Ira von Fürstenberg: the pin-up princess

Like the waves and troughs of a runaway heart monitor in a particularly dramatic episode of Casualty, the life of Her Serene Highness Princess Virginia Caroline Theresa Pancrazia Galdina zu Fürstenberg (mercifully known as Ira) conforms to no conventional arc.

Indeed it is hard to think of anything conventional about the 79-year-old subject of my latest book. As rich as she is aristocratic — her father was a prince, her mother an Agnelli — she became famous as a child bride, married to Marbella Club founder Prince Alfonso von Hohenlohe. After a second failed marriage, to a notorious Brazilian playboy, she pursued her love affairs unfettered by marriage. A woman of numerous incarnations, she has been a Vreeland Vogue model, a movie star, a fashion industry executive and much else.

Even today she remains magnetic. She is the definition of a moving target: when not lunching with cardinals in Rome, where she has an apartment, or overseeing work at her new house in Madrid, she could be anywhere from Chatsworth to the presidential palace of the Ivory Coast, though she is seldom in one place for more than five days. Talking to her is to play linguistic roulette. Over lunch in the vineyard of the Andalucían monastery she has restored, she will speak to me in English; receive a call during which she flips between Italian, French and German; summon the next course in Spanish; and resume her conversation with me . . . all in the same husky voice, liberally sprinkled with the word “darling”.

She admits that she was not cut out for motherhood or matrimony. “I am not of the world of today, let’s be very frank, I came from another era,” she says, by which she means the era of glamour and gracious living embodied by women such as her aunt Marella Agnelli, or the late princess-turned-actress Lee Radziwill or style queen Gloria Guinness. But she is not just from another time, she is a visitor from several other times: living a life that has taken her from the fag-end of the courtly world of the patchwork of kingdoms, principalities and duchies that were scattered across what is now Germany, Austria and Hungary, to the birth of the celebrity culture that has come to dominate life today.

A Junoesque trouser-suited woman, the confident set of her features framed by salon-perfect tumbling ash-blonde hair, it is hard to detect the vulnerability in her features captured by Cecil Beaton when he photographed her as a 15-year-old, her big eyes peeping tentatively out from beneath a fringe of long lashes. Brought up in a Venetian palazzo and dressed in couture since childhood, by the time this picture was taken she had already modelled for Emilio Pucci (a family friend, of course), and enslaved a dashing prince who had glimpsed her across a crowded palace ballroom.

Unsettlingly, she was 15 while Prince Alfonso von Hohenlohe, with his Errol Flynn moustache and slicked-back hair, was 31. Three family conclaves and one papal dispensation later, with what seemed like the entire population of Venice lining the canals and bridges, she and Alfonso married in the presence of the world’s newsreels and newspapers. “It was the most glamorous event Venice had witnessed for centuries,” trilled British Movietone News. “She is Princess Pin-up Number One,” gushed the Daily Express.

From a distance of 65 years Ira rationalises the union unsentimentally. “I was curious, like I am still today; I thought I would meet more new people and experience a new world.”

Her honeymoon delivered. Arriving in New York, Salvador Dalí asked if he could paint her nude: her husband refused. In Los Angeles Gary Cooper gave the newlyweds a party where she danced with Frank Sinatra. Then it was on to Acapulco before settling in Mexico City, where Alfonso was establishing himself as a businessman. Two children in swift succession failed to provide the glue to hold the crumbling marriage together and she left her husband for the spectacularly named Baby Pignatari, who looked like Victor Mature, spent like Croesus and was hailed by Life Magazine as the “new no 1 playboy”.

One of the richest men in South America, he piloted his own planes and crashed cars for fun.

Thus began Ira’s new life as the wife of a Latin American industrialist with duties including commissioning Oscar Niemeyer to design the marital home; but the marriage did not last long enough for it to be built. Much of their time together was consumed by trips to Europe to try and locate her children who were being hidden by their father.

“[Baby] had this obsession with these children,” she says, “and he kept on saying to me, ‘You’ve got to get these children back. I will give them back to you.’ He never succeeded.” It was while on one of these fruitless hunts that she received a telegram summoning her to Paris. “I went to Paris and he just sent a friend who worked for him. He said, ‘Baby wants to leave you.’ ”

It makes being dumped by text message seem positively humane. “I felt terrible. That was the worst time of my life. I’d left my children and lost a husband whom I adored.” She resolved never to marry again. “From then on I had a good time: a lot of boyfriends, a lot of fun, no boring big connection.”

Her bachelor-girl existence was led from a flat on the Place Vendôme where in 1967 she was photographed for Vogue by Henry Clarke. No more girlish glances from under long lashes, instead she sits cross-legged on a pile of cushions gazing directly into the lens. Grand, titled, beautiful and “with-it”, it is amazing that it took Diana Vreeland so long to get Ira into her magazine, but once in its pages there was no dislodging her; whether modelling furs or swimwear, or sharing tips on how to wear a jewelled Van Cleef & Arpels belt.

Ira was jet-set royalty at a time when to board a plane was to join an airborne cocktail party. On one flight to Rome in early 1966 she met producer Dino De Laurentiis. Just weeks later she was shooting her first film, Matchless, as its star. The poster was the definition of pre #MeToo filmmaking: “THIS WOMAN is the most thrilling act of espionage you’ve ever seen! She holds the key to ‘Matchless’ — a spy plot as flawless as her beauty — as reckless as her body!”

But it was more than her physical beauty that fascinated people. She moved effortlessly between the protocol-encrusted world of castles and palaces and the modern milieu of fashion and film shoots; a phenomenon remarked upon by the late British author Andrew Sinclair. “No other aristocrat has yet accommodated himself or herself as well to their own time as Princess Ira Zu Fürstenberg. She has the total courage of her modernity.”

It was on another flight, this time to Paris for couture, that she met the man with whom she would spend the next years. Intense, unsmiling and obsessed with contemporary art, Paolo Marinotti was a new sort of man for Ira, an intellectual. He would have been a poet had he not inherited a huge textiles business which gave him the means to fill a Venetian palace with art, Fontana was a favourite. Today, that palace, Palazzo Grassi, houses the Pinault Collection.

Ira’s Rome duplex filled with works by Roy Liechtenstein, Jean Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Josef Albers and Yves Klein. There was more of the same decorating the walls of the apartment Marinotti had given her in St Moritz. The pair also built a summer retreat on the Costa Smeralda, where Ira Beach was named in her honour. There was even talk of marriage, but then Ira’s eye was caught by a young interior designer; a handsome man with collar-skimming dirty-blond hair who had the looks for advertising low-tar cigarettes and the body of a sculpture by Praxiteles. He looked amazing. He was also Ira’s own age.

From then on I had a good time: a lot of boyfriends, a lot of fun, no boring big connection

But it was another love affair, with a young lawyer, that took her to Geneva, where she reinvented herself once more. By 1978 she was president of Valentino’s fragrance business, positioning herself as one of the égéries of a shiny new type of society emerging from the chrysalis of the politically turbulent and dowdy Seventies. If there happened to be a soirée for Cartier in St Moritz, or the launch of a new lighter by Céline at the Plaza Athénée in Paris that needed attending, Ira would be there basking in the flashbulbs. And in 1980, when Chloé opened a boutique in Geneva, she helped organise a lavish charity party and fashion show. The object of this soufflé of style and society in sedate Geneva was not so much the opening of a shop as the honouring of Ira’s latest protégé, a designer who, after a quarter century of relative obscurity, was about to have his moment of apotheosis.

Karl Lagerfeld had yet to attain the highest rungs of the ladder of his fame and was yet to take his role at Chanel, but Ira saw in him a star. Later, Ira would visit Lagerfeld at the Rue Cambon headquarters of Chanel where he would press half a dozen outfits on her as gifts. But in recent years their intimacy cooled. “He was a great friend of mine. Now we don’t even talk any more,” she said, a few months before he died.

The 1980s saw Ira’s life take another bewildering turn as she moved to London to open an antiques shop with her new lover, and landed on the Mark Birley, Anouska Hempel, Charles Powell, Margaret Thatcher circuit.

It was while taking a French spa break from life in go-go London that she met the widowed Prince Rainier of Monaco. By the Monaco Red Cross ball of 1985, dressed Dynasty-style in a gown of Klein blue, hair crafted into a monumental bouffant, she was sitting next to him in the seat once occupied by Grace. She would have made a lively chatelaine of Monaco’s Pink Palace, but such was the furore when her elder son said he expected his mother to marry Rainier that the palace press office in Monaco issued a specific denial.

Ira had no finer press spokeswoman than herself, charming journalists with her mixture of candour and humour. No wonder she thought she would try journalism; the result was a column called “Demeures Princières”, featuring her grand friends in their grand houses, tapping into the benign celebrity colour magazine culture then at its height. But her most recent métier is creating artworks of her own. “I decided that I was going to make something with the beautiful stones I had seen in Nepal,” she says of her latest incarnation. “Slowly my life became increasingly centred around making objects, and that is now my main thing.”

Today, her frantic social schedule is punctuated with exhibitions of Crystal Buddha heads, porphyry and ormolu memento mori, golden bears scaling rock-crystal bookends and other baroque flights of her fecund imagination. But however exotic they may be, they seem ordinary when compared to their creator.

‘Ira: the Life and Times of a Princess’, by Nicholas Foulkes is published by HarperCollins (£50) on June 17

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