Loulou & Yves

  Between his Balthus and Saint Laurent connections, it seemed there was no one Thadée didn’t know or hadn’t at least met. He had no trouble filling his days, whether lunching at Maxim’s with the cinema idol Arletty and the decorator Madeleine Castaing, or thinking vaguely bookish thoughts alone at Café de Flore over a 3:00 p.m. Bloody Mary and Welsh rarebit, or paying a call in Fontainebleau on Vicomte Charles de Noailles, the garden-enthusiast half of a roaringly successful mariage blanc. Thadée had a good ear for anecdotes—Charles told him how his wife, Marie-Laure, had flown into a rage when their cook served two dishes with the same color sauce—barbarians at the gate! Tennessee Williams greeted Thadée on the Lido in Venice as “Today.” Kenneth Anger took him to a party at Brian Jones’s where he got to know Mick Jagger. Thadée was an attentive but not prissy student of luxury, especially when it came to the exquisite food served at Pierre and Yves’s. While registering the poached lobster with warm cucumbers, he could also find the humor in oeufs et caviar en gé lee: eggs inside eggs!

  A typical night out for Thadée began with aperitifs at rue de Babylone. He was not insensitive to the Lalanne sheep grazing across the room or the priceless Dunant bowl that casually held the nuts. Drinks might be followed by dinner at Maxim’s and a quick stop at Françoise Sagan’s before moving on to the Sept. Knowing he would never be able to pay the check if called upon made Thadée anxious.

  Nothing came of Loulou’s threat to quit Saint Laurent, though the same fall she did take a holiday, crossing on the SS France with Jimmy Goldsmith and Teddy van Zuylen, while leaving Thadée to sort himself out with Yves and FranÇois-Marie. Two months earlier, she had met the society publisher George Weidenfeld while staying with Teddy at Haar, returning to Paris with offers from Weidenfeld to bring out her autobiography (she was all of twenty-six) and a second book on her life in fashion (which, generously speaking, amounted to five years). The wider world was taking notice of Loulou’s style anarchy—on her, “a tweed jacket always looks like a costume from The Rules of the Game, slightly bent for card-sharping purposes,” as one writer put it. She asked Thadée to collaborate on the books, but he wouldn’t even consider it: “You know very well I’m an incapable.” Like Lagerfeld’s idea of doing a volume on Elsie de Wolfe with Thadée, Loulou’s publishing projects came to nothing.

  Van Zuylen and Goldsmith underwrote Loulou’s trip, including the daily massages and other treatments she said would keep her in shape for drinking. One day, she struck her head on marble and fell facedown following a failed leap during a game of musical chairs. Also on board were her aunt Annabel, Goldsmith’s mistress, and Teddy’s American wife, Gaby. Both women were conveniently indisposed, Annabel because of her advanced pregnancy, the baroness with a paralyzing case of sciatica. For two confirmed wolves, the situation was ideal.

  LOULOU [French society was] terribly stuffy. Everyone thought I was after their husbands, and then when I wasn’t, they’d be rather insulted. One has a very exaggerated reputation.

  LADY ANNABEL GOLDSMITH Loulou and Jimmy … Hmm, a bit tricky, that one. He met her through Teddy van Zuylen, who was having an affair with her. Jimmy was taken by Loulou, though he wouldn’t have picked up on her finer points. She was far too mad for Jimmy to ever be taken seriously. I was pregnant with Jemima, so I never knew whether anything happened between them. I’d always suspected it. I genuinely don’t know and would rather not know. I wouldn’t want to think that the child I loved and cherished had done something like that to me. I don’t think Loulou would have done. But I’m not so sure.

  INDIA JANE BIRLEY Loulou was held up by my stepfather, Jimmy, and father, Mark—everyone in the family considered her a genius. “Loulou’s a fig-uh,” Jimmy used to say, “A fig-uh!” Huge compliment. God yes I respected her, so tiny and tufted out, how could you not? But talking to Loulou was like talking riddles. The cackling and cawing, I could never make out what she was saying.

  AMIR FARMAN-FARMA I was engaged to India Jane and lived with her for four years. Within the Birley clan, Loulou occupies the uppermost rung of the taste ladder. To Jane, she was an icon. The Birleys are quick to dismiss people as “common.” They grew up among aristocrats but aren’t aristocrats themselves, so they had to figure out how to take revenge and distinguish themselves. The solution was style. “Okay, I’m not a marquess, but my boots are John Lobb, and these shirts were handmade by my tailor in Hong Kong.” They feel that if they’re not vigilant, they could slip and be revealed as common themselves. It’s an obsession. After Jane and Prince Charles went skiing together, she complained, “God, the royal family are so middle-class!”

  Karl Lagerfeld was methodically tracking Loulou from the sidelines, taking the view that at twenty-five, she was over. Karl was working on the Christmas number of Paris Vogue with, as guest editor … the one and only Marlene Dietrich. He was looking for fresh faces to include in the issue, but, he told Thadée, Loulou was not a candidate. Her last pictures in Vogue were terrible, Karl said, and besides, she looked like a forty-year-old alcoholic. François-Marie joined in: Loulou was ugly, her eyes were too small, and she had an awful mouth. Dietrich herself dismissed Loulou after hearing how she’d been smashed at the director Philippe de Lorca’s in the middle of the day. Corey Tippin remembered how you smelled Loulou before you saw her. He was at the restaurant Chez Francis when, moments before she and Nicky made their entrance, a blast of cheap rye assailed his nose. Marisa Berenson had been on the cover of Newsweek as “Queen of ‘The Scene’ ” recently, and Karl, François-Marie and Corey were all offended by the way she talked about gay men—as if, Thadée said, they were “pet poodles.” The Newsweek piece explained how despite their allure and sparkling lives, Berenson and her friends found “precious few men to move in with these days… It is very hard to be a swinging single on that elevated social plane if there is no one to swing with, and indeed, a new breed of man has evolved called the “‘untouchables.’” These would be fags. “I’ve become a fag moll, really,” Loulou announced. “There’s nothing more fun than fags.” “Bachelorette” Florence Grinda complained that “there are so many men around who only like men.” She was seconded by Betty Catroux: “It’s very frustrating for beautiful girls today to think of all the boys they’ll never touch.” “Plenty of tears have been shed,” sighed Berenson, whose relationship with David de Rothschild, Marie-Hélène’s stepson, had lately been put on ice. “I, for one, have become a big fan of homosexuals. I adore them. They are talented, sensitive, refined people who make the best friends. I’d rather go out with a fag than a boring man any day.”

  LOULOU Boys are always telling me I have to eat. They sort of stick me in the chest and say, “I’ve never seen anything like that.” Well, I’m eating a lot more ice cream than I used to, but all I ever please are the faggots and the fashion freaks. Boys don’t give a —.

  STASH KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA There was a memorably insane night in Paris in 1974 with Ronnie Wood;86 his wife, Krissy; Loulou; David Bowie; and my future girlfriend Cindy Moscati, who was then with David. We were at a short-lived joint near Lipp run by an extraordinary African-American woman with bleached-blond hair. Loulou was very crazy and far gone. She drank a great deal and partook of many substances, living always to great excess. She’d already been extremely ill with cirrhosis. How she survived and managed to go on burning the candle at both ends is beyond me.

  RICARDO BOFILL Loulou had her own flat, tiny, on rue des Grands-Augustins. One day, she turned up at my place with her toothbrush. Okay, I thought, this is a sign things are getting serious. From semi-living together we began living together, though she kept her apartment.

  What are the chances? Loulou wound up living directly across from the studio where Balthus had worked forty years earlier. The roofscape when she looked out was the cousin of the one he painted in The Window. The symmetry went further: Balthus had committed a crazed act at 4, place de Furstenberg; Loulou would do the same at number 5. Poor and in love with Antoinette, convinced she’d never mar
ry him because he was socially and financially unworthy, Balthus had taken a tincture of opium, timing it so that he would be discovered, though insisting it had been a sincere attempt to kill himself.

  RICARDO BOFILL I don’t know what drove Loulou to make love with homosexuals … the difficult childhood, or the experience with her first husband hadn’t been good … I don’t want to get into that. But whether or not the lovemaking was successful—she tried with Fernando—she was proud of her ability to sleep with homosexuals. Each time was a triumph. Friendship and sex overlapped. She had affairs with everyone. Anyone who could. Affairs she didn’t remember. They caused her great anxiety. She really didn’t know what she was doing.

  INÈS DE LA FRESSANGE Gay men found Loulou’s ambiguity attractive—Yves had a real tenderness for her. Maybe if he’d liked women, he would have chosen her. I can easily imagine une amitié amoureuse between them.

  RICARDO BOFILL I wasn’t a homosexual, but I was very jovial, and had been surrounded by homosexuals my whole life. I preferred them to normal people. More sympathique. Better company. Sensually, everyone was the same, and so, comme ç a, Loulou and I had a lot of experiences together, discovering a part of ourselves… It was a very liberal time. May ’68 wasn’t that long before. AIDS didn’t exist. Everyone slept with everyone. Loulou did, in any case.

  Imagine the kind of sex a woman can have with a homosexual. It’s a bit different, in practice. It should be satisfying, but … With me, Loulou made the passage from—she had never made love with someone she really loved. Maybe she found a special pleasure and discovered something she hadn’t known. Like all women, she wanted a child, even if she was so childlike herself. I did not.

  Clara’s talk with Loulou in the café hadn’t resolved anything. Loulou escaped to New York for the wedding of Sly (“Dance to the Music”) Stone and model-actress Kathy Silva at Madison Square Garden. Twenty-one thousand people attended. It was a paid event for everyone except four hundred invited VIPs, tapped from society and fashion: Loulou, Maxime, Giorgio Sant’Angelo, Amanda Burden … The bride and groom were custom-draped and -caped by Halston in his-and-her gold sequins. A full concert followed the ceremony, staged by Joe Eula.

  Back in Paris, Loulou filled pages and pages with Quaalude-fueled scrawl, illegible even to her. After Thadée dropped her off at rue des Grands-Augustins following a night out, she might go out again, alone, building on her knowledge of Paris lowlife. From the louche bar next to her apartment she got the addresses of even grittier dives, where she drank until daylight. “I often hear you fall on the stairs,” a neighbor worried. “The other day I was concerned, it took you almost five minutes to get up.” In September 1974, Thadée noted, “a doctor told [Loulou] she had to practically stop drinking, that her liver is so big she’ll die.”

  Later that fall, he wrote, Loulou “told me about [her trip to] Barcelona, her nymphomania, the night in a bar where she danced on the table, the police wanted to arrest her…” Dining in a restaurant with Thadée and Helmut Berger, 87 she passed out. Thadée carried her home, undressed her and put her to bed. He could have easily taken advantage of her, but didn’t.

  By day, Thadée was the picture of companionability, helping Loulou prepare for a trip to Chad with Ricardo, but worried that Clara would find out they’d spent the afternoon together. Thadée and Loulou had agreed on a script, which naturally she forgot: “What am I supposed to say, when did you leave me? … I love lying.”

  Thadée was finally making headway in his relationship with Loulou, even though “I learned she’s physically in love and that [Ricardo] is her best friend.” At the Sept, Loulou and Kenzo plunged to the floor in a heap, tangled and lip-locked. Loulou said she was “tempted to go home with him to see what would happen.” Instead, she found herself in bed with Thadée, trading real kisses. Things went no further, but it was progress.

  KIRAT YOUNG In fashion, a woman like Loulou makes everything go round, but she’s not free. Pierre and Yves had a hold on her. They wanted her for themselves. Loulou was a rather androgynous character, skinny, delicate-looking, okay? It’s ideal for a muse, but not really what regular European Latin guys are into. So in her relationships with men, she had something to prove.

  JEAN-LUC FRANÇOIS Loulou was a bit of a ball-breaker, un garç on manqué.

  As Loulou opened up to Thadée, a scorched-earth pattern to her affairs emerged that disturbed him. She told him that she blew off one lover after “that agonizing period of irritation that comes before the hateful, unavoidable cliché: ‘Okay, now I’ve had enough, get out of here.’ ” Thadée found the way Loulou spoke those words “chilling.” Another suitor told her she made love like a man. Four months after Thadée wondered whether Loulou might marry Joël Le Bon, she said that just the sound of Le Bon breathing “makes me want to kill him.”

  COLOMBE PRINGLE Joël was a good-looking party boy who did the Saint Laurent show music. “Cokehead” doesn’t do him justice.

  FRANÇOISE PICOLI Apart from Loulou, Joël’s attentions were directed at men. There was an affair with M. Saint Laurent, I think—both Yves and Pierre were sex-crazed. Joël was a great charmer, very handsome. He drew well and did some work as a photographer for Tan Giudicelli, the designer. Unfortunately, it did not end well for him.

  BRUNO MÉNAGER People in the house didn’t make it easy for me when I started. They came right out and asked if I’d been brought in by M. Bergé, M. Saint Laurent or Christophe Girard. The implication was clear, and embarrassing. Pierre Bergé hired me.

  KENZO TAKADA Loulou and I were very attracted to each other. She was so much like a boy. I’d first heard about this person, “Saint Laurent’s muse,” in 1973 from the model Jaime Santiago. I thought she was untouchable, someone I could never know: Loulou was couture, and I was prêt-à-porter. I assumed she was a snob when we met at the Sept, but not at all. Soon our two groups—me, Jaime, and Pablo and Delia, 88 and Loulou, Clara and Thadée—were going out together four times a week. Evenings began at La Closerie des Lilas with vodka-champagne cocktails, then dinner, then dancing at the Sept, or, more rarely, New Jimmy’z.

  MICHEL KLEIN Kenzo was an important chapter in Loulou’s life. Tensions arose because Kenzo was the most creative designer in Paris. Saint Laurent was parallel, but in couture. The problem was Loulou, who was Yves’s muse and Kenzo’s mistress.

  LOULOU Kenzo was the first competition Yves had in years. They greatly admired each other … I used to see a lot of Kenzo, and I think that was a great driving force for Yves … He has always been very competitive, and in a way he wanted to impress me too, kind of say to me, “I’m as great as your friends are, and you can have as good a time dressed by me as you could by so-and-so.”

  KENZO TAKADA Loulou would say, “That jacket of yours would look good on Ricardo,” and give it to him. I never thought of asking her to leave Saint Laurent and work with me, but I think Pierre was afraid she might. One day I ran into him and Saint Laurent on rue du Bac. Yves said hello. Pierre turned his back.

  There came a point when, for me, it couldn’t go on, the affair with Loulou. It lasted six months, a year… Of course, she was an exception, the one time I’ve been with a woman. I was in love with Jaime.

  ANDRÉLEON TALLEY Loulou was a woman of little insecurity. Maybe she was insecure underneath, but she didn’t present herself that way. She really must have felt confident in her relationships to men, gay or straight. Nongay or nonstraight. Fernando or Fred Hughes. She lured Kenzo to bed—I mean, of all people! Loulou never seemed defeated. That’s what Yves loved about her. She was a cross between Holly Golightly and Sally Bowles. Those women expressed independence, although there was insecurity behind. Sally Bowles was not loved by her father. The boy in Cabaret—remember Michael York?—she could not get him into bed, but finally succeeded. She said that all the other girls who’d tried were maybe just the wrong girls. So Loulou was like a haute couture Sally Bowles.

  Clara Saint (bottom right) had been losing the battle with “Comte
sse Lulu de la Falaise” (bottom center) for Thadêe Klossowski for years when Antonio Lopez sketched the women at Angelina, the tearoom, for “Antonio’s Guide to Paris,” Interview, April 1975. Clara never looked so good. The collage also featured Susi Wyss, “Paris’s Privatest Hostess”; Pablo Mesejea and Delia Cancela, “Latin fashion power in Paris”; a very high-cheek-boned Fernando Sanchez; the model Paula Marie; and Jean-Dudes Carnival, a lover of Antonio’s who posed for his Fire Island Series of Instamatics. © The Estate of Antonio Lopez and Juan Ramos.

  Fred was the kind of person Loulou gravitated to: an elegant, dilettante-y dandy with provenance. He was like a hybrid orchid. Loulou had an affair with Fred, I’m absolutely certain without fail. Fred, yes. Fred, for sure, because at the end of his life when he had multiple sclerosis, on his last trip to Château Lafite to stay with Éric and Beatrice de Rothschild, she wouldn’t have been changing his sack, the thing, the catheter where you have to pee into it, if she wouldn’t have been really close to him. She would have just said, “Oh, you do it.” Loulou and I were on sentry duty, rotating eighteen-hour shifts as caregivers. Éric and Beatrice certainly weren’t going to do it, waking Fred up and putting him on the toilet. He was so proud that he’d attack us verbally, because you don’t want your friends to see you in this position. But after two days as wannabe nurses, we said we cannot, we will not have a holiday. So Éric hired a nurse.