Loulou & Yves

  PIERRE DE MONTJOU Children are like dogs: They accept everything. And they live by comparison. If they have nothing to measure their lives against, as we didn’t, any lack doesn’t register until later, when they can make distinctions. To know unhappiness, you have to know happiness. I had been unhappy, but didn’t realize it until I was thirty or forty.

  I’ll tell you a story that will surprise you. One day twenty years ago, I’m driving back to Paris from a meeting. I have nothing to do that night, so I’m driving leisurely, at one point randomly leaving the highway. I recognize the landscape, even the light and smells. That’s odd, I say to myself. The next thing I know, there’s a sign: villeperrot 2km. So I go, I continue, I turn. I start not to feel well. Upset. A heavy feeling. I recognize the roads from the bicycle rides we took forty years before. They lead me to the house, I climb the wall … I’ve relived that moment many times. So many awful memories … Loulou suffered enormously. A precarious, affectionless childhood. She was lost emotionally her entire life.

  DAVID SULZBERGER Loulou and Alexis’s relationship as children was out of a fairy tale. The pocketbook version is of a little girl who, deserted by her mother and father, holds her brother’s hand, keeps him on the straight and narrow, holds everything together, is everything to him, a substitute for absent parents, from age six to sixteen. It created a remarkable bond.

  JOHN MCKENDRY Loulou would know how to get into trouble, and Alexis would know how to get out.

  LOULOU Alexis was the one who was always running after me like a little brother, but he was also the one who took care of the money, the tickets… We are lucky to have been brought up without any roots or ties, because it makes us rather malleable.

  DAVID MLINARIC Oh dear. I knew Loulou’d had an unpleasant childhood, but I didn’t—I’m in shock. It’s as though I’m hearing about somebody else. How very light my friendship with Loulou was, it turns out.

  DIANE VON FURSTENBERG Those years she kept hidden inside always. I don’t know the details, nor do I want to, but she was a result of that time, a mixture of strength and fragility, elegance and decadence.

  MARIE BELTRAMI Her childhood took a serious toll, but she didn’t use it as grist—“Look what I lived through, and see what I’ve made of myself.”

  5

  A Precocious Itinerary:

  Sussex to Gstaad, New York to Provence

  HUBERT DE GIVENCHY I left Schiap to open my own house in ’51. She never spoke to me again. When Elsa closed in ’54, Maxime was still working for Paquin.

  MAXIME DE LA FALAISE [I designed] everything—jewelry, every sweater, every belt … [The] old vendeuses … remembered the days when they went for fittings at the maisons closes. Those high-class whores wore boots that went up to the top of their thighs … [Then] I fanned out—fabrics in Italy, gloves for W. Pinkham & Son … shoes for Rayne. I introduced the rugby shirt to France … [People] offered me a lot of money to open a couture house. I never wanted that kind of life. To be responsible for a couture house is to accept only seeing fashion people. Nothing, not money, not glory, would make me accept that sort of prison.

  Anyone who thinks Maxime overplayed her career and was interested only in skiing on opium with Dado Ruspoli is deceived. For Renée Collard, a fledgling couture company, she banged out corrida and flamenco looks. In January 1955, Australia’s Sun-Herald denounced Dior’s new line—which it said women hated, flattened the breasts and elicited “howls of rage from men”—as a publicity stunt. Dior was not the real hit of the Paris season, the paper declared; rather, it was the Countess de La Falaise. Maxime made great copy. The reporter enthused that not only had she presented a collection that equaled or exceeded the offerings of more famous dressmakers—she did so against frightful odds. Maxime had had her prototypes produced in London, but “French Customs spoiled her plan … denying her the right to bring in clothing not made in France.” With less than two weeks before her show at the Plaza Athénée, Maxime began again from scratch. She modeled the clothes herself, and New York buyers “were swept off their feet … she has displayed to the fashion world in such a dramatic fashion manner that she can compete with the best of them.” The article noted that the countess had a daughter, age seven.

  In 1955, Williams & Hopkins of Bournemouth, England, “drapers and costumiers” affiliated with the London store Marshall & Snelgrove (now Debenhams), played the countess card when publicizing Maxime: “The Comtesse de La Falaise is widely known as one of the most brilliant stars in the constellation of international élégantes. You will discover in her designs the epitome of Parisian elegance and chic.”

  Maxime was more of a designer than she is given credit for. This “rich satin hostess skirt” and “shirt look” from the above catalogue anticipates Carolina Herrera by decades. The promotional emphasis was on “separates,” a new concept Maxime borrowed from Givenchy.

  DIDIER GRUMBACH Gaby Aghion started Chloé in 1952, but the company only took off with Maxime, in 1960, when she codesigned the collection with Gérard Pipart, long before Karl Lagerfeld arrived in ’64. A cashmere shirtdress by Maxime put Chloé on the map. She was a freelance styliste—a new métier in the late fifties, meaning a consultant or designer who worked as a hired gun for a manufacturer or ready-to-wear house. Historically, the first styliste in France was Ghislaine de Polignac, at Galeries Lafayette, telling vendors how to de-vulgarize and chic-ify their designs. Ghislaine had never had a job and didn’t need one. Maxime was part of this same movement of elegant women—Andrée Putman, Emmanuelle Khanh—who went out a lot and had taste and knew how to talk to manufacturers. They didn’t draw and weren’t necessarily credited; Maxime wasn’t.

  French designer ready-to-wear was in its infancy, a cottage industry called “confection,” the production of outworkers—concierges or a Hungarian emigrant tailor turning out ten pieces a season. Couture was still the big employer—Patou and Lelong had twelve hundred workers each. Confection wasn’t industrialized until the mid-sixties, when it became prêt-à-porter. Everyone claims to have invented designer ready-to-wear—Saint Laurent, Valentino, Cardin … but Dior was first in ’48, Jacques Heim in ’50, Fath in ’54. In fact, Saint Laurent in 1966 was one of the last.

  JOSÉPHINE RINALDI Maxime lived and worked above a fishmonger’s in a fifth-floor walk-up on the rue de Grenelle. I was her assistant, even if I did most of the work, designing fabrics for the big mills. One morning I arrived and she led me into the bedroom. There was a man under the covers. Maxime whipped them back, announcing, “Voilá, Louis!” The first thing I saw of Louis Malle was his ass.

  Maxime’s dinner parties were famous. She’d have the Malle brothers, Ionesco, Leonor Fini with a breast hanging out of a cutout in her dress, Roberto Rossellini, 28 Francesca Bertini29 … Maxime was very in love with Louis, the perfect French bourgeois.

  BRADLEY LANDER Maxime and Louis drove to Hungary in 1956 during the revolution to help the refugees, meeting up with Mark and Annabel: a café society response to global tragedy. It was Maxime’s idea for Louis to cast Jeanne Moreau in Elevator to the Gallows.

  KATELL LE BOURHIS “I put the fly in the milk,” Maxime said, because she introduced Jeanne and Louis, and they became lovers. Forty years later, Maxime still wore his baptism medal. When Louis died, she sent it to his daughter, Chloe. Maxime said she deflowered Malle, but wasn’t it his mother—isn’t that what Murmur of the Heart is supposed to be about?

  KENNETH JAY LANE Maxime told me she’d had affairs with women during those Paris years. Maybe with Annabelle, the actress, and she may have mentioned Fini.

  RICHARD OVERSTREET One night, Leonor and Maxime were having dinner alone at Leonor’s place on the rue Payenne. The bell rang and it was an evening messenger boy with a pneumatique.30 He was invited in, offered a drink or two, and before three shakes of a unicorn’s tail they were all in bed, the lad getting ravished. Maybe the other way around. Probably both. Oh, the glory days of pneumatiques and girls being girls.

  WILLY LANDELS
Maxime said she couldn’t stay with her brother, Mark, in London because “he’s disapproving of my black lovers.” My dear, we all went to Le Vieux Colombier in Saint-Germain to hear Sidney Bechet. Marvelous saxophonist. I’m sure those mannequin girls had black lovers, yes. I don’t see why not.

  HAMISH BOWLES Like so many, Maxime had an affair with Emilio Pucci, hadn’t she?

  BRADLEY LANDER Giscard d’Estaing’s younger brother, Olivier, was another one. And the American artist Bernard Pfriem.

  KATE BERNARD When Maxime had the affair with Max Ernst, his wife, Dorrothea Tanning, knew. It was with her permission.

  JOSÉPHINE RINALDI Maxime’s thing with Max was just a little couchette. He and Dorothea had us to dinner, and he said there was something he wanted to show me in the bedroom: the skeleton of a dwarf. I left before dessert.

  ————————

  LADY ANNABEL GOLDSMITH I had a lot to do with bringing up Loulou, actually, and it would’ve been more, but I’ll explain. Should we start from the beginning? My first sighting of Mark was at a ball in London in 1952. He wore a black armband because his father had just died. The next year, he rang me to say that the only nice thing about his Christmas at Charleston were two enchanting children—Loulou and Alexis, his niece and nephew. After we married in 1954 we went to Charleston on weekends, and on one of those Alexis and Loulou were there.

  This was after they’d been sent away to that ghastly couple in France. I’ve never in my life seen anything so stunning as Loulou as a little girl. A haunting face—so beautiful, people turned around in the street. She could be affectionate, giving you a hug, but everything was inside, a Birley trait. She’d spent her life hiding her feelings.

  Maxime was ruthless, always putting herself first. But she was working her ass off—it wasn’t her fault she couldn’t provide the children with the life she wanted for them. Alain wasn’t going to have them stay with him, so he sent them to boarding school in England. Poor little things, their English wasn’t good. Loulou was seven. I said to Maxime, “This is mad. If they’ve got to go to school here, why don’t you let me have them—a guardianship—but you take them whenever you want.” Loulou and Alexis were stuck in their frightful sterile schools, but at least one could have got them out on weekends. They loved being with me. They would have had my life, which has always been about children, a proper ordinary home life at Pelham Cottage, our little Regency house in Kensington. Maxime was absolutely pro the idea, but Alain wouldn’t allow it. I remember fighting back tears, Loulou and Alexis snuggled beside me on the train to school. I could see Alain was jealous. “I don’t want them, but that doesn’t mean you can have them,” his attitude was. When we kissed good-bye at Lady Cross, Alexis couldn’t keep it together, sobbing, clinging to me, wanting me to save him. God it was awful, Loulou so tight-lipped, trying to control herself, this tiny fragile doll-like creature in a hostile new place among all these hulking great schoolgirls. It seemed so barbaric. I remember thinking, How is she going to make it?

  I did get to look after them a bit. When it was Maxime’s turn to have them, she’d give them to me. Loulou slept in my bed at Charleston. Pelham Cottage was a child-friendly house, my son Rupert was born in 1955, Robin soon after. There was a nanny … Loulou loved it. Such bliss, taking her to films and plays. She and Alexis were like my own children, and Loulou grew in confidence. I often think about how different it could have been.

  LOULOU [The school] was called Portsdown Lodge at Cooden Beach and it closed down soon after. It was not a good school but actually rather fun. I was the only foreigner, and when I arrived I was quite petrified. There was a big gym with ropes and on the first morning I climbed the ropes and sat on a beam and dropped beetles down on to the English girls, who I knew would be very squeamish. And all the teachers crowded around underneath shouting to me to come down, which I pretended not to understand. Eventually the French mistress was sent for. That was the first day. On the second day that lovely book The Hobbit was read out loud in class and I began to understand the language, and a month later I could speak English …

  PAQUITA PAQUIN If Loulou talked about her childhood it was something with an element of chic. English boarding school was tough but chic.

  LOULOU Then, in desperation, they sent me to school in Gstaad. I was fifteen, and one afternoon I found [an abandoned] St. Bernard dog … carrying such a heavy milk pail … [its] paws were bleeding in the snow, so of course I adopted it and had it washed and bought it a huge collar. It was against regulations to keep a dog at school and you know it is not easy to conceal a St. Bernard in Gstaad. Every day I exercised my dog in the main street. One icy morning it saw a tiny poodle and swallowed it whole … I just skidded along behind as it chewed it up … The poodle’s owner was an actress and she was left with an empty leash in her hand. It was rather terrible. The headmaster de-

  cided what I needed was my mother. Little did he know how wild she is … I was booted out [of school] for various reasons … I didn’t need someone trying to put the blame on my parents … I also got accused of stealing Liz Taylor’s Afghan hound, but in fact it adopted me, so that was rather unfair … [Looking for a job] didn’t go over well at all. One doesn’t do that sort of thing at nice-little-rich-girls’ private boarding schools. Finally, I was sent to live with my mother in New York in 1964. We were both rather neurotic at the time. It was a rather wild time for both of us. I worked for Iolas, the gallery with all the Surrealists. It was great fun.

  KENNETH JAY LANE My friendship with Maxime took off in the early sixties. I ran into her with Johnny Galliher, a charming man who never worked a day in his life, liked boys, liked girls, played cards rather well and gave ladies’ lunch parties—Babe Paley, Maxime, whomever. Schiaparelli was in love with him, but he got away. Maxime was working for a fabric company and living in SoHo with Bernard Pfriem. He taught at Cooper Union and drew beautifully, hyperrealistic figure studies, and had an exhibition, mainly nude self-portraits, his big schlong hanging out. I said to Maxime, “Now I know why you’re with Bernard.”

  JOHN STEFANIDIS The genitals were very prominent. And there was Maxime, the smartest-looking woman one could imagine, of whom there was not a single sketch. The contrast with this huge, dour, rather unattractive man …

  PATRICK WALDBERG Tall and erect, built like a lumberjack, with a wind-tanned face and piercing blue eyes, [Bernard Pfriem] might well have been the commander of some grand duke’s army.

  ALLEN ROSENBAUM There was talk of his being slightly sadistic. He did careful Renaissance-style silverpoint drawings, very tight. Pfriem brought Loulou and Alexis up.

  Born in Cleveland in 1916, Pfriem had worked as a butcher as a very young man, exposed to the bleeding horrors of the slaughterhouse—a good place for a future artist to study flesh, limbs, bones. If Maxime knew Gorky, Ernst, Tanning, de Kooning, it was thanks to Bernard, who met them while teaching at MoMA after the war. He arrived in France in 1950 as a postgraduate student on the GI Bill, soon buying a number of ruins in Lacoste, in the Luberon, in Provence, literally for a song—fifty dollars, ten dollars, a refrigerator. The boulangerie was two hundred dollars.

  SETH TILLET My parents, textile designers, were friends with Maxime, and so we rented Bernard’s house in Lacoste. He was kind and funny, but I hated his work, all those big toes, big fingers, overdrawn, horrifying, false virility, like him, a manly, sixties idea of an artist. He was like a well-endowed knucklehead, the artist equivalent of a football player. I couldn’t imagine he would command Maxime’s affection.

  NICKY HASLAM Why would you paint yourself when you’ve got these two absolutely stunning beauties at home? Loulou was going to the Lycée Français. I remember her bent over her desk in her gymslip with ink-stained fingers, doing her homework.

  GERARD MALANGA Loulou told me she walked home from school, all the way from Ninety-fifth Street to West Broadway, between Houston and Prince. I assumed she wanted to explore the city. Or was it to save on train fare?

  KEN
NETH JAY LANE Loulou slept on the mezzanine, which was bizarre—usually the young girl doesn’t live with the mother and the mother’s lover. Maxime had me and a rich friend of ours from Paris for dinner, a very luxurious lady, Kitty Lillas, her husband owned the Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville department store. Kitty was twenty-five years older than I, had a three-masted schooner and a flat—chic as hell, filled with Louis Treize furniture, bang on the Seine—and she wanted to get a divorce and marry me. She was unshockable, though she did find Maxime’s living situation depressing. Which it was …

  CHRISTOPHE DE MENIL Maxime viewed her social perch as license rather than obstacle to a wide-ranging love life. Bernard wasn’t an obvious choice; it was an inventive alliance. People in Maxime’s milieu might well try for a banker or politician. But as a woman who’d been titled, she felt free to do what made sense to her.

  TOM PENN My father was Irving Penn. I met Bernard Pfriem when he was doing a sitting for Look on Provence and I was eight, so 1960. Bernard and Maxime lived between New York and Lacoste, where he ran an art school with Sarah Lawrence, so Loulou knew Lacoste, too. He created the most romantic existence there. I can still hear the cicadas … I remember being told that if the mistral blows and there’s a crime, the judge considers reducing the sentence. If you murder someone, it’s like, “We understand, it was windy.”