Loulou & Yves

by Christopher Petkanas

  ANDY WARHOL Diary entry, Paris, May 26, 1977 Went to lunch with Clara Saint … and Paloma Picasso … Clara’s suffering through the marriage of her boyfriend Thadé e Klossowski … She found out by an official notice in Le Figaro placed by Thadé e and Loulou … I said Clara and I should announce our marriage in Le Figaro to outdo them.

  The civil ceremony was on June 11, the ball on June 30. Nineteen days of exquisite pain.

  ALYNE DE BROGLIE Clara suffered badly. But there had been a yet bigger tragedy in her life, the death of Vincent Malraux.

  GRACE CODDINGTON I was close to Clara Saint for many years. Men were always being stolen from her. She’d been with Thadée, then François Lamy—until a model103 came along and pinched him, too. Clara was literally a saint.

  ERIC BOMAN It’s the rare breakup that allows one to remain friends with both parties. I tend to sympathize with the injured. Clara and I were at a café within earshot of Loulou’s wedding. It was a perverse but perhaps deliberate choice of venue. She cried into her coffee.

  MICHEL KLEIN Many people felt they had to choose sides. Deneuve stuck with Clara, who Loulou’s friends were banned from seeing. Charlotte didn’t care. She gave a party for Loulou and Thadée and remained close to Clara.

  JACQUES GRANGE Loulou stole Thadée, Clara must have said to herself—What mistake did I make? It’s possible to be a strong couple and have affairs, too—we all did then. But Clara’s were more than that. She wanted everything: Thadée to entertain her, and then other men, her obsessions. I didn’t judge, but when you share your life with someone and leave them at home … The way Thadée saw it, he was available.

  JOHN STEFANIDIS It was extremely awkward. Clara was very, very indignant. Furious. Of course she was hurt and upset, but it wasn’t justified.

  MICHEL KLEIN I’m walking on eggs here, I don’t want to get in trouble with Thadée. For everyone but Clara, he and Loulou were a foregone conclusion. Two pieces of the same puzzle, the most desired man and woman in Paris. Loulou wasn’t a thief. One day something simply went click. The second she trained her eyes on you—as a lover, friend, husband—you were done for.

  DIANE VON FURSTENBERG When I heard the news, I compared Loulou in my diary to a beautifully wrapped bonbon in a Paris confiserie and wrote that I didn’t understand. Why was she doing this?

  FRANÇOISE PICOLI In late 1976, Loulou had serious health problems. Bergé saw she was a free electron and needed someone to control and keep an eye on her, that she couldn’t grow old the way she was going. That’s when he pushed hard for the wedding.

  PAQUITA PAQUIN The marriage absolutely seemed like a manipulation at the hands of Bergé. Such a reshuffling of the deck, it could only be him. Not that Thadée wasn’t attracted to Loulou, but was it reciprocated? It’s easy to plant ideas in people’s heads. Bergé says to himself, They should marry, she’ll be less all over the place. Thadée thinks, She could be my wife, that would be cool. Loulou figures, He could be my husband, I’d be a lot calmer.

  FLORENCE TOUZAIN I know it ended badly with Ricardo. She tried to kill herself. If Ricardo hadn’t left her, she’d never have married Thadée.

  JEAN-LUC FRANÇOIS Of course the marriage was arranged. Pierre orchestrated it to add a brick to the empire. Thadée was the prince, Loulou his consort, chosen to rescue a complicated situation. He was a joli garç on, and he had a famous name. That was his dowry, presented on a platter.

  It wasn’t the wedding of the decade—it was the publicity campaign of the decade. Loulou was the kind to get married barefoot on the beach, a madly in love, sexually radiant bride. If it didn’t last six months, who cares! Instead, she got a Pierre Bergé Production. But she played the game, handling it like a pro, like she’d signed a contract.

  CAROLINE LOEB There are many ways to “arrange” a marriage. “Oh, he’s no good for you, you’d be much better off with him. Not that one. That one.”

  NICOLE DORIER Pierre Bergé loves to manipulate people. He stole Thadée from Clara and stuck him in the arms of Loulou. Maybe they fell in love after, but everyone said it was a mariage d’inté rê t. A marriage of convenience.

  MARIE-DOMINIQUE LELIèVRE It amused Saint Laurent and Bergé to marry Loulou off to Thadée, to play maman and papa.

  AMY FINE COLLINS I’m a distant observer, but Loulou and Thadée’s marriage looked to me like Carlos de Souza and Charlene Shorto’s. Carlos worked for Valentino and was his lover. When that ended and Valentino became involved with Bruce Hoeksma, the American who makes the really expensive handbags, Valentino married Carlos off to Charlene to ensure he stayed in the family. That’s the point: No one leaves. Versace, too. Paul Beck was Gianni’s lover before he married Donatella.

  ROBERT COUTURIER Les mariages arrangé s … Marie-Hélène de Rothschild had a very close friend, Comtesse Chareté d’Ormesson. Chareté divorced her husband, Olivier, to marry his cousin, Jean d’Ormesson, the novelist. Then Jean met one of the Béguin sugar heiresses and divorced Chareté. In France, it’s terrible if you lose your husband and don’t remarry, because your social position goes out the window—pouf!—you’re nothing. So the problem was, What do we do with Chareté? Well, Marie-Hélène took her under her wing and gave her to her husband, Guy: Chareté became Guy’s mistress. It was 1970. But then Guy dumped Chareté and became the lover of Anne-Marie Stehlin, widow of the French general, an elegant American lady who was born Schwob. Old New York German-Jewish: Our Crowd. I grew up with these people—it was fun! Anyway, now that Guy had changed mistresses, the question became, what do we do with Chareté? She was married off to Iain Watson, the former lover of Alexis de Redé, Marie-Hélène’s best friend and walker. When Chareté died of breast cancer, Iain became the problem: What do we do with Iain? Well, he married Alexandra, the daughter of Teddy van Zuylen, Marie-Hélène’s brother, who Loulou’d had the affair with. Not to be left out, Marie-Hélène loved turning gay boys straight: Alexis, Jacques Grange, too. Not that she turned them for long. Of course, her big love was Étienne de Montpezat, someone else with a Loulou connection: He eventually married the first wife of Teddy Goldmith, Jimmy’s brother. But Marie-Hélène didn’t let Étienne go just like that. She had him sign a paper that he would fuck her once a month. On and on and on. So you see how all these people are just pieces on a chessboard…

  ANDRÉLEON TALLEY The Europeans are very sophisticated about their love lives. You can have your ex-husbands across the dinner table and they could be the best friends of your current husband. Or if you’re really refined, you could have your husband’s mistresses to dinner and it doesn’t really matter.

  Pierre orchestrated the marriage as a quick rebound for Loulou after the devastation of Ricardo, because the time between his leaving her and the marriage to Thadée was just so short. Pierre was the grand seigneur, laying down the rules, the codes. If he wanted Loulou to be happy, he would’ve encouraged the relationship with Thadée. But who knows?

  ANNABELLE D’HUART People in the Saint Laurent clan who were twenty-five carried on like they were fifteen. It’s a nice way of excusing a lot of doubtful behavior, and how I prefer to think of Loulou and Thadée in their treatment of Clara and poor Caroline Loeb. She was in love with Thadée, but didn’t even have the right to be seen with him! Then Bergé suddenly decides—paff!—“I’m taking her, Loulou, and putting her with him, Thadée.” But what about Caroline? She was only twenty-one, defenseless. I didn’t have the tools to deal with the clan at first, and I was twenty-six. I often think of little Caroline, discarded and run over. It was humiliating.

  MATTIA BONETTI Listen, I knew Caroline well then. She knew what she was doing.

  RICARDO BOFILL It shocked me how quickly it all happened. Plus, I had no idea that Thadée, the friend chatting with Loulou when I came home from work, was someone she could marry! It was unimaginable. Their personalities didn’t go together at all. But I was happy she’d found a guy so calm who took care of her and was always supposed to write, but didn’t write. I have to laugh a little. I’
m a professional, building one building after another. Thadée wanted to be a writer, which is not the same as being a writer. Worse, he cloaks it all in such seriousness.

  JACQUES GRANGE So even if Clara was a libertine, it was still pretty rough, non? I thought of her the day of the wedding, locked in her room. She was doubly humiliated because it was Yves who gave the ball. The fanfare … it was very public … so much press … Yves raiding an arrangement of ferns and plunging them in Bianca Jagger’s corsage, crying, “Elle est sublime! Sublime!” Clara had to swallow hard, hold her tongue and soldier on, because Yves was her boss.

  ————————

  JUDY FAYARD The wedding ball was at an old chalet104 on an artificial island in an artificial lake in the Bois de Boulogne. Pierre wrote it off as a business expense, I presume. I covered the ball for Women’s Wear Daily. I’d started at Life in the States in ’65 as a secretary in direct mail, landing here in Paris at WWD in ’75. I was more concerned about what I was going to wear to the ball than writing the story. I’d run into the ladies’ room, make two or three notes, then race back to the party. I was in a group with Carlos Macías, Bianca Jagger’s brother. Guy Cuevas was the DJ at the Sept, and it’s entirely likely that he deejayed that night. We were asked for nine. I went home at seven, fairly bedraggled, seven sheets to the wind—and I wasn’t the last.

  Loulou et Thadée Klossowski

  BAL DE MARIÉS

  LE 30 JUIN 1977

  CHALET DES ÎLES, BOIS DE BOULOGNE

  LES CONVIVES

  Naguib Abdallah

  Charlotte Aillaud

  François-Marie Banier

  Princess Minnie de Beauvau-Craon

  Thierry Beherman

  Edwige Belmore

  Marie Beltrami

  Marisa Berenson

  Pierre Bergé

  Manolo Blahnik

  Peter Blunschy

  Joël Le Bon

  Leonello Brandolini d’Adda

  Ruy Brandolini d’Adda

  Javier Arroyuelo

  Gilles Blanchard and Pierre Commy

  Antoine de Broglie

  Gabrielle Buchaert

  Patrice Calmettes

  Ginette Camu

  Bruce and Elizabeth Chatwin

  Michael and Tina Chow

  Edith Cottrell

  Guy Cuevas

  Polly Devlin

  Jimmy Douglas

  Gilles Dufour

  Maxime de La Falaise

  Joël Fournier

  Emmanuel de La Fressange

  Inès de La Fressange

  Egon von Furstenberg

  Philippe Garrel

  Alyne Genty

  Tan Giudicelli

  Clio Goldsmith

  Isabel Goldsmith

  Jacques Grange

  Bettina Graziani

  Pascal Greggory

  Didier Grumbach

  Michel Guy

  Lyndall Hobbs

  Annabelle d’Huart

  Alexander Iolas

  Sueo Irié

  Mick and Bianca Jagger

  Nathalie Kent

  Michel Klein

  Stash Klossowski de Rola

  Carol Labrie

  Karl Lagerfeld

  Patrick Lichfield

  Caroline Loeb

  Rafael Lopez-Sanchez

  Jean-Claude de Luca

  Hélène de Ludinghausen

  Carlos Macías

  Princess Marina of Greece

  Victoria Marten

  Lucienne Mathieu-Saint-Laurent

  Susan Moncur

  Alexander and Charlotte Mosley

  José and Anne-Marie Muñoz

  Nico

  Bulle Ogier

  Paquita Paquin

  Elsa Peretti

  Paloma Picasso

  Françoise Picoli

  Gilles Raysse

  Baron Alexis de Redé

  Bettina Rheims

  Éric de Rothschild

  Baron and Baroness Guy de Rothschild

  Ewa Rudling

  Yves Saint Laurent

  Fernando Sanchez

  Jaime Santiago

  Marina Schiano

  São Schlumberger

  Barbet Schroeder

  Barbara Schwarme

  John Stefanidis

  David Oliver Stone

  Kenzo Takada

  Andre León Talley

  Patrick Thévenon

  Tracy Ward

  Antoinette de Watteville

  Isabelle Weingarten

  Michael White

  Régine Zylberberg

  LES JOURNALISTS

  Joan Juliet Buck, British Vogue

  Hebe Dorsey, The International Herald Tribune

  Judy Fayard, Women’s Wear Daily

  LES PHOTOGRAPHES

  Nicky Haslam (sous le pseudonyme de Paul Parsons), Ritz

  Guy Marineau, Women’s Wear Daily

  Jack Nisberg, Britsh Vogue

  THADÉE KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA Pierre and Yves pictured us becoming big personalities. To be the godfathers of our social success excited them.

  RICARDO BOFILL Loulou invited me at the last minute, but I didn’t go. The clan … too uncomfortable …

  LAURENCE BENAÏM The ball would go down in the history of Paris nightlife as the first great mashup of baronesses and punks, of old socials and gate-crashers. The Stinky Toys105 gave a surprise concert, then, as Loulou said in her best guttural voice, “spent the rest of the night throwing up in the bathroom.”

  LOULOU I invited my English life, my New York life, Thadée had a Roman life, we had a Parisian life; we also invited people we’d love to meet and everybody said yes. That struck people a lot. It was the first time in Paris there was a such a mix of age, class, activities, a jumble of characters and everyone adored meeting each other, looking at each other. There were some French punks, and they were quite social in a way, they longed to meet grand people. It was like at the zoo, everyone was frightfully interested by one another.

  PAQUITA PAQUIN Loulou invited me, the photographers Pierre and Gilles—people who were a bit punk. Edwige Belmore, who later manned the door at the Palace, was just a street kid. Loulou didn’t want only the straightlaced Saint Laurent crowd.

  INÈS DE LA FRESSANGE My brother Emmanuel and I were asked, but we had no idea why. We didn’t know Loulou or Thadée. I think they’d heard we were good-looking.

  ANDRÉLEON TALLEY I was dressed beautifully by Halston in his own white dinner jacket. I arrived with Karl Lagerfeld in a big—you call them SUVs now. He had a bigbigbig black Hummer. Jacques de Bascher did not attend. No! Way! Are you—? With Karl and Yves fighting over Jacques, by that time, he was banned. No way! People had sex in the Bois. Picadillos!

  Three hundred invitations went out by telegram. By some counts, five hundred people turned up. Tables for ten were set out under a green-and-white-striped marquee Yves had decorated himself, topping the trellised poles with black mannequin heads wearing white paper-doily coiffures. He did the centerpieces, too, white sweet peas and red roses. Guests were ferried to and from the chalet on a canopied flat-bottomed boat, strung with garlands of white gardenias and red lanterns. The trip took four minutes, weeping willows brushing the water. Yves’s date was his mother. Loulou and Thadée stood on the bank among the palms and hydrangeas, greeting everyone as they stepped ashore.

  JUDY FAYARD It was eminently charming, Loulou done up like a celestial goddess with some sort of headpiece. It could have been a witch’s hat. Did she wear a witch’s hat?

  FARIDA KHELFA The Ballets Russes collection was the year before. Loulou was pure Bakst, 106 a drawing for Scheherazade right off the page.

  Yves costumed Loulou as Queen of the Night, her head draped in a ca-puche of the same delphinium-blue chiffon, spangled with gold and silver, as her halter top and harem pants. The glittering crescent moon pinned above her forehead and constellation of stars in her hair were fashioned out of cardboard, glue and rhinestones. Cuffs and snake bracelets c
overed her arms from wrist to shoulder. Thadée wore the same suit he wore for the ceremony, changing only his shoes and boutonniere.

  LOULOU The day before, we started to work on my dress. I never plan what I’m going to wear, and Yves hated to dictate, so we grabbed some blue fabric that was covered in gold stars and he threw it over me. It was held together with elastic under the crotch and only stayed put because I am totally flat-chested. It was so last-minute that the dress had no proper hems and it was pretty uncomfortable. A wonderful woman named Nina Wood created the headdress. Yves loved her.

  HEBE DORSEY You had no idea where you were, it could have been Venice or Amsterdam … Bergé was very father of the bride, keeping an eye on everything … Frankly, I can’t tell you who was there, except that you could have been in New York ten years earlier, when millionaires (art buffs, generally) mixed with the wildlife, because they knew they were guaranteed a good time … The fancy people grouped themselves in a corner with the instinct of a vanishing species.

  ELIZABETH CHATWIN Oh, I haven’t thought about that party in years! A complete and utter fairytale … everything so lavish … lanterns … draperies … nonstop champagne … unbelievably delicious things to eat, exquisitely pretty little pastries, all from Fauchon. They were as good as they looked, which sometimes they’re not, generally.

  MANOLO BLAHNIK If I start talking about Loulou, it’s going to be for a hundred million years, because I have so many interrupted moments with her. She was like wind, the impression that she create is like she has no kind of weight in the life because she bounces through, like bouf! bouf! A gift of explosive contagious joy … I still get shivers of joy when I remember that party. I jumped into the water—drink a little and I’m out of it!

  CAROLINE LOEB I was still in love with Thadée, became stupidly drunk and sobbed through the whole thing. Yves was really sweet, calling me “Rachel”—Rachel Félix, the nineteenth-century tragedienne—because he knew I wanted to be an actress. Thadée consoled me. For being in the wedding party, he and Loulou gave me a beautiful African pâ te-de-verre necklace.