Loulou & Yves

by Christopher Petkanas

  This unsavory knowledge now served to throw into unappetizing relief a recipe that Maxime had published in her August 1, 1971, food column in Vogue—after her friend’s arrest. She had treated her readers to “John Vesey’s oyster stew,” adding that the “designer of custom furniture devised this one-dish meal in his bachelor kitchen with ingredients easily at hand.” I mean, the very word “hand”! She was talking about a man who presumably had fisted the shit out of that poor kid—reamed him inside out.

  PETER DUNHAM Maxime was big, her food was big, her decorating was big. She was glue-gunning way ahead of the curve, taking the “Love” posters Yves sent out every year at Christmas and turning them into lamp shades.

  LADY ANNABEL GOLDSMITH Jimmy and I had a flat in the Carlyle, and whenever he had a business dinner, I asked Maxime, because she needed money and maybe there’d be somebody to back her new venture, baking materials or whatever it was. But she was so persistent in pushing herself, it became embarrassing. She was always after Jimmy to help her. Those dinners stopped.

  HAROLD KODA After Mrs. Vreeland was fired from Vogue, she came to the Met Costume Institute. She decided to do a Russian show, so all these costumes started coming in from the Kremlin, the Hermitage … The Russian curators said only professionals could handle their objects, but Maxime had already appeared as someone who had a relationship with D.V. Mrs. Vreeland was an Anglophile and loved anyone with a burnish of … Nearly everyone in the restoration department was Social Register, and Maxime qualified as a volunteer dresser because she too was mondaine.

  First to go up were regional garments from the richest class of peasants: A-line seraphim dresses and over-vests in silk brocades. But what made the restoration staff froth at the mouth were the madderall linings. I was helping Maxime find some limbs for her mannequin, but she didn’t want regular straight arms, which would have shown the dresses’ Christmas-angel sleeves, she wanted angled hip arms—but not the hip hands that went with them. She wanted normal hanging hands. The mannequin looked like she was doing karate. When I asked if she wanted help positioning them, she said, “They are positioned. Doesn’t it look like she’s making bread?” The aristocrats of the Russian peasant class didn’t make their own bread, but it says something about Maxime that that’ s how she saw them.

  Mrs. Vreeland arrived, trailing a posse of debutantes who, through exposure to D.V., were getting their last bit of spit and polish. “What are these?” she shouted, jabbing at the mannequins. “They have no hauteur, no panache, no éclat. Out! Out!! Out!!!” It was the first time we’d met. Instead of the refined creature I’d always imagined, she was a squawking caricature.

  BABS SIMPSON Maxime wasn’t a follower, and Diane didn’t appreciate you unless you were. I had mixed feelings about Diane myself—great respect for her professionally, but difficult to deal with because she did not, shall we say, tell the truth. I could never warm to her because I couldn’t trust her.

  TONNE GOODMAN There was always the possibility of friction between the volunteers Mrs. Vreeland knew, like Maxime, and the academics in the museum, like Stella Blum and Stephen de Petrie. Mrs. Vreeland encouraged people to be bold and experimental, and that did not always sync with the restraint necessary curatorially. Maxime got caught in the middle. Her journey with us was not smooth.

  KATELL LE BOURHIS Diana and Maxime couldn’t stand each other, though Diana always acknowledged the great beauty Maxime had been. All three—Loulou, Maxime, Diana—had a juvenile quality, in the best sense of the word.

  HAROLD KODA Maxime had begun her own design consultancy, and Mrs. Vreeland felt she was borrowing ideas … Suddenly, we stopped seeing her. She’d been asked not to continue.

  HUBERT DE GIVENCHY Maxime lived in a cloud. She had great financial problems—I don’t think her brother or parents helped her—but she managed. She lacked direction. One day, she wanted to make a lamp shade out of the pleated plastron of a man’s tuxedo shirt. An amusing idea, but who would buy it? She wasn’t organized to be creative. Same problem chez Loulou. Maxime was content to be admired.

  ANDRÉLEON TALLEY It was my first year at Women’s Wear, maybe. Maxime had told John Fairchild about her bedroom, which Bob Denning93 helped her with, and so I was sent to photograph the famous nineteenth-century French daybed in apple green velvet. Broderie anglaise curtains and walls covered in Pierre Deux paisley were also part of the conversation. I arrived and Maxime’s in a frown.

  “What are you doing here? It’s the wrong day. I have my collection to do.”

  “Maxime, I could lose my job!”

  “Oh, there must be a mix-up. Good-bye. Come back another day.”

  I did, and she had nooooo sense of guilt—at-all-at-all. Laid up in the damn sleigh bed this time was the young Getty boy, the one who’d had his ear cut off and sent to his father!

  “Oh, he’s asleep now,” Maxime said, “we have to come back. Let’s go out and buy some food and we’ll make lunch.”

  Maxime could turn it on: hauteur when she wanted to be hauteur, like when she played the Marchesa Di Fiore in Blood for Dracula. She could be very like that person living in a castle in Tuscany and then on the other hand dancing at Le Jardin, turning her Schiaparelli herringbone tweed day coat with the purple satin lining inside out and rolling it up to make a fabulous evening muffle.

  BRADLEY LANDER John Paul Getty III was brief, a flirtation. Maxime flirted with everyone, even the UPS man.

  JOHN STEFANIDIS As a woman, Maxime certainly never compromised her freedom. She was a trouper. Loyal. Game. But not warmhearted, even to a friend like me. You took what she gave. She was the most fantastic seamstress. We were together on Patmos with Teddy Millington-Drake,94 and there were Provençal-like fabrics you could get then from Romania. Maxime cut out caftans and, sitting on the beach, sewed and appliquéd them by hand, very beautifully and quite fast. She gave me one as a present.

  WILLY LANDELS Staying with Teddy on Patmos was heaven … huge thermoses of bloodshots on the beach. My daughter Francesca was with us, Loulou and Maxime, too, and a very good-looking boy, Eric Boman—I gave him his first job as a photographer. Loulou was a kind heart, not at all what one expected from someone so chic. She had much more dimension and depth than people imagined for such a glamorous woman. The mother was wild. Careless. She lived day to day. One day she was writing a cookbook, the next day designing a carpet.

  BRUCE CHATWIN Letters to Elizabeth Chatwin [Patmos] 1 August 1970 Dear E., … You may complain of my lefty views, but God I’m right. We have the daughters of the upper classes here in force and I have been listening to a baklava of snobbery and prejudice for the past week. Maxime McKendry and John are here, which is quite fun, but they are rather brittle too. Shilly shalling conversation … 12 August 1970 … Magouche Phillips95 is here and quite wonderful, a great relief after rather a procession of fine looking but dreary ladies. I couldn’t have been more pleased when Maxime McKendry left. God what a bore. Forever reminiscing about amusing boîtes on the Left Bank in the old days when we were young and gay. Then followed by alcoholic soulful looks.

  MIN HOGG Maxime appeared in a black one-piece Rudi Gernreich swimsuit. The front was very demure, but when she turned around, the back was nonexistent. You saw her entire bottom.

  FRANCESCA OPAčIč I was eight or nine. Maxime didn’t like me at all. On the boat to the beach, she was always pushing me about. “Move over there, girl!” I fell madly in love with Eric Boman and announced I was going to marry him, but somehow understood I couldn’t. I thought Teddy had the most brilliant way of being rich, traveling without any luggage, because if he bought a shirt, he bought it in three colors, sending one to Patmos, one to his villa in Tuscany and one to his house in London. He even bought books in threes. Maxime would walk dramatically over the hills like Isadora Duncan. One day, she caught me taking the mick out of her. “Beastly child—go away!”

  CHARLOTTE MOSLEY Maxime had lost her luggage and was running up wonderful turbans and things. You must remember I w
as very young, only eight-een, from deepest Dorset. So to be staying with Teddy Millington-Drake on Patmos and thrown into probably the most sophisticated circle of people in Europe—John Stefanidis, John Richardson, Maxime and John, Ginette Camu96 … Maxime was a completely free spirit, Hoovering in the nude … John McKendry was a very quiet, thin, shy man—as shy as I was. He didn’t look well. Obviously clever, but not a good color.

  ————————

  MAXIME DE LA FALAISE John was playing a game of Russian roulette, and when he finally decided to live, it was too late. For a while he was absolutely obsessed by the moon. I never knew why, and I never asked. He would spend hours just staring at it. He was a mad, mad romantic.

  ANDY WARHOL Diary entry, Zurich, February 11, 1980 Loulou said John Mc-

  Kendry was actually killing himself slowly because he’d always fantasized how great and romantic and wonderful the aristocracy must be. Then when he married a countess—Loulou’s mother—and met people like Jackie O … he realized they were just normal dumb people like everybody else. There was nothing left for him to live for. Of course I think that Maxime just drove him crazy. I couldn’t say that to Loulou, though.

  ALLEN ROSENBAUM John paid a high price living with Maxime and became somewhat disenchanted. He was no longer in control of himself. The Met was paternal and patient. Ted Rousseau headed the painting department and was wonderful. Maxime’s great friend Rosi Levai—she’s estranged from the man who owns the Marlborough Gallery—Rosi worked for Ted and had an affair with him. She was badly treated, what a rake Ted was. Anyway, one day Gary Farmer and I were going to a matinée. John was going to Avedon’s, and he dropped us off. I knew we should never have left him, because he was looped, just so unbelievably high. Years later, I told Avedon there was something I’d always wanted to ask him. Before I could finish, he said he knew what it was. John was out of his mind that day. It would’ve been very tempting for Dick to do his portrait. But no, Dick said, he hadn’t taken advantage of John and photographed him.

  Have you ever read Paul’s Case by Willa Cather? It’s about a Midwest bank teller with dreams of glamour, and he embezzles just enough money to go to New York and buy beautiful clothes, go to the opera, and when the jig is up throws himself over a railroad trestle. That was John’s story, burning the candle very brightly at both ends.

  PATTI SMITH On the surface, John’s sorrow would be attributed to his unrequited love [for Robert Mapplethorpe], but … the deeper consideration seemed to be John’s inexplicable self-loathing. … In Peter Pan, one of the Lost Boys is named John. Sometimes he seemed so to me, a pale and wispy Victorian boy ever chasing after Pan’s shadow.

  JANE ORMSBY GORE I watched John go bonkers. Too much drink, too much drugs. Maxime would take away his passport, then as soon as he found it, he’d come to me in Wales. I changed my mind about their marriage. It must have been hell for him, sweet, kind, Irish, speckledy-freckledy John wed to this grand society fascinator who slightly puts him down. He told me, “When we have a dinner and someone in to serve, I’m so uncomfortable because I feel it’s me who should be serving.” The whole thing was Maxime’s fault because she fed him only rich fancy food and he was raised on boiled potatoes.

  KENNETH JAY LANE Maxime got hold of some fresh black truffles and did them en croûte with foie gras. There’s nothing richer. John, who really wasn’t well—he was turning green—said, “Oh no, Maxime, I really don’t think I should have that.” She practically pushed it in his mouth. He didn’t die, not on the spot.

  GARY FARMER Maxime went to Europe, telling John to eat the fruit in the refrigerator. There were two huge jars of cherries pickled in brandy, and he was not supposed to have alcohol of any kind.

  John never returned to his old self after the Munich hotel room incident. He broke all the bones in his foot. He had his Elsa Peretti belt, the buckle was hollow and he’d filled it with white powder. He was enjoying it in his hotel room without any clothes on and took too much. He was hallucinating. He smashed a mirror and cut himself all over. Blood everywhere. From his window he could see the moon getting bigger and bigger. There was an electrical wire on the ledge and using it he thought he could touch the moon, and he fell out of the window attempting to do so. Luckily, I think he was only on the second floor. The hotel people found him on the ground naked, covered in blood. John re-enacted the scene for Maxime in New York and fell off his crutches. She was so angry, she stormed out, leaving him where he fell. When she came back hours later, he was still on the floor. This was toward the end. He walked with a cane and was only—what?—forty-two?

  CYNTHIA SAINSBURY He fell? He wasn’t pushed?

  JANE ORMSBY GORE John was clutching emeralds when he jumped, I think. He was on acid. He thought he could fly. The stuff was pure, not like drugs today. Basically, you thought you were getting close to God, or that you could go to heaven.

  ANDREA STILLMAN John could have been the doyen of all print curators if he hadn’t gone off the rails with his addictions. Well, there’s Andrew Rose at the National Gallery, but he’s so boring. It was difficult to get anything done in the department. We were rudderless. Terrible stasis. We cobbled it together, because that’s what nonprofits do. In a museum, no one would ever say, “Well, you’re so sick, we’ve got to hire someone else.” They pay you beyond the grave.

  GARY FARMER As John became more and more ill, his behavior erratic, Maxime was mortified. She rented a maid’s room at the top of their building and moved John up there. “Well, I can’t have a party with John here like that,” she said. Poor John was feeble and not lucid. He didn’t understand why he was there and couldn’t go home. I pleaded with Maxime. It was outrageous. Allen and I made such a fuss, I guess she brought him back downstairs.

  ALLEN ROSENBAUM Maxime was worried both about appearances and that John might lose his job if the museum realized what the problem was. He was a romantic fantasy for her, and when it became less romantic, she wasn’t about to be tied down. Her behavior with John at the end was as cold-blooded—it was the same as when she visited the children when they were little: “Say hello to Mummy. Give her a kiss. Gotta run.” I shouldn’t speak of the dead this way, but what would you say about a woman who exiles her husband from their apartment so when people come to dinner she’s not embarrassed?

  GARY FARMER One day, I came back from lunch and found a message from Maxime. “John’s acting kind of funny,” she said when I called, “you must come over right away.” John’s secretary and I rush over. Maxime is clearly distraught. “I don’t know what’s wrong. He won’t answer me.” John is sitting on the edge of the bed, half-dressed, totally unresponsive, comatose. The secretary calls an ambulance, and of course when you call an ambulance, a policeman comes to see what’s the matter. Maxime was furious. “Who called the police? Who called the police?!” They took John to St. Clare’s. He’d been in before. This time he didn’t come out.

  ALLEN ROSENBAUM He was admitted into the mental ward, but Maxime had him moved to a general ward in case someone from the Met visited. She was in a panic … John’s pension fund … She had no security. She was still an amazing presence, but at a point where she wasn’t going to snag anybody. She’d had little tucks and things, enough to re-create what she had been.

  SUZANNE BORSCH John’s daughter, Renee, was told nothing—she didn’t even know John was her father. John had told me about Renee in confidence. What would Loulou be to Renee, familywise? Is there a name for what they were to each other?

  JANE ORMSBY GORE I never knew John had a child—and I thought he told me all his secrets!

  KATELL LE BOURHIS Maxime knew John had a daughter but never mentioned her.

  SUZANNE BORSCH Renee’s mother, Janet, was an old sweetheart of John’s from Canada. Janet’s Lebanese, a Blake scholar who spent summers in England doing research. It’s where she met John. Renee was born in 1960. Janet was already married to a man called Paul Warner. Renee didn’t learn Warner wasn’t her father until she was thirty.
She and Janet were stuck in traffic, and Janet just blurted it out: “You’re not Paul Warner’s daughter—you’re John McKendry’s daughter!” It could’ve been that Renee was saying, “You know, I look so different, I never thought I really belonged in this family.” Warner, too, may have suspected that this tall, gangly girl wasn’t his. John didn’t abandon Renee, but he couldn’t have contact with her, because it was Janet’s wish that Renee not know. Much later, Renee contacted Maxime, and she was kind, giving her John’s journals.

  ALLEN ROSENBAUM Renee is not naïve about John. She desperately came down from Canada to New York when Lucie married Marlon Richards, greatly wanting to be accepted into all of that. It was all rather cruel, I think, snobbism and whatever. Renee understood they weren’t going to treat her as one of them.

  John loved jewelry auction catalogs, what he was reading during his final stay at St. Clare’s. He was covering his face with gelé e royale because that was the secret the rich had for keeping young and beautiful. John collected monotypes. He’d bought The Fireside, the largest known Degas monotype, for the museum, and there was an incredibly valuable Pissarro, out on consideration, just lying there on his hospital bed! He was at the tipping point. John asked Robert to come take his photograph. Maxime thought the picture was cruel, but give me a break. She wanted a nice ending to the fantasy, that’s all.

  JOHN MCKENDRY Letter to Allen Rosenbaum, February 2, 1975 Robert came and stayed on for dinner… It’s odd to think of how little that now means when once I would have cared so much…