The Woman I Wanted to Be (8 page)

Another night, in Thailand, I was so mad at Egon—I’d found him in our hotel room having a massage from a beautiful Thai girl—that I’d gone down to the bar. A rather gloomy American man bought me a very strong Thai beer, announced he worked for a defense contractor, then said, “Oh well, the Vietnam War will soon be finished, but it doesn’t matter because there will be a new arms market now in the Middle East.” (Two months later, the 1967 Six-Day War erupted in Israel, Jordan, and Syria.) I was shocked. I had never realized that wars actually meant business for some people. They use research, marketing, sales—everything a normal company does—but for the business of weapons and war. It was a jolt to learn that as soon as defense contractors hear there is a conflict somewhere, they send salesmen and open a new market.

Egon and I went everywhere and discovered everything together. I remember the first time he took me to Villa Bella, his mother’s chalet in Cortina d’Ampezzo in the Italian Alps. I had never been in such an elegant, welcoming, unusual house before. All in wood, it looked like a glorified gingerbread house full of antiques, an unexpected mix of colorful fabrics and quantities of silver and Murano glass. There were many housemaids dressed in Tyrolean fashion and butlers in full gear,
yet the household was not stiff. The young ones would go skiing all day and gather with all the others for dinner. Food was abundant and delicious, of course, and the conversation humorous and superficial.

Clara, Egon’s mother, was there with Count Giovanni Nuvoletti, who was to become her second husband a few years later. Giovanni was a writer and a man of the salon. He was very eloquent and held court, while Clara was light and witty. We were a group of friends from university who had come to Villa Bella for the Christmas holidays, and I shared a room with a beautiful redheaded girl called Sandy. I celebrated my twentieth birthday there, still feeling slightly out of place. By the time I celebrated my twenty-first birthday in that same villa the following year, I had become more comfortable and at ease with the family, the milieu, the lifestyle in general.

Egon took me to the South of France to meet his glamorous uncle Gianni Agnelli on his yacht and to watch the Grand Prix of Monaco, the famous car race. He took me to the film festival at the Lido of Venice and the Volpi Ball on the Canale Grande. I met everyone that was anyone anywhere—aristocrats, courtesans, businesspeople, actors, painters, and all of the Café Society entourage. How would I ever remember all these names, places, all this information, I wondered, taken by the dizziness of it all. It all felt like what Hemingway so eloquently described as a “moveable feast.”

But our experiences were not only about glamour and wealth. Egon was a real traveler, inquisitive, full of energy and curiosity, eager to meet all kinds of people in whatever country we were in, keen to eat into the adventure—sometimes literally. I remember a man he befriended in the old souks of Djerba, Tunisia, who invited us to his house for lunch. We followed him through the narrow twisting alleyways, turning to the left, to the right, and to the left again, having
no idea where we were going. We finally arrived in what looked like an abandoned apartment building, climbed the stairs, and arrived in the man’s house, filled with children, some of whom were obviously sick. Food was served and I couldn’t touch it, I felt repulsed, but Egon downed it with grace as if we were at the most elegant home in Paris. I will always remember that day, the lesson it taught me. Egon had an incredible ease about him, which made all people feel good about themselves. He was a true prince.

I’d traveled a lot with my family as a child, but Egon brought it to a different level. He infused in me the same curiosity and sense of adventure, which I carry to this day. I’m always ready to go. I pack lightly. I travel lightly, leaving time for the unknown. Even as a child I loved to travel, through my Tintin books. It was with Tintin that I learned geography and discovered the world first—America, Egypt, Peru, China, the Congo. When I arrive somewhere I have never been before, I always think of Tintin.

B
ut Egon’s most important gift was our children, all the more because I was hesitant about having them, especially Alexandre. He was the unexpected result of a weekend I spent with Egon in Rome in May 1969. I was living in Italy then, working as an intern for a fashion industrialist, Angelo Ferretti. Egon was taking the summer off, having completed his training program at Chase Manhattan Bank in New York, and was on his way to India and the Far East with a friend from school, Marc Landeau, before starting another job at the investment bank Lazard Frères in New York. I was very excited to see him and he, evidently, me. He had organized a big dinner with friends at Tula, a fashionable restaurant off Via Condotti, and I went with him wearing
an evening jumpsuit with a plunging décolleté we had bought on sale that afternoon on the Via Gregoriana.

I remember there were paparazzi outside in the streets, but what happened inside was brighter than all of their flashbulbs. Egon gave me a beautiful ring he had designed, a pale sapphire in a big gold setting. To my complete surprise, this dinner was an engagement party. I was very excited, even though I did not totally believe it. Yet that night, in the intimacy of our bedroom, I remember whispering to Egon: “I will give you a son.” Did I really mean it? Or was I only trying to be seductive? In any event, after the weekend, Egon went to India and I went back to Ferretti’s factory.

A few weekends later I went to Monaco with friends to watch the Grand Prix again. Ferretti was in Monaco, too, and offered me a ride back to Milan at the end of the weekend. He drove his Maserati very fast and I thought it was all the high-speed twists and turns in the road that were making me nauseated. I felt even more sick the next day and thought a sauna might make me feel better. It didn’t. Instead I fainted in the middle of Piazza San Babila and remember hearing people saying “She’s dead, she’s dead” and all I could do was move a finger to show them “No, I’m not dead.” What I was, of course, was pregnant. I couldn’t believe my ears when the doctor told me the news.

Here I was, barely twenty-two, and what I wanted most was to be independent. Furthermore, Egon was one of the best “catches” in Europe. Who was going to believe that I had not done it on purpose? I went home to Geneva to see another doctor who told me he could help me end the pregnancy. I was torn.

I went to my mother for advice. She had taken Egon’s gift of a ring more seriously than I had and was horrified at the thought that I could make such a decision on my own. “You are engaged,” she said. “The least you can do is discuss the matter with your fiancé.”
Reluctantly, I drafted a telegram to Egon, who was in Hong Kong, offering him the choice. I have kept the telegram of his wonderful reply in my scrapbook. He was clear and definite. “Only one option. Organize marriage in Paris July 15. I rejoice. Thinking of you. Love and kisses, Eduard Egon.”

S
uddenly my life was giving me vertigo, though it was a happy dizziness. No time to waste. All the wedding preparations: invitations to be printed, wedding dress to be made, ceremony and party to be arranged, trousseau to be bought. As usual, my mother was a great help. We visited Clara, Egon’s mother, in Venice and planned it all together.

Clara was very supportive, but on Egon’s father’s side, the patriarch of the Furstenberg family was evidently not. Jewish blood in the family was unheard of and there was opposition. I also overheard a slight at the Agnelli house—something I interpreted as a clever, ambitious little bourgeois girl from Belgium getting what she wanted. I felt belittled and hurt and remember walking with a very determined stride around Clara’s garden, caressing my pregnant stomach. It was then I had my first conversation with Alexandre. “We’ll show them,” I said out loud to my unborn child. “We’ll show them who we are!”

The wedding took place on July 16, 1969, the same day that the first American astronauts were sent to the moon, in the countryside outside Paris, in Montfort l’Amaury. My three-month pregnancy did not show at all in the Christian Dior wedding dress its designer Mark Bohan had created for me. The mayor married us at the town hall and there was a huge luncheon reception afterward at the Auberge de la Moutière, a charming inn and restaurant managed by Maxim’s.

The crowd was young, beautiful, and glamorous; the food exquisite; and the entertainment enthusiastic. My father had hired the entire
company of fifty musicians and singers from the trendy Russian nightclub Raspoutine. To my embarrassment, he took the microphone, sang in Russian with the Raspoutine musicians, and broke glasses. Everyone else loved it and the wedding party was a huge success. The only nonparticipant was Egon’s father, Tassilo, who had been so pressured by the family’s disapproving patriarch that he came to the ceremony but boycotted the reception, though it barely diminished the celebration or our joy. Egon and I left the guests dancing and singing, and went back to the center of Paris, changed our clothes, and went walking the streets and in an out of the shops of the Faubourg St-Honoré.

For our wedding present his mother gave us a beach house on Sardinia’s beautiful Costa Smeralda, where for the whole month of August we packed a crowd of sixteen friends into three tiny bedrooms. We were all so young and had so much fun.

Our beautiful son, Alexandre Egon, was born six months later on January 25, 1970, in New York. Our equally beautiful daughter, Tatiana Desirée, followed just thirteen months later. Just as Egon insisted that we marry and have Alexandre, he was insistent that I have Tatiana. I’d gotten pregnant again just three months after the very difficult birth of Alexandre by emergency cesarean after sixteen hours of labor. The idea of starting all over again needed some encouragement. Lovely Tatiana was born on February 16, 1971, this time by a scheduled cesarean. There are no words to describe how grateful I am for Egon’s enthusiasm and support. He played a bigger part in both my children being born than I did, though I played a bigger part afterward.

L
ife in New York was lots of fun in the early seventies. Real estate was cheap, so many diverse and creative people could live there.
Pop art in the galleries and nudity on Broadway made us feel that everything was new, allowed, and the freedom we felt had just been invented. Prince and Princess von Furstenberg (we had dropped the “und zu”) were the “it” couple in town. Our youth, our looks, and our means put us on every invitation list and in social columns. On any given night, we went out to at least one cocktail party, a dinner, sometimes a ball, and always a stop at some gay bar at the end of the night. We lived on Park Avenue but still felt very European and continued to spend a lot of time there.

We hosted lots of parties for Europeans coming to town. I remember the big party we gave for Yves Saint Laurent and the last-minute dinner we gave for Bernardo Bertolucci, who had just opened
Last Tango in Paris
. The movie was quite racy and shocking and its talented and handsome director was the hit of New York. Everyone came to our parties—Andy Warhol and his entourage, actors, designers, journalists, and, of course, many Europeans. Life was fast, to say the least, too fast, finally, for me.

The marriage itself had its own stresses. Egon was my husband and my first true love, but our marriage became complicated. He loved to have fun and was very promiscuous, wanting to experiment as much as possible. I tried to embrace his behavior and accept an open marriage; I certainly did not want to judge him. I acted cool and hid my suffering, not wanting to be a victim. But I had two young children to take care of and was starting an equally demanding business. It finally became too hard to manage it all.

S
trangely enough, what saved our relationship and preserved our love was the end of our marriage in 1973. The tipping point was a February cover story about us in
New York
magazine: “The Couple Who
Has Everything—Is Everything Enough?” The title was bannered over the ravishing photo of us posing in our tented living room.

The idea for the story came from the magazine’s editor in chief, Clay Felker. Clay was traveling home from Europe when he saw a small photo of Egon and me at a charity ball in Texas in the newsmaker section of
Newsweek
. The ball had been designed by Cecil Beaton and dignitaries had been invited from all over the globe. Egon and I looked particularly glamorous. The young princess was wearing a beautiful, practically topless Roberto Capucci gown and the young prince was breathtakingly handsome in a perfectly cut tuxedo.

Clay, who was the creator of the weekly, decided to assign a pictorial cover story about this young, intriguing couple. A serious feminist writer, Linda Bird Francke, and a highly qualified photographer, Jill Krementz, were assigned the story. There were photos of Egon in the subway, me at the hairdresser, the babies in their nursery, the two of us walking the streets and at an art gallery with Egon’s parents. The photos looked very good and the quotes were unusually candid and titillating. Egon teased about having an open bisexual relationship and I compared sex in a marriage to a left hand touching a right one. It sounded so blasé and cynical but we were very young, acting cool at all cost, and, ultimately, very naïve with the press.

The result was shocking and it destroyed our marriage. Reading the magazine and seeing our lives exposed under a magnifying glass, I realized that that couple was not who I was. I didn’t want to be a European Park Avenue princess with a pretend decadent life. That woman was definitely not the woman I wanted to be. I had to leave the couple in order to be me. Egon moved out soon after that piece in
New York
magazine, but our friendship and shared family lasted forever.

Egon and I had an easier, deeper, more sincere and respectful relationship after we parted. Of course he was sad and resentful at first, but the breakup was absolutely the only right thing to do, so eventually he accepted it. Parting ways does not mean erasing entirely someone from your life. The relationship can evolve, and be nurtured, but in a different way. Not an easy task, but as anything meaningful, well worth it.