Free The Woman I Wanted to Be by Diane von Furstenberg Page B

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 entirecompany 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.
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    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