THE name was synonymous with quiet elegance, style, quality, the best in life. The stores could be found wherever rich people shopped: on Fifth Avenue, Rodeo Drive, Bond Street, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore. Frank Sinatra, Ronald Reagan and Bing Crosby all wore the loafers; the world's most glamorous women, Ava Gardner, Audrey Hepburn and Sophia Loren among them, carried the handbags and wore the silk scarves.
Gucci was class.
How strange it is, then, that the Guccis themselves are so sleazy they could have stepped straight from the pages of the kind of pulp fiction that sells well at airports. Duplicitous, manipulative, constantly at each other's throats, constantly plotting one against the other or manoeuvring for more money or power, there is less love lost between the Guccis than there was between the Borgias.
One elderly Gucci, betrayed by his son, went to jail. A younger member of the clan was forced to become a fugitive by his uncle and his cousin. Another claimed he was beaten up at a family board meeting. They fought all the time, fought like alley cats. Whenever one member of the family crossed another, he filed a lawsuit, sometimes many lawsuits, invariably for millions of dollars. Then the other filed a counter suit. Grateful lawyers, generations hence, will be sending their children to college courtesy of the litigious and libidinous Guccis.
'It is a very peculiar family,' says Patrizia Gucci, the estranged wife of recently deposed chairman Maurizio. 'They are fighters. Each fights against the other: father against brother, brother against cousin, son against father. They are all crazy.' Little was known about the hatred, greed and jealousy within the Gucci family until a notorious board meeting in 1982. But shouting, arm-waving and temper tantrums were always on the agenda when family members convened for meetings in the sumptuous officesabove the Gucci shop in Florence's high-toned Via Tornabuoni.
Paolo Gucci, convinced the rest of the family was scheming against him, decided to seek revenge by asking questions about funds that seemed to have disappeared in Hong Kong. This caused consternation around the table, not least on the part of Paolo's father, Aldo, who had, over the years, supported innumerable mistresses by laundering sums through the Far East to evade tax.
While various relatives were shouting at him to sit down and shut up, Paolo noticed the proceedings were not being minuted by the secretary whose duty it was to sit in on the brawling that passed for Gucci board meetings. He demanded his questions be noted. The secretary glanced around the table, registered the majority will, and remained motionless.