Loulou & Yves

  TARA REDDI The closer you get to Bradley, the less you know him. He worked for Jane Stubbs, then his movements became murky. His legal address is my apartment. One day, the Canadian passport office rang. “We’re calling about Mr. Lander’s visa for Libya.” “Oh, what could possibly be the matter?” “Will you be speaking to him?” “He’s in Patagonia.” This was a chance to finally find out something, so I kept up the conversation. “When will he be back?” “When he finds the giant sloth.” The woman believed everything I told her. “What’s wrong with the application?” “We need a clearer photograph.” Of course when I got off the phone, I called Bradley immediately. “Going to Libya, are we?”

  CHRISTOPHER MASON He has grace-and-favor lodgings in Provence with Anne Cox Chambers, of Cox Enterprises, one of the richest women in America. When you have dinner with him he’s always just got back from his favorite place on the planet, Calcutta. For someone so flip, he’s astonishingly well-versed in international politics. While he has countless ways of finessing the conversation so his employment is never qualified, he clearly cultivates an impression that he works for the CIA.

  ROSI LEVAI Maxime developed a real drinking problem. She could be nasty and became quite large, really blowzy, with an enormous bosom she just let hang.

  KATELL LE BOURHIS At one cooking class, she said to me in French so no one would understand, “Tu comprends, les amé ricains n’y connaissent rien en salade, mais rien. Iceberg, c’est dé gueulasse. Je vais leur faire une vraie vinaigrette.” She had on a Saint Laurent crêpe de Chine peasant blouse, and while tossing the salad, one of her breasts popped out. Looking straight up at the students, she said, “I really must get them fixed.” Maxime loved the knife. Ç a, alors! She was sliced and resliced everywhere.

  STEVEN M. L. ARONSON I had run into her at a party, and she invited me to come in at the end of her next cooking class so she and I could sup alone on the leftovers. I took care to eat beforehand, of course. She was sloshing around a glass of red wine, and told me to make myself a scotch. Presently, she set down a messy-looking chicken with calvados dish that I pretended to eat. In the middle of the meal, one of her two good-sized Alsatian-type mixed breeds took a king-size dump, which she didn’t seem to notice.

  She announced that she was repairing to the kitchen to see to dessert, confiding, “It’s a syllabub. The sweet of the seventeenth century. Until, really, the end of the eighteenth, when it was usurped by ice cream, of all silly things.” The way she slurred “usurped” made all too clear how much wine she must have put away. To beguile me in her imminent absence in the kitchen, she handed me a copy of the recipe, on which she had taken the trouble to note the variations in spelling: solybubbe, sullabub, sullibib, sillibub … When after about ten minutes she had not reappeared, I went to find her, and there she was, her head lolling in the cut-glass bowl of sillibub. Or should I say sullibib.

  JOëL FOURNIER I stayed in Maxime’s apartment when she went out of town for a face-lift. I was having people to dinner and called and asked where she kept the silver. “In the library,” she said. “The box on the left, not the box on the right.” Sure enough, I grabbed the wrong one, the lid flew open and all these ashes fell out. They didn’t look like anything, so I vacuumed them up. Maxime called the next day to see how the party had gone. “I hope you got the right box,” she said. “The other one has John’s ashes in it.” I got off the phone and did the only thing I could do: empty the vacuum cleaner back into the box.

  ROSI LEVAI Maxime got her bosom sorted out and had a few other things done, lost weight and was a beautiful statuesque woman again, doing Saint Laurent licensee work—childrenswear, men’s socks—for Connie Uzzo.

  MAXIME Don’t say that I design, because there is only one designer at Yves Saint Laurent. I adapt the designs for the licenses. The drape of a skirt can give you the wrist movement for a glove, the corner of a handbag can give you an idea for sunglasses. I work for Saint Laurent so easily because his are the sort of clothes I’ve spent my life with—my grandmother’s and mother’s Indian silks and shawls, the Irish farmworkers who wore red and green flannel petticoats under their black skirts … I like working against interference. I work on the [subway]… The other night I was wearing a sort of twisted silk turban of Loulou’s, which made me look about nine foot tall. You know, they loved it. The African and Hispanic people have incredible fashion sense … [they’re] terribly into gear. They want to know where you got your bag. I’m a terribly good advertisement for Yves on the subway! … If you dress up, you’re safer on the subway, frankly … When I see there’s danger, I get close to the most dangerous-looking person and silently demand protection …

  I feel rather happily rootless, really. I could leave this place and go to another and put up my tent, and in a week it would be just as cozy… [A] rather rude English friend referred to [my apartment] as the largest bedsitter he’d ever seen … The walls of the loft are the palest possible tea-rose pink, while the ceiling is a wild pistachio that over the 2,000-square-foot expanse loses its garishness and reduces light and shade like young fir trees in a forest … I don’t like things to be too self-explanatory. Or too neat. I like people to be able to wander about as if they were in a country house that they don’t really understand.

  AMY FINE COLLINS The Saint Laurent job Loulou had gotten for Maxime was make-work, somewhat, so she could earn a small living wage. Living on that part of Fifth Avenue seemed crazy at the time, the most unlikely, downscale address, but in keeping with her bohemianism.

  PETER DUNHAM Maxime’s sinecure was designed to keep Loulou undistracted and calm and not have the problem of her mother. That’s how things were done at Saint Laurent in those days. I was in my twenties, Maxime a woman of a certain age. Unlike her friends John Richardson and Kenny Lane, she was uneasy with young people, but like them she was someone one could learn from. Teddy remembered going to Montecalvello. “My mother’s been in the kitchen for days,” Loulou moaned. “This visit’s gone on too fucking long.” Teddy lifted a pot lid. Maxime was boiling a disgusting illegal animal part. He practically had a seizure. The point is that Maxime was Loulou’s mother. As such, we all had to pitch in and make sure she was okay—“What’s Maxime done now?” She could be prickly; Loulou, never. Loulou never pulled rank and was genuinely humble. Maxime had none of her daughter’s finesse.

  JAMES KILLOUGH I knew “the Countess of the Cliff” very well, one of many dark, twisted Auntie Mames in my life, something of a dragon. The way Maxime and I met—she was in her late fifties, I was sixteen—was strange but appropriate, given her history. My family had just moved back to New York from Rome, and I was having trouble fitting in, a melodramatic young ghey wanting to be an actor. We lived on Gracie Square next to Gloria Vanderbilt, I went to Trinity and was a salesman at Gucci—Patricia Gucci, Aldo’s sole heir, was a good school friend.

  One night, my mother called me from a party at the town house of an heiress friend. “Dahling, you must come immediately. I’ve met the most wonderful man: He’s an actor and he’s Italian!” Why she thought a man closer to her own age would appeal to me as a friend is still a mystery. The Italian actor was actually more of a performance artist. I won’t give his real name; this story is about to get morally dubious. I’ll call him “Marcello.” He wore beautiful lace-up riding boots and had luxuriant, twenties-movie-star wavy black hair. My mind thrashed in a confusion of teenaged arousal. Toward the end of the party, Marcello said in Italian, “You are the most beautiful boy I’ve ever seen,” and gave me his card. I called and he invited me to lunch with his friend, Maxime, at her loft. Later, I found a quotation from a longtime friend of hers: “Maxime made Cruella de Vil seem like a pussycat.” She was indeed fearsome. Had I not been raised in a semi-Australian household, where the women are caustic and the men keep their balls protected at all times, I’m not sure I would have survived the lunch. The dragon spread her wings, breathed fire at me and we sparred verbally. Her bed was raised on a dais and Morocconized with
drapes, throw pillows, clashing prints. “Andy pays me in paintings,” she explained breezily of the Warhol silk screens everywhere. But what really caught my eye was a Tic Tac stand. There weren’t Tic Tacs in America yet, much less a display stand, like a plastic Christmas tree of colored boxes jutting upwards. “I consider it an objet d’art,” she said. That impressed the fuck out of me. After lunch, we went to Barneys. “Marcello and I are going shopping. What are you doing?” Shit, she’s telling me to fuck off, I thought, dazed by the ferocity of her rudeness. The middle-aged man I am now sees she was just being a jealous bitch tired of the lusty teen hanging around.

  It soon became clear that Marcello was a bonafide gigolo. He confessed as much when I was alone with him, again shaking with lust, a few weeks later in his own, Zenlike loft in SoHo. He was a chronic womanizer. What did he want with me? “Spogliati,” he said gently. “Strip.” I took my clothes off and stood there, naked. He didn’t do anything but sit on the sofa and look at me. Following that unconsummated, weirdo living-naked-statue evening, I lost interest. What use did I have for the kept man of a nasty, aging, eccentric British aristocrat?

  However, it wasn’t over between me and Maxime. She was developing a relationship of her own with me, calling whenever she had problems with Marcello. Maybe it was one of those amusing British oddnesses for her to sometimes have a high school student at her table. Times were tough for her and getting tougher. She was doing dribs and drabs for Saint Laurent, tidbits Loulou would throw her, and trying to get cooking shows off the ground. The problem with being a mean old witch is only psychopaths would want to watch you cook.

  I’d dropped out of Wesleyan and moved to Paris when Marcello called about “a top-secret project”: badly faked Etruscan vases he was going to fob off on no less than Pierre Bergé, obviously using his connection with Loulou and Maxime to get in. Needless to say, the sale didn’t go through, but this incident apparently caused a bit of a scandal in the House of Saint Laurent; indeed, neither Loulou nor Maxime appeared to have been aware of what Marcello was up to. Maxime swept into Paris. Once she realized I wasn’t complicit, we spent the better part of the week together. This was a different Maxime, a French Maxime, and I really enjoyed those few days together.

  Over dinner one night, a friend asked her how she knew me. “He was in love with my boyfriend,” she stated. It took me aback that she thought that, both of me and of him. He was clearly her gigolo. If she was under the impression there was any affection from him for her, she was delusional.

  BRADLEY LANDER We knew him as “Lorenzo”—“Lorenzo the monster,” we called him. An aberration. He and Maxime had the most terrible rows. She also had a boyfriend she shared with Nan Kempner. She and Nan became un-great friends over him, briefly. Nan was away for the weekend and Maxime stole her Greek party boy, another gigolo. She insisted she had no idea he was Nan’s.

  CHRISTOPHER MASON Nan had this marvelous succession of young studs. Manoli Olympitus later married Jan Cushing, a pretty Upper East Side blonde, a Mortimer’s girl, before moving on to my lovely friend Emily Todhunter, a celebrated English decorator who’d had a long-running romance with Taki. A very tangled web. Anyway, the story was that Nan was keeping Manoli, this hot Greek rake, at the Carlisle so he’d be constantly available to her.

  ROBERT COUTURIER Maxime didn’t have any enemies. Enemies don’t exist in society, only temporary allies. She believed her own publicity, which I’m sure was better than the reviews she got from Rhoda. People treated Maxime like a star because she behaved like one: La Folle de Chaillot. Like Proust’s Marquise de Villeparisis, she became almost sainted as she got older. Nothing she did could possibly surprise. She told me once how she’d walked into a dinner party, sat down and heard a squeak.

  “I peeked and quickly realized I’d sat on a tiny dog and killed it.”

  “Maxime! What did you do?”

  “Well, what could I do? I put it in my purse.”

  “What?!”

  “Yes. I couldn’t tell the hostess I’d just killed her dog. It would’ve ruined the party. Of course she was calling for it all through dinner.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. I just carried on as if nothing happened. When I left, I dropped the dead dog in a bin on the street.”

  “But what about your friend?”

  “Oh, she ran around looking for Fifi and finally gave up.”

  It seems Maxime had a dog problem. At another dinner party, investment banker Paul Lepercq’s wife, Kay, arrived with not one dog but two—and there was already the host’s two-hundred-pound Newfoundland clawing at the door from inside the bedroom. Pandemonium was on the menu, three dogs shrieking out of control. Maxime, who’d only just met Kay, started telling her where to get off, poking her in the chest. Kay pushed back, they were shoving each other. The other guests—Babs Simpson, Billy Baldwin, the actress Hermione Gingold—were transfixed. Maxime: “You gotta go, and take those fucking dogs with you!” Kay was not a small girl herself, but Maxime made quick work of her, literally, physically throwing her and her convoy out the door. The host was grateful, and everyone applauded. Maxime dusted herself off and helped put the finishing touches on dinner. The next time the host saw Kay, she said, “Who does that cunt think she is?”

  ————————

  TARA REDDI Loulou was in town, and Maxime commandeered me and Rosi to help with a party. Loulou was aloof. We killed ourselves cooking, and it wouldn’t have mattered if we’d served Ritz crackers and cheese spread.

  There was a tense moment where the Saint Laurent people didn’t want Maxime coming to the office anymore. She’d offended, somehow.

  CATHERINE SCHWAAB Maxime was involved in counterfeit Saint Laurents, wasn’t that the problem?

  JOHN RICHARDSON Pierre had no time for Maxime. The message to Loulou was, “Please keep your pest of a mother out of the way.”

  LOULOU When she was seventy or so, my mother’s contract with Yves wasn’t renewed. She was furious. Yves liked her because she told him funny stories, but her relationship with Pierre wasn’t good. She didn’t think he appreciated her and was clumsy, verbally. They’d be at a party and she’d say, “Have you seen my dossier on such-and-such?” Pierre hated talking about work outside the house.

  AMY FINE COLLINS Maxime was poor as a church mouse. But she could live well on air, picking up the most disgusting furniture, junk, at the Sixth Avenue flea market and painting it with tribal motifs. She painted the way she cooked, cigarette ash falling, total chaos. But something great came out of it. She was like a witch with her cauldron. Nothing to do with today’s precious foodie culture. She may have had a crush on me. She wanted to lift my dress to see my pregnant stomach.

  CHRISTOPHER MASON Maxime was always between projects that were going to be fabulously successful, but she was living by the skin of her teeth. She reminded me of C. Z. Guest, who always had these get-rich-quick schemes that never panned out.

  ROSI LEVAI There was a show of Maxime’s “Africanized” furniture in Palm Beach and one in New York at Judy Goldberg’s gallery in 1991. All her chic friends came to the opening. She didn’t sell a thing.

  Maxime was slowing down. She shuffled. Quite honestly, she was hard up, living month to month. There was the maintenance on the apartment, and whether Loulou wanted or was in a position to pay it … I think Loulou always helped, but it wasn’t enough. This was before Pierre sold Saint Laurent to Sanofi,127 Loulou still had her stock shares. Maxime was proud of her, but one didn’t know that because of anything she said. She never talked about her in an affectionate way, or in any way, really.

  NICOLE DORIER Mme. Muñoz, Hélène de Ludinghausen and Loulou had written agreements that no matter what happened to the company, Bergé had to give them X amount, and when it was sold to Sanofi, these agreements were brought out.

  JOHN RICHARDSON We all thought we were going to have to put our pennies together to save Maxime. Her life in New York was coming to a screeching halt when this deus ex m
achina, Sarah St. George, came along, and everything was wonderful.

  KATELL LE BOURHIS Maxime phoned early one morning and told me she’d fallen in love. “Oh Maxime, really, I can’t now,” I said. “I’m late for work.” She said a woman had kissed her in the back of a limousine and her mouth tasted like roses. I met Sarah and she was frumpy, like a Sloane Ranger, very Cotswolds horses and hounds.

  ROSI LEVAI Sarah had been stalking Maxime, almost, as a personality. She’s obsessed with the Birleys, a hanger-on, flighty, part of that group of British pseudo—you know, upper-class, but without the heritage. She had money and used it to join a rather arty set, but Sarah isn’t arty herself.

  BRADLEY LANDER Sarah had tried to meet Maxime before, at the suggestion of Maxime’s nephew, Robin, the one who’d been mauled by the tiger. “I have the answer to all your problems,” he told Sarah. “My aunt Maxime.” But when Sarah called, Maxime hung up on her.

  STEVEN M. L. ARONSON Everything connects, it seems—sooner or later. In 1974, I had a call from an English friend of mine, the distinguished writer and historian Max Wyndham, aka Lord Egremont, whose country seat is Petworth, which amounts to a palace—I mean, the queen once rang him up herself to ask if she could come to tea. He wanted to know if I could put up his sister in New York. Carlyn was a registered nurse who was coming here to help care for a young woman who’d been injured in a speedboat accident in the Bahamas that had literally cost her an arm. The evening of the day Carlyn arrived happened to be the premiere of Andy Warhol’s Blood for Dracula—I was by then Andy’s editor and publisher—and I invited her to go with me. She seemed to enjoy the film every bit as much as I did, for the trash classic that it was.