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ARTS | FILM HBO’s ‘Agnelli’ Highlights Fiat Chairman’s Appetite for Women and Danger In what would be a corporate liability today, Italian industrialist Gianni Agnelli’s behavior was considered reckless, yet visionary and inspiring

‘I have met hundreds of CEOs in my career. But none had Agnelli’s gift for inspiring others and raising employees’ creativity and performance,’ says Robert Dilenschneider. PHOTO: HBO

By Brenda Cronin Updated Dec. 16, 2017 8:47 a.m. ET

He jumps out of helicopters, goes naked on his yacht in the Mediterranean and is a James Bond-level Casanova. Would you want this man running your company?

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Gianni Agnelli was a restless, seductive Italian aristocrat and industrialist. For three decades, starting in the 1960s, he reigned over Fiat, the manufacturing and auto giant founded by his grandfather in 1899 in .

“Agnelli,” a documentary premiering Dec. 18 on HBO, remembers Fiat’s charismatic leader and his colorful life. It also reflects how the mores for the corporate elite have changed since his heyday.

In his native , Agnelli’s rakish reputation added to his mystique. At his death in 2003, at age 81, flags across the country flew at half mast. But the HBO documentary arrives in very different era, one in which public figures face more intense scrutiny, sparked in part by sexual-harassment allegations against businessmen, entertainers, politicians and others. Taki Theodoracopulos, a friend of Agnelli, says the Fiat chairman and president “never forced himself on any woman.”

“I think it was a different time in terms of the paparazzi and the press,” with some of Agnelli’s escapades kept out of the spotlight, says Graydon Carter, the documentary’s executive producer. By contrast, “today, everything’s out in the open.”

Agnelli’s 1950s-era high jinks would be unthinkable for a CEO today. PHOTO: GLOBE PHOTOS/ZUMA PRESS

Agnelli may have had more leeway than other executives, Mr. Carter says, because his family was Fiat’s majority owner. If he were running a major company now, he “might have had a little bit of difficulty in these days. He would have to tone it down,” Mr. Carter says. “But he wouldn’t have to tone down the charm and the charisma and the style.”

The documentary follows Agnelli from his service in World War II and his coming-of- age as a jet-setting playboy and unapologetic one-percenter to his rise as a global statesman. Many considered him Italy’s uncrowned sovereign, the steward of the

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country’s economic renaissance from the postwar period through the turbulent 1970s.

Between 1966 and 1996, Agnelli led the Fiat conglomerate, which included cars and Juventus, Turin’s soccer team. “He was involved with everything Italians love: sex, cars and sports,” his niece, Isabel Rattazzi, says in the film.

Deploying instinct and charm, he became an international symbol of Italian success. PHOTO: DAVID LEES/THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES

Agnelli, who trained as a lawyer, never professed to have his grandfather’s business acumen. Instead, director Nick Hooker says, he joked that if he ran the newspaper stand outside Fiat’s headquarters in Turin, it would be bankrupt in a day. Even so, deploying instinct and charm, he shepherded the company, becoming an international symbol of Italian success.

A collector of houses, art and ravishing women, including his wife, Marella, he dressed impeccably and lived recklessly. He cheated death repeatedly, skiing despite shattering a leg in a car accident. He tore around Turin in a souped-up Fiat with a Ferrari engine. In the film, former colleagues and ex-girlfriends shudder at the memory of Agnelli’s driving, how he dodged pileups by speeding into oncoming traffic.

“I think he felt very alive when there was the chance that he might get killed,” Mr. Hooker says. That included having his helicopter pilot climb high above a friend’s villa so he could splash down into the swimming pool.

Before taking the helm at Fiat, Agnelli spent time on the French Riviera, sailing and romancing women such as Swedish actress Anita Ekberg. “He had been a playboy when he was young, but no decent Italian is going to be dismayed by that,” journalist Gianni Riotta says in the documentary.

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Agnelli cheated death repeatedly, skiing despite shattering a leg in a car accident. He tore around Turin in a souped- up Fiat with a Ferrari engine. PHOTO: HBO

Mr. Theodoracopulos recalls how as a very young man, he was dazzled by Agnelli, who took him under his wing as they prowled the casinos and clubs of the Côte d’Azur in the 1950s. Cocaine was on the scene, Mr. Theodoracopulos says, and Agnelli took part but “never showed it—he was very careful with the drugs.” In an interview published in 1991 in Vanity Fair, Agnelli said he hadn’t been tempted by cocaine.

The industrialist’s relatives cooperated with the documentary, Mr. Hooker says, sitting for on-camera interviews and opening up photo archives and family albums. “I told the family: ‘We’re going to talk about women, we’re going to talk about drugs.’ And they were like, ‘That’s all water under the bridge,’ ” the director says.

Agnelli’s 1950s-era high jinks would be unthinkable for a tycoon today, says Mr. Theodoracopulos, because “you’d lose your job!” Back then, men who inherited family businesses had personalities, he says, while today, many executives work their way up through the ranks. Climbing the corporate ladder makes one “develop a different sort of personality,” Mr. Theodoracopulos says, “You have to be nice to everybody. You have to be bland and to blend in.

“Now you have to behave,” he adds. “It’s much less fun.”

A fitful sleeper, Agnelli rose at dawn to have tea and muesli and call friends around the world, peppering them for gossip, Mr. Hooker says. He stage-managed every detail of his life, from the cut of his suits to dinner menus, often scrapping the meals proposed by his wife for more elaborate ones.

Agnelli’s vision—not his exquisite taste or daring—distinguished him from other leaders, says Robert Dilenschneider, founder of the Dilenschneider Group, a New York- based communications firm. “I have met hundreds of CEOs in my career, and I have worked for dozens,” he says, but none had Agnelli’s gift for inspiring others and raising employees’ creativity and performance.

“Corporate leaders today are worried about the next quarter. They are worried about product defects—and they should be—but they really don’t elevate themselves to a higher level of conduct” as Agnelli did, Mr. Dilenschneider says.

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Agnelli accompanied his wife, Marella, center, and the Duchess Castelbarco-Toscanini, granddaughter of conductor Arturo Toscanini, to the opera in in 1960. PHOTO: GAMMA-KEYSTONE/GETTY IMAGES

He stage-managed every detail of his life, from the cut of his suits to dinner menus, often scrapping the meals proposed by his wife for more elaborate ones. PHOTO: GAMMA-RAPHO/GETTY IMAGES

More than 25 years ago, Mr. Dilenschneider says, he and Romano Prodi, a professor and future prime minister of Italy, were speaking at a gathering in Milan when a mob of reporters and photographers burst into the room, “flashbulbs going off like mad.” They were surrounding Agnelli, who proceeded to hold forth not on the automobile business

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but on the importance of style, generosity and continuous learning throughout life.

“The climate today doesn’t allow for a guy like Agnelli,” Mr. Dilenschneider says. “It’s too focused on performance...CEOs focus on doing this. It’s hard for them to get out of their skin.

“I think Agnelli wanted to live,” he adds. “I think most CEOs today, they want to survive. It’s a very different mind-set.”

Business leaders now are too focused on the bottom line to have fun, says fashion designer Jackie Rogers, who caught the eye of a young Agnelli in the South of France, when she was modeling for Chanel. “There’s nobody around like him anymore,” she says in the film. “Because they’re so involved with making money, they’re boring as hell.... Gianni was funny and exciting. He was incredibly alive.”

Write to Brenda Cronin at [email protected]

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