Loulou & Yves Read online

  Loulou & Yves

  The Untold Story of

  Loulou de La Falaise and

  the House of Saint Laurent

  Christopher Petkanas

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  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  With gratitude to him who woke me.

  Plus chic, tu meurs.

  —fashion bromide

  Introduction

  Loulou de La Falaise did not lack for publicity, generated by her often painfully close personal and professional relationship with Yves Saint Laurent. More than four decades of ecstatic party photos, self-adulating Newton portraits and how-she-wears-it stories culminated in 2011 with six pages in Paris Match, the most widely read publication in France, and the ghoulishly unequivocal title in tall type trumpeting “La Deuxième mort de Saint Laurent”—“The Second Death of Saint Laurent.” Louise Vava Lucia Henriette Le Bailly de La Falaise was sixty-four.

  The outlines of Saint Laurent and Loulou’s friendship and collaboration are easily recited by people in the fashion business, and with just a little more effort by those with only a glancing rapport with what used to be called “the women’s pages.” Founding his house in 1962, Saint Laurent was well on the way to claiming his due when he met Loulou six years later. En toute modestie, Saint Laurent agreed with the mature view, universally held, that he was one of the three greatest designers of the twentieth century, Chanel and Dior bringing up the rear. Hadn’t he put women in trench coats and see-through blouses and safari gear and smokings and cast them in a petticoated excess of taffeta, challis and passementerie as RRPs—Rich Russian Peasants?

  At his elbow for thirty years was Loulou, his creative right hand, the dream maker behind all those lip-smackingly flamboyant accessories, and his muse—a designation she found so wanting, it could make her cuffs rattle. In and out of the studio-hothouse, fingers freighted with turquoise boulders, a nautilus shell the size of a football weighting her neck, she was the one whispering in Yves’s ear, talking him off the ledge, propping him up, cajoling, prodding, holding court at Club Sept, walking Moujik, trawling the souk, lifting the bottle, rolling the joints, snorting, playing dress-up, painting rainbows, wrapping the turbans, draping the shawls, conjuring the bijoux de fantaisie in unsuspected materials like cork and cardboard that tipped the Saint Laurent look into something else.

  On the theory that everyone loves a cocktail party, and because people with a drink in their hand tend to be candid, Loulou & Yves traces Loulou’s life chronologically through the memories of more than two hundred voices: husbands, lovers, extended family, friends, enemies, slightly less bitter detractors, colleagues, groupies, Yves, pundits, hangers-on—and Grace Jones. Readers mingle at the party as invited guests, listening in and collecting clues as the narrative unfolds, nostalgia and fact colliding with wishful thinking and score settling. Warring accounts of the same event are part of the charm of a supple literary form, oral biography, that allows the interweaving of diary entries, letters and press clippings with the testimonies that flow from more than one hundred and fifty original interviews. Others from the vaults—books, newspapers, magazines—plump the story line. The voices speak for themselves, uncensored, in their own words, each in his own idiosyncratic manner. Some of the conversations overheard are loving, others bitchy, as only the fashion world can be.

  The precedent here will be obvious to many. Edie (1982), Jean Stein and George Plimpton’s life of the doomed Warhol “superstar” Edie Sedgwick, ennobled “the spontaneous quality of the spoken word” while using “the kaleidoscopic ‘flicker’ technique of films, in which a series of quick images of considerable variety provides an effect of wholeness” (Plimpton). He coined the metaphor of oral biography as cocktail party, the social forum where Loulou came most alive, deploying her legendary chien, her exalted level of chic, to play to her constituency.

  1

  Sir Oswald and Lady Birley

  ROSI LEVAI1 She was the root of all evil.

  LOULOU DE LA FALAISE [She was] the first hippie.

  MARGALIT FOX Rhoda, an Irish beauty, was considered an eccentric even by the elastic standards of the British Isles. Lady Birley often made lobster thermidor, for instance, and then fed it to her roses.

  MAXIME DE LA FALAISE She would make fish stew and sometimes would forget that she was making it for the garden. So she would add a bit of cognac, some garlic and spices. The roses would almost cry out with pleasure … She was the only woman in Ireland allowed to ride to the hounds, dressed in a suede jacket and Hindu turban.

  HUBERT DE GIVENCHY In her Mexican petticoats and piles of necklaces, Rhoda Birley made Millicent Rogers2 look like the store-bought version of a bohemian. She had the mysterious air of a fortune-teller—you could picture her around a campfire in Romania. She could also be fantastically chic in a navy suit from the sale at Balenciaga. If she had you to lunch, there’d be Cecil Beaton or John Gielgud or Oliver Messel3, she’d cook the meal herself, and that’s what she’d wear while tossing the salad: couture … a projection of the future Loulou. It’s the fact that they were three, a trinity—Rhoda, Maxime, Loulou—that makes them so fascinating, a dynasty of utterly singular women, each with her own extraordinary style, multiple generations of intense creativity, the beauty perpetuated, one more eccentric than the other. I was lucky enough to know and admire them all. Rhoda married Sir Oswald, an English portraitist favored, as you know, by society and the Court of St. James. Maxime married a French count.

  HAMISH BOWLES [Loulou] was the true descendant of a line of formidably stylish women. Through her birthright she had inherited the whimsy and poetry of Ireland, the pragmatism and eccentric flair of England, and the chic and dash of France.

  GEORGINA HOWELL For sheer longevity as aristocrats of style, the de La Fa-laise family are the most famous of fashion dynasties … Maxime was a young crop-headed comtesse, tall and thin enough to carry off the most extreme clothes of an extreme period… With her rusty bobbed hair, scornful green eyes and feline face, Loulou has, since her first meeting with Saint Laurent in 1968, inhabited the world of inspiration between the couturier’s dreams and the first snip of the scissors. Then there is Lucie … small, with fine features and a cameo profile.

  JANE ORMSBY GORE Rhoda, Maxime, Loulou—they were all quite original, weren’t they? Not sort of Bob Basic, misses twinset and pearls, were they?

  WILLY LANDELS I have a terribly funny image from the sixties. Desmond FitzGerald was working in the V&A furniture department. Rhoda, Maxime and Loulou were seated on a sofa in his flat in Pont Street, all three immensely chic, all three smoking joints.

  JOSÉPHINE RINALDI Maxime gave a party in Paris in the late forties, greeting guests stretched out on a bed while covered in fresh flowers. Underneath she was naked. Rhoda arrived at the opera one night in an evening dress, carrying a marketing basket with leeks spilling out, carrots—everything she needed to make pot-au-feu. Loulou was practically the sanest of the three.

  AMY FINE COLLINS
The beauty was stamped out like a coin. Maxime was a close second to Rhoda, Loulou less beautiful than Maxime. Lucie, Loulou’s niece, is pretty but not …

  JOHN RICHARDSON It’s remarkable, that family, three Irish beauties in an unbroken line, all with an Irish fecklessness I find rather attractive.

  ELIZABETH LAMBERT [Rhoda’s] were the colors of high summer—emeralds and purples and reds—and she was likely to wear six scarves, three sweaters, probably even two skirts, all jumbled together at once… Friends remember her as a scatterbrain of immense heart; a romantic, a Celtic beauty, a beautiful clown, always close to poignancy and sadness as well as to laughter.

  CHRISTOPHER GIBBS A potent creature, Rhoda. Her aura made me careful of her company. She had a gypsyish, untamed elegance—she’s not Maxime’s mother for nothing. And we can see it shining on in Loulou. We all turn into our grandmothers sooner or later. And Loulou got there soon.

  JOHN STEFANIDIS Rhoda was born into the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. She traveled to India in the twenties, returning with saris and jodhpurs that Loulou made into her own. The grandmother was a remarkably stylish woman and of course in that regard a very important influence on Loulou. Rhoda and Maxime had a certain loucheness. But style in the family goes back even further, to Rhoda’s mother…

  MAXIME DE LA FALAISE Vavarina Pike … wore only cream and natural colors: an ivory fedora, heavy silk shirts with pearl buttons, beige tweeds, and a gold pince-nez on a fine chain. I remember her in those manila-colored cardigans from men’s departments in London [stores].

  CHRISTOPHER PETKANAS Catherine Henrietta (“Vavarina”) Howard of County Wexford married Robert Lecky Pike, barrister and blustery high sheriff for County Carlow. Robert was from a long-established Quaker landowning family with fishing rights on the river Slaney, and had attended Magdalen College, Cambridge. Rhoda and her two brothers’ food education took place in an age of groaning breakfasts and sumptuous teas, the family shadowed by retainers as they moved about the country on their rounds of visits. According to the 1911 census of Ireland, conducted when Rhoda was twelve, it took thirteen people to care for five Pikes: a governess, a butler, a footman, a chauffeur, a “garden labourer,” a groom, a cook, two kitchen maids, two housemaids and two ladies’ maids. Robert and Vavarina were tormenting, not to say terrorizing, parents.

  MAXIME DE LA FALAISE Once my grandmother fell into a muddy stream when she was out walking. She called for the servants to bring a change of clothes, a chair, a bathtub filled with hot water, and a Coromandel screen to the water’s edge. She couldn’t bear the thought that my grandfather would see her as anything but perfect.

  LADY RHODA BIRLEY [I was raised] surrounded by horses, stables and racing. [My governess] was marvelous—a great linguist...We went through George Eliot and Hardy together and couldn’t wait for the postman to bring the next batch of books.

  Vavarina grew tired of the Troubles, of the Northern Ireland conflict, and brought Rhoda to London, where she met Oswald Birley. As a painter, Oswald was like William Orpen without the romance, John Lavery without the chic. Rhoda fancied herself an artist, too. She and Oswald married in 1921. He was forty-one, nineteen years her senior. Rhoda’s diary for 1922 failed even to mention the arrival of baby Maxime. Her godfather was a Frenchman, Oswald’s friend Sem, the great Belle Époque caricaturist. Mark, Maxime’s only sibling, arrived in 1930. It was said that the family took baths together, but were not close in the way that mattered.

  HUBERT DE GIVENCHY George V sat for Sir Oswald, Queen Elizabeth, heads of state, the leading hostesses of the day—Lady Cunard—and Oswald’s friends Churchill, Eisenhower and Gandhi. With Rhoda, and Maxime as a child, he traveled to India and America for commissions. Rhoda had a lot of men in her life, and why not? Churchill was a great admirer. Oswald gave him painting lessons.

  LOULOU In my family, the women have always invented themselves… My grandparents used to spend half the year in India, when they weren’t busy discovering the small harbors of the Côte d’Azur… Inventing oneself is a way of earning one’s living, considering there was never any money at home… You have to be quite brave about it. You’ve got no choice, unless you bind yourself to rules you don’t like.

  Loulou’s long-suffering grandfather was educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge. He studied old masters in Dresden and Florence, later receiving Beaux-Arts training at the Académie Julian in Paris. Oswald’s first exhibited work earned an honorable mention at the 1903 Paris Salon. He was knighted in 1949, three years before his death. The auction record for a Birley was set in 2012, when his velvet-and-pearls portrait of a thirteen-year-old poor little rich girl, Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton, brought $36,250, with premium. The seller was Vogue’s Hamish Bowles, no surprise there.

  Oswald came from well-fed burgher stock in Kirkham, Lancashire, but was born in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1880: His parents, Hugh Francis and Elizabeth Birley, née McQuorquodale, were on a world tour. More than fifty Birleys were buried in Kirkham between 1767 and 1940. Their fortune was built on sailcloth, cordage and the spinning of linen, flax and cotton. In the eighteenth century, the family business furnished the Royal Navy. By 1876, Messrs. Birley and Sons’ flax mill had grown to sixteen hundred workers and was shipping its wares to New York. The one stain on family history is Loulou’s great-great-grandfather. In 1819, Hugh Birley, a Manchester Tory, helped lead the Peterloo Massacre. Two thousand men charged a crowd of fifty thousand demonstrators demanding parliamentary reform. The yeomans directly under Birley slashed their way through with sabers. Eighteen were killed and five hundred wounded. A jury concluded that Birley’s offensive had “been properly committed in the dispersal of an unlawful assembly.”

  The family was granted armorial bearings by the College of Arms, four boars with their tongues out, and lived well as country squires at Bartle Hall and as town fathers at Hillside, handsome Georgian houses in and around Kirkham. As the nineteenth century flickered out, so did the Birley textile works, hobbled by obsolete machinery. But Oswald thrived, earning equal billing in a group show with Glyn Philpot and Gerald Kelly at the Knoedler gallery in New York, painting Aubrey Beardsley’s actress sister, Mabel, as an Elizabethan page in a fur-tipped tabard, and showing at the London Salon and Venice Exhibition. A pit bull named Joseph Duveen helped Oswald wrest commissions in the United States from the man who created the Gibson Girl, and from what passed for American royalty: J. P. Morgan, Jock Whitney and Andrew Mellon. Oswald, with Duveen and art historian Kenneth Clark as fellow judges, awarded first prize to an anonymous work in an amateur painting competition in 1921. The Sunday artist was Winston Churchill. The friendship between Churchill; his wife, Clementine; and the Birleys was thus founded on art, and on World War I—Oswald had been in the Royal Fusiliers and then a captain in the Intelligence Corps. As Churchill lay dying in 1965, Scotland Yard opened the door to his home in Hyde Park for a last visit from Prime Minister Harold Wilson, family members and Lady Birley. Lady Churchill’s friendship with Rhoda continued at Chartwell, her home in Kent, and on widows’ holidays on the Riviera.

  In London, the Birleys ran with Sybil, Lady Colefax, who founded Colefax & Fowler, the bluestocking decorating firm, with Tom Fowler; June Capel, whose father, “Boy,” had been Chanel’s lover and first backer; the diplomats Harold Nicolson and Duff Cooper, 1st Viscount Norwich; and Cooper’s wife Lady Diana, actress and society totem. Maxime and Mark were raised in East Sussex at Charleston Manor and in London. Long since leveled, the Corner House, at 60 Wellington Road, St. John’s Wood, had been remodeled by Sir Clough Williams-Ellis, architect of Portmeirion, the wacky Welsh resort village modeled on Portofino. Charleston was a working farm with modest possibilities when Rhoda chanced upon it in 1928. But it had pedigree: The property dated to the eleventh century, its owner, William the Conqueror’s cupbearer, assuring that Charleston was recorded in the Domesday Book. Nikolaus Pevs-ner, foremost scholar of English architecture, declared it “a perfect house in a perfect setting.”


  LOULOU Lady Birley had [it] exorcised. Everyone except her is a bit nervous there.

  Rhoda sped through the countryside at night in an open-topped Avies, face veiled against hay fever, head- and neck scarves flying, not caring to turn on the lights, preferring to rely on moonlight and her homing instinct to guide her back to Charleston. For the renovation, the Birleys hired Walter Godfrey, one of the finest conservation architects of his time. The largest tithe barn in England was transformed into a painting studio for Oswald and a four-hundred-seat theater where René Blum’s post-Diaghilev Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo performed. The Birleys’ close association with the company resulted in portraits by Oswald of Nijinksi’s daughter, Kyra, and the prima ballerina Alexandra Danilova. Rudyard Kipling and Oliver Messel’s parents, and later his sister, Anne, Countess of Rosse, were friends living nearby at Nymans. Devoted gardeners, the Messels and Birleys helped fund seed expeditions in the Himalayas. Rhoda knew her roses, old-fashioned, climbing and shrub. At Charleston, she employed or consulted a trinity of twentieth-century horticultural greats: Harold Hillier, Gertrude Jekyll (hence the cold crabmeat “Lady Jekyll” Rhoda served with soda bread and stewed medlars for tea), and Vita Sackville-West, whose hand was suggested in a succession of garden “rooms.” Rhoda and Vita are thought to have met through their involvement in the Land Girls army of civilian farm workers in World War II. At Rhoda’s death, in 1980, she still retained several gardeners and a chauffeur.