ALYNE DE BROGLIE Walking out on this handsome aristocrat with a château, it proves Loulou wasn’t a snob.
SUSAN GUTFREUND The knight and I had many wonderful times together and never discussed Loulou once in thirty years. Never mentioned her. Desmond often stayed with me, so it would have been normal for him to say, if they were that friendly, “Oh, have you seen Loulou recently?” She was an ex-wife—it wasn’t my place to bring her up. So to say they were friends just seems odd to me.
NICKY SAMUEL Donald was a Scotsman, unbelievably good-looking—women flopped at his door. I suppose you’d call him a sexual deviant. He liked kinky sex. Sexually, he was very exciting, and maybe that’s what Loulou found in him, as well as me. If you watch Performance, that explains Donald in a nutshell: It’s almost autobiographical. He liked to do it with several young girls at once. That was the deal—and my reason for not moving in with him.
CELESTIA FOX I introduced Louise and Donald. He saw himself as a profoundly dangerous character, deeply decadent and evil. He took his sexual appetites very seriously. Extremely wild stuff. I was terrified but also fascinated!
BARBARA STEELE He had these little demonic teeth, these little fangs… You half-expected him to have a little tail. He was like a Pan creature.
WILLY LANDELS I couldn’t bear him but was good friends to his brother, David, a producer of Performance who became the agent of Helmut Newton. Donald was a talented filmmaker, but there was something threatening and ruthless about him.
Donald Cammell, whose priapism got him into a lot of trouble, and Deborah Dixon, photographed by Frank Horvat, early sixties. Cammell tried unsuccessfully to cast Loulou in Performance, his 1970 film starring Mick Jagger. Dixon worked on the costumes, and on the sets with Chrissie Gibbs. © Frank Horvat. Reproduced from Donald Cammell: A Life on the Wild Side, by Rebecca and Sam Umland (FAB Press, 2006).
ANITA PALLENBERG Donald didn’t have a high opinion of women… I met him in the early sixties … I was modeling in Paris and I think I met his girlfriend first, Deborah, on a job … We did go on holidays together … like on Saturday night after clubbing drive down to Saint-Tropez … [Donald] wanted to partake of every woman… Women did not resist. Women were willing.
PATRICK BAUCHAU Deborah was making pots of money in those days. She was a top model. She befriended girls in unusual ways.
CHRISTOPHER GIBBS Oh dear. Ugh. For Christ’s sake. God. Did she really? Loulou? With Donald Cammell? How interesting. I had no idea. I’m horrified. She was so young, and he such a seasoned philanderer. He’s hard to be fond of, Donald, so willful, and attractive, and vain, and rotten. He preyed on women. He liked having a stable of girls getting off with each other and him being part of it. He’d been with Deborah Dixon for many years when Loulou met him. Deborah was from Dallas, like Fred Hughes;51 as children they took dancing classes together. Deborah and I worked as a team on Performance, doing the sets. She’s now Deborah Roberts, married to Anthony Roberts, an English writer. She loved Loulou, certainly.
DAVID CAMMELL James Fox plays a gangster in Performance, hiding out in the house of a washed-up rock star—Mick—who’s got these two birds, Pherber—Anita—and Lucy. Mia Farrow was to play Lucy, but she broke her ankle and the role went to Michèle Breton.
When I came out of the army, I went to Cambridge. Jacqui Chan, the actress, was my girlfriend. She’d been with Tony Armstrong-Jones, and as the biggest story in the world was his imminent marriage to Princess Margaret, I was molested by the press, who even found their way into my bedroom. I was invited to the wedding but had to leave the country to escape pursuit. Jacqui and I lived in Battersea with another actress, Edwina Carroll, who was romantically involved with Marlon Brando and Bob Marley. Visits from Jacqui’s friend Loulou, at loose ends after dumping the knight, turned into sleepovers. One day the doorbell rang, and accompanied by her father was a friend of Edwina’s, a pretty young lady with a smart, battered Louis Vuitton suitcase: Grace Coddington. Grace moved in and spent her time weeping gently, waiting for the telephone to ring: She was in love with the very married photographer John Cowan.
Tony Armstrong-Jones had photographed Donald in his studio. Before becoming a filmmaker, Donald had been a well-thought-of portrait painter, classically trained. He studied at the Royal Academy of Arts and with Pietro Annigoni in Florence—Annigoni did the famous portrait of a young Elizabeth II in Garter robes. Donald was only nineteen in 1953 when The Times named his painting of Sheridan, Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, dressed as a page for the coronation, society portrait of the year.
MICK JAGGER I went to someone’s house in the country once and I saw some picture of the guy whose house it was and I looked at the bottom and it said, “Donald Cammell nineteen-fifty-something” … I said, “It can’t be,” and I asked around, and it was … He had a tremendous melancholy … this dynamic which was both dark and distraught and very magnetic and seductive … He was very erudite, very educated. He was very interested in the mysteries of life, hinging on the kind of spiritual. He was very, very sensual, yet he had a kind of ascetic quality … He purposely threw his spell on … women—innocent some and not so innocent others.
SAM UMLAND Donald’s father was Scotland’s unofficial poet laureate. He’d lost the family shipbuilding fortune by the time Donald was born in 1934. Donald may have been molested as a boy at boarding school. He left his first wife, a Greek beauty queen, because she became pregnant and he absolutely did not want to be a father. Painting Eartha Kitt’s portrait led to an affair; later he was involved with Patti d’Arbanville, 52 International Velvet, possibly Faye Dunaway and Jacqueline Bisset. Donald reduced Mick to tears on the set, but I always thought Donald saying they’d slept together was just a keen bit of promotion. Donald was treated for hepatitis around the time of Performance. I assume he contracted it sexually. There was always the constant fear he might kill himself. He disappeared once at a cocktail party in a fancy New York apartment, there was a search, all these people frantically looking for this guy they thought was about to commit suicide. They found him in a side room with another guest, a society matron in pearls, on her knees, giving him a blow job. Donald suffered from priapism, which partially explains all the fucking: He was always trying to lose his erection.
Donald’s second wife was China Kong, the daughter of Marlon Brando’s mistress, Anita Loo. Cammell and China met in 1971. She was twelve and he was thirty-eight. Some people I interviewed for my book on Donald said they were having sex when she was as young as thirteen. She was definitely underage. Brando was so outraged he tried, unsuccessfully, to have Donald deported. China and Donald married in ’78.
Before Performance, he’d done a treatment of The Touchables. Four women kidnap a rock star and have their way with him sexually. Swinging London cheese. Donald worked on an adaptation of the Georges Bataille novel Story of the Eye and did some editing on the Stones documentary Gimme Shelter. Anita Pallenberg had an abortion to do Performance—it’s why Keith Richards hates Donald Cammell’s guts. He went on to make Demon Seed—Julie Christie is raped and impregnated by a computer. Brooke Shields was twelve when she began filming Tilt, about a pinball champion. No cut of Wild Side includes the scene where Christopher Walken tells Steven Bauer to bend over—Donald wanted him to howl in pain, as if he was actually being penetrated.
CHINA MACHADO Donald was the kind of guy who would fuck the producer’s wife, and then wonder why the film wasn’t made.
DREW HAMMOND Everyone who knew Donald very well understood that he suffered or perhaps was the beneficiary of what the jargon calls “dissociative personality.” There were many times when Donald attended meetings with a gun at his side … He often carried a little bag, and what the producers didn’t realize was that there was a Glock 17 … I was surprised myself that he didn’t use it in certain dealings …
KENNETH ANGER Death seemed like a friend to him … He always said that he would kill himself, from the age of seven.
————————
Vogue documented the picnic with a wistful portrait of Maxime, Loulou and Alexis in cotton shirts and ties “in the fresh, clear as a Maine breeze prints D.D. and Leslie Tillett are famous for,” sold at Portmanteau. Seed money for the shop was supplied by Jacqueline Onassis, who imported the Tilletts and the decorator Billy Baldwin to exert what influence they could on the villa she and her husband, Aristotle, were building on Scorpios. Shaded by a beribboned tulle parasol, Loulou appears on the same page in Vogue in a white eyelet frock with leg-o’-mutton sleeves the magazine said had been “found at the antique dress fanciers’ heaven,” Harriet Love.
MAXIME DE LA FALAISE “Vogue’s Food Gazette,” Vogue, July 1970 A happy picnic needs some privacy. Spear the ground with sharpened bamboo poles and … drape a fragile wall of color with calico or quilts. Tie dried flowers to the poles … lay Arabian rugs … Baskets and wine can be gypsy-wrapped with cotton kerchiefs. No dips for the raw vegetables.
SETH TILLETT I delivered fabric for my parents as a boy. “Go to 1040 Fifth and give this bolt to Mrs. Onassis.” If it was Bunny Mellon, there’d be a guard with a pistol, and she’d come down to give me fruit or cakes. Maxime was like Cruella de Vil. She’d just open the door and say, “Thank you, darling,” and take the bolt. I was always afraid she’d draw me in and I’d never come out.
GERARD MALANGA I’d met Loulou before with Andy at a party at François de Menil’s54—she must’ve been fifteen—and then later at John and Maxime’s, at their first apartment on Jane Street and Eighth Avenue. There was a picture of a stunning girl on the mantel. “Who’s that?” “Oh, that’s my daughter. She recently got married.” I was enchanted, never thinking I’d see her again, and now here we were at this picnic. I shot some footage of Loulou that day for what became Pre-Raphaelite Dream—two screens, split projection.
Loulou took a shine to me immediately. I was really decked out, leather trousers, my hair long—I was just at my best. We went out after to Salvation, a disco on Sheridan Square. She never went home that night. We had this whirlwind two-week bohemian romance, glued together, while still continuing to shoot. Pre-Raphaelite Dream had no dialogue or plot, I just followed people around with my camera, like the poets John Wieners and Rene Ricard. It’s almost fifty-eight minutes long, 16-mm notebook footage, like a diary.
Loulou was lurched out of my life when Nicolas Roeg called her to come to London to audition for Performance, okay? Nicolas was codirector with Donald Cammell and had just finished Far from the Madding Crowd. Loulou tested for Lucy. I always thought of her as the personification of Alice in Wonderland. I’m a poet. I wrote a whole book of poems to her, they’re in my archives at Yale.
PORTRAIT OF LOULOU
Good weather on dirty streets of New York City
in late afternoon
sunlight LouLou is not without grace,
clouds over her head
At night my heart sinks
at the thought of what’s going to happen
a week from now, a few months perhaps
Today could even be your birthday
We meet each other
in dreams “Dove Lace”
I wake up I see your hands in the dark
We meet each other in history
Beatrice Portinari, Laure de Noves, Giovanna
without family name now lost in the wind
The love that goes
on unrequited or leads to a short-cut to death
I live with the thought of this in my head,
this open space in the sunlight
falling on you on a hillside
Your posture in the seacoast wind
It’s almost dinner time
Will we move into the indecipherable locations
which could alter our memory and feelings?
Is a story on film a trick of the eye?
You’ve become central to everything poetic.
Your spirit is revealed on film in its total exposure
to daylight but here the “tail-end” changes color
and fades out. My eyes branching out in the eye
cup view-finder.
An album stacked with wedding photos disappears
A young girl waits on the grass in the sunlight
for someone to come. We sit on a blanket. Someone is taking
our photo.
29:iv:68 nyc
DEBORAH ROBERTS I tried to watch Performance recently, but couldn’t—too violent. I’m credited as costume consultant. Donald was seeing Loulou and looking for someone to play Pherber. But Loulou skipped town and went flailing around Morocco, writing him this sweet long letter, apologizing for not saying she was leaving but how she was too unusual for Hollywood. It was full of her crazy daredevil behavior … a fling she’d had with Brian Jones in Tangier. He’d thrown her out. She was literally on the street with her suitcase and nowhere to go.
Like so many people, Loulou came in with the tide in Tangier, there that summer of ’68 when the Rolling Stones founder made his historic recordings of folk musicians in the Rif Mountains, what would become Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Jajouka. He was on an accelerated and irreversible downward spiral, broken, having trouble getting it up, deserted by Anita Pallenberg, who had moved on to Keith Richards, and on his way to being airbrushed out of the Stones. Jones was staying at the Minzah hotel with his girlfriend Suki Potier, who modeled for Ossie Clark. One morning, he suddenly blacked out, having had an industrial quantity of hashish the night before. “Fuck him,” said Potier. “This happens all the time.” Loulou entered the scene just before or just after an incident that involved a broken mirror, Potier threatening to slash her wrists, and an ambulance. Jones drowned at home in his swimming pool the following summer. Mick was working and missed the funeral. He sent a wreath.
DEBORAH ROBERTS Finally, Donald settled on Tuesday Weld for the part of Pherber. I didn’t do it on purpose, but before filming I cracked her back, and she somersaulted over me, breaking her ankle. I took her to the airport in a wheelchair. She wasn’t pleased. That’s how Anita got the role. I do think Loulou would have been too eccentric. Already Anita was a bridge too far, but at least she’d been in movies.
GERARD MALANGA Had Loulou been cast—we’re talking about five degrees of separation here, because Anita had a son, Marlon, with Keith Richards, and Marlon winds up marrying Lucie, Alexis’s daughter—Loulou’s niece!
51 Fred Hughes (1943–2001), Andy Warhol’s business manager.
52 Actress who has worked regularly in film and television since her 1968 debut in Warhol’s Flesh.
53 Caresse Crosby (1891–1970), New York–born patron of American expatriate writers in Paris.
54 Architect brother of Maxime’s friend Christophe.
9
Hippie de Luxe Londonienne
THADÉE KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA There was the ritual of Sunday afternoons in [Fernando Sanchez’s Paris] apartment on the place de Furstenberg, tea, cakes, music from New York, joints, crazy laughter and that Sunday in the fall of ’68 when [Fernando] so proudly introduced us to Loulou. She was 21. Escaped from her Irish husband … she’d been in Tangiers with Brian Jones, nearly drowning in a swamp of drugs … [Fernando] saved her …
YVES She was one of those rich hippies from London, very Pre-Raphaelite with long frizzy hair.
FERNANDO SANCHEZ Violet velvet trousers, a wreath of flowers on her head—that was Loulou … like a fairy out of an Irish storybook … Her excesses reeled me in … [She] may be the last of the disturbing women … [the way] Marlene Dietrich is disturbing.
LOULOU Well, somebody had said, “I have this great friend in Paris, you must look him up,” so I went to this man’s house and just moved in with
all my suitcases. He is now a great friend of mine, Fernando Sanchez, the lingerie designer. He is a real bachelor with his own habits, and to be suddenly invaded like that … But he was quite charmed, and he was the one who said, “I must introduce you to Yves and Pierre.” I gathered he meant Yves Saint Laurent—and I imagined Yves was living with Pierre Cardin! I had worked for Harpers & Queen as a junior editor in London, but we had never covered French fashion—too stuffy, we thought. … In England, we didn’t have the cult of the couturier like here … I’d never lived in Paris … I was completely ignorant about French couture. I knew that Yves Saint Laurent was well-known, but I wasn’t as impressed as all that … I had come straight from London, so I was all sort of London ’60s-ish, the new thing … I wore ultra-short skirts or Ossie Clark floral mousseline dresses with Saint Laurent Rive Gauche boots, trè s joli … In Paris they were amazed, they used to stop in the streets; they’d never seen anything like it … Nobody spoke English. The women wore kilts. I was taken for a Zulu … [Yves] thought it was divine, and he saw that I was someone who changed, who announced fashions …
“Lulu de la Falaise at the Cerruti show wearing YSL’s Liberty wool kilt with black cardigan and art deco scarf and pin, topped by a red leather ‘halo’ headband.” Women’s Wear Daily, January 27, 1970. Drawing by Kenneth Paul Block. Photograph copyright © 2018 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
When I tell this story, people can’t believe there were tea parties back then … It was all so French, I couldn’t believe it. En plus, I may have been bilingual, but I had lost the rhythm, I had the vocabulary of a ten-year-old. I had lived through all these hippie years where mental effort was nil, and suddenly I met these people who were very brilliant and clever; I couldn’t understand a word of what they were saying. Thadée was my ally; well, he’s very shy, it’s not that we used to talk that much, but he was my brother across the room … we were both the same sort of animal.
Loulou & Yves Page 11