Loulou & Yves

by Christopher Petkanas

  FRANÇOIS R. VELDE It’s tempting to think that Antoine Hocquart de Turtot could have saved Alain and Maxime and Daniel all the grief they suffered about the La Falaise title by simply acknowledging that he was Alain’s father. After all, Antoine’s title, count, has never been in question, and the one child he recognized having with his only wife, Henriette, was a girl. But it’s more complicated than that. The general principle is that titles are inherited only by legitimate offspring. If Alain was the illegitimate son of Henriette and Antoine, he could not inherit Antoine’s title—or Gabriel’s, his supposed father’s, for that matter. The only way Alain could inherit Antoine’s title is if he became Antoine’s legitimate son. This could happen, under the terms of a law of 7 November 1907, if Alain was legally recognized by Henriette and Antoine as their child before or at their marriage, and if one of the following conditions was met: Gabriel had disavowed Alain, or Alain was born more than three hundred days after the date of a preliminary court order leading to the separation or divorce of Gabriel and Henriette. If legitimization had taken place, there would have been mention in the margin of Alain’s birth registration. I have a copy of the registration before me, and there is not.

  ————————

  KIM VERNON Loulou was in Tampa for HSN to do what turned out to be the last show, but was too sick to go on. Ariel went on for her.

  PATRICIA MORRISROE Loulou lost her looks, and it didn’t even seem to be the result of bad plastic surgery. Strange, the disintegration. She looked scary, like a gargoyle. Maybe she was on prednisone or some other steroid. I wonder if she had AIDS.

  STASH KLOSSWOSKI DE ROLA Her health gave out altogether and abruptly. That summer, I was in Montecalvello, and Thadée called and said, “We’re stopping with you, then going on to Greece.” Then he called back and canceled. “Loulou came back from America and she’s too exhausted and we’ll see you in September.” By that time, the news had come that she was seriously ill, as I suspected.

  At the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire for Le Festival International des Jardins, April 2011. Loulou designed a jewelry-themed garden for the event; she died the following November. © Eric Sander for the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire.

  KATELL LE BOURHIS She didn’t come to Patmos as she was supposed to. I remember sitting on the beach discussing it with John Stefanidis and Verde Visconti. “Kata, I’m very worried for Loulou,” John said. “Why is no one giving money? Can we get together a group of people … ?” Verde said she could give a little, and I promised to see Leonello Brandolini when I returned to Paris in September.

  STASH KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA Verde and I were very concerned because we read between the lines. Knowing Loulou’s history, we thought, Oh God, this is even worse than we’re being told. Indeed, when the verdict came down that she had terminal cancer, we weren’t surprised and realized it wouldn’t be long. But at that stage, how do you ease her exit? Obviously, by the time they got around to seeing doctors, there were no thoughts of any operation, nothing that could be attempted. Alternative treatments were suggested, but by then Loulou couldn’t even go to Paris, she’d get ill in the car.

  LAURENCE BENAÏM It was the end of an era, of a certain world, and she was trying to hold on. With everything she’d taken over the years, she aged almost prematurely, as if old age had arrived in one blow. I saw Loulou become smaller and smaller, thinner and thinner, diminished until she was a shadow of herself, practically transparent.

  KATELL LE BOURHIS By September, she was going down quickly. “Brace yourself,” Ariel told me on the way out to Boury. Loulou showed us an attic space that connected with her bedroom. It had the bamboo rails Alexis designed for the shop, and below them all her Chinese and African baskets filled with bracelets, necklaces … “For once in my life, I have a proper dressing room,” she said. She was able to walk, but badly.

  Loulou didn’t want to see a lot of people. But up to her last breath, Leonello was going every weekend. If you didn’t drive, it wasn’t easy—first a train to Gissors, then a car. John’s not young, and he came from London. Every day, Ariel was doing the food shopping at the Prisunic in Saint-Germain and taking it to Boury. Everyone can say she was no good for Loulou’s business, but when it counted, she was there. To go to Boury in the fall, when it’s cold and raining and you’re working and you have your own life and each time you see your friend you’re thinking, besides the empathy, about what? You’re thinking about your own death. I’ve been close to death twice in my life, so I know what it is—not to give false hope, but to make someone who is deathly sick and suffering like hell think about something besides their body. Ariel did that for Loulou. Up to the end, they even had supposed “working sessions.” La pauvre. Loulou paid dearly.

  DIANE VON FURSTENBERG When she was dying, I called and wrote to her. I was angry but never stopped loving her, and I don’t think she ever stopped loving me. Loulou’s end was sad, but she wasn’t somebody you felt sorry for in any way.

  PIERRE BERGé I went to have lunch with her in the country a few weeks before she died. We walked in her beautiful garden, and she was absolutely fantastique. She was very English about her illness; she never complained, not to anyone.

  LOUIS BENECH I saw her the week before she went, and she was wondering when she would be strong enough to … She was suffering but still in the garden, taking a bit of sun, cutting a few roses, weeding by the kitchen door. No, she wasn’t resting.

  STASH KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA Friends went and said good-bye, and I was ready to go, but she didn’t really want to admit this was it. She was still struggling and fighting on and living her own bizarre life with her terminal illness, being very active at night until she had that fatal fall and broke her hip, which precipitated … I think she lived forty-eight hours after that.

  SETH TILLETT We all came to know, too late, that hep C is a mute “ninja” virus that stealthily and mercilessly lays waste to the liver over many years, with few symptoms until it’s well advanced. The kicker is that it’s easily passed through minute amounts of blood; the next horrifying and supertardy discovery being that a straw passed between bloody noses was an ideal silent transmitter. Hep B is the up-front, violent, treatable liver-killing virus. You acquired it from reckless behavior, fucking on the piers, say, or dancing on broken glass in Mykonos, or swimming in filthy Nile water. Then you turned yellow, got the shots, got better. Not so with hep C. It seems that Loulou, my old crush, had both.

  Hep C was AIDS lite (gag), murder without spectacle. No ghoulish “Thriller” transformations. Creeping cirrhosis, high risk of liver cancer and no cure for the viral infection (until 2015), only the nauseating and very dubious interferon “treatment,” loathed by all.

  People underestimate the ritual of sharing involved with coke use, the babbling idea raves that followed. But why should illness and death be the wages of creativity, daring, gaiety, energy, courage? They’re not, of course. But do the laws of physics, then, govern the world completely, if not justly? Live hard, die young. Long live the bores, literally.

  JOHN RICHARDSON Apparently, Loulou was tiny and unrecognizable when she died, shriveled up like a little mummy.

  CHARLOTTE MOSLEY I was completely unaware. Oh dear, oh dear. What a sad end.

  ANNA KLOSSOWSKI DE ROLA For [my mother], her cancer didn’t exist. She wanted to shield us from it and refused to impose her worries on others. She died here, in her room. Which is now mine.

  PIERRE BERGÉ We have lost a member of our family.

  138 Yves and Pierre’s collection brought $441.8 million at two sales in 2009, including $28 million for Eileen Gray’s circa 1919 “Dragons” armchair, the highest price ever paid for a work of twentieth-century furniture. The asking price for Yves’s apartment was $31.4 million. It sold in 2012.

  29

  “The Second Death of Saint Laurent”

  OLDA FITZGERALD Loulou died in November 2011, Desmond in September, of cancer. He was proud of their association. He felt they’d had a wonderful romance,
but not one grounded in real life. When she married Thadée, she brought him to Glin to get Desmond’s blessing. She had a luminous quality, like a flame burning in a forest. Although her destiny was not to live in Ireland, I feel she will always be part of the story here.

  Desmond represented Christie’s in Ireland. We kept the castle going by moving into a wing for the summer and renting out the rest, and then, in the late nineties and aughts, running it as a hotel. In 2009, we did what Desmond said he’d never do, what he’d always dreaded, and sold at Christie’s our silver, porcelains, best furniture and paintings, including several Birleys. Desmond had spent years buying back things previous knights had sold when they needed money, and now he was selling them, too.139 He never realized his dream of creating the equal in Ireland of Britain’s National Trust and finally conceded that the whole Knight of Glin business was “a romantic charade.” I still live partly at Glin, but my daughter, Catherine, and her husband, Dominic West, the actor, run it now, renting the castle for stays and weddings. It’s the best possible outcome.

  HUGO VICKERS Before Dominic West, when Catherine married the fantastically wealthy Earl of Dunham, Lord Lambton’s son, it should have been the answer to all of Glin’s money problems, but somehow wasn’t. With no male heir to pass his title on to, Desmond tried to get it changed for Catherine to “Dame of Glin” or whatever. But nobody was having it.

  ————————

  RICHARD DE LA FALAISE I happened to be in Paris the week Geoffroy’s genealogy was published. I’m lying in bed with my iPad and I see in Le Figaro that Loulou de La Falaise is dead. Bollocks! Great English word, bollocks. I call Geoffroy. “Guess who just died?” He’s like, “Who, for God’s sake?” I go, “Loulou.” He goes, “Bloody hell! Just when the book is about to come out!” From Daniel, we learn the funeral is at the Église Saint-Roch. It’s the only time that branch of the family talks to us, when somebody dies. Geoffroy immediately started calling journalists to prevent the further spread of lies in Loulou’s obituaries. Le Monde’s was very good, clean. The rumor was Loulou wrote it herself.

  GEOFFROY GUERRY Point de Vue asked specifically if the La Falaise title was real, then ignored what I said, because the truth detracts from … There are so many fictions about the family, but the untruths contribute to their appeal. You need myths. Take them away and a lot of people would find the La Falaises less interesting.

  The family said, and the press repeated, that Loulou died in her country house, which is more picturesque than saying she died in Gissors, which she did, in a poor people’s hospital.

  GABRIEL DE LA FALAISE Like Emmita, Loulou died ruined. I know. The Stasi are choirboys compared to me!

  MARTINE DE LA FALAISE Describing the hospital, Richard used a horrifying word, an archaic term that doesn’t even exist anymore: mouroir, a place where people who are beyond saving go to die.

  ANDRÉLEON TALLEY The end is not glorious for anyone, especially if you’re living in the country. After she fell, they took her to Gissors and she never recovered, so maybe she didn’t realize she was in a rotty hospital.

  RICHARD DE LA FALAISE My father ran into Thadée before the service nursing a cognac in the café opposite the church. Daniel, Lucie and Pierre Bergé sat in the first row; we were in the back. The place was full of celebrities—Inès de la Fressange, Catherine Deneuve, Bernard-Henri Lévy, 140 Arielle Dombasle.141 Heads bobbed like piano keys—no one knew when to stand up and sit down. God, it was entertaining! Everyone cried. Frédéric Mitterrand gave a eulogy. Daniel and I greeted each other after. “Nice to see you.” “Nice to see you.” No mention of the e-mail arguments. I gave him a copy of Geoffroy’s book. He didn’t thank me.

  CHRISTOPHER GIRARD I was barred from the funeral by Bergé, just as he’d barred me from M. Saint Laurent’s. Pierre considers me a traitor because I didn’t stay on with him and Yves after the house closed and went to work for Bernard Arnault instead. Pierre detests Arnault. But at forty-three, I couldn’t become the private secretary of two complicated old men.

  JEAN-PIERRE MASCLET My photograph of Loulou was blown up on an easel near the altar, a visual record of her at the peak of her powers. I mean, everybody wants to be remembered at their best. There was also a loose print inside the program as a memento. The picture was taken in the early eighties. There were hair and makeup people in the studio that day, but she didn’t want anything. I shot her just as she was.

  NICOLE DORIER It’s a beautiful portrait, but I thought, She’s dead because of all her vices, and they’re displaying this picture of her with a cigarette? Loulou died young, at sixty-four. I’m sixty-four and have no desire to die. Pierre Bergé despises me, but being the hypocrite that I am, I went over to kiss him. “Oh,” he said. “You. For you to show your face, I guess there has to be a funeral.” Anna spoke. In a few spontaneous words, she humanized her mother, took off the wrapping paper. “You won’t be there anymore to console me… The cat searches for you everywhere…”

  PAQUITA PAQUIN Thadée hadn’t prepared his speech, a luminous remembrance of him and Loulou lying in a meadow, sealing their commitment, exchanging une promesse d’amour, of complete loyalty. He described the setting … the sky, the grass. Usually, Thadée barely spoke. But that day, he did with such ease. No false timidity. He was transfigured by Loulou’s death: liberated from something that had been holding him back. Vie rê vé e, the diaries he published after Loulou died, is a continuation of his speech that day.

  LOUISE KAHRMANN There was this extraordinary moment when two doves flew into the church. They were still for a while, and then as Thadée was speaking, they flew down together above his head. He said something like, “These birds are here and Loulou is with us now.”

  GEOFFROY GUERRY Yes, a bird flew in, and the priest—you know the one I mean, he does all the celebrity funerals, le père Letteron—compared it to Loulou. But you know, it was just a dirty city pigeon. Then Arielle Dombasle sang, and Pierre Bergé read a text by Saint Laurent.

  © Jean-Pierre Masclet.

  Loulou’s “emotionally wrenching!” funeral in the French celebrity press.

  Louise de La Falaise, known as “Loulou,” a name fit for a mistress of Louis XIV, a nickname evoking a heroine straight out of Alban Berg.142 The sparkling, multicolored facets she radiates sums up everything about her. A nymph with the body of a hermaphrodite, she stamps everything she does with dramatic contrasts. Contrasts only she could pull off. What begins as elegance becomes exuberance, and the next thing you know she’s off slumming with the riffraff. The haughty and aristocratic lines of her body do nothing to lessen the hint of sensuous tumult that astonishes, intrigues, conquers, disturbs. Her aloof reserve is a summons full of mystery. Make no mistake: Under the unchaste veil of black lace hides a little girl who is all woman. For a long time, my ATM PIN was “Loulou.”

  ANNABELLE D’HUART I went to Loulou’s funeral and was glad I did. Truthfully, I think she was a remarkable human being. But from the day I separated from Ricardo, I never heard from her again. In the end, frankly, I wasn’t very important to her, I counted for so little. I overcame and was brave and became what I wanted: an artist. I met someone wonderful in the person of Ricardo. I made my peace. I don’t have a single negative thought for Loulou today.

  FLORENCE TOUZAIN After the Mass, M. Bergé invited about thirty of us back to the foundation for a drink. The salon was hung with pictures of young Loulou as a mannequin. You could call it a last, nice gesture.

  MARIE BELTRAMI Éric gave a lunch at home. Funeral lunches are a little bizarre. People laugh, and you drink to forget why you’re there.

  JOHN RICHARDSON Pierre Bergé arrived in New York a few days after the funeral and we had dinner. I don’t think he did as much as he could have to look after Loulou in her last year or two, but then she’s dead and he was enormously generous, the church was filled with flowers and so on. Apparently, the whole of the church was in tears at Thadée’s speech. I must say, people who aren’t usually dazzled by
funerals were amazed at the extraordinary love and sadness generated. And I don’t think anybody realized, certainly least of all Loulou, how adored she was.

  139 The Christie’s sale brought £1. 76 million, with buyers’ premiums.

  140 Cofounder of the New Philosopher movement in France in the seventies.

  141 Miami Vice actress married to Bernard-Henri Lévy.

  142 Alban Berg (1885–1935), Viennese composer. The gutter-born title character of his opera Lulu is an actress who has men falling at her feet, shoots her benefactor in the back, inspires the love of a lesbian countess and is forced into prostitution. Lulu is murdered by a client, Jack the Ripper.

  30

  Afterlife

  LOULOU Thadée’s a kind of writer. He writes diaries which he never publishes. Maybe one day he will. People are more unpredictable than you think, even people you are living with … He fell in love with me in a rather literary way…

  PAQUITA PAQUIN Vie rê vé e grew out of pages from Thadée’s journal that appeared in Egoï ste before Loulou died. One thing the book clears up, if you accept Thadée’s version of events—and I lean in that direction—is Pierre’s role in resolving the Loulou-Thadée-Clara triangle: He had none. I prefer to remain naïve when it comes to Pierre, because I like him. He’s a great puppeteer, but I refuse to Machiavellize him.