Loulou & Yves

  NICKY SAMUEL Basically, John had serious cirrhosis, a lot of it caused by the poor diet he was brought up on and, you know, the later sort of rich living and stuff. He had a very delicate composition. You have only to look at photographs of him to know.

  ANDREA STILLMAN John came from so far out in Calgary it was like the Wild West. It really was a case of the small-town boy coming to the city and being blinded by the lights.

  JANE ORMSBY GORE John’s parents moved from Northern Ireland to Calgary and with all these children had to live in, um, one room. His teacher—or was it his priest?—was infatuated by John and arranged for him to go to a special school, not because he had dyslexia or anything, but because he found him such an interesting character and was obviously in love with him.

  GARY FARMER John delivered groceries to earn money to go to college and would prop open the latest Vogue in his bicycle basket and read it while he did his route, fantasizing about the rich and famous, the glamorous and fashionable in New York.

  ALLEN ROSENBAUM John arrived with fantasies out of magazines and lived with a man named Jim. Jim’s still alive and married and sensitive about people knowing. John wanted to meet Peggy Guggenheim. The closest he got was Iris Love.48 John went out with Iris, a kind of sadist who ran him ragged. We were all afraid of her. John joined the Met prints department as assistant curator in 1962, working his way up to associate curator in charge when he married Maxime at the Chelsea Registry Office. She was beautiful, I must say. John became this weird sort of dandy.

  CHRISTOPHER GIBBS The wedding party in the lovely garden at Pelham Cottage was a collision of the wild young of John’s set and the wild not-so-young of Maxime’s, beauties of yesteryear, a collision of people who doped and people who drank. John did both with his tongue out. He used to come to London on shopping trips for the museum and loved going on jaunts to obscure libraries and houses and knew all sorts of old collectors and scholars. He was terribly perceptive about art, laying out information in a gentle, sharing way. When talking to him, you thought you knew a lot, too.

  ALLEN ROSENBAUM Hyatt Mayor retired as head of prints in 1968 and chose John to succeed him. Mayor may have been in love with John and, later, questioned promoting him. The department had always collected photographs, but the name wasn’t changed to prints and photographs until 1970, making John the museum’s first curator of photographs. These were the Hoving years. Tom could be foul. “I’m the one who’s going to get my ass reamed out over this”—that was the mood. He always made me feel like my fly was open.

  John had basically taken Maxime away from Bernard Pfriem, that was the sequence. In the beginning, Maxime’s crowd wasn’t wild about John, nor his about her. But you learn to like the person your friend is with, if you don’t want to lose your friend. Maxime and I had a curious relationship. You remember the bad things more easily than the good, but she was generous, always including me. They lived at 190 Riverside Drive. I was a block away on Ninety-second Street.

  MAXIME DE LA FALAISE I’ve always lived in funny places. I’m happier in neighborhoods that aren’t really the place to live. In New York, I’m three blocks away from Ninety-fourth Street—it’s the sort of street where black pimps pimp for second-class drag queens. There are drunks and the OTB. I don’t think we have a methadone clinic though. I was always just staying with someone most of my life. I never really felt somewhat settled until I married John … I like the idea of living in a tent. There’s nothing of value in this place that can’t be packed in a matter of minutes.

  MARTINE DE LA FALAISE After Maxime remarried, she continued to use La Falaise. The family had a good laugh over that. If tomorrow I marry M. Dupont, I can’t call myself “Martine de La Falaise Dupont.” C’est pas possible! But I saw Maxime’s carte de visite. It read “Maxime de La Falaise McKendry.” There were more opportunities for her with that name.

  JOHN STEFANIDIS Maxime’s title wasn’t in the least important to her. People imagined her father was some grand courtier, but she’d deflate them, explaining that he was first and foremost a tradesman, no better than a plumber. Maxime didn’t have an ounce of snobbery.

  JANE ORMSBY GORE Originally, I thought that John’s marrying Maxime was wonderful for him. He’d known dire poverty, having to clear out of the house in all weather when his epileptic mother had a fit. Then suddenly he was in palaces with Maxime.

  JOHN MCKENDRY In northwestern Canada, it’s like Siberia. Anyway, I was telling [my father] about all the aspects of my job, you know, mentioning here and there the lunches with rather well-known rich people, and when I finished my father looked at me and said, “You’re just a plaything of the rich.” There were two photos on [his] living room wall: one of Stalin and the other of the pope. My father believes in Labour and the Catholic Church. I believe in neither. I believe in the very rich.

  ALLEN ROSENBAUM Suddenly, John was at Drue Heinz’s49 for dinner, at Diana Vreeland’s for tea, staying with Henry McIlhenny50 at Glenveagh Castle in Ireland … The first time I had reine de Saba was at Henry’s in Philadelphia, and the discussion would be, “Where is everyone getting their boys from these days?” I think Australia was out, it was no longer the place … When Jackie Onassis was working as an editor at Viking, John loved the Veau d’Or because that’s where she had lunch every day. If I was discouraging about something he wanted to do, he’d say, “Why shouldn’t I? All my other dreams have come true. If you were in a play, Allen, you’d be dead in the next act.” And it’s true, most of his dreams did come true. His life was better than fiction. There was a whole world of fad-ridden jeunesse d’oré e John worshipped in London revolving around the Ormsby Gore girls. He was thrilled to be taken into this crowd that was wellborn except for a peppering of young working-class entrepreneurial types like Michael Rainey, riding the crest of Carnaby Street. They flirted with macrobiotic diets and loaded themselves into gypsy caravans to look for the Holy Grail in Glastonbury and ended up sheep farmers. Alexis was going to Bard and working as a private chef, then became one of the caravan kids.

  JANE ORMSBY GORE Not that John wasn’t totally sortable, but it was a fairy tale he was living. I used to say, “You must’ve dreamed one day you’d have dinner at the Metropolitan, surrounded by masterpieces, because you get what you dream for.”

  ANDREA STILLMAN My sister and I had summer jobs at Vogue, but now we needed to earn real money. I applied for the position of John’s secretary after it had been offered to my sister and she didn’t take it. “Why are you here again?” they asked me at the interview. “We don’t understand. We wanted to hire you, but you turned us down.” My sister and I are twins.

  The miracle is that someone from Calgary cowboy country wound up at the Met. As a curator, John had an intuitive sense of what was rare and exquisite. He bought a Pollaiolo, one of the most important engravings of the early Renaissance. John recognized a masterpiece worthy of the Met and could convince the trustees to acquire it. Diana Vreeland was getting the Costume Institute off the ground, so John was part of that, too, through Maxime. He was a man of real appetites, for the best and most famous. But he didn’t have an opportunistic bone in his body. He wanted to please so badly. He had no self-confidence, no moral compass. He may have wanted to be a Falaise, but he wasn’t venal. His relationship with Maxime was a bit like a mother-son relationship. She took care of him, in a manner of speaking.

  Now and then John would say, “Come with me, Andrea, today we’re going to do something fun,” like go to Southampton to see Tanya Grossman. She published Rauschenberg, Rivers, and did Motherwell’s A la pintura with John. If Jim Dine was there, we’d have lunch together. John would come into the office obviously high on something and say in a calm, breathy voice, “Come, Andrea, let’s just walk through the Impressionist galleries.” “But John, the entire crew has been here all day waiting for you so they could hang the Paul Strand show opening next week and they’ve left in a snit because it’s four-thirty.” “Oh, Andrea, forget all that…” And he took my arm
and we strolled through the galleries.

  After the Met, I worked as Ansel Adams’s assistant. When John walked in the door in the morning, it was like Ansel coming out of the darkroom: The sun shone. Protean joyfulness. The museum was still pretty darn conservative then. John was larger than life. He stuck out. All the other curators were old and gray, deans of their fields. John didn’t publish the scholarly articles expected of him, and he didn’t do any definitive photography shows. Strand sent his in crates as a packaged exhibit. That’s not curating. The Man Ray and Imogen Cunningham shows came ready to hang or were done by other people.

  ASHTON HAWKINS Maxime was helpful to John in his job, producing a solid social life, quite brilliant in the way she mixed people up. She knew people in Paris nobody in New York knew, they came here and she was their connection. I met David, Ambassador Bruce, at one of Maxime’s Saturday lunches. It seemed clear she and David were having a little something.

  John was a bit wacky. Quite a lot of it was drugs, but the craziness was built in, too. Curators are allowed to be different. Henry Geldzahler had broken the ice at the Met. The culture of the museum under Hoving allowed for an eccentric like John. He and Henry did coke in John’s office, but then people did coke right in the galleries at the opening of Henry’s “New York Painting and Sculpture” exhibit, slumping to the floor.

  ANDREA STILLMAN John had a titled English friend who was always waiting for him at the Stanhope with cocaine. “I’ve just got to dash across the street.” Then he’d come back really happy. If John was in debt to his dealer, I knew nothing about it. Oh my goodness, no. He treated me like a deb.

  GARY FARMER Allen Rosenbaum, my then-boyfriend, got me a job with John. He’d had liver failure before I knew him and episodes of bizarre behavior; now he was acting bizarrely again. He had this sort of chemical imbalance and was given some kind of drug to level out his behavior that he didn’t like because it made him feel boring. He told me that when he’d been convalescing before, Maxime would push him in a wheelchair in Riverside Park, and he was always terrified she was going to let him go from the top of the hill. I’m not trying to massacre Maxime. I hope this doesn’t come out sounding bad.

  MAXIME DE LA FALAISE [John] was very musical, rather fey, but halfway through the marriage he started to get iller and iller. We had five good years and five pretty terrible years.

  47 Sculptor daughter of the Marquis de Cuevas, the ballet impresario, and a great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller.

  48 Socialite archaeologist whose great-great-uncle was the industrialist and art collector Solomon Guggenheim; Peggy Guggenheim was his niece.

  49 Ketchup heiress and Paris Review publisher who, through her marriage to H. J. Heinz II, became the stepmother-in-law of Teresa Heinz, wife of former Secretary of State John Kerry.

  50 Henry McIlhenny (1910–1986), chairman of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

  8

  Donald Cammell, Sex Addict

  JANE ORMSBY GORE The first time I saw Loulou at the knight’s, I remember thinking, What a funny choice for her to be marrying him. I don’t think she knew how rigid, “dinner-at-eight-and-you’ll-be-seated-there” he was. Loulou didn’t know how to run an enormous old-fashioned Irish country house—she was nineteen! At Glin, as the Madam, she was expected to order the food, do the placement, which of course her mother knew, but she hadn’t been brought up by her mother. Maxime was so appallingly selfish. “Am I beautiful?” “Do people love me?” “Am I sufficiently admired?”

  LOULOU [Desmond] had a huge property without a penny. Americans came for the day. My husband gave talks. I went crazy … I used to walk along the battlements and scream into the night.

  CHRISTOPHER GIBBS Desmond longed for a creative partner at Glin orga-

  nizing life and making magic. I can understand Loulou’s not enjoying it.

  HAMISH BOWLES In great haste, almost divining the marriage wouldn’t last, Vogue sent Beaton to Pont Street to do their portrait.

  ANDRé LEON TALLEY I love that picture, they look so alienated from each other and she’s—what is she? Marchioness of Glin?—sitting there folded over in a little crêpe dress, the beautiful bored English aristocrat. You can tell she’s miserable. She had to have tea every afternoon with those dreadful people, probably very xenophobic, and she was looking for the big life. She got the big life.

  Maxime always said Loulou had more affinity with the tinkers anyway, weekends with Desmond at the Bismarcks on Capri and at Longleat in Wiltshire with the Marquess of Bath notwithstanding. To relieve the boredom at Glin, Loulou involved herself in a cottage industry, knitwear produced in the stables of a nearby stately home on hand looms operated by local farm ladies and sold at Bonwit Teller and Henri Bendel in New York. The company was called Holly Park, after the estate, and Desmond was director. It got a big boost in 1967 when Jacqueline Kennedy toured Ireland, visiting the Guinnesses at Leixlip and returning with quite a few Holly Park things. The Milners, Desmond’s mother and stepfather, Ray, were encouraged.

  CELESTIA FOX Everyone at Queen knew Loulou was deeply talented. Her clothes were famous in London. She wore vintage before anyone. Then one day she just stopped coming to work. She left Queen, she left Desmond, and went off with another man. Literally, just like that. I only saw her once after, more than thirty-five years later, in 2004, at Victoria Waymouth’s funeral.

  ————————

  NICKY SAMUEL Funnily enough, Loulou and I both left our first husbands for the same man: Donald Cammell. I left Nigel Waymouth. As you know, Donald directed Performance, with Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg, Keith Richards’s girlfriend.

  JANE ORMSBY GORE Everybody was in love with Donald Cammell because he was the best fuck, apparently. Everyone left everyone for him.

  JOHN STEFANIDIS Loulou simply couldn’t face being married to this rather crusty curator. The way she handled the breakup was typical of her: You know—bang!—she just went. She was very elegant about it. No upsets, no recriminations.

  DESMOND FITZGERALD It was a singularly curious marriage. When it fizzled out, it did so with an amiable lack of rancor. We are on very good terms.

  RAY MILNER Letter to Desmond FitzGerald, May 15, 1968 I did not intend … to give the impression that [your mother and I] disliked Louise. We both found her interesting and attractive. Your mother however remarked to me more than once that there seemed to be a barrier which she could not cross … I often wondered about Louise’s inability to look directly at a person and thought there was something about her eyes. Also, her inclination to overdress or underdress in order to be conspicuous was hardly encouraging. Now falling out of love with you after a year and a half and developing a passion for some nonentity confirms our view that married life is not her vocation. My own view is that she is utterly selfish, self-centered and not very intelligent.

  I think you should consider that your marriage has been a complete failure.

  We are not suggesting that you should persecute the child or make things unduly difficult for her. Quite the reverse. If I had any confidence in her mental stability I would suggest that a divorce should be arranged under which she would be the plaintiff. That however seems to me out of the question. She is entirely too mercurial and her word, either written or spoken cannot be relied on. Consequently, I can see nothing you can do but to bring divorce proceedings against her at the earliest possible date … If she were mature of course consideration should be given to the possibility of a reconciliation but that, under all the circumstances would be utterly preposterous …

  I do not like the idea of putting detectives on her trail, nor do I think that would be necessary …

  LOULOU Desmond and I parted friends, and we parted very pleasantly … London life was fun, but you know, all those little dinner parties and everybody cooks. They all thought I was such a wonderful cook. In fact, I had no idea how to cook anything. I used to put cocoa in all my dishes … At the beginning, it was quite fun, but then I thought, This is not m
y life, I can’t do this forever … I suddenly found myself landed with the job of being hostess and I didn’t like it … I’m not the homey type. I hate sitting in one spot. I love airplanes taking off and landing … Everything of value that one has should be portable … I never really saw my marriage as being forever, I must say … Then I had a scandalous love affair. With … somebody … with a man called Donald Campbell [sic]. I thought it very inelegant to move into someone else’s flat and instead I went to New York.

  DAVID MLINARIC I was terribly impressed by the fact that Loulou asked for nothing when she left. She took an incredibly straightforward view: “I’ve made a terrible mistake.” It’s interesting, because the divorcées at the time who demanded half or whatever it was didn’t get back on their feet anything like as quickly as the two society girls I knew—Loulou and Arabella von Westenholz—who took nothing. Desmond had an English upper-class way of not showing how he felt. I was one of his best friends and he never talked about Loulou’s leaving. He carried on regardless, very courageous.

  MARIANNE FAITHFULL The last thing Loulou wanted was to be stuck in a castle in Ireland with Desmond FitzGerald. He needed a completely different wife, and he found her in Olda, who worshipped him.

  OLDA FITZGERALD Loulou left behind all her clothes in Desmond’s flat, beautiful Moroccan and Far Eastern things. I can quite understand Glin seeming deadly. It’s an isolated, lonely place. You had to be pretty devoted, which indeed I was. So I couldn’t agree more with her. Desmond said she’d go to the top of our daffodil hill and just scream like it was all too much. They were stars in different firmaments. Loulou was really, really interested in clothes, and Desmond was really, really interested in Irish furniture. He had a year of being miserable, but Loulou’s grand gesture of going to live in New York was wonderful for me, because my relationship with Desmond began and there was no friction. She behaved in the most gentlemanly way.