For convergence-of-interest reasons, the moment I knew there was an excerpt of Barry Diller’s memoir, Who Knew, available at New York Magazine online, I knew that this would be the subject of my next column. It is at the intersection of so very many of my interests: new Jewish books, Belgian-Jewish North American households, pretty dresses, and the boundaries of sexual orientation (the last of which is itself the subject of my own next book).

That’s the rational explanation. The real reason is that I am a nosy so-and-so and had always heard that Diane von Fürstenberg had a gay husband. I had not given this much thought, but once prompted, I was curious to know what was up with that.

The very existence of Who Knew suggests I’m not alone in my curiosity: “Much has been written about us, whispered about us, wondered about us. So I’ll just start at the beginning and let the story unfold.” Yes, I now plan to drop whatever I was doing and read the book once I have it.

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Who are the people at the centre of this story? Diane von Fürstenberg, née Diane Simone Michelle Halfin, is a fashion designer. She invented the wrap dress. Even if you don’t think of yourself as a fashion person, you know these dresses.

She’s also just one of those iconic personalities always in the ether, even if you (like me) never gave her any particular thought. DvF, kind of like glamorous French-Jewish public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy (BHL) but with (even) better hair.

Barry Diller, for his part, produced Cheers and Saturday Night Fever, and went on to be an all-around mega-successful businessman in the entertainment field and beyond. Diller is, much like moi, of the Jewish persuasion.

It is by no means a secret that Fürstenberg, the child of Holocaust survivors, is also Jewish. She and Diller were even featured in a Forward spread of Jewish power couples, in which I learned that they—like Barbra........

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