The rumor mill has been off the charts since Fitzgerald announced her return to modeling after reneging on a three-million-dollar contract with French cosmetics manufacturer Le Ciel and disappearing into thin air last year, leaving boyfriend and noted fashion photographer Guillermo Villanueva brokenhearted. The announcement of Fitzgerald’s engagement to Mondelli CEO Rocco Mondelli took many off guard, particularly, my sources tell me, heartthrob Villanueva. Villanueva has not been seen on the arm of a female since his breakup with Fitzgerald, and Thursday night might just have proved why.
Sources backstage say the first meeting between Fitzgerald and Villanueva since the announcement of her engagement was a tense, bittersweet moment with all signs pointing to the fact the swarthy, Venezuelan-born photographer is still in love with his former muse. Given Fitzgerald is now engaged to dark and dangerous Mondelli, previously considered an uncatchable target, there was bound to be tension. The two men apparently managed to avoid each other until Fitzgerald suffered an apparent panic attack prior to going onstage and was talked through it by Mondelli.
Fitzgerald came offstage “white as a ghost and visibly shaken,” says my source, after a performance that was wobbly and not at all like her vintage self. “Fitzgerald’s two beaux were poised to comfort her, causing a most uncomfortable moment.” Villanueva evidently ended up without the girl. No doubt the ladies are poised to line up to console the charismatic photographer now that his period of mourning has officially been put to rest.
“Fitzgerald and Mondelli are obviously very much in love,” said the source, who speculated a panic attack was also the cause of Fitzgerald’s nonappearance in the show last year. “But one has to wonder, with a performance that shaky, if Mondelli’s investment in Fitzgerald on the business side was a wise one.”
This fashion veteran, for one, hopes it will be. I’ve always loved the way Olivia Fitzgerald commands a catwalk. She is one of the few women in the world who can put on a coat and convince you that you must have it immediately, and I’m looking forward to her next appearance in London and to that swagger of hers making a return to the stage.
As for the delicious Guillermo Villanueva...? We’ll keep you posted.
Read on for a SOCIETY WEDDINGS Exclusive!
Rocco & Olivia’s wedding day through the eyes of Stefan Bianco
STEFAN BIANCO HAD ALWAYS considered himself a man above trite, clichéd expressions, but in Olivia Fitzgerald’s case, his first impression had indeed been worth a thousand words.
The night he and the couple had celebrated Olivia and Rocco’s engagement at his restaurant Tempesta Di Fuoco in Chelsea, he had watched with a mixture of horror and amusement as the legendary blonde beauty had dismantled his ultracool, unruffled friend in front of his eyes, turning the notorious bachelor into a bewitched specimen of manhood none of the Columbia Four would have recognized if they’d been there to witness it.
At the time Stefan had laughed it off, thinking this was Rocco’s bed, and if he wanted to make it with the stunning, former supermodel Olivia, who was he to voice an objection? It had been a brilliant strategic choice on Rocco’s part to wed one of the world’s most recognizable faces and send the Mondelli brand skyrocketing. But the way his friend had been acting?
Of all the four men who’d attended Columbia University together and bonded into an inviolate brotherhood dubbed the Columbia Four—himself, Sheikh Zayed Al Afzal, Christian Markos and Rocco Mondelli—Rocco had been the toughest. The hardest. Behind himself, of course. But he was a special case...
At Columbia they’d joked Rocco was aptly named for his impenetrable heart. For his lack of emotion in sending yet another female to the curb when he was no longer interested... Yet here he was on his wedding day, calmly sweating it out as he waited for his bride to appear like an apparition sent from the gods above to save his breaking soul.
If she loves me, she’ll come.
Stefan shoved his hands in his pockets to prevent them from shaking some sense into Rocco as that fatalistic drivel continued to spew out of his friend’s mouth. Olivia wasn’t here to throttle. He would have enjoyed that.
Rocco’s bride was missing.
Oh, she was somewhere in Italy, to be sure. They’d learned that this morning when she’d landed at the Milan airport at eleven. But given the argument she and Rocco had apparently had, the subject matter of which Rocco refused to divulge, Olivia’s appearance in Lake Como at the Mondellis’ historic family villa for the society wedding of the decade was not at all a given.
“I’m going to drive into Milan and check the apartment,” Rocco announced. “Olivia loves the gardens there. It’s a possibility.”