Spotlight: Ever-obsessive, Lapo Elkann returns with no apologies
BOLOGNA: He is dressed in urban fatigues, but there will be no blending in for Lapo Elkann. There never really has been. Born into the all-powerful Agnelli family, the Italian version of the Kennedys in power, money and tragedy, he was one of their bright spots: a top executive at Fiat, with an idiosyncratic style, a kinetic charm and a publicly cultivated reputation as one of Italys most enviable bachelors.
In October 2005 all that came to a very public end. He was found near death in a coma from a cocaine and heroin overdose, in the apartment of a 54-year-old transsexual prostitute named Patrizia. It was front-page news in every major newspaper Д including the one owned by his family. When he awoke and was released from the hospital, he promptly left the country.
Now, he is back, in what has been a slow and meticulously managed return to Italy after an 18-month exile in America following the incident in Turin that nearly cost him his life and what seemed like an extremely charmed existence.
Ostensibly, his renewed visibility is to promote his new designer eyewear line, Italian-Independent. But another far more delicate campaign is at work here, the one to reconcile his image Д and by extension that of his family Д with his fellow countrymen.
Elkann, 29, is very clear, however, about one thing: He is not asking for anyones forgiveness.
“I have never let down Italy and I never will,” he said during a rare interview in the lobby of a hotel on the outskirts of Bologna. “I love my country and I owe a lot to my country, and in that sense whatever I can and will be able to do for my country I will do.”
With his mane of red hair pulled back, Elkann spoke candidly on a range of subjects that include his new passion for design (”I am not yet even a decent designer, but I love it”), the mission statement of his new company (”My key goal is to make complexity become your simplicity”) and why he currently prefers life in New York over Italy (”It doesnt allow you to be lazy”).
But the task of reinserting himself into Italy will not be easy for Elkann. Apart from his own problems, he has the steep history of his family to contend with.
“I believe that in Italy there are two important things; one is the Vatican and the other is the Agnelli family,” said Giancarlo Galli, who wrote a biography of Gianni Agnelli, Elkanns grandfather. “And in the same way Italians love and hate the Vatican they also love and hate the Agnellis,” he said.
Gianni Agnelli is a near-mythic figure in Italy: A fabled industrialist who turned his families automobile company into the most important company in Italy and one of the major European car builders. He was also a subtle, yet extremely powerful, behind-the- scenes political player for decades.
One potential liability for Elkann is his maverick streak. He has a disdain for convention and his unpredictability can flare up, as it did during the interview when he aired an extraordinary theory: that his overdose may have been part of a setup orchestrated by Luciano Moggi, the disgraced former head of Juventus who resigned last year and remains under investigation for his role in the game-fixing soccer scandal and with whom Elkann says he argued a week before the incident.
Juventus is owned by the Agnelli family. “Why was there a photographer already waiting at the hospital” when he arrived in the ambulance? he asked.
Elkann speaks in grandiose terms befitting someone of his pedigree but also emits an affected earnestness of someone who seems to be grasping for some acknowledgment that has long escaped his reach. He is sober now, but he smokes throughout the interview, at the end of which he openly admits that he is no saint. He blamed the strain of watching his family company pass through an especially difficult period for the events of the now infamous evening.
“I am an obsessive personality,” he said. “And if you are an obsessive personality you need to be aware of it and be able to drive it with success. There are moments in your life when you are driving it well but you shift and you shift badly and you hurt yourself. Its like a car accident; we all have crashes, and I was very lucky not to die in that crash.”
