The Woman I Wanted to Be by Diane von Furstenberg

half the time but we all lived very happily together when he came to New York. We gave huge fun parties to celebrate the movies he produced. The children loved Barry and he loved them in return, though like any reasonable person, he cursed at them when they were naughty. Egon appreciated Barry’s involvement and used to joke that the children had “two fathers.”
    Barry and I went out a lot when he was in New York, and I would go out alone when he was not there. Sometimes I flirted with other men or boys. It was that time in New York; we were very free. Barry did not ask questions, nor did I for that matter. Our relationship was above that. We loved being together and we loved being apart.
    I had a little fling with Richard Gere, who had just finished American Gigolo. Hard to resist. His agent, Ed Limato, was upset with him and told him that seeing me was not a good move for his career as Paramount distributed the film. Barry never said anything but I know he was not happy. Barry was always cool, above anything and anyone. He knew it would pass.
    Studio 54 had opened, and was the final stop for any evening in New York. Sometimes, when Barry was in LA, late at night I would put on my cowboy boots, take my car, park in the garage, walk into 54, meet my friends, have a drink, and dance. What I loved best was going in alone, the long entrance, the disco music. I felt like a cowboy walking into a saloon. But the idea of being able to go to 54 alone is what thrilled me the most: again, a man’s life in a woman’s body! It was fun. We all felt very free as we did not know yet about AIDS. I neverstayed too late though. I had my children and my mother at home and had to wake up early to go to work.
    I kept going back and forth to the factories in Italy and would sometimes stop in Paris on the way, to shop and act like a rich American tourist. I remember having tea in the lobby of the Plaza Athénée with my friend, the tall, flamboyant André Leon Talley, who was the Women’s Wear Daily Paris correspondent at the time. I used to force him to pretend he was an African king.
    I had become the woman I wanted to be and I absolutely loved my life. I had two beautiful, healthy children; a wildly successful fashion business; a lot of fun and a wonderful man with whom I shared so much. In 1980, Barry rented a sailboat called Julie Mother and he and I sailed the Caribbean. I was reading a fascinating book The Third Wave by the futurist writer Alvin Toffler. The book predicted that soon we would communicate through computers, that we would have ways to connect to information and in turn send that information around the world. It sounded wild, like science fiction. I was amazed, underlining paragraphs and taking a lot of notes. I remember my fountain pen had turquoise ink, the color of the sea, on which we were sailing . . . I had a feeling the world would change. It did.
    The night we came back, I got the call from Hans Muller. My mother was in bad shape. He needed me to come to Switzerland immediately. I jumped on a plane. After spending a few very difficult weeks in the mental ward of the hospital taking care of my mother and watching her fight her demons, I returned to New York, but things had changed. I felt out of place in my own gilded, easy life. Barry was as loving as ever, but I felt off balance. To see my mother sobad, to relive with her the horrors of her past, took a toll on me. I had to escape the excess of my fast-moving life. I took the children and went as far away as I could: the island of Bali.
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    “D o your work, then step back. The only path to serenity,” wrote the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu in the sixth century BC. I took that big step back in the summer of 1980 as I walked five miles along a beautiful, peaceful Balinese beach and watched the sun come up on my first day there. New York, Barry, Richard, success—I had run away from it all. That morning, at five a.m., I chanced upon Paulo, a handsome bearded