Word: gianni
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...build 70% of the Italian Army's World War I trucks. The company went on to furnish Mussolini's military, and Il Duce rewarded it with the tariff protection and freedom from strikes that guaranteed its preeminence. In 1921, the year before Mussolini took power, Gianni Agnelli was born to a life of elegance and power-and, eventually, responsibility...
...Gianni-he was christened "Giovanni" but began early to use the shorter name to distinguish himself from his grandfather-followed a circuitous and somewhat star-crossed route to his inheritance. When he was only 14, his father was killed in a plane crash; ten years later, his half-American mother died in an auto accident. Gianni was raised largely by English governesses (he speaks impeccable English) and by his relentlessly entrepreneurial grandfather. He recalls that "we always wanted to know what was going on in Detroit"-and at 18 he was sent on a two-month auto tour...
Back from the wars, Gianni chose to follow some of his grandfather's advice: "Have a fling for a few years to get it out of your system...
...full career in the gossip columns long before he reached the financial pages. In the postwar years, taking up with a fast new international society, he ran around with Aly Khan, Rubi Rubirosa and Spain's auto-racing Marquis de Portago. Gianni's crowd gathered in Paris, London and Buenos Aires, at the Palace in St. Moritz, at his own 28-room villa at Beaulieu on the Cóte d'Azur...
Tire fast life decelerated sharply at 5 a.m. one day in 1952. Gianni was racing to Monte Carlo from a party in Cannes when his car skidded into a meat truck. He spent three months in a clinic in Florence. The accident left him with a stiff right leg-he still limps -but he denies any personal trauma besides distress that "I had not been able to let my friends know I would be late for lunch." Within a year, he settled down in Turin and, at 32, he married swan-necked Princess Marella Caracciolo di Castagneto. As Gianni...