Loulou & Yves

  DEBORAH ROBERTS I think Loulou was too much for Bofill. He was such a dictator. He wanted to control her but couldn’t.

  THADÉE KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA Diary entry, February 18, 1977

  5 am—leaving Loulou’s … :

  Her: i wanted to kill myself in Barcelona.

  Him: yes, i saw. quite a bandage.

  (Later)

  Him: If i slip into your bed, do you think we’ll fall asleep faster?

  Her: listen, i don’t know.

  Him: no, it’s okay, i’m going.

  Thadée admitted that his entire behavior was predicated on Loulou’s impending refusal. According to the elaborate intellectual strategy he erected, he facilitated her rejection to the point of canceling it out. But the strategy failed: He was, in fact, rejected, notwithstanding their mutual affection. Everything was now coming to a head, he wrote: “[Ricardo] can’t live with [Loulou], she can’t live without him, and I can’t allow myself to be imprisoned in [Clara’s] insane unhappiness.” Thadée needn’t have worried. Loulou had given a lengthy interview to Interview in which she declaimed her emotional distress but also her great love for Ricardo. Then, just as the magazine was going to press, it received word of the upcoming marriage of Loulou de La Falaise… and Thadée Klossowski. Not a little cruelly, Warhol published the interview anyway.

  MONIQUE VAN VOOREN “Lou Lou Klossowski: No Polish Joke,” Interview, May 1977

  MONIQUE VAN VOOREN What do you think when people say that you are really the one who designs Yves St. Laurent … you’ve heard that rumor?

  LOULOU I think it was created by a whole bunch of people who are jealous of Yves St. Laurent. In fashion it’s rare that someone stays at the top for that long. The nature of fashion is that people are in, and then out, and for someone to be in fashion as long as Yves gets on everybody’s nerves. Everybody’s very jealous of him, and so they don’t say it because they’re friends of mine, or to flatter me. They just say it to be nasty to Yves, because they’re all longing for him to be finished, over and done with. They’re longing to say he’s finished, he’s mad, he’s crazy, he’s rotten, he doesn’t work and I do everything—which is ludicrous. I’m much too young to make those huge, sort of Russian ball gowns…

  Working as hard as you do, how is your personal life affected? Do you fall madly in love? Do you have a love at present?

  I don’t often fall in love. I mean I do… I used to have a lot of crushes, but I’ve only fallen in love twice in my life.

  What kind of man do you like or favor?

  Creative people. Inventors.

  On what level?

  As long as they invent, I don’t mind.

  Do they have a certain age?

  No, not really.

  Do you prefer young men or older men? Beautiful men?

  Obviously, one prefers that they should be intelligent, inventive, young, sexy. I don’t really like beautiful men actually.

  You’ve lived in America, France, England. What do you find the basic differences between them? Why do you choose to live in France rather than America?

  First of all, I prefer to live in Europe, I guess because I’m European. When I lived in America, six years ago, I had a lot of time and thought New York was divine, lots of fun and everything, but at the same time I felt a little claustrophobic in America. There was a lack of a sense of values.

  What do you mean by that?

  I think the values America is based on are ugly—success, money, fame.

  You don’t like success? You don’t like fame?

  I like all these things, but I don’t think that they should be the most admired. I think there are other things.

  Like what?

  I admire people who just know how to live, who have intentions about everyday life. It’s the way they organize their personality.

  But don’t you think people who have been able to organize their personalities and everyday lives are basically successful?

  Yes, but that’s another type of success. For me, my brother is successful because he’s done what he always wanted to do. He’s always wanted to have a farm and a family. He’s created a united family and he has a farm that functions—now in America that wouldn’t be considered a success…

  What’s his first name?

  Alexis. When I see him, I see somebody who is whole, who is strong. You put him in New York, you put him in Paris, you put him in his sheep farm, you put him in a crazy London party, and he is the same. To me that’s success. I shall consider myself successful when I become sure enough of myself to be myself all the time, and to love and to like what I’ve done with myself.

  Don’t you think you do now?

  I think that by comparison to others I do, but I really don’t—I’m not satisfied. I’m not easy to satisfy.

  Are you in love right now?

  I hate those sort of terms because they never … they’re so general, so overused. Yes, I love somebody very much.

  Of all the countries you have seen, which has impressed you the most?

  The Sahara desert crossing. It was the most beautiful trip of my entire life—three weeks in Jeeps. I’m fairly claustrophobic, so for me to be out in such complete open space … I’m not claustrophobic about being closed in a room, unless it’s very ugly. I’m claustrophobic when surrounded by people whose sense of values I don’t like, listening to music I don’t like, surrounded by buildings I don’t like, seeing dirt everywhere. That upsets me; I get very nervous. The people of the desert are the most fabulous people in the world. They’re the last aristocrats. They’re completely grand with nothing, completely noble—the biggest sin is to say evil of others… It’s all sky and land for miles; you have a completely pure and mystical life without having to have any symbols of mysticism …

  Are you into the occult at all?

  Well, I come from a family of witches, so I was born into it and live in it without particularly making a point of developing it. I think that if one is going to develop occult powers, one has to be in a very stable position, and one has to be very sure not to use it for the wrong reasons.

  When you say you’re from a family of witches, on which side do you mean?

  Well, my mother and grandmother have been witches …

  You know St. Laurent better than most people; do you socialize with him outside of work?

  Yes. Mostly it’s pretty quiet; Yves isn’t such a gregarious person. We have a strange relationship. It’s a sort of a very ephemeral tie—there isn’t anything very precise.

  What is your ambition in life?

  My ambition is to fall absolutely and passionately in love with myself.

  What prevents you?

  It needs a lot of work, I suppose.

  In what kind of apartment do you live?

  I live in a flat which was rented with furniture. I’ve moved all the furniture out of one room and dumped it into the next, which I never go in to except to change. I’ve covered all the furniture with white sheets, and it looks kind of eccentric—like a room in a loony bin.

  Do you want to change your lifestyle, or do you like it the way it is?

  Now I’d like to change, but …

  What prevents you?

  I’ll be thirty. I’m in a year where I’d like to change many things.

  Like what?

  I don’t know. So many things I want to change, and I just have to decide which way. Basically I would like to change everything.

  Do you want to live more luxuriously?

  No, I don’t care about luxury. I like space—space means luxury.

  What do you think about Marisa Berenson? Are you envious, would you like to live her life?

  Oh, I love her, but no. I’m the kind of person who can understand most people. I can understand when people tell me that they want this and that, though they may be things that I would never wish or want in my life.

  Outside of personal happiness, have you attained, or obtained, things that you’ve wanted in life?

>   Yes, the things I wanted five years ago I guess I’ve attained, and now I want other things.

  Of all the people you know, let’s take men first, whom do you admire the most? Someone alive, contemporary.

  Well, I admire my boyfriend … I know that I like Jasper Johns as a painter; I like Berlinguer as the leader of a movement; I like, well, I do admire my boyfriend! He’s very important as an architect and inventor.

  What’s his name?

  Ricardo Bofill …

  Now I’m going to ask you a few names, and you tell me just one word about them. What do you think of Hé lè ne Rochas?

  I think she’s nice.

  Marie-Hé lè ne de Rothschild?

  I like her very much because she’s got guts, she’s got nerve. She’s terribly natural, sort of like an elegant truck driver. I love her.

  Diane von Furstenberg?

  First of all, she’s a friend, and I like her as a friend. She’s a very good girlfriend, and I’m totally impressed by her self-madeness.

  Are you happy?

  No, I’m not.

  ALYNE DE BROGLIE Ricardo left Loulou a message, written on the mirror in their apartment with her lipstick. That’s how she found out he’d left her. Small and delicate as she was physically, after reading the message, Loulou crossed the Seine to BHV, bought an ax, came home, and hacked the bed she and Ricardo slept in to pieces. She didn’t want anyone else sleeping in it, so she destroyed it, an act with a certain panache.

  ANDRÉLEON TALLEY I remember when the great person from Spain signed “good-bye” or “au revoir” or something on a mirror. That devastated her.

  RICARDO BOFILL Like all my relationships, mine with Loulou ended in a civilized way. No anger. Everything happened for the better, even if the Saint Laurent clan was furious with me. Some saw me as macho. I don’t know why, it’s something I despise. The clan said I treated her badly, that she wanted us to stay together, that I left her. In fact, we left each other. Yes, I heard she tried to kill herself. People talked. But I prefer not to revisit all that. As you know, when someone wants to kill themselves, they really kill themselves. The attempt of someone in a neurotic state isn’t a suicide. If something isn’t going right, I sever myself and move on. Loulou was like that, too. Her unhappiness didn’t last long, just the time from when we separated until she married Thadée, two weeks or a month. In that period, she came to La Fábrica several times.

  JOHN STEFANIDIS Didn’t Pierre arrange for all three of them—him, Loulou and Thadée—to go to Venice together? That’s when they fell in love, or realized they could live together, and came back engaged.

  KATELL LE BOURHIS There was a long weekend in Venice in early May organized by Pierre. Loulou and Thadée returned engaged. That’s the story I always swallowed.

  THADÉE KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA The Christmas [before], angry with Clara, I left on a trip to Ceylon … I got back … in May. God knows what happened, in June I married Loulou.

  KENZO TAKADA Loulou and Clara became estranged. Suddenly we had to see them separately. No one understood why. This was before the wedding was announced.

  ALYNE DE BROGLIE After Ricardo, Loulou wanted to quit Saint Laurent and return to the States. But Pierre and Yves made her an offer she couldn’t refuse: a small fortune. Thadée was also put on the payroll as a way of keeping her.

  THADÉE KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA Diary entry, May 10, 1977 I’ll never get over the nightmare of these last months, these last years—the harping that made me nauseous, the stupor, the mountingly desperate graphomania—when the absurd house of cards that was my life teetered so hopelessly.

  In Venice, we decided to get married. Of course, it will be agonizing for both of us, but we want this agony, to wrest the unhappiness that binds us. Our marriage will be explosive… Now we are one … I promise you we’ll have a dream life. My love, my Loulou.

  97 Yvette Guilbert (1865–1944), flame-haired Belle Époque diseuse, the subject of many works by Toulouse-Lautrec.

  98 Patriarch of a financial dynasty worth billions.

  99 Marc Bohan was scheduled to join the Dior studio, working alongside Yves as a fellow assistant, on the very day in 1957 that Christian Dior died. Though Yves succeeded Dior, Bohan was secretly kept on in case Yves didn’t work out. When Yves quit in 1960, Bohan replaced him.

  100 Jacques Rouët (1917–2002) ran Dior until 1984.

  101 Slang for mistress.

  102 Lesley Blanch (1904–2007), adventuress author of The Wilder Shores of Love.

  16

  Wedding of the Decade

  Loulou purred up to the town hall of the fourteenth arrondissement for the civil ceremony in Pierre’s mirror-polished black-and-bordeaux Silver Wraith, the first model Rolls-Royce produced after the war, with touring limousine coachwork by Hooper & Co., carriage makers to Queen Victoria. There to greet her were Yves, Pierre, Maxime (in an antique Creole nightshirt and on the arm of artist Alain Jouffroy), the Camus, Bianca, Marisa, Paloma, Marie-Hélène, Joël Le Bon, Caroline Loeb, John Stefanidis, François-Marie Banier, Anthony Palliser and Thadée’s mother, Antoinette.

  Smiling even more widely than usual, Loulou looked like the cat that got the canary: Thadée Klossowski. The groom wore a white double-breasted suit with peak lapels, white shirt, white satin tie, white shoes and white boutonniere. His bride alighted onto the pavement as a Georges Lepape pochoir print from a 1912 edition of La Gazette du Bon Ton. “It’s all from Rive Gauche,” she dutifully announced to reporters, and “very Poiret”: a soft jacket with passementerie buttons and trim, ballooning silk Zouave pants caught at the shin, a blouse of fine openwork, an organza shawl, an asymmetrically wrapped turban stabbed with a pearl pin and a huge diamond brooch, opera-length gloves, opaque stockings, a belt of twisted cord, and ropes and ropes of fake pearls. Loulou was a blast of snowy white, stained by the blood-red of her bouquet, waist sash and beggar’s purse. Her evening sandals were gold, and apricot aigrette feathers trembled skyward from her turban.

  JOAN JULIET BUCK It was as formal as the uniform of an Indian prince taking up his duties, as playful as a costume out of an attic trunk, as precise as couture.

  ANDRÉLEON TALLEY Loulou was the most unorthodox bride you could ever imagine, like a Lesley Blanch Wilder Shores gitane who’d just gotten off a camel.

  YVES I’ve never seen her like this before. She looks so girlish, so cute. You know, normally she’s so haute, so stylized, so arch. She’s a little different now, n’est ce pas? But I’m sure she will return to her former self in about five minutes.

  CAROLINE LOEB There was this very chic, fun thing that wasn’t fun at all, that Loulou and Thadée would have their most recent lovers, their amants en titres as witnesses. So Joël was Loulou’s and I was Thadée’s. The Camus gave the wedding luncheon.

  NICHOLAS FOX WEBER I knew from one of the Saint Laurent biographies that Balthus didn’t attend, quite a big statement for a father. Let me ask you one question: Anywhere on the Falaise side, is anyone Jewish? Because Balthus would have stayed away from that. He was a tremendous—I mean he would have just—you know that was his … Unconsciously, he was afraid that people at this over-the-top event would unearth his myths. I can imagine him not going because he is not the Count of Rola in this setting. That, or it just didn’t interest him.

  ————————

  LAURENCE BENAïM By what magic spell, cast by the House of Saint Laurent, had Clara Saint’s boyfriend become Loulou de La Falaise’s husband? … Clara was the only member of the Saint Laurent inner circle who didn’t attend the [wedding] ball …

  THADÉE KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA Loulou and I had become inseparable over the five years before our marriage, even if each of us had very complicated romantic lives … We were both so unhappy … We wanted to stop all the affairs we were having and save each other … The only way to escape the mess was to get married! … I decided that wanting to be a writer and not succeeding was making me too unhappy, that it would be better to stop and become a loving and atte
ntive husband and finally to be happy, working a little …

  LOULOU It’s so much more fun to be with someone who everyone likes … I am not a gold digger or anything like that, but I usually do manage to get a castle … My two husbands both have fabulous ones.

  Loulou and Thadée Klossowski de Rola (far right) on their wedding day with “fathers of the bride” Pierre Bergé and Yves, Paris, June 11, 1977. Collection of the author.

  JUDY FAYARD The concensus was that the engagement was very strange. First of all, Thadée’s leap from Clara to Loulou, and then, “Why Loulou?” Everything happened so fast. One minute he’s living with Clara and the next minute he’s marrying Loulou and isn’t it all so funny.

  ALICE RAWSTHORN Thadé e’s desertion was a cruel blow to [Clara], and it split the younger end of the Saint Laurent set, as Paloma sided with Clara. Yves’s loyalties were less clear-cut. Fond though he was of Clara, he adored Loulou …

  MARIE-DOMINIQUE LELIèVRE Not only had Clara lived with Thadé e for thirteen years, she worked with Loulou every day. By giving the wedding ball, Yves and Pierre were slapping Clara in the face … She was dumbfounded, and not, by the way, alone in feeling that way. But she let nothing show. La Saint-Laurentie was an endogenic sect, with Yves as high priest: every disciple expunged his ego (and moods) in deference to the master’s. He was both God the all-powerful Father and Christ the redeemer, building his church on Pierre’s shoulders … the YSL logo, the uplifted arms of the Y, was almost Christlike in its symbolism. If an apostle like Clara denounced Yves’s cruelty, she was as good as Judas.

  PIERRE BERGé [Clara] is very strong. No problem, however serious, lasts very long. She pulls herself back together by force of will. And her great quality is that she never, never mixes in the affairs of others [and] never mixes her professional and private lives.