève in the mountains for a day in the snow. The car broke down and Egon went to get help. I remember opening the glove compartment to check his passport. I had never met a prince before and I wanted to see if his title was written on it. (It was not). When Egon came back to the car with a mechanic, the engine started immediately. There was nothing wrong with the car. To this day I remember Egon’s embarrassed face. It was his helplessness that seduced me.

Egon lived in a small, luxurious rental apartment near Lac Léman while I was living at home with my mother and Hans, but we were always together. My mother, who had never acknowledged a boyfriend of mine before, immediately adopted him. They would become very close. Egon had a lot of energy and a great sense of adventure. He was always planning trips and places to discover. He suggested a group of us join a package deal trip to the Far East. I managed to convince my mother to let me go with them only for her to discover when she brought me to the airport that the only passengers going were Egon and me. The others had dropped out. I panicked, worried she wouldn’t let me go alone with Egon, but she did.

We had a great time. India, New Delhi, Agra, and the magnificent Taj Mahal, Thailand and its floating market, Burma and its hundred pagodas, Cambodia and the ruins of Angkor Wat, the making of clothes overnight in Hong Kong. We went sightseeing all day every day as perfect tourists, and at night, we were invited to dine with local people through Egon’s Fiat connection. Egon was the most charming young man in the world. His charisma and enthusiasm were contagious and traveling with him was always full of surprises and serendipity.

In Bangkok we dined with Jim Thompson, a famous American who had settled in Thailand after the war and had organized all the independent silk weavers into the huge business he owned, the Thai Silk Company. Mr. Thompson was wearing a silk shirt and pants and embroidered velvet slippers. He lived in a magnificent old Thai house full of antiques. From the house, we could see the weavers working at night, lit by lanterns, all along the floating market. I remember him telling us he was leaving for a holiday the next day in the jungles of Malaysia. He was never to be seen again. Rumors say that he was a double, triple agent and had been killed.