Loulou & Yves

  IN MEMORIAM

  YVES SAINT LAURENT

  COUTURIER FRANÇAIS

  ORAN 01 08 1936

  PARIS 01 06 2008

  Clara Saint used her dislike of flying as an excuse not to attend. What she really objected to was dipping a wooden spoon in an urn of Yves’s remains and sprinkling them around the garden of Villa Oasis next door. For refusing to fall in line, Pierre sent Clara into exile.

  Sometime before February 2009, when the contents of Yves and Pierre’s Paris homes were auctioned by Christie’s in “the sale of the century,” Pierre combed through Yves’s apartment for gifts for Yves’s closest friends and invited them for one last visit. Then the unimaginable happened: Pierre received a call from Karl Lagerfeld, breaking the silence of a decades-long cold war. Yet more unimaginable was Karl’s message: He told Pierre that he had Yves’s letters to Jacques de Bascher and was trying to decide what to do with them. He said he was so revolted by their baseness, obscenity and “sexual violence” that he thought the best solution was to burn them. Then before ringing off, Karl had second thoughts. No, he told Pierre, he would keep them after all. There’s a scene in Saint Laurent where Yves is in the studio writing to Jacques, his words heard in voice-over. Karl is presumed to have “leaked” Yves’s letters to director Bertrand Bonello.

  Fernando Sanchez captured his old school friend Yves cultivating his loner reputation in Marrakech. © Jano Herbosch. Courtesy of the holder.

  ————————

  MARIE BELTRAMI Loulou was so worn-out after her company was liquidated, she had interferon therapy. To make up for everything that had gone wrong, Ariel got her work with Oscar de la Renta, the Home Shopping Network and designing home accessories—vases, cloisonné boxes. This enabled Loulou to return the money she’d borrowed from Éric de Rothschild and to have something to live on. One day, she told me, “It’s done, I’ve paid back my loans.” It was a point of honor with her.

  NICOLE DORIER She may have paid back other people, but definitely not Saint Laurent. Le pauvre, he couldn’t have cared less.

  ANDRÉLEON TALLEY Loulou was no longer the Loulou of the seventies, when she was just right there on the cusp of everything. The world had changed and she was adapting, seriously trying to stay afloat.

  KIM VERNON Loulou was searching for new venues. I thought, HSN or QVC, but high-end, like Twiggy or Iris Apfel. HSN was looking for more interesting designers who’d never think of doing television. They were open to Loulou as someone exotic bringing Europe to America. I did the deal for her. She did apparel, shoes, bags, accessories—everything. Loulou was truly unknown to this market. The customer is large in size, age fifty and up, has dinner, a drink, waits for her favorite designer to come on and shops as a real emotional experience. You get really addicted.

  HSN was respectful that for Loulou to come from Paris was a big deal. They didn’t pay her travel, they never do unless you’re a huge star they’re trying to land. She and Ariel flew to Tampa with things from the Paris line that Loulou felt could translate down, like synthetic versus a silk. HSN sourced the vendors, and Loulou would say, “No” or “Yes” or “Can you change that?” She did cotton knit ponchos, copies of ones in her store, that looked like a million bucks. But if something couldn’t be made at the right price and still have her design integrity, she had the right to kill it.

  Everyone who appears on HSN needs media training. Loulou had a tiny ego. As charismatic as she was, going on air can shut you down, and sometimes she found it paralyzing. Once the cameras start rolling, you can never stop talking: “This is how to wear it. This is why I love it.” People in the prairie plains are living through you and your life in Paris and the magazine article on your house in the country. You’re on for an hour, then sit around for six, waiting to go on again. Loulou’s fashion legacy didn’t really matter, even though the storytelling was always about Saint Laurent. Women watching HSN wouldn’t understand what it meant to hang out with him in Morocco. If they knew him, it was because they had a soap or fragrance.

  It’s a big deal when HSN commits to a new designer. There’s a dollar value attached to every minute of airtime. They took a gamble with Loulou. HSN gathers data very quickly. If something’s not tracking, they just move on to the next item. It’s not, “Hang it on a rail in Bergdorf’s and pray somebody buys it.” After the show, Ariel would run for the breakdown results, whereas Loulou didn’t want to know. Ariel was her facilitator and champion. Pushy, like me. They were a team, like sisters. Frick and Frack. Tampa was another world for them, but at some point you gotta go to dinner, right? These women were cool. They never wanted fancy; they wanted an authentic experience, so I always made sure we went to a restaurant with a dock. They were happy just sitting on the causeway…

  KIRAT YOUNG Selling on TV, Loulou thought, I’ll be like Diane von Furstenberg. But she was starting off at sixty. Diane had been, like, forty-five. Huge difference. And Loulou was so French, her world so rarefied.

  KENNETH JAY LANE I made a point of watching her. She was laid-back, like she was talking to you or me or Yves. That approach can or cannot work. My things are sold on QVC by a nice chubby boy from Brooklyn, Barry Ort. When I originally did the show, the lady viewers wouldn’t have dreamed of asking me home to dinner. Not that they didn’t adore me—it’s just that they’d have to totally redecorate their houses. But they’d love to invite Barry, he’s so cozy and cuddly.

  HOME SHOPPING NETWORK March 22, 2011

  PRESENTER: What were you thinking? It’s just great how you designed this.

  LOULOU Well, I thought it would be fun to have a really big ring. And sometimes when you have a really decorative ring, you don’t need to wear a bracelet. Sometimes it can be an option—either you buy the ring or you buy the bracelet. If you’re very brave, you buy both … I think it’s fun to have all those stones, as if you were sort of in the chest of treasures with all the stones going through your fingers.

  It’s great. It really does remind me of, like, a Hamptons summer look. You would easily see women who understand great jewelry dare to wear pieces like this.

  You know, white jeans and a white T-shirt. It’s a showstopper.

  And it’s so comfortable. [Addressing viewers:] This is going to really flip you out. When you get [the ring] at home, what’s going to happen is, you will totally flip out, because you’re like, “Oh my gosh, it’s incredibly, incredibly comfortable!” Now it crosses three fingers. There’s no doubt about it. I want to explain this right up front so you’re not surprised when you get it at home. But what you’re gonna love is that you can still use your hands. You can manipulate. You could be on a typewriter, typing a report, and you’re okay with this even though it covers three fingers. It’s very well balanced, and I do, I almost want to dare you to try this ring … And you know for such a big look, it’s a low profile.

  Yes, because it’s quite flat. And it’s very lightweight.

  It’s darling. It’s absolutely such a great piece. And you know what’s going to happen, too? This is going to be one of those famous collectibles down the road.

  Maybe. I hope so.

  JEAN-PAUL KNOTT There was a desperation to Loulou doing shopping television. Sad. It wasn’t worthy of her. Those programs were pitiful.

  MARY RUSSELL She did HSN? Really? Poor thing. Bless her heart.

  JOHN STEFANIDIS I think it’s absolutely admirable she did it, though I’d rather she hadn’t.

  JüRGEN DOERING Anyway, it was too late. The strain of taking planes … She must have already been quite ill.

  ————————

  ÉMILE GARCIN Maxime was no longer beautiful, but a monolith, like one of those stones you see erected at crossroads in the countryside. She and Bradley got along well until her health problems started. She fell, he took her to the hospital, they argued, and one day he found it more worthwhile to be in the service of Mme. Chambers.

  WILLY LANDELS Maxime had entered another realm. Loulou phoned her in t
he last days and asked if she should come see her. “Nonono,” Maxime said. “Mme. Obama is coming to stay. She dresses so well, I’m dying to know who her couturier is.” Sweet, no?

  LOULOU I brought my mother jellied daiquiris when she was in hospital in Arles. “The cameras, darling,” she said. “Don’t you know we’re in a Warhol film?” She thought the nurses were actors in costume. She divided people, thinking one person was two. “Which of you is the original? This was not de-cided.” You know the story about her slipping outside her building and suing and winning is true, but she got the idea from a British designer who lost an eyelash during a face-lift in New York and got a lot of money. Maxime had the same ambition.

  VERONICA HORWELL “Maxime de La Falaise,” The Guardian, May 8, 2009 Maxime de La Falaise, who has died aged 86, was brought up to make, host and be decorative. Her business in life was to create a style of living, whether she was paid for what she created or not … For more than 40 years she was an original whose look, cooking and domestic arrangements were imitated by many …

  NICKY HASLAM Maxime lived through Loulou, to a degree. I think one’s parents would have loved to achieve or be what one does, or is. I mean, my mother would have loved to be a gay decorator, without a doubt in heaven.

  SIKI DE SOMALIE Une trè s grande dame, Maxime. She died at home. With her raccoon eyes, she looked like a Van Dongen. After the funeral, there was a lunch at the house with Loulou, Thadée, me and my husband, Sarah, Anna, Daniel and Bradley. Maxime was Bradley’s mother, the mother he would have wanted.

  HUBERT DE GIVENCHY We grew distant, and then suddenly I learned she’d died. Latterly, she’d shared her life with a woman. I was quite surprised—I wasn’t aware of her tastes in this area. But then Maxime gave in to all sorts of impulses. This woman she was with had one arm. I saw them together once. She was quite pretty.

  The last time I saw Loulou was at Saint Laurent’s funeral, but I did contact her after Maxime died, asking what would be done for her in Paris. I don’t think she ever responded, or maybe she said there would be something later. But there wasn’t. Not anything. I was a little put out.

  ROSI LEVAI “Oh, I’m leaving you all my jackets from the Russian collection,” Maxime said to me. But I never heard anything, needless to say.

  Maxime by Kenneth Paul Block for Bonwit Teller, probably late 1960s. Too fastidious for words, as disenchanted as one could wish, Kenneth was the last in the line of great fashion illustrators: Eric, René Bouët-Willaumez, René Bouché. Collection of the author.

  KATELL LE BOURHIS Near the end, she said, “Are you finally going to give me a French kiss?” “Not a French kiss,” I said, “but a kiss on the mouth, yes.”

  ÉMILE GARCIN Maxime gave nothing and expected nothing. Loulou got her the job at Saint Laurent; Maxime didn’t ask. Sarah was the pursuer, Maxime the pursued. When Sarah talks about her today, it’s always the jokes, like a kid in school making fun of a classmate, Maxime tripping and flying across the room, everyone laughing.

  It was every man for himself with Maxime, though she thought it natural that people should help her. Throughout her life, she was taken in charge, materially, by this one and that. She was like a cat, always landing on her feet. But she didn’t need anyone. Elle suffisait d’elle-mê me. Her entourage understood that.

  Not that she wasn’t interested in people, but Maxime didn’t have what you’d call “bonnes relations” with anyone, a function of her solitariness and selfishness as an artist, to the degree she was one. It would never occur to her that someone might need to hear “I’m thinking of you.” “I love you.”

  This morning I had a call from Jeanne Moreau. We’ve been friends for thirty years. Jeanne made me think of Maxime. Same type of personnage. Jeanne has her courtiers. It’s that generation. Anouk Aimée, another friend, same mold. People are drawn to women like Anouk and Maxime and Jeanne for their autonomy and way of seeing things. Dialogue is relatively difficult. I see that with Jeanne every time we broach a subject that interests me. “Oh, s’il te plait, Émile, we’re not going to talk about that!” Maxime was exactly the same. You share the moment but know not to hope for anything more.

  28

  In Extremis

  HAMISH BOWLES Saint Laurent had been dead two years, so that makes it 2010. We were in Marrakech for the opening of the Berber museum in the Jardin Marjorelle. It didn’t seem like a command performance for Loulou, that she was obliged to attend. In fact, I was struck by how conspiratorial and complicitous that group, including the Catroux, had remained, considering all the stresses, strains, ruptures and fissures.

  When I broke through the barrier I’d perceived to be there, Loulou was enormously fun, witty and droll. A great revelation—to me, not anyone else. The problem was mine, not hers: Since impressionable boyhood, I’d been beguiled by her, and then in awe of her, intimidated by her legend, by the persona itself. She had a formidably patrician manner, which I came to understand was a facade, even an armorial device.

  KENZO TAKADA I saw her for the last time at the opening of the Saint Laurent retrospective at the Petit Palais in 2010. Something had gone out in her. Do we talk about drugs or not? I think we can. I had hepatitis, too. In 1987, I stopped taking completely. But honestly, I think she continued, no?

  In March 2010, I asked Loulou to lunch for a piece I was writing on Maxime for T: The New York Times Style Magazine. It was my period of exhuming “Fabulous Dead People,” an online column I wrote for the paper and the governing critieria for the pieces I did for T. Maxime certainly qualified.

  Loulou had been out of my sights (I was certainly never in hers) for more than twenty years. I was disappointed by the restaurant she chose, an ordinary brasserie in the fourteenth, the kind of place businessmen who work in outlying districts in Paris and wear bad suits with food stains go. It turned out she was a regular—the Zeyer was near her apartment in Montparnasse.

  I got there first, took a table by the window and watched as she arrived in the rain, head down in concentration, tugging at her bangs in that way I remembered. I helped her off with her trench. She licked her lips a lot. Not much eye contact. She was pretty stony. Distracted. Not inconvenienced, exactly, and not there out of duty to Maxime, but not overjoyed, either. She ordered grilled sole and one glass of white wine.

  In the eighties, we had seen each other—what?—fifty times? Five hundred times? But she didn’t remember me. Acute feelings of diminishment. She wasn’t making conversation easy. I had nothing to lose, so I set myself up a second time, reminding her of the mortifying episode when I peeked at Thadée’s jacket label. “I can’t imagine what possessed me to do that then!” Still nothing.

  We talked about her friend François Baudot, a fashion journalist who had recently been named to the Ministry of Culture. Le Point cried cronyism: Baudot was godfather to Carla Bruni-Sarkozy’s daughter, and the president had personally sponsored his nomination. Culture Minister Frédéric Mitterrand was in no position to challenge the appointment, as Carla had been instrumental in getting him Balthus’s old job at the Villa Medici. Shamed by the scandal, Baudot, sixty, would kill himself two months later.

  Loulou was very good about whom I should talk to about Maxime, ticking off a list of thirty-one people, including Sarah St. George and Bradley Lander. Some, like D. D. Ryan, the Halston loyalist and Bazaar photo editor under Vreeland, she wasn’t aware were dead or had forgotten were no longer with us. She was furious about Kate Bernard, saying something about drugs but chewing her words and talking in shorthand, so I had trouble following. “This woman arrived in Provence, went to bed, got up two weeks later and left without doing a stitch of work.” Loulou drifted, shifting tense. I felt like her bewildered studio colleagues. An allusion to Bernard Pfriem set off dreamy ramblings on artists’ houses and the American architect Peter Harnden, whose “austere, linear” work in Cadaqués she liked. Another story required deeper knowledge of La Falaise family culture than I then had in order to grasp the subtle, perverted mean
ing.

  LOULOU At the Met ball in 1983, my mother was suddenly very maternal. We arrived with Pierre and Yves and got out of the car, and as we were going up the steps and all the photographers were taking pictures, she put a coat over my shoulders. It’s really not on. Pierre and Yves were dumbfounded. Anyway, she was happier in Provence than she had been when she was younger and afraid of losing her job and getting older and worried about whether she was invited to this party or that.

  Loulou was forthcoming about her childhood but had few details. I did not feel she was holding anything back. The most bitter attacks were reserved for the Birleys. Weeks before he died, in 2007, Mark had abruptly sold his portfolio of clubs for $207 million. He left the bulk of his $200 million estate, valued after taxes, to his daughter India Jane’s son. Except for a $12.2 million tax-free bequest, Robin was brutally cut out of his father’s will, which he challenged, settling out of court with his sister for a reported $52 million. Contrast with Loulou, the chic cousin. Chic, but poor. At the mention of India Jane, she snapped at me.

  LOULOU Why don’t you ask Jane yourself? She’s the one with all the lolly. I stopped having lunch with my uncle because I couldn’t tolerate his digging into my mother anymore. He spent three quarters of the time talking about his mum and the rest about mine. My parents—there was no question of Alexis and me staying with either of them when we were little. It’s possible my mother lost custody of me. She never told me.