I was recently offered a copy of Patricia Gucci's new memoir,
In the Name of Gucci, and knowing nothing about Gucci other than that I can't afford it, I thought it would be an interesting read.
And it was. I wasn't sure what to expect. I thought it might be more of a history of the company and all of the scandal surrounding it at the end of Patricia's fathers' tenure. But, it wasn't. It was far more personal than that.
In the book, Patricia talks about not only her relationship with her father, Aldo Gucci, but her mother's relationship with Aldo. Patricia's mother, Bruna, was Aldo's mistress for over 30 years, starting when she was merely 20 and he was a long-married 53. Oh, and, not only was she young and he married, but she was also his employee and resisted his advances repeatedly, for all of the above reasons. The author tries to spin it as a love story, but from my modern perspective (these events took place in Italy in the 1960s), it didn't quite fly.
Another attempted spin that didn't quite fly for me was Aldo's arrest and subsequent incarceration for tax evasion. The author, again, tried to paint her father in the most positive light, but, again, for me, it was a hard sell. Aldo Gucci was the head of Gucci and was very hands-on according to everything else Patricia wrote; and yet, when it came to this, he was suddenly the victim someone else's ineptitude.
The spinning aside, the book is very interesting. It looks at Patricia's relationship with both her mother and father as well as how their relationship impacted her. I sometimes got the impression, while reading this, that Patricia felt like a sort of third wheel with her parents. Her father was gone and her mother was depressed much of the time, leaving Patricia to be raised by a nanny. In fact, Bruna only really cheered up the one week a month they were visited by Aldo. And when he'd arrive at their home in England he'd pat Patricia on the head by way of greeting and then her parents would send her to her room so they could be together.
For her part, Patricia clearly loved her charming, handsome, absentee father, without know that much about him. For example, she didn't find out that her parents weren't married and that her father was, in fact, married to someone else until she was nearly 10 years old. That was also when she found out that she had three half-brothers, all grown men with children of their own. From what she wrote, this didn't seem to impact her negatively at all; she was just excited to finally meet her brothers. (Spoiler: they did NOT feel the same about her).
And, when it was all said and done, it was Patricia, and not any of her three half-brothers, that was named as her father's heir. The story, of Aldo and Bruna, of Aldo and Patricia, and of Patricia and Bruna, to get to that point, is an interesting one. And one worth reading.
If
you'd like to read it, the book is available on
Amazon; or you can learn more about it on
Patricia Gucci's website.
Happy Monday, All!
Gracey
