Free The Woman I Wanted to Be by Diane von Furstenberg

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.
    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, havingno 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