Loulou & Yves

by Christopher Petkanas

  ROBERT COLACIELLO [sic] “It’s a Family Affair: The McKendry–de La Falaise Clan,” Interview, March 1973

  JOHN [Mc KENDRY] I never think about fashion.

  LULU You think about it the whole time.

  MAXIME You live for fashion.

  JOHN No, I think about clothes. I see a pretty shirt and I want it.

  MAXIME And you get it.

  JOHN I try to get it, either by buying it or getting someone to buy it for me. But fashion, who cares?

  MAXIME Trashion? …

  JOHN My assistant’s mother knows more about the press coverage the family gets than we do.

  MAXIME She clips us! I never clip myself.

  ROBERT COLACIELLO But publicity can be important.

  LULU Yes, very important.

  MAXIME Oh, I love to read myself.

  JOHN … But bringing out last year’s clippings, how embarrassing.

  PATRICIA MORRISROE The dynamics of the Falaise family were so incredibly rich and nutty. They were like an aristocratic version of the Royal Tenenbaums, with Loulou as the fashion fairy-tale princess.

  JOHN MCKENDRY Alain once said to me, “These children are impossible. If you gave either one of them $100 and it was supposed to last for a week, they would spend it all on a scarf that costs $99, as if it were nothing special, never thinking about the twenty-one meals to be eaten.” … [Alain] treats me like one of the children, rather than putting any responsibility on me. He calls Loulou, Alexis and me, “les enfants.” He accepts everything. Tolerance isn’t the word, it’s worldliness.

  MAXIME DE LA FALAISE He’s been through every scene you can imagine. And he’s saved me from so many disastrous love affairs.

  ANDREA STILLMAN John was so proud of those kids, and of Maxime. He was starstruck. Obviously, he was never going to have children of his own. Alexis was star-spangled beautiful. He made Loulou look like nothing.

  LAURENCE BENAÏM The brother was good-looking, mostly. Not very talented.

  RICARDO BOFILL Alexis wasn’t made to work. Loulou tried to help him, but … She was almost his father.

  ALLEN ROSENBAUM He was the beauty in the family, and the only sweet one. I cannot impress upon you enough how gentle and sweet he was. Alexis had flirted with the movies, playing a minor role in a Robert Bresson film. He was not aggressive. Perhaps a certain earnestness. Loulou was very protective. I had enormous affection for him.

  John had desirous feelings for his brothers and sisters when he was growing up, he told me that. Now that he’d married Maxime, the nastiest voices were saying that he was just in love with the children. And he was. There was an erotic interest in both of them, though obviously Alexis would have been the more, you know … But there was nothing dangerous or overt. I promise, no sort of—my God—incestuous—no. Yes, I’m sure John would’ve been thrilled to have an affair with Alexis, but that doesn’t mean it was in the air. He just wanted to play with them, not in the sense of fondling, but to feel embraced as someone who’d made the grade. He kept pace. John’s greatest aphrodisiac was glamour. Loulou was glamour. I thought she and Alexis were fond of John, though who knows who Loulou was really fond of. I always felt she had the blood temperature of a reptile.

  DAVID CROLAND John was like a woodland creature. I was certainly aware of his feelings for Alexis. I understood what it was like to be tall and exquisite and look eighteen when you’re really fifteen, because that was me, too. There was something not quite right about all four of them living together. Alexis escaped.

  CHRISTOPHER GIBBS Certainly John loved Alexis, both delicate souls. But Alexis didn’t have much gay in him, as far as I know. John did have that capacity for falling in love with men and women. I just don’t see anything coarse in it. He was a very amorous being.

  GARY FARMER John fantasized about both kids. He loved having people think there was an incestuous relationship going on. But it was just a decadent fantasy, as far as I’m aware.

  PATRICIA MORRISROE I didn’t meet Maxime until the late eighties—I was writing the biography of Robert Mapplethorpe, and she’d invited me to lunch. I thought, Is this woman gay? Maxime was a gold mine of information, fantastic memory, very forthcoming, happy to say whatever popped into her head, talking a mile a minute while whipping up a whole fish stuffed with blood oranges. She was still beautiful, not dissolute. She had the bob and all the rings, but at the same time she could have been an Irish washerwoman. Such big hands, and quite big herself. Maybe not as busy as she used to be. A bit desperate for company. At a low financially. She was writing about her mother, whose voice she said made her ill, literally. Maxime hated Rhoda, that came across very clearly. And one got the impression she wasn’t very interested in Loulou.

  Maxime wasn’t drinking. It wasn’t as if we’d had several bottles of wine and she let John’s feelings for her son just slip out. She volunteered it. I didn’t even know she had a son. She knew what was happening when it happened. Other people mentioned it. It was fairly well-known.

  “It’s a Family Affair” (continued):

  JOHN You haven’t asked us the most interesting question of all. What we think about incest.

  ROBERT COLACIELLO Okay, what do you think about incest?

  MAXIME Well, the people in one’s own house are most like oneself, so one is bound to find them more attractive than outsiders.

  LULU No, I find outsiders more attractive.

  MAXIME You do?

  LULU I mean, I love being cozy with my family, like dogs in a basket.

  MAXIME I’m not saying I feel sexual about my family, it’s just that I can understand the feelings of incest. They don’t shock me.

  LULU Oh, no, it’s not shocking. I would like to be attracted to Alexis for sex, but I’m just not. I’ve spent too many years sleeping in the same bed with him, kicking and snoring. I mean that really turns you off.

  Well, John proposed the question, so let’s hear from him.

  MAXIME John’s very incestuous.

  JOHN Yes, I’m incestuous.

  LULU No, it’s not incestuous because you’re not a blood relation.

  JOHN But people consider it incest.

  But biologically it’s not incest. And that’s the main taboo against incest, the genetic thing.

  JOHN That’s a bunch of nonsense, I really believe that’s a myth. It’s like when they tell children that if they masturbate too much they’ll go crazy.

  LULU No, interbreeding does result in very strange people. The Rothschilds are very strange.

  So were the Romanovs.

  JOHN I’m interbred.

  MAXIME You’re very strange.

  JOHN The way I look is partly because where I came from my cousins kept marrying cousins. I think it does make you very extreme. But I think the taboo comes from a fear of something else.

  I loved that incest scene in The Damned. It was featured as the ultimate horror.

  JOHN I could never understand why she was so horrified. She was actually quite lucky to have such a beautiful boy in bed. But, if someone were to ask me what I thought of incest I would say I don’t think about it, it’s just there.

  MAXIME You brought it up.

  JOHN I know, but I mean I don’t really think about it as incest…

  MAXIME Just extreme cuddling.

  JOHN Cuddling … crushes … hugging … anything.

  Well, sex has such a wide range of possibilities anyway!

  MAXIME That’s what I was just about to say. I mean, is sex just fucking?

  LULU You know what I told Jack Nicholson last night. “I’m sorry I can’t stay, but I have to go home and sleep with my mummy and daddy!”

  ANDY WARHOL Diary entry, Zurich, February 11, 1980 … had lunch … with Loulou … She said [John McKendry] had so many boyfriends. His idea of marrying Maxime was fantasizing that her son Alexis was going to live at home with them and that he could have an affair with him… Then he envisioned Loulou … bringing home pretty boys every minute that he could fuck. And actually
he did steal her boys.

  KENNETH JAY LANE Alexis married a girl called Louisa who wasn’t as pretty as he was.

  JANE ORMSBY GORE Alexis and Louisa Ogilvy disappeared to Wales and became sheep farmers. She’s a complete homebird, goes nowhere, doesn’t wear makeup, marvelous cook, makes the butter, bakes the bread, grows the vegetables. Totally loving, totally in awe of Alexis.

  ALLEN ROSENBAUM Alexis didn’t lead the glamorous life Maxime wanted for him. Louisa directed him away from her agenda, which he happily was never seduced by. Louisa was strong—strong enough to deal with Maxime. Too strong for Maxime. Maxime didn’t like her. Gary and I visited Alexis and Louisa in Wales. It wasn’t like there was an address or anything, just the name of a village. When we asked for directions, people pointed over the hills, so we just drove to a very high point and looked around. “There’s a gypsy wagon, that must be them!” And it was.

  ELIZABETH CHATWIN Alexis was being a sort of—that special French word for someone who makes special furniture? É bé niste? No, not é bé niste. Maybe it is é bé niste—someone who works with wood but isn’t a carpenter. But of course he couldn’t make a go of it, the farm either.

  GRACE CODDINGTON I started at British Vogue in 1968, and Loulou sent me Alexis to do some modeling. He needed money to fix his fences.

  MAXIME DE LA FALAISE “Vogue’s Food Gazette,” Vogue, September 1970 A visit to Alexis de La Falaise in South Wales. Narrow lane tumbling with

  honeysuckle, wild roses, foxgloves. A small farmhouse in a valley with a stream … bracken-covered moors. This is apple country, and elderberry; and there are a million good ways of living off the land … [like] elderberry-blossom pancakes.

  MARIANNE FAITHFULL Alexis was one of my dearest friends. I don’t remember him dating Amanda Lear, 62 but what a wonderful idea. There was a visit to Wales from his father. Probably realizing how poor Alexis was, and not wanting to eat potato and carrot stew all weekend, the count had brought foie gras and other delicacies as a present. He offended Louisa and Alexis terribly. Louisa’s so fussy and hapless. I can’t imagine she and Loulou got on. Alexis and Louisa were a mésalliance, really, apart from the children, Lucie and Daniel. I didn’t understand them together, but that doesn’t mean anything. Obviously she had something he needed.

  JEAN-NöEL LIAUT I met him at a dinner Desmond Guinness gave. He lacked strength. Drained of all substance. You know, I’ve always thought the men in that family were vampirized by the women.

  ————————

  DAVID CROLAND The period when I saw Loulou the most was 1970 to 1972. She was Fernando’s hostess, the first person to serve me tea in a painted glass like a thimble, like they do in Morocco. Everything Loulou and Maxime did was right. If they put their gloves down, it was the right place. If they crossed their legs, it was the right way. I called them “les sauvages raffiné es.” “You’ve got us, darling,” Maxime said. “You’ve got us.” Girls like Loulou and Marisa could be raunchy, down, dark—but never vulgar. High-low before there was such a thing. Jeans and a couture jacket. Halston commissioned me to do portraits of them and all his girls: Berry, Elsa Peretti, China Machado. Ray Crespin was at Harper’s Bazaar. Chryss Goulandris.63 Models: Carmen Dell’ Orefice, Karen Bjornson, Marina Schiano, who later ran Saint Laurent in the States … Halston knew Loulou needed money and had her design prints—pigs and ducks and rabbits with little hard-ons on Abraham silk.

  Loulou took an apartment with Berry over a grocery store on Second Avenue and Fifty-eighth Street. They slept in the same bed. Navajo rugs, tea-dipped chintz—I mean, these girls knew what they were doing! We’d get together around four for tea, smoke something, drink something, think about where to have dinner, and then spend the next six hours getting dressed. I introduced Berry to Richard Bernstein. All the famous Interview covers, the airbrushed photographs—Richard did them. Berry and Richard became lovers. Richard was gay. They were almost engaged. Then she met Tony Perkins64 and got married and moved to Los Angeles and that was the end of that.

  MARISA BERENSON Our group was Andy, Fred Hughes, Fernando, Halston, Liza Minnelli. Loulou wasn’t a Halston model per se, though she did do one show. We’d go to his house in the country and spend the weekend madly tie-dying fabric for his collection.

  DIANE VON FURSTENBERG My very first memory of Loulou: I was just starting out and went to show my dresses to Diana Vreeland at Vogue. Loulou happened to be there and tried them on. Diana gave her a huge fashion spread, shot by Avedon.

  VOGUE “Look at Loulou Now—All Shine and Dandy for Evening,” September 1970 Springs of copper-colored curls, big blue eyes rimmed with kohl, paperclip-thin—“the Marchese Casati65 held together by gold thread,” said a friend. Half French, half English, her voice is a soft looping mix of accents. She loves a good giggle, potatoes eight days a week, and the eccentric black-and-white cat she found in Morocco. …

  With Fernando Sanchez, 1969. Yves had launched the safari look the year before—the year he met Loulou. © Jano Herbosch. Courtesy of the holder.

  SETH TILLETT Loulou’s the only person I’ve had a lifelong crush on. I was fifteen when I met her, she was a twenty-three-year-old runaway bride. We were in Provence. My father gave a lecture on silk-screening to Pfriem’s students, and Loulou helped. I can still see it. The lecture was outside under a tree. She held a whole fish while my father inked it and literally just printed a piece of canvas with it right there. It was the summer of 1970.

  The same year, twelve-year-old Robin Birley—Loulou’s cousin, who’d been in her wedding party—his mother, Annabel, and casino owner John Aspinall entered the cage of a pregnant tigress at Aspinall’s private zoo in Kent. The animal reared up and put her front paws on Robin’s shoulders, knocking him to the ground. The whole of the boy’s head disappeared inside the tigress’s mouth. Aspinall forced it open. Annabel thought her son was dead, his jaw “held on by a thread and there was just a hole where one side of his face had been.” All but one of the plastic surgeries Robin underwent over many years had to wait until he was fifteen, when his face was fully formed. He remains permanently disfigured.

  BOB COLACELLO In the summer of 1971, Andy … took me to a party at Joe Eula’s66 … an old black maid was cooking up a storm, and sweating, and cursing Joe Eula: “You ain’t nothin’ but a fuckin’ faggot!” “And you ain’t nothin’ but a fuckin’ nigger, honey” … All the tall, thin exotic girls kept coming and going, cooing and kissing, cracking jokes and whispering gossip, falling to the floor at the foot of [Halston’s] chaise … Pat Ast introduced me to this chorus line of international beauties: Marisa Berenson. Berry Berenson. Loulou de La Falaise. Elsa Peretti. Marina Schiano. Anjelica Huston …

  DAVID CROLAND Joe gave a spaghetti dinner twice a month. The season when everyone came from Europe was Thanksgiving to Christmas: Valentino, Dalí at the St. Regis, Saint Laurent with six cabine girls, his house models.

  BOB COLACELLO … Andy came back [from Venice] raving and ranting. “We met the Volpis and the Dolpis and the Polpis and every lady is a contessa and they all live in palazzos and they were all pushing their daughters on Fred [Hughes]. But he was too busy with Loulou … She helped us a lot … I think we might have [sold] one [portrait]. … Fred was really great. I think he might marry Loulou.”

  Fred was always “sort of engaged” to a beautiful girl from a glamorous family … Andy broadcast the upcoming wedding of the year, leaving Fred all the more embarrassed when Loulou … ran off with Éric de Rothschild.67

  STEPHEN BURROWS I met Loulou at a party at Halston’s boutique. The whole gang was there: Elsa, Pat Ast, Karen Bjornson,68 Shirley Goldfarb.69 Berry. Betsy Kaiser70 and Lily Auchincloss.71 Joe. Loulou and Berry were cut buddies: When you saw one, you saw the other. The shop was filled with orchids from Tony DiPace, the flower guy everyone used—Bill Blass, Oscar … Tony and I both had shops at Bendel’s. Loulou was saying she wanted to be a jewelry designer. She was her mother’s child … nothing snooty… They had that flower-child
mentality. Love everyone. Laugh. Be happy.

  There was an emerging DJ scene—deejaying began at a gay club, Charades. It was all Motown, the Philadelphia sound, the Memphis sound, Dusty Springfield. We loved the Bee Gees. We’d go dancing at Aux Puces, a supper club that on Sundays became a disco. Don Findlay, a pioneering DJ, worked there. Halston used him, Bendel’s … Sanctuary had been a church; all the pews were taken out to make a dance floor, and the DJ was in the pulpit. The Loft was an after-hours club. Summer meant Fire Island. The Pines was fantasyland.

  DAVID CROLAND We never stopped dancing, except to roll a joint. Robert Mapplethorpe was my boyfriend. I brought him to dinner at John and Maxime’s in 1971. We were playing it straight; no one knew we were together. Robert I knew through wild girl-about-town Tinkerbelle, one of Andy’s starlets.

  A tribe to rival Yves’s: Halston’s. The drawing by Joe Eula of Elsa Peretti, Loulou, Pat Ast, Berry Berenson and Marisa Berenson illustrated a story on Halston in Interview, May 1972. © The Estate of Joe Eula.

  David Croland photographed by Brian Duffy wearing a Persian necklace Croland bought at London’s Chelsea Antiques Market, London, 1969. Croland was Robert Mapplethorpe’s first serious boyfriend. Photo Duffy © Duffy Archive.

  STEVEN M. L. ARONSON I, like practically everybody else, met Robert Mapplethorpe at one of Maxime’s dinners. He lost no time inviting me and Elsie Woodward, who was on my right, to come see his developing body of work. Elsie was raring to go, so the next day we ventured into the wilds of Chelsea together. You have to hand it to that grandest of grande dames: She appeared to be totally unruffled by the phallic and priapic images on the walls. But then, of course, she had famously survived even worse. Like, say, the shotgun death of her adored only son at the hands of his wife!