Loulou & Yves

by Christopher Petkanas

  ROSI LEVAI Thadée liked to play pinball and wasted an awful lot of time doing it. The time I met him, at dinner with Maxime at a wonderful restaurant outside Biarritz right on the Adour, La Galoupe—it doesn’t exist anymore—Thadée didn’t say a word. Not even, “How is it that you’re down here?”

  KENZO TAKADA Thadée didn’t reveal himself. There wasn’t a lot of conversation. I like to be seated next to him at parties, because I don’t talk a lot either.

  CHRISTOPHER GIBBS Very nice chap. Beautiful manners. Handsome. Courteous. Not at all a go-getter.

  MIN HOGG Pierre supported him for years, but I suppose Thadée also has money from his dad? Too passive to be bisexual, wouldn’t you say? Obviously a very weak person. Charming, but weak.

  PETER DUNHAM He’s very séduisant. Is he the butchest man who ever walked the planet? No. But I never really got a gay vibe from him.

  JUDY FAYARD I think everybody assumed Thadée was not 1000 percent straight. That was in the air.

  HAMISH BOWLES In the world of which Thadée has always been a part, devoted to aesthetics, he’s never been less than devastatingly attractive. The package is scintillating: the provenance … but he’s a cipher.

  THADÉE KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA I don’t like reality, and I make every effort to get out of it … I am frightfully lazy … so I’ve always longed to prevent people from expecting too much. I’ve always let them know that they can be very nice to me, but I am not going to be terribly nice to them. I’ll be pleasant and all that, but they shouldn’t expect too much from me. And it has sort of worked. I’m sure people are disappointed in me. It takes a long while for them to [work it out]. I mean I can go a very long way on just a smile.

  ————————

  MARIE-DOMINIQUE LELIèVRE Loulou’s relationship with her mother was so ghastly, like in Bergman’s Autumn Sonata, but Thadée had reason to resent his father, too. You don’t know the story? Thadée was castrated by Balthus. He told me that when he and his brother, Stash, were young, they took drawing classes and showed their work to their father. Balthus said, “If you ever pick up a pencil again, I’ll cut your hands off.” So, voilá, Thadée never did anything with his life because he had his hands cut off. He thought of himself as an aristo—which he is not—and aristos in the sixties and seventies thought they were above working.

  LOULOU I think to be the son of a great painter is a little crippling. But Thadée had a remarkable childhood. It was all well worth it.

  THADÉE KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA Contrary to his reputation as an eccentric, not to say sadistic, grand seigneur, [my father] was a very lovely man, gentle, reserved … Such lovely manners … Of course, like all great artists he was very egocentric … As a dad he was extremely sympathique, even if distant. Everyone says [it can’t be easy being Balthus’s son], but I’m not aware of it … It’s traumatizing, undoubtedly, but … I think one is lucky to be the son of a great man. Without question it’s a handicap to the extent that what I learned in my childhood, in the very cultivated milieu I grew up in, is a sense of rightness … It strikes me not just in my father’s paintings but with Yves Saint Laurent … But this notion of rightness is an obstacle in a certain way, because you immediately realize the page you’ve just written is worthless … All this makes you set your standards very high—you feel you mustn’t be third-rate. It makes you shy and wary of showing yourself … Being surrounded by people like [my father] just makes you refrain from making a fool of yourself, out of respect and admiration for them, because you don’t want to embarrass them.

  NICHOLAS FOX WEBER Balthus defines the word “narcissism.” John Russell83 told me, “In the whole world, Nicholas, there is no greater liar.” But for all the trickanary, Balthus was a man of profound erudition. He was ambivalent about the worlds of wealth and fashion—he liked them but was condescending, as he was to most everything. I sensed he himself didn’t have a lot of money. And if he didn’t, then Thadée certainly didn’t.

  There are people who live modestly and have fortunes, and people who live lavishly but are cobbling it together—the case with Balthus.

  Thadée suffered the long shadow of other family figures. Rainer Maria Rilke, the great German poet, was the object of the devouring love of Thadée’s paternal grandmother, Elisabeth Spiro. Erich, her husband, published a monograph on Honoré Daumier, the social satirist. If the Marquis de Sade is taken seriously today, it’s thanks to Balthus’s brother, Pierre Klossowski, a leading twentieth-century intellectual who translated Virgil into French. Antoinette de Watteville, Thadée’s mother, was legitimate if low-level Swiss nobility, nose in the air. Originally, she had no interest in marrying an impoverished painter.

  NICHOLAS FOX WEBER Antoinette and Balthus married in 1937. What year was Thadée born? Forty-four? Okay, right after that the family moved to the Villa Diodati above Geneva. Balthus had two Byron connections. Byron had also lived at Diodati, and Balthus claimed he descended from Byron through a Gordon grandmother. I have the strongest memory of a moment at the Grand Chalet, Balthus’s house in Switzerland, where Thadée’s half-sister, Harumi, mischievously said to her father, “Loulou doesn’t believe a thing about your being Scottish.” And Balthus just went, “Whuuhh?” I thought, All right, Loulou’s the real thing, from a fancy family, and she’s challenging Balthus, not just falling lock, stock and barrel for the usual story, and she’s brave enough to say so.

  Balthus and Antoinette began living apart soon after Thadée was born, and he and Stash remained with their mother. From then on, you hardly see Balthus intersect with the boys.

  STASH KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA It was … a very nineteenth-century upbringing—big beautiful houses, tons of relatives and servants and children, nannies and definite boundaries between children and adults. My parents separated … but it was very seamless, and we all, my mother included, spent summers holidays at [my father’s] French castle.

  NICHOLAS FOX WEBER Balthus told me this stupid anecdote. He and Miró were in a restaurant having lunch, and Thadée and Stash showed up to meet him, and they had very long hair. “Oh, Nicholas, they looked like two homosexuals.” That wasn’t Balthus being his smartest self, because he sounded like someone in Palm Beach complaining about his kids’ haircut. It irritated me. It wasn’t worthy of him. He was usually too dignified to show his homophobia. He picked his prejudices. He wasn’t reticent to show his anti-Semitism—his way of dealing with the vulnerability of being Jewish.

  THADÉE KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA My father only became lauded and famous in the ’80s … Before that, he was known only to a few connoisseurs. I was aware since I was a child that he was a great painter, but there wasn’t this weight of celebrity … At seventeen, I was sent to Rome to live with [him] … [He] had begun to restore the Villa Medici, which was in a pitiful state. It was very exciting—when you scraped a piece of furniture or a wall, underneath was something incredible. I spent several years of total happiness. It was then, I think, that I wanted to be a writer, or else a psychiatrist or diplomat. But those professions meant going to school, which I had no desire to do, so I thought being a writer suited me …

  NICHOLAS FOX WEBER [Thadé e and Stash] lacked their father’s talent and drive but had some of his personal flair and charm as well as his fondness for having a good time among people who were rich and smart.

  STASH KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA The director of the French Academy in Rome lived at the Villa Medici, and when my father’s term ended, he bought the thirteenth-century castello of Montecalvello, near Viterbo, and then the largest wooden structure in Europe, eighteenth-century, more than forty rooms, the Grand Chalet, near Gstaad. There was a separation of properties before he died in 2002, giving the chalet to our stepmother, Setsuko, and the castle to Thadée and me. My brother was often written out of things because my father had moments of generosity.

  NICHOLAS FOX WEBER Balthus started asking to be called “Count de Rola.” Dozens of Polish families, minor nobility, are entitled to the Rola coat of arms, but there are no titles
attached. Despite my disproving his right to a title, Balthus was still “le Comte Balthasar Klossowski de Rola” in his obituary in Le Figaro. He even claimed to be a cousin of Lee Radziwill’s husband, a genuine Polish prince. People laughed at him and Stash for their inventions. One day, Diego Giacometti phoned Balthus. “I hear your son is now the Prince of Marrons Glacés.” Balthus hung up on him.

  Once, while on a bender, Thadée decorated the walls of the Villa Medici with scatological graffiti. Balthus approved. His sons didn’t stand in the way when their father put the moves on their sixteen-year-old girlfriends. Thadée’s military service was cut short because he said he was found to be “psychiatrique.” In 1965, he washed up in Paris, living in a studio Antoinette rented for him from her friend Diane Bataille, widow of Georges; their daughter had posed for Balthus as a teenager. Georges Bataille had been part of the same cozy circle of brainy eroticists as Pierre Klossowski. Both men published on Gilles de Raille, the fifteenth-century madman with a pattern of sexually abusing children before murdering them—the same Gilles de Raille who would capture the imagination of Jacques de Bacher, the wastrel whose affections Yves and Karl competed for. Bataille’s novels deal frankly with incest, necrophilia … Diane told Thadée he died watching a porn movie.

  NICHOLAS FOX WEBER For Balthus, Thadée, of his two sons, was the one who made good, because he married well: Loulou. On the other hand, it was Stash to whom Balthus gave a major work—a portrait that Stash had originally stolen from him!

  DAVID CAMMELL Stash used to hole up here with me in London—he’s charming, but a tremendous holer-upper. The English record producer who lent him his house in Malibu suddenly died while Stash was living there, and it’s become Stash’s by default. Overstaying his welcome with me always coincided with him announcing that he was off to St. Moritz anyway, where he bummed off somebody else, the travel paid for by the sale of his father’s scribbles. He’d go up and down Bond Street selling to art dealers doodles he’d taken out of Balthus’s rubbish bin and that my brother, Donald, signed with Balthus’s signature. Thadée was so unlike Stash, so honest and respectable.

  STASH KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA Warhol had seen me hypnotize Edie Sedgwick in Paris and said, “I’ll give you an entire wall of Flowers if you come to New York and do this for me on film.” Of course, I totally ignored him, like an idiot, and went to L.A. instead. If you know anything about me, you know that in the sixties I was very much a part of the pop-rock music world, playing percussion in Vince Taylor’s band. Young people who are obsessed with the era, they just have this fascination with me. The people I saw on a daily basis were the Beatles, the Who, Jimi Hendrix. The Stones, of course … In 1964, our band shared the top of the bill with the Stones at the Paris Olympia, which is how we became such good friends. Loulou was great friends with Mick, too. The infamous 1967 Brian Jones drug bust—I was busted with him. It ruined my career and reputation.

  A Hard Day’s Night had been a huge success, and I was courted to play the lead in a new television series touted as being like the Beatles movie, but broadcast every week: The Monkees. I was crestfallen when I saw the pilot and turned the project down, only to be replaced by Davy Jones.

  Stanislas—“Stash”—rented a mansion in the Hollywood Hills with the money he’d made selling his father’s rejects. He hates to brag but recalls how sixty girls slept on the floor—“the pickings were very rich”—plus how he “bedded” Tuesday Weld, Nico, Anita Pallenberg, Suki Potier, Paul McCartney’s future wife, Linda Eastman, “etc. etc.” He shimmied up the wisteria of Mick’s London house in a cape while Mick was away, burst in like Zoro on Marianne Faithfull and got what he came for—“Well, that deserves a fuck,” as Faithfull remembered it. Stash says he’s on “quite a few” Beatles songs, including “Baby, You’re a Rich Man,” and that he cut a single with Paul and John and Mick. But the tapes were lost, wouldn’t you know it.

  STASH KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA In fact, I knew Loulou before my brother did, and remember well the first time I beheld her, at a ball in London given by the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava. I had a fling with the woman who became Desmond FitzGerald’s second wife, Olda Willes. She still alive?

  CECIL BEATON Diary entry, June 1967 I remember seeing Prince Stanislas two years ago at a freak Dufferin party when he walked around, a huge, white and black Hamlet, wearing, in spite of the heat, a heavy black cape. He looked extremely self-conscious and po-faced, was said to be a promising pop singer. The promise has come to nothing. Tonight [at Christopher Gibbs’s] he was still dressed as Hamlet, with stripes of sequins on his blouse and his shoes painted psychedel-

  ically in silver, magenta and gold. He showed a large white dé colletage, had a vast Adam’s apple, huge white hands with fingers covered with rings. Byzantine black pageboy hair, white face with potato nose, he was quite revolting-looking.

  STASH KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA Robert Fraser, who represented Warhol in London, was present at the Dufferin ball and at one point said to me, “What you need is some emergency measures.” He gave me my first-ever snort of pharmaceutical cocaine, a gourmet treat found at all the London salons at the time.

  KEITH RICHARDS Stash had the bullshit credentials of the period—the patter of mysticism, the lofty talk of alchemy and the secret arts, all basically employed in the service of leg-over … “I’m Prince Blah-blah.” All hot air … You could say he’s so shallow you couldn’t paddle in it … The first time I went up to Staten Island to meet [my future wife] Patti’s family I’d … brought [him] along … a real live prince. The fact that he’s a real live asshole was neither here nor there.

  ————————

  THADÉE KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA I lived in what had been Georges Bataille’s office, rue Saint-Sulpice, and since I was there I was first asked to inventory his papers, then … [to edit] the complete anthology of his works … I don’t know who said that to read, to understand Bataille, you have to understand Hegel, and I don’t think I’ve ever even read Hegel, so I didn’t understand very much … Anyway, if I have vague notions of philosophy … it’s because of the almost ten years I worked on Bataille …

  Thadée also worked in television, on Archives du XXe siècle, which profiled painters, writers … His job was to make small talk—with Ezra Pound, the novelist Paul Morand—while the cameras were set up. Inevitably, the subjects wanted to talk about his father, not Thadée. He and Pound watched the Apollo 11 moon landing from a café in Rapallo. Thadée admitted he was little more than a script girl, and that dying was preferable to working.

  THADÉE KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA Fortunately, I dismiss my own whining about not being able to accomplish anything, luckily there were friends, this extremely brilliant group I became part of in the autumn of ’65, the little Saint Laurent band … First of all Pierre Bergé, who is extremely cultivated; Charlotte Aillaud, the wife of a then-famous Gaullist architect, Émile Aillaud … Hélène Rochas, the Rochas perfume heiress, a wealthy woman we made fun of a bit, but with a lot of affection … It was a very easy life, even if Yves Saint Laurent himself was extremely neurotic … Crazy uncontrollable laughter … a desire to have fun, to become intoxicated by every means … Of course there were a lot of girls, I was a pretty boy … All this made for a very entertaining life.

  One of the girls Thadée came to know those first months in Paris was Clara Saint. Ten days after their first meeting, he was “decidedly” in love. Clara had been engaged to Vincent Malraux, a son of French Culture Minister André Malraux, when Vincent, eighteen, was killed in a gruesome car crash with his brother, Gauthier, in 1961. The tragedy was worsened by the fact that Clara had given Vincent the Alfa Romeo Giulietta had been driving without a license: She was helplessly complicit in his death. After Vincent and before Thadée, she’d fallen for Rudolf Nureyev. Clara learned of Vincent’s death while seated in a VIP box at the Paris Opéra watching Nureyev perform. She turns up in published diaries and memoirs, albeit under a pseudonym.

  FRÉDÉRIC MITTERRAND Cé lia … worked at a fashio
n house and belonged to the inner circle of its two founders … Petite, very pretty, and well built, with a porcelain complexion and the tiny hands of a doll … she was of South American origin … [Childhood] pictures show her as the diminutive heiress to a mysterious fortune, ensconced on a velvet sofa in a vast Buenos Aires drawing room just like those found in Haussmann-era townhouses of the wealthy districts of Paris. She did not talk about her father, and I never found out why; her mother brought her as a teenager to Paris, where they lived extravagantly for a while, adopting the mœurs of what was still called “café society.” Her intuition, stylishness, and a very confident sense of taste endeared her to all sorts of brilliant people, but she never lapsed into the triviality and snobbery that might have been used against her. When the money finally ran out, she went to work for the famous fashion designer whose clothes she and her mother could no longer afford to wear, and she did so the way one returns to the bosom of one’s family, without bitterness but with unspoken nostalgia for the prodigal years. She’d had a few lovers, all handsome and remarkable, and had even briefly been the talk of the town when, before a horde of astonished reporters right in the middle of Orly airport, with her own slender little hands she had pried from the clutches of some KGB goons a Russian dancer with whom she was in love and who would soon become famous the world over.

  ANNE-MARIE MUñOZ It was very difficult for [Clara] to go to work, after the conditions of ease in which she’d lived. When you know how she learned her profession from scratch, she is very courageous. But her greatest power is intellectual. She is lucid, logical. There is never any hysteria, any folly.