Loulou & Yves

  CAROLA PECK She had no objection to good copies of good furniture, statues, materials or pictures: one must never let authenticity stand in the way of good taste … Old Oxford friends, the Dublin intelligentsia, Desmond’s Guinness and Mitford relations, students, celebrities, tourists, her German relations, decorators, art historians, pop stars and rural squires all rubbed shoulders [at Leixlip] … House parties usually included one notable, one brain, one title and a talker, with some American visitors to be converted to Georgian sparkle and gaiety… [Mariga] was part bare-footed Solvig, part Tennysonian Pre-Raphaelite … part 18th-century rationalist…

  … and a German princess: Mariga’s father, Albrecht von Urach, was a member of a junior branch of the royal house of Württemberg. When Princess Margaret came to Ireland, Mariga was the only one who didn’t curtsy, claiming—wrongly—“I am the senior princess here” and ignoring that serving royalty always take precedence over dispossessed. Still, Queen Marie-Henriette of the Belgians was a great-aunt, Empress Elizabeth of Austria a great-great-aunt. As Prince Albert of Monaco’s first cousin, Mariga’s grandfather had been first in line for the principality’s throne and for ten minutes after World War I was king of Lithuania. Nevertheless, Prince Albrecht was impoverished. And a Nazi. In 1934, he settled his Scottish-Norwegian wife, Rosemary, an artist and journalist, and their daughter in Japan, where he was attached to the German embassy. Rosemary was schizophrenic—possibly the result of a horse fall, her condition diagnosed only when it was too late, after she had decided Hirohito’s generals were plotting against him and that she needed to tell him right away, in person. Presenting a diplomatic passport, she was admitted into the Imperial Palace, five-year-old Mariga in tow. Bayonets were drawn, the little girl watching, shrieking as her mother was pumped with morphine. Rosemary was deported. She then slit her wrists and was lobotomized, with predictable results. Mariga, an imaginative elision of her real name, Marie-Gabrielle, was raised by her godmother in Surrey. Lionized and pilloried in equal measure, she reached the summit of her celebrity as a tastemaker in 1968, when Diana Vreeland put her on the cover of Vogue’s Book of Houses, Gardens, People. Valentine Lawford, the book’s author, described Mariga as a cross between “grande dame” and “beatnik,” with “the hieratic quality that princes share with peasants.” Beaton said she had the mal occhio and that with her bird’s nest hair, lanced with artificial flowers, Mariga created the “alarming” atmosphere of a drag queen. What he may have thought about Loulou dancing buck naked on the dining table during a dinner party at Pont Street is not known.

  “The Knight of Glin and Madam Fitz-Gerald,” Vogue, February 1968: Desmond Fitz-Gerald, the Master and Knight of Glin, has the eyes, arrogance, bearing, and look of imminently terrible temper, appropriate to the bearer of the oldest title in Ireland. His wild Celtic spirit meets its match in the Gallic-Saxon fire of his wife… Although they have been married for less than two years, the Fitz-Geralds are already formidable, granted that forgiving, admiring, fearful tolerance usually only given to aging famous eccentrics. Madam Fitz-Gerald, who gives the impression that she has just ground part of la populace under her foot, has a startling, uncompromisingly beautiful face and an infinite, irritating mystery that she does not cultivate. It is heightened, though, by the way she dresses for her effect, at one moment looking like a hero of the 1914 war, the next like Cora Pearl, 46 sometimes like an absent-minded undergraduate. In fact, she is never absent about anything which concerns her. Mr. Fitz-Gerald is writing a book about sixteenth- to nineteenth-century Irish architecture… Although the traditional home of the Fitz-Geralds is the Castle of Glin in Ireland, they spend most of their time in their London flat. They are in that rare English tradition of the great idiosyncratics, shrewd, perceptive, tough, guarded, and gentle.

  Mario Buatta, the American decorator, took this snapshot of Loulou at the Hunting Lodge, the Hampshire home of John Fowler, in about 1968. Why so Sloane-y, Loulou? © Mario Buatta. Courtesy of the holder.

  JOHN STEFANIDIS I’d seen Loulou at a party at the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava’s with a pheasant feather in her hair quivering above the crowd. The next morning, I rang Willy Landels at Queen, saying, “You must take notice of her.”

  WILLY LANDELS I hired Loulou immediately. The news had to be broken to Anne Trehearne, the fashion editor. “You work too hard, Anne, so we’ve got you a present: a new assistant.” Anne said she chose her own assistants.

  Loulou turned up the first day wearing several skirts, armloads of jewelry. She and Anne went off to lunch at Terrazza and came back the best of friends! Queen’s fashion was good but not competing with Vogue’s. Queen was powerful insomuch as it dared to annoy the establishment and had “Jennifer’s Diary,” the society column. It didn’t sell many copies, but the five thousand people who mattered read it.

  When Queen and Harper’s Bazaar merged, I worked with a young fashion editor, still wet behind the ears, by the name of Anna Wintour. There were two ways of showing clothes: as the designer intended, or, like Loulou, inventing as you went along. The way Loulou did it was more amusing.

  LOULOU Undated letter to Bernard Pfriem Darling B. I am now working in Queen since two days which is great fun, I got so bored doing nothing but seeing friends all day that I decided to work, then came a tiresome long period of job hunting, having no degrees and not knowing how to type you can imagine that I did no[t] meet with great enthusiasm, till a friend got me this which [is] marvelous fun but very hard work million[s] of telephone calls and then choosing colors accessories and clothes and dressing models for photos …

  Write me and tell me how you are, darling, I want to hear from you. lovelovelovelove Loulou

  CELESTIA FOX Loulou and I were an absolutely desperate duo at Queen. Trouble. Loulou liked her drugs. This was the beginning of LSD, but before coke. She smoked loads of dope and took a huge amount of pills, uppers and downers. We lived on purple hearts—speed—because we never went to bed and had to get up for work. We earned ten pounds a week.

  LOULOU In those days we weren’t meant to feature clothes unless the designers advertised. So we would club together to buy a small $5 advert for Ossie Clark, who didn’t have a penny.

  CELESTIA FOX The summer of ’67 was the high point of the sixties, of Swinging London, and at the heart of it, Queen. The designers were Foale and Tuffin, Zandra Rhodes, Gina Fratini, Bill Gibb. Mary Quant, obviously. There was a little couture, but we weren’t interested in that. Ossie designed for Quorum, the center of the universe. The workroom was above the shop—Loulou spent her life there. One weekend we went to stay with her father in Paris, a rather dreary, reclusive, miserable Frenchman. It was quite tense. He and Loulou certainly didn’t have much of a relationship.

  37 Actress and singer who lived and collaborated with Serge Gainsbourg.

  38 Rachel Severne (1933–1994), Desmond’s sister.

  39 Vogue excerpts are from the American edition, unless otherwise noted.

  40 Sister of Jane and daughter of David, the British ambassador to the United States whose marriage proposal Jacqueline Kennedy refused in favor of Aristotle Onassis’s.

  41 Photographer and David Hockney’s biographer.

  42 Cofounder of the London modeling agency English Boy.

  43 Astrologer wife of Mark Palmer.

  44 Nan Kempner (1930–2005), New York socialite who claimed to spend “more than I should, and less than I want” on clothes.

  45 Rupert Birley (1955–1986), Loulou’s cousin, disappeared off the coast of Togo in a presumed drowning.

  46 Cora Pearl (1835–1886), Second Empire courtesan.

  7

  “She’s Married to a Fairy, So What’s Her Problem?”

  CELESTIA FOX No sooner had Loulou married Desmond than Maxime married John McKendry, in London the next year. Loulou told me that John was Desmond’s best friend and that he had met Maxime at her wedding.

  KENNETH JAY LANE I introduced Maxime and John at a party Ben Sonnenberg, the publicist, gave
for Loulou and Desmond in New York. John was a friend of Bruce Chatwin, and a Bruce Chatwin type: eccentric, but with a certain brilliance.

  JANE ORMSBY GORE I was there when John met Maxime on Sardinia at Peter Ward’s, father of Rachel Ward, the actress. Her mother, Claire, went off with Tony Lambton—you know, Lord Lambton. John McKendry was championed by the knight and also a great friend of mine, godfather to my son. Darling John, the most fragile, charming man … Now you mustn’t ask me too much. There’s a lot I don’t remember. Too much dope. You know what they say, “If you remember the sixties, you weren’t there!”

  ALLEN ROSENBAUM John and Maxime met at a reception for Loulou and Desmond in the Blumenthal Patio at the Met. You do know, don’t you, that Loulou was called “the Knightress of Glin”? She wore a little silver metallic dress, smocked on top and cheerleader length. The only thing missing were roller skates. She wasn’t some teenager worrying about her acne. She had confidence. She must have known she wasn’t beautiful, but turned it into something else.

  There was a crisis: Maxime had lost a Kenny Lane chandelier earring in a cab or something, and John deputized himself to recover it, the knight-errant on a holy quest, running to the lost and found, calling the taxi company … I don’t think he found it, but it didn’t matter. It was the crusade that mattered.

  MAXIME DE LA FALAISE Undated letter to Veronica Milner As you must have gathered on the telephone—I’m divinely happy, I had no idea this could ever happen—John is a marvelous person, very sensitive but with a lot of strength too—we neither of us have the slightest doubt about each other and feel as though we had known each other for a lifetime … He seems to get on very well with the museum people, trustees and collectors for he has beautiful manners and is witty and at ease with everyone—Hopefully he will be made full curator in about a year—he only makes £10.000 a year but should get a raise soon, he is very friendly with Hoving the new director. We shall have to find another apartment, alas, as Bernard is being very difficult about all this … We’d like to get married in London in June but may do it here quietly much sooner in order to get out of this tangle with Bernard and leave things clear and in the open vis-à -vis [John’s] working world. Alexis likes him so that’s fine … I just this second got a letter from Louise—enthusiastic about John and I—what she describes as she and I being “blissfully happy with the same breed of men”!!

  ALLEN ROSENBAUM For John, it was instant devotion. Maxime was all his dreams in one person, why he’d come to New York. She loved the idea of being the wife of a Met curator and that John was such a romantic figure, her Irish shepherd. There was a betrayal of his elegance that came through, almost like

  a peasant thing: He had big hands and feet. It was perfectly apparent to any-one who knew Maxime and John what the cement was, and how it lost its adhesiveness.

  MAXIME DE LA FALAISE I married the Met, and John married an aristocrat … He was fascinated by our whole family. He wanted to be us.

  ALLEN ROSENBAUM Maxime was living with Pfriem when she met John. I saw her in a million moods. She could be extremely cutting. Cruel. I witnessed more than I cared to. There are things I will never forgive her for, the way she treated John at the end … I got very close, but not close enough to get burned. Maxime loved shock, but safe, correct shock. Wearing this, cooking that, just being casually mad and upstaging, using shower-curtain liners as real curtains … It was all done with throwaways: no effort.

  MAXIME DE LA FALAISE Letter to Veronica Milner, December 5, 1966 I desperately want to start my own business—just as Ken Scott and Pucci do making their own fabrics and clothes and acting as consultants for other business concerns …

  Alexis, Loulou, the decorator David Mlinaric, Maxime, John McKendry, Lady Annabel Birley and India Jane Birley on Maxime and John’s wedding day, London, June 1967. © Allen Rosenbaum. Collection Allen Rosenbaum. Courtesy of the holder.

  STEVEN M. L. ARONSON My first impression of Maxime, circa 1970: a soi-disant superior being. She looked intimidating, grimly forbidding—like a female-policeman action figure. I was seated next to her at a dinner party at Bessie de Cuevas’s47 on Central Park West, and she immediately launched into a story that I had trouble following and that I remember ended with a bang: “He did it with a pelmet!” She sat back, waiting for my reaction, her huge, staring eyes boring into me. I had no idea what a pelmet was, and her domineering manner kept me from inquiring. I laughed politely, but I was thinking, This woman is heavy furniture, let me outta here! But then she did a total turnaround and began acting coquettishly, pointing out her husband at the long table and all but eating him up with her eyes. When I mentioned to Andy Warhol, whose name Maxime had been dropping all evening, that I had met her, he said, “She’s kooky—I mean, she’s married to a fairy, so what’s her problem?” A direct quote, by the way.

  JOHN STEFANIDIS Maxime certainly wasn’t as deep as her daughter, but the artistic impulses and manifestations of elegance and preoccupation with fashion came from a certain—it wasn’t superficial. She lived life à la bohê me, not necessarily to her advantage. She could have found some wealthy American gentleman to marry, but she didn’t: She married John McKendry. She wasn’t a sugar daddy–type person. Maxime was very taken with John, and he by her, though they couldn’t have been more different or come from more different worlds.

  JOHN RICHARDSON Maxime was a rebel, a true bohemian. People now are such sheep, but she didn’t give a damn about what was in, in fashion or anything else, living with money and without. She had all sorts of abilities beyond—she could write, decorate, she was a great cook … And she had this son and daughter who were great assets, above all Loulou. Maxime lit up a room … all those clichés … Positive. Much more a lover than a hater. And frivolous, wildly pretentious, feigning to feel deeply and occasionally even morally about things. She didn’t know when she was lying. Her whole life was a chic sham. She wasn’t particularly wellborn. Loulou had an infinitely better character. Maxime was like Rhoda, same Edwardian values.

  There wasn’t a deep side to Maxime: What you saw was what you got. But creatively nothing was beyond her.

  LOULOU My mother always earned her own living, paid her own way. It never was her style to fawn or pay court or change her ideas according to what other people said or did.

  GARY FARMER John told me the minute he met Maxime he decided to marry her. John was a fool for beauty, enamored of the lifestyle Maxime represented and glamour and wonderful clothes and jewels and all those things.

  ASHTON HAWKINS Maxime saw John as someone she could train and make into her own, which she did. I knew him well, through our friend at the Met, another curator, Henry Geldzahler. John and Henry were in the same arena. You felt a light touch with John. Thin and boyish. Flamboyant clothes: the image of the bohemian at that time.

  LADY ANNABEL GOLDSMITH Maxime rang me up and said she’d met this amazing man, and they came to Pelham Cottage for dinner. I was still with Mark. For that matter, I was still married to Mark when I had Ben and Jemima with Jimmy, but let’s not go into those eccentricities. He was odd, McKendry, and made a funny mixture with Maxime, she so domineering and he so weak.

  OLDA FITZGERALD I wondered whether it was a likely thing to work. They were very colorful, but you wouldn’t exactly have thought of John as a virile, paid-up member of the macho male contingent. He was lovely, like an elf.

  CELESTIA FOX He was so much younger than Maxime, by ten years, and probably not the butchest thing in the world.

  CHRISTOPHER GIBBS Maxime came into my life through John, such a sweetheart, up for any nonsense, the most un-showing-off, unpushy, delightful person. We were all rather amazed when he fell for this legendary siren, though it was Alexis and Loulou, too, he fell for, hook, line and sinker. A package deal. He wanted this beautiful, exotic, aristocratic family who could complement him. He was not glamorous himself. They must have seemed—how can I put it, more patrician than anything he’d come across before.

  John and Maxi
me were a convincing couple. They were. They tried hard to love each other. Maxime must have been conscious of John’s youthfulness and that of his gang. As you’re aging and catch a glimpse of your profile in the glass, and it’s not quite what you’d hoped, and the glass is getting mistier but you’ve still got this charming young friend, and so on and so forth … I was always rather maddened by Maxime and her giant posturing vanity. How can I put it? We worshipped different authors. But I loved John always. He was small and had marks of not having had enough to eat as a boy, an almost rickety look, pale and freckled.

  JOHN STEFANIDIS John was rather wide-eyed, telling us how he’d starved as a child in the wheat fields of Canada, which we found difficult to believe. “Why were you starving, John?”

  PATRICIA MORRISROE Everyone I interviewed about John was all-out crazy for him. I remember his father earned something ludicrous, like a dollar a day. He was a gardener.

  MAXIME DE LA FALAISE Fantastic man, John’s father. The first time I visited him, before I even dropped my bags, he said to me, “What do you think about the working conditions in Russia?”

  ALLEN ROSENBAUM John and I go back to 1959, ’60. He had gone to the University of Alberta, and we were in graduate school together at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU. John came from a dirt-poor Irish immigrant family in Canada. He had five siblings and they slept three to a bed. There was some theory that as a child he’d had hepatitis that went undetected and so he had a scarred liver.