Loulou & Yves

by Christopher Petkanas

  GARY FARMER I never got the sense John’s downfall was due to Robert. John was having lots of promiscuous sex, telling stories about who he’d run into at the baths. There were judgmental friends who thought other friends were smuggling drugs into his hospital room, but it wasn’t true. He was destined to burn out anyway. He wanted to be in that other fabulous dimension, in the illustrations of the fairy-tale books he loved so much.

  ALLEN ROSENBAUM If your dreams catch up with you, you dream new dreams that are scarier and scarier, you’re on thinner and thinner ice. No one’s to blame. John pinned a fantasy on Maxime the way he pinned a fantasy on Robert. There was no death wish. He didn’t throw himself in front of a train like the character in Paul’s Case, though it is true he didn’t want to be saved.

  Loulou got a call in Paris saying John was dying. She had dinner that night with Ricardo, Thadée, Hélène and Kim, Charlotte, Patrick Thévenon of l’Express and Michel Guy, culture secretary under Giscard. Loulou, holding Thadée’s hand to keep from crying, was “devastated,” he wrote. She flew to New York the next day.

  CHRISTOPHER GIBBS Dear John. What was his affliction in the end? There was no HIV or anything like that? I can well understand resorting to drink and drugs if I found myself hitched to Maxime.

  LADY ANNABEL GOLDSMITH I don’t even understand now, all these years later—did he die of AIDS? Hepatitis B, was it? C? I thought he’d had a bad needle. He definitely died of hepatitis, whichever’s the bad one. Wasn’t he fragile? But terribly sweet.

  WILLY LANDELS Somebody said John died because of Maxime’s cooking.

  ALLEN ROSENBAUM John had liver disease. For the funeral at St. Thomas More’s, Joe Eula did a mad flower arrangement in a barrel. All the Met people were there.

  HENRY GELDZAHLER (Eulogy for John McKendry) He was an effective curator because he darted through the complexities of the museum as if he were reading a novel in which he was a character … John was so interested in others, in the rare birds with their often invented plumage, that he seemed only vaguely aware of what a fine and fascinating bird he himself was. That was his charm.

  Closest to him were his wife, Maxime, and her children, Loulou and Alexis. As many photographs attest, these were indeed enchanted days in which the reality of relationships merged wholly with the fantasy that John spun like silk … He made the decision to live out his life at the level of excitement that meant everything to him. He did not envisage a comfortable maturity leading to a calm old age … John was a Rabelaisian butterfly, a being interested in states of ecstasy without the constitution to support his appetites. His death did not come as a surprise … Nor to me was his death tragic. The Greeks believed in the perfection of man’s life at various states of being. John’s life had such a form … We cherish John’s memory because the life he chose had an enchanting perfection and an aesthetic completeness.

  NICKY SAMUEL John Richardson called Maxime “the Widow McKendry.”

  ANDREA STILLMAN We saw each other after John’s death because I sold Larry Rivers’s Jack of Spades for her. We met in her apartment, and I recall thinking, This is really … I’m very uncomfortable here, there’s something not quite … Later I realized she was coming on to me.

  ALLEN ROSENBAUM The first time I phoned Maxime after the funeral, she picks up the phone and says, “I knew after John died no one would call me.” And I thought, Well, I am calling you, bitch. Fuck you!

  ANDRÉLEON TALLEY Maxime called me one night after John died and said, “Come round, I’ll make you dinner.” I arrive, the door’s open, I walk through.

  “Maxime, I’m here.”

  “Ohhhhhh, I can’t find John’s ashes anywhere.” Her speech was slurred. “Is there a tin on the nightstand?”

  “No, Maxime, nothing that looks like a tin of ashes.”

  “Ohhhhhh, I need my husband.”

  “Let me look in the other room.” She was incomprehensible, and the ashes were her focus. I turned and went straight out of the apartment back home. And left her there.

  STEVEN M. L. ARONSON I ran into Maxime at the big bowwow opening of the Avedon fashion retrospective at the Met in 1978. I remembered that the show had originated with John, and congratulated her on that. She was only too happy to play the widow card—up to a point. She said, “John lit a fire under the Met to recognize photography as art, but it was me who got him to give Dick the exposure he deserved. So, you see, this show is our baby—John’s and mine.” She mentioned that she was writing a piece about her earliest experience of modeling for Avedon in Paris, and that all she had had to do was close her eyes to recapture the feel of the long-ago garment against her skin. I asked, “How did it feel?” She said, “Like steel wool, but whispery—like a cloud.”

  Maxime had meanwhile positioned herself alongside the large-scale Avedon of Loulou in a black leather jacket taken the year before. She declared, “The earrings she’s got on belonged to my mother. I only lent them to her for the sitting, and I mean to get them back.” With that, she made a mock grab for them in the photograph. Maxime was playing to the gallery. At that precise point the photographer from Women’s Wear Daily clicked gaily away.

  89 Marie-Louise Bousquet (1887/88–1975), Paris editor of Harper’s Bazaar.

  90 Count and Countess Brando Brandolini d’Adda, Venetian style royalty. Gianni Agnelli was Cristiana Brandolini’s brother.

  91 Host of brainy seventies talk show.

  92 Warhol insider and Interview transcriber who inked her breasts, producing “tit prints.”

  93 Robert Denning (1927–2005), decorator who, with Vincent Fourcade, plundered the fringed and tufted interiors of Victorian France for anyone who could write the check, from Oscar and Françoise de la Renta to Diana Ross.

  94 Teddy Millington-Drake (1932–1994), artist lover of John Stefanidis.

  95 Agnes (“Magouche”) Fielding (1921–2013), artist married, successively, to the painters Jack Phillips and Arshile Gorky and to the travel writer Xan Fielding.

  96 Ginette Camu (1937–2003), manager of the Madison Avenue Rive Gauche boutique, later at Dior in Paris.

  15

  STOP PRESS

  CAROLINE LOEB I met Thadée at Club Sept in 1975. He was on the dance floor, held up by a crutch, his leg in a cast. He wasn’t handsome. He was sublime: long face, square chin, hooked nose. He wriggled his hips like a double-jointed puppet and fell. I fell. Hard. We went back to my studio together, a bit stewed. I loved him. He liked me well enough.

  GRACE JONES [The Sept drew] the famous, the lusty, the intellectuals, the chic, the beautiful, the half-crazed, the loners, gay, straight, in-between, over the top, under the radar, the undecided, whores, models, and Casanovas, the marginal within the marginal, all sorts of heroes of the night … bodies coming and going in the shadows. A weird sort of community …

  THADÉE KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA It was a time that’s hard to imagine now. At New Jimmy’z, chez Castel, there was always someone to pick up the check … At the Sept … the only thing [owner] Fabrice Emaer cared about was giving us a good time. Loulou insisted on paying. So every six months he’d hand her a bill for three whiskeys.

  LOULOU We were never asked to pay for a drink downstairs, and it never even occurred to us to do so. Kenzo and Yves were the ones who paid, the ones who could foot the bills.

  BETTY CATROUX I loved the Sept! It was brilliant because it was a restaurant and nightclub in one, a bit louche but also wildly charming. Dumbstruck with admiration, lying under a table totally wasted, it’s where I met Francis Bacon. Also David Hockney, Robert Mapplethorpe … Andy Warhol, obviously. When you had enough of the restaurant you went downstairs, flirted and drank. And then when you had enough of the nightclub you went back upstairs to the restaurant …

  CAROLINE LOEB Thadée often stayed out late with la bande Saint Laurent, leaving me alone in his too-small bed; we slept intertwined. Waiting for him in his studio, I listened to Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue on a loop. It was romantic. He came home a little tipsy, a
nd we made love.

  There was a Balthus event at the Villa Medici, so Thadée took me to Rome. I wore my pretty Yvan & Marzia dress, all salmon pleats, my hair in ripples. As in Paris, I wasn’t allowed to go to any of the parties. Too young—twenty. Too much of a nobody. Again, alone in his room, this one huge and frescoed.

  He started coming home later and later from his nights out, until the day when, early one morning, there was a knock on my door. It was Loulou. She had come to get him. She was drunk. We all were then, all the time.

  Like Yvette Guilbert, 97 Loulou wasn’t beautiful; she was worse. She completely subjugated me. It was the first time I’d had a coupe de foudre for a woman. She operated on paradox, humor, goading, with her raspy voice, all those filterless Camels, hard alcohol and hard drugs. The fashion was for powders: white, brown, opium.

  Loulou wasn’t just queen of the Saint Laurent crowd—she was queen of Paris. Her life was a work of art, more than what she designed. I’ll never forget when I was finally “allowed” to meet her. I fell madly in love. I wanted to be her. I became a mini Loulou, a tormented, much less alluring version with more of an ass. Thadée recognized something of her in me. I know—I looked in his diary. I hadn’t been trophy hunting—I didn’t know he was Balthus’s son until later. I had my own Balthus connection. My grandfather, Pierre Loeb, gave Balthus his first solo exhibition, in 1934.

  Loulou and Clara weren’t threatened by me. To Loulou, I was more of an irritation, like a groupie to be swatted away—“Leave me alone!” Anyway, Thadée wanted her, not me. That was obvious. He and Clara weren’t really together anymore. They were like an old couple, neither of them faithful. But Loulou was still a menace to Clara, Loulou with her lack of boundaries …

  KIRAT YOUNG Clara wasn’t blameless. I was the face of the 1976 Ballets Russes collection, and when we did the pictures, the photographer was this good-looking guy, François Lamy. Clara was at the shoot as press officer, but we also knew she was his girlfriend.

  MARIE-DOMINIQUE LELIèVRE Clara had no shortage of affairs, including a rather public one with Fred Hughes.

  ALYNE DE BROGLIE Thadée and Clara were in trouble. He had Caroline Loeb, and she had François Lamy. Still, Clara had no intention of letting Thadée go.

  DAVID SULZBERGER I’d begun dating Loulou in 1975. I was introduced to her by the Camus. Belgians. Bernard was a hugely generous, hugely outgoing banker. Latterly, Ginette became a complete, distressingly incurable alcoholic. Heartbreaking. John Stefanidis was as devoted to her as he was to Loulou. This is no criticism, but John disguises his wonderful, good, kind qualities under such a layer of vinegar, it’s as if he doesn’t want anybody to know how nice he really is.

  OLIVIER CAMU As a teenager, I remember Thadée didn’t say much. There was always the book that was coming out but never came out. He was afflicted with some kind of Balthusian torpor. There was one party at our house, I had my bac exams the following day. “No worries,” my father said, “I’ll be up at seven-thirty to drive you.” The next morning, I walked into the living room and found Loulou on the floor, head thrown back against the sofa, vibrating with laughter. Champagne bottles everywhere. She, Peter Bemberg98 and my father, Bernard, had been up all night and were still at it. “Oh my God, is it seven-thirty already?”

  My mother looked after the VIPs at Dior. The queen of Sweden’s wedding dress was such a secret, the fittings were done in our living room. There was so much competition between Dior and the Maison Saint Laurent, my mother had to hide her friendship with Yves—when she went to dinner at rue de Babylone, Marc Bohan99 and Jacques Rouët100 couldn’t know. My father developed brain cancer but was never told, because he would’ve jumped out a window. After he died, my mother suffered acute depression.

  DAVID SULZBERGER I had a perfect little apartment on the Île Saint-Louis in the house Le Vau built for himself while developing the island. I’d come to Paris on weekends from London, and Ricardo would go back to Barcelona. He was doing these rather wonderful, Mussolini-ish satellite cities near Roissy airport. Loulou was Pierre and Yves’s genius adopted child. She and I were dating, but she didn’t hide her relationship with Ricardo. It wasn’t okay with me, but it was nothing I could change. Her health was always an issue. She’d already had bad hepatitis.

  JOHN RICHARDSON Loulou was her own worst enemy, healthwise. She got hepatitis, which turned to worse things, and she never went to a doctor. With hepatitis, giving up booze and whatever, you can recover. But she just drank more and got worse.

  Loulou spent Christmas 1976 in New York with Paloma Picasso at the Jaggers’ on East Seventy-second Street. Mick was in a state of high elation, racing to greet John Lennon and Yoko Ono with a spoon of coke. Warhol’s diary notes how “Halston and Loulou de La Falaise put a lot of the pick-me-up in a covered dish on the coffee table and when someone they liked would sit down they’d tell them, ‘Lift it up and get a surprise.’ ”

  ALVA CHINN Halston’s coke was for shit. I know the best because I had it in Brazil. His had something in it that made me go to the bathroom. Sometimes I pretended to be doing it when I was not, because if you’re with people who do substances, and you stop, it’s like you’re saying something about them.

  DAVID SULZBERGER On our first date, I invited Loulou to the movies. I was somewhat shy. We saw a convoluted thriller called something Condor. Everybody in an office that’s really a front for the CIA gets completely massacred within the first five minutes, except Robert Redford. At dinner afterward I was going over the plot, and Loulou said, “What on earth are you’re talking about, David? I don’t understand a word you’re saying.”

  I certainly wanted to marry her. Plenty of people did. Anthony Palisser? The painter? If she and Anthony were more than friends, I know nothing about it, and I think I would—he and I were close. As he was always hard up, I commissioned him to do a couple of portraits of Loulou, none of which Anthony nor I can find. I had encounters with Alain and Maxime in which I was the well-behaved-young-man-asking-mother-and-father’s-permission, and they were the traditional parents wanting to know, “Are your intentions honorable?” Alain and I had lunch at the Jockey Club in Paris. He was delightful.

  LOULOU [My father has a] sort of an intellectual appreciation of me … I tell him everything. He loves the idea of me as a poule101 de luxe … But he didn’t used to like me. He thought I was awful, a nymphomaniac. He thought that I was after him.

  DAVID SULZBERGER Maxime I had glimpsed as a boy in the late forties at my parents’ dinner parties in Paris. All the ladies were in dresses of one shape, and Maxime was in a dress the shape of that bottle. There was an element of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” about her. “Who is this mystery? Is there any mystery?” But being so stunning gave her the benefit of the doubt. Instead of honorable, Maxime would’ve been much more interested in my attentions being dishonorable. We had lunch in New York at Café des Artistes. Maxime was didactic, asking tough questions. “How much do you earn?” Before I could answer, she’d lose interest. No intellectual follow-through, unable to focus on anything other than herself. She led a liberated, “me first” feminist existence. But rather than being politically motivated, it was purely instinctive.

  Did I propose to Loulou on bended knee? I think I did, but anyway she said no. I was heartsick. She said she wasn’t the marrying type: “It’s a great deal easier to be faithful to people than to one person.” She made quite a song and dance about marrying—“Why should I? I don’t need to”—so I was quite vexed when she proceeded to do so. I’ve asked two women since. One said no and the other said, “Let me think about,” and then said no. It’s discouraging, though I’m relieved not to be with either of them. But if Loulou had said yes, I would’ve been the happiest man in the world.

  RICARDO BOFILL I have no diploma. I don’t like conventions, la petite famille petit bourgeois, marriage … I don’t need it. The proof is that I’m a bachelor. If I marry, the relationship is over. My relationships are based on private agreements,
words exchanged, not a piece of paper. Many women have lived with me in this way, and I always said to them, “With your new husband, your lover, you’re better off than with me. I’m not made to marry.”

  Loulou took an interest in my work. She wasn’t cultivated in the sense of having great culture, erudition, knowing the classics and the history of art. We were always on the move. Helmut Berger came by the flat and like that we took off for the Olympics in Innsbruck. The trips Loulou and I took across the Sahara were like health cures: Instead of a clinic in Switzerland, we went into the desert, to Ténéré in Nigeria, to Tamanrasset in Algeria with Fernando. I had friends there, Touaregs. I wanted Loulou to experience their rites and to show her the architecture. She was inspired by the dress of the chè ches bleu, nomads who changed three times a day, to make the fire, take tea …

  ANDRÉLEON TALLEY They slept in their underwear under the stars, do you understand? Under the desert sky with the blue men and the Touaregs. Who do you know besides Lesley Blanch102 that did that? I don’t. They could’ve been killed. The blue men don’t even receive people!

  RICARDO BOFILL Loulou took risks—psychological, intellectual. I admired her for it. But she had no parachute. We took every drug there is. She had such stamina, but working and then staying out all night did me in. I wasn’t strong enough to live this double life that had gotten so crazy and out of hand. We couldn’t continue to live together. We were going to become sick or destroy ourselves. So we separated. I need to concentrate for my work. Loulou’s was more frivolous. I’ve taken a lot of drugs in my life, but I have a sense of limits. Loulou was like a child. She frightened me because she had no brake mechanism.