Tragedy Ends Love Affair With Enclave
MIAMI BEACH — It was love at first sight.
Gianni Versace took one look at the small, architecturally distinctive community known as South Beach on his first visit to Miami six years ago and felt his heart melt. By all accounts, the attraction could not have been more mutual.
“For sure, we loved him. He was definitely one of us,” said Al David, director of an agency, Boss Models, that often supplied handsome young men for Versace’s fashion spreads. “While Madonna and Sylvester Stallone went out to the suburbs, he lived on 11th and Ocean, literally in the middle of everything. You saw him everywhere. That made a statement in itself.”
Versace did not just move into town, said Glen Albin, editor-in-chief of the monthly magazine Ocean Drive. Versace “promoted it. He actually said, ‘I adopt Miami.’ ” In turn, his adopted home reacted to his murder on Tuesday with an outpouring of grief, disbelief and anger. Many felt as if a cherished regional landmark had been destroyed, as if a passionate symbol of Miami’s glib glamour had suddenly been whisked away. “This community will miss him,” Albin said, “in an enormous way.”
Sister Opened Door to Miami
Versace, gunned down outside his Mediterranean-style palace in the heart of South Beach, first came to Miami at the insistence of his sister, Donatella, now heir apparent to the family’s $530-million international fashion empire. It was 1991, and to the international jet set, Miami was “still very undiscovered,” Albin recalled, “kind of the virgin Ibiza.”
“Get off that plane! See Miami. It’s unbelievable,” Donatella Versace urged her brother when she heard he would have a stopover en route to Cuba. The designer took her advice and playfully asked an airport cab driver to take him to the most exciting place in Miami. That turned out to be the News Cafe in South Beach.
On Tuesday, the News Cafe also turned out to be the last place Versace would visit before he was shot twice in the head and died on the steps of his mansion.
South Beach still nursed a pleasantly seedy quality when Versace first saw it. Only a handful of the boisterous Art Deco hotels and apartments that line Ocean Drive had been renovated, but the club scene was active. The community was open, inviting and nonjudgmental. Gays and straights hopped from one spot to another, oblivious to sexual brand names.
“Everybody accepted everybody,” said Andrew Kostas, who designs and builds the clubs and restaurants that outnumber grocery stores, gas stations and other more plebeian enterprises. “I’m straight and I go to gay places all the time. No one cares. There’s no line.”
Versace extended his stay and turned up at the gay nightclubs Warsaw and Paragon. By day, the designer was captivated by the languid warmth of South Beach. Beauty was everywhere he looked.
The light that beat down from the big, brilliant blue sky was beautiful. The palm trees were beautiful. The ocean was clean and accessible, and it was beautiful too. The bronzed young men and women who thronged South Beach were beautiful--and they were multicolored because Miami teems with a sultry sense of diverse internationalism.
Born in Africa, raised in Paris, Eric Omores, manager of the nightclub Bash, said the visual eclecticism was part of what attracted Versace to South Beach. “I think the quality of the lifestyle, combined with the multicultural demographic of this area, was very appealing to him,” Omores said. “Then you have the really tropical weather. You are still in the United States of America. But here, you really live the American dream in a tropical, dreamy kind of way.”
But while easy on the eyes, South Beach knew better than to be boring. The place was complicated, not the dumb blond of beach communities. “It’s a very contrasty type place, very grunge-meets-beauty,” said Eugene Rodriguez, owner of a production company housed in a 1940s movie theater here.
‘Here People Are Highly Visible’
“It’s a sexy place, South Beach,” said Rodriguez, whose Big Time Productions handled several Versace photo shoots and fashion campaigns. “The weather is so pleasant, so nobody’s heavily dressed. You’re always outside. In L.A. you tend to be scattered around. In New York you’re indoors and dressed in black. Here people are highly visible. That’s part of the charm of the whole place.”
The place has no airs, and no hard-edged attitude either, said Debbie Sackin, a manager at the China Grill, a high-end eatery where Versace sometimes took meals. “Everybody is somebody here,” Sackin said.
Singer Gloria Estefan, for example, walks her baby in a stroller on the streets of South Beach. Madonna blends in, another statuesque creature in sunglasses and slicked-back hair. And Gianni Versace was everywhere.
“I’d always see him walking around. He would go to the thrift stores on Washington Street, toward Lincoln Road. All the designers like to go there,” Rodriguez said. “I saw him once on the sidewalk, looking at a dress through the light. I’ll never forget that.”
Versace was so enamored of this area that one season he did a Miami collection of clothing. In that series, Versace put the word “Miami” on silk shirts that cost $1,500 apiece. They became hot sellout items in London, Paris and Hong Kong.
By 1992, Versace was plunking down $2.9 million to purchase a decrepit old apartment building called the Amsterdam Palace. The place was not exactly a flophouse, but it was not far from that either. When he told friends he planned to make it into his residence, they replied that he was crazy. That is not a house, they scolded him. That is an enormous building.
Versace responded by scooping up the Revere Hotel next door for $3.7 million. He tore that structure down to make room for his garden and swimming pool. Renovating the structure at 1116 Ocean Drive took 2 1/2 years, and Versace oversaw every detail. It became his favorite of four homes in Europe and the United States.
In the fashion of an old Roman villa, the grand 13,000-square-foot mansion is built around a central courtyard, open to the air. From the large fountain, Versace’s trademark Medusas spew water into the pool. A shower near the pool, just inside the house, accommodates eight people.
Murals, mosaics, antiques and rich fabrics adorn every surface of every room. The ceiling of one salon is painted to resemble a leopard-skin-print Versace scarf. The dining room walls are a Byzantine mosaic made of pebbles. The fixtures in Versace’s personal bathroom are gold-plated, with heavy marble counters. Many in South Beach compared the setting to Fellini’s “Satyricon.”
They felt comfortable making the comparison because so many people spent time in Versace’s mansion. The 50-year-old designer loved to entertain, and often opened the house for fund-raising parties. He held such a benefit not long ago for Best Buddies, a charity for developmentally disabled children headed by Anthony Shriver, and attended by Eunice Kennedy Shriver. Proud that South Beach was the first 20th century neighborhood to be named to the National Register of Historic Places, Versace hosted a recent benefit for the Dade Heritage trust, a local preservation group.
Mansion Filled Public, Private Roles
“He wanted the house to be used,” said Albin of Ocean Drive magazine. “He didn’t see it as some kind of museum.”
Miami runs on ultra-high octane, and routinely stays open 25 hours each day. Parties pump deep into the wee hours, particularly among the wealthy Latin Americans and Europeans who have established enclaves here in recent years. When their workday was over, Versace’s “entourage,” the staff of a dozen or more who attended to his fashion work here, liked to branch off and head for the Forge, the Cuba Club, the Strand, Mezzaluna and Farfallo. They partied for hours at clubs like Amnesia, Liquid and Bash. Versace hit those spots sometimes too. But most of all he favored small dinner parties at home.
Most famous people tap a minion to summon their guests. But Versace himself would get on the phone and call 10 or 12 people to invite them to his house. Three or four months ago, at a party to honor his sister, about 20 guests repaired to Versace’s roof after dinner to enjoy a private fireworks display. Then the whole crew went off to the Warsaw, a gay club, to dance the night away.
“He liked parties, and mixed a lot of different worlds. There would be a member of the Smashing Pumpkins with Emilio Estefan; Sting; Albita Rodriguez; models, male and female; the writer and actor Buck Henry,” said Miami social writer Tom Austin. “It could be anyone from Madonna to someone who had a great look. It was all about the mix, about the clash. There was a little friction to him, which was nice. He was an absolute gentleman. There was no public wildness. He knew what he was doing.”
But if Versace’s home here was his entertainment center, it was also his sanctuary. This year, he planned to spend the entire month of July relaxing in his palazzo, swimming in the ocean across the street and making plans to open his first mega-store--in Miami Beach, of course. He and his lover of more than a decade, Antonio D’Amico, enjoyed strolling together along Lincoln Road and Ocean Drive. They knew they could walk anywhere in South Beach without attracting attention. In casual uniforms of jeans and T-shirts, they were as inconspicuous as the next international mega-millionaires, as down to earth as anyone they might meet in the street.
“Gianni, you got so used to seeing him, he was everywhere.” In his six years here, Versace “became part of South Beach,” said Geo Darder, a party and special-event promoter here. “You saw him on the streets, he was a neighbor.” Darder, hosting a table full of cigar smokers and vodka drinkers at the Cuba Club, a night spot decorated to look vaguely like a hunt club, paused. “Considering the lifetime of this place, six years is a lifetime,” he mused.
Friends say D’Amico was inside the mansion when Versace was killed on Tuesday. Police will not confirm those reports, and D’Amico has spoken to no one outside the immediate family, who converged on the palace within hours of the designer’s death.
But at the Cuba Club less than 48 hours after Versace’s death, Marie Flores lapsed into Spanish to describe her reaction to the killing. “Indignacion,” she explained, meaning more than its simple English translation. “They took something away from us. We loved that man. He was part of us. And now it’s as if someone had raped our city,” she said. “To think that it happened here, like this, it breaks all the order and the charm of Miami Beach, where you could be anyone, any kind of celebrity, and walk alone, without fear.”
A memorial service for Versace is planned for today in South Beach.
Times staff writer Ann-Marie O’Connor in San Diego contributed to this story.
