Loulou & Yves

  ANNABELLE D’HUART I met Loulou for the first time that night. I was living in New York and went to the ball with Fernando in a magnificent Balenciaga of his mother’s. The next year, I moved back to Paris. Loulou and I became close—very close.

  THADÉE KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA I remember that night offering smack to Mick Jagger, who was horrified … For some reason we had our pockets full of drugs; well, it was a party. So all the kids came with a gram of this or that as a present.

  There was heroin a-go-go. Buried inside a big bag of coke someone had thoughtfully given the newlyweds was a diamond ring for Loulou. At sunrise, waiters appeared with baskets of warm croissants and enormous terra-cotta pots of apricot jam.

  JOAN JULIET BUCK “International Get-Together,” British Vogue, August 1977 At one moment it was almost like Buñ uel’s Exterminating Angel. 400 people gathered on a small island for a ball, and none of them willing to move down to the dock and take the boat home. “Goodnight, goodbye,” they’d say, and then, ten minutes later, they would be seen at the bar, having just one last glass of champagne, or dancing a quick last paso doble under the tent … The food was endless, delicious—pâ té s and duck and ham, and sorbets weeping from cornucopias made of biscuit. And a few hours later, brochettes and merguez sausages … Ré gine attempted to lead a defection back to her nightclub for spaghetti at three, but lost most of her troops on the way. French Vogue erected a studio with a white backcloth in the grounds to record the groups … the night was kind; not a line showed; not an ankle was twisted, and a certain kind of manic ecstasy kept verbal exchanges short, table-hopping constant and spirits high. When dawn had come and gone, Pierre Bergé went out in a rowboat, all alone, followed by a pair of swans; he rowed to shore; and seeing that it was clear to leave, others followed, and the party broke up.

  JUDY FAYARD Taxis waited on the other side to take us home. On the boat for the return trip, Bianca’s brother stood up, stripped, jumped off and swam to shore in that disgustingly murky water.

  LOULOU [For] our honeymoon … we set out in a red convertible Volkswagen we’d been given as a wedding present. We [ended up] in Turkey, where we took the coastal roads. The car needed servicing and Thadée, who claimed Turkish mechanics were the best in the world, dropped the car off for its checkup. When we returned, the mechanics had removed every last bit of the engine! When they finally reinstalled it, the car refused to go uphill, so we put it on a boat to Venice, picked it up over there and made our way back to Deauville, where we’d been staying with Yves …

  MICHEL KLEIN Of course, Clara and Loulou still had to work together. Those of us on the sidelines were too oblivious to care about how much harder this was for the one who had been left behind: Clara.

  MATTIA BONETTI Clara’s office was around the corner from the couture house on avenue George V with the rest of Rive Gauche, so she and Loulou were separated, physically. In any case, they were femmes du monde: If they were thrown together, they knew how to behave.

  PAQUITA PAQUIN Clara was back at her desk the Monday after the ball. Not easy.

  103 Ingmari Johansson and François Lamy, in a double blow to Clara, married the same year as Loulou.

  104 To satisfy a whim of Empress Eugénie, Napoléon III dismantled a chalet in Berne, transported it by train to Paris and remounted it in the Bois. The Chalet des Îles was patronized by Proust and Zola and is still in operation.

  105 An early French new wave band, the Stinky Toys had performed in London in 1976 on the same bill as the Clash and the Sex Pistols. The group’s one album was dismissed as reheated Rolling Stones/New York Dolls.

  106 Léon Bakst (1866–1924), Ballets Russes scenic and costume designer.

  17

  La Vie en Couple

  PIERRE DE MONTJOU We first heard that Henry de La Falaise, had died of a heart attack, in 1972, when he was charged by a bull while out walking in Majorca. But then Emmita said it wasn’t a bull at all, just a harmless cow! I broke up laughing.

  GABRIEL DE LA FALAISE Henry must have had a mistress at the end, because a lady telephoned me saying he’d instructed her to contact me if she hadn’t heard from him in three months.

  I worked with Emmita on her memoir, but pulled out—too silly! She and Henry spent every summer with Eddie and Mona von Bismarck on Capri, but there’s not one mention of Eddie’s being homosexual! Emmita gave a few lunches after Loulou and Thadée married and invited them and me and Alexis. We were polite to each other. Thadée was mute. Whatever drug he’d swallowed the night before was still working. Emmita made fun of Maxime for giving cooking classes and not washing when they’d rented a house together on the Riviera in the forties.

  GEOFFORY GUERRY The La Falaises are an amusing family, romantic but sad. Beyond the showbiz, Loulou carried the burden of her childhood her entire life. No father image, even less of a mother image. She told me straight-out she barely knew her father—and she’d had time to know him. They’d both been living in Paris for five years when he died, in 1977. Alain wasn’t what you’d call whimsical, and I’m not sure he was thrilled with his daughter’s lifestyle.

  Alain was remembered for writing no books of his own and for demanding to be reimbursed for Loulou’s first wedding ball; the Milners obliged, and Desmond himself may have contributed, even if he, as a married man, was still receiving an allowance from his mother and stepfather. The sum total of Alain’s oeuvre was French translations of Louis Bromfield’s Wild Is the River, about the Mississippi, and Why I Escaped: The Story of Peter Pirogov, about a Soviet Air Force pilot’s defection in Stalinist Russia. Alain’s last years were perhaps the happiest he’d known. Half a century after Bettina Bergery passed him over in favor of the odious Gaston Bergery, the Pétain henchman who was acquitted in a postwar trial and died in 1974, she and Alain were finally in each other’s arms. The condolence letters among her papers at Yale leave no doubt that she was his widow in everything but name, Givenchy sympathizing with “how great must be your pain,” and Maxime, who knew Bettina from their Schiaparelli days together, signing off melodramatically “with all my deep feeling.” The paid death notice Maxime took out in The New York Times was careful to note, fallaciously, the passing of the Marquis de La Falaise. The title, if it existed, had gone after Henry’s death to Gabriel de La Falaise—Henry’s adopted and Richard’s biological son—not to Alain. Maxime was keeping warm around this time with what Warhol called an “almost-boyfriend,” Craig Braun, the graphic designer Andy had worked with on the Stones’ Sticky Fingers cover.

  GABRIEL DE LA FALAISE Yves Saint Laurent attended Alain’s funeral, so drugged he had two bodyguards to hold him up.

  PIERRE DE MONTJOU I knew Alain well. We used to play backgammon at the Jockey. He had several Hennessy real estate holdings in Paris and worked for the company in PR or advertising. It’s no secret: Alain wasn’t a La Falaise: He’s the illegitimate son of Antoine Hocquart de Turtot. It’s even in the official, published Hocquart de Turtot genealogy by Geoffroy Guerry. Antoine married Henriette de La Falaise, Alain’s mother after her first husband, Gabriel, the fencing champion, died. But Henriette and Antoine’s relationship had already been going on a long time when Alain was born. Alain was the picture of Antoine. They resembled each other like two drops of water. There’s never been the least ambiguity about it. There were no DNA tests to prove paternity back then.

  LADY ANNABEL GOLDSMITH Rhoda died in 1981. Loulou came to London for the funeral. Maxime and Mark fell out because everything went to him. He’d been making money and paying the expenses at Charleston and giving Rhoda an allowance, so automatically he got the house, which he sold. The paintings in Oswald’s studio were auctioned. Maybe Maxime was given a few. I didn’t think she got a fair deal. She was bitter and so she and Mark became estranged. Not that they were ever particularly close. No one in that family was. Maxime wasn’t close to Rhoda. Mark didn’t like Rhoda. Rhoda couldn’t stand Maxime.

  ————————

  CAROLINE LOEB After the wedding,
Loulou introduced me to Kenzo, and I became a salesgirl in his shop. Everyone was so fucked-up at Kenzo, all so stoned, cocaine and heroine everywhere, even the boutique. I had an affair with his business partner, Gilles Raysse. We’d drive to Deauville with Kenzo in his Rolls and Jacques de Bascher, and Gilles would give us coke and money to gamble. I don’t want to be a stool pigeon, but no one in that group walked out the door without taking heroin or a line of coke—plus alcohol—Loulou included. The cracks were always obvious: You don’t do all the drugs she did and have all the sex she had if you’re not profoundly fucked-up. I know because I’ve been down that alley, too. And then being an icon, it has to cost you because it’s so grotesque.

  ANDRÉLEON TALLEY Paloma Picasso was about to come into her inheritance and living in New York at the Waldorf with her soon-to-be husband, Rafael Lopez-Sanchez. One time, Loulou borrowed her limousine to go to the Anvil, the reallyreallyreally louche sadomasochistic gay bar where women normally were not allowed. Loulou was in a lavender duchesse satin skirt from the Ballets Russes collection, a Ballantyne cashmere cardigan sweater worn the wrong way around, the gilt buttons running down the back, and rows and rows of faux pearls. The focus was on men in leather, their bums and fronts exposed. No one talked to us. Suddenly there was a man on top of the bar urinating! I kept saying to Loulou, “We have to leave because I’m wearing the peau de soie dinner slippers Reed Evins made for me and they’re going to be splashed by a stranger’s urine!”

  JACQUES GRANGE I was fascinated that Loulou could live and work at the pace she did. But I wondered, people who are always laughing and in midstream, between two shores, if it doesn’t hide unhappiness. Because it’s not normal to be gay and marvelous all the time, non? It stupefies me. It would depress me to always be drunk. But I’m not Loulou.

  ALVA CHINN I saw Loulou at a Kenzo party around 1980, one of the craziest parties I’ve ever been to, hundreds of people. I went with Marion Womble, a male model who worked for Saint Laurent. There were people having sex, almost like a show. The way everyone was standing around watching, it was like a performance. There was a lot of wildness happening in that room. Everyone was really messed up, higher than high. The way I was raised, I always leave with the person I arrive with. But I couldn’t handle it and left without Marion.

  Winter 1982, the year the author began covering Saint Laurent. Collection of the author.

  PETER DUNHAM I’m not saying this as a fact about Loulou, but her whole world was so much into having orgies.

  DIANE DE BEAUVAU-CRAON You know, back then we did it right and left, front and back—and not just once a night.

  ————————

  The House of Saint Laurent had seen them come and go at the Paris bureau of Women’s Wear and W. They lived through André Leon Talley, who was followed by Ben Brantley, now the New York Times’ chief theater critic. Ben hated Paris and spent a lot of time literally hiding under his desk. I arrived on January 2, 1982, as a one-size-fits-all reporter after a short tour as the bra-and-girdle editor in New York, where my first story had been a national retail survey of the running bra. The beat was better than it sounds. In W terms, “intimate apparel” translated as “at-home wear,” which meant I got to quiz socialites like C. Z. Guest and Gerry Stutz about why they might choose a caftan over hostess pajamas.

  Almost everything I knew about Loulou I knew from White Women, Helmut Newton’s breakout book of 1976, which featured her in ecstasies of self-absorption against a mirror at the Hôtel Pont-Royal in Paris, and from a 1978 “High Life” column by Taki in The Spectator. Taki had voted Loulou into the Hall of Fame of his fantasy Radical Chic Association, alongside Jackie O, Melina Mercouri, Baroness Gaby van Zuylen and Gianni Agnelli’s sister, Susanna. They were all guilty of wanting it both ways. Marian Javits, wife of the New York senator, worked undercover for the shah of Iran while pushing for Eskimo rights; Loulou was employed by a couture house while advocating for the proletariat. “Loulou has a phoney title,” Taki wrote, “likes smoking exotic Eastern tobacco that gives one hallucinations … and believes Eurocommunism is the greatest discovery since margarine … that if Europe went red, couturiers like St. Laurent would be buried in the Kremlin Mausoleum in case they overdosed.”

  That I wasn’t overly interested in knowing Loulou when I could have known her, or at least known her better, takes nothing away from her charisma, whose power you felt even when it wasn’t aimed at you. As everyone in the fashion world learned sooner or later, John Fairchild was deeply evil, a bloodsucker and a bully. No one cried when he died. Well, maybe Leonard Lauder. John’s top, bootlicking lieutenant, Michael Coady, was a runtish, chinless man who looked like a cross between a shrimp and a weasel. Of course, we called him “Michael Toady,” just as we called the fabulously collusive Jane F. Lane “Jane Fucking Lane.” A shapeless, sexless woman with the piano legs of someone in her seventies, even though she was only in her thirties, Jane was to Michael what Michael was to John. Michael’s idea of a joke was imitating a cripple walking, or boarding a plane, filling a wineglass with his urine, then handing it to a stewardess, saying the drink tasted funny, what did she think? Once, at a party, he put his hand under Jane’s dress, poked around, then offered it to the man next to him for a whiff.

  John owned his drudges, or tried to, so one avoided the Kool-Aid and kept one’s distance, a matter of survival. Showing too much interest was the path to annihilation, or a promotion you didn’t want. I was twenty-six when I moved to Paris, and anyway my new life there trumped my interest in the ruthless culture of W and WWD, with its hierarchy of “ladies.” Loulou was one.

  John’s love for Saint Laurent was irrational, maybe even … well, let’s leave that to John’s biographers. People talked.

  BRUNO MéNAGER The show was always on Wednesday, and Women’s Wear would come for pictures the day before or the day before the day before. I remember John Fairchild coming with his friend, his petit copain, I mean. Or am I dreaming? It seems to me that once … That’s what we understood, that it was his companion.

  John force-fed Seventh Avenue Yves until it choked on him. As Yves also sold newspapers, John could find a reason for someone in the bureau to go to YSL three times a week. “Yves stubbed his toe. Go to avenue Marceau.” No excuse for a story was too small. So Loulou and I saw each other a lot. We couldn’t not see each other.

  Headquarters was in a Second Empire town house, which after Yves’s retirement became the Fondation Pierre Bergé–Yves Saint Laurent (and not the other way around). Since 2017, it has housed the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris. The building’s façade still shows the spindly interlocking letters Y, S and L: the flawlessly beautiful Cassandre logo Hedi Slimane, one of Yves’s successors, mothballed after officially hacking back the name of the house to Saint Laurent. You entered through heavy glass doors and a thick red velvet draft curtain. From the reception area at the top of the stairs, you might glimpse Anne-Marie on her way to the cabine or ateliers. (In the late seventies, she was earning seventy thousand dollars a year. For Loulou’s salary, deduce what you will.) And you could see into the plush salon where Violeta Sanchez, Kirat Young and Mounia Orosemane, who was said to use black magic if she didn’t get the dresses she wanted, twirled and slunk for Yves in the white-knuckle days leading up to a show, an army of gilded ballroom chairs and enormous humped, buttoned and fringed damask sofas adrift on a green moiré carpet. Yves, who knew Victor Grandpierre from when he designed the original Dior boutique on avenue Montaigne, had asked the decorator for all the bells and whistles of the richly upholstered Napoléon III style, as reflected in the Paris salon of Bonaparte’s niece, Princess Mathilde. To immerse himself in the period, Yves had only to pay a visit to his friends Guy and Marie-Hélène de Rothschild outside Paris at Château Ferrières, whose Second Empire rooms represented an apotheosis of the idiom.

  The atmosphere at avenue Marceau was stiff, severe, muffled, formal. Denise Barry de Longchamp, the receptionist and former Chanel model who called out the
looks by number at the Saint Laurent shows, sat with brutally good posture, hair scraped back in an immaculate pleat, behind a desk swiped clean of everything but a telephone. She wore a pussycat bow and what passes in France for a smile, thin and tight. Once, in 1983, when I was there to interview Yves, Pierre took the extraordinary meas-ure of greeting me himself, escorting me to Yves’s private office, which cost more to decorate than the combined lifetime salaries of several at-elier workers, but which he rarely used. There was a definite feeling that if Pierre hadn’t personally taken charge of the appointment, Yves might have slipped away. There was a lot riding on it: the launch of Paris, the perfume. Stories on fragrance introductions were the ones you worked hardest to duck at Women’s Wear. Still, when it was your turn …

  Pierre shut the door firmly behind him, trapping the sickly-sweet smell of a brace of lilies, so strong you wanted to throw up. In his brief to Jacques Grange, Yves had referred him to the modernist Paris apartment Le Corbusier had done in the early thirties for Charles de Beistegui, the extravagant heir to a Mexican silver fortune. So there were brawny honey-colored bookshelves in the Frank taste but also the sort of highly caloric elements Beistegui piled on after he wearied of his “machine for living”: a gilt mirror bristling with foliage, thronelike armchairs in cherry silk damask, an Empire desk with metal mounts. “Everything is posed,” as Lawrence Benaïm put it, “là, mise en scè ne, in that obsessive and pathetic search for perfection”: photographs of Yves’s mother, Lucienne, and the actress Silvana Magnano; a kitchsy ceramic bulldog; the crucial sheaf of good-luck wheat; the famous Bérard of Vreeland with an empty face wiped of its features. The Mathieu-Saint-Laurents could make a small claim to a few drops of blue blood: The Baron de Mauvières, an ancestor, drafted Napoléon and Joséphine’s marriage contract. His portrait hung in Yves’s office.