Loulou & Yves

by Christopher Petkanas

  GARY FARMER The McKendrys were famous for their dinner parties, an exciting mix of celebrities and the art and fashion worlds. You’d see the de la Rentas; John Richardson and his boyfriend, Boaz Mazor; the von Furstenbergs; the Kempners; Lally Weymouth72; sometimes Robert Rauschenberg or Andy Warhol. Marisa if she was in town. It’s where I met Berry and Tony Perkins. John and Maxime had the back half of what was once a grand apartment, the entrance hall doubling as the dining room, a big table full of liquor, you mixed your own drink. I remember sitting on the kitchen floor with Diana Vreeland, pulling pigeon bones through our teeth, John in a silk paisley shirt, crushed-velvet pants, patent-leather shoes… He had a Moroccan belt studded with coins that he wore to acquisitions meetings with the board, and later, adopted from Maxime or Loulou I guess, the famous Peretti belt with the big silver loop buckle.

  DAVID CROLAND Maxime knocked out a room to create a big open kitchen—she had an open kitchen before anyone. The parties were a wonderful mélange of Drue Heinz, Joe Eula, Kenny Lane, Zandra Rhodes, Halston, Giorgio di Sant’ Angelo and visiting beauties from around the world.

  MAXIME DE LA FALAISE “Vogue’s Food Gazette,” Vogue, August 1970 Cook in the early morning or in a midnight breeze. The refrigerator doesn’t care. Don’t plan menus. Plan good food. Who needs more than one or two superior, loved-over dishes plus the best of salads, cheeses, wine? Eat where it’s cool and pretty.

  ANDREA STILLMAN I went to dinner at John and Maxime’s once, and that was enough. John was so sweet to invite me, but I was his secretary, really out of my league. It was a heady crowd. Somebody “Richardson.” Bob Colacello from Interview. I was seated next to Mick Jagger. I was stunned and wanted to leave as soon as possible. I asked him if he was married. He turned to the person on the other side of him and never spoke to me again the entire evening. Of course, as soon as I said it I realized he was married to Bianca, but I still didn’t think he was very polite. The apartment was an enchanting wreck, fabrics thrown everywhere, a strange and exotic Aladdin’s world.

  DAVID SULZBERGER The entire apartment was draped in—it was like being inside a lamp shade.

  MAXIME DE LA FALAISE Everybody loves my place. The French think it’s French, the Viennese think it’s Viennese, the English think it’s English. It’s actually no one thing. And thank God it’s managed not to look chic … When you’ve worked in the fashion business for years, you can keep a lot of colors in your head … I think that if you’ve lived with something and looked at it for a long time, you’ve absorbed its essence … My style is hit-or-miss, but I think it’s mostly hit.

  ————————

  LOULOU Berry and I discovered Robert Mapplethorpe, and I introduced him to my mother and John and New York society. We’d drive out to Coney Island with David and Patti Smith. Robert and Patti were living in the Chelsea Hotel. Her typewriter was on top of a pile of laundry. Robert was a total admirer of de Kooning and did watercolors inspired by him; he wasn’t a photographer yet. Halston asked Berry and me to a Christmas party, and we brought Patti and Robert. Being a little less broke than David and Robert, we bought their artwork to give as presents to Halston to get them known. After that, other people discovered Robert in a more official way.

  DAVID CROLAND You know that game rich people play, dressing up as the help? Well, Loulou invited Robert and me to a dinner party in an Upper East Side town house. Identities were concealed until the second course. “Hahaha, I’m not really the maid, I’m Drue Heinz!” “Hahaha, I’m not the butler, I’m John Richardson!” Robert was tricked out in a leather vest and codpiece, white shirt open to the navel, lots of jewelry. John descended on us. “Who are you boys?”

  PATRICIA MORRISROE Loulou described Robert as a bird with extraordinary plumage, the fetish necklaces … That’s what he was like to her, do you know? A necklace, something pretty you have around you. You don’t get to know the necklace because the necklace doesn’t talk, and you don’t expect it to. Loulou couldn’t recount any conversations with Robert, because I suspect they had none.

  DAVID CROLAND Robert and Patti were very much together at the same time that I was his first model and serious boyfriend. He made and sold jewelry. There was a shop on Fourteenth Street where we used to buy these divine Bakelite cuffs with crystal insets and brass studs. We paid five dollars apiece, sold them to Halston for twenty, who sold them to Babe Paley for a hundred. A fetish necklace could be a horseshoe strung with a rabbit foot with a cross. Cool stuff. We double-dated—me and Loulou, and Robert and Patti—for

  Fernando’s birthday party in the ballroom of an Elks lodge. That was the night everyone found out that Robert and I were lovers, that I was sharing him with Patti.

  PATTI SMITH Things came to a head… The four of us were dancing. I liked Loulou… She wore a heavy African bracelet, and when she unclasped it, there was red string tied around her tiny wrist, placed there, she said, by Brian Jones …

  Robert and David kept breaking away, heatedly conferring off to the side. Suddenly David grabbed Loulou’s hand, pulled her off the dance floor, and abruptly left the party.

  Robert raced after him and I followed. As David and Loulou were getting in a taxi, Robert cried out to him not to leave. Loulou looked at David, mystified, saying, “Are you two lovers?” David slammed the door of the taxi and it sped away.

  ALLEN ROSENBAUM Robert and Patti were kids when they came to John and Maxime’s dinners. Robert was a creep, hanging around the edge of the party. The die was cast: He was the voyeur who’d landed in a honeypot. Opportunistic. That was never true of Patti. I got her book on Robert just to see how John and Maxime are mentioned, and they’re mentioned very generously.

  GARY FARMER Patti was publishing little broadsides and would read after dinner, salon-style. In 1972, she came out with Seventh Heaven, and Maxime and John gave her a book party. Copies were one dollar, handed out by Patti from a shopping bag. She was delightful. Everyone thought so. I watched Robert develop from a skinny kid to this pumped-up guy with muscles—he went to the library and took out a book on bodybuilding. He had a secondhand Polaroid, but John gave him his first new camera, also a Polaroid. John bought a couple of Robert’s early pieces—there was a picture frame collaged with photos from pornographic magazines. Robert was always looking for an invitation. “Oh, you should go and talk to so-and-so over there. He’s having a party tomorrow night, and I’m sure he’ll ask you.”

  ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE I knew that socializing was beneficial to my career. But it was all very subtle. I wasn’t an aggressive socializer. It was subtle aggressiveness. Subconsciously calculating, I guess.

  ANDRÉ LEON TALLEY I’d not heard of Mapplethorpe until I saw a picture at Maxime’s of a man in leather chaps with his bum showing, very Spanish Inquisition, and another of a man with his huge, huge penis on a butcher’s block. She gave it to me, not because I liked it, but because her dog had peed on it and there was a urine stain. So she thought, Okay, you can have it now.

  ANDREA STILLMAN John would say, “Oh, Patti and Robert are coming for lunch. I brought some things from home,” shopping bags of food prepared by Maxime. I thought it was weird, but if John saw something in them, they must be brilliant. Robert certainly presented himself as famous. He and Patti loved it, because John showed them everything from Albrecht Dürer to tobacco trading cards. I remember thinking, Okay, I can do this, I’m a secretary at the Met, I’m serving lunch in the curator’s office, where there’s not supposed to be any food because there are rare engravings out on the tables, and I’m washing dishes that these two scruffy kids have eaten off in the ladies’ room. The plates were glass, and without detergent the vinaigrette was hard to get off. I didn’t necessarily think this was the best way to run the department, but if it made John’s life easier, then that was okay. He was somebody you wanted to help. I’m a caregiver. If I had to beat off his creditors, telling them he’d just sent a check when I knew very well a check was not forthcoming, that was okay, too. John had spending mani
as. He fell in love with the jewelry of Fulco di Verdura. “Oh, wait till I show you what I got for Maxime!” He took out an enormous crested yellow sapphire ring. “Oh, John, how gorgeous!” What I really thought was, You’re a curator making thirty thousand dollars a year—this ring costs more than your salary! It went back. At one point, I typed Maxime’s manuscript for her medieval cookery book. I did it because I loved John. Everyone did. It went both ways. My husband ran Multiples art gallery. John bought things from him partly to help us.

  I think Allen Rosenbaum was in love with John, so I’m guessing there was animosity with Maxime; jealousy, I’m thinking. I didn’t realize John was a full-fledged gay. I guess I didn’t want to admit it. I’m from the Midwest, what can I say? And I managed not to grasp that Maxime was a lesbian.

  ASHTON HAWKINS Robert used John, but that was nothing unusual. It’s called ambition. John was Robert’s passport. I assumed their relationship was sexual. I myself wasn’t openly gay, but most people thought I might be. It was all very clouded then, in my own head, as well. Maxime didn’t care about John’s relationship with Mapplethorpe, and as we turned out to know, she was a lesbian, as well as being a nonlesbian. A woman of many appetites. I’m sure conservative elements at the Met disapproved of John’s marriage.

  AMY FINE COLLINS John was always billed as being bisexual. Gloria Vanderbilt was married to Wyatt Cooper, and I can’t vouch for his degree of interest in women, but there were a lot of those glamorous marriages then, Nicky Waymouth and Kenny Lane … We all loved the men going both ways.

  PATRICIA MORRISROE It didn’t come as a shock to Maxime that John was gaga over Robert, but she did feel Mapplethorpe exploited him. It was through McKendry that Robert learned everything, because he had access to all the Met archives, Steichen, Lartigue … Certainly Maxime despised Patti, who she complained was dirty.

  MAXIME DE LA FALAISE I think people were rather horrified by Patti because she always seemed to have creepy-crawly things running up and down her legs. I remember visiting Robert at his loft, and Patti was in bed complaining that her feet were stuck in the typewriter.

  LOULOU When John admired someone as he admired Robert, he was fawning. So to see your husband fawning is probably not … Robert gave my mother and John a box he’d made, a Joseph Cornell–type composition, two dolls inside the stomach of a larger one, with a camera bellows attached. It was meant to convey nurturing.

  ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE Letter to John and Maxime, December 1971 I hope that one day I will be able to show the two of you in one way or another my appreciation for helping me to somehow struggle through this period…

  JOHN RICHARDSON Maxime and John’s marriage worked until John fell for other people. Mapplethorpe was an operator, using Maxime to successfully crash that whole English world of her glamorous friends and relations and that great network of social and artistic life she was very much a part of.

  ALLEN ROSENBAUM The strongest feeling, if any, Maxime had about Robert was jealousy. John was sexually a fragile person. He responded to anyone who was affectionate. He wouldn’t have been a very effective lover. We once had a little fumbling sort of thing that came to nothing. I had no sense of a sexual life between John and Maxime, or of any disappointment in its absence. He was desperately in love with Mapplethorpe, his one last fling. I joke that John’s giving Robert a Polaroid was an early example of safe sex, but it’s true: If you pointed a camera at John, he went into a trance, like you were making love to him.

  DAVID CROLAND Loulou was sophisticated. She didn’t care that her stepfather was having a so-called affair with a friend of hers. Robert and I were having lunch at Elephant & Castle in the Village when he told me John was taking him to London. I was livid! They went, and John returned alone, while Robert went on to Paris. Loulou was there, and she introduced him to Yves, Pierre, Fernando …

  Robert was so green, he didn’t know what he was in for. The trip was supposed to last two weeks, and he stayed two months, even visiting Alexis in Wales. England opened Robert’s eyes.

  ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE Nobody was shocked by anything. A lot of the people I met came from these really decadent families where the married men were gay and nobody thought anything about it. I became the toast of London.

  MAXIME DE LA FALAISE Robert felt very at home in England, much more than in New York. Americans think of themselves as having no class distinctions, but money in itself is a class distinction. There’s an aristocracy of money here, and if you don’t have it, you’re somehow lower-class. In London, Robert was immediately accepted as a hippie aristocrat. Don’t forget, that whole London group were trying to pretend they were Cockneys at the time. That was like the sons and daughters of Park Avenue trying to speak with Brooklyn accents. It was ridiculous, but everybody was doing drugs and trying to be daring and outré.

  ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE Yves didn’t speak any English, and he would just giggle. I was wearing my crazy jewelry, which he ripped off for his own collection. I was furious because I didn’t have any money. He invited me to the show and the models came out with my dice jewelry and domino cuffs …

  DAVID CROLAND Robert was never in love with John. John was with Robert to the point of obsession. And you know what else? Loulou was in love with me, okay? A little close for comfort, no? But that’s the deal. Everything became yet more awkward and squirmy with Robert Having His Nipple Pierced, shot at the Chelsea by Sandy Daley. Robert’s in my arms getting his nipple pierced. Patti did the narration. She was not comfortable about gay sex. “Asshole stuff,” she called it. In the narration, she tells how when she was shaved in the hospital when she had her son, her father saved her pubic hair.

  “Bright light of Paris: LouLou de La Falaise, turning up here, there and everywhere” in a skunk and wolf cape by Fernando Sanchez for Revillon, Harper’s Bazaar, February 1970. The unsigned drawing is probably by Emily Chan. © Courtesy of Hearst Magazines.

  John sat at the screening at MoMA with Maxime pretending he was Robert’s boyfriend, and you know what I thought? I thought, Fuck you! I was with Robert right up until I introduced him to Sam Wagstaff.73 I told Robert, “Your ship’s come in, baby.” I gave them to each other.

  PATRICIA MORRISROE John and Robert had sex once. It was not successful. John was bipolar, so one can understand why Robert might have pulled away. When Sam swept in, that was the end of John, apparently a lovely guy. Sam was not. He was a raging anti-Semite. Robert, too, in the way of someone from Floral Park, Queens, and as an affectation borrowed from Sam.

  ALLEN ROSENBAUM Sam was the most proper-looking young New York society man, just magnificent, like a cross between Abe Lincoln and an SS trooper, in another league to John, who was becoming grander and grander. When I suggested that taking a chauffeured car to Philadelphia was quite a bit of change to put in a chit at the museum for, John became enraged. “No wonder Loulou doesn’t like you,” he said. “You’re so boring, so sensible, so middle-class.” I’ll never forget, she’d had a modeling job for which she was paid a thousand dollars, and she’d lost the check. She was completely indifferent about it. She wouldn’t admit to caring. It was gone and that was it.

  LOULOU The good times got very crazy—drugs and all that stuff. Reality just caught up… I used to love going to Fire Island, but I’d probably be fed up with it by now. You can only go so far. All that madness—what does it mean? … There’s a choice—either you’re going to live on the top of some Himalayan mountain, or you’re going to have to conform to everyday life … We made fools of ourselves for six, seven years … I don’t think I did anything but go wild … [I] did nothing practically, except be involved in youth revolution and be a hippie and all that sort of thing. And now: Here’s the serious stuff coming up. Not one of the eternal children anymore. I’m dropping in.

  61 Maggy Rouff (1896–1971), Belgian couturière who published La Philosophie de l’élégance at the height of World War II.

  62 Singer and muse of Salvador Dalí. While Lear insists she was born a woman, Ian Gi
bson, a Dalí biographer, says she is transgender.

  63 Shipping heiress.

  64 Anthony Perkins (1932–1992), actor best known for his role in Psycho.

  65 Luisa, Marchesa Casati (1881–1957), spectacularly wealthy, fantastically eccentric arts patron and muse who died in poverty.

  66 Joe Eula (1924–2004), fashion illustrator and Halston’s artistic director.

  67 Steward of Château Lafite Rothschild.

  68 Halston house model.

  69 Shirley Goldfarb (1925–1980), American Abstract Expressionist with a remote place in the Saint Laurent circle.

  70 Betsy Kaiser (1933–2013), socialite named to the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame in 1971.

  71 Lily Auchincloss (1922–1996), philanthropist married to Douglas Auchincloss.

  72 Washington Post senior associate editor whose parents, Katharine and Philip Graham, led the paper for decades.

  73 Sam Wagstaff (1921–1987), collector who played a decisive role in the recognition of photography as a fine art.

  11

  Loulou & Yves

  LOULOU One fine day in 1972 … I got a call from Clara Saint, who said that Yves wanted me to come and work for him … I was on holiday at Diane von Furstenberg’s in Sardinia, and since I was in Europe, I went to see them in Paris …

  DIANE VON FURSTENBERG Loulou arrived in Costa Smeralda with a tiny, tiny wooden suitcase and a few scarves. They were all she wore, folded in different ways to make a top, a dress …