SOCIAL CLIMES : A Princess Tells a Bedtime Story : Diane von Furstenberg Slips Into Homes of the Rich and Famous for Book on Beds

Diane von Furstenberg can tell you that Prince Michael of Greece reposes in a carved Renaissance bed that previously belonged to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Jewelry designer Kenneth Jay Lane (of Barbara Bush fake-pearl choker fame) takes his rest in a canopied alcove in New York.

Von Furstenberg is an expert on beds, and not just because she regularly sleeps in three--in her 18th-Century Connecticut farmhouse, her Paris apartment and her New York pied-a-terre. )

With photographer Stewart O’Shields, Von Furstenberg has prowled 170 bedrooms of the rich and famous in Europe and the United States to produce “Beds,” a recent Bantam release. The book illustrates historical, exotic, expensive, frilly, fashionable, pedigreed, famous, artsy, tailored, beachy and dressed-up varieties of what she considers the most essential locale in a house.

Others may think the hearth, the kitchen or even the TV room of primary eminence, but, as Von Furstenberg says: “The No. 1 ritual, common to all cultures and to all social backgrounds, is going to bed.” (Bathrooms, of course, have a similar common denominator and will be the subject of her next book.)

“My mother used to say, ‘I bless the soul who invented the bed.’ It means, make a ceremony of the moment you go to bed as a way of saying thank you to the day.

“There’s no question that there’s now a major interest in the home,” she continues. “This is the era of communication--you can stay home and watch the world go by on TV, and you can watch movies at home. And it’s less safe to go out today. So people stay home. A bed is home within a home within a home.”

Not that the Belgium-born Von Furstenberg is one for cocooning. Throughout the Diane Decade--the ‘70s--this dress-designing princess-by-marriage was famous for her signature clothing, sheets, eyeglasses, cosmetics and the ubiquitous cheap-chic wrap dresses that landed her on the cover of Newsweek.

She was also famed for her jet-set social agenda.

“I’m definitely a gypsy,” she says. “Already this year I’ve been to the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador, China, Japan, Europe quite a few times and California several times. Yet, I’m a homey person. It’s definitely in Connecticut where I’m the happiest.”

She certainly continues to be a social person. One of her best friends, Fox chairman Barry Diller, in whose guest bed she sleeps when in Los Angeles, put up a tent in his back yard for a recent dinner party in Von Furstenberg’s honor, inviting his A-list--from Madonna and David Geffen to Aaron and Candy Spelling.

The designer leaned on her friends when compiling the book. “You ask,” she says, describing her method for gaining entry into bedrooms of international pals such as Calvin Klein (all three guest bedrooms in his New York home feature pristine white sheets), Fernando Botero (a simple wood bed guarded by the artist’s bronze Adam and Eve sculptures) and Rolling Stone magazine founder Jann Wenner (a curvy bird’s-eye maple wood frame).

Von Furstenberg nixed the beds chez Diller because she didn’t find them “that special,” she says; Diller’s bathrooms, however, will be featured in the next book.

The most brilliant bed in the book, she believes, doesn’t belong to a close personal friend. “Thomas Jefferson’s bed at Monticello is the one I liked the most. It’s in a doorway between his sitting room and workroom. I thought it was so ingenious. He could sit in bed and decide--get up on the right side, go to work; get up on the left side and sit. It’s so simple but so clever.”

She says can tell a lot about a person from the bed he or she sleeps in. What do hers say about her? Five of them, past and present, are photographed in the book. The one in Paris, tented in ivory-striped satin and fitted with orange and white linens, is her favorite. “It’s like a little house. I can close it off and isolate myself. It says that I like to be protected.”

Von Furstenberg, who will turn 45 on New Year’s Eve, has been single since her 1974 split from Prince Egon von Furstenberg. She retired from the limelight in 1983 when she sold her cosmetics company and moved to Paris.

Now, she is making a comeback.

“I thought my Diane von Furstenberg business was in the back of me,” she says, sinking into a sofa in a guest room at Diller’s, where her 20-year-old daughter, Tatiana, is living while trying to crack the entertainment business. A son, Alex, 21, is a student at Brown University.

“I thought, ‘Am I going to be the person who was famous when I was 28 years old?’ I spent two years soul-searching, (ending) contracts--and I had big ones. I gave up a lot of money. My accountant wasn’t happy, but some of the companies (licensees) were doing very cheap things.

“I decided I was going to take control again, and I was inspired again. Because the economy was so bad, what I stood for made sense. If I brought anything to the industry, it was making nice things everyone can buy. I decided I wanted to show my children that I could do it again and show the world it wasn’t an accident the first time.”

So Von Furstenberg says she gave herself a year--she has a month to go--to “lay out the blueprint” for her business and creative future. So far, she has decided to hold on to five of her licensees. As a sideline, four years ago she also founded a small literary publishing house in Paris. In November, she launched a new dress line for Russ Togs in New York, and she hopes to buy back Tatiana perfume from Revlon.

“I have wonderful ideas about the home, about quality and color,” she says, possibly alluding to forays into the design of furniture and home accessories.

“I will make a lot of announcements starting in January,” she says. Then there is the forthcoming book that will reveal Barry Diller’s bathrooms to the world.