ROME (dpa) – Silvio Berlusconi, media mogul and candidate for the office of prime minister, has never hidden his admiration for Gianni Agnelli. “One should go down on one’s knees in his presence,” he once said of Fiat’s honorary chairman.
According to Henry Kissinger, the Nobel laureate and former Secretary of State, “Gianni is so charming that you forget what a strong man he is.”Anita Ekberg and Rita Hayworth, in other ways, also fell victim to his appeal.To ordinary Italians, Agnelli’s name conjures up images of immense power and wealth, while his mellow but firm voice still causes legislators to prick up their ears. No other man in recent Italian history has enjoyed such power and commanded such respect.However all is not well with the former playboy turned industry baron and elder statesman, who turned 80 this year.Fiat is losing market share and the problem of finding a worthy heir lingers on. Meanwhile, the curse on the 100-year-old Agnelli dynasty seems increasingly like the one which blighted the Kennedys.Recently, Gianni’s only son Edoardo, 46, died in mysterious circumstances amid rumours of suicide.This loss followed the death in 1997 of Giovanni Alberto, a nephew who had been made head of Fiat’s scooter subsidiary Piaggio as a training ground for the Fiat chairmanship. Giovanni Alberto died of cancer at 33.The two deaths are only the most recent tragedies to have hit the descendants of Giovanni Agnelli, who founded Fiat in 1899. They include the premature departure of Gianni’s father Edoardo, killed in a plane crash when his son was 14.Gianni was raised by his grandfather and tutored by a strict English governess in Turin.“The blue-eyed boy would be brought up to expect wealth and power … to become as great and as powerful as the Savoys, the Medici … or any other dynasty from the pages of Italian history,” wrote Alan Friedman in his book “Agnelli and the Network of Italian Power”.And, as Friedman points out, Gianni would succeed in accomplishing his destiny in full.“He was also destined to take his family’s dynasty far beyond any power even his determined grandfather could have conceived, in the process creating a power so very nearly absolute that it would eventually come almost to challenge the very legitimacy of the modern Italian democratic state.”The personal history of Gianni mirrors that of Italy. As his company managers always pointed out to politicians: “What is good for Fiat is good for Italy.”After spending some rather rebellious years in school and fighting the Russians during World War II, Agnelli was told to enjoy the good life before joining the family business.The young and handsome Gianni didn’t need much convincing.As Italians embarked on postwar reconstruction and discovered the Dolce Vita, Agnelli spread his charm in Turin, Monte Carlo and St. Moritz, backed up by an annual allowance said to be around one million dollars.A lover of fast cars and beautiful women – “I don’t like talking about women, I like talking to them,” he once said – his yacht was one of the biggest and most luxurious on the Cote d’Azur. His affair with Anita Ekberg is said to have started on the sun deck.Agnelli’s apparently carefree attitude almost cost him his life. While returning from a party at 5 a.m., he once crashed his Ferrari into a meat truck near Monte Carlo and broke his leg in several places.A year later, he married half-American Princess Marella Caracciolo di Castagneto and started preparing himself for a new life as head of Fiat.Agnelli became chairman in 1966 and spent the next years learning the ropes – “I had not the slightest idea how a car was made,” he later recounted.But difficult times were in store. With the country plagued by terrorism and industrial unrest, Italy’s largest private firm became a favourite target of the extreme left.As Gianni matured into a sober gentleman, the 1980s brought about a modernization in the business, job cuts, diversification and new production centres in South America and Eastern Europe.He had by now become a friend of the influential and was among the first to visit the Oval Office when George Bush became president. He was parliament’s most powerful lobbyist and a revered trend-setter – businessmen would strap their watch over the cuff to imitate him.As the 1990s brought about corruption scandals and globalization, his family holdings were investigated and Fiat was forced to look for foreign partners.Since his retirement from Fiat, in 1996, the company’s 220,000 employees have been directed not by the Agnellis but by outsiders who have sought to make Fiat more open to outside investors.The change has not gone down too well with the family and the company itself.Despite last year’s alliance with General Motors, experts say Fiat is still too reliant on small cars, where profit margins are minimal, and has been unable to shed its image as a maker of “cheap and reliable cars”.Today, Agnelli spends much of his time nurturing his pet projects: the Juventus football team and Formula One racing team Ferrari. Surgery to replace a heart valve and the removal of an abdominal aneurysm have forced him to slow down.But the problem of finding an remains unresolved.“The important thing is that there is someone in each family generation that takes responsibility and has the right talents,” Agnelli once said.
