(3 of 4)
It was Donatella who persuaded Versace to visit her in 1991 in her favorite new sunbathing spot, Miami Beach. On his way to Cuba with his longtime companion Antonio D'Amico, he obliged his sister with a stop at the Hotel Fontainebleau, where she was vacationing with her husband Paul Beck, a former Versace model, and the couple's two children, Allegra and Daniel. The designer hired a driver to show him around the area, and he wound up in the then not yet trendy section of South Beach. "I sat in a bar and started to look around at the people," he later told TIME. "I said to my friend, 'Why do we have to go to Cuba? It's fun here.' It was love at first sight."
In the next couple of years, he spent $6.6 million (and an estimated $32 million in renovations) on the two Ocean Drive buildings that were transformed into his Casa Casuarina residence, where his life last week came to an abrupt end. Versace's arrival brought a much hyped infusion of glamour to South Beach. Soon after he started spending time there, it was hard to stroll down Ocean Drive without stumbling upon a fashion shoot. Chic restaurants popped up, and so did more and more modeling agencies, as aspiring cover girls and boys started hanging around Versace, hoping to be discovered. (Every now and then he'd pick a face out of the crowd and dole out a contract.)
Versace relished the scene he helped create. "He wanted to be where the buzz was," says Bowles, a visitor to Casa Casuarina. "He loved the excitement." Versace saw Miami Beach, where he spent, on and off, a number of months a year, as a frothy pink-drink antidote to his life in Italy, where he divided his time between his three-story 17th century palazzo in Milan and a 17-room villa on Lake Como. "For reading Proust I have my house on Lake Como," he said in 1993. "Here, in Miami Beach, I don't want another monastery to live in. I want a place to read Truman Capote."
On whatever continent he found himself, Versace seemed to generate the kind of social whirl that in fact might have appealed to Capote. In South Beach, guests filtered in and out of Versace's media room, where the music video of the moment would be playing--often the work of a pop star in attendance. He didn't create his palatial showplaces to let them sit empty. He loved playing host and entertainer, lending the Lake Como villa to Bruce Springsteen and his former wife Julianne Phillips for their 1985 honeymoon, giving impromptu dinner parties for friends passing through Miami and often opening his South Beach doors for charity events.
Yet Versace in mid-life, it turns out, was a tempered bon vivant, a high-glitz homebody. After occasional major bashes, like the New Year's Eve soirees he threw for the past two years in South Beach (where guests included everyone from Calvin Klein to Rosie O'Donnell), he might decamp to a gay club called the Warsaw Ballroom with a small group of friends to watch male dancers perform. But he was known as a quiet purveyor of the scene, a man who avoided drugs and heavy drinking. "I once proposed that we go out," recalls his friend Janie Samet, a French fashion writer, "and he remarked, 'You can go to a restaurant if you want, but things are always better at home.'"