Loulou & Yves

by Christopher Petkanas

  JANE ORMSBY GORE witnessed Loulou and Desmond FitzGerald’s lightning marriage, and John McKendry’s theatrical dissipation, at close range. Jane’s years working for Chrissie Gibbs and David Mlinaric led to her own London decorating firm, with clients from Isabella Blow to Robin Birley, for whom she designed the bars and restaurants attached to Loulou’s, the nightclub.

  MONIQUE-ANTOINE (“MOUNIA”) OROSEMANE was Yves’s mannequin vedette, while it lasted. She thought she would have liked to become Mrs. Stevie Wonder after flirting with the singer at Diana Ross’s second wedding, to Arne Næss, in 1986, but nothing came of the idea. Mounia tried her hand at acting, singing and painting after retiring from the Saint Laurent cabine, and has a clothing shop, Mounia Boutique, in her native Martinique.

  RICHARD OVERSTREET, an American painter, met Leonor Fini while working on John Huston’s A Walk with Love and Death (1969); he was the director’s first assistant, and she designed the costumes. Overstreet is keeper of the Fini archive in Paris.

  ANITA PALLENBERG (1942–2017) starred as Pherber with Mick Jagger in Performance, directed by Loulou’s boyfriend, Donald Cammell. Anita worked her way through at least two other Rolling Stones, Brian Jones and Keith Richards (he insists she also had an affair with Mick; she maintained no). Anita was thirty-seven in 1979, when the seventeen-year-old groundskeeper she and Richards employed at their Westchester estate fatally shot himself in the head on her and Richards’s bed in a suspected game of Russian roulette while Anita, who had been sleeping with the youth, was in the room.

  PAQUITA PAQUIN, a French fashion journalist, wrote Vingt ans sans dormir: 1968–1983, a memoir of Paris nightlife.

  CAROLA PECK (1921–2014), an early supporter of the Irish Georgian Society, restored Prehen House, County Londonderry, an eighteenth-century estate woven into the history of the Ascendancy.

  BOBBY PELIGRY ran the International Wool Secretariat in the late seventies.

  JANE PENDRY worked closely with Loulou as accessories manager at Saint Laurent. Her Dovima Paris line of shirt- and tunic dresses are designed for the working daughters of ladies who lunch.

  TOM PENN had an affair with Loulou in the sixties, but is uncomfortable talking about it. He administers his father’s oeuvre as executive director of the Irving Penn Foundation,

  ELSA PERETTI and Loulou were joint members of Halston’s tribe, before Loulou switched definitively to Yves’s. Elsa’s jewelry designs have earned billions for Tiffany & Co. In 2013, after thirty-nine years with the company, she signed a new, twenty-year agreement, receiving $47.3 million up front and higher royalties.

  BEATRICE PEYRANI’s Le Faiseur d’étoiles is the sole, unauthorized biography of Pierre.

  JEAN-JACQUES PICART, a retired fashion consultant, brought Inès de la Fressange and Carine Roitfeld to Uniqlo.

  FRANÇOISE PICOLI, as an assistant in the Saint Laurent studio charged with executing Loulou’s directives, suffered from the often floaty way Loulou expressed herself. After the house closed, Françoise became what the French call a “coach,” a fashion professional who advises young designers.

  MARIE-FRANCE POCHNA wrote Christian Dior: The Biography, the standard life of the couturier.

  YUTA POWELL championed the clothes Loulou designed after Yves retired, selling them at the Manhattan boutique that carries her name.

  COLOMBE PRINGLE steered Paris Vogue after Francine Crescent and before Joan Juliet Buck.

  ALICE RAWSTHORN authored a 405-page biography of Saint Laurent that treats his and Pierre’s private lives, but leaves out Madison Cox. Pierre wrote that Yves and Madison were the two most important men in his life, and that their importance was equal. Pierre had been involved with Cox for more than fifteen years when Rawsthorn’s book came out in 1996.

  WILLIAM P. RAYNER, as a Condé Nast executive, wrote the foreword to Maxime’s Food in Vogue. His marriage to Chesbrough (“Chessy”) Hall, the Pond’s cold cream heiress who formed the Mac II decorating firm with Mica Ertegun, led to a job at the magazine publishers after her mother wed company chairman Iva S. V. Patcevitch. Rayner became tied to a much greater fortune as the husband of Kathy Johnson, the daughter of Maxime’s friend, Anne Cox Chambers.

  TARA REDDI, with Rosi Levai, looked after Maxime in the eighties as she suffered the depredations of early old age. Reddi is currently a senior director of the Esther Schipper gallery in Berlin.

  KEITH RICHARDS, a founding member of the Rolling Stones, received $7.3 million for the English-language rights to his 2010 autobiography, written with James Fox.

  JOHN RICHARDSON remembers his friendship with Loulou, Maxime and Maxime’s mother, Lady Birley, through the lens, and sometimes the grinder, of the great social historian he is. John lends dignity and purpose to the term “socialite,” and of all the Picasso biographies, his is the most complete.

  JOSÉPHINE RINALDI was Maxime’s assistant when Maxime worked as a freelance styliste in Paris in the fifties. Her Cuisine de Joséphine is illustrated with watercolors by Joe Eula.

  MARIE-GILONE DE RIQUET DE CARAMAN-CHIMAY is a Belgian aristocrat of the first water, with direct bloodlines to Count Henri Greffulhe, the principal model for Proust’s Duc de Guermantes.

  DEBORAH ROBERTS ceded her place as Donald Cammell’s lover to Loulou and others. She left behind the hectic life she led as a model with Cammell to coauthor French Country Living: A Year in Gascony.

  ALLEN ROSENBAUM tagged along with his school friend, John McKendry, to testify to the bacchanal of New York in the sixties and seventies. He is now director emeritus of the Princeton University Art Museum.

  MARY RUSSELL became instantly embedded in the Saint Laurent crowd when she opened the Paris office of Glamour magazine in the mid-sixties. She owes the access she had as photographer to her high-profile boyfriends: Count Giovanni Volpi di Misurata, playboy Gunter Sachs …

  CYNTHIA SAINSBURY had a front-row seat to Swinging London: Her husband, Barry, of the supermarket Sainsburys, was the money behind Mr. Fish, purveyors of flamboyant menswear.

  CLARA SAINT was the press officer for Rive Gauche for more than three decades, starting with the first collection, in 1966. It is unclear if she is aware of the full horror of what Thadée says about her in his published diaries, because she has an eye condition that prevents her from reading. Friends have read her the book aloud, but only parts.

  SARAH ST. GEORGE, Maxime’s lesbian savior, is vice chairman of the Grand Bahama Port Authority.

  NICKY SAMUEL threesomes with Loulou and Donald Cammell were perhaps the inevitable outcome of both women leaving their husbands for him. Nicky, who would eventually marry Kenneth Jay Lane, had one splendid London house after another, thanks to her father, Harold, who bought up great swaths of the capital after the Blitz, amassing property assets in the billions.

  FERNANDO SANCHEZ (1935–2006) loved Loulou, and Loulou loved him back, though his being gay complicated things. Fernando was inspired by “the indolent dreams of harem life as it must have been” to design lingerie “you don’t have to be stuck in the bedroom to wear.”

  VIOLETA SANCHEZ was one of Yves and Helmut Newton’s mannequins fétiches. In 1981, Newton cast her as a whorehouse madam for a YSL ad campaign, with other girls from the cabine as her employees.

  CATHERINE SCHWAAB is editor in chief of Paris Match.

  AUDREY SECNAZI, as a Saint Laurent design assistant in the fallow nineties, did her best to boost Loulou’s morale. For Saint Laurent, Audrey taught Pierre Niney, who plays the title role, to draw like Yves.

  JEANLOUP SIEFF (1933–2000), at Yves’s request, photographed him nude in 1971, the pictures used in ads for Pour Homme, the first YSL men’s fragrance. A signed print sold at Christie’s in 2010 for $48,099, with fees.

  BARBARA (“BABS”) SIMPSON and Maxime worked at Schiaparelli in the same period, and both had affairs with Bernard Pfriem. Babs is the model for all society women who go into magazines, in her case Vogue and HG.

  PATTI SMITH, Loulou, Robert Mapplethorpe and David
Croland’s idea of fun in the early seventies, when Patti was sharing Robert with David, was driving out to Coney Island. Patti doesn’t reject the title of “godmother of punk,” but would prefer something more encompassing.

  SIKI DE SOMALIE was a neighbor of Maxime in Provence. She trades in objets de curiosité, like mounted Coptic processional crosses from Ethiopia, at her shop, Siki de Somalie, in Paris.

  MICHAEL SPECTER is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a former New York Times Moscow bureau chief.

  PATRICIA (“TRIXIE”) STAPLETON (1947–?) worked with Desmond FitzGerald in the Victoria & Albert’s furniture and woodwork department in the sixties, when it was headed by Delves Molesworth. Stapleton wrote her account of Loulou and Desmond’s wedding to Molesworth.

  BARBARA STEELE would have liked to be known as a different kind of actress, but by 1960, with the gothic gore classic Black Sunday, she was on her way to becoming “Queen of the Horrors,” despite a later role in Fellini’s 8½.

  VALERIE STEELE is director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.

  JOHN STEFANIDIS’s limits were tested during his affair with Loulou, but however it ended, his affection and loyalty never wavered. Born in Alexandria to Greek parents and raised mostly in Cairo, John has decorated for Anne Getty, the Duke of Westminster, the Bank of England …

  ANDREA STILLMAN, John McKendry’s secretary at the Met, is a noted authority on Ansel Adams, photographer of the American West.

  JANE STUBBS spun fantasies about Madison Cox after he left Pierre, however improbable. She creates themed libraries by the linear foot, such as one Pierre ordered for a guest room in Tangier, on the subject of Morocco.

  DAVID SULZBERGER is still smarting from the rejection he received when he asked Loulou to marry him in the seventies. A dealer in Islamic art, David left Harvard to work in the CORDS pacification program during the Vietnam War, partly to annoy the father who could have kept him out, New York Times foreign affairs columnist Cy Sulzberger. He eventually returned to Harvard, where his Ph.D. examiner was Henry Kissinger.

  KENZO TAKADA sold Kenzo, his fashion house, to LVMH in 1993.

  ANDRÉ LEON TALLEY, as close to Maxime as he was to Loulou, figured in the deal Pierre brokered many years ago with Sonny Mehta at Knopf to publish a Saint Laurent biography. Pierre had promised Joan Juliet Buck she could write the book, but reneged when he and Madison Cox broke up and she sided with Madison. Pierre may have regretted the decision, because when André failed to produce a manuscript, Pierre paid the tab, paying back André’s advance. In 2014, André cut ties with Vogue as a staffer because, he says, “he hit the glass ceiling there.” He crossed over to the other side, to Zappos, but it didn’t work out. No matter, around the corner was a full-scale documentary, The Gospel According to André, which could just as easily have been called Why André Matters.

  JOHN TAVENER (1944–2013), Lady Birley’s protégé, was the rare composer of sacred music to break out and become known to a wider public. The Beatles’ Apple label recorded his work, and his Song for Athene was performed at the funeral of Princess Diana.

  TAKI THEODORACOPULOS’s wife, Alexandra, and Loulou are very distantly related: Alexandra’s mother, Princess Lyna Schöenburg-Hartenstein of Austria, and Emmita de La Falaise, Loulou’s aunt, were sisters. Taki is a reactionary columnist who, The Guardian says, “sluice[d] offensive and outdated stereotypes into the pages of The Spectator.”

  VICKY TIEL left her mark on the eighties with dressed-to-spill goddess gowns, steel stays radiating pitilessly from the diaphragm.

  SETH TILLETT’s parents, D. D. and Leslie Tillett, the textile designers, were part of Maxime’s circle. Seth designed the sets and lighting for Cassandre, starring Fanny Ardant, at the 2015 Festival d’Avignon.

  FLORENCE TOUZAIN designed leather accessories at Saint Laurent in the house’s last years.

  SAM UMLAND, with his wife, Rebecca, is the author of Donald Cammell: A Life on the Wild Side.

  FRANÇOIS VELDE, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, launched heraldica.org in 1995.

  KIM VERNON brokered Loulou’s deal with the Home Shopping Network.

  HUGO VICKERS was asked by Cecil Beaton to write his biography, only to learn a month later that his subject had died. Hugo’s life of Beaton is his most popular work, though The Kiss: The Story of an Obsession is his best. The book traces Hugo’s acquaintance, while at Eton, with indigent gentlewomen—spinster sisters—one of whom misinterprets a stranger’s friendly kiss and for the next twenty years goes off the rails stalking him.

  MICHEL VIVIEN was chosen by Yves over Christian Louboutin to do his shoes, though Louboutin did successfully campaign to get one model into Yves’s last collection. Michel also designed shoes for Alexander McQueen at Givenchy and John Galliano at Dior.

  MONIQUE VAN VOOREN, who conducted the infamous 1977 Interview interview with Loulou, was one of the last, old-fashioned sex bombs, arriving in New York from her native Belgium in 1949 to study law on a Fulbright Scholarship. She recorded Mink in Hi-Fi with Skitch Henderson, and later appeared in the Batman television series (1968). In 1983, van Vooren was ordered to perform five hundred hours of community service for lying in a federal probe investigating whether she had stolen Social Security payments made to her dead mother.

  FRANCINE VORMESE, a journalist who had a long association with French Elle, was a neighbor of Loulou in Paris at 26, rue des Plantes.

  DIANA VREELAND (1903–1989) had been the fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar for just over a quarter of a century when, in 1963, she became editor in chief of Vogue, a position she held for eight years. Between 1973 and 1987, D.V. produced twelve fashion exhibitions as special consultant to the Met’s Costume Institute.

  PATRICK WALDBERG (1913–1985) wrote extensively on Surrealism, including the 1958 biography Max Ernst, and was a close friend of Georges Bataille, whose complete works Thadée edited.

  ANDY WARHOL (1928–1987) was a dominant figure in the Pop Art movement.

  PETER WEBB, in researching Sphinx: The Life and Art of Leonor Fini, learned that the painter and Maxime had both been lovers of Max Ernst.

  NICHOLAS FOX WEBER started his “psychobiography” of Loulou’s father-in-law, Balthus, with his subject’s participation, but abandoned the arrangement when the artist would not confess to desiring pubescent girls, to being half-Jewish, and so on.

  EDMUND WHITE’s one degree of separation from Loulou is Annabelle d’Huart, his translator’s girlfriend. Edmund’s trilogy of autobiographical novels has made him the leading gay literary voice of his generation, but for sheer bravado, there is also Caracole, his delirious, overlooked erotic fantasy.

  ERIC WILSON is fashion news director of InStyle.

  KIRAT YOUNG was the long-running mascot of the Saint Laurent cabine, a mannequin on a higher plane. She walked for Oscar and Valentino but also knew them socially, the couture ladies, too. Nan Kempner opened her New York guest room to Kirat, and Annette de la Renta’s early enthusiasm for her jewelry has led to a real business. Not every former mannequin has a social secretary.

  Notes

  *Please note the links referenced throughout this work may no longer be active.

  I am indebted to a cadre of interviewers—especially Laurence Benaïm, Nicholas Coleridge, Bob Colacello, Alicia Drake, Bettina von Hase, Georgina Howell, Rita Konig, Marie-Dominique Lelièvre, Paquita Paquin and Monique van Vooren—whose published writings on Loulou, Yves, Maxime and others allowed me to quote them “from the grave.” I am also grateful to Nathalie Dupuis, Josyane Savigneau and Alain Veinstein, whose interviews with Thadée Klossowski allow his voice to be heard. Vie rêvée, the diaries of Loulou’s husband, was a crucial source in reconstructing her life in the crowded, decisive period from her arrival in Paris in 1972 to their marriage in 1977.

  Vogue and Vanity Fair are the American editions, unless otherwise noted. “La Falaise” often appears incorrectly as “la Falaise” in books and a
rticles. For consistency, the error has been corrected throughout. The following abbreviations are for sources with multiple citations.

  ABY Judy Fayard, “All About Yves: Clara Saint—‘Lucid, Logical, Profoundly Original,’ “ Women’s Wear Daily, May 19, 1978.

  ALF Rita Konig, “À La Falaise,” HG, September 1988.

  ALI Frances Wasem, “A Life in Style,” Harpers & Queen, October 2005.

  ALS Georgina Howell, “A Line of Style,” Vogue, March 1992.

  APL Olivia de Lamberterie, “À pas de Loulou,” Elle, October 24, 2014.

  AWD The Andy Warhol Diaries, ed. Pat Hackett (New York: Penguin Classics, 2010).

  BIS Cecil Beaton, Beaton in the Sixties: The Cecil Beaton Diaries as He Wrote Them, 1965−1969 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).

  BHL Oleg Mitrofanov, “Baronesse Hélène de Ludinghausen,” Acne Paper, no. 10 (Summer 2010).

  BS Joan Juliet Buck, “Blithe Spirit,” W, February 2012.

  CDI Christian Dior, Christian Dior & I, trans. Antonia Fraser (New York: Dutton, 1957).

  COC James Killough, adapted from “Countess of the Cliff,” purecreativefilm.com, November 15, 2011.

  DC Kevin Macdonald and Chris Rodley, Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance, BBC and Total Performance, 1998.

  DCC Nathalie Dupuis, “Du côté de chez Thadée,” Elle, May 31, 2013.

  DJL Alain Veinstein, Du Jour au Lendemain, France Culture, Radio France, August 6, 2013.

  DOD Mademoiselle Agnès, “Loulou de La Falaise, de onze à douze,” Paris Vogue, April 2005.