Loulou & Yves Read online

  Emmita’s life was dedicated to exploring the outer limits of grand train. Fifty years after the wedding of her friend Elena Patiño, the Bolivian tin heiress, she could still recall the Patou dress she’d worn as a bridesmaid, and the Côte Basque garden party where as a teenager she’d been presented to the queen of Spain and Prince of Wales. She’d just been at decorator Elsie de Wolfe’s in Versailles, at the Windsors’ in Neuilly, at Boucherin having Henry’s cigarette boxes made into minaudières, in Saint Moritz—Henry was vice president of the Corviglia Club—at the Vatican for a private audience with Pope Pius XII. When Emmita’s rosary broke during their meeting, His Holiness helped pick up the beads. She once hitched a ride on a Fokker with the Colombian chief of protocol, who was traveling to Cartagena to greet President Roosevelt. That she was airsick and vomited on the protocol chief’s suit was hardly her fault—the point was, she had avoided taking a commercial plane. Emmita eluded criticism of her vanities, her frivolities by paraphrasing Valéry: Le plus profond, c’est la peau. Thus absolved, she was free to tell you how the Colombian clergy had their cassocks made at Lanvin and their shoes at Lobb; how crucial it was to separate the noblesse pontificale from the noblesse napolitaine when doing one’s placement; how the Duke of Civitella’s nose was so beautiful that his mother broke it when he was sixteen so he wouldn’t succumb to the gay men who would have otherwise come on to him. Emmita had no irony. Everything was premier degré: Dado Ruspoli, Prince of Cerveteri, feeding cocaine to the birds on Capri; jeweler Pietro Capuano staffing his house there exclusively with deaf-mutes—how else could he be sure the servants wouldn’t talk? At one point in her memoirs, Emmita writes of how she was glad to escape the “dark skins” of Jamaica for Palm Beach.

  The worlds of Loulou and Emmita and Henry overlapped. The La Falaises mixed with Fiat’s Gianni Agnelli and his wife, Marella; Loulou would have an operatic affair with their nephew. Emmita dressed at Lelong, Dior, Fath, Rochas, Dessès, Balenciaga and, finally, Saint Laurent. Victor Grandpierre designed the YSL couture salon, “rafraî chi” over the years by Jacques Grange, and as Emmita’s decorator arranged the Meissen birds in her Neuilly flat. The La Falaises were there at the Hôtel Lambert in Paris in 1956 when Baron Alexis de Redé hosted Le Bal des Têtes, commissioning the decorations and ladies’ headpieces from an unknown assistant at Dior, Yves Henri Donat Mathieu-Saint-Laurent. Yves had yet to meet Pierre Bergé, the pugnacious business brain behind the empire they would build together, and, for a while anyway, Yves’s romantic passion.

  Two decades later, Loulou’s throaty “har, har, har” could be heard bouncing off the frescoes in the Lambert’s Galerie d’Hercule. Redé shared the mansion with Baron Guy de Rothschild and his wife, Marie-Hélène, one of Saint Laurent’s most prized clients and a senior member of his sanctum sanctorum. Henry and Emmita had known Marie-Hélène and her parents, Baron and Baroness Egmont van Zuylen, in the forties in New York, after Henry had been demobilized. They were all part of a fashionable colony of émigrés, including Count and Countess Pecci-Blunt and Arturo López-Willshaw, heir to a Chilean guano fortune, who occupied the left side of the dining room at Le Pavilion; Pétanists were segregated on the right.

  GEOFFROY GUERRY Loulou’s father was a translator in the war, having been discharged because he wasn’t up to fighting, physically. But with both Henry and his younger brother, Richard, at the front, Alain saw this as a disgrace. Richard and Henry were not very nice to him, reminding him that he couldn’t hack it on the battlefield.

  GABRIEL DE LA FALAISE My father, Richard, was deported to Buchenwald. When the war ended, Henriette had no idea if he was alive or not—it took nine months for her to find out that he’d died of pneumonia after the last camp he was in was liberated. He was thirty-five. By 1945, Henriette had outlived five of her seven children. As my mother, Rayliane, was not very maternal, I was adopted by Henry. That didn’t change anything: I was born La Falaise and adopted by one.

  Henriette’s grief was redoubled. In December 1945, the Los Angeles Times carried the story, convicted betrayer of count cuts throat. The count was Richard de La Falaise, the betrayer his “sweetheart,” the “beautiful” Landette Legros, who had once held the gliding championship in France. Henry had been in the courtroom the day before, when Richard’s widow, Rayliane, testified viciously “against the striking blonde.” “I never betrayed Richard,” cried Legros. “His wife is jealous because we loved each other and wants revenge.” Henry was so mortified by Rayliane’s testimony, he took pity on Legros, begging the judge for clemency. It was not given. Legros received a sentence of five years’ solitary confinement for denouncing Richard to the Gestapo. She returned to her cell in Fresnes Prison outside Paris and slit her throat with a razor. “Cellmates screamed for help and ripped their smocks for bandages until physicians came to administer blood transfusions.” She was expected to live.

  GABRIEL DE LA FALAISE If Maxime thought Alain had money when they married, she was in for a surprise. My stepgrandfather, Antoine Hocquart de Turtot, was absolutely adorable but a hopeless gambler, losing everything Henriette had at the baccarat tables in Deauville with King Farouk and the old Aga Khan. He even sold her furniture to pay his debts. She owned a good dozen beautiful Haussmannian buildings in Paris and several properties in the provinces, but one after the other they were sold to pay Antoine’s debts. He ruined her. Our family was broke.

  3

  Rogue Countess

  LAURENCE BENAÏM [Loulou] comes from one of those families where the women, beautiful and broke, marry the men—and not the other way around—assuming their duties in a novelistic way, which naturally feeds their disposition for loneliness, dreams and illicit games. Elegant down to their silence, the husbands flourish like late bloomers in an English garden.

  MAXIME DE LA FALAISE [Before marrying Alain] my father and mother gave me a little drinks party in my father’s huge studio. I saw this group of people at the far end of the room who I knew were family and I knew I had to introduce my fiancé. Suddenly I realized I could not remember my mother’s maiden name. I knew it was a fish though, so I walked very slowly going through … perch, salmon, trout, sprat, sardine, whiting, getting hysterical. I finally hurled myself on my mother and in a terribly loud voice, I said, “What is the name of your family that is a fish?!”

  MIN HOGG Maxime was predatory, like a great big bat, a swirling-cape sort of person. She told me that when she married Alain, she was terribly keen that the church door remain open during the service so that a spirit could come in, or not leave, a spirit that releases you from the wedding if you want. Or it’s not in the eyes of God anymore. She was already thinking of escaping.

  MAXIME DE LA FALAISE [Alain] was very handsome, small, sublime legs, puny chest, ravishing mouth. For him, working was something one did before lunch. I was a raging blast of youth. Alain was perfect for having children. Marrying him, I married my idea of France. It wasn’t sexual. It was fate… He had a very aristocratic mind, in the good and the bad sense.

  LOULOU My father is a French aristocrat who thinks it’s not respectable to work. He’s cold, but within this coldness he has an intellectual appreciation of people.

  LADY ANNABEL GOLDSMITH Such a dry little man, like a desiccated nut. All the juices squeezed out of him. Humorless. Terribly mean, moneywise. Maxime used to make me laugh, saying what a frightful bore he was.

  MARTINE DE LA FALAISE Alain was so ill-humored, the opposite of Henry, who knew how to have fun, throwing buckets of ice from his fifth-floor Paris apartment on the prostitutes who worked out of convertibles in summer. Alain was cold and distant.

  GABRIEL DE LA FALAISE I saw him practically every Sunday in the spring and fall at Longchamp. He wasn’t warm or expansive. Introverted. He had a lot of financial problems, and not much of a métier. He was in publishing, soi-disant, for a while at NRF, now Gallimard, perhaps as a proofreader. Alain’s last job was with a weekly guide to Paris.

  SARAH ST. GEORGE Maxime had Loulou the year afte
r they married, in ’47, and Alexis the year after that. Alain put Maxime to work—he knew Schiaparelli, and she got a job there. She was the wage earner.

  MAXIME DE LA FALAISE [Loulou] was born in the bathtub while I was doing translation for a fashion magazine. Alain put little wads of ether under my nose, burning it.

  LOULOU My grandmother always insisted I was born at teatime, my mother says cocktails, and it does make a difference, doesn’t it?

  MAXIME DE LA FALAISE In my day, the well-off from good families saw their children a bit like they saw the doctor. The children were bathed and came down at certain times, you gave them little cookies, said three words and they were sent away. We went to all the soiré es mondaines, to the Polignacs’, 15 Marie-Laure de Noailles’s.16 We borrowed. All our money went on taxis. At nine o’clock the dresses had to go back… Françoise de la Renta17 and I were often at the same affairs. I would see her in a dress that she borrowed from some couturier—the same dress I was planning to borrow the next evening. I never worried because Françoise was so neat and careful. I knew that the dress would be in perfect condition for me to borrow it the next night. Sometimes it happened the other way around—I would borrow a dress that Françoise planned to borrow the next evening. I’m sure she worried quite a bit because after I wore it, the dress was apt to be in a less-than-perfect state—cigarettes, wine, you know.

  HUBERT DE GIVENCHY I met Maxime in ’47. We were both working at Schiap. I’d already been at Fath, then Robert Piguet. No one had yet heard of M. Dior. The opening of his house had been announced, but it didn’t exist yet. He wanted to hire me and said in the meantime I should go to Lelong. I was one of two thousand employees there and unhappy. Dior still hadn’t opened, so René Gruau, the illustrator, suggested I apply at Schiaparelli. I was hired. If it didn’t work out, I could still go to Dior.

  Elsa Schiaparelli wasn’t pretty, but she had allure, chic. The first time I met her, she was wearing a hat like an Etruscan sculpture, panther ankle boots and a suit jacket with boutons bijoux by Jean Hugo.18 If you connected the beauty marks on her face, they made the Milky Way, so she had Johnny Schlumberger make her a Milky Way brooch in diamonds.

  At twenty, I found myself in the midst of a brouhaha of outrageous women. Babs Simpson ran the boutique before going to work for American Vogue. Bettina Bergery designed the windows. Françoise de Langlade, future editor in chief of French Vogue, was Schiap’s press attaché and on her second marriage. When Élie de Rothschild19 declined to make it three, she thought it best to go to New York, where, as we know, she became Mrs. Oscar de la Renta.

  Then there were the vendeuses mondaines—society saleswomen who needed to work: Sonia Magaloff, a Georgian princess; Baroness Daisy de Cabrol … When Princess Cora Caetani invited Mrs. Harrison Williams20 to lunch at the Ritz, she hoped it would end with a visit next door to Schiaparelli and an order. The women felt cornered into buying, even if they didn’t want anything.

  Maxime, Hubert de Givenchy, Ben C. Morris (in drag behind Givenchy) and Joan Whelan, Paris, 1953 or 1954. Morris and Whelan were Americans who worked for Givenchy, he as a design assistant, she as a model. Collection of the author.

  JEAN-NOËL LIAUT Sonia Magaloff had a maid who did nothing all day but string her pearls. Poppy Kirk was another Schiap girl. Mercedes de Acosta21 had been with Garbo and Dietrich and was now having a huge affair with Poppy.

  I wrote Hubert’s biography. He told me that when he was starting out, a group of friends—Gruau, Christian Bérard,22 Jacques Fath, the decorator Christos Bellos, Philippe Venet, a tailor at Schiap—had been hugely supportive: early gay solidarity. I wasn’t interested in writing the book unless I could talk about Hubert’s homosexuality. He and Philippe—they’ve been together forever—agreed. When I finished, they called me down to their house in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, and in between tea at Lynn Wyatt’s23 and drinks next door with Mary Wells Lawrence,24 every time the word homosexual appeared, Philippe took out the scissors, ten pages at a time. He has the intelligence of a hairdresser. Hubert’s society friends loathe him. Susan Gutfreund won’t even say hello to him. The abuse Philippe has accepted for Hubert’s money …

  HUBERT DE GIVENCHY Before I met Audrey Hepburn, Maxime was my feminine ideal. I was a little in love with her. She was my idol, a Gruau drawing come to life. Everything about her was exquisite: hands, eyes, legs. Perfection. She was my muse, though my mother thought she was too sophisticated for me. Maxime practically never spoke of Loulou, and rarely of Alain. He was no beauty prize, but he had a name. He was known in Paris mostly because of Henry. Alain and Maxime led separate lives.

  She sailed through the salons at Schiap, statuesque, languorous, stopping to chat to clients. She was a mannequin mondain, not a vendeuse. She wouldn’t have known how to write an order. If Maxime went to the Ritz, it was because she wanted a good steak. Elsa hired her for her ability to carry off even the most eccentric clothes, wearing them to parties so people would say, “Where did she get that?” I don’t know if she was paid a salary, perhaps a small one. I think she was paid in dresses, five per season. She didn’t work only for Schiap, who was jealous of her. The captivating, harebrained Maxime was a bit of a rival.

  DUFF COOPER Maxine is a new star in my firmament. She is only 26. [My wife] Diana thinks her the most beautiful girl she has ever seen. She is also good and intelligent. She loves her husband who is extremely nice. I like being with her, but I am not in love with her and would never seek to persuade her to do anything she thought wrong.

  It was Cooper, the former British ambassador to France, who suggested Maxine change her name to Maxime. At one of her parties he attended, she improvised a buffet table by tossing a couple of yards of beautiful fabric she had hanging around over an ironing board. But was Cooper being disingenuous about their relationship? He was in light of what has gone down in history as “the Mistress Ball,” an event that celebrated his many lovers, all known to his wife, Diana, who was none other than the ball’s guest of honor. With the exception of the novelist Nancy Mitford, everyone on the planning committee was presumed to have had or was having an affair with Cooper: In addition to Maxime, the list ran to Alvilde, Viscountess Chaplin; the architect Edwin Lutyens’s daughter, Barbara; future Washington powerhouse, Susan Mary Alsop; and Ghislaine de Polignac. Louise de Vilmorin, yet to publish Madame de, was excluded from the committee due to severe bossiness. The ball was held in June 1949 at the Paris home of Tony Pawson, an American collector of rich men. Diana was enthroned on a dais in Pawson’s garden and crowned as twenty “virgins” in diaphanous white robes paraded balletically and Maxime capered about in a long woolly unicorn headdress threaded with roses, coming to rest at Diana’s feet. Maxime scripted the romantic pastoral tale. Diana said only she knew what it all meant.

  The same year, Maxime made it onto the Best Dressed List’s top ten, alongside Babe Paley and the Duchess of Windsor, but was bumped to the “professionals” category because she designed for Paquin. For Schiaparelli she created what she called “the Picasso Hat,” an asymmetrical cloche that swept down over one side of the head. The hat’s profile followed the wearer’s; seen from the side, the two aligned. Maxime was Vogue’s chouchou, pictured in the French edition in a satin damask at-home dress, playing with Loulou on the floor, holding her aloft, stuffed animals scattered about, in a portfolio of “Les Enfants et leurs mè res,” including the Comtesse Jacques d’Oilliamson and Mme. Bertrand de La Haye-Jousselin. In 1950, under the heading “ ‘The Way She Wears It,’ ” American Vogue hailed Maxime as “a prompting spirit in Paris couture,” noted how she’d helped start the trend for “cropped gamine haircut[s]” and marveled at the way she shortened for day an ankle-skimming tubular knit dress she’d designed for Paquin “boutique” (ready-to-wear) by blousing it over her belt for a “skirt-and-sweater effect.” The article also featured Adele Astaire; Pauline Potter, waiting to become the Baroness Philippe de Rothschild; Margaret Campbell, waiting to become the Duchess of Argyll; and Slim Haywar
d, man-killer.

  Alain de La Falaise, Loulou’s father, in a wire photo announcing his first marriage, 1931. Collection of the author.

  The painter Leonor Fini, Lady Diana Cooper and Maxime dressed as unicorns for “the Mistress Ball,” Paris, 1949. The party was a tongue-in-cheek celebration of outgoing ambassador Duff Cooper’s extramarital affairs. © Leonor Fini Archives, Paris. Courtesy of Richard Overstreet.

  JOHN RICHARDSON At first, it seemed poor Maxime was doomed to live in the shadow of her hugely glamorous, socially agile mother. But then Maxime outdid Rhoda in style and charm and visibility.

  JEAN-NOëL LIAUT Schiap and Rhoda were the same generation, cut from the same cloth. Elsa’s daughter, Gogo, told me her mother couldn’t bear to have her around. Schiap was in such a rush for Gogo to go to boarding school, she sent her two weeks early. Gogo gets off the train in Switzerland, but there’s no one to meet her, so the tramps in the station teach her to play poker while the stationmaster calls the headmistress. Schiap was a tyrant. Even in school Gogo had shocking pink satin sheets. Elsa insisted.

  MAXIME DE LA FALAISE All I had was underwear and jeans. I borrowed the rest from Schiap… Schiap dressed me for nothing, and I was supposed to float around Paris saying to U.S. tourists, “I’m so glad you like my dress, it happens to come from our collection.” But I wasn’t very good at hustling… [Schiaparelli] looked like a monkey that’s just had its banana snatched away… [She] hated everybody. She made me pose in dresses that were too small and never said thank you. But she taught me everything. I understood a certain genre. Severity. Line. Unnegotiable. Like Yves. Thanks to her, from then on I steered clear of everything saccharine and chichi—everything designed to charm. I think Schiap elevated fashion to the level of art. You wore art even if it was ugly. It was better than wearing a pretty dress.