Loulou & Yves

  PETER DUNHAM It was a very tight, incestuous family. Hélène Rochas picks up the extension in her apartment and overhears Kim d’Estainville making a rendezvous with a man, and she recognizes the voice—and it’s Pierre!

  Hélène showed Kim the door and took up with Stavros Niarchos, followed by the novelist Patrick Modiano. The one it ended tragically for was Tina Chow, who died of AIDS in 1992 at forty-two. Tina had wed the whip-cracking restauranteur Michael Chow in 1972, following his short-lived marriage to Grace Coddington. (Grace remembered their year together as one she’d rather not: Michael had cornered her into marrying him by mailing out hundreds of wedding invitations without telling her.) Tina and Loulou were two sides of the same coin, minimalist and maximalist. Both had bulletproof aesthetic judgment and a visceral abhorrence of ugliness. Both were iconized for their androgyny and venerated by gay men. And both designed jewelry—a typical Tina bangle, of woven bamboo, encased a handful of loose, rattling rock crystals. Her uniform was a T-shirt, gray flannel trousers, plain loafers and fresh flowers pinned to an N. Peal cashmere cardigan. Tina never hid that she had AIDS. But when she died, her family issued a statement that her illness might be traced to an “affair with a bisexual man in Paris who has since died” of the disease: Kim d’Estainville. Ridiculously, Hélène publicly rejected any connection between their deaths, exclaiming, “Mais quelle idée!” Privately, friends fretted, “But Hélène, it could have been you!” (For that matter, it could have also been Bergé—he was sleeping with Kim, too.) Later, the fortune-hunting François-Marie Banier put the moves on Hélène, but she sent him packing. François-Marie moved on to bigger game: L’Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt.

  PETER DUNHAM Pierre really didn’t allow Madison to have friends. He lived a very controlled, gilded-cage existence. I have to take the Fifth on some of this because I have my own history with Pierre. Yves was supposed to know and not supposed to know about Pierre and Madison; Pierre was supposed to know and not supposed to know about whatever Yves was up to.

  JANE STUBBS I remember arriving in Tangier with Madison and waiting at the luggage carousel. His phone rang. It was Pierre. “Where have you been? You were supposed to get in at five-twenty-five.” It was 5:27.

  MATTIA BONETTI In the beginning, they saw each other—not in a hidden way, but separate from Yves, to avoid scenes—and separate from the clan. Pierre asked me, “What do I have to do to keep him?” I told him, “You have to give Madison everything, and I don’t mean materially, because otherwise he’s going to leave.” Madison can be quite rascally. Maybe he’d said something to Pierre that had him worried.

  To pursue my own life, I had to leave the Sun King’s orbit. It meant greater poverty, and being less in the spotlight, but I had no desire to frequent these people of a certain age, Charlotte and the others, in whom I had only a mild interest, and who had absolutely no interest in me. It was all one-way in that crowd. There was a nucleus, with Loulou at the center, and then a ring of satellites, and then another ring—several solar systems, planets—and I had no desire to be a planet in the third ring.

  JEANLOUP SIEFF I wasn’t part of the first circle. Monsieurs cheek to cheek, it’s not my thing.

  ANNABELLE D’HUART Madison was eaten by the big bad wolf, but clever; he played the game well. He was barely out of his teens when he met Pierre, but not stupid. There were things he wanted. He went to Parsons and had his own apartment. We stopped seeing each other because he entered the family and I resisted. He lived the high life with Pierre, graduated from school, returned to New York and started his own garden-design company. Chapeau. But the others are dead. Joël is dead. Loulou escaped, surrounded by cadavers.

  CHRISTOPHER MASON When Madison left, Pierre was flabbergasted. He couldn’t believe anyone would dare walk out on him.

  Madison moved to New York in the late eighties with Konstantin Kakanias, who aspired to drawing campy cartoons. Greek, Konstantin was just butch enough to make women editors who weekended in Putnam County wonder what it might be like to sleep with him. Madison’s rapports with women were more … cumbersome. He had two who were actually in love with him: Jane Stubbs, the antiquarian bookseller, and Marian McEvoy, Queen of the Glue Gun, though to be fair, she had no challengers. It was pathetic and at the same time admirable, Jane telling the Times that her husband had left her for a younger woman. Actressy, with Kabuki makeup and a luxuriant jet mane, McEvoy was a sorceress, enthralling gay men, bringing them to their knees. As editor in chief, she brought down the oldest decorating magazine in America in twenty-four issues: It screamed louder than After Dark. McEvoy had married and tried to have a baby with a Belgian designer who arrived from nowhere and left, dying of AIDS, without leaving a trace. Jane was nice to McEvoy’s face but called her a bitch when she wasn’t looking. They were competitors for Madison’s attentions, if not his affections. All the while, Pierre wasn’t letting go. In a secret arrangement he had with McEvoy, she would call him to report on the comings and goings in Madison’s life. Obsessed with Madison herself, she did everything she could to undermine his affairs. Her debriefings with Pierre continued as Madison changed boyfriends, to W’s Stefano Tonchi, of all people; to John Mayberry, who was said to be an architect; and to Louis Bofferding, a prissy old-school antiques dealer with the paranoia and grandeur special to people who feed on the Duchess of Windsor’s leftovers. McEvoy and Madison shared a country house, but when she could no longer tolerate his boyfriends, that ended. Madison eventually “came back,” as Pierre wrote, returning to the fold. There were twenty-eight years between them, Pierre was getting on, “came back” did not necessarily mean … But Madison’s friends and exes knew better than to gossip about the details of their reconciliation, or his putative connections to the Moroccan royal family. If there was a leak, Madison’s band knew that he wouldn’t say anything—and that they’d never hear from him again. He and Pierre would stop buying knickknacks and commissioning libraries and sending them their rich friends.

  PIERRE BERGÉ Letter to Yves, February 17, 2009 With you, Madison remains the most important relationship of my life. He appeared … when alcohol and drugs had taken possession of you … Nothing worked, not the deintoxication cures, doctors, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, me. I was out of ideas, our days filled with pretending … We didn’t know if you could do your next collection. We came close to the edge, hunted by rumors, the press … Thanks to [Madison], probably, I weathered the storm. He gave me what I needed: his youth, culture, courage, integrity, love … I didn’t leave you … I could have during this time with Madison, I almost did. Finally, it was Madison who’d had enough, who left. Yet another victory for you. Do you remember Christmas 1987 in Deauville, when I confessed my state of chaos? … It was the terrible period when you were hiding glasses of whiskey behind the curtains … You loved [Madison], hated him, then loved him again. His admiration and affection for you speak for him… When he came back, you had nothing more to fear, and you understood that I’d found in him what no one else could give me: a unique, solid relationship free of the demons of jealousy … Thank you for seeing that. The war was over …

  MATTIA BONETTI For Madison and Pierre to stay together for so long … it represents half of Pierre’s life and all of Madison’s. Remarkable. When I say “together”—they both remade their lives with other people, Madison with Konstantin, and now Jai.119 Pierre was for a long time with the designer Robert Merloz. To celebrate Madison’s fifty-fifth birthday in Tangier in 2013, there was a long weekend of lunches and brunches and dinners and parties, at least one hosted by Pierre, with musicians and acrobats, Madison kneeling at Pierre’s chair …

  ————————

  ALYNE DE BROGLIE Loulou liked a druggy crowd. Luigi d’Urso didn’t spend his nights at home sucking lollipops. And for Loulou to be pals with John Galliano? That’s not a friendship that falls in your lap.

  ANNABELLE D’HUART Loulou had her own clan, independent of Saint Laurent: Leonello Brandolini,120 Ines Des Longcha
mps.121 The Gunzbourgs122 are complè tement alcoolisé s. They look like two barrels of whiskey. Leonello was the same type as Loulou: speedy, enormous capacity for work, putting in thirteen hours straight, then doing coke and starting over.

  JEAN-LUC FRANÇOIS Loulou was capable of some not-very-classy behavior with her friends, leaving you out of a dinner, neglecting you because she had some fire to put out. She was always saving her skin, and her family’s, so I forgave her. When people said she was self-centered, I defended her. Like many Tauruses, she could be influenced by people who were … nul. Michel Klein wasn’t good for her. Ariel de Ravenel I never understood.

  INÈS DE LA FRESSANGE Loulou and Luigi were very, very close. He handled press for the Italian state travel agency. Luigi was like a character in a Françoise Sagan novel, with a distant relationship with reality, same as Betty Catroux. Loulou spent a week with us every summer in Provence. She had le sens des choses, laying the table with an old bedsheet and bouquets of thyme and lavender. Even a dowdy lace tablecloth was transformed in her hands. I’ve rarely seen someone so in love as Thadée. His passion for Loulou was total. As a parent, she wasn’t in the Hollywood/Joan Crawford mold, castrating and narcissistic. She didn’t oblige the cliché by being a bad mother. People imagine her traveling in a chauffeured limousine in a sable coat, but they’d arrive in a small car, a thermos for the baby … It amused me that this woman who had the ear of God the Father cut her fingernails very short, never any polish, liked nothing more than trudging through her garden in mud boots and laughed like she was in an English pub. Loulou shared a tomboy quality with Chanel. That must have pleased Saint Laurent. She reminded me of those aristocrats who prefer the company of their tenant farmers. In the end, she was chic and sophisticated in spite of herself.

  One year, André Leon Talley appeared in Provence with forty-five suitcases, trunks from T. Anthony… Loulou and I were making party decorations for my stepdaughter’s birthday, on all fours in shorts and old T-shirts, wearing the kids’ pink Afro wigs. To say he was disappointed … He expected to find us draped in white linen, laden with jewelry, hair done, sipping whiskey sours under parasols, like it was the twenties and we were Zelda Fitzgerald in Antibes.

  HILTON ALS “The Only One,” The New Yorker, November 7, 1994 André Leon Talley gave a luncheon in Paris a few years ago to celebrate the couture season’s start. The people he welcomed to the luncheon—held in the Café Flore’s private dining room, on the second floor—included Kenneth Jay Lane … Inè s de la Fressange … Joe Eula … Roxanne Lowitt, a photographer … Maxime de La Falaise … and her daughter, LouLou …

  Following shirred eggs and many bottles of wine, Roxanne Lowitt … invited the guests to assemble in order to be photographed. LouLou de La Falaise removed an ancient huge round compact from her purse and began to powder her nose as her mother sat in readiness. Joe Eula ignored Lowitt and continued drinking. Talley got up from his seat to sit near Maxime de La Falaise, who had admired a large turquoise ring he wore.

  “Look, LouLou!” Talley shouted. “The color of this ring is divine, no? Just like the stone you gave me!”

  “What?” LouLou de La Falaise asked, barely disguising her boredom.

  “This ring, child. Just like the stone you gave me, no?”

  LouLou de La Falaise did not respond. She nodded toward Roxanne Lowitt, and Lowitt instructed her to stand behind Maxime de La Falaise and Talley. LouLou de La Falaise said, “I will stand there only if André tries not to look like such a nigger dandy.”

  Several people laughed, loudly. None louder than André Leon Talley. But it seemed to me that a couple of things happened before he started laughing: he shuttered his eyes, his grin grew larger, and his back went rigid, as he saw his belief in the durability of glamour and allure shatter before him in a million glistening bits.

  INÈS DE LA FRESSANGE Loulou intimidated me, the way a good student can be intimidated by a bad, unruly one. She was the girl at the back of the class cracking jokes and throwing spitballs at the teacher. We didn’t have a friendship independent of Luigi, never once had lunch alone. As I’m practically square, I wasn’t the sort of person she could like. The kind of jokes she made about people, I’m incapable of: who said what about whom—dinner-party talk. I’ve never abused alcohol or anything else. There’s a certain humor among people who drink, and it created a gap between us. She must’ve been very solid, considering how skinny she was and all she engorged in her life. Plus, I was ten years younger. I hadn’t known Warhol, the Swinging Sixties, Studio 54. Loulou was half-English, and the English don’t talk to each other, right? So our conversation remained deliberately light. “Mais comment tu vas?” “Bien, bien.” She wasn’t girlie—“Oh, where did you get your bra?” Not very Sex in the City.

  JEAN-LUC FRANÇOIS Inès would have liked to be Loulou. When she left Chanel and launched her own line, Loulou’s official position was, “I work for the king. Why would I want to go out on my own?” But what she really thought was, Merde. Inès isn’t even a designer, she’s a mannequin, and now she’s got a shop on avenue Montaigne—where did I go wrong? In private moments, Loulou would say, “Inès will never be me. Elle est vraiment stupide, cette fille. She’s always asking me questions and milking me for ideas. It’s the only way she knows what to do.”

  Loulou and Luigi were both bored at home. How many times she and I’d be having dinner, she’d call him and he’d turn up alone. Then for the rest of the night they’d make the rounds together. Or Loulou would call Thadée, who preferred to stay in with a book, to tell him she’d be home late. Sometimes he was the one who called: “Come home. Now.” Which she did. He was her security valve, allowing her to test the limits. By the end of the night, her lipstick could be up here and her mascara down there. If she’d had a whack job for a husband, they’d have been dead before everyone. Drugs, disease … a lot of our group isn’t around anymore.

  She could drinkdrinkdrinkdrinkdrinkdrinkdrink and still be the last one drunk. Typically, we’d finish the night standing at a bar, Loulou with no voice left. Tongues were loosed. “In our world, you’re a prisoner, and you make the best of it.” She meant arranged marriages, her incestuous work situation. She could have pulled out and had a different life, but didn’t because she was loyal. So she suffered … love affairs she didn’t pursue … She was crazy about what’s-his-name, the Fiat guy. Around 1990, she had offers to go into the decorating business, but couldn’t make the break. Saint Laurent was her entire world.

  I finally renounced the life I led with Loulou, Joël, Paquita, Fabrice … That life is why I divorced Martine. I didn’t want to end up in a coffin. Martine died in 1999, falling from her sixth-floor apartment, wearing an evening dress, wrapped in a cape and covered in jewels. Her little cat was on the roof in the rain, and she was trying to catch him.

  113 Philippe Colin was an assistant director to Louis Malle and, at the time of his affairs with Clara Saint and Joan Juliet Buck, a film critic. His wife, Marie, is coartistic director of the Automne à Paris cultural festival.

  114 Husband-and-wife sculptors. Woolly sheep by François-Xavier Lalanne (1927–2008) are highly collectible. Mme. Lalanne’s mirrors edged in bronze lilies were integral to Saint Laurent’s interiors.

  115 Francine Weisweiller (1916–2003), literary saloniste.

  116 Anne-Marie Madeleine (“Boul”) de Breteuil (1909–1993), Marrakech social linchpin whose houseguests included Churchill and FDR.

  117 Countess Jacqueline de Ribes, society influencer who, with Yves’s encouragement, drew on her highly evolved personal style to become a surprisingly respectable designer in the eighties.

  118 Culture minister of France, 1981–1986 and 1988–1992.

  119 Jaimal Odedra, Bollywood costume designer.

  120 Leonello Brandolini d’Adda, son of Cristiana and Brando and a top executive at the French publishing house Hachette.

  121 Minor actress who appeared in Peter Handke’s La Femme gauchère (1978).

 
122 Jacques de Gunzbourg, an actor of sorts, appears in a number of films, including Sam suffit, by his wife, Virginie Thévenet, who is herself an actress.

  20

  Muse?

  DIANA VREELAND I believe women are naturally dependent on men. The history of painting, of literature, of music, of LOVE—this is what men have given the world, not women. I think all women are muses. M-U-S-E-S in one way or another.

  LOULOU Oh, muse, muse. “Muse” is a word that always makes me laugh, because nobody knows what it means. It’s an influence of attitude, I suppose, but the word is so wrong. “Muse” is a totally imaginary word, it doesn’t sound like real life. Whereas, on the contrary, my influence on Yves is entirely real life: the friend who works with him and says, from time to time, “Don’t be so silly, Yves” … I thought, Nobody’s going to have fun in clothes if you don’t enjoy making them … Maybe a genuine muse could be an actress or someone Yves sees once a year and is part of his dreams, but I’m part of his everyday life … Yves likes to work at his house. I sometimes go for weekends. He likes to be in a messy room with the seven people he’s close to and the dog playing with his toys …