“Have you ever been told that you look a lot like Elizabeth Taylor?”
“Oh, I assure you that I am much better.”
The first time that Maurizio Gucci and Patrizia Reggiani were seen the sparks jumped.
It was at a social meeting of the Jet Set Milanese puppies, a night of November 1970: he was 22 years old;
She, 21 and wore a red dress that left Maurizio deeply impacted, to the point that from then on, he began to call Patrizia “Il Mio Rosso”, my red goblin.
She called him Mau.
On the second appointment and despite the fierce opposition of the Gucci, he asked him to marry.
The history of luxury, desire and ambition that ended in tragedy starring both has as many juicy anecdotes and script turns that all the expectation before the premiere of the Gucci House is justified.
As explained Sara Gay Ford in the book in which Ridley Scott is based, her romance began as a forbidden story, worthy of cap puppets and Montescos.
Despite being destined to inherit Gucci, Maurizio was a timid and inexperienced young man when he met Patrizia, a child who had grown overprotected by his father after the death of his mother at five years.
Rodolfo Gucci had other plans for him, but he did not have the appearance on stage of Patrizia Reggiani, a strength the nature of violet eyes, extroverted, excessive in every way, fruit of an extramarital adventure between a rich transport businessman and the waitress
From a Modena restaurant where it stopped to eat.
Patrizia grew up with a mother who projected on her tonnes of ambition, and that was the engine of almost everything he did in his life, including the commission of assassinating her husband.
The disproportionate hobby of her to her luxury is summarized in this phrase that she said in a television interview: “I prefer to cry in a Rolls-Royce to be happy about a bicycle.”
Maurizio and Patrizia were married in October 1972, but among the 500 guests of the wedding there was not a single relative of the boyfriend.
His father, Rodolfo, had tried by all means to prevent marriage (he came to ask him to the Archbishop of Milan).
After years without spoken, family reconciliation arrived when Maurizio was destined for New York to assume business reins in the United States, where Gucci’s popularity between bankers and Hollywood actors began to grow as foam.
The first daughter of the couple, Alessandra, was born in 1976 and the second, Allegra, in 1981. Things began to twist at Christmas 1985, the first ones that Maurizio did not happen at home.
All divorces are bitter, but that of Maurizio and Patrizia was also watered from ferocious family battles for control of the brand and constant problems with justice by tax evasion.
After the separation, Maurizio had a brief Affaire with the Sheree McLaughlin model, a blonde to the Farrah Fawcett, Florida, which in many aspects was the Némesis of Patrizia.
But things became really serious when he started a relationship with Paola Franchi, an old friendship of youth, divorced from a copper magnate, with which he becomes reunited at a private party in Saint Moritz.
They were going to get married when Patrizia urged her plan.
The Commissioner who stopped Patrizia at dawn on January 31, 1997 he has a cold and impassive woman who was still a cold and impassive woman, “who still thought that money can buy everything.”
Two years ago of Maurizio’s murder and Patrizia lived in a body of Queen in a Milanese Palazzo with the daughters of her, two maids, a cocker spaniel, a starling, two ducks, two turtles and a cat.
She went to police station with a blue evening dress, a mink coat, diamond bracelets, gold earrings and huge sunglasses.
Of Gucci, of course.
