Loulou & Yves

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  PAULE MONORY Before Loulou left to have Anna, she said, “You have to be closer to M. Saint Laurent so he doesn’t feel the void.” She didn’t say, “Do my job”; the message was, “Lessen the effect of my empty chair.” I never dared sit in it. To have the honor of being directly under Saint Laurent’s gaze, you had to honor his clothes, to have Loulou’s esprit, body, invention. She never worried someone might replace her, because no one even came up to her ankle. I’ve always minimized my possibilities.

  The year before, Diane von Furstenberg had met Alain Elkann at a party Bianca Jagger had given her daughter, Jade, for her fourteenth birthday—DVF is Jade’s godmother. Elkann and Diane are practically related. He’d been married to Margherita Agnelli, the only daughter of Fiat chairman Gianni Agnelli, and Egon von Furstenberg was the son of Gianni’s sister, Clara. Alain’s son John heads Fiat today. His brother, Lapo, with his taste for transvestite and transgender prostitutes, is the Elkann you read about.

  Diane and Alain’s romance took off, and in 1986 she gave a party in New York to celebrate it. “He’s written four books,” Warhol mentioned to his diary, “and in France if you’re an intellectual, you don’t have to work …like Loulou de La Falaise’s husband who’s supposed to be a novelist but I don’t think he’s ever finished anything …”

  ALAIN ELKANN This is a painful … You see, maybe sometimes you don’t want to hurt people. Loulou has been a very dear person to me. I got to know her better when I interviewed her. You may find it interesting:

  “Vivre Poétiquement,” Paris Vogue, November 1986 With her international pedigree, Loulou de La Falaise is the archetype of la parisienne, lauded for her elegance, imagination, creativity and poetic non-conformity … She is like an Irish setter or a Thoroughbred racehorse … an adventuress in life who knows how to merge the present with the past. To her handful of intimates, she is the most loyal friend one can imagine…

  As we all know, Saint Laurent lives by his clan, so it is hardly surprising that Anna, Loulou’s one-year-old daughter, is Yves’s goddaughter, and that Thadé e, her husband, a writer and homme de culture, plays a (curious) part in the chemistry of the great house on avenue Marceau. Every evening, Thadé e arrives to collect Loulou in the company of Anna, the sole baby allowed in the master’s studio, where she runs around on all fours. Yves is very Catholic: His gifts to Anna are magnificent antique crosses …

  Loulou and Thadé e insist the decoration of their apartment … is the product of pure chance. Everything seems temporarily suspended from safety pins: a dé cor for parties where the provisional becomes permanent … The first thing Loulou does when she returns home in the evening is to undress and slip into one of the capacious dressing gowns designed for her by Fernando Sanchez … The years of spending nights in nightclubs are over: These days, she and her friends see each other at home. At weekends the Klossowskis head for Sens, 120 kilometers from Paris, where they rent a house with Leonello and Maria Brandolini … Easter and summer and fall holidays are most often spent in Montecalvello …

  Loulou’s ground-shaking affair with Alain Elkann was obviously taking its toll on his live-in relationship with her old friend Diane von Furstenberg when this picture was taken at a party in Rome in 1988. © Marcellino Radogna.

  By any measure, it follows, Anna has an exceptional mother, but Loulou does not seem to think there is anything particularly special about herself: “This is how my family is: The women have always played a hugely significant role. I think of my mother, who lives now in New York, and of my grandmother, a fascinating woman who was extremely elegant: Both always treated life as an odyssey, approaching it like gypsies, magically, combined with a good dose of fun and lightheartedness, all without ever losing their sense of important values.

  FRAN LEBOWITZ [Diane would] jump out of a window [for a man.] She meets Alain, and five minutes later she’s living with him in Paris

  ALAIN ELKANN I was just out of a marriage that was tormented and difficult, and it was not the best period in Diane’s life.

  Diane described her relationship with Alain as “like a marriage,” and became pregnant. Her friends complained he was controlling and treated her like a saleswoman. To Diane’s son, Alex, she was a doormat with a pathetic pattern of assuming the identity of her male partner. In Paris, Diane and Elkann were strenuously social. Everyone came to dinner: the actors Marcello Mastroianni and Anouk Aimée, Edmund White, Valentino, Christian Lacroix, Inès de la Fressange, Loulou and Thadée … Alain’s English was good but a little broken, charmingly so. Still, people remarked on it, for it showed the limits of what worldliness, privilege and money can buy. Years after her tarriance with Alain in France, Diane admitted Loulou was everything she’d abandoned: career, glamour …

  ANNABELLE D’HUART “I’m stopping by Diane and Alain’s for a drink before dinner,” Loulou told me. Then it became a regular thing.

  ALAIN ELKANN Loulou came many times in the apartment I share with

  Diane in Paris, Thadée, too. Diane is a great achiever. She’s probably more successful than Loulou was, but probably has less this elegant quality of Loulou. They’re almost opposites. Loulou belonged to a very good background but was rather poor for a long time of her life, and so she was capable to be chic with nothing. It could be tremendously chic to have a boiled egg in the kitchen, because she had a way of moving her—How you call them? What is the name for forks and spoons?—cutlery—that was unique. She’s a perfect example that money isn’t everything, because she had this aristocratic way to make a cake with one egg. It was her destiny to be on the knees of Marcel Duchamp when she was a child. Let’s say it’s a parable that ended with her marrying Balthus’s son. In the world of sharks, she was probably a too sophisticated person, for me a great quality. I’m not admiring people because they make money.

  Loulou had the aesthetics of English women like Diana Cooper or Lady Cunard, with lots of jewelry and blah, blah, blah. She had, like very few people have, a repulsion for vulgarity or lack of elegance. But the refusal of mediocrity was natural, not snobbish. She had a difficult childhood but an aristocratic temperament—how can I say?—never complaining. So even if times were tough, you’d never know.

  She gave more importance to her friends than her career. There are many ways of being ambitious. One can be ambitious to have elegant relationships with your nephew, brother, husband, lovers, friends. It was like that with Loulou. Thadée was sincerely in love with her, which I understand, you know. He’s a real gent and I do love him, too.

  ANDRÉLEON TALLEY Once Loulou married, there were not that many affairs. Well, there was Alain, a very grandiose person in his own mind. That was serious. We talked about it, just in the two minutes we had together backstage after a show, and she thought I was being judgmental. “André, why are you being so middle-class?”

  KATELL LE BOURHIS Who hasn’t slept with Alain Elkann? Franchement.

  RICARDO BOFILL Loulou liked to wreak havoc with couples. She was like a man who sets out to make a woman—except she was a woman making men, the initiator! It became a kind of anguish. She started with a sort of nymphomania and finished in a dead end.

  ALAIN ELKANN I don’t want to talk about love. We exclude. This is not something public, but between her and me, and as she is no more here, she deserves respect.

  ANNABELLE D’HUART It was the moment that counted for Loulou, not the consequences. The ground around her wasn’t firm. Using friendship as an entry point, and all her feminine resources, she inserted herself between Diane and Alain, driving a wedge. And then what did she do? She created total mayhem, seducing Elkann and taking him for herself—and Diane’s a tough cookie! Not like me, I’m nothing. But Diane was really hard. What made it worse, Loulou and Diane were old friends!

  FRANCOIS CATROUX Loulou fell in love with Alain, but Alain wasn’t in love with her, he was just having an affair.

  ALAIN ELKANN I don’t believe Loulou broke nothing. I don’t believe�
�not only Loulou, in general—that people have the power of destroying couples or not. Because if a couple goes berserk, there’s something wrong, right? A strong couple, even if there are waves, accidents, the couple sticks. I don’t have anything to apologize. I don’t see anything ugly. If suddenly in your life you fell in love with someone, this is not destroying. If a person is attractive, very attractive, you can’t blame the person, right? Now you can imagine that a person of Loulou’s personality … She was a work of art herself, a masterpiece.

  I think you should speak to Diane von Furstenberg. You are digging in something … Loulou has a husband. When you talk to Diane, if she will want to tell you …

  DIANE VON FURSTENBERG Loulou was a rival for a moment. I was unhappy, I knew I had to win—I wasn’t going to just stand by and be humiliated, and I certainly wasn’t going to break up with Alain because of her!

  GIOIA DILIBERTO Elkann had had other flings during their relationship, but his dalliance with de La Falaise broke Diane’s heart. … De La Falaise wasn’t just some wispy model girl who liked to dress up. She had brains, talent, charisma, and boundless vitality … Her insouciance verged on cruelty … [Diane] discovered a note de La Falaise had written to Elkann, confirming that they were lovers.

  DIANE VON FURSTENBERG There was a confrontation, I won and that was it! If anything, I think Alain was the victim, caught between two strong women. He has a problem. If this hadn’t happened, we probably would’ve stayed together.

  ALAIN ELKANN [Diane] could have had a child and she didn’t. I’m sure the abortion was difficult for her, but if a woman has an abortion, it weakens the [love] story she’s having with the father of his child.

  ANNABELLE D’HUART It was all over between Diane and Alain after Loulou. The keys to the apartment were handed back to the landlord, one returned to Italy, the other to the States, and that was it. Finished. The end. Loulou was fearless, but it must’ve been a heavy load to carry, what she’d done to Diane.

  DIANE VON FURSTENBERG It wasn’t Alain’s affair with Loulou that broke us up, it was the one after that. What affected me is that I had given up my work and turned my back to fashion to live with him in Paris—and this person he ended up going with was exactly like I was.

  Diane fixated on her mouth as a metaphor for her relationship with Alain. When she climbed into the dentist’s chair to have a tooth pulled, she was undecided about whether to leave him. But after she got out, “So goes Alain with the tooth.” Diagnosed with tongue cancer, she was reminded that she had literally held her tongue when she was with him. Diane writes about Loulou and Alain’s affair in both her memoirs. One was published while Loulou was alive, the other after she died. In the first book, Loulou is identified as “my good friend.” Diane waited for Loulou to die to name her.

  ALAIN ELKANN Things have to be seen inside a context. You have to understand what aristocracy is, France and what a husband is. If you read about the eighteenth century, you will understand many things, right? Read Les Liaisons Dangereuses; read the theme of the mistress. Sometime, especially in the aristocratic world, you have husbands and lovers. When I interviewed the queen of Italy, she said to me, “I was intimate to my children and to my lovers.” She made a long pause and then she said, “And to my husband”—and I’m sure she loved him. Loulou and Thadée had a real marriage. Not maybe in the petit bourgeois idea of suburban life. If you read the book of Thadée, it’s not the memoirs of a post office clerk in the outskirts of Chicago, right?

  DIANE VON FURSTENBERG My relationship with Loulou changed a bit after. But in the context of a lifetime, it was a hiccup. When we were young, nothing shocked us, so I wasn’t suddenly going to behave like a bourgeoise. But I have to be careful because she is no longer here, and it’s not fair, because I am alive to have the last word. I never discussed with Thadée whether he knew, but I think he did and it didn’t matter. I mean it did at the moment, but in time … Loulou had little exercises, games, flirtations, but there was really nobody after Thadée.

  COLOMBE PRINGLE They were a real couple. For two people in that milieu to last so long … They were like Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, like nineteenth-century eccentrics. But obviously if you look at marriage with conventional eyes, they’re incomprehensible.

  No one cared enough when Elkann published Misguided Lives in 1989 to unbeard it as a roman à clef, but the characters Maud and Nanni Belgioso could only be Loulou and Thadée:

  Nanni and Maud were the perfect couple … The Belgioso had a style, a way of talking that was contagious … Maud … knew how to enjoy herself; she hated life to be heavy and bourgeois … [She] wore heavy African bracelets, large rings and many necklaces … “She’s not really beautiful, but she has a way of moving, of moving her hands, of speaking … Maud has the body of a young girl. Tiny, without hips … “

  Maud ran a fashion business to cover her husband’s debts and to support the family. The fact that Maud worked and was successful didn’t make Nanni jealous; on the contrary, he was proud of his wife. For him it seemed normal not to work, to get up late… He kept their house simple and well organized, filled with bottles of champagne, many books, good music, objects and fabrics brought home from their various journeys or by their many friends, who came and went constantly… Nanni was polite and smiling … but he was reserved. He concealed himself and his thoughts behind a well-tested patina … He was skilled in kindling the passions of a pederast… From those who were taken with him he demanded affection and distance…

  [Maud] was accustomed to having her friends flatter her, the little queen of the group and to having the last word, no matter what … “You see, Nanni can’t understand, he can’t grow up … he’s not ambitious. As for me, I’ve allowed myself to become completely caught up in the system. … I am [in love with Nanni], unfortunately, but it’s hard, very hard, to have to take everything with a smile, always…”

  22

  Les Girls Saint Laurent

  NICOLE DORIER In 1973, a certain Mme. Baudoin, the directrice at Jean-Louis Scherrer, told me there was a cabine casting at Saint Laurent. That’s how information circulated then, from house to house, it was all word of mouth, the agencies weren’t involved in the couture, we booked ourselves. The casting was a grand ceremony. Already the dressers looked at you differently when M. Saint Laurent asked you to change into something else and come up a second time, it meant you had a chance. There were two categories of mannequins in those days, les filles photos, and the ones who knew how to walk and were maybe a little rounder, les filles couture, so classic, I thought, in their chignons and too much makeup; I wanted to do photos but was accepted for the Saint Laurent cabine.

  In every atelier, it was the same ritual, Mme. Raymonde, one of the habil-

  leuses, the dressers, introducing me: “Voilá, Nicole, la nouvelle.” Twenty pairs of eyes examined la nouvelle to see what they had to work with. A few measurements were enough for the suit atelier, bust-waist-hips, 84-63-92, shoulders, legs. But les dames les flouteuses, the women who did the evening dresses, wanted everything—arms, wrist, back, the distance between my breasts. A dummy was made from my measurements.

  You arrived in the morning, put on your regulation white lab coat, sheer tights—black tights were still in the future—and eight-centimeter heels. No one had worn a bra since May ’68. My dressing table was at the end of the cabine on the right, a more strategic position than being by the door: You could see your enemies arriving in the mirror, but they couldn’t see you, not directly. You fixed your hair, did your makeup, then waited for the phone to ring, the studio or ateliers asking you to come up. There was a lot of downtime, so you played canasta with the dressers or Yahtzee with the other mannequins. We were six. There was a big sign, défense de repasser. Girls had been bringing in their ironing. At collection time, you did the big show, where it was unveiled, and then the daily three o’clock show for private clients—the Duchess of Windsor might be there—all held at rue Spontini with no music. Our w
orld and the world of les filles photos didn’t cross. The first time they were used at Saint Laurent, the first time there was music and that we showed outside the house, was in 1976 at the InterContinental. In the early eighties, the afternoon shows were stopped and a film of the collection shown instead. It was the death of the cabine.

  Another girl was hired at the same time as I was, Sabine, a pretty brunette with long hair. After a few days, they asked her to cut it—and two days after that told her to leave. She lost her long hair and her job. People’s attitude changed when you said you were at Saint Laurent, admiration mixed with desire. Being une fille Saint Laurent was like a label that guaranteed quality; others wanted you—or didn’t want you because you were trop Saint Laurent. It was the seventies, I ran around town in my little navy blue Austin with its leather steering wheel. It was the era of Castel’s, Le Privé, L’Aventure, Régine’s had just opened, the Bar des Théâtres, foie de veau pommes de terres sauté es, Donna Summer, gas at 1.35 francs the liter. Each girl was given two Rive Gauche models per season. In 1977, the clothes stopped, though we earned a bit more.