Loulou & Yves

by Christopher Petkanas

  It was sadistic of Pierre to lock Yves up with a journalist like that. Yves had nothing to say—he was a bad interview on a good day—and even if he had, he wouldn’t have been able to say it. He was incoherent. He practically ate his cigarettes. “Paris est une femme,” he eventually managed to croak out, saying it again, and again, and again. The “interview” lasted half an hour. Bergé finally came to let us out. “Ç a va, Yves?” And then to me, spitting out my name: “You got what you need, M. Pet-ka-nas?”

  GRACE CODDINGTON Pierre was the aggressive businessman everyone resented. There were terrible stories about how he treated Yves in order to make him work, locking him in a room, throwing away the key—“You’re not coming out until the collection is finished!” I remember awful scenes. A photographer would just be doing this job, his lens resting on the edge of the runway, and Pierre would start an actual fistfight, rolling up his sleeves, picking the photographer up by the scruff of the neck and punching him.

  Fairchild used to scream at Yves that what he needed to do was engage in daily life, to get up every morning and buy the paper and a baguette. Still with the volume turned up, John spoke to his staff like children, using actual baby language. The bureau always seemed to be beset by some staffing crisis. “Now Christopher, I want you and Christa to run the office together,” he decided one day in true desperation. Christa Worthington was a fellow reporter. We saw each other outside of work, even though I had never known anyone so misanthropic. Sitting two inches away from her in a cramped, willfully shabby office under the eaves of a building on rue Cambon that backed onto the Ritz and neighbored on Chanel, was not joyous. Vigilance was necessary, lest she bring you down.

  “Christa’s going to be the mama bear,” Fairchild announced, “and Christopher, you’ll be the papa bear.” Agreeing would have meant John owned me. “Oh, but Mr. Fairchild, I love my job just as it is.” In 2002, long after she’d been fired, glamourizing reports about the attic of Christa’s Cape Cod being stuffed with Paris couture surfaced in connection with her rape and murder. The garbage collector who was convicted is serving a life sentence. Christa was forty-six.

  One season in the mid-eighties, when John and Pierre were fighting and we were banned from the Saint Laurent show, John mobilized the entire bureau to find out what was in the collection before it was shown. Did the fight have to do with Armani? Was Armani gaining ground? John fed on madness and chaos. Memo from Toady: “No stories on Saint Laurent unless okayed by me first!” Shut out by Pierre, John commanded Christa to make the rounds of all the nightclubs to flush out mannequins who could describe even one dress, which would then be drawn by Kenneth Paul Block, dean of the illustration department, as Kenneth had done for Princess Diana’s wedding gown. I spent an entire afternoon sitting on a bench opposite Saint Laurent because, John said, I might see a dress delivered from the embroiderer’s. You couldn’t reason with him and say, “But the dress would be in a bag.” John was abusive. Today you’d never get away with it. He’d hand out these ridiculous unfulfillable assignments, then swan off to dinner at the Ritz with André Oliver, an early lover of Pierre Cardin who designed most of the Cardin couture. André was Women’s Wear’s and W’s shadow editor. If he bought a new stereo system, John ordered a story on it. If André heard about a boatyard in Copenhagen, I went to Copenhagen. If I covered a party, John would call André from New York early the next morning, then wait for me to file so he could scream at me about what I’d missed. Oscar de la Renta and Bill Blass were crucial to John in the same way. For a while, there was also Rory Cameron, part-time decorator, full-time voluptuary, but André, Oscar and Bill were John’s foot soldiers, repaid, as everyone on Seventh Avenue complained, with far more coverage than they deserved. John squeezed them like lemons for their connoisseurship, an efficient, cheap and nearly foolproof way of editing the paper and magazine. For whatever their shortcomings as dressmakers, these were men of great taste, great style. Unlike John, who knew something was good only if you told him it was good. He bought his books by the yard, albeit from Heywood Hill.

  When none of his schemes for previewing the collection produced anything, I got a press kit for the show from the printer by posing as a Saint Laurent messenger. It was even my idea; obviously, I had no trouble sinking to Women’s Wear’s depraved level of warfare. But by the time I got back to the office, someone had figured it out and Pierre’s lawyers were on the phone, promising legal action if we published the pictures. John was always whinging about “bringing home the bacon,” but when I brought it, he caved. I always assumed Pierre knew I was the thief, but years after I left the paper, he readily accepted an interview for a story on his house in Provence, so who knows?

  One Friday night in winter, there was some reason to be at avenue Marceau, probably a picture to be taken—a reporter always had to accompany the photographer at Women’s Wear in those days, even if it was just to shoot a dumb shoe, and I promise you, we were not stylists. Our rendezvous was with Loulou, as it often was. “Elle arrive.” Well, she didn’t arrive, not for a long time. We waited. Finally she came in from outside. She had been to the pharmacy. You could run across the street to the pharmacy without your coat on even if it was snowing—it was that close—so it was very handy if you happened to work at Saint Laurent and needed some mouthwash. Loulou walked in with an armload of bags up to her chin. When I described the scene to Patrick McCarthy, Women’s Wear’s bureau chief at the time, he quacked, “Don’t you know about Loulou, Christopher?” It’s true that French pharmacists aren’t too bothered about prescriptions, and Loulou had a special relationship with hers. Not for hard stuff, just for whatever she needed to stay happy and functioning.

  THADÉE KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA Loulou and I, if we did drugs for more than two days running we’d feel sick and we’d stop. Normally people that feel sick take more. We had very non-addictive natures so we could play with drugs, play with danger. Unless you were somebody who would jump into a bar, then sprawl in the gutter and be spat on and revel in this destitution and whatever—it never crossed our minds that this would be enjoyable, this sort of masochism or whatever the word is.

  LOULOU I’ve never liked people who pull me down to sinister things which I don’t understand. I lived through it as a child, so I’ve always kept way out of that … I’ve always been fairly fearless, and at the same time fairly shy, because I’m quite a private sort of person. I’m quite good at giving, but not so good at taking. When you give it’s quite easy to be brave and outgoing; it’s harder to accept gifts.

  ————————

  Loulou appeared on page one of Women’s Wear Daily more than ten times, including on October 4, 1978, photographed by André Leon Talley in Paris with the designer Michel Klein at the opening night party for Succès. Paloma Picasso designed the play’s costumes. WWD Archive copyright © Fairchild Publishing, LLC.

  MATTIA BONETTI “Ricardoooo! Ricaaaardo!” This was Loulou at 3:00 a.m. after the Sept, screaming out the window down rue de l’Université toward Ricardo’s apartment. He was living with Annabelle d’Huart by this time, and Loulou was married to Thadée.

  FRANÇOISE PICOLI Now that she was married, her health was better, her life was a bit less destroy. “I’m celebrating one year of marriage today,” she announced to the studio. “How does it feel?” we asked. “Better than this time last year,” Loulou said, exchanging glances with Alyne. We were stunned. No one expected an admission that she wasn’t as happy as she was supposed to have been when she wed Thadée, that the marriage wasn’t all it was billed to be.

  Bofill and Joël Le Bon were still in the picture. The desks in the studio were very close together. If M. Saint Laurent phoned Anne-Marie from home, she’d bend under hers, whispering, “Oui, non, oui, non.” You could die laughing. When Loulou made a rendezvous, a personal call, she’d go under her desk on all fours. One Friday, she suddenly left to catch a plane. Thadée called an hour later. Normally when this happened, we’d say she was out on an appointment—bu
t it was eight at night! “Thadée, she left in a taxi.” “But to go where?” “How should I know? Home?” “But she’s not here.” She’d gone to Barcelona or wherever for the weekend, totally reckless. “Loulou’s out of her mind,” Anne-Marie said. “She’d better be careful.”

  CLARA SAINT I have become a sort of ascetic. I want … to be alone sometimes—something I couldn’t do before… The only thing I regret is that I lost a lot of time with people and things that were unimportant to me, only for fear of being alone. And finally, I was alone. Now I’ve arrived at a sort of peace with myself…

  CAROLINE LOEB I stayed on the fringes of Loulou’s world for maybe a year, a lost soul, still in love with Thadée. Then I stopped being invited. I feel like they erased me. It was painful when they threw me out. They found me boring, which I probably was. I don’t blame them. I wasn’t fun. They had the money, they had the drugs. I didn’t have the money, I didn’t have the drugs. I was of absolutely no use to them.

  KIRAT YOUNG At the Sept and later the Palace, there were kilos of the stuff going around. But it wasn’t dark and heavy, do you know what I mean? Always very light. Fabrice Emaer had opened the Palace, Paris’s answer to Studio 54, in 1978, and he had Thadée and Loulou host a fancy-dress ball, Angels and Demons, to launch it. I came as Krishna, Mounia as an African queen. Marie-Hélène de Rothschild gave a huge dinner beforehand, with everyone in costume. There was loads of anonymous sex at the Palace. When Alicia Drake interviewed me for The Beautiful Fall, I tried to steer her away from the druggy stuff. And then the book came out and I saw that Loulou had spilled the beans, Thadée saying how his favorite thing was to mix lines of heroine and coke and I don’t know what!

  MADISON COX I think that Yves lived vicariously through Loulou, because she really personified the “it” girl; she was not just a party girl … I can remember when they were making the costumes for that Le Palace party in the Saint Laurent studio and seeing them all there, making things up, it was truly like children putting on a home musical.

  NICOLE DORIER Loulou adored that monstrous couple, Martine Boutron and Jean-Luc François, because when they delivered their jewelry, they also brought her drugs. For that matter, was Ariel de Ravenel, Loulou’s future business partner, completely innocent? Loulou had her bad angels.

  MATTIA BONETTI It’s amazing Loulou lasted as long as she did. There was everything then—poppers, LSD—it was the seventies! The only one who really didn’t take anything was Pierre. He fought the drug battle alone.

  FRANÇOISE PICOLI Everyone knew Loulou had a drug problem because it showed. The drinking … you couldn’t really talk to her after lunch. At one point she went to Switzerland for a cure. But even when her health was linked to drugs in the press, it wasn’t mentioned in the house, because at Saint Laurent you knew better than to have a loose tongue.

  Buried in the January 16, 1980 issue of Women’s Wear was a small, easy-to-miss item, “Loulou’s Out of Town.” “For the first time since she started working for the House of St. Laurent … Loulou Klossowski won’t be helping YSL with his next couture collection. Klossowski, who has been ailing for some time with a liver infection,” was off for two months to a Munich “rest house.” Bergé said it was nothing to worry about, that Loulou simply needed a hiatus. She ran into Warhol at this time in Zurich, telling him how Yves relied on “a million pills” just to cope with the burden of his immense talent. Save for her, his morose moods infected everyone in the studio, Loulou said. “That’s why she gets sick,” Warhol observed in his diary, “because she’s always trying to act happy and it’s really a lot of stress on her liver. She hasn’t had a drink in a year but doesn’t think cocaine is bad.”

  JOHN STEFANIDIS Her reputation for drugs was exaggerated. They never impinged. People who take drugs for recreation can easily become known as drug addicts and they’re not. I don’t know how you categorize these people. Cocteau was an addict. Who wasn’t? You know what I’m saying?

  BRUNO MéNAGER With their blind passion for M. Saint Laurent, the atelier heads thought Loulou and Betty were on a highway to hell and taking him with them. But he didn’t need to be taken. He was perfectly capable of getting there on his own.

  MIN HOGG Yves and Loulou would be sitting drinking whiskey secretly in the studio, and then Pierre would come in. “Don’t you drink any more whiskey—either of you!”

  VICKY TIEL A fabric rep from Abraham told me that Saint Laurent kept a full bottle of scotch on his desk, and that by the time the appointment was over, it was down to the bottom.

  ————————

  ANNABELLE D’HUART Memories are tidied away in drawers. Open one and they all come back. In 1977, I’d suffered un grand chagrin d’amour and left Paris for New York. Loulou and I both knew Fernando, so we were curious about each other. Fernando adopted me. Our relationship was pararomantic, as his and Loulou’s had been. Fernando was a Pygmalion. He taught you to see. I was born when I met him. He gave me confidence when I had none.

  CAROLINE LOEB It was Benjamin Baltimore107 Annabelle moved from Paris to forget. He was my first love. Small fucking world.

  ANNABELLE D’HUART I had a certain aura in New York, because I was young, twenty-four, and photographing artists like Cy Twombly and Brice Marden. Plus, I was pretty, I posed for Antonio Lopez and Jean-Paul Goude,108 I was invited everywhere. I had a kind of eccentricity—how do you call it? Pride of innocence. One of my friends was a Parsons student, Madison Cox. In November that first year, Pierre Bergé was in New York with his lover, Joël Le Bon. I introduced Joël to Madison, they fell in love and Madison followed Joël to Paris, transferring to Parsons there. When I moved back to France in 1978, I was embraced by the Saint Laurent clan. Then at a dinner Loulou gave, I met someone whom she had loved before she married Thadée: Ricardo Bofill.

  RICARDO BOFILL The party continued after Loulou married. One day I asked her, “Do you want to give me a present? I want to meet a good, interesting woman. Can you organize something?” So she gave a little dinner. There was Annabelle, Isabelle Adjani, the Berenson girl. Annabelle had a pre-adolescent quality, same as Loulou. The evening was like a big gift from Loulou to me, her former lover.

  CAROLINE LOEB Annabelle looked incredibly like Loulou. It was all such a mess. Loulou chose Ricardo’s girlfriends: “Take this one, you’ll have fun with her, and this way I can still control you.” Loulou was also pissed off that Fernando had done for Annabelle what he’d done for her: taken Annabelle under his wing.

  ANNABELLE D’HUART We were the closest friends. What endeared me to Loulou—she was like an all-seeing gypsy who survived against all odds, hypersensitive, like she had no skin. And a seductress. “Annabelle, ché rie, it’s Loulou. What do you say to lunch? Just the two of us.” And for two hours you were the center of her universe, as though she’d said to herself, Voilá, this person’s an enemy. I’m going to be like Salammbô, use every means, but by the end of lunch her opinion of me must be reversed.

  Fernando encouraged the idea that I was Loulou’s little sister—I was five years younger. We looked alike and were often compared. “Oh, there goes a Burne-Jones,” referring to Loulou; I was a Botticelli.

  DIANE VON FURSTENBERG Annabelle d’Huart is a lovely girl who wished she were Loulou, tried to be, but lacking the personality of Loulou, never quite made it.

  ANNABELLE D’HUART Being so young, I was impressed by Loulou’s breadth, her reach, her magnitude. She was spoiled, in that every door was open to her. Her stepfather had been a curator at the Metropolitan. She knew Warhol. Snap her fingers and just when she needed a job, she had one at the Iolas Gallery. She had a pretty name, an incredible body, the most dazzling clothes. She was adulated, walking fireworks, she shone like a star. Whatever she said about having nothing, it was the kind of nothing when you have everything else. The queen of England doesn’t pay for her taxis either.

  Antonio Lopez (left) shooting Annabelle d’Huart for Oui magazine, New York, 1977. Her tulle confection is from the colle
ction Antonio designed for Fiorucci. Loulou was Annabelle’s near-ruination. © The Estate of Antonio Lopez and Juan Ramos.

  That summer, 1978, we all went on a big holiday to Sicily and the Aeolian Islands. Madison and Joël, Thadée and Loulou, me, Stash, Luigi and Gwendoline d’Urso, 109 Ricardo and Serena Vergano. Loulou was a bit the queen bee, controlling and competitive, trying to best everyone with what she knew, but fine. It was an idyllic trip. Ricardo was in charge, leading us to the Segesta temples and all the Renaissance towns, Noto, Ragusa, Modica … He was no longer with Serena, who sang Neopolitan songs with the Sicilian sailors we met on the way. Ricardo fell passionately in love with me in Sicily, the start of a great love story. There was no ambiguity about Loulou on his part, and it wasn’t a problem for me either. I didn’t think there were any unhealed wounds. Loulou, to me, was simply a young bride in love with her new husband. Still, I was a little afraid of the waters I was dipping my feet into. I was timid and naïve. I knew nothing. There was a lot of game playing in this crowd, and it frightened me. But I was too young to understand their past, what made them behave the way they did. I thought, Maybe I’ll go back to New York in September. Which I did not. I moved in with Ricardo, into the same flat where he’d lived with Loulou. Then in 1980, I had Pablo. I was a mother and Loulou was not.