Loulou & Yves

by Christopher Petkanas

  Creativity isn’t enough. I saw that writing my biography of Natalia Paley, 134 someone else who had great personal style and knew a lot about clothes but nothing about business. In 1940, she opened a couture house in New York

  financed by her husband, Jack Wilson, who’d been Noël Coward’s lover. Karinska135 and Niki de Gunzburg136 were partners. Everything was sublime, they spent a fortune, but there was no management. In six months, they were out of business.

  NICKY HASLAM Oonagh Guinness, one of the brewery Guinnesses, backed her Cuban husband, Miguel Ferreras, in a Paris couture house in the early sixties. Ferreras had worked for Charles James. It was the biggest opening ever. They had two town houses. Huge flop.

  CHRISTIAN LACROIX Princess Baba de Faucigny-Lucinge, 137 Ariel’s grandmother, had a boutique in Cannes in the thirties. She filled it with Austrian leather shorts in August and wondered why they didn’t sell.

  KIRAT YOUNG It’s like Hélène de Ludinghausen, another lunatic. She has a boyfriend, Kerry Nimji, who thinks he’s a couturier. The guy will be ruined. Of course, he’s much younger than Hélène, and gay, but that’s beside the point. I think he worked for two seconds for Pauline Trigère two hundred years ago. His poor family, Indian from Kerala, is bedazzled because Hélène took him here and there, ta-ta-ta. They set him up on avenue Montaigne. For the first collection, Hélène naturally called all her friends and they showed up and bought his overpriced dresses. But nobody wants to go back a second time.

  LOUISE KAHRMANN Loulou put her head in the sand and never opened a bank statement. She didn’t like hearing bad news. Ariel took it all for her. The accountant literally chased Loulou around the boutique, begging her to make decisions. “I don’t want to know,” she’d say. “I don’t want to talk about it!” She’d been raised never to discuss money. It wasn’t the “done” thing. God, no!

  She lost a lot of weight, which saddened me, because she was skinny to begin with. Loulou was a very private person. I didn’t ask any questions. There were rumors. We weren’t making any money, but carried on anyway, even opening a second boutique, on rue Cambon. Her relationship with Karl, just a few doors up at Chanel, had gone bad decades earlier with M. Saint Laurent’s, and she heard things Karl said about her that were quite negative. But she took it on the chin. She was even undermined from inside her own company. Since nobody was managing it, people would do things—not behind her back, but they did what they wanted.

  The champagne bill from Ravenel’s son’s marriage to Loulou’s fitting model was sent to the boutique and paid by a bookkeeper who refused to inform Loulou or confront Ariel. At the lowest point, Loulou and Ariel had lunch with Yves at rue de Babylone. Loulou was very, very nervous. The lunch had evidently gone well, because soon after there was an infusion of cash.

  NICOLE DORIER Saint Laurent had no concept of money. He would have had no idea if the check he wrote her had four zeros or five. He liked to smack down Bergé, and by helping Loulou, here was his chance. Whether it was enough …

  MICHEL KLEIN Yves was quite loony at this time, so you can’t say what Pierre and Yves didn’t do. You can only say what Pierre didn’t do.

  STASH KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA Pierre Bergé is not an unkind man by any stretch of the imagination. There must be a reason why he didn’t bail out Loulou. My brother put up a considerable amount, but it was throwing good money after bad.

  LOUISE KAHRMANN Loulou would have done everything to keep me, but in 2007 I was offered another job, and as the company was winding down, I took it. I was relieving her of a salary, but on the other hand she saw that one by one everyone was leaving. She feared being alone. “I never wanted a big store with all these different collections,” she told me. “All I ever wanted was a little shop with limited runs, to do something small but well.”

  Instead of the usual boring “Louise worked for me and did such and such” kind of thing that you usually put in a reference letter, Loulou wrote, “Louise was one of the prettiest girls I’ve ever had in my office, she’s terribly social and knows everybody and is on all the best guest lists from London to Paris and I would recommend her to everyone.” On my last day, she gave me a load of jewelry and a photo of herself with a poem she’d written around the edges, breaking down in tears in front of everyone.

  SUZY MENKES I think “naïve” is the word, really. It’s tragic she should have lost so much money, but her failure doesn’t surprise me. Look at all the people who have come out of Prada—none of them have made it, either. Loulou designed jewelry she might have picked up on the hippie circuit had she not had Saint Laurent to feed that urge. I always felt it was a failing of his that he never found a dauphin within or without. Not that I think she would have been it.

  JOHN STEFANIDIS I knew what was happening, the debacle, but not from Loulou—she never unbuttoned about it. I’m not acquainted enough with the fashion world to know, but I can’t understand why she wasn’t snapped up.

  DAVID MLINARIC You do know the English are very private, don’t you?

  In the present tense they’re not, but people of my age group wouldn’t complain a bit. It was built into us. Loulou, the knight, Alexis—they just wouldn’t. It was part of our upbringing. I have the most desperate fortune of any-

  body I know, but wouldn’t dream of discussing it. I’m not surprised Loulou never told me of any unhappy business. In her view, it would have spoilt the lunch.

  JüRGEN DOERING Loulou should have made a luxury house like Kering or Vuitton pay through the nose for her to do jewelry, knitwear, whatever.

  KATELL LE BOURHIS There were other possibilities beyond designing for an endangered species of rich, idle women like Nan Kempner. Bernard Arnault would have taken her. Marisa Berenson has no creativity and he hired her to give her opinion on makeup. Just to have Loulou doing a little performance at Saks, saying hello … But then she never had any sense of career. She was a woman who gardened and loved cats, do you understand? No ambition.

  SUSAN GUTFREUND You have to ask yourself, Why didn’t François Pinault hire Loulou? François is a good friend. I think he might have been frightened by—how do I say this?—the whiff and perfume of wild nights. You remember Galliano at Dior? The ateliers would be there at 8:30 in the morning, ready for fittings, and he never showed up. For a businessman, it’s hard to understand the lack of discipline. At his house in Saint-Tropez, when François says you’re leaving for lunch at Club 55 at 1:15, he’s ready at 1:14 with his hat on.

  GRACE CODDINGTON Loulou was “pre” the celebrity and social-network explosion. Had she been ten or fifteen years younger, everyone would have been talking about her wildly. She took on too much. Even respected designers only supervise their bags and shoes. Loulou was from a different era. In the sixties, everybody put their name on a boutique … Mary Quant. Now it takes years to build a business. You rise and fall, as Marc Jacobs knows too well. I’m lazy. I have five hundred shows to go to in Paris. Out of friendship or politeness, I should have seen Loulou’s collection. I’m guilty as judged.

  AUDREY SECNAZI After the bankruptcy, Loulou admitted she’d been naïve. I told her how mystified I was: “Why hadn’t M. Bergé and M. Saint Laurent helped, or helped more? It’s not normal.”

  “Audrey,” she said, “you’re not looking at it the right way. It’s not that they’re not normal; it’s that I’m normal.”

  MARIE BELTRAMI It’s easy to blame Ariel, but without her, Loulou would never have tried. Loulou admitted she was too influenced by people who told her she would be the follow-up to Saint Laurent.

  DIANE VON FURSTENBERG In the scope of her life, the failure of her collection is not important. A comma. The truth is, Loulou did not have the physical health at that point.

  CATHERINE SCHWAAB We had lunch, and she made nothing of losing her business. It seemed to roll off her. “Oh, well, you know, these things happen, it wasn’t as bad as all that…” I suppose it was the way she handled all her misfortunes.

  LAURENCE BENAÏM Loulou had a dandyish p
osture, unconcerned with consequences. She was like the romantic heroine of a decadent English novel who burns down the castle for love. Today, everyone wants to be an owner. Loulou was a tenant in life. She owned only the moments she created, the fires she lit, the last fires of a society inherited from the great Paris salons. I remember going to her apartment on rue des Plantes and seeing piles of unpaid bills from the boutique. The last time I saw her, she and Thadée were filling big plastic garbage bags with her old Saint Laurents to give to the foundation.

  FLORENCE TOUZAIN A lot of people turned their back on Loulou when she went out on her own. If Saint Laurent gave her money, he’s the only one. Loulou was incredibly generous. It pained me that so few returned the favor. Lucie lives une vie bohè me à l’anglaise—she could have helped her aunt in return for a time when Loulou helped her. Living with Balthus in Switzerland, Thadée’s half-sister, Harumi, was isolated. The kid knew nothing. Loulou helped her out of that and with her jewelry business. People took advantage of Loulou and lived off her. She pushed Alexis out front so he could earn a living, Maxime the same.

  MARC BERI One day, I passed in front of the boutique. It had been cleaned out. That’s how I learned Loulou had gone bankrupt. She’d designed and M. Goossens had made beautiful bronze knobs in the shape of a cat’s head for the front door. I knew they’d be stolen, so I planned to come back for them. But I waited too long. When I finally went back, the place was rented and the cat heads gone.

  More than ten years after Loulou dumped him, Richard Biais still won’t say a word against her, a case of real idolatry that doesn’t prevent him from seeing things the way they were. His name for Ravenel is “the ship-sinker: She sunk Kenzo, and she sunk Loulou.” Knowing how the House of Saint Laurent had treated Alyne de Broglie, Richard considers himself lucky not to have gotten in deeper. “Poor Alyne,” he said. “After working there for seventeen years, they cut off both her legs at the knees.”

  132 Line Vautrin (1913–1997), designer whose neo-Romantic jewelry falls between costume and precious, and who worked largely in resin, glass and gilt bronze.

  133 Zack Carr (1945–2000), Calvin Klein designer who was said to be “more Calvin than Calvin,” and who had his own short-lived label in 1986.

  134 Princess Natalia Paley (1905–1981), a first cousin of Tsar Nicolas II, and wife of Lucien Lelong.

  135 Barbara Karinska (1886–1983), New York City Ballet costumer.

  136 Niki de Gunzburg (1904–1981), American Vogue editor who starred in Vampyr under the screen name Julian West.

  137 Baba de Faucigny-Lucinge (1902–1945), mannequin whose marriage to Jean-Louis Faucigny-Lucinge created one of the leading couples in European society of the interwar wars.

  27

  Final Stretch

  In April 2007, Pierre took a call on his cell phone that would write the first page of his next chapter: An MRI revealed that Yves had brain cancer. Glioblastomas are treated by surgically removing as much of the tumor as possible; radiation and chemotherapy go after the rest. No treatment was considered for Yves. His doctors and Pierre agreed that any efforts would be futile—and that Yves wouldn’t be told the truth about his condition, because it would kill him faster than the tumor. As his affairs were already in order, his will finalized and filed with a notary, there was no end-of-life paperwork to arouse his suspicions that he was living under a death sentence.

  There was a convenient and vaguely credible alibi for Yves’s condition. He had fallen three times on the same stone staircase in Tan-gier, where in the late nineties he and Pierre had purchased another toehold in Morocco, Villa Mabrouka. Each fall required a trip to the hospital and stitches. Pierre and the doctors were one in telling Yves that the accidents were responsible for his state, and it’s what he believed. People with untreated glioblastomas usually survive less than six months. In one way, Yves was the prefect patient, making it easy for everyone, including Loulou, by never once asking in the fourteen months that remained to him, “Please, tell me the truth. What do I really have?”

  NICOLE DORIER I’d stayed on three years after M. Saint Laurent retired, working at the foundation. There were just a few of us. The emptiness literally made me nauseous. The house had always been a place where things were half-said. One day someone would tell you something, and a few days later deny having said it. You had to read between the lines, hear what wasn’t said, see what you weren’t shown. You never knew which Bergé you were going to get, the nice one or the mean one, the one who slapped you on the back or boxed your ears. He looked for trouble, came after you, came after me. We knocked heads. I left because he didn’t want any women around anymore, only boys. I was on a sinking ship taking me down with it. In a letter I wrote M. Saint Laurent but never gave him, I said that I should have gone in 2002 with everyone else, it would have been less painful, but that I stayed because I thought, maybe out of an excess of pride, that I could be useful to him, be his memory… I wrote that if leaving is to die a little, you also leave in order not to die, life exists elsewhere, I have to find it…

  I’d always made him chocolate truffles for the New Year. It was January 10, 2008. We’d had no contact for three years. A friend met me so we could sit in her car in front of avenue Marceau and wait for him to come out so I could give him the truffles, lipstick at the ready—I was afraid he wouldn’t recognize me right away without it. I was very nervous, not knowing how he was going to react. What had he been told after I left? I imagined the worse. We waited an hour, and the chauffeur appeared with Moujik IV. M. Saint Laurent would be out any second. I got out of the car, my heart racing, worse than at the cabine casting in 1973. Then with the most beautiful smile I could’ve hoped for, he said, “Mais, c’est Nicole.” I was saved. We embraced. I told him what I had not been strong enough to tell him when I left: “I’m not abandoning you.” He said, “You’re as beautiful as ever.” It was as if nothing had changed … A kiss through the car window … He always rode up front with the chauffeur.

  Yves’s sister Brigitte played along with the all’s-well charade, having lunched with her brother, dressed comically in a Ralph Lauren black polo shirt, for the last time at rue de Babylone the month before. They did so tête-à-tête, which was unusual. Normally, they were joined by Lucienne, their mother, and Philippe Mugnier, Yves’s last “companion,” whose bedroom next to Yves’s had been converted from an office. The luncheon was perhaps the last chance for Lucienne to see her son alive, but an exquisitely rigid pas de deux of proprieties governed the relationship between the greatest couturier of the second half of the twentieth century and his maman. Lucienne was exceptionally vain, even for the mother of a fashion designer. There was no question of her visiting him unless she was coiffeé, parfumée, maquillée, bijouxed and in heels as high as her ninety-four years allowed. But she just couldn’t manage it. Lying in bed in his last days, Yves was at least comforted by his mother’s voice, heard through the telephone placed at his ear.

  When the time came, June 1 at 11:12 p.m., Yves was surrounded in his room by Pierre, Betty, Anne-Marie and her husband, José. He died in Betty’s arms. Yves had married off Loulou thirty-one years before. Adil Debdoubi, his valet de chambre, removed his glasses and laid them on his desk. Saint Laurent, the film, even got Adil’s name right. In a scene at the end of his life, a barely sentient Yves asks him if he thinks he gave Betty and Loulou as much as they gave him. Debdoubi assures him he has nothing to worry about, but Yves still wonders, muttering with mounting hysteria, “Sometimes I don’t know anymore. Yes, sometimes I don’t know anymore. I don’t know anymore. Odd, isn’t it. I just … don’t … know!”

  Yves had said to Pierre many times that he, Pierre, would be the one to close his eyes, but they wouldn’t stay shut; a nurse weighted them with compresses. Deneuve was alerted and despite the hour strode into the apartment, laid down beside Yves on his Art Deco sharkskin and ebony bed, and kissed him. Moujik avoided his master’s room for several days. A photo was taken of the corpse, which Pi
erre says he looks at often.

  It was Yves’s last big moment, but Pierre could not resist stealing his thunder, letting the world in on a secret he’d been savoring: The men had entered into a civil union the September before. Pierre also made it known that if you wanted to see your flowers at the funeral, they had better come from Henri Moulié.

  YANOU COLLART Bergé stood at the top of the stairs at the Église Saint-Roch directing traffic, telling everyone where they could and couldn’t go. He made Yves’s family use the side door. Everybody was there: the Sarkozys, Jeanne Moreau, Farah Pahlavi—Saint Laurent had designed her wedding dress when she married the shah of Iran and he was still at Dior. Loulou was in the intimate friends’ section. Anne-Marie Muñoz was there; she could barely walk. You know how it’s usually done at funerals, everybody passes in front of the catafalque, right? Well, the priest announced that only Bergé’s close friends could—the priest made a mistake. He was so nervous, he said “Pierre Bergé” instead of “Yves Saint Laurent”!

  INÈS DE LA FRESSANGE From far across the church, I saw someone and thought to myself, God that old woman’s chic. Then I realized it was Loulou, hiding her grief under a big black fedora. She who was almost always in pants wore a pencil skirt and tights. She was in a state of collapse. In a short time, she’d lost her brother and Yves. It was awful, because after Thadée and Anna, Saint Laurent was probably the person she loved most in the world.

  RICARDO BOFILL What did he die of anyway? I have no idea. Self-love, wasn’t it? I think his ego must’ve killed him.

  Pierre chartered a plane to Marrakech for a group that included Loulou, newscaster Claire Chazal, Jack Lang and Pierre Thoretton, who would direct the maudlin 2010 Saint Laurent–Bergé lovefest, L’Amour Fou. The occasion was the unveiling of a monument to Yves in the former gardens of the painter Jacques Majorelle, whose restoration Yves and Pierre had funded and which they had opened to the public. Yves’s old rival Madison Cox was charged with the placement of an antique Roman stele. It sits on a square plinth, a potted agave at each corner, enclosed by a plain iron rail. The plaque reads: