The House Of Gucci: A Sensational Story Of Murder, Madness, Glamour, And Greed Quotes
"I am just as worthy as the next man, even if he is rich or from an important family."
"We are the eyes and ears of this neighborhood. We know who comes and goes and it’s part of our job to observe."
"Incredible! I don’t feel any pain! I didn’t know that it doesn’t hurt when you get shot."
"So this is it, now I am going to die. What a shame to die like this. This is not fair."
"Quality is remembered long after price is forgotten."
"Once you got in at Gucci you knew you were set for life."
"Gucci hadn’t made it yet. It was known to the carriage trade, but not to the upper middle class. The shoe made the name take off."
"The status symbol has always been semi-secret, shared by women who really care about clothes and worn like a club insignia."
"He was a kind of one-man market research firm."
"Elegance is like manners," he used to say. "You can’t be polite only on Wednesday or Thursday. If you are elegant, you should be every day of the week. If you are not, then it’s another matter."
"It was difficult for anyone to walk out of a Gucci store empty-handed because there was something for everyone at every price range," Roberto recalled.
"For me, that bischero, that fool of a son doesn’t exist anymore, do you understand?" he screamed.
"Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned," Maurizio muttered, kneeling on the low padded bench inside the confessional.
"Turn the page!" he would bark at the boys. "Go on. Don’t look back. Cry if you must, but shoot!"
"Everything must be perfect," he said with a grand sweep of his arm. "Even the bricks in the walls must know they are Guccis!" he said.
"You must never forget, Maurizio. You are a Gucci. You are different from the rest. There are a lot of women who would like to get their claws into you—and your fortune. Be careful, because there are women who make their careers out of trapping young men like you."
"You are very rude! You should know that you are not the only one in this world to have money," Fernando shot back.
"How is she supposed to teach me anything?" Enzo protested to his father. "She is ignorant, she makes mistakes in grammar."
"I can assure you I am much better," she replied, provocatively pouting her coral-red lips, which were outlined in a darker shade of red.
"Harvard accepted De Sole, with a scholarship. Bright, ambitious, and motivated, De Sole quickly identified the United States as a land of opportunity."
"I loved it," De Sole said later. "It was part of my personality. Italians of my generation were all about ‘Mamma’ and ‘pasta,’ but to me, everything about the United States was new and exciting."
"In the American mentality, going away to college is a rite of passage," De Sole observed.
"De Sole is two-hundred-percent American," said his longtime colleague Allan Tuttle. "He moved from a relatively closed society into a more open society and today he is more American than he is Italian, especially in his enthusiasm for the system."
"Making partner became my absolute goal," De Sole said. "I worked harder than anybody else, I never asked for any breaks, I was obsessed with it."
"Anyone who can stand up to Aldo like that must come and work for me!" he said excitedly.
"Gucci is like a fine racing car," he began hesitantly, looking at the old familiar faces clustered around him. "Like a Ferrari," he said, using a reference he thought they could relate to. "But we are driving it like a Cinquecento," he said, referring to the small, postwar utilitarian model produced by Fiat.
"I need my freedom! Freedom! Freedom!" he explained. "Don’t you understand? First I had my father, who told me what to do, now I have you. I have never been free in all my life! I didn’t enjoy my youth and now I want to do what I want to do."
"It wasn’t a question of living with my uncle, but surviving," Maurizio once said. "If he does one hundred percent, you have to do one hundred and fifty percent to show you can do as well as he does."
"My intelligence disturbed him," she said later, "he wanted to be number one and thought he had found the people who were going to make him number one!"
"The family war has paralyzed this company for years, at least in terms of its development potential. I often ask myself, how many competing labels have been born and reached success just because Gucci was standing still? Now it is time to turn the page!"
"If they had killed him, he would have suffered less," Maurizio said. To keep Aldo far from his company, in one place, after a life lived dashing around the world, was punishment enough.
"Why give money away to the tax authorities?" he reasoned.
"It is the kind of fighting where you go in as pigs and come out sausage," another paper wrote, quoting an English comedian.
"Keep going!" she wheezed through clenched teeth despite his neck-hold. "I could use a few extra inches!"
"I have tried to work with them, but every time I take one step forward, one of them goes off and does something that has nothing to do with anything else we are trying to do. And now they are waging war against me!" Maurizio said, pushing his tortoiseshell glasses back up on his nose with his middle finger in a characteristic gesture.
"Only a real jerk would dump his wife at Christmas," Patrizia said ruefully years later.
"We have one more chance to recover the Gucci customer, and that is to provide him with product, service, consistency, and image," Maurizio was saying.
"My relatives are undermining everything I want to do," Maurizio had said earnestly to Morante, leaning forward in his chair. "Florence has become a swamp where all initiatives flounder."
"It was a total honeymoon," recalled Morante. "They were completely in love with each other."
"I hadn’t thought of moving. But at my first meeting with Dawn she went through the whole process of what she was trying to do at Gucci. I was very impressed with her and thought to myself, this has to be something serious."
"Maurizio finally called all the workers in Florence together to present Dawn Mello to them. By that time, they were full of misgivings."
"Having blazed her trail through the tough world of New York retailing, Mello tried not to let the reactions of Gucci’s staff discourage her."
"The first thing I had to do was understand the company. The family had taken away a lot of the historical value and promoted a lot of low-level people into important jobs."
"We can’t clean our dirty linens in public. We have to fix up our own house and then go back to the market from a position of strength."
"In order to sell style, we must have style!"
"Maurizio’s promises that he would overcome the accusations against him had proved true."
"He took me into the factory in Florence and said, ‘Richard is OK,’ so we’d go back and forth together."
"Gucci is an icon to Florentines. It is a brand they covet, not just another client. The power that goes along with the possession of that icon is not easily understood."
"I want to create clean sportswear with a European flair, more sophisticated and modern than Calvin Klein but with a sales volume like Ralph Lauren’s."
"I had to play the hard guy. It’s a role I played reasonably well and Maurizio didn’t like it at all."
"Sometimes you get ruled against—that’s life."
"You have no right to say those things about Maurizio! We are trying to help him!"
"Even under pressure, he radiated a sense of calmness and peace of mind, qualities that had gotten him through some tight situations."
"Flanz’s placid demeanor hid a sense of adventure and love for the outdoors—on weekends, he traded his gray banker suits for black leather motorcycle gear and cruised the countryside."
"Maurizio would say ‘Fine, OK,’ and then he would go on and do what he wanted to."
"Maurizio had no concept that unsold inventory declined in value."
"Increase sales, decrease expenses! Hey! I could have said that, the question is, ‘How?’"
"Maurizio, you’re the chief executive," shot back Kirdar. "That’s your challenge!"
"Maurizio didn’t seem to understand that Tom was designing everything by himself, the company was going to market in March and we couldn’t buy fabric, we couldn’t do a show!"
"In most cases, you assume a stance like that is a bluff," said Rick Swanson. "But we were really worried. He seemed irrational enough that he just might do it."
"He is making fun of us!" Kirdar said angrily. "He thinks we are weak and he doesn’t respect us anymore."
"Maurizio was one of the most eligible men in Milan, but he was not a womanizer," added his friend Carlo Bruno. "There were a lot of women interested in him, but he was not a playboy."
"I swear to you, Alessandra, I swear, I didn’t do it."
"You’ll come over around twelve-thirty?" he asked, reaching over to cup her hand in his.
"Maurizio Gucci, in this city, was in the shadows. Everybody knew his name, but few knew him."
"Each [Gucci] company had its own debt problem," Swanson recalled. "It was like having a bunch of little hungry birds that all had to eat at once."
"Gucci created the sector," said Huth. "With between two billion and three billion dollars of stock out there, Gucci created a critical mass and people started to focus on it."
"Polizia! Aprite!" he called into the intercom.
"Then the prevailing psychology was, ‘There might be some juice left in Gucci, but how hard do you have to squeeze to get it out?’" recalled Toker.
"On a human level, I’m sorry; on a personal level, I can’t say the same thing," Patrizia said flippantly to waiting journalists.
"He may have died," she told a friend, "but I have just begun to live."
"Ninni snapped to attention. His colleagues over at the carabinieri had been investigating the mysterious murder of the former businessman for almost two years with no breakthroughs."
"Dottor Ninni, I’m afraid," the voice grated. "I know who killed Maurizio Gucci."
"Ninni jumped into his car, his mind racing."
"I’m forty-nine years old, heavyset; I’ll be wearing a red jacket…. Make sure you come alone."
"Patrizia Reggiani had ordered the murder of Maurizio Gucci and paid 600 million lire, or about $375,000, for it."
"WELL, NINNI, if you think you can get something out of it, go ahead," Carlo Nocerino said reluctantly to the Criminalpol chief.
"Maurizio Gucci was sentenced to death by his ex-wife, who found the people who were willing to satisfy her hatred in exchange for money."
"The guy [Arnault] just asked himself over for dinner without calling first!" De Sole said indignantly.
"But her defense is not credible," Nocerino said softly, before raising his voice again.
If he wants the company he can have it!" De Sole exploded. "I’ll just go sailing. My wife is sick of all this. I want to spend more time with my daughters.
"I don’t go around starting fights, but if you pick a fight with me, I am going to fight back just as hard as you do."
"We were just sitting there, waiting for someone to take us over," Tom Ford recalled. "It was so frustrating."
"This is war. I have been through these fights. It takes incredible determination and there are no guarantees. You really have to want to win."
"The businessmen had become stars and the stars—at least for an instant—had become passé."
"Nothing had come either of earlier, little-known conversations between Ford, De Sole, and Giorgio Armani."
"The luxury goods business was no longer just about quality, style, communication, and stores, but also about ruthless corporate fights."
"Arnault smiled. From his austere, glassed-in headquarters on Paris’s Avenue Hoche, he knew De Sole’s every move."
"Eleanore urged him to do not what was 'best' for De Sole, but what was 'right' by Gucci."
"The meeting... was a stiff, scripted encounter, for which both men had rehearsed their parts."
"Arnault lavished praise on De Sole and Ford, saying his interest in Gucci was not hostile."
"De Sole tried to get Arnault to agree to stop his advance."
"We are really brand managers. When we look at a company, it’s not ‘Let’s buy it,’ but ‘What do we do with it?’"
"The Gucci story symbolizes the struggles faced by many families and individuals in Europe who have created and grown their own businesses."
"The Gucci story continues to unfold as new players, captivated, commit themselves to perpetuating the magic."
"Roberto Gucci still lives in Florence, where he founded his own leather goods business, House of Florence, just one month after Maurizio sold out to Investcorp."
"The Gucci family was mortified as each new blowup blazed across newspaper headlines."
"The issues that created the splits were company issues, not family issues."
"You began to understand the product, to know the artisans, and you began to see the potential and feel it inside you."
"The company was the family and the family was the company!"