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...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...
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...
...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...
...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...
Miami bureau chief Tammerlin Drummond was sipping coffee and scanning the wires last Tuesday when the bulletin flashed: Gianni Versace had been shot. Drummond dashed out the door and drove straight to the designer's South Beach villa, where his blood still stained the front steps. What she discovered there was more like a Versace catwalk than a crime scene. "It was totally surreal," says Drummond. "There was a squirrel on a leash perched atop a man's head. A dachshund wearing a necklace pranced about, and models were everywhere, mugging for the cameras...