Diane Gilman Women Empowering Women

 Survivor of child abuse and breast cancer

In the late 60’s, Diane followed the music scene to San Francisco, hand-crafting one-of-a-kind denim creations for Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Grace Slick & Jefferson Airplane, Jerry Garcia & the Grateful Dead, Jim Morrison & the Doors, the list goes on…Diane moved closer to her childhood dream in the mid-70’s when she moved to New York City. In the early 80’s she was discovered by Bloomingdale’s to produce her first full collection. Diane Gilman went on to be credited as the first designer to introduce washable silk in the US; a coup which brought her broad fashion department store recognition and millions of devoted followers. 

The Jeans Queen on QVC

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:03

Hi everyone, here we are for another episode of Be Heard Women Empowering Women. And I'm so excited today to have Diane Gilman, the Gene Queen. Um, I welcome Diane, and she was uh QVC and Home Shopping Network's top personality after age 60. And the thing that uh motivated her was uh blue jeans because at a certain age we our bodies change. Uh Diane, introduce yourself.

SPEAKER_00: 0:38

Oh hi, so um Diane Gilman uh retired from live television but deliberately to try a whole new territory called being a silverella influencer. I feel yeah, I feel that honestly our um generation is so underrepresented. And when you watch cable TV, if you were a young person, the first thing you'd say to yourself is shoot me before I get old. I uh because every commercial is about going into old age, feeble, diapers, taking tons of drugs, absolutely, yeah, which is the exact opposite of me.

SPEAKER_01: 1:32

So I know, and you know, Diane, I I might be a little younger than you, not much. I'll be 75.

SPEAKER_00: 1:38

Everybody is. Oh, come on, I just turned 78. I mean, that is honey, I'm 75, so it's not that big. A long tunnel to to look through, and it's kind of amazing because it feels like it was like uh my life was a minefield, and somehow I avoided uh I I was able to suss out or avoid any major explosions and losing limbs or anything.

SPEAKER_01: 2:10

But you know, really good that and I bring up our age only because when we were in the decades of the 60s, 70s and 80s, yeah, it was uh survival of the fittest. Women were be they're still being killed, but they were domestic violence was not being recognized. I was uh situation. And that was nothing.

SPEAKER_00: 2:36

I think it just being a businesswoman. That too. Um it was really it was really unique that in the field of women's fashion, every CEO was a man, and none of them trusted talent. They wanted to hire you for your talent, but talent was so ephemeral that they wanted to crush it the minute they got it because they couldn't really recognize it. And that, you know, for a woman like me, where it was all talent and I lived in breathed fashion, I love it. Um you were easily duped and easily taken over. On the other hand, from my childhood, which was extremely difficult because of my father and his actions towards me, I just kept looking for a father all my life, right? Yes, and so one business partner after the next would be fiscally abusive or mentally abusive for control. And it was just this endless hamster wheel until finally and and not coincidentally, uh, when HSN got a new CEO and I had just turned 50, I think I was 58 and a half, um, and had been there for a while already, 20 years. She was a woman. Yay! And my career shot straight up. I went to her, said, I have a fashion invention. This may sound crazy to you, but I really think it's gonna work. And she said, Yeah, yeah, as a woman, this really makes sense to me, a middle-aged gene with different measurements in the industry. And that is how I got my big break with my once-in-a-lifetime kind of light bulb moment that you were saying in the beginning about going through a mindfill and surviving.

SPEAKER_01: 4:42

And you know, my first book was called Raised by Wolves, Trapped by Demons. Because I know my parents were the wolves, and my first two husbands were the demons. Well, all a lot of men in my life were demons. Okay, yes, and I was held back and I was demeaned, and I was emotionally and physically abused.

SPEAKER_00: 5:03

Well, I was emotionally and physically abused, yes, and uh at the age of about 12, 13, um the basic point was my father was always after me physically from the age of about three years old. So I was always defending myself against him. I spent my childhood with him running around the house with a butcher knife screaming, I'm gonna kill you, because I wouldn't do what he wanted me to do. And I would lock myself in a bathroom, and that's how I would spend 12 hours of every weekend day. And there was no there was no internet or or cell phones at the time. So you just sat there staring at a white tile wall.

SPEAKER_01: 5:48

I was like, And you really didn't tell people. Like I know my father's.

SPEAKER_00: 5:52

Well, though, I I went when when I got into high school, um, there was a guidance counselor, and I said, uh, I don't know how to tell you this, but my father is, I'm gonna say it in adult terms, yes, after me in a inappropriately physical with me. And you know, that was the 50s and the 1950s, and she called my parents and said, Do you know what your child is saying about you? She's lying, and yeah, that was great going home from school that night. Yeah, and so my my parents decided because they didn't want me working, and even though I showed an obsessive promise for fashion at a very early age, three or four, uh, they decided that that they should put me in a mental institution until I was so miserable that I changed my mind. And then, and this was now 1963, they were going to do an arrangement. Then what the medical institution thing didn't happen. My father's brother talked him out of it, but then um they decided to lock me in my bedroom, serve me my meals in there, and find a man, do an arranged marriage, and get me impregnated immediately, and that would be the end of my delusions about passion. So your mother didn't it was so scary, so scary.

SPEAKER_01: 7:34

My mother agreed, but did she not believe that your father was doing those things? Did she not believe that?

SPEAKER_00: 7:41

We discussed it ever, ever, never brought up, but she saw it. I mean, it was so apparent that and so when I I found out about the mental institution when I was 18 and 19, and I thought I've got to get out of here. This is really scary, and you and I your parents are supposed to teach you your coping skills, your core beliefs, you're and nurture you, right, you and it was it was so you know, and you grew up almost the same time I did, I'm three years older. So, what was on television? My favorite uncle, leave it to be bird, all of these house was with the heels on the mouseworks were such a quirky but happy family kind of show. And my yeah, my thing was more like the Adams family, and so I developed a huge um a huge distance from anybody around me because they weren't leading the same life. I was leading a double life, which is really difficult. Being a teenager is difficult enough. And uh, you know, I had to leave. And for years, way into my 30s, I always had nightmares. Wake up screaming that my parents were after me, like I would have a nightmare that I was grocery shopping. Yeah, and went and opened the trunk of the car and they were in the car with a giant like gunny sack and put it over my head and dragged me out and took me prisoner.

SPEAKER_01: 9:36

And I mean, I had those kind of well, they had taken you prisoner for your whole childhood of your teenage years, and I know what that's like because every dream I have is crushed. I thought I was going to be able to do that.

SPEAKER_00: 9:48

I wouldn't let them, I would not let them crush my dreams.

SPEAKER_01: 9:54

I I took me a long time. But my question's a little different is the fact that um my father, who thought he was Italian, found out later he didn't find out, I found out later he wasn't because he was adopted. Um, he would not let go of me. He didn't want me to date, he college was out of the question, the Peace Corps, service, anything I brought up, a job promotion that was gonna send me to Los Angeles to work for Capitol Records, like all these things. But I was too naive. I just didn't have the emotional strength to defy him. So I did what a lot of women do when all the other doors are shut. I got married, and I got married absolutely to get out of there. It was an escape hatch and it was horrible.

SPEAKER_00: 10:40

I just got out of, I just got out of there to get out of job.

SPEAKER_01: 10:43

You're lucky I don't mean it too.

SPEAKER_00: 10:46

You know, you're not lucky though if your life is fueled by anger, and that was my fuel. I was so angry. And I asked myself this question again and again throughout my life. Why did I get the parents I got? And you know, I just did Maria, I just did a um a 78th birthday podcast on my podcast called Too Young to Be Old, YouTube. Yes, and it was called, I titled it Conversations, Conversations with My Younger Self. And I went back in time, and what I said to myself from the age of one to let's say 15 was it's not your fault. Because when you've got parents like you or I had, their word is God, they feel they are 100% correct 100% of the time, and you're always left feeling bad, child, inadequate child, rebellious child, difficult child. And then when I my conversation with myself in my latter teenage years through my mid-20s was basically get the hell out of there, escape and don't look back. And I lived like a nomad for about 10 years, and when I came to New York, it was much easier to just sort of disappear. But you know, Marie, um I never went back to my family, I never spoke to them. I was terrified somehow they would, you know, get me. And when my father passed away, I was, I believe, 45. They were older parents to begin with. So um I decided to go back for the funeral. And uh my mother would never see that I wanted to try and make amends with her. She just decided that I was after their money, of which they had none, totally delusional. But by that point in my life, I had introduced Washable Silk to America. I had my name on the wall of every department store in America, Diane Gilman collection. I was in every local newspaper for spring, summer, winter, fall, da-da-da-da. And what did my mother say when somebody said, Aren't you proud of Diane? She should have married a Jewish doctor.

SPEAKER_01: 13:31

Oh, I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised. That was it. I just said the other day to someone, people have been trying to kill me since before I was born. And the reason I said before I was born is my mother, I had given her a journal at the end of her life so I could have it after she died. And she didn't want to want to write in it, but she wrote a few things. So she when she died, I read the journal, and there was a chapter that said, How did you feel? Now I'm the firstborn. How did you feel when you found out you were pregnant with me? And she wrote in this journal, Well, we didn't have a lot of money, so I kept jumping off the steps and I took some hot mustard back. In other words, that she tried to get rid of me and knew I would need that. Okay. So I was always yeah, I was always told that my my reach was beyond my grasp, that I wanted things that weren't possible for me. They couldn't send me to college, that I couldn't go away, so I'd get hurt, you know. So I had to like learn that I was stronger than they taught me I was.

SPEAKER_00: 14:40

Well, when when I was at my father's funeral, I found out that my French teacher in high school, I was adept at languages, and he knew that I loved fashion. I lived in Breedhead. He went out on his own and applied for me and got me a four-year scholarship to the Sorbonne, which would have, of course, completely changed my life. I would have been bilingual and the number one language for fashion, French. I would have interned with Dior or Saint Laurent. And my parents intercepted the letter and burnt it. And I found out when I was in my late 40s. And it was, you know, the her my mother's attitude was like nothing. Like, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 15:33

You don't know how much this resounds with me when I was five. Oh, yeah, I mean unbelievable.

SPEAKER_00: 15:40

And so I would say the two major challenges in my life were number one, my family, and the the lack of love, the need for obsessive control, right? Um, the absolute disinterest in my talents or my happiness. And the other thing would be just when I thought, okay, I've really fought so hard my whole life, and I finally made it even to my standards. Like, okay, this is good. I did something good for my generation of women, the baby boomer gene, and I did something good for myself and live living a lot of my dreams, living my life, my best life. I get diagnosed with stage three breast cancer, and it was like, no, you gotta be kidding me here. But um did you get a mass ectomy? I did you get a double mastectomy, but frankly, I did too. That was not even emotional for me. I think that I went through the whole treatment, which lasted about two years, all told, between the mastectomy, the bust replacement, all that stuff. And um, you know, I did it like an out-of-body experience. I think I was just robotic. I know that uh the guy that I lived with for 20 years died of cancer, and so I was mortally terrified of not only cancer, but chemo, because what he went through it was and he passed in '97. So they they knew, you know, nothing like they know today about chemo. It was just like being bludgeoned with a hammer. Um, I remember saying to myself the night before the chemo started, okay, Diane, this is not a dress rehearsal. Like you cannot afford to use any of your energy feeling sorry for yourself or feeling scared or not, or saying um no, because I had so many people around me saying, Oh, don't do chemo, just do green drinks, and yeah, okay, perfect. And um I came out of the other side of cancer so much more prepared to live the rest of my life productively. I yeah, you know, when you are a fashion designer and you live in Manhattan, which is all about fashion, unlike most of the rest of the world, and you're living in a penthouse overlooking Central Park, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And everyone is saying, Oh, Diane, you had another great show on TV, you set another record uh financially. You live in a bubble. When you get cancer and you're sitting there with a hundred other women waiting to get an infusion, or you're going that morning to the hospital to get your breast whacked off. Um, you start to realize that cancer can teach you a lot of valuable lessons. It was for me the great leveler and equalizer. It taught me how to be empathetic and compassionate. It taught me that there was there are situations in life, and honestly, growing older is one of them, where you're just one of many. That's it. You're all at the same level. And I um I never look back on the cancer with any bitterness. No, I look back on it and think, bravo to you, Diane. You took a terrifying negative and made it into a positive. And whenever I think about it, I I only have I only have positive thoughts. You know, I had um credible doctor, the surgeon was incredible, and she's now the head of all cancer surgery at Mount Sinai in New York. And I only got to see her and I got speed railed in, um, partially because of my presence on TV and the doctor I knew who got me in there, but just partially out of luck. And uh she looked me up and down when she met me. And she said, Well, you look like a totally healthy human being to me with a localized disease in a part of your body, if we have to take it away that you don't need. And I thought, Bravo.

SPEAKER_01: 20:48

That's holy God, I got the right person because I I I need to put this part in since we're talking about breast cancer. I had no problem, I handled whatever problems I've had with my body, and there'd be many and like you. And I remember her saying it was like a lumbectomy. Oh, okay, a lumbectomy. And then she said to me, I asked a female surgeon, also, she said to me, Would you mind waiting a minute though? I didn't get this one test back. And I really I said no all about the water, so she kind of calls me back in and she said, Great, I I hate to tell you this, but it's a very aggressive type of cancer, and there's more of a throat than we thought. So I'm going to do the sectomy. And I said to her, do a double. And my husband could not believe that. I said, Oh, absolutely, take them both off. And then, unfortunately, I had not done the research about breast implants that I should have. I had breast implants that caused me infections and surgeries for three years.

SPEAKER_00: 21:54

Oh my God.

SPEAKER_01: 21:56

So what I did a couple years ago, the last time I had an infection, I told my plastic surgeon, I said, take them out. I said, uh, let me look like a 10-year-old boy. I don't care. I am not going through any more of this. And he did. So it's just roll with the punches, I guess. But thank God I didn't.

SPEAKER_00: 22:18

For me, I it I had always wanted to get a breast lift. I never had large breasts to begin with, you know, a B cup, not a big deal. Um, and I had no emotional attachment to it, but when I got the inserts, it was and and finally I got all of those horrible drains out. That was the thing that drove me nuts. Um, I thought, wow, this is what a breast lift is like. I and it was good. I have to say, you know, the surgeon chose two plastic surgeons for me, and I got to choose one. I I chose one who was like one of them was very showy guy on Park Avenue, and I thought, screw that, I don't I don't want some star. And the other guy was very staided, but had been in the neighborhood forever, was three blocks away from me. And and um, you know, it when you are faced with mortality, it really and truly is that's like climbing Mount Everest. Yeah, whoa. That was amazingly scary.

SPEAKER_01: 23:36

I have been in many life-threatening situations, both health-wise and with men, and at far access.

SPEAKER_02: 23:44

Me too.

SPEAKER_01: 23:45

And you know, I'm supposed to be here. And what I want to do is also ask you, and this is a branding question because I am trying to brand myself. I'm very new at this. So after the breast cancer, I imagine you had to rebrand yourself. Am I right? Did you have to rebrand yourself after your breast cancer?

SPEAKER_00: 24:06

Well, I had a huge active fan base of about 650,000 women. And I remember when I got the news about cancer, I asked the surgeon, I said, can we could we wait about two weeks before we start chemo? I have because she sort of oversaw the whole thing. She's Dr. Lysaport, genius, written five best-selling books on breast cancer, New York Times. She said, Yeah, we can't wait much longer than that. So I go down and I have to give a speech and basically say, I'm gonna take a year off television to have a new career, saving my life. Please don't forget about me. Let me introduce my substitute. So the network doesn't really want me to say anything. They sort of want me to disappear, but that's absurd. So I give the speech after they've gone through it. Next day, I I call my assistant and I said, I don't know if I did a good job with my speech. What's on Facebook? And she said, Oh, about 80 responses. And I said, 80, because you know, HSN has Facebook pages. And she said, no, Diane, 80,000. And by the next day, it was a 130,000 messages of love and wishing me well. And I think because my message with uh fashion was always forget about the younger woman, we should have our own fashion brand, and I'm doing that for you, and I'm wearing it every day along with you. I so agree. Kind of a seamless highway into reintegrating myself, and then when I stepped away from live television to do podcasting and social media, that message was so ingrained in me and so much part of my belief system that I think my biggest challenge was knowing that a lot of the teleretail QBC HSN customer had sort of aged out. They did not have a real direct attachment to social media, so I had to reintroduce myself to a whole new audience. And I reintroduced myself with the skills I learned while going through breast cancer treatment: compassion, kindness, empathy, and wanting to build not a nuclear family around me, but uh a family of women around me. Yes, all of us going through the same like challenges, which included, you know, one in every three women are going to have cancer within their lifetime, one of every two men are gonna have cancer within their lifetime. So it's not like you're alone, but how do you get to these people and offer them a message of hope and inspiration and aspiration to a better life? So I think because I had started that focus, even while I was selling my own fashions, which I loved and I'm wearing today, um, I carried, I was able to carry that forward. And and like you, for me, social media, at least being very active on it, is new. I take it as an adventure, but I I think my whole challenge now is integrating the fashion end of me for older women, which virtually nobody else does or cares about. We're we're treated like we're disposable, with um an audience that really and truly seeks a better, more active, more comfortable, more productive life as they grow older that nobody teaches us right we can have.

SPEAKER_01: 28:38

Yeah, I'm coming back this because I said we have a lot of similarities. Um 2020 pandemic, I had an immune disease, not only also getting over breast cancer. My husband has Parkinson's and he was going into stage three. I found myself being mean to him. I knew that it was depression. I knew, and I contacted a therapist on Zoom, and she was the one that encouraged me to write a book. And she said every day when he shuts down, because he would not speak to me after four o'clock, he was silent. I would go in and write a chapter. And I to segue off that, and reaching women, I got such response to that book, raised by Wolves Chat by Demons, that I started the podcast, Be Heard, Women Empowering Women, which you are on right now, right? And this is what we need to oh I started the new book.

SPEAKER_00: 29:35

I started the podcast off my second book, which was written from a slightly different point of view of someone who had climbed Mount Everest a zillion times and just didn't think at the age of 72 I was gonna get hit like that. But let me tell you a dream I had, and I had this dream the night before Kimo. I can't even believe I slept the night before I chemo. So I my favorite car in the whole world for me was my little trenchcoat beige BW thug. I dreamt I was going down a rural country road with wilderness on both sides, and it was super pebbly and rocky and bumpy. And I had this feeling I had to get somewhere. And I had these dreams all the time, like constantly climbing stairs and never getting to the top. Okay. So I'm driving and I'm driving and I'm driving and I'm driving. And suddenly I hit what looks like a wall, but I look up and it's literally a perpendicular mountain that comes to a needle point on the top. I back the car up, I gun it. I go up a little bit, I fall back down. I back the car up, I gun it again, I go up a little more and come back down. And then I think to myself, well, what would you even do if you got to the top? You just tip over the other end and crash. And I got out of the car and grew into a giant, and the mountain became a sharp pebble that I stepped over. And that I believe would summarize the rest of my life. Oh, that's a great metaphor. You have to grow. Yes. You are you are in some ways very much in charge of you. So if you see a problem, if you see a scary situation, better to look at it from a giant's point of view, like eagle-eye point of view, and see the whole terrain than look at it from a tiny point of view where it looks insurmountable. And so that dream, I I've had dreams like that before that aren't just a dream, they're sort of a message from the spirit world.

SPEAKER_01: 32:15

I relate to that because I always dream about not being able to find my classroom, my car keys.

SPEAKER_00: 32:24

Yeah, like the years you've got to take the final and you can't find the classroom.

SPEAKER_01: 32:30

We're so alike, and in my first book, I wrote about in my second marriage, well, it was actually the second time I married this guy. Oh my gosh. And uh a Liz Taylor moment. I uh it was I said it was like Sisyphus going up that mountain with the chain, and the gods would just push him back down and he reached the top. And that's how I felt about my ex-husband. And until I got that mindset, which really uh took a long time before I got that grit that um strong will that knew I could overcome anything, nothing was gonna change. You know, you have to find that within yourself, don't you, Gary? You have to find yeah, it's in you. You're not gonna get it from a man, a husband, an employer, anybody. It's in you. And before we run out of time, how would you advise our listeners to take a chance and reach for their dreams, whether they're in midlife or beyond?

SPEAKER_00: 33:28

You know, um that is interesting because uh everybody said to me when I said, you know, the thrill is gone. I I really want to leave telerling. I've been here 30 years. I can do it in a coma. I am so used to it, but that doesn't mean it's good.

SPEAKER_02: 33:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 33:46

And I'm gonna be 78. I mean, if not now, when? I want to try something else. Now I've developed my communication skills on TV. I don't really feel I had them before. I like being in front of a camera, I like the girly stuff, the makeup, the hair, all of that. And I love have building a female familial audience, and I want my legacy to be helping women live their best life. So I felt I had no encouragement when I left. I had a lot of people very angry at me, like, what do you mean you're leaving? Well, you're a money. As you as you would if you're the meal ticket, right? And they're losing the meal ticket. Right. And I thought, what do you want for the rest of your life? And that would be the question. And I wanted my heart to beat quickly again. I wanted to get excited, I wanted to feel like, oh my god, I did it. Like, I will say that my podcast, Too Young to Be Old, which is rated on YouTube. We were just named to be in the top 80 of podcasts for females over 55. And then we found out yesterday, Marie. We are now in the top 10. That's fantastic. And I thought right on, Diane, right on. Like I felt when I when I made that decision, and I know nothing about electronics or the internet, or you know, I just know about communication. I thought, my God, this feels like going to the top of the Empire State Building, putting a bungee cord around your waist and saying, Yeah, hey, bye-bye. I'm gonna jump in.

SPEAKER_01: 35:51

I so understand the excitement of that. Because and I know that anybody that read my first book, I that has reached out to me, has touched them. There's something in their life as a woman that they relate it to in my book. But the marketing of on my own, trying to get that book out there was mind-boggling. And that's when I decided, look, if you if you live to be a hundred, this means you're in your last quarter. You gotta get the message out to these women. And that's when I started the podcast, which I'm teaching myself as I go, but I have 25 episodes of it.

SPEAKER_00: 36:27

Me too.

SPEAKER_01: 36:29

But thank you.

SPEAKER_00: 36:30

Oh, I think I've only done about 15. But you know what?

SPEAKER_01: 36:34

I'm gonna go look them up.

SPEAKER_00: 36:35

No matter what. You've gone, thank you. Um, you look at the one that's my solo podcast, because I usually do it with guests, but the one that's conversations with my younger self. Yeah, I'm gonna look at that. I think you'll really, really relate to that. Um I am going to posted. There need to be, oh, thank you. There needs to be more of us, Marie. There need to be more women who are entering our what I call our third act and deciding to do it in a grand way, in a big way, in a public way, in a helpful way. And you know, I always said, I hope my legacy is after I'm gone, my name is mentioned, and people say, And then you think God, she helped me so much. Diane's or Diane was so kind.

SPEAKER_01: 37:28

So you know wrap it up because I'm gonna get it. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00: 37:31

Thank you for this opportunity.

SPEAKER_01: 37:34

Let's share each other's podcast. That's the way to go. I love it. Okay, I'll get back to you. We'll do this again. All right.