Loulou & Yves

  Beyond her mother, the real-life Clara had no family. She’d lived in Buenos Aires until she was six, until 1946, when her parents separated and she moved to Paris with her Chilean mother. Her French-Argentine father died when she was twenty, leaving her a huge national brand in Argentina that she likened to Nestlé: coffee. Clara unloaded the company and was now rich. In seven years the money was gone. She’d blown through it all dressing at Chanel, buying apartments and her boyfriends’ cars, spending her wealth on friends and parties, on everything and nothing. Clara was a balletomane. Through dancer friends she met Nureyev, and through him Margot Fonteyn, who introduced her to Pierre Bergé one day at Maxim’s when he passed by their table.

  JUDY FAYARD I always liked Clara. Honest. Direct. She took the job at Saint Laurent because she needed to work. But she didn’t feel sorry for herself. It was just the way it was. She told to me all about the Nureyev escapade in 1961, how he’d been performing in Paris and wanted to defect and she arranged his escape.

  CLARA SAINT [Nureyev] was the only one of the [Kirov Ballet] who spoke English, the only one we could communicate with. So we showed him around Paris, and we became friends. Then the troupe was supposed to go on to London. But when they all got to the airport, the officials told Rudy they weren’t pleased with the way he had behaved in Paris, and that he was to wait there for the next plane to Moscow.

  It was early in the morning and I was asleep when I got a call from one of the French dancers who had gone to say good-bye. He told me to come to the airport right away. There was Rudy, with a big Russian guard on either side of him. He was almost hysterical by then and kept repeating, “I can’t go back, I want to stay here.”

  I saw a sign that said “Police,” so I went and explained that I had a friend who didn’t want to leave and was being forced to. [The policemen] told me they couldn’t make the first move to go to him. I said he couldn’t [move first] because he was with the bodyguards. They were plainclothes policemen, so they said they could pretend to have a drink at the bar.

  So I went up to Rudy, and as I leaned over to kiss him, I told him he would have to go to the policemen. “Where?” he said. Then he just got up suddenly, pushed away the guards and ran over to the policemen. And that was that. The guards tried to grab his arm. But one policeman just said, “Oh no, no, no. After all, we are still in France here.”

  JULIE KAVANAGH It was infatuation rather than love on Clara’s part. She and Nureyev were together only a few weeks in Paris, and what began as a coup de foudre soon fizzled out. For him, Clara had served her purpose. She, I think, was left feeling pretty bitter about having been used.

  Thadée, meanwhile, twisted the night away at Castel with B-film star Elsa Martinelli; sipped aperitifs with Marie-Laure de Noailles and Louise de Vilmorin; and was whispered the confidences of the procuress and call girl Susi Wyss. Susi spelled out for Thadée actor Rex Harrison’s very special needs, which she happened to know because her apartment had been a gift from Jean Paul Getty, Jr., and Harrison was having an affair (while married to actress Rachel Roberts) with Getty’s wife, Talitha. On a slow night, Thadée might take in a pop concert, Sandie Shaw at the Olympia.

  ————————

  RICARDO BOFILL Loulou had—I don’t know if one can say it this way—a particular sensuality, meaning … When I first knew her, she was not only surrounded by homosexuals; homosexuals were the only men she slept with. She was having an affair with Fernando and very in love with him. She didn’t like men then. She hadn’t found pleasure with them and preferred homosexuals, driven to make love with them.

  ELSA PERETTI Loulou and Fernando made a beautiful couple. She was in New York and he was in Paris when she decide to break with him. She went, she stay two days, and she come back. She was the only woman Fernando ever was with; the rest of his life was very gay. I ask him, “Do you miss Loulou?” He said, “It’s like I don’t have any more flowers in my place.”

  MARY RUSSELL Nowadays, sexuality is ghettoized, but there was no such thing as gay or straight then. We all tried everything. It could be a boy in your bed, it could be a girl. Gay men slept with straight women who were like gay men themselves. Falling in love took ten minutes. Loulou was almost genderless. She could be madly in love two months, a week, a day.

  When Loulou was involved with John Stefanidis, she was also sleeping with Donald Cammell, Hiram Keller, Éric de Rothschild and Nicky Samuel (then Waymouth). Kenzo, Mathieu Carrière and David Sulzberger were in the wings. But no matter how many people Loulou gave herself to, there was still room for Thadée: “He’s a bastard my friend he tells me I have a present for you and in my pocket I find a completely empty notebook that doesn’t say I Want Loulou … Still, I love him very much …”

  Keller’s biggest success was behind him: wearing a G-string in Fellini’s Satyricon. For obvious reasons—the lips, the cheekbones—he was known as “the Face.” Carrière appeared nightly in Paris at the Alcazar, declaiming Goebbels’s speeches in drag, and in the Marguerite Duras film India Song. Kenzo was the hottest thing in French ready-to-wear. David Sulzberger was one of those Sulzbergers—his great-uncle Arthur had been publisher of The New York Times. Rothschild would shortly come into Château Lafite, one of the most illustrious wine estates in the world. Even so, Loulou turned down his marriage proposal—on the grounds that he was too cozy. Éric later commissioned Ricardo to design new cellars at Lafite, an example of the cross-pollination Loulou liked to perform within her circle, especially if both parties were or had been lovers.

  ANDRÉLEON TALLEY Maybe she regretted it later, but perhaps Loulou was just so “Holly Golightly” she didn’t think she had to marry a Rothschild. Maybe she didn’t want the responsibility of being Baroness de Rothschild when she’d already been the Countess of Glin, or what was it?—Viscountess FitzGerald or whatever he’s called. She didn’t ride to the hounds. She hated that life!

  SUSAN GUTFREUND I met Loulou socially with the Rothschilds. She was always at Éric’s parties—this was in the eighties, after he married Beatrice Ca-racciolo, an artist with wonderful style, very much like Loulou’s. Eric appreciates that. I would have thought he and Loulou were a perfect match. What always intrigued me—maybe she was shy, but she had that enigmatic smile and way about her, like Saint Laurent.

  In the early years of knowing Loulou, Thadée couldn’t keep up: She declared that John Stefanidis was the only person she loved—and in the same breath vowed never to sleep with him again. In London for a Rive Gauche show, she was called on the carpet in front of John by someone who’d seen her and Hiram behaving dangerously on Mykonos. Sobbing violently, Loulou tried to explain and reel John back in. On the same trip, she lost her bag, keys and money, did quantities of cocaine with Nicky, answered a 3:00 a.m. call from Donald by racing to his flat, and spent the night with Nicky and Donald. Marianne Faithfull was there, too, wanting to make it a foursome, but had had to be medicated for spasms.

  NICKY SAMUEL She’s not here to defend herself, but Loulou and I did have one fun evening where, together, we got back at Donald in bed. I wasn’t a muse, but Ossie Clark did make a lot of clothes for me. So that was something else Loulou and I shared. I revered her and was flattered when people teased that we looked alike. I’ve always longed to pull off wearing a couture dress with a bit of old tat from the flea market, but only a few women succeed. Anyway, I’d never met anyone so talented. Loulou was very together and able to hold down a job and speak two languages, whereas I was just hopeless. I’d been married to Nigel Waymouth and was living in Augustus John’s old London studio in Mallord Street, stoned out of my mind. To tell you the truth, I was so stoned during those years, I can’t remember a lot of it.

  After Donald, I met Kenny Lane at Maxime’s in New York. Still in this period of being unbelievably stoned, and knowing he was gay, I married Ken anyway because I fell madly in love with him and couldn’t believe he wanted to marry me. Lady Diana Cooper was my maid of honor. Fernando made the wedding-night robe, and
Yves did both my dresses, for the registry office and luncheon at Mark’s, another club of Loulou’s uncle’s, and for the party after.

  Ken had a Moroccan boy butler called Mustapha who came into the bedroom the morning after our first night together, and he mistook me for Loulou. I was in bed, so maybe he just saw the back of my head. In any case, it was, again, an immense compliment. Whether or not it was because Loulou had been in Ken’s bed before we have to leave to other people’s fantasies. Kenny will tell you anything I say is rubbish. He tries to wipe me out as his only wife. One could say the whole thing was my fault, except I was very young, twenty-three. Ken was almost twenty years older and should have had more sense.

  I was inside that bubble a very short time. It nearly finished me off. When our marriage broke up after two years, I was so stoned and upset I moved to Wales. That’s how scared I was. I’ve been living here now for nearly forty years. I’ve never been back to New York.

  JANE ORMSBY GORE Nicky’s marriage was torture for her. She wants to be part of the fast set in America, she marries Kenny, who’s not interested in women, but she lives a huge New York life that ends with her jumping out of a window at the Ritz.

  With Fernando Sanchez, Kenny Jay Lane and Dimitri Sravoravdis, Athens. © Jano Herbosch. Courtesy of the holder.

  Antonio Lopez worked from this Instamatic he took of Loulou for his collage “Antonio’s Guide to Paris,” Interview, April 1975. © The Estate of Antonio Lopez and Juan Ramos.

  KENNETH JAY LANE I was never a druggie. It took me a while to find out that unfortunately the girl I was married to was, and that was the end of us.

  ALLEN ROSENBAUM Everyone thought Kenny and Nicky’s marriage was absurd, a lark both of them could afford. It wasn’t a sham, because it didn’t fool anybody, and they didn’t want to fool anybody. John and Maxime aren’t to be compared. In their case, it was self-delusion, a very complicated fantasy on both their parts.

  ————————

  Loulou returned to Paris after avenging Donald with Nicky in London. Drifting on a cloud of Mandrax,84 she told Thadée everything. He himself was seen around with Ingrid Boulting, the indelible face of Biba cosmetics and a future star of Elia Kazan’s The Last Tycoon. “[Loulou] fell asleep saying she really loves making love with Niki [sic] …,” Thadée told his diary, “but that you need a man too.”

  A couple of weeks later, she had stiff news from the doctor.

  THADÉE KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA In December 1972, [Loulou] was recovering from her first bout of hepatitis (either from diving into the Nile while on a cruise with Ricardo Bofill, who admired her recklessness, or from dancing barefooted on broken glass in Mykonos with Hiram Keller, who was terrified) …

  Keller had already been exposed to hepatitis C as a cast member in the original Broadway production of Hair, probably at the hands of John Bishop. Bishop was the show’s “official” cast doctor, one of three fashionable Dr. Feelgoods in New York in the sixties who were infamous for their “vitamin” shots. While Thadée kept Loulou company as she convalesced, Clara was cultivating Jérôme-Olivier Nicolin, a drag artist who had been photographed by Avedon and practiced his trade on a campier, more traditional, less high-minded level than Mathieu Carrière. Unlike him, Nicolin was presumed to be stone gay.

  JEAN-NOëL LIAUT Jérôme had his hour of glory as Belle de May at La Grande Eugène, the cabaret. He hated himself physically and suffered from not being attractive in the cruel fashion milieu he found himself in. He died in 2006, utterly alone.

  Against all possible odds, Clara and Nicolin’s relationship seemed to be not just erotic, but violently erotic. She returned home from his apartment with her body covered in bruises. Did he wear his wig and a bow-painted mouth when he beat her? It was too grim to think about. At the end of one evening Clara and Jérôme had spent at Corey Tippin’s, Corey—an American model and makeup artist—escorted Clara back to rue Jacob, dozing off with her and Thadée before going home. Clara was half-asleep when Thadée penetrated her with his fingers. When she woke up and saw that Corey was gone, she raced like a madwoman through the streets of Paris to his apartment, naked under her trench coat.

  “I can’t bear it when a man wants me,” Clara told Thadée, referring to the half-sex they’d had that night. “It disgusts me.” She was also living the special hell of a classic triangle, with Thadée her punching bag. “You want my friend?” Clara ranted, referring to Loulou. “You want to fuck her? How? Does it obsess you? No? Does she come after you, does she excite you? Yes, yes, she’s clinging—oh, it’s got to stop, I have a feeling I’m headed for a bust-up with my friend.”

  No cliché of the strangulated situation went unexploited. Clara ripped into Thadée for being jobless and penniless. She found his journal and read it, becoming so enraged she destroyed four notebooks.

  PAQUITA PAQUIN Their money problems were so bad, they lived without heat. Hélène Rochas even offered to buy an apartment just so she could rent it to them; if they couldn’t make the payments, at least they wouldn’t be thrown out. And yet Clara had a job! She must have earned a good salary.

  STASH KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA Why Clara and Thadée’s finances should have been so disastrous is a mystery. There was one incident where he ended up in hot waters because we’d come into some money and he spent a large sum for some quixotic ill-thought-out thing to rescue Clara’s mother from a tax problem due to her impulsive gambling. Everybody from Pierre Bergé onwards was appalled, not to mention my own family, and my brother was almost cut off. To pay the French state for a woman of whom it was said that she should have been deported was considered very stupid indeed.

  Clara swung maniacally between wanting to marry Thadée and have a baby, ordering him to get out and live with Loulou, crying that none of her dreams had come true, and threatening a showdown: “I’m going to talk to Loulou. I want her to leave you alone… You don’t see how you are with her … like someone infatuated, and how indifferent you are with me … Don’t kid yourself, she seduces everyone. I don’t hold it against her.”

  Clara heaped all the blame on Thadée, standing by her friend Loulou, who she feared had gone truly crazy. Loulou longed for someone to physically carry her off. She wanted to walk away: from Yves, avenue Marceau, Pierre … In October 1973, after just thirteen months full-time at Saint Laurent, she was so morose, muttering, “I know I’m good for nothing,” Clara swept her out of the studio to a café.

  THADÉE KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA Diary entry, October 25, 1973 [Loulou] started to cry, she scratched herself like an addict, she said she’d had enough of fashion people, that she wasn’t paid enough, that she was worth more, that she had a million things in her head, that she wanted to leave—for a while Baba’s85 sensible words calmed her.

  The scenes carried over to the salons and tables of Charlotte Aillaud and Hélène Rochas (née Nelly Brignon). They were the first-rung Saint Laurent hostesses—that is, if you didn’t count Marie-Hélène de Rothschild, who ruled all of Paris with her knockout punch of intimidation and charisma. Marie-Hélène was simply less available to the Saint Laurent clan than the other women, given her duties as the wife of the diffident patriarch of the French branch of the banking Rothschilds, Baron Guy. Nelly, by 1941, had been a petit rat in the Paris Opéra’s dance school and was studying acting. She and a friend were catching the last Métro of the night when they ran into a man the friend knew: the couturier Marcel Rochas. Nelly was nineteen; Marcel, thirty-nine. They married the next year. La m è re de famille painted by Leonor Fini gave no clues to the head of Parfums Rochas that Nelly—reborn as “La Belle Hélène”—would become. She was catnip to the women’s magazines, hailed as France’s first CEO in a jupe. When Loulou met Hélène, around the same time she

  met Yves, Hélène’s lover was Kim d’Estainville. “Playboy” was an old-fashioned term even in d’Estainville’s peak years, but it really did fit. He was good-looking. He had style. He was oily. Hélène could be tediously dame but also surprising and lovable. With a f
ew drinks in her, she once stood up for fellatio as not just for the boys but the act of a woman in love. “All right, then, Hélène, do you swallow?” She turned bright red, answering with a convulsion of giggles. Hélène survived the Occupation, the death of Dior, cuisine minceur, Ultrasuede, Pierre Cardin becoming a restaurateur and hijacking Maxim’s—and, only just barely, the early spread of AIDS. How she became the poster girl for why a woman might not want to take a bisexual male lover was the most flammable café-society story of the eighties.

  Charlotte Aillaud had been deported to Ravensbrück during the war in a convoy of 27,000 that “was really chic. I wouldn’t have settled for any other.” It included Dior’s sister, Catherine, and the woman Charlotte would bunk with, Geneviève de Gaulle, the general’s niece. The writer Françoise Sagan fell in love with Charlotte after seeing her coming out of Jimmy’z, the Paris club, at two in the morning in a chiffon coat. Sagan rained jewels and flowers on her but never succeeded in getting her into bed, settling instead for a long and deep friendship. Charlotte did, however, have an affair with one of Cocteau’s boyfriends, the novelist Pierre Herbart, and society dentist Claude Lebon. Her conversation was so exquisite, it was said she spoke written French. As for her husband, Émile, it’s hard to imagine that the stand of undulating, luridly colored public-housing towers he designed in the Paris suburbs in the late fifties were ever taken seriously—and eventually he was discredited.

  Yves pressed his case for a more complete relationship with Thadée at dinners given by Charlotte and Hélène, pursuing him with poppers and exclaiming his happiness at being seated next to Thadée, “so I can tell you I’m crazy about you… I want to sleep with you so much … just tell me maybe.” Thadée says he never succumbed, that he told Yves he would not become an object of dispute between him and Clara. François-Marie Banier was also hitting on Thadée, who wrote, “My entire life will be changed if I allow myself to love him … if I acknowledge this feeling …”