The Chiffon Trenches

by André Leon Talley

  Lee Radziwill’s handwritten account of my introducing her to designer Martin Grant. They went on to become the best of friends.

  CLICK HERE FOR A TRANSCRIPT OF THIS LETTER

  Martin doesn’t care for the faux fanfare of editorials in the glossy American Vogue.

  The Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, the first biracial member of the English royal family, wears Martin Grant, and he was so proud when she appeared wearing his classic, simple lined trench coat or his beautiful soft striped pale gray shirtdress on a tour of Australia.

  For the month of August, Lee would vacation in Corsica, at great expense. Martin and his partner, Mustapha Khaddar, would travel with her. She loved these holidays and so did Martin.

  Lee took her matching Goyard luggage and piled it in a separate van on the way to a private plane for her four-week holidays in the sun, renting the house of Comtesse Jacqueline de Ribes, another Truman Capote “swan”—actually, one of the last ones living.

  In the de Ribes holiday house, there was a maid named Jackie. Lee would screech, in her mellifluous voice, “Jackie, do this! Jackie, fetch this. Jackie, get me a glass of water.”

  It was a secret joke between Martin and Lee; she channeled all those years of walking in the shadow of her famous sister, the First Lady. Jackie the celebrity had stolen Ari Onassis from Lee. It was Lee who expected to marry him, yet she went to the nuptials of Jackie and Ari on Skorpios. In her public will, Jackie left provisions for Lee’s children, Tina and Anthony, but she left nothing to Lee, “for whom I have great affection because I have already done so during my lifetime.”

  As Peter Beard, one of the great loves of her life, and a friend to the end, once said about Lee: “It’s important in life to hold out for elegant miracles.”

  Lee was the elegant miracle in my life.

  In 2016, when Lee had to have brain surgery, she called me and said, “André, I need a turban when I come from the hospital.”

  Norma Kamali sent me three jersey turbans, and I went to meet Lee at the hospital.

  I just missed her—she had just been discharged—but her apartment was only around the block, so I rushed over. Lee was in her car outside her home, waiting for a wheelchair. I gave her the turbans as her devoted caretaker Murelia helped her out of the car.

  Granting this little request was nothing, yet so appreciated by Lee.

  In recent years, Lee sold her last Paris flat on avenue Montaigne and rarely left her New York apartment. I visited Lee often on early Sunday evenings at her home; her beautiful hair was combed out, and she wore pale gray cashmere sweats and her favorite peony-pink shade of cable-knit socks. No shoes. She had a cigarette in her hand and her black and white Japanese Chin, Lola, by her side. All Lola wanted was to have her stomach rubbed. I could oblige her, for hours!

  I saw Lee last in January 2019, a few weeks before she died. I went up one Sunday evening wearing my big red Norma Kamali sleeping-bag coat and she said, “I have to go and get me a red coat like yours.” She made you feel as if your choices were the best.

  I noticed then, for the first time, that she had let all of her hair go pure white. I told her it was so elegant, like an eighteenth-century marquise or duchess. She loved that.

  Everything was still impeccable and remarkable at her home. Her favorite pieces from Paris now populated her drawing room. She shared with me what a tough Christmas she had had. I told her mine was equally as tough and lonely, except for my intimate Christmas Eve dinner at Catie and Donald Marron’s, with their children, William and Serena. I told her of Catie’s Rothko and her Twombly, as well as her beautiful Christmas decorations, including a hall table displaying an entire Bavarian village in miniature. I also told her how I dared to ask for a take-away bin of the best Virginia ham and dressing, since the Marrons were leaving the next morning for the Caribbean.

  After two hours of talk, Lee got bored with me and told me it was time to leave. That was Lee. She was always so specific in her actions and reactions. Just before leaving I asked if I could take a photo of Lola, her seductive little lapdog. Lee picked Lola up; “Don’t you want a photo of me?” she said. I took one of them both, and Lee looked so beautiful, at peace with all that remained: her friends; Tina, her daughter; Lola, her dog; and her memories.

  She loved my last delivery of flowers, or so she said: two small orchids for her escritoire, and four small pots of pink cyclamens, just after Christmas. The last thing she said to me, upon my asking her availability: “It’s not convenient today,” and, in the most melodious voice, a personal Lee sonata: “Goooood-byyyyyyeee.”

  Lee saw the best in people she loved; she saw life’s wonderful experiences of trust, laughter, and friendship through the eyes and sensitivity of a child collecting gleaming seashells from fresh ocean waves. In the words of her close friend Hamilton South, “Whatever time each of us had with her should be remembered as nothing less than a privilege.”

  I learned from Martin Grant, at five A.M. on a Saturday, that Lee Radziwill had passed the night before, Friday, February 15, at home. He called me from Paris; I was in Durham to screen my documentary. Friday night I had received the key to the city, given by the mayor. Onstage with me was my favorite high school teacher, Wanda Garrett.

  Martin Grant said he had planned to see Lee in late January. She told him he could sleep in her guest room. He didn’t make it, but he did fly overnight from Paris, with his partner, Mustapha, for the strictly private invitation funeral mass. Hamilton South had called him, to say the time and date of the service and that an invitation would follow.

  “Hamilton has not called me. Do you think I am on the list?” I shrieked into the telephone at Martin as I sat in my small suite.

  I didn’t know if Lee had put me on the list of 250 chosen guests requested to be at the funeral. I was a nervous wreck! My good friend Georgia Donaldson brought me her fresh homemade Brunswick stew and sat with me every day as I waited for the phone to ring with my invitation. All I could think about was Lee transitioning from this universe to another. She was at peace, having fought against formidable odds.

  After three days, finally, the call came. I texted Martin the news. He replied: “Praise the Lord. You can now relax, you battling princess.” He asked if I would pick him and Mustapha up from the Mercer Hotel the day of the funeral. I said of course.

  At 8:40 A.M., there was Martin on the sidewalk, in a midnight-blue and wool silk jacket, navy trousers, the most elegant and polished black shoes, and a pea jacket of his own design, of such simple and clean lines, it was akin to the simplicity of Yves Saint Laurent’s famous pea jacket, in his early career.

  It was couture. Of course. We had fifty minutes to get uptown from Mercer Street to the church of St. Thomas More on East Eighty-ninth Street. Lee’s father’s sister, Aunt Maud, had been a parishioner there. On the way, I remarked that Lee, were she here, would have taken that pea jacket right off Martin. “And I would have given it to her,” he said, and lit a Marlboro Light cigarette. Mustapha was also dressed so elegantly in a single-breasted cashmere coat, trousers, and really wonderful black leather shoes. Both men looked the way you should look: classic, in quality fabrics with simple cuts, and really dashing.

  We continued with our fond memories of Lee. I told them that when I gave her a beautiful black leather square handbag, with gold metal ornamental handles, for her birthday, I was sure Lee quickly handed it over to her maid. I never saw her carrying it and she never mentioned it again. The best things to give her, on any special occasion, were her favorite white orchids. I often sent up six beautiful white orchids in fresh terra-cotta pots, from Rosedale Nurseries in Hawthorne, New York. In Paris, I would go to Moulié-Savart, tucked in the corner of the Place du Palais-Bourbon (just two doors down from American Vogue’s headquarters in Paris), and select fresh lemon trees, in huge terra-cotta pots, for Lee’s living room. She could not easily recycle these plants as gifts.

  In her final moment of creativity, Lee was laid to rest in a simple wicke
r coffin; the entire top was covered in her favorite sweet peas, white and pale pink.

  Each moment of Lee Bouvier Radziwill’s hour-and-ten-minute-long liturgy was carefully, exactingly, painstakingly created. Her funeral program was sixteen pages, printed on pale ivory stock. The first note: “PRELUDE, Excerpts from Puccini’s ‘Music Without Words.’ ” Lee’s favorite bedtime music. Her surviving daughter, Christina, read E. E. Cummings’s “Maggie and Milly and Molly and May.” It must have been her favorite poem from childhood. Then Hamilton South gave the most heartfelt and sincere eulogy.

  The recessional, to Brahms’s “O Welt, ich muss dich lassen,” moved me to articulate: “Good-bye, Lee, good-bye, Lee, I love you.”

  After the funeral, Martin, Mustapha, and I took the car back to the Mercer Hotel. It was so fitting that Martin and I would share the moment of Lee’s death in such a close bond. We sat there quietly in a corner of the Mercer lobby and remembered how we had spent so many moments in our lives in this very same hotel, often seeing Karl Lagerfeld there, and how on his last trip, Martin saw Naomi Campbell. She still has the elegant red redingote coat she wore in his breakout runway show (and subsequently wore right out onto the street).

  How did Lee take to Mustapha?

  “Well, at first, she said to me, ‘Martin, how appalling, you can’t have a boyfriend called Mustapha.’ She was having nothing to do with him. Then I told her everyone in Paris kept saying Mustapha looks so much like President Barack Obama. She quickly chimed back, with no explanation, ‘When are we having lunch with him?’ That’s all she needed for approval.”

  On one of the last trips to Corsica, Lee fell, going down the steps from her villa. She went home, called Martin the next day, and said she couldn’t walk.

  Martin taxied to her apartment; cradled her in his tiny, childlike, elflike arms; and took her downstairs to a waiting car. She wore only her nightgown and a sweater.

  X-rays showed Lee had broken her hip. She was immediately operated on and had a hip replacement. When she saw the replacement X-rays, she said, “I have a beautiful Brancusi sculpture inside me.” This was typical Lee, turning a serious and grave crisis into an amusing, whimsical anecdote.

  In Lee’s simplicity, she was magnificent. She tried so many careers: acting, film producing ( Grey Gardens), interior decorating, editing (two great books, published by Assouline of Paris), writing for magazines, gardening, even designing. I said immediately after the funeral, inside the church, seated alone, to the Daily Mail, that the Bouvier soeurs—Jackie and Lee—were the closest thing America had to royalty.

  Lee did not bow to the pressure of New York social life, where air kissing and backstabbing is the norm. She cared little about what was the last word in fashion or being accepted by a clique of society crows just to get out of the house for lunch. She leaned heavily on her close-knit circle of good friends; she demanded so much of them, but so much was given in return.

  We both loved church services: She went to my church, Abyssinian Baptist, and I went to hers, St. Ignatius Loyola, on Christmas Eve. Before she died, Lee went around her apartment selecting special gifts for friends; her executor later sent me a pillow in leopard print by Renzo Mongiardino, the Italian interior designer, which had traveled with her through all her lives in many homes. And a favorite framed photograph of Lee and I, in our white looks, she in Dior trouser suit and me in a white Prada alligator coat at a Vanity Fair party. At Christie’s, I bid on many lots from her estate; I was happy to purchase her Bible she had kept with her since her mother had given it to her at the age of eight. It is spine cracked and well worn. And the only pair of candlesticks, which she kept on her mantle: a pair of French ormolu.

  Hamilton shared with me, five days after her funeral, that Lee had been cremated.

  Her ashes were to be scattered, partly in the Mediterranean Sea, partly in the Atlantic, and the remainder placed in a headstone next to her father, John Vernou Bouvier, in the Saint Philomena Cemetery, in East Hampton.

  XVIII

  In his final days, Karl pushed everyone away. Everyone, that is, aside from Choupette, his beloved white cat that he was devoted to and spoiled (the feline, who was known to wear rare diamond jewels, had her own maid, who accompanied her on trips, and a personal dentist).

  The last time I saw Karl Lagerfeld was in late 2017, at a private party thrown in his honor by V magazine at the Boom Boom Room in New York. I was surprised to be invited; if Karl really didn’t want to see me, I’m sure I would not have been on the list. I went with Gloria von Thurn und Taxis. Our table flanked Karl’s big table.

  Right away I walked up to Karl and his all-important, ego-addled table. It was his party, after all, and my grandmother raised me right. Through gritted teeth, I said, “Hello, Karl, how are you?” Then I swiftly made my way to my assigned seat for dinner.

  Gloria made her round later on and spoke to Karl in full German for about four minutes. She came back and told me she was telling Karl about me. She said Karl seemed interested in my welfare and asked her how I was doing, and if I was okay. But then he got distracted by so many people. She knew it was time to get up from his table and just leave it alone.

  Naomi Campbell was there. Virginie Viard was there, but I never saw her. Mariah Carey came, in a clinging Chanel evening dress, and sang in honor of Karl. When she saw me, she stepped off her elevated stage platform and gave me the biggest hug. After Mimi’s performance, Gloria and I left, without saying good night to Karl. I wanted to get out with my dignity intact. Although I missed Karl, I would not play kiss-ass to him.

  I was already mourning the loss of Lee Radziwill, who had died the weekend before, when I learned from CNN on February 19, 2019, that Karl Lagerfeld was dead, at eighty-five years of age. He had been rushed to the hospital, and a liter of fluid had been removed from his lungs. Then he simply went to sleep and never woke up. Only Sébastien, his aide-de-camp, was there with him in his final moments.

  Anna Wintour called me from London. “I thought he would live forever,” she quietly uttered, with that break in her voice she usually gets when she allows her emotions to well up into a mobile device. “We were trying to get through, Amanda and I, making plans to see him for dinner, when we got to Paris.” We continued talking for a while, remembering our best moments together with Karl.

  Sally Singer from Vogue e-mailed me and, with grace, asked me to contribute something. Within ninety minutes I’d written directly on my iPhone what would be my last piece in Vogue on Karl Lagerfeld. I wrote from the heart.

  Naomi Campbell also called me, from some foreign city, on one of ten ubiquitous cell phones she keeps in a Hefty zip-lock bag (a cell phone for each country is thrown in her carry-on, as well as a fresh bottle of Tabasco sauce). Naomi wanted me to know she was thinking of me. It meant a lot.

  Three days later, Karl was memorialized. I was not invited, though I would not have been able to make it on such short notice anyway. Anna Wintour and Princess Caroline of Monaco both spoke. Anna wore all the blue aquamarine stones, surrounded in diamonds, that Karl had given her. Two brooches and a big necklace. I saw the photographs. According to my dear friend Amanda, the Lady Harlech, the service at the crematorium was dignified, though it lacked the touch of Karl. There were no foot tubs or buckets of full-blown roses, white ones, the way Karl would have loved. You would think someone as meticulous as Karl would have planned out exactly how he wanted his funeral to go, the way Lee Radziwill did. But as I have written, Karl did not like to deal with death.

  In my Southern Baptist culture, people visit the graves of loved ones. One summer, I faxed Karl that I had been to the grave of my father, who is buried in Roxboro, North Carolina. Amanda Harlech told me later that Karl told her, “Apparently André’s spending his time running around North Carolina, visiting graves of his relatives.”

  While he rarely spoke of death, Karl did mention that he did not want any funeral, and no one was to view his remains. Karl did not want to be seen in a state of death. H
e told me he had included in his will that when he died, he was not to be seen by anyone.

  His wishes were not followed. He was laid out in a black wooden coffin, in a black jacket and his favorite lean-legged black suede trousers, a wide necktie, and a high Edwardian white-collared shirt; the necktie was accessorized with some of his favorite diamond stickpins and precious rare vintage stones. Only a chosen few were invited to view his body. Karl would not have liked any of this. He would not have wanted it. But the service was not for him; it was for those mourning his loss, and for Chanel to have a sense of closure.

  When Karl’s mother died, we were in Paris at a party for Karl, and he received a private phone call. He came back and continued on as though nothing had happened, but I could tell he was perturbed.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  He hesitated. “My mother has passed.”

  I started to give my condolences but he stopped me and moved on to another topic.

  He never mentioned his mother’s death to me again except once, to say he wanted his ashes mixed in an urn with hers in the château he had bought for her. The remaining ashes, he wished to be mixed with those of his one true love, Jacques de Bascher.

  Karl Lagerfeld refused to acknowledge the most basic fact of life: Death comes for us all. The only funeral I ever saw him attend was Gianni Versace’s. Karl chartered a private jet for the day and we flew together from Paris to Milan. We sat in the third row, behind Princess Diana of Wales and Elton John. Gianni was one of the few designers Karl sincerely liked. Everyone liked Gianni; he came from a big family and he had a kind heart. They weren’t intimate friends but they enjoyed each other. They really got on.