Loulou & Yves

  Loulou was in and out of the hospital in early 1975 with what Women’s Wear winkingly called “tummy trouble.” In fact, she had a stomach infection, hepatitis and a liver abscess that required surgery. Pierre was with her the first time she was admitted: It was that serious. Since she wasn’t allowed to drink for a year, she decided to have a baby with Ricardo. No one was more surprised than Bofill when Loulou told W they were “unofficially married.”

  She was back at the Sept less than a month after her operation, now openly affectionate with Thadée. The way they held hands, Clara told Thadée, he and Loulou looked like they’d been fucking the night before.

  80 A former cement factory in Barcelona where Bofill also works.

  81 Jean-Michel Frank (1895–1941), high priest of modernist interior and furniture design.

  82 Edmonde Charles-Roux (1920–2016), Paris Vogue editor in chief who was fired in 1966 and avenged her employer, Condé Nast, the same year by earning the Prix Goncourt, France’s highest literary honor, for To Forget Palermo.

  83 John Russell (1919–2008), art critic.

  84 Quaaludes.

  85 Pseudonym for Clara Saint in Thadée’s Vie révée.

  86 Rolling Stones guitarist.

  87 The lover and a favorite actor of Visconti had known Yves at the height of Berger’s Damned period, only to play Yves, aged and out of it, more than forty years later in the more reliable of the two Saint Laurent biopics, Bertrand Bonello’s Saint Laurent, which Bergé aggressively opposed. Léa Seydoux acquits herself as the film’s Loulou. Berge endorsed Jalil Lespert’s Yves Saint Laurent, in which Loulou is played by Laura Smet, the daughter of singer Johnny Hallyday and actress Nathalie Baye. Smet’s performance passes unnoticed—her character was practically written out.

  88 Argentine designers who worked in London under the name Pablo & Delia.

  14

  Glue-Gunning Ahead of the Curve

  GARY FARMER Maxime was writing the food column for Vogue and a cookbook of English recipes from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. So she would make these outrageous dishes—hare in ale, chicken with oysters. I was one of the eaters. A tester.

  MAXIME DE LA FALAISE Seven Centuries of English Cooking Once you have it in your power to cook the rudiments of a medieval royal banquet, an Elizabethan nursery breakfast, an eighteenth-century tavern lunch, or a savory ice, you begin to see the people, their clothes, their furniture … Recipes are often read with pleasure, even if they are not used. This is why the majority of the earlier dishes have been included in their original texts. …

  Capon recipe from The Forme of Cury (1378):

  Take gode cow mylke and do it in a pot, take parsley, sauge, ysop, savoury and other good herbs, hew them and do them in the mylke and seeth them, take capon half roasted and smyte them in pieces and do thereto pynner and honey clarified, salt it and colour it with safron and serve it forth.

  JOHN STEFANIDIS Maxime fancied herself a great cook and did that terrible cookery book. I think my copy may have been thrown out. She made such horrible food, but it didn’t matter because she created such a nice atmosphere.

  STEVEN M. L. ARONSON Andy Warhol had warned me not to have anything to do with the food Maxime served—“You’re gonna have to eat before.” In all fairness to Maxime, this might have had something to do with the fact that he was eating very simply in those days—only meat and potatoes—while she was experimenting with medieval game pies.

  MAXIME DE LA FALAISE I choose things people can easily do—no roast cranes or peacocks.

  Whatever else you want to say about Maxime, it’s not every socialite/cookbook author who gets a send-up by a Columbia philosophy professor and New York Review of Books writer. Juliette Mensonge, hosting a dinner party for her little club of ancient-food enthusiasts, is a pseu-donym for Maxime.

  JONATHAN LIEBERSON “Medieval Cookery” [Before dinner, one guest] was seated beneath an elaborate baldachin (cleverly made out of grocery boxes stapled to the wall)… [Juliette] wore a high-waisted velvet gown and train … and a conical hat and veil … “This soup hasn’t been eaten since 1500,” Juliette said … “It’s a spiced broth that was a favorite of Louis the Bald of France” … Juliette crisply enumerated [the ingredients]—pickled goat, snipe, sneezewort, duck feet, truelove, licorice … Our cries were so bleary and insincere … [that] by the end of the third course, Juliette had changed into a Dickens workhouse overseer and would stand over each of us until we had finished our portions … Juliette’s reputation as a medieval cook grew, at least to the extent that freelance ambulance drivers were said to park in front of her apartment house to pick up the emergency cases they expected would sooner or later be carried from her dinner parties.

  ALLEN ROSENBAUM Maxime could produce a very good meal, and she could produce a hideously indifferent meal. Eighteen for dinner was not a strain. One time when the Mayors were invited, she served spinach she hadn’t washed and a single measly little chicken, putting it down in front of Hyatt, as if to say, You figure out how to divide this one fucking bird among all these people. She could also be bountiful. At one party, Diana Vreeland told me that you can eat chicken with your hands, but only one hand. There was all this sort of dicta.

  MAXIME DE LA FALAISE “Much Ado: Sloppiness Is Out,” Vogue, May 1973 It’s no longer embarrassing to be well-educated … Experts in their field, especially archaeologists with grave-robbing gossip, are at such a premium and ladies who know some are boning up on such people as Madame de Sé vigné and Marie-Louise Bousquet89 and her Paris salon in the ‘fifties … open house once a week, everyone there who was anyone, and warm lemonade to drink.

  Milton Glaser’s droll cover for Maxime’s much-maligned cookbook, first published in 1973. © Milton Glaser. Courtesy of the artist.

  Loulou was in one of her butch garçon manqué periods when Women’s Wear Daily photographed her for a “Quality People” feature in 1975. The paper called her “one of Paris’ most unconventional—and consistent—young beauties.” “I get dressed incredibly fast…,” Loulou shrugged. “I never really plan what I am going to wear… it’s a mystery to me…” © Guy Marineau.

  As Maxime was not known to wear her hair in a voluminous flip, this portrait by Kenneth Paul Block for Bonwit Teller is possibly a beauty makeover, perhaps from the early ’70s. The dean of Women’s Wear Daily illustrators admired Maxime personally and often did fantasy makeovers for the paper’s sister publication, W. Collection of the author.

  KENNETH JAY LANE The McKendrys had stayed with Oscar and Françoise de la Renta in the Dominican. Hélène Rochas, Kim d’Estainville and the Brandolinis90 were there, too, and before they returned to Europe, Maxime and John had a dinner for them. At each place were three oysters. Now, the French are very particular about where they eat oysters; still, everyone was very polite. “Maxime, des huîtres! Where did you get them?” “Oh, there’s a little man around the corner, he’s so cheap!” When she wasn’t looking, handbags were opened and pockets filled. Seriously. I’m not joking.

  ANDRÉLEON TALLEY One night, there was a blizzard. You couldn’t get taxis, New York was deserted. Loulou called me from Paris.

  “Please, you must go see my mum, she’s a bit lowly.”

  I had on a Norma Kamali down coat, walking thirty blocks like in an Alaskan avalanche. Maxime answers the door.

  “Ssh, ssh, Patchouli is giving birth.” Patchouli was a stray mutt. “I just cut the placenta.”

  “What are we having for dinner, Maxime?”

  “Kingfisher soup.”

  It was like a bouillabaisse of exotic birds from Thailand. I thought, She’s going to mix the placenta of the dog with the soup and I’m going to be eating dog placenta. She put the soup on the table and went back to the midwifery, and we’re on the twenty-fifth floor and the window is open and I just took the bowl and emptied it out the window. So when she came back, she thought I’d enjoyed the soup.

  KATELL LE BOURHIS John and Maxime were Elizabethan specialists,
he in drawings, she in food, so they’d do research together in London. Maxime practiced a kind of cuisine de sorciè re. To find in New York the ingredients for that elaborate sixteenth-century cooking, she was going far uptown, where they sell the things for voodoo. At one dinner, Pierre Bergé warned everyone, “Maxime has been marinating the jaw of a horse in her filthy bathtub.” So of course all anyone could think about was the hairs in the drain.

  LOULOU One day I called her up and she said, “Darling, I had Pierre over last night and did an all-black dinner … black pudding with squid sauce.” Being a taster when she was doing her medieval cooking, there’d be an animal inside an animal inside an animal. My grandmother was the same way. We dreaded mealtime.

  VINCENT FREMONT Maxime was a regular guest at Andy’s in Montauk. I had the honor—sometimes it felt like a duty—of driving her out from Manhattan. The next morning, I’d have to take her to the Amagansett farmers’ market to shop, with Andy’s money, of course. Paul Morrissey and Andy bought the Stanford White compound in Montauk in 1972. Lee Radziwill rented the main house and we had the two cottages. I assigned the guest rooms, so when May came around, I’d be asked to a lot of dinner parties. Andy’s guests were eclectic. We never had just artists or just fashion people. Everyone left their egos at the door, and there were big ones—Manolo Blahnik, Marina Schiano, Maxime. These are not wallflowers. We saw a lot of Maxime in the seventies. She came to Andy’s lunches on Union Square, and then at 860 Broadway. “Den mother” is a good way to describe her, because we were all twenty-somethings. Andy referred to us as “the kids.”

  Maxime’s mood could consume the room. She liked to push everybody around, but you didn’t push Andy around. She’d leave the fish for bouillabaisse out in the sun all day because she was determined to re-create for her book not just the ancient dishes but the ancient conditions, the hygiene, like she wanted to see how much botulism she could feed us before we died. One weekend, she and Marina had a cook-off. Marina won because earlier in the day we’d seen Maxime on the beach near Dick Cavett’s91 cove, lying buck naked on a bed of seaweed—and there was seaweed in her soup.

  There were all kind of benefits if you knew Andy. You don’t get into a gay sex club like the Anvil unless you’re a guy, but they made an exception for Roz Cole, his book agent. Andy was there one night and they told him one of his woman friends had been in recently and was thrown out because she tried to grab all the guys’ cocks. We knew it was Maxime.

  JOHN RICHARDSON Maxime and I were in a Warhol soap opera, filmed in her apartment. She had no money coming in and rented out rooms, so this situation was useful to Andy, he could use it.

  VINCENT FREMONT Andy taught me to use a Sony Portapak, and I cast Maxime in Vivian’s Girls, later changed to Phoney because everybody is constantly on the phone and they’re not who they say they are. The inspiration was Stage Door, with its rooming house of women trying to break into show business, played by Halstonettes Nancy North and Karen Bjornson, plus assorted drag queens. Candy Darling, using her best Kim Novak voice, played a put-upon actress. Brigid Berlin92 was 350 pounds and had to do her scenes from her bed in the George Washington Hotel. Maxime was the tough landlady, John Richardson her underhanded brother. He was terrific, actually. Boaz Mazor’s character has a secret affair with Maxime’s. Her apartment was very rich visually, with lots of pattern, opulent but not wealthy-opulent. Phoney has been shown at the Warhol Museum but was never meant for release.

  Later we worked on a cable TV project about dinner parties, Nothing Serious, and I shot a test in Maxime’s dining room. Andy and I had lunch with someone from Channel 5 who ripped us off and did a dinner-party show with Halston. It was a disaster because everyone was too lovey-dovey nicey-nicey: Victor Hugo, Halston’s stoned on-and-off boyfriend; Liza Minnelli … I think Maxime was the one who got Vittorio De Sica to make Blood for Dracula. Based on their scenes together, De Sica was happy he did it. I’m sure Fred, Mr. Style, had something to do with the look of the film. We had to redo Maxime’s audio because she mumbled. But we were never disappointed in her as an actress. The voice alone …

  KATELL LE BOURHIS She spoke like women at Claridge’s during the war, mashing and chewing her words, rolling them around in her mouth like stones, or a hot potato.

  GERARD MALANGA Andy was an opportunist by sticking Maxime in the movies. It was just the prestige of it: Andy’s MO. I don’t want to sound cynical, but I don’t think he thought Maxime …

  PAUL MORRISSEY Maxime might have had a film career had she been younger, but I had the impression she wasn’t interested. Her background—the extraordinary parents, brother, children—all played into the movie.

  Alexis had already made Andy Warhol’s Tub Girls, six reels of Viva, yet another Warhol “superstar,” in bathtubs with, in turn, Alexis, a fully clothed Brigid Berlin and Abigail Rosen, the first person to work the door at Max’s Kansas City. Maxime could barely be bothered to smile for the Town & Country photographer who assembled Andy and eight other “Warhol Girls,” “New York ladies who give and go to lots of those multilevel … parties you hear so much about”: Jackie Rogers, Monique van Vooren, Sylvia Miles, Francine LeFrak, Marian Javits, Ann Barish, Ethel Scull, Marjorie Reed. Maxime toughed it out longer with Warhol and his tribe than many, putting up Candy Darling when she needed a bed, corralling Nan Kempner to help her pay Candy’s medical bills when she was dying of leukemia, leaning on Vogue editor in chief Grace Mirabella to have her husband, William Cahan, a leading cancer specialist, review Candy’s case. In 1977, Maxime designed the menu for the Andy-Mat, Warhol’s version of an Automat: shepherd’s pie, fish cakes, Irish lamb stew. Orders were to be written out by diners, sent to the kitchen by pneumatic tube and served by waitresses in nanny uniforms. But Andy’s backers fell through, and with them Maxime’s dream of a “'nursery' cocktail” of milk on the rocks. She also designed for Blousecraft, Gibi Knits, Celanese, Bloomingdale’s, Rébé, Pucci, Bobbie Brooks, Dorville of London, Williams & Hopkins of Bournemouth, Eve Stillman, Genesco, Michael Sekers and Hamon Knitwear. To make ends meet, Maxime taught silk-screening at FIT and wrote frequently for Interview, interviewing Diana Vreeland, Paul Bocuse and fashion’s Mme. Defarge, Sonia Rykiel. Her Vogue pieces on the period’s reigning hostesses—D. D. Ryan, Lily Auchincloss, Babe Paley—were collected in a book.

  WILLIAM P. RAYNER Foreword to Food in Vogue The hundreds of recipes in this book reflect that cross-index of lifestyles and nationalities that can come only from a periodical that is at home in five languages and on four continents, together with an author who is herself a citizen of the world … Perhaps even more important [than the celebrities] are the two hundred or more private individuals whose friendship for Maxime is witnessed in the thought and quality of the recipes they contributed.

  ALLEN ROSENBAUM Vogue got rid of her because she got too original, writing about TV dinners and frozen frankfurters. She was playing a game of one-upmanship—“Catch me if you can”—and it backfired. There was never prolonged success. Remember “the Countess Maxime de La Falaise for Pond’s cold cream” ads, where she’s wearing a tiara? “Swirl with Maxime,” practical separates for the hostess-cook? Creativity was crucial to Maxime’s view of herself; certainly it wasn’t supported by her talent. She had so many careers, always hustling. Loulou saved her many times.

  MAXIME DE LA FALAISE I’ve never really had any money, you know. People assumed I did, but I always lived on my wits… I’ve never been spoiled by having too much money too easily. [Our family has] always had to work for what we got. So we’ve become quality snobs as opposed to social snobs, and we’re very demanding of ourselves and truly as honest as we know how to be.

  LOULOU [My mother] is a great gypsy, always thinking of extravagant ways of making money. She is always inventing things, pretty weird things I say. She invented a sort of rubber washing-up glove which you fill with water and put in the icebox to freeze, and then you lay it on your liver. It was meant to be soothing and she thought it would make her
fortune. Which it did not.

  MAXIME DE LA FALAISE I’m a mass commodity! A mini-conglomerate.

  STEVEN M. L. ARONSON I was an acquiring editor at a publishing house and had given Maxime a contract for a cookbook—which she never delivered. She was in my office one day when her eye wandered to a stack of books on my desk. She picked up the letters of Lytton Strachey’s ill-fated friend Dora Carrington—“This will be perfect for him,” she said. She also separated out the diaries of Count Harry Kessler—“This one will do quite nicely, too.” She then somehow extracted from me a promise to send every few months a parcel of belles lettres to this great friend of hers who she said no longer had ready access to things like books. I naturally asked who the beneficiary of my largesse was to be. “A brilliant furniture designer!” she exclaimed: a man whose metalwork was collected by people like the Windsors and the Rockefellers—steel, she told me, was putty in his hands. She then wrote down his name for me: John Vesey. And his address: some prison or other. I asked what he was in there for. She answered, “Oh, nothing much.”

  Around the time I mailed the third parcel—to Sing Sing or Attica or wherever—I learned that Vesey was serving five years for having sexually assaulted and grievously injured a seventeen-year-old high-school dropout from North Carolina whom he had picked up at the Port Authority Bus Terminal one night and taken back to his town house in the East Sixties for dinner. The prosecutor had described the assault to The New York Times as “ ‘the most horrible case’ of homosexual mutilation he’d seen ‘in years,’ ” adding that the underage cracker had required two consecutive operations.