The starry
and scandalous end of the trashbag genre … Lady Gaga as Patrizia Reggiani in
Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci.
Gaga, Gucci and prison ferrets: how true crime
conquered the world
Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci stars Lady Gaga in a
tale of fashion and murder. But is true crime – once the soul of cinema, from
thrillers and horrors to westerns – now outgrowing the big screen?
Danny Leigh
Wed 17 Nov
2021 06.00 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/nov/17/lady-gaga-house-of-gucci-prison-ferrets-true-crime-ridley-scott
What took
you so long, House of Gucci? This story was destined to become a movie from the
moment the bullet left fashion heir Maurizio Gucci dead outside his Milan
office in March 1995 – shot, a witness said, by a hitman with a “beautiful,
clean hand”. The film by Ridley Scott now finally arrives dripping with star
power, and Lady Gaga as Gucci’s ex-wife Patrizia Reggiani. But the story alone
was enough: a glittering tickbox of money, revenge and a villainess kept
company in jail by an illicit pet ferret called Bambi.
True crime
gold. So why, now that the film is actually here, does the Gucci case feel a
strange fit for a movie after all? Put it down to timing. The film’s
development began in entertainment prehistory: 2006. Back then, a lavish movie
was still the grand prize for any news story, and true crime – that trashbag
genre – would simply be glad of the association. Now though, film and true
crime have the air of an estranged couple. Had Maurizio Gucci been gunned down
on Via Palestro last week, Netflix would already have the rights and the podcast
would be on Spotify.
Such is how
true crime conquered the world. The vast success of the 2014 podcast Serial
remains the origin story, but the peak never seems to come. The genre has
become bigger than the movies – made that way by an interlocking partnership
with pods and streaming.
“When I
started studying true crime, nobody took it seriously,” says New York writer
Jean Murley, who in 2008 published The Rise of True Crime: 20th Century Murder
and American Popular Culture. “Now it feels like the dominant form of pop
culture storytelling. And I’m glad. I think it has a lot to tell us about
ourselves.” It just probably wouldn’t tell us in a film. “True crime movies
were definitely bigger in the past,” says Murley. “Media changes. We change.”
Yet the
movies were there first. Consider the classics: Fritz Lang’s trailblazing M
sprang out of real child murders; Psycho saw Hitchcock repurpose the grim Ed
Gein case. Beyond individual milestones, the very stuff of film storytelling –
gangster movies, horror, thrillers, westerns – all grew out of true crime. It
is less a sub-genre than the soul of cinema.
The
big-screen genre became a sliding scale, from sober documentary to the starry
and scandalous. House of Gucci is the latter, of course – a bloody soap.Of
course Jared Leto is involved, and already a meme in his velvet suit at the
London premiere. The red carpet hijinks feel old-fangled too. At the higher
end, true crime now carries itself differently. Stories may still focus on the
wealthy and notorious – but only with a certain gravity of purpose.
Take The
People v OJ Simpson, 2016’s acclaimed longform dramatisation. Stylistically, it
had everything a series gives and a movie cannot. The breathing space of its
running time, the episodic structure, room for breadcrumb-trail detail – all
this came with streaming and TV, which are perfect for true crime. But there
was also a question of tone. After Serial, a bar had been set, whatever the
medium. If a project was going to reopen a famous old wound such as, say, the
killing of Nicole Brown Simpson, it would also have to widen the lens, humanise
the victim, contextualise everything. The mere crime could not be the only
story.
Hollywood has always made money from a gun and a girl.
The gun is glorified and the girl – the woman – is silent
For
podcasts, the whole point has been the quotidian. Terrible murders, everyday
victims. The lesson of movies such as M or Psycho – that monsters are among us
so FFS roll the window up – now comes instead from Park Predators and Wine
& Crime. The gulf is only made more pronounced by the low-tech of it all,
millions of dollars away from the aggressive gloss of a Ridley Scott movie.
Still,
plenty of true crime podcasts indulge in cinematic scene-setting. This American
Life – the series from which Serial span-off – says it makes “movies for
radio”. But the filmic touches feel less like homage than a cannibalising for
parts.
Even a
Hollywood crime story now becomes a podcast. Film-maker Vanessa Hope is the
granddaughter of movie producer Walter Wanger and actor Joan Bennett, once a
leading femme fatale. In 1951, suspecting an affair, Wanger shot his wife’s
agent, Jennings Lang, in a Beverly Hills parking lot. This year, Hope told the
story in a 10-part podcast, Love Is a Crime, with Jon Hamm and Zooey Deschanel
playing her grandparents. To Hope, it made perfect sense that the project was
not a movie. “Hollywood has always made money from a gun and a girl. The gun is
glorified and the girl – the woman – is silent.” The very nature of film, she
says, is wrong for the job. “A two-hour movie always reduces the full arc of
people’s lives – and the person most reduced is the victim.”
A similar
ripple of change has reached Britain. Last September, huge audiences watched
Des, ITV’s three-part drama about the 1983 arrest of Scottish serial killer
Dennis Nilsen. Co-writer Luke Neal had been inspired by The People v OJ
Simpson. “You start out thinking you’re watching to find out how OJ got away
with it. And the brilliance is, he ends up a minor character. What keeps you
there is the human cost.”
In Des,
Neal created the same dynamic. “We watch these stories because we want to know
who this person is who takes other people’s lives. In fact, he doesn’t matter.
What does is the people whose lives he took. The problem with true crime is it
wants to compete with fiction, so you end up with countless Ted Bundy movies.
But real killers have no glamour. The truth isn’t Jamie Dornan in a sexy game
of cat and mouse.”
Longform
true crime upped the ante elsewhere too. Another landmark was The Jinx, Andrew
Jarecki’s 2015 portrait of the US real estate heir and now convicted murderer
Robert Durst. The finale featured a muttered confession, seemingly recorded by
accident. How could a movie match that? (And who now remembers All Good Things,
the Durst-inspired movie released by Jarecki five years earlier, starring a
vague Ryan Gosling?)
The impulse
to crack cases on air has been wired into the true crime podcast. That the
results often end in a shrug is not a dealbreaker. Loose threads are simply
picked up online. But for a Hollywood movie, uncertainty is death. The
exception that proved the rule was David Fincher’s doubt-shrouded Zodiac, a
box-office hit that inspired not a single rip-off. (Fincher then took his
serial killer habit to Netflix with the sleekly titillating series Mindhunter.)
But true
crime as live investigation is not the only new remit. Genre fans have always
skewed female. Podcasts have only intensified that, and the result is a
landscape of work made by women for women about – and this can seem an odd
dynamic – women being murdered. There is an explanation. Social psychologist
Amanda Vicary is a true crime fan with a professional interest. “My research,”
she says, “shows that women like true crime when it gives them information
about techniques to escape a killer.” If horror movies give our fear centres a
harmless work-out, modern true crime has a bleakly practical purpose. “Women
listen,” Vicary adds, “to find out what to do if they’re thrown in the trunk of
a car.”
Of course,
House of Gucci centres on a woman too. The Black Widow trope is as old as it is
statistically improbable and commercially alluring. If the story overlaps with
Killer Women With Piers Morgan, it is not the first film to draw a prestige
male director to a real story of a woman accused. This year’s other major true
crime-ish movie was Stillwater, with Tom McCarthy fictionalising the case of
Amanda Knox, who was acquitted after four years in an Italian jail for murder.
Knox herself went public with her distress.
House of
Gucci has also drawn criticism from family members on various grounds: 1)
violation of privacy; 2) Al Pacino’s rendering of patriarch Aldo Gucci (“fat,
short, ugly”). But it would be a mistake to think the old hulk of movie true
crime was the only problem. The whole genre still lives on ethical thin ice.
The success may not be helping. This September, a giddy podcast-ish hubbub
greeted the disappearance of American “vanlifer” Gabby Petito. It only grew
louder when she was found to have been killed. Big True Crime was already at
work. “When you turn on Hulu,” her mother, Nichole Schmidt, tweeted this month,
“and your daughter’s story is the recommended show.”
Even lovers
of the genre are also troubled by a fixation with one kind of victim. “True crime
has never reflected the reality of murder,” Jean Murley says. “It’s almost a
fantasy genre. Who gets killed in America? Disproportionately, it is young men
of colour. But the quintessential true crime victim is a young, pretty, white
woman. It’s very ritualised.” Murley will consider this and other matters in an
updated version of her book. There is a lot to say about true crime in the 21st
century.
Des writer
Neal is optimistic – cautiously. “I do think true crime is changing,” he says.
“And that’s good. It needs to. Because actually, life is not cheap.”
House of Gucci is released in UK cinemas on 26
November.
Interview
The Gucci wife and the hitman: fashion's darkest tale
Abigail
Haworth
When Patrizia Reggiani married Maurizio Gucci, they
became one of Italy’s first celebrity power couples. But then he left her – and
she had him murdered. Abigail Haworth unpicks an incredible tale of glamour,
sex, betrayal, death and prison in the dizzying world of high fashion
Patrizia
Reggiani perched on an armchair wearing a short, colourful dress and sunglasses
Death by
design: Patrizia Reggiani had her husband Maurizio Gucci gunned down – a crime
for which she would spend 16 years in prison. Photograph: Uli Weber/The
Observer
@AbiHaworth
Sun 24 Jul
2016 08.00 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2016/jul/24/the-gucci-wife-and-the-hitman-fashions-darkest-tale
Two years
ago, not long after Patrizia Reggiani was released from prison, a camera crew
from a trashy Italian TV show turned up unannounced at her Milan workplace.
Reggiani had just spent 16 years inside after being convicted of arranging the
murder, in March 1995, of her ex-husband Maurizio Gucci, the last of the Gucci
family dynasty to run the luxury brand. The former socialite had always
maintained her innocence – her best friend had set her up, she said – but the
TV crew caught her in a reckless mood.
“Patrizia,
why did you hire a hitman to kill Maurizio Gucci? Why didn’t you shoot him
yourself?” badgered the reporter.
“My
eyesight is not so good,” she lobbed back. “I didn’t want to miss.”
Understandably
then, when I try to find her, Reggiani’s inner circle doesn’t seem keen to let
her near another journalist. “She’s not here. She’s off work with a bad back,”
says Alessandra Brunero, co-owner of Bozart, a Milanese costume jewellery firm
that has employed Reggiani as a “design consultant” since April 2014.
Sentenced
to 26 years on appeal, Reggiani was required to find a job as a condition of
her parole. She turned down her first offer of release in 2011, according to
the Italian press, because the very idea of working horrified her. “I’ve never
worked in my life and I don’t intend to start now,” she told her lawyer.
Bozart,
with its Renaissance-style premises full of sparkling necklaces and
chandeliers, was obviously an acceptable compromise. Brunero and her
business-partner husband have now become Reggiani’s de facto minders, tasked
with ensuring the 67-year-old sticks to her parole and quietly rebuilds her
life as a regular citizen.
Reggiani in
court in 1998, her face impassive
‘I am a
very strong person. I survived all the years in captivity’: Reggiani in court
in 1998. Photograph: EPA
“Oh, mamma
mia, it’s not easy,” says Brunero, a stylish 40-something. She invites me
inside, and I get the impression she really needs to talk. “I cried after that
TV interview. It was terrible,” she says, putting her head in her hands.
“Naturally, Patrizia was only joking…”
Even before
the impromptu “confession”, persuading Reggiani to remain low-key was a lost
cause. One of her first acts of freedom was to go shopping on Via Monte
Napoleone – Milan’s Bond Street – decked out in gaudy jewels and movie-star
sunglasses, with a large pet macaw perched on her shoulder. The paparazzi
couldn’t believe their luck. Lady Gucci, as she used to be known, was back.
The gunning
down of 46-year-old Maurizio Gucci one morning in the red-carpeted foyer of his
office, and the subsequent murder trial, captivated Italy in the late 1990s. It
was sensational fin de siècle stuff. This was elegant Milan, not mob-riddled
Naples, and execution-style killings of the city’s glamorous elite were
unknown. Reggiani, dubbed the “Liz Taylor of luxury labels” in the 1970s and
80s, was an immediate suspect. She had openly threatened to kill Gucci after
their split. But, without evidence, the crime went unsolved for nearly two
years. A tip-off led to her arrest in 1997, along with four others, including
the hitman.
I met Maurizio at a party and he fell madly in love
with me. I was exciting and different
While the
public loved it, the Gucci company was less enthralled. After decades of
infighting among the heirs of the founder Guccio Gucci, the brand was no longer
under family control. Maurizio, a grandson of Guccio who’d ousted his relatives
from the business to become CEO in 1992, had been forced to sell his stake 18
months before he died. Ownership was taken over by Bahrain- based investment
bank Investcorp. The murder coincided with a thrilling revival of the brand’s
image in the mid-1990s under new boss Domenico De Sole and edgy young designer
Tom Ford.
“The last
thing Gucci wanted was a sordid scandal,” says Giusi Ferrè, a veteran
Milan-based fashion writer and cultural critic with trademark spiky orange
hair. “The company tried to ignore the whole drama and they wanted everyone
else to ignore it, too.” The label’s continued rise over the past two decades
has eclipsed memories of the murder even more. Gucci is currently on yet
another high. Revenue is soaring, and androgynous new creative director
Alessandro Michele recently turned Westminster Abbey into the most hallowed
venue ever for his latest collection. Yet the amnesia is odd, because the saga
has everything: glamour, greed, sex, death, betrayal, raging status anxiety. It
probably says more about the primal allure of a name like Gucci than all the
sales figures in the world.
After
Reggiani was arrested, the media dubbed her Vedova Nera – the Black Widow – and
touted all the stereotypical theories about her likely motives. She was jealous
of Maurizio’s girlfriend, she wanted his money, she was bitter about his
neglect, she was plain mad. If there is a grain of truth in any of these, there
was also something deeper, too. “Everything Reggiani was stemmed from being a
Gucci,” says Ferrè. “It was her whole identity, even as an ex-wife. She was
furious with Maurizio for selling out.” Even after her release from prison,
Reggiani couldn’t let go. She told La Repubblica newspaper in 2014 that, now
she was available again, she hoped to return to the company fold. “They need
me,” she said. “I still feel like a Gucci – in fact, the most Gucci of them
all.”
Bozart’s
owners relent a week later and agree to introduce me to Reggiani at their
offices. She appears in their grand sitting room wearing a short floral dress.
She is tiny, barely 5ft tall, although her enormous hair, now reddish brown,
and nude high heels give her extra height. “That’s a lovely dress,” I say to
break the ice. “It’s Zara. I don’t earn enough at this place to buy proper
clothes,” she replies, throwing a disgruntled look at her hovering employers.
We sit down
on matching white sofas to espressos and iced water, and I ask her about life
in Milan’s San Vittore prison. “I think I am a very strong person because I
survived all these years in captivity,” she says in the heavily accented
English she picked up during her jet-setting days. “I slept a lot. I took care
of my plants. I looked after Bambi, my pet ferret.” Bambi, she adds, was a
special privilege negotiated by her lawyer, but the creature met a sticky end
when a fellow inmate accidentally sat on him. “I don’t like to talk about this
time at all,” she says, already keen to change the subject. “It is all a bad
dream to me.” Reggiani won’t admit out loud that she was in prison, referring
to her incarceration as “my stay at Vittore Residence.”
She relaxes
more when we start to talk about the past. She was born in a small town outside
Milan to a waitress and a much older man who made his fortune in trucking.
They were
very rich, but not part of Milan’s high society. As a young woman she liked
fine things – her father spoiled her with mink coats and fast cars – and she
found her way on to the elite social circuit. “I met Maurizio at a party and he
fell madly in love with me. I was exciting and different,” says Reggiani. The
Guccis came from Florence so Maurizio also felt something of an outsider. “I
didn’t think much of him at first. He was just the quiet boy whose teeth
crossed over at the front.” Reggiani had other suitors, but the young Gucci
chased her hard with all the riches at his disposal.
They
married in 1972 when they were both around 24. The union caused a rift with
Gucci’s father Rodolfo, one of Guccio Gucci’s sons, who disapproved of
Reggiani’s background and, no doubt, her strong personality. Maurizio was an only
child whose mother had died when he was five, and his father had always been
overprotective.
“Maurizio
felt free with me. We had fun, we were a team,” says Reggiani. Rodolfo softened
after she gave birth to a daughter, Alessandra, and he could see that she
“really loved Maurizio”. The elder Gucci bought the couple numerous properties,
including a luxury penthouse in New York’s Olympic Tower. Early adopters of
celebrity coupledom, the pair rode around Manhattan in a chauffeur-driven car
with the personalised plate “Mauizia”. They hung out with Jackie Onassis and
the Kennedy brood whenever they were all in town.
I was angry with Maurizio about many things. But
losing the family business was stupid
“We were a
beautiful couple and we had a beautiful life, of course,” says Reggiani,
throwing her hands in the air and briefly leaving them there. “It still hurts
to think about this.” She perks up when she remembers the lavish colour-themed
parties she threw in the early 1980s – “one was all orange and yellow,
including the food” – and the trips to private islands on their 64m wooden
yacht, the Creole, which Maurizio bought to mark the birth of their second
daughter, Allegra. (Worth millions, it is still owned and sailed by the
couple’s two daughters). Their charmed world also included a ski chalet in
Saint Moritz, a holiday home in Acapulco and a farm in Connecticut.
It all
started to unravel after the death of Rodolfo in 1983, Reggiani says, when
Maurizio inherited his father’s 50% stake in Gucci. “Maurizio got crazy. Until
then I was his chief adviser about all Gucci matters. But he wanted to be the
best, and he stopped listening to me.” The Gucci brand had been losing prestige
from over-licensing its famed double-G logo and from mass production of canvas
bags. Maurizio had a plan to restore it to high-end glory by reverting to the
exquisite craftsmanship the company was built upon.
He fought
for years with his uncle and cousins, who jointly owned the other half of the
firm, until he pulled off a plot to buy them out with the help of Investcorp.
The couple’s marriage imploded along the way. Apparently weary of Reggiani’s
constant “meddling”, one evening Maurizio packed an overnight bag and left.
Meanwhile, the company lost millions under his control. Reggiani had been
right, at least, that Maurizio was mismanaging business and not creating enough
revenue to execute his grand ideas. His personal fortune was dwindling and he
was forced to sell Gucci wholly to Investcorp for $120m in 1993.
“I was
angry with Maurizio about many, many things at that time,” says Reggiani. “But
above all, this. Losing the family business. It was stupid. It was a failure. I
was filled with rage, but there was nothing I could do.” She turns her head and
drops her voice so low I can hardly hear her. “He shouldn’t have done that to
me.”
Giuseppe
Onorato was sweeping away leaves inside the arched doorway of Via Palestro 20,
the graceful building where Maurizio Gucci had his private office, at 8:30am on
27 March 1995. “It was a lovely spring morning, very quiet,” says Onorato, now
71, the former building doorman and the only person who witnessed what occurred
next. “Mr Gucci arrived carrying some magazines and said good morning. Then I
saw a hand. It was a beautiful, clean hand, and it was pointing a gun.”
The gun
fired three shots at Gucci’s back as he went up the steps, and a fourth into
his head as he collapsed. “I thought it was a joke. Then the shooter saw me. He
lifted the gun again and fired two more times. ‘What a shame,’ I thought. ‘This
is how I die.’”
Reggiani couldn’t bear the thought of another woman
taking the power, status and money she ‘had earned’
Onorato
can’t remember how he made it to the foyer’s steps after he’d been shot twice
in the arm, but he was sitting there in a pool of blood when the carabinieri
arrived. “I was cradling Mr Gucci’s head. He died in my arms,” says the
ex-doorman.
Speaking on
the phone from Sardinia, where he has a small holiday house, Onorato still
sounds incredulous that he survived. “I still have stabbing pains in my left
arm, but every day for the past 21 years I’ve woken up thankful I’m alive.” The
gunman vanished into Milan’s Monday morning rush hour. The aftermath wasn’t
easy for the doorman.
As the only
direct witness, Onorato was terrified that the killer would return. “I was a
poor man, so I had to go back to work at Via Palestro 20 when I recovered. I
had a panic attack every time an unfriendly looking stranger approached.”
After
Reggiani’s conviction, the courts ordered her to pay Onorato compensation of
the equivalent of roughly £142,000. He has yet to receive any of it, he says.
Reggiani’s daughters, who are now in their late 30s and have always stuck by
their mother (at least publicly), directly inherited Maurizio Gucci’s millions,
as well as the yacht and properties in New York, Saint Moritz and Milan.
Reggiani declared herself nullatenente – the Italian word for bankrupt, meaning
“a person who has nothing”.
“I’m not
bitter,” says Onorato, “but I do wonder, if a rich person had been wounded in
that doorway instead of me, whether they’d have been treated with more
respect.” He has a point. When, for instance, Gucci’s lawyers proposed a
divorce settlement to Reggiani of £2.5m plus £650,000 per year, she rejected it
as “a mere bowl of lentils” and landed a better deal.
Onorato
isn’t the only person whose life was turned upside down by the murder. Paola
Franchi, now 61, had been Gucci’s live-in partner for five years before his
death. The couple shared a palatial apartment on the city centre boulevard,
Corso Venezia, along with Franchi’s 11-year-old son Charly, and had planned to
marry. Tall and blonde, Franchi didn’t fare much better than Reggiani in the
trial’s media coverage, which often portrayed her as a glamorous gold digger.
“Oh, they
always resort to these stupid types,” Franchi says. “Actually my previous
husband, whom I left for Maurizio, was even richer, so it was all nonsense.” An
interior designer turned artist, Franchi lives in a converted porcelain factory
in Milan and spends half the year in Kenya. Her home is stuffed with books,
paintings and exotic souvenirs. She’s chatty and quick to laugh, with a
lightness of spirit that I wasn’t expecting.
During the
trial it emerged that Reggiani had put pressure on her hired accomplices to
carry out the murder quickly, before Franchi and Gucci’s wedding. Reggiani’s
one-time best friend Pina Auriemma, who confessed to arranging the hitman,
testified that Reggiani couldn’t bear the thought of another woman taking her
place as Mrs Maurizio Gucci – and with it, the power, status and money that she
“had earned”.
She also
feared that her daughters could lose some or all of their inheritance if the
couple had children. “Patrizia was stalking us,” says Franchi. “She still had
spies in Maurizio’s circle and she knew all about our plans, his business
dealings, everything. She called many times abusing him and threatening to kill
him.”
If Gucci
didn’t take Reggiani’s calls, she sent him diatribes on cassette tape, later
played in court, saying he was “a monster” for neglecting her and their
daughters, and warning that “the inferno for you is yet to come”.
“I begged
him to hire a bodyguard,” says Franchi, “but he refused. He didn’t believe
Patrizia would go through with her threat because of their girls.”
My family has cut off my financial support. I have
nothing, I haven’t even met my two grandsons
Gucci and
Franchi had crossed paths briefly in their youth on the Euro-rich-kid party
circuit. They reconnected by chance when they were both reeling from unhappy
marriages. “We fell in love immediately. Maurizio used to tell me” – Franchi
starts to cry – “that we were two halves of the same apple.”
The day
after the murder she received an eviction order from Reggiani to move out of
the grand apartment she’d shared with Gucci. The notarised timestamp, Franchi
noticed, showed the papers had been drawn up at 11am the previous day – less
than three hours after Maurizio died. “In those days co-habiting couples had no
legal protection. Charly and I were out, just like that.”
Franchi
slowly began, as she puts it, “to build a different future”. But five years
later she suffered another tragedy. While visiting his father over Christmas,
her son Charly killed himself at the age of 16. “It was completely unexpected,”
she says. “He was a happy, shining boy, greatly loved. We think it was a flash
of teen madness.” Franchi has photos of Maurizio and Charly all over her house,
but says they’re not there so she can dwell on her pain. “I like to have their
faces around, to say hello. For a year after Charly died I felt a rage in my
soul, but then I got on with life. I’m the kind of person who has to keep
moving forward.” She poured her emotions into painting and writing, she says,
and is also active in a charity for troubled or suicidal teens, L’Amico Charly,
that her ex- husband set up in memory of their son.
When Franchi
moved out of the Corso Venezia apartment, Reggiani moved in with her daughters.
She lived there in luxury for the next two years, until one of her accomplices
boasted about the murder to the wrong person. The man informed the police, who
launched a sting operation to trick Reggiani and her four paid accomplices –
her friend Pina Auriemma, a friend of Auriemma’s who set up the hitman, the
hitman himself and the getaway driver – into discussing the crime on wiretapped
phones. It succeeded. Among other evidence they found at Reggiani’s home was
her Cartier diary, which had a one-word entry for the day of Gucci’s death:
“Paradeisos” – the Greek word for paradise.
In court,
Reggiani admitted she’d paid Auriemma around £200,000, but denied it was for
the murder, claiming Auriemma had arranged the hit herself and was threatening
to frame her if she didn’t pay. “But it was worth every lira,” Reggiani then
added, confusingly, unable to help herself even then. All five involved in the
murder plot were found guilty. Despite the Gucci company’s supposed
indifference to the scandal, on the day of the verdict the Italian media
reported that Gucci shops around the country hung silver handcuffs in their
windows. (Gucci declined to make any comment at all for this article.)
Paolo
Franchi in her decorative garden
‘I begged
Maurizio to hire a bodyguard’: Paolo Franchi, who Gucci lived with for five
years after leaving Reggiani. Photograph: Uli Weber/The Observer
At Bozart,
Brunero’s husband and co-owner Maurizio Manca gives me a tour of Reggiani’s new
workplace. It seems almost too perfect for her. The jewellery the upmarket firm
creates is designed to be big, ornate and dazzling. Manca, who is dressed all
in black and has a mop of floppy grey hair, freely admits the 60-year-old
company had its heyday in the 1980s when “there was corruption everywhere and
the money was flowing”. Stars, including Madonna and Pamela Anderson, have worn
Bozart’s designs which, best of all, supplied all the glitz worn by Linda
Evans’s character Krystle Carrington on the set of Dynasty.
When she’s
at work, Reggiani spends much of her day advising Bozart’s design team and
reading fashion magazines. “She’s like our Michael Schumacher – she keeps on
top of trends and test-drives our creations,” says Manca.
“I prefer
Senna. He has much more class,” Reggiani says, emerging from her portrait shoot
with the Observer photographer. There’s a pause while everyone remembers the
unfortunate fates of both drivers, and the analogy is quickly dropped. Reggiani
says she enjoys the job, but admits that she hasn’t found it easy to adjust to
the modern workplace. “I don’t like computers. They are quite evil.” Manca
points out, in her defence, that the fax machine was still cutting-edge
technology when she went to prison. Still, he adds that they had to remove her
computer from their internal network after she permanently deleted Bozart’s
entire photo archive.
Nobody says
it directly, but it seems clear a big reason for taking on Reggiani was to
generate publicity and try to rekindle the firm’s edge of flashy danger. If so,
it hasn’t been straightforward so far. When Reggiani first arrived she helped
to design a collection of rainbow coloured jewellery and evening bags inspired
by her pet macaw, Bo. Bozart held a launch in Milan in September 2014 and
invited the fashion press. “Everybody came and it was a big success,” says
Manca. “But it happened to be on the same day that Gucci was having a runway
show up the street. The next day there was nothing at all in the newspapers
about Patrizia’s collection.” Manca says the journalists later told him they’d
been leaned on by “someone at Gucci” not to publish. While Gucci wouldn’t
confirm or deny, an Italian fashion editor friend later doubts his claim. “The
fashion corps probably just didn’t like the parrot designs,” he says.
All the
same, Manca and Brunero appear to be genuinely fond of their employee. As the
afternoon goes by, Reggiani gets tired and cracks in her bravado appear. She
talks about how, by court order, she lives in a Milan townhouse with her
89-year-old mother, who is still in good health. “Sometimes I wish I was back
inside Vittore Residence because my mother is very difficult. She berates me
every day for no reason.” Reggiani’s daughters Alessandra and Allegra, who were
18 and 14 when she was arrested, are both married and now live in Switzerland.
Unimaginably rich thanks to their father’s estate, they haven’t visited
Reggiani much since her release.
It’s almost
the stuff of Greek tragedy. “We are going through a bad time now,” says Reggiani.
“They don’t understand me and have cut off my financial support. I have
nothing, and I haven’t even met my two grandsons.” She says she has “no idea”
what the future holds when her parole ends, possibly in a few months. She may
continue to work at Bozart and says she’d like to travel when she’s allowed to
leave the country again. She seems to have given up the idea of trying to find
a job at Gucci, even if she hasn’t quite let go of the past. “If I could see
Maurizio again I would tell him that I love him, because he is the person who
has mattered most to me in my life.” I ask her what she thinks he’d say to her
in reply, and she sounds a note of realism at last. “I think he’d say
the feeling wasn’t mutual.”
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