Diane von Furstenberg Read Online Free Page B

have also noted in the children of Holocaust survivors, including adaptability, tenacity, initiative, and street smarts. These were qualities that Diane shared with Leon.
    Indeed, in temperament, she is much more like her father than her mother. Leon “never saw limits. Diane is the same way,” says Philippe. “She got her strength from him. It’s like you have a certain model of car, and then years later a new version comes out, which is an improvement. This is how I think of [Diane and Leon]. No one has energy like those two. It’s the kind of energy that can move mountains.”
    “There was very little darkness in my father,” adds Diane. “He liked to work, eat, and make love.” He was awesomely successful at his job, and he adored Diane and Philippe. Of course, he loved Lily, too, but he often seemed indifferent to her suffering. “He didn’t want to acknowledge her wounds, so he ignored them,” wrote Diane. She has no doubt that Leon slept with other women when he traveled, but “that was not the problem between my parents,” she wrote. The problem was “his insensitivity toward” Lily.
    Affectionate and boisterous, Leon drove a big blue convertible Chevy at a time when American cars were a rarity on the streets of Brussels. He embarrassed his children at parties and weddings by singing loudly, sometimes in his exuberance picking up glasses off the table and smashing them on the floor. “He loved Diane intensely,” says Philippe, “more than any other man ever would.”
    Years later, when Diane returned to Brussels a celebrity, Leon would meet her at the airport with a huge bouquet of red roses. Once, without warning Diane, Leon called Le Soir, Brussels’ most important newspaper, to invite a photographer to his house to take a picture of him with his famous daughter.
    As a child, Diane felt like a mini adult, caught in the prison of childhood, smothered by Leon’s adoration. She longed to escape. Driving around Brussels on errands with her father, she’d sit on her knees so she’d look bigger. Diane never fooled anyone that she wasn’t a child, but some people mistook her for a boy. Dark and gap-toothed with frizzy hair that coiled close to her head, she looked impish and clever. She loved to read, yet, at the Lycée Dachsbeck, from which Lily had graduated and which Diane attended from kindergarten to age thirteen, she was an indifferent student.
    At school, Diane found herself in a sea of delicate blondes, little girls who would grow into sleek, silk-limbed beauties with straight golden hair. She felt like an outsider, establishing the pattern of insecurity in her life. That insecurity, however, has been one of the ignitions of the confidence she has fought to achieve and that she strives to impart to other women through her clothes and the example of her life.
    Diane believed she could never rely on her looks. “I really thought I was a dog when I was a young girl,” she says. She developed other assets. She strove to be charming and sophisticated, even in kindergarten, where she experienced her first male conquest. Five-year-old Didier Van Bruyssel, now a Brussels businessman, fell under her spell. “We met at school and I immediately liked her. We became friends. Then, I remember dancing with her at some fancy children’s party with my parents watching and feeling overcome,” says Bruyssel.
    Diane was aware of her effect on the boy and enjoyed every moment of it. Even then, “I always wanted to be a femme fatale,” she told the writer David Colman.
    Growing up, Diane and her brother, Philippe, had only a vague sense of being Jewish. Their parents didn’t practice their religion or even talk about it. In fact, Philippe didn’t know he was Jewish until he was nine, when the headmaster at his school asked him if he knew what the six-pointed star meant. When Philippe answered no, the headmaster wasstunned. “But you’re Jewish,” he said. “How could you not know it’s the Star of