WWW- THE grandson of late, great Italian playboy Gianni Agnelli inherited the Fiat chief's well-known appetite for disco dust and dangerous women - but he sometimes chooses a different kind of companionship.
A salacious profile in next month's Vanity Fair exposes the sordid double life of Lapo Elkann, 28, the Fiat scion whose fairy-tale world flipped upside down in October when he overdosed on cocaine and heroin in the apartment of a pre-op transsexual prostitute in Turin, Italy. His brush with death made international headlines but had little impact in Manhattan, where Elkann remains a frequent presence at Cipriani Downtown and other Euro haunts.
After the death of his grandfather - famed as much for his suits as his rumored trysts with Jackie O., Rita Hayworth and Anita Ekberg - Elkann was appointed Fiat's worldwide director of brand promotion, charged with reviving the flagging carmaker that also owns Ferrari, Alfa Romeo and Maserati. With Italy's top starlet, Martina Stella, on his arm, a bottomless bank account and a fleet of cars in cities across the globe, the limelight-loving auto prince cut a wide swath through international society, raising Fiat's fortunes along with his public profile.
His elders in the notoriously private Agnelli clan were less than amused, VF reports, and even less so by the events of Oct. 28.
While first reports claimed Elkann was found in the apartment of a "South American woman," subsequent stories revealed the flat belonged to Donato Broco, a 53-year-old tranny streetwalker known as "Patrizia," who claims he was a client.
With help from two other pre-op party girls, Elkann had snorted a "near-lethal cocktail of cocaine and heroin" from which he would not recover for three days. (Elkann's representative claims he did not know the coke was mixed with heroin and denies that Elkann was wearing a dress and high heels, as "Patrizia" claimed.)
Several of Elkann and Agnelli's friends - including Henry Kissinger, who once employed Elkann as his assistant - offer kind words about the troubled heir.
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"Lapo is like a son to me," Kissinger tells Vanity Fair. "He is intelligent, extremely sensitive, very amusing and has an extremely human quality."
Elkann's involvement with drugs came as no surprise to some. "[Gianni] had a lifelong flirtation with the same substance," says Agnelli biographer Alan Friedman. And "for [Lapo]," a school friend says, "his grandfather was like God."
