The Melancholy Korean

Let’s start at the beginning. I was born Diane Halfin in Brussels and grew up in a comfortable middle-class family. I grew up without many problems, without really being aware of the process. When I was thirteen, my parents separated, an event that was to have great import in my life. I was sent away to different boarding schools all over Europe, and I’ve been on my own ever since. It was not really a tragedy. On the contrary, I didn’t much like being a child anyway and always wanted to be grown up. So, after having had a simple childhood, I spent my teen-age years infiltrating into more sophisticated groups. Always the youngest, the most awkward, the least experienced and definitely the least glamorous, I kept looking around, wanting to learn how to become one of those secure and glamorous women across the room.

DVF at fifteen, with her brother

At the age of eighteen I was in Geneva; part time university, part time working… and I met Egon! A wonderful, beautiful, cheerful, knowing-everything, having-been-everywhere, nineteen-year-old authentic prince. We became close, closer, the closest. We had the best time playing grownups, going around the world with little money but plenty of enthusiasm and lots of introduction letters to the best places and people. After two years of perfectly “without responsibility” romance, Egon left for America. He was too young to get married and we decided to split. I went to Paris, took many different jobs, stayed up very late every night—lived a single girl’s life for a year. But Egon and I missed each other, and in the summer of 1969 we were married. In October I sailed in with all my trunks, carrying a child as well as my hopes and expectations for a successful future in New York.

But, I forgot to say, the minute I knew I was about to become Egon’s wife, I decided to have a career. I needed to prove something more than ever—I had to be someone of my own and not just a plain little girl who got married beyond her deserts.

Egon was very helpful and as a matter of fact pushed me a lot into my career. Besides working like a dog and having two children, I was going out a lot with Egon.

Everything was new and exciting. There was hardly a party or opening that we didn’t go to. Appearing at four or five cocktail parties, a gallery preview, two dinner parties and a discotheque in one evening was routine rather than unusual.

It was a lot of fun in the beginning and I must confess that I enjoyed the attention we were getting. Still, I wondered was this really all I wanted from life—to be a princess and attend parties?