Loulou & Yves

  Bernard, César31 and John Rewald32 were in the Look story. I infuriated my father by rearranging a still life of bread and wine he’d composed, but he didn’t put it back. John gave lectures, but those Sarah Lawrence girls hadn’t a clue who he was. Bernard was difficult, charming but moody. Explosive personality shifts. His life with Maxime was a thunderstorm. After they broke up, he spoke of her and Loulou with profound affection. He couldn’t relinquish Maxime, becoming incensed if anyone mentioned her. Even after she’d gone, you felt her presence at Bernard’s, or antipresence.

  BABS SIMPSON Do you know how old I am? One hundred. I had a brief do with Bernard myself, before Maxime. She reminded me of Bridget Tichenor, two beautiful, conspicuous figures of British descent who abandoned their children and had bisexual husbands—not Alain, the one who came after. Bridget tried hard for Alex Liberman33 but married Jonathan Tichenor, the boyfriend-assistant of George Platt Lynes.34 Bridget, a painter, was more accomplished than Maxime, a gifted amateur. Women found Bernard attractive, partly, because he was so interested in sex.

  KATELL LE BOURHIS Pfriem made some proposition to Loulou, attacked her sexually. Maxime told me a million times! It’s the one time in her life she was shocked. Five years before she died, she was still raging: “Can you believe what he did?!” She detested Pfriem. I’m not excusing her, but frankly those were times—I don’t mean there weren’t morals—but in that European aristocratic high bohemian milieu, everything was possible.

  STEVEN M. L. ARONSON Bernard was never mean about Maxime—when he told me that she had once confessed to a full-blown love affair with her brother, it was nothing against her, just something he was imparting in passing. Maxime, on the other hand, was never not vicious about Bernard, whom she referred to contemptuously as “Pfriem.” One day, years after he was safely dead, she thundered out of the blue, “Pfriem raped Loulou !” She wouldn’t go any further, so who knows—it might only have taken place in Maxime’s overwrought imagination. It could even have been some sort of twisted wish fulfillment.

  LOULOU I had been in New York … from age 14 to 17, but then I was kicked out of school and sent to London by my mum, of all people, to live with my grandmother … I had a miserable time.

  CELESTIA FOX Maxime banishing Loulou back to England—was it because she was having an affair with a fifty-year-old violinist? Nobody was happy with her lifestyle. The idea was to get her out of New York and away from the musician.

  LADY ANNABEL GOLDSMITH You can imagine that for a spirited young person, being stuck with your grandmother in St. John’s Wood wouldn’t be the most suitable of lives. Dull. Loulou would sneak out and spend the night with me at Pelham Cottage.

  Bernard Pfriem, about 1961. Maxime alleged that he sexually abused Loulou sometime before she married in 1966, at nineteen. Maxime: “The children really had no home at all until I met Bernard. Alain was always farming them out …” Collection of the author.

  LOULOU Madame Rambert was a great friend of my grandmother, and they both decided one day that because I was skinny I was to be a great ballerina. How wrong they were. I became rather lonely living all alone at my grandmother’s house and spending all day with the little girls of the ballet school and went to bed at nine o’clock. Really I felt myself to be quite deprived … You understand I wanted very much to meet all sorts of famous people, who I knew lived somewhere in London but I didn’t know where … There I was, all alone, and [my grandmother] wouldn’t introduce me to anybody, she was so competitive. I had worked in an art gallery in New York, I had been involved in artistic life, and suddenly I was meant to be a deb. I hated it…

  JANE ORMSBY GORE I came out, as one does, when I was eighteen. Your parents give tea parties where you meet all these ghastly, proper people—swells—who then ask you to balls every week. Loulou and I were rebellious and laughed hysterically about a white tulle frock I was meant to wear. There was an official list you had to be on if you were a deb, and Rhoda forgot to put Loulou on it, also forgetting to put a coming-out notice in The Times. So she escaped.

  LOULOU The young people in London don’t like someone who hasn’t been raised the same way they have; I had had an unstable upbringing and I didn’t have their self-confidence … so I just used to be aggressive and talk about modern art. My grandmother was still being difficult, so I wrote soppy poetry all alone in my room, which she thought was wonderful. She proceeded to organize this evening where Iris Tree35 and I were to recite our poetry in front of Ted Heath36 and a whole bunch of old codgers. I said to her, “I’m not going to do it,” I refused. But then I relented, on the one condition that she invite some fun people for me after the poetry reading. I went through the whole thing, and she also kept her end of the bargain. I met Desmond and my life became better.

  28 Roberto Rossellini (1906–1977), filmmaker.

  29 Francesca Bertini (1892–1985), silent-film star.

  30 Until 1984, a letter could be sent within Paris in two hours via miles of underground pneumatic tubes connecting post offices, to be hand-delivered by a cyclist.

  31 César Baldaccini (1921–1998), sculptor whose media included compacted refuse.

  32 John Rewald (1912–1994), Impressionist scholar.

  33 Alexander Liberman (1912–1999), Condé Nast editorial director.

  34 George Platt Lynes (1907–1955), pioneer of homoerotic photography.

  35 Iris Tree (1897–1968), poet, actress and charter bohemian.

  36 Edward Heath (1916–2005), British prime minister, 1970–1974.

  6

  The Knight of Glin

  JOHN STEFANIDIS Rhoda had told Loulou, “You must be married within the year,” and so she was, to Desmond FitzGerald, in 1966. He thought Maxime was a bad influence on Loulou, and I imagine Maxime dismissing him as stuffy.

  DAVID CROLAND I was taken by Andy Warhol to Cannes for the screening of Chelsea Girls with Andy’s boyfriend Rod LaRod, director Paul Morrissey and some of the cast: Nico, Gerard Malanga, Eric Emerson, Susan Bottomly. Edie Sedgwick was no longer Andy’s reigning superstar; Susan—International Velvet, my girlfriend—was. Chelsea Girls was never shown—too smutty—so we just had dinner with Brigitte Bardot, then went to England to meet the Beatles. One night, we went to the flat of this vivacious girl and a man who seemed a hundred years older than she was: Loulou and Desmond. I wasn’t aware such relationships existed. Desmond was imposing, grand, but not fake-grand—he was a knight!

  CHRISTOPHER GIBBS The Knight of Glin—“knighty” to friends—had recently arrived from Harvard, working on a Ph.D. in Irish Palladianism he never finished. His friends Mariga and Desmond Guinness were living at Leixlip Castle in Ireland and had just revived the Georgian Society as the Irish Georgian Society. The knight was on the founding committee, eventually becoming president. Desmond Guinness’s mother was the most beautiful of the six Mitford sisters, Diana. Then of course later she married Oswald Mosley, leader of the Fascist party in Britain. For years there was an Irish Georgian Society fund-raiser in the States called “Dinner with the Two Desmonds.” They were an incredible double act, those two, blue eyes flashing, suavely shaking down rich Americans to rescue Irish architecture.

  Desmond was an assistant keeper at the V&A and assiduously painting the town, enjoying a raunchy romance with Talitha Pol, who went on to marry John Paul Getty, Jr., and become part of the Saint Laurent mob in Marrakech.

  Desmond FitzGerald photographed for Holiday by Slim Aarons, carrying the ornamental pike of the Royal Glin Artillery, Glin Castle, County Limerick, Ireland, 1962. Cropped out of the picture is a giant family portrait that had been hauled out of the house and posed directly on the ground—a typical Aarons touch. © The Lilliput Press of Dublin. Courtesy of the holder.

  MIN HOGG Before or after Talitha there was Jane Birkin.37 Desmond liked androgynous, flat-chested girls, at least until Olda Willes, his second wife. He was ambivalent, frankly. I don’t know if he had affairs with men, though he’d have told you immediately if you’d asked him
—he said he thought about sex all the time! Jane fit his tastes brilliantly by being without a curve in any direction, like Loulou, like a boy. Loulou wasn’t yet formed, really, as Loulou, when she was with Desmond. She was still embryonic Loulou.

  In March 1966, Desmond had written his mother, “I should love you to meet a girlfriend of mine who I think you might like for a change!!! She is called LOUISE de La Falaise & is French. I am very much in love with her + vice versa. We do not however intend to get married for some time to make sure. So don’t get in a flap! She is very respectable but as usual with all my girlfriends has no money, Oh dear Oh dear … I am very happy.” Desmond and Loulou were engaged in May and married in October. He was born in 1937, so ten years older than Loulou, and had had a bleak childhood, if not quite as bleak as her’s, nannies and nursemaids filling in for unavailable parents. Desmond’s father, also named Desmond, had gone to school at Lancing with Evelyn Waugh, betrayed a weakness for showgirls and suffered from bovine tuberculosis. His wife, Veronica, née Villiers, was the Mother From Hell, pompous and skittish. Veronica was not titled, but grandly let it be known that her maternal grandmother was Lady Cornelia Churchill, daughter of the 7th Duke of Marlborough, a lineage that also allowed her to claim the prime minister as a first cousin once removed. So according to Veronica, there were plenty of grounds for obeisance. After Loulou and Desmond married, comparisons between Philip de László and Oswald Birley became uncomfortably unavoidable. László had done a portrait, typically spectacular, of Elaine Guest, Veronica’s mother. The Hungarian artist was simply of a different rank, capturing a savoir-vivre in his subjects that eluded Oswald.

  Desmond’s first eight years were centered on Glin Castle, a rather plain bow-fronted, bay-backed late-eighteenth-century Georgian pile, redeemed by a double flying staircase and ravishing Adamesque plasterwork, hard by the Shannon Estuary, County Limerick, Ireland. Built near the still-standing remains of a thirteenth-century ancestral castle, the house was later “Gothicized” with turrets, battlements, pepper-pot lodges and other toy effects, giving it the air of a child’s fort.

  Loulou lived between London and Glin Castle, Ireland, during her marriage to Desmond FitzGerald, which lasted little more than a year. Loulou: “[Desmond] had a huge property without a penny… I went crazy… I used to walk along the battlements and scream into the night.” © The Irish Georgian Society. Courtesy of the holder.

  Desmond’s forbearers had landed in Wexford in 1169 with the Anglo-Norman invasion and the blessing of Henry II, earning grants of territories for their sleek performance as “adventurers.” The early Knights of Glin were fire-breathing clan leaders, losing their holdings in continued clashes with the Crown. Defending his castle in 1600, the then-knight casually ordered a message sent to the forces who had taken his six-year-old son hostage and tied the boy to the mouth of a canon: “The knight is virile yet and his wife strong. The vulva is still open and the penis vigorous. It is easy for them to produce another child.”

  The son was freed, the knight defeated.

  The bloodthirsty medieval knights gave way to landowning Anglo-Irish gentry: FitzGeralds of the (minority Protestant) Ascendancy, a class that rhymed with domination and privilege. Life at Glin in the nineteenth century could be told by the front hall, with its priceless porcelain in a wobbly cabinet nobody could be bothered to ask Mrs. O’Brien to dust, and mess of hunting crops and walking sticks. Glin was a place of pleasure, of champagne lunches, strawberry teas, bathing in the Shannon, the knight’s birthday celebrated with a feu de joie fired by the Glin infantry, afternoons on the river in his thirty-ton cutter, regattas, carriage drives, expeditions that culminated in picnic suppers, paddle steamers that delivered guests from Limerick, bicycling (the craze of 1895), black silk and lace ruffles for the daughter of the demesne (“worn with a grace that is utterly beyond the reach of the chignoned maids and matrons of these modern democratic days”), Saturday entertainments where the waltzes and quadrilles and bowls of steaming whiskey punch went on so late, you never made it to church. Game books carefully recorded the bags of snipe and plover. By 1927, it could be reported that “The town of Glin … has this season become the resort of fashionables, for the pleasure of sea air and bathing.”

  The knights courted bankruptcy; not that it showed. A few thousand acres could always be sold off to pay for “encumbrances.” Revenue from flowers grown for Moyses Stevens, the London florist, and from fisherman who leased the salmon weirs, topped up the rents of tenants (188 in 1861), freeing the knights to indulge their eccentricities and appetites, whether it was riding a horse into the drawing room when calling on friends or fathering children with the local maidens. For knights who demanded it, there was also jus primae noctis, or “right of the first night”: sleeping with a tenant’s daughter the night before her wedding.

  Loulou married into the “stranded gentry,” as Desmond’s social tranche was ruefully called after the Land Acts transferred property ownership in Ireland from landlord to tenant at the turn of the century. Then, to capture electricity, the government requisitioned the Shannon; with the weirs went Glin’s last important source of income. It would have gone down with a number of other great houses destroyed in the civil war if Desmond’s grandfather, confined to a wheelchair, hadn’t informed the IRA that they’d have to burn the castle down with him; the men retreated.

  Veronica went to the trouble to give birth to Desmond in London: She wanted him to be British and saw his future in England. He chose Ireland. Veronica was a monster, but she labored and sacrificed to hold off the bailiffs and offer her son an education, selling produce from the potager, violets to Covent Garden, taking in paying guests, discreetly letting go of a good painting. Desmond claimed to have gone to “more schools than you’ve had hot dinners.” As a boy, he was trundled to class by coachman and pony trap. Serially rejected by Eton, he was admitted to Stowe, academically a second- if not third-rate preparatory school, although one pledged to producing civilized gentlemen. With the death of his father in 1949, Desmond found himself the 12-year-old heir of a moldering castle and a five-hundred-acre estate of money-losing park- and dairyland. Veronica had married a Canadian utilities executive with deep pockets, Ray Milner, who funded repairs; still, money was tight. In 1961, Desmond put an ad in The New Yorker, offering Glin for rent. His selling points were features not then associated with Irish houses: central heating and six bathrooms. At the same time, he was cultivating a reputation as a flâneur with a Churchillian rhetorical flourish. In other words, he was becoming an aesthete. At Harvard, he fell in with the brilliant but blighted polymath Dorothy Dean, who would appear in Warhol’s Chelsea Girls and plant a flag in gay social history by declaring herself “a white faggot trapped in a black woman’s body.” Desmond was also writing for Country Life and building his address book. On one road holiday alone, in 1962, he stayed successively with the art collector Douglas Cooper near Nimes, the historian Harold Acton outside Florence and Mona von Bismarck on Capri. Back in Cambridge, Desmond announced he would wed, and then not wed, Laurence Coëffin, a misty relation of Napoléon Bonaparte, who later married Jean-Louis Scherrer, a negligible couturier who had worked side by side as an assistant at Dior with … Yves Saint Laurent. Coëffin is said to have taken one look at Glin and decided “it would make a wonderful ruin.” Renting a little house behind Leixlip from the Guinnesses, Desmond was part of that momentous nucleus of scholars, dealers, decorators and writers that included Mark Giroud, John Cornforth, John Fowler, Chrissie Gibbs, John Harris, Geoffrey Bennison, David Mlinaric, Min Hogg, Peter Thornton.

  Mick Jagger came to stay at Glin with his girlfriend Marianne Faithfull, and the village youths nearly fell out of windows following their progress down Church Street. Loulou hated being called “the Madam FitzGerald.” She thought the quaint and curious title reserved for the knight’s wife, which had replaced the earlier “Dame,” ridiculous. While “Madam” had no legal basis, “Knight of Glin,” passed through the male line and first
documented in 1425, was a tangle of sentimental hopes and gauzy certainties. The title may be royal, or an Anglo-Irish adaptation of a Gaelic chieftainship, or … Descendants of the first knights were styled as such by acts of Parliament, and though the designation is recognized in Burke’s Landed Gentry of Ireland by virtue of patents under the Great Seal, it disappeared from Debrett’s in Desmond’s lifetime—after the 1980 edition, Irish hereditary knights were dropped in favor of peers and baronets only.

  CHRISTOPHER GIBBS Desmond had a depressive side. Fragile. Seriously black moods, sitting in his office in the V&A in the dark, taking to his bed for weeks. After Loulou, he was diagnosed with manic depression. It was lithium for the rest of his life. There are different kinds of love. Desmond was bewitched by Loulou, ravaged and seduced. They were both escaping their families. In Desmond’s case, it was his willful mother. “The knightmère,” we called her.

  ELIZABETH CHATWIN Everyone was mystified: “Surprise! The knight is getting married.” There was a party where Loulou was introduced to Desmond’s friends, this tiny slender person, sweet but not the least sophisticated. Shy and embarrassed. No sang-froid to face being looked at by all these strangers.

  MAXIME DE LA FALAISE Letter to Veronica Milner, July 20, 1966 Price of house [in Lacoste for Louise and Desmond] +terrace 26000 NF (£5,200) … almost all this village property is still assessed as “ruins” … These properties are also considered “Monuments Historiques” as they are part of the old fortified village of the early 17[th century] … I do think that you and Ray are absolute angels to do this—Lacoste is very much [Louise’s] home … Bernard Pfriem has been my constant companion for about eleven years! Due to religious complications, divorce etc, it was almost impossible to marry—we may soon be able to—Louise owes to him her knowledge and attachment to the arts—and a lot of other sterling qualities which he helped to develop—The children really had no home at all until I met Bernard. Alain was always farming them out—too long to go into by letter! Anyway they both adore him+he them …