Loulou & Yves

by Christopher Petkanas

  As my piece was being fact-checked, Loulou learned that it addressed John McKendry’s erotic fantasies about Alexis. She became very angry, leaving me threatening voice messages.

  LOULOU The fact-checker called me, and since I’m in Montecalvello, the message got scrambled, in any case saying that everything in the article was true, which I didn’t know how one can know how true things are. In any case, there’s one thing I’m greatly opposed to and which has no—nobody even has any idea about is that my stepfather had romantic feelings toward my bother, and I don’t want this included because it’s libel. The rest is all right—the fun, the wit, the sex. But not my brother. I will not have his name—it’s just hearsay—it’s not—nobody knows about this, even John Richardson. I’ve checked with everyone you’ve talked to and nobody has any idea of this theory of my ex-stepfather, my whatever it’s called, having … This is—I won’t have this published. I’ll say it’s hearsay. And I’ll be pretty bad about it.

  The next call I got was from John, who said the material about Mc- Kendry and Alexis was “below the dignity” of The Times. He spoke hurriedly, as if to give his disapproval more weight. I don’t think he liked making that call, but he did it out of affection for Loulou and loyalty to Maxime.

  ————————

  MARIE BELTRAMI Loulou had such a lavish train de vie working for Yves, and now she was broke. After the Petit Palais retrospective, she—I don’t know how many people know this—she announced to me, “Thadée says we have to move to the country and give up the apartment because we can’t afford it.” What I’ve never understood is, why did no one step in? Pierre?

  ALYNE DE BROGLIE Of course Pierre was aware of Loulou’s situation. He’s aware of everything. She’d been helping him organize parties in Marrakech, which, by the way, was pretty rotten of him, paying her for work like that.

  JACQUES GRANGE Loulou lost a lot of money, and I understood that Pierre was very good about it. He solved the problems, absorbed the debts, as always. Pierre is terrific. Fantastic. He can grumble, but there’s no doubt he’s a loyal friend. He doesn’t let go of his clan.

  FALLON MULCAHY My interview with Ravenel came to a head when I said that Bergé had a well-earned reputation for taking care of those in his immediate circle, but that some thought he’d neglected Loulou. She became spitting mad. “I will not talk about this! I refuse! If I knew you were going to ask these questions, I wouldn’t have taken the call.” She also said she owns Loulou’s name, but can that be? Not Thadée?

  ELSA PERETTI Pierre didn’t do anything? With all the money he got from the auction? And the houses? Rue de Babylone?138 What a pity. It would have been nothing for him to help Loulou.

  MATTIA BONETTI It was and it wasn’t Pierre’s place to intervene. He can’t play papa his entire life. I don’t like it when he’s made out to be a monstrous villain. Clara’s not too happy with him, either. But he wrote the checks for all those people for decades—enough is enough!

  NICOLE DORIER You know the La Fontaine fable about the cricket and the ant? Bergé had nothing left to give. You can’t be the milk cow forever.

  LOUIS BENECH Pierre’s not a tender man, but rather a bright, clever character who can be extremely generous, when he wants to be; he wasn’t with Loulou. He was probably jealous and pissed off at her proximity to Yves. It was even greater than Betty’s.

  KENNETH JANE LANE I think about how well I’ve provided for my maid, and then I think about how Pierre provided for Loulou…

  JEAN-PAUL KNOTT I assumed Bergé was there till the end with Loulou. He wasn’t? It’s monstrous that she was forced to move from Paris. Rive Gauche would never have been what it was without her.

  FLORENCE TOUZAIN M. Saint Laurent and Mme. Muñoz couldn’t help her—he was dead and she had advanced Parkinson’s. Bergé did what he could, via the foundation, but could have done more, if only to honor Loulou and M. Saint Laurent’s friendship. Thadée could have stepped in but didn’t, just as he did nothing when the house closed and the paychecks stopped. Loulou was the breadwinner. That never changed. Now he was caught up in his own sorrow at the realization that she was very, very sick.

  AUDREY SECNAZI The day she moved, she was in a terrible state. Undone. But she didn’t complain or accuse anyone. “C’est normal,” she told me. “I played the game.”

  MARIE BELTRAMI I think losing the business and apartment triggered her illness. She’d never had such a violent shock. So much of her life had been lived at 26, rue des Plantes. When Anna saw it empty, she cried.

  STASH KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA People who say that all my brother had to do was to sell one of our father’s drawings, it’s bullshit. People talk out of their asses. Thadée had virtually no drawings to sell. I must say, he was not as favored as I was, in that sense.

  FRANCINE VORMESE I still live at 26. Loulou and I saw each other in passing. We took the elevator together. She had une gaieté ravageuse, enigmatic, triumphant. You looked, you took, you left. You didn’t take, it was all the same to her. The last time I saw her, she was in front of the building with Thadée. They were leaving after thirty-three years, an entire lifetime. Very upsetting. Their apartment was being emptied, rugs rolled up in the entrance hall. I kissed her. “I’ll miss you very much.” “We’re going to live in the country,” they said.

  AUDREY SECNAZI Fashion is filled with people who know how to fight and have the weapons, but no heart, no sensitivity, no talent. Better to be like Loulou, so disarmingly candid. Sarah loaned her her apartment in Paris, so she had a place to sleep in town. Even M. Bergé helped. Loulou never said a word against him. She was hired to do the Rive Gauche exhibit at the foundation in 2011 and design jewelry under her own name for the Majorelle boutique in Marrekech. The idea was that she would continue with the foundation as artistic director.

  JANE KRAMER Bergé ’s friends—many of whom are in his debt—say he has sacrificed himself for friendship. They describe him as faithful, generous, and kind … his enemies … describe him as foul-tempered, mean-spirited, controlling, and vindictive … he has a lugubrious, rather terrifying self-regard and … seems undisturbed by the tempering plain truths of self-reflection.

  MARIE-DOMINIQUE LELIèVRE Pierre gives you what he wants, not what you need. If you are one of the chosen, he can be supportive to the point of spoiling you. Since my biography, unauthorized, of Saint Laurent came out, every time Pierre see me, he acts like the devil’s just come into the room. That’s the small-town side of Paris: Everyone’s afraid of his shadow. When I interviewed Thadée, he told me, “You know, an important thing for Pierre in his power over Saint Laurent and men in general is his big dick. I know because I’ve seen it. He was so proud, he took it out all the time!”

  ————————

  DAVID CROLAND In 2011, Marisa celebrated her sixty-fourth birthday with a dinner at the Monkey Bar in New York. I hadn’t seen Loulou in ten years. There was a disconnect … She was marvelously dressed, but the effect was grown-up. No arty jewels. She’d become very French, more comme il faut. Formal. Correct. Bourgeois. The wall came down and then it went up. There was none of les sauvages raffiné es. I didn’t know she was ill.

  MARISA BERENSON It was February 15. I hadn’t a clue. I would like to have known.

  INÈS DE LA FRESSANGE Loulou’s last coqueterrie and act of elegance was hiding her illness. In late life, she reminded me of the Baroness de Waldner, who was not beautiful, with that immense beak of a nose, but what chic! Une vieille dame anglaise in her garden, wellingtons drying by the fire even in Paris, straw hat tied with a foulard under her chin, arriving for lunch at the Flore with a bunch of violets attached to the basket she used as a handbag. Loulou descended from the same branch.

  ANDRÉLEON TALLEY I didn’t have much information about her after the shop closed. I’d seen the Rive Gauche exhibit and called the apartment. Later I learned they’d already moved, so she probably never got the message. I guess they were downsizing. I’m sure she had no regrets about sell
ing the chandelier. That was the last time we spoke, but didn’t speak.

  DAVID SULZBERGER We had dinner in May. Loulou looked her usual wraithlike self. Fine. She and Thadée were staying in Sarah-the-one-armed-bandit’s flat, Fernando’s old place, which is so funny, because it was where Loulou and Ricardo had begun their love affair almost forty years before.

  MARIE BELTRAMI Going on television and traveling to India and New York for Oscar and to Morocco and Florida was grueling because she already had hepatitis C. But she was proud, stoic, a real warrior, hiding her condition. She wanted to live, to continue going out. She had just gotten back from America—this was in July—when she told me she had two cancers. She saw I couldn’t quite take it in, so she repeated, “Yes, I found out while I was away, I have two cancers, Marie! I have nodes on my breasts and under my arms. But don’t tell anyone!” I’d been a nurse. I saw her swollen stomach. In fact, she had cirrhosis and liver cancer. She’d had cirrhosis before and been successfully treated. “You’ve got to go to the hospital now,” I said. “The nodes must be drained.” She told me she was waiting for test results from her doctors and they’d be back in August. “No,” I insisted, “you’ve got to go now.” With hep C, you can’t drink, and she was still drinking. She never stopped. It was her choice. The cancer was too far along for chemotherapy. Nothing could be done for her.

  DAVID SULZBERGER In July, Éric de Rothschild called to say she was very ill. I phoned Loulou and we agreed I’d come by the next time I was in France. In August, I took the night boat over. Not wanting to arrive for lunch at nine in the morning, I went and looked at the Bayeux tapestry, which by the way is the best cartoon this side of Fantasia. Daniel, Lucie and Anna were at the house when I pulled up, laden with apple ciders and pear juices I’d bought on the way, also various English things, potted shrimps and relishes and so on. Daniel made lunch and I had forty-five minutes alone with Loulou in the garden, telling her, you know, how sad and sorry I was, how when I’d seen her in May I’d had no idea…

  PAQUITA PAQUIN We had dinner that summer at Marie Beltrami’s in Paris. She was reserved, reticent, sick but not wanting to acknowledge it. In the last years, Thadée had been vigilant, making sure that evenings didn’t go on too long, ensuring she didn’t get out of control, escorting her home. Loulou’d brought courgettes from Boury. To cook from her garden was important to her. She’d gone to Bon Marché to buy a special pasta and made a wonderful dish, “the sixty-centime recipe,” she called it. In a hard life, her final months were as hard as any she’d known.

  GEOFFROY GUERRY The end of Loulou’s life wasn’t very gay. She must have been a bit resentful. “I’m living here in the country now,” she told me, “because I didn’t want to be in Paris anymore.” Richard de La Falaise, her first cousin once removed, had commissioned me to write the family history, and initially I’d had trouble contacting her. Thadée convinced her to talk to me. In retrospect, I think she was frightened to revisit her past. She gave a tour of her apartment on television, proudly showing a bust of her father. “Les Falaises, the oldest family in Normandy.” Actually, no. You could tell she didn’t know much and was afraid to go further. She had no idea where the municipality of Falaise is, and after all, that is her name. She was a paradox, proud of her background but ignorant about it. Daniel the same. The last time we spoke, she was in the States. I was still hoping to get some photos from her for the book. “Yes, I’ll send them,” she said, but when she got back …

  I’m a genealogist by métier. My job is to produce a historically accurate work backed by legal documents. My findings don’t necessarily please the client, but that’s okay, I’m not in the flattery business. There’s a lot the La Falaises have wanted to hide. Daniel’s version of the family history is padded. He wasn’t always happy with what I found, because it doesn’t match what’s been handed down. I’m distantly related to Loulou myself. Antoine Hocquart was my great-grandfather’s brother.

  RICHARD DE LA FALAISE Loulou knew nothing. She told Geoffroy some story that we were Polish nobility and that Bailly—she said an ancestor somewhere had been a bailiff—bailli—and ennobled. Lucie and Daniel didn’t want to participate in the book because there was no money involved. An e-mail argument broke out between him and me after he signed off “Count Le Bailly de La Falaise, Marquis de La Coudray.” Geoffroy and I burst out laughing. We drafted an answer based on nobility law to smack him down once and for all. There has never been a Marquis or Count de La Falaise. It’s a myth. Our surname is Le Bailly; “Falaise” refers to an ancestral estate. I waged a huge battle, heavily correcting the information on Wikipedia. We’re still waiting to hear back from Daniel.

  We’re not the Rochefoucaulds, we’re not the Brissacs, but Loulou contributed a strong brick to our humble family foundation. Daniel is a piggybacker. You know the English series Keeping Up Appearances? That’s him.

  FRANÇOIS R. VELDE Before the Revolution, nobility was inherited or acquired by royal grant or by holding certain positions or offices, and carried with it various privileges, such as tax exemptions. Most nobles were not titled. “Seigneur de La Coudraye” was not a title, nor a sign of nobility, but merely denoted the owner of the fief or property called La Coudraye.

  A title of nobility was a sort of decorative enhancement, a lawful honorific attached to a patronymic and some piece of land. Like the conferral of medals, it was the exercise of the sovereign prerogative. Formally to hold a title, one needed a grant (letters patent) from the king, noble status and ownership of the land bearing the title. So, for example, the king might have decided to raise the lordship of La Coudraye to the rank of a marquisate, allowing the grantee and his senior male-line descendants and owners of the fief to be called “Marquis de La Coudraye.” After the Revolution, titles ceased to be linked to land ownership, but remained limited by the terms of the original grant, almost always male-line descent from the grantee.

  The use of “marquis” by the Le Bailly de La Falaise family is based on the 1801 marriage of one of its number, Pacôme, into a family, La Coudraye, of alleged titled nobility. I say “alleged” because I am not all convinced that the title of Marquis de La Coudraye, first ascribed to Jean-Baptiste de Loynes, was genuine. Guerry, in his book, accepts at face value, and relies almost entirely on, Herluisson’s Gé né alogie de la famille de Loynes of 1895, and so adds nothing new. The story told in it is that Jean-Baptiste was authorized by Louis XIV in 1707 to serve as equerry to Marie Casimire, widow of King John III Sobieski of Poland; she was originally French and living at the time in Rome. When she returned to France, Marie Casimire named Jean-Baptiste “ambassador to Rome,” a less plausible claim, and rather bizarre, since a dowager queen did not have or need ambassadors. It is, of course, even harder to fathom how the widow of an elective monarch had the power to confer any title. Nevertheless, it is said that in appointing Jean-Baptiste “ambassador,” she called him “marquis,” and as a matter of fact, the letters patents of Louis XV appointing his son Daniel as governor of Fontenay-le-Comte style him as “marquis.” Those letters, I presume, are the “confirmations” of the title by Louis XV mentioned in the Loynes genealogy, but they are no such thing. I emphasize that at the time it was quite common for official documents to use “courtesy titles,” but they do not constitute a formal grant. Herluisson states that the title was again confirmed by letters of 1817, but I can find no trace of them—they’re not in Révér- end’s Titres, anoblissements et pairies de la restauration, which is quite eliable—and neither, by the way, can Guerry. I don’t know what these alleged confirmations could be, I suspect an overzealous interpretation of some official correspondence addressed to the “marquis” rather than a formal grant, which would have been easily found.

  But even accepting the letters as legitimate conferral, we are still not out of the woods—far from it. Daniel’s last male-line descendant, Gaspard de Loynes, died childless in 1876, having purportedly ceded the title of Marquis de La Coudraye in his will to Gabriel Le Bailly d
e La Falaise. Gabriel was Gaspard’s maternal cousin once removed, Pacôme’s grandson and Loulou’s great-grandfather. Transmission of French titles occurs strictly in agnatic line—that is, through the male line—and is never based on private transfer: They are not in the holder’s gift to give. The Council of the Seal at the Justice Ministry, the only body with jurisdiction over the validity of titles, and which still exists, would never have certified the “cession.” So even assuming the title was once genuine, which, as I’ve said, I strongly doubt, the French Republic would not recognize it today. Guerry, you will notice, is careful not to say that the council could have or would have confirmed the “transfer”; he merely says it was never asked to do so. I can’t say for sure why after Gaspard’s death the family chose to style themselves “Marquis de La Falaise” rather than “Marquis de La Coudraye,” but obviously the title was important to them, since they clearly publicized the “transmission” to genealogists and nobiliary directories fairly quickly. While not titled, the Le Bailly de La Falaise family cannot be denied its nobility. They have been admitted to the Association d’Entraide de la

  Noblesse Française, a private organization whose membership criteria are quite strict.

  RICHARD DE LA FALAISE Recently, Geoffroy was hired by a “noble” family and had to tell them, “Bad news, you have the particule, the de, but you’re not noble.” One of the cousins threatened to sue. Geoffroy has insurance for just this sort of thing. In the fifties, Le Cahier noir, written under a pseudonym, exposed the title pretentions of a number of French families. Some members committed suicide. If we knew then what we know now about the La Falaises, we’d have been in Le Cahier noir, too!