Free Diane von Furstenberg by Gioia Diliberto Page B

to a French restaurant to celebrate. “There was a very pretty woman sitting next to us with her husband, and Egon said, ‘You know, I’m so excited. I’m getting married, and I’m going to be a father.’ And the woman said, ‘That’s so nice, and look at me; I’m pregnant, too!’ Egon goes over to her and puts his hand on her belly so he can feel her baby’s heartbeat.” Her husband didn’t object. “Egon oozed charm. He could get away with anything,” says Landeau.
    His future wife may have been pregnant, but that didn’t interrupt Egon’s trip. As the friends traveled to Bali, Laos, Cambodia, and Japan, Egon worked on the guest list, and whenever they found themselves on an Air France flight, he’d ask a flight attendant to mail the list to Diane when the plane returned to Paris.
    Despite Egon’s enthusiasm about the wedding, Diane was embarrassed to be a pregnant bride. She didn’t want anyone to think Egon had to marry her. Of course, that’s exactly what people in Egon’s social world believed. “They felt that Diane was on the make and had taken advantage of Egon,” says John Richardson, the art historian and Picasso biographer, who met the couple when they first moved to New York.
    With Lily in tow, Diane traveled to Venice, where she ordered a trousseau of tablecloths and sheets with the von Furstenberg monogram from Jesurum, Italy’s most famous manufacturer of handmade lace. She and Lily also visited Diane’s soon-to-be mother-in-law at Morocco d’Venezia, the eighteenth-century villa outside Venice where Clara lived with her second husband, Count Giovanni Nuvoletti, to discuss plans for the wedding, now just six weeks away. The villa was more enchanting than Diane had expected. The stuccoed house had cornflower-blue shutters, a red-tiled roof, and pink roses cascading from window boxes. More roses meandered over the property, perfuming the air.
    Clara was in a unique position to be wary of and sympathetic to Diane. Her own grandmother, the plain but clever Jane Allen Campbell, had been an American adventuress straight out of a novel by Edith Wharton. Born in 1865 in New Jersey, Jane had tried to find a rich husband in New York. When that failed, she traveled to Rome, where her wealthy aunt lived, and she landed an Italian prince, Carlo Bourbon del Monte, Clara’s maternal grandfather.
    Anti-Semitism was not uncommon in the von Furstenbergs’ social set, and to understand the visceral prejudice of many European aristocrats it helps to read Proust. In Remembrance of Things Past, the protagonist Swann describes a French prince who was so anti-Semitic that he leta wing of his chateau burn down rather than borrow fire-fighting equipment from the Jewish Rothschilds next door. The same prince also chose to suffer an agonizing toothache, rather than consult the only available dentist, a Jew.
    Clara’s own in-laws from her first marriage, the von Furstenbergs, had been disappointed when Tassilo married her, a girl without a title, despite her grandmother’s marriage. Her commoner status compromised the position of their children in the Almanach de Gotha, the directory of Europe’s royalty and higher nobility, and ruined their sons’ chances of being received into the Knights of Malta, the oldest surviving order of chivalry. As Alex von Furstenberg points out, however, Tassilo was the younger son, and “in those aristocratic families in Europe, the oldest son gets everything, and the younger sons marry rich people. That’s how it worked.”
    Diane insists she never felt the sting of anti-Semitism from Clara. (Diane’s friend Howard Rosenman recounted a purported anti-Semitic incident involving Clara in a Los Angeles Times piece five years ago. Diane denies that it ever happened, and Rosenman now backs away from the account.)
    Tassilo, though, on several occasions made remarks that could be interpreted as anti-Semitic. At dinner the night before his son’s wedding, he drank too much and