'The House of Gucci' Shows the Rag Trade Can Really Be Murder: Family of Machiavellian Fashionistas Built Empire on Legal Antics, Bad Behavior--and Bad Taste

The Wall Street Journal, September 1, 2000. Page W1

By Daniel Akst

It's a rule of thumb in business that the more glamorous the industry -- and the further its products get from life's bare essentials -- the more miserably everyone involved seems to behave. Does the company make sheet-metal screws in Ft. Wayne, Ind.? What a bunch of nice folks. Do they make feature films in Los Angeles? Better brush up on your Machiavelli.

Doubters of this principle should immediately consult "The House of Gucci," Sara Gay Forden's exhaustive and gossipy account of the Gucci family's self-inflicted tribulations in running (and ultimately losing) its renowned luxury-goods business. Even by the Borgia-like standards of the fashion industry, the operatic Guccis were special. Not content with the usual familial stew of love, jealousy and greed, they added tax evasion, bigamy and, yes, even murder to the mix.

But perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Guccis was the family's astonishingly bad taste. Despite their grand pretensions ("We are not businessmen, we are poets!" Aldo Gucci once told an interviewer), their personal style was crass and their behavior often appalling. Gucci stores aspired to be temples of exclusivity, and they came close to succeeding; at one point New York magazine used its cover to proclaim Gucci's the city's rudest store. But for all the talk of quality and elegance, the firm that once specialized in fine hand-made leather goods was happy during the 1980s to cheapen its name by flogging canvas tote bags covered with its logo at retail outlets all over the world.

The Gucci empire was started in 1921 by former dishwasher Guccio Gucci and his wife, Aida, who opened their first store in Florence. But it was their son Aldo who built the Gucci brand into a global snob-appeal powerhouse, extending it first to the rest of Europe and then to the great green breast of the New World. Aldo, who died in 1990, was a dynamo, by turns paternalistic and tyrannical.

He wasn't the only one of the founders' offspring with an interest in the business, however, and after 1974, when his brother Vasco died, Aldo shared ownership with his surviving brother, Rodolfo, a minor star of silent films who never managed the transition to talkies. Aldo resented his brother's 50% share, which was out of all proportion to his contribution to the company, and began trying to funnel profits through a perfume subsidiary that he and his sons controlled.

The family business soon devolved into a network of ever-shifting alliances and betrayals, obscure legal arrangements and, often, open warfare. Aldo's son Paolo, for instance, unhappy with his role in the company, was determined to start his own Gucci brand but was blocked at every turn by his father and uncle, who sued him and warned suppliers that casting their lot with Paolo would cost them Gucci business. In retaliation, Paolo ratted on his father's colossal tax evasion over the years -- with the result that the elder Gucci, already in his 80s, went to prison. Despite the bitterness of their feud, the father helped the son financially (from behind bars!), although the epic litigation ruined Paolo, who died penniless.

All that is nothing compared to the saga of Paolo's cousin Maurizio, who managed to unify the business under his own hand only to prove that he lacked the most basic management skills to keep it afloat. ("He became like a seat cushion that takes the shape of the last person to sit on it," his wife complained.) Thus did ownership of the Gucci enterprise -- and the Gucci name that was probably its biggest asset -- pass into the hands of a private investment firm and, ultimately, the stockholding public.

The disappointment of losing the venerable family business (albeit in exchange for a gigantic payday) should have been Maurizio's biggest problem, but soon after letting go somebody gunned him down outside his office in Milan. It would be churlish to disclose here whodunit, since Ms. Forden saves the unwinding of this mystery until the end of her generally fascinating account. When something like justice was finally done, Gucci stores around the world displayed a pair of sterling-silver handcuffs in the window.

Where did Gucci get such a kinky sense of humor? Probably from the remarkable Tom Ford. Once Gucci was rid of all those Guccis, the company enjoyed a remarkable turnaround, thanks in large part to the designer Ford, who embraced Gucci's over-the-top style, infused it with sexuality and at the same time deflated its awful pomposity.

But successful fashion giants are generally two-headed monsters guided by a brilliant manager as well as a design genius, and judging from this book chief executive Domenico De Sole deserves just as much credit, if only for having the patience of Job. He not only turned Gucci around but against all odds fended off a hostile takeover by Bernard Arnault, the legendary head of LVMH Group, and even managed to acquire the grand French firm of Yves St. Laurent.

Ms. Forden's book dwells numbingly at times on the gross trappings of wealth and the dizzying minutiae of the Gucci family's legal battles, and her prose can be somewhat leaden. But all in all "The House of Gucci" is a penetrating chronicle of the rise and fall of a family business, one that shows clearly how even big, successful family firms often can't survive without professional management and outside capital -- and how the personalities of the founders' descendants can make selling not just prudent but inevitable.

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Mr. Akst is a novelist and financial journalist.