Read Online The Woman I Wanted to Be by Diane von Furstenberg - Free Book Online Page B

friends. I love to remember. It’s not that I dwell in nostalgia, but that I love intimacy. It is the opposite of small talk. It is the closest thing to truth.“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” as I learned in Oxford when I studied the English poet John Keats.
    I have tried not to lie my whole life. Lies are toxic. They are the beginning of misunderstandings, complications, and unhappiness. To practice truth is not always easy, but as with all practices, it becomes a matter of habit. Truth is cathartic, a way of keeping the trees pruned. The truer you can be the better it is because it simplifies life and love.
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    T here are many degrees of love, of course. I know now that of all the so many times I’ve been in love, only two men were truly great loves. I married both of them, one toward the beginning of my life, the other much later.
    Egon. I cannot begin to describe all I owe to my first husband, Prince Eduard Egon von und zu Fürstenberg. I will be forever thankful to him because he gave me so much. He gave me my children; he gave me his name; he gave me his trust and his encouragement as he believed in me; he shared everything, all of his knowledge and all of his connections as he gave me his love.
    I met Egon at a birthday party in Lausanne. I remember his big smile, his childlike face, and his gapped teeth. He had just enrolled at the University of Geneva where I was taking courses. He had also just returned from a few months in a Catholic mission in Burundi, where he had taught children and taken care of leprosy patients. I was impressed. I remember what I was wearing the night I met him because he complimented me on it—pink palazzo pajama pants and an embroidered tunic I had borrowed from my mother’s closet. We were both nineteen.
    Egon was the perfect eligible bachelor, an Austro/German prince by his father, and a rich heir from his mother, Clara Agnelli, the eldestchild of the Fiat motorcar family. Egon seemed interested in me, maybe because I had already made a lot of friends in Geneva, and he had just arrived. We went out a lot and one Sunday we drove to nearby Megève in the mountains for a day in the snow. The car broke down and Egon went to get help. I remember opening the glove compartment to check his passport. I had never met a prince before and I wanted to see if his title was written on it. (It was not). When Egon came back to the car with a mechanic, the engine started immediately. There was nothing wrong with the car. To this day I remember Egon’s embarrassed face. It was his helplessness that seduced me.
    Egon lived in a small, luxurious rental apartment near Lac Léman while I was living at home with my mother and Hans, but we were always together. My mother, who had never acknowledged a boyfriend of mine before, immediately adopted him. They would become very close. Egon had a lot of energy and a great sense of adventure. He was always planning trips and places to discover. He suggested a group of us join a package deal trip to the Far East. I managed to convince my mother to let me go with them only for her to discover when she brought me to the airport that the only passengers going were Egon and me. The others had dropped out. I panicked, worried she wouldn’t let me go alone with Egon, but she did.
    We had a great time. India, New Delhi, Agra, and the magnificent Taj Mahal, Thailand and its floating market, Burma and its hundred pagodas, Cambodia and the ruins of Angkor Wat, the making of clothes overnight in Hong Kong. We went sightseeing all day every day as perfect tourists, and at night, we were invited to dine with local people through Egon’s Fiat connection. Egon was the most charming young man in the world. His charisma and enthusiasm were contagious and traveling with him was always full of surprises and serendipity.
    In Bangkok we dined with Jim Thompson, a famous American who had settled in Thailand after the war and had organized all the independent silk weavers into the