Loulou & Yves

by Christopher Petkanas

  Working at Saint Laurent could be maddening. Market research or even mentioning another company was out of the question. No one else existed. You’d try to talk to someone about what Valentino or whoever was doing, and it was like, “So? And?” The house held itself above everyone and everything. M. Bergé would say, “After Saint Laurent, nothing, no one,” even though Karl was picking up speed at Chanel. The politics at avenue Marceau were vicious. There were two distinct camps: Saint Laurent’s and Bergé’s. The only place there was no backstabbing was the studio. M. Bergé and M. Saint Laurent might plunge knives into each other, but you stayed well out of it.

  JEAN-LUC FRANÇOIS I was backstage with Loulou after a show when the cleaning crew arrived. As usual, M. Bergé threw M. Saint Laurent to the care of his bodyguards—except this time M. Saint Laurent wasn’t having it. He sat on the floor, started sketching and gave a drawing to one of the cleaners, a black woman in a head scarf. M. Bergé became hysterical because a Saint Laurent drawing—one he hadn’t monetized—got away.

  JANE PENDRY After the company went public, suddenly you had outside stock market people putting their noses in, wanting to create accessories divisions to tame something like two hundred licenses worldwide. Until then, there’d been one man in charge of them all. Bonkers. Contact between him and M. Saint Laurent had degenerated to the point where telephone books were being hurled across conference rooms. These were the days when fashion companies made it up as they went along, every house sort of hobbling along administratively. We had a watch deal with Cartier. But since no one had factored in aftercare, customers couldn’t get their watches repaired. Chaos. I got rid of some weird and wonderful licenses, like playing cards.

  After every couture show, Loulou and I’d go through the collection to see what was transformable for Cartier, which sublicensed the jewelry to Trifari. Wooden cuffs hand-carved in Africa, they’re not going to translate—or is there a way?

  We traveled together to impossible places like Rhode Island, the world capital of costume jewelry, and she found the fun and fascination in it. Actually, she found it rather exotic. Loulou was a good practical English girl who liked having things sell. It broke her heart when huge amounts of couture jewelry wound up in staff sales.

  Even before the sale to Sanofi, M. Saint Laurent had become a recluse. The pressure had started long before, with Rive Gauche. “This is what sells, we went more of it,” and on it trundled. There’d be a headline, saint laurent est mort, then a week would go by and he wouldn’t come to work, and Loulou and the rest of the studio would be sitting around wondering, Do we wait for him? Do we get on with it? If you asked, “What’s happening with M. Saint Laurent?” you met a wall. “He’s not feeling very well at the moment.” Other times, he’d wrong-foot everyone and turn up at 9:00 a.m., there’d be a swell of optimism—“He’s back! He’s on form!”—only for him to sink back down again. He was angry: “They sold my house!”

  JANE KRAMER It probably tells you more about France than about Yves Saint Laurent that … his appearances are recorded and analyzed and argued over like Elvis sightings.

  LOULOU Yves is very accessible here. It is the contrary to what people assume. And if he wants to be elusive, then I don’t want to be the front person. I shouldn’t have to talk for him. It’s ghostly. It is exaggerated, this myth. He’s just hard at work, and when it is over, we both crawl home.

  JEAN-LUC FRANÇOIS With Sanofi, work excited Loulou less. She’d had enough. One day, she picked up an envelope on her desk. “Voilá, it’s all over now. No more tissue-lined envelopes. When I need a pencil these days, I have to place a written order.” She loved Saint Laurent like a brother, but told me she couldn’t talk to him anymore, that she could no longer reach him.

  NICOLE DORIER Often you wanted to say something to him, something simple—how much he mattered to you, how worried you were about him. But words were not easy for him, so you didn’t try, making do with looks, smiles… Some of the corridors in the house were so narrow, you had to stop and stand sideways to let him pass, rare moments of intimacy with le maî tre.

  JANE PENDRY After three years, one got the feeling, Aprè s moi, le dé luge. Do I really want to carry on till the bitter end? Saint Laurent was still making exquisitely beautiful clothes, but like all designers, he needed to reinvent himself. He lived in a bubble. The clothes became self-referential. No fresh air. Which I think Loulou felt as well.

  FRANÇOISE PICOLI In the nineties, especially, for all the reasons we know, Saint Laurent was often unable to work. To keep things going, Loulou and Anne-Marie Muñoz had to step in and design the collection. I’m talking about Rive Gauche; no one ever touched the couture. Anne-Marie did the suits, a matter of choosing less expensive fabrics for existing couture models. The problem was that the couture clients were not happy to see their things replicated in ready-to-wear.

  Loulou designed completely new models to fill out the collection. Then Saint Laurent would make a surprise appearance, and he was never enthusiastic. So there was a struggle. Obviously, he had the last word. But Loulou could be insistent. I remember a coat in billiard green wool broadcloth. Every day she’d show it to him, and every day he’d make a face. She never stopped trying, but he didn’t put it in the show.

  ALYNE DE BROGLIE Saint Laurent loved Loulou, though she could get on his nerves. If he didn’t like how she accessorized a mannequin, he didn’t say so straight-out; he’d say, “I prefer …” or grimace. But she wasn’t shy with him and held her ground. For the rest of us, including Anne-Marie, if he said “black,” it was black. Loulou, no. “Le style Saint Laurent” he was stuck in wasn’t necessarily what Loulou transmitted in the sweaters she designed. They were closer to the body and maybe sweeter, cuter than the YSL codes strictly allowed. But her style wasn’t suppressed; it coexisted with his.

  COLOMBE PRINGLE In the years when Saint Laurent wasn’t well, Loulou held down the ship. Maybe the collections had a bit too much tartan—you could tell some of the ideas hadn’t been completely reworked by Yves. But she got it done.

  AUDREY SECNAZI Once, he handed in a single drawing. We did an entire collection from it.

  An example of the kind of stress and madness Loulou and Anne-Marie worked under: First of all, when you talk about Saint Laurent, you are talking about someone who fantasized about attaching himself to a big bronze bust and dropping into the Seine. Chronically, he never had any cash on him. Marie-Dominique Lelièvre, one of Yves’s biographers and a good friend of his sister Brigitte, wrote how, free of his minders, he would find himself casually selling for pin money valuable objects from his sedulously amassed stockpile to a neighbor at 55, rue de Babylone by the name of Jagger. By March 1990, Yves was sucking down two bottles of whiskey a day. He was losing his mind. He had a fantasy about being a marine and chopped all his hair off, leaving an alarming bald spot at the temple. Stumbling around Marrakech, he met an antiques dealer who sold him bibelots by the pound, so many they filled a minivan, €800,000 worth. Up in Paris, the ready-to-wear season was approaching. Loulou and Anne-Marie did their best to keep up morale, assuring the ateliers that the drawings were coming, tout va bien, they’re coming, vous n’inquitez pas.

  Everyone had an opinion about how Yves should be disciplined, even his Moroccan manservant: Monsieur should be talked to like a private in the army. Finally, Pierre delegated a nurse and Brigitte to fly to Marrakech in her brother’s Learjet and bring him back to Paris. Loulou or Anne-Marie might have gone but couldn’t be spared. When Brigitte arrived at Villa Oasis, she found Yves in a disgusting—filthy—state, rejecting food and sedatives, crawling, literally, along the allées in the garden. Told he was needed in Paris for the collection, he refused to leave. Brigitte tried a lie, that their mother had had a heart attack, but Yves saw through it. Eventually, he was herded onto the plane.

  In Paris, Pierre leaned on someone so Yves could slip into the airport unnoticed via an entrance used for high-risk convicts and the mortally ill. He was committed t
o the Clinique Médicale du Château des Garches in the Paris suburbs, describing it as “that kind of clinic with bars.” The windows in the ward for the mentally ill where he spent his first two days were indeed blocked so inmates would not be tempted to throw themselves out. Loulou and Anne-Marie received bulletins: Yves was screaming “assassins!” in the halls. After the top-security ward, he was transferred to a unit with a billiards room and park that Pierre seemed to say was not as bad as all that—“It didn’t look anything like a prison!” Yves had touched down from Marrakech on Saturday; the show was the following Wednesday. He never made it. He had started the collection but never finished it. That fell to Loulou and Anne-Marie. Yves saw pictures of the show and said it was very pretty, that he had been greatly helped by Loulou and Anne-Marie, but that no one had designed the collection in his place.

  YVES Everything comes from me. When I’m not working on a collection, je vie dans une absence totale. The two nervous breakdowns I had, one on top of the other, were very bad for me. I was very unhappy and very badly cared for. The first was at the Labrousse hospital. A year ago [in 1990], I had another breakdown, so serious they had to treat me for delirium tremens. They put me in a psychiatric hospital for three months. It was hideous …

  I don’t go out anymore, but that’s because of my treatment. I sometimes go to the Opéra, but I don’t read a single newspaper, don’t listen to the radio, never watch the news. Actually, I can watch it if I want, because my valet de chambre has a television in his room, so I put my head in and see what’s happening … [But] I prefer to find out from others. The image of a woman prostrate on the streets of Beirut, of a crying baby devastates me … Pierre Bergé is undoubtedly right when he says I was born with a nervous breakdown.

  129 Elsa Triolet (1896–1970) won the Prix Goncourt, a first for a woman, in 1944 for Le Premier Accroc coûte deux cents francs. The Schiaparelli necklace was composed of aspirin-shaped porcelain beads.

  130 Louis Aragon (1897–1982), Dadaist-Surrealist-Marxist who, with Triolet, formed a celebrated literary couple.

  25

  Ain’t Laurent Without Yves

  HUGO VICKERS Desmond and Mariga Guinness’s marriage was not destined to last. At one point after separating, a fearful drama played out. She continued to live at Leixlip, he in one part of the castle and she in another, Mariga standing at the gates in a torn dress crying, “Look what Desmond’s done to me now!” She called Penny, his second wife, “the fuck person.”

  BRIGHID MCLAUGHLIN In 1989, Mariga visited Wales with friends on a garden tour of Portmeirion … On her way home on the ferry between Holyhead and Dun Laoghaire, she had some drinks in the bar; she excused herself and entered the ship’s cinema. When the film was over and the lights came on she was found in her seat. In the middle of the convulsive Irish sea, with waves rising in unwatched loneliness, Mariga Guinness suffered a massive heart attack. She was injected with penicillin, to which she was allergic. She died shortly afterwards … A constant theme in Mariga’s life had been her fascination with her great-great-aunt, Elizabeth, the empress of Austria. Strangely, both died at the same age travelling on ferryboats, one stabbed in the heart and the other of a heart attack …

  The funeral was slightly inconsequential. Everyone knew that, mentally, Mariga had died five years earlier. Everyone knew that she had a death wish.

  CAROLA PECK She drank to forget, but could not … Like the Wilkie Collins heroine, “she was wrong, she was obstinate, she was interesting, she was admirable, she was deeply to be pitied” … Saturated in eighteenth-century grandeur, in which she had lived, loved and nurtured her mind, for a time she was crushed by ill-fortune and comparative poverty … [Living in Northern Ireland,] she was driven into being virtually a recluse, a strangely pathetic figure, walking barefoot into Mrs. O’Boyle’s pub for companionship…

  CHARLES LYSAGHT She’d have been the queen of Lithuania if the kaiser had won the war.

  Hiram Keller, Loulou’s dancing-on-glass partner on Mykonos, died in 1997, age 53, of liver cancer. Ossie Clark and Donald Cammell had gone the year before. Clark was 54. Loulou’s friendship with him had never lapsed. He died destitute and morose, living in a public-housing project in West London. Yves knew the name Ossie Clark, but did he know that he had swept the floors at Dior in ’58, all of sixteen, a year after Yves’s ascension? As a designer, Ossie had ceased to register since at least the early eighties. He was stabbed to death by Diego Cogolato, his 28-year-old former lover. Cogolato was convicted of manslaughter and did six years. Donald Cammell’s death at 62 was even more horrific.

  SAM UMLAND The story that after shooting himself at home in the Hollywood Hills it took Donald forty-five minutes to die and that his estranged wife, China Kong, handed him a mirror so he could watch himself bleed to death was her invention. Donald didn’t commit suicide in the classic manner, putting the gun to his temple, as in the Cocteau film Le Sang d’un poè te. The coroner’s report showed that he leaned forward from a seated position—sometimes you have to act these things out to see how they’re done—put his elbows on his knees, placed the gun on his forehead above the hairline with his left hand and with the right pushed the trigger. There was no exit wound. The bullet perforated the brain and lodged in the back of his throat. With a wound like that, the pressure from the bleeding snaps the spinal cord in two minutes anyway. Does anyone really believe you can shoot yourself point-blank with a .38-caliber pistol placed against the top of the head and actually live? Donald was making sure he was dead.

  ————————

  Loulou is on Paris, Malcolm McLaren’s landmark 1994 album, no small measure of her bona fides. Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Hardy brought their marquee power to the recording, but McLaren was enough of a fetishist to want Loulou for his ode to Paris, too. Four years later, the ground opened under her when Pierre took Rive Gauche away from the studio and brought in Alber Elbaz. Loulou, Yves’s natural successor, was passed over, at fifty still plausible; Thomas Maier was older than that when he rescued Bottega Veneta. No one had more to lose from Elbaz’s appointment than Loulou. Overnight, she was relieved of the prefall and cruise collections, the licensed accessory lines and Rive Gauche jewelry. There was also the ready-to-wear itself, which, if you quantified it, Loulou was at least one-third of the equation. Pierre had been chairman of Merloz’s company and shut it down the year before, confessing to years of financial hemorrhaging. The launch alone had cost two million dollars. While he didn’t rule out Robert one day succeeding Yves, obviously Pierre had come to his senses. Or maybe he had just fallen out of love.

  Pierre insisted that Rive Gauche was a weight Yves was happy to be rid of, though we never heard that from Yves himself. He was mute. He had no say in his replacement. Not that he was in any condition to go through the selection process anyway. Pierre had always sworn that no one would replace Yves while he was still alive. But the truth was, Rive Gauche was in death throes.

  JEAN-PAUL KNOTT Bergé hired Elbaz at a time when M. Saint Laurent was extremely unhappy. He’d done it all. Nothing was ever good enough.

  KARL LAGERFELD This idea of suffering for the dress—I mean, dressmaking is okay, but you sell dresses, you don’t sell anguish … Nobody is forced to do this job, and if they don’t like it, they should do another one … But don’t start doing it and then say, “Aaaah, it’s too much” … Suddenly, they become artists. They are too weak. Too fragile. Non … We cannot talk about our suffering. People buy dresses to be happy, not to hear about somebody who suffered over a piece of taffeta.

  LOULOU [Yves would] come in at night, drape the mannequins with fabric, and we’d arrive in the morning and see these sort of ghosts in faille, crow’s wings mixed with magpie colors, very strange colors. He was in a total state of delirium.

  It’s then that he did … that very very dramatic collection, Opéra, then that he did the Russian haute couture collection with all the shawls, producing 40,000 drawings of such beauty. When you have someone who
is delirious but does work like that, it’s very unsettling.

  He suffered terribly, really terribly in the last years, because the press and the world clamored for details, and Yves in the end would have been very happy designing a puff of wind … In fact, he’s a lover of simplicity. That’s what’s dangerous in his work, because the more you simplify, the more you risk becoming boring. Anne-Marie and I, we who worked with Yves for so many years, we always felt we were doing something completely new… I learned about harmony and perfectionism, about the “silence” of clothes, as Yves used to call it. I learned to design clothes that enhanced, but did not overtake one.

  NICOLE DORIER M. Saint Laurent wanted to continue with Rive Gauche, but M. Bergé dissuaded him: “You’ll have less stress, you’ll be able to devote yourself to your couture,” blah, blah, blah. With Elbaz, we went from a show budget of 800,000 francs to 2.5 million, including 80,000 francs he paid a stylist for two days’ work. We’d always used the same standard runway; Elbaz had one custom-built in steel in the shape of a Y. It rattled.

  ALBER ELBAZ I got an amazing welcome from Mr. Saint Laurent and Mr. Bergé, but I didn’t feel like a designer. I felt like a son-in-law going into a house and taking something from them … It was very hard for me. For a couple of months, I had lunch almost every day with another person at Saint Laurent and, every lunch, someone else was crying in front of me. You see, Clara, Loulou, they were emotional because it was their baby. They made it happen, and here I am coming and taking it from them.