Loulou & Yves: The Untold Story of Loulou de La Falaise and the House of Saint Laurent

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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.

The Birleys were two of only twenty-four guests, excluding the hosts and the guests of honor, to attend a dinner for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth given by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his wife, Anne, on March 29, 1942. Eight years before, Oswald had gone out to Windsor with his easel for sittings with the king’s father, one of the many times he painted him, and mother. Queen Mary recorded her opinion of the finished portraits in her diary after viewing them in the artist’s St. John’s Wood studio: good. Hers hung in the King’s Writing Room at the castle, his in the Queen’s Vestibule. Oswald was nearly commanded to wear breeches to the Chamberlains’ dinner—until Mrs. Chamberlain asked the king’s preference and the palace reminded her that breeches are permitted only when the host wears the Garter: the prime minister did not. Following protocol, a proposed list of guests was submitted to the king’s private secretary. Everyone was approved, including Charles Vane-Tempest-Stewart, Marquess of Londonderry, and his wife, Edith; the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire; Lord Halifax, former viceroy of India; and Lord Maugham, Somerset Maugham’s brother. As the Birleys sipped their consommé, they couldn’t have known that in 1954 their son, Mark, would marry the Londonderry’s granddaughter Annabel.

ANNE DE COURCY 1939: THE LAST SEASON It was only the third time in the century that the Sovereign had dined at 10 Downing Street … The royal couple arrived punctually at 8.25 p.m. … guests stood waiting in a half-circle … presentations were made … Those invited included friends at the highest political level, known to be greatly liked by the King and Queen … The Londonderrys … combined politics and social grandeur … Edith was the most famous political hostess of her day… The brilliant entertainments at Londonderry House were a noted feature of the Season … Representing the arts was the portrait painter Oswald Birley, for whom Mrs. Chamberlain had just sat … Birley’s well-cut clothes, neat military mustache and genial manner gave him more the air of a solider than of the artist and music lover that he was. He and his dark Irish wife … shared an interest in Indian philosophy and had visited India several times already. For him, the invitation to dinner held an additional bonus: he was able to study the King, the subject of his next portrait, at close quarters. Although the order of precedence of the various distinguished guests was unequivocal, the seating plan had not been achieved without a certain amount of anguished consideration … the list of precedence … was sent along with the table plan to the Palace … Food, drink, the chairs the guests were to sit on … all had to be settled in advance … There were four services of waiters … In deference to royal tastes, the meal was comparatively simple: … filets de sole Bercy, selle d’agneau bouquetière with pommes Parisienne were followed by Poussin à la Polonaise, salade de laitue, asperges vertes, Parfait comtesse Marie aux fraises Grand Marnier with crème Chantilly … The names of those brought up to talk to Their Majesties had been carefully arranged …

(The Queen suggests starting to talk with Moucher Devonshire and Lady Londonderry, followed by as many of the others as there is time for.) … The royal couple stayed until 11.40 p.m.

ALISTAIR LAIRD Though Birley had none of Sargent’s psychological insight, Sargent made Birley’s career possible. There was so much money in Europe at the turn of the century, everyone wanted his portrait painted. Sargent did all the well-to-do. Birley was a product of that explosion.

HUGO VICKERS His bread and butter were captains of industry—bankers, railroad magnates, sausage-factory owners. Lord mayors. Grumpy men with waistcoat chains.

INDIA JANE BIRLEY My grandfather was the last of the great bravura portrait painters. Of his time, there’s only him and László. Oswald went to Spain as a young man to look at Velázquez. He idolized him. My grandfather’s studio at Charleston is where I paint now. He had a reputation for perhaps repeating himself—too many military men with their hands clasped. But there’s no one I’d rather have been painted by, and I’ve been painted by Lucian Freud. I went with Prince Charles to record his trip to Bangladesh in the nineties and lived in Bombay. I found portraits by Oswald from the twenties, improved by local artists.

NICKY HASLAM A fairly hopeless painter, wouldn’t you say? Sub-Sargent fashionable. Subsubsubsubsub.

JOHN RICHARDSON Oswald was a perfectly adequate performer, but he looks awfully second-rate now. Rhoda was to my mind the figure, a good friend of Brooke Astor, showy, narcissistic, highly affected, not as grand as she thought she was. Maxime was always talking about how she was a great gardener and a great cook and how she combined these two interests, feeding the roses with bouillabaisse.

LADY RHODA BIRLEY After a time, the claws surface. Winston Churchill did a beautiful painting of one of the lobsters we had in the South of France called After Luncheon at Cappon, Cap d’Ail. Roses enjoy all sorts of things we enjoy ourselves.

ELIZABETH LAMBERT On the matter of feeding the roses … she felt there was nothing better than fish, and she was very likely to donate the cod or mackerel that had been the subject of a still life and had already lingered for too many days in her painting studio. She brought ancient and unpleasant shellfish all the way back from a painting holiday in Brittany, and when a dead goldfish was discovered in the lily pond she called for a spade—not to bury it, but to feed it to the Fantin-Latour rose.

LOULOU She’s a very exotic and daring cook, who suddenly gets hold of an idea, cooks it thousands of different ways, and then moves on to something else.

LADY RHODA BIRLEY Once I get an idea it’s like a tidal wave—everything comes pouring in and it’s difficult to be selective. One ends up with more actors than audience because there’s hardly any room left for the audience. I also think I overestimate the public interest in the things I do. I always think they won’t be able to resist them, and I’m surprised when they do.

KENNETH JAY LANE I loved Rhoda. Maxime did not. I gave Rhoda a show in New York once. She painted. Not very well. Realistic. Amateurish. Still Life with Mushrooms—that sort of thing. Marjorie Merriweather Post ⁴ came, Gloria Guinness⁵ … Rhoda hosted an arts festival at Charleston. In 1969, the program included a conversation gastronomique. She wore her hair in Charles II banana curls, a black pailletted skirt, a chrome yellow shirt held closed by Chanel brooches, and around her waist an embroidered Spanish piano shawl. She made pâtés to sell, a revolting mixture of salmon and sausage meat. As it was a broiling day, they bubbled and turned poisonous in the sun.

There was lunch under a tent, then the conversation in the wonderful Elizabethan barn. On the stage were Rhoda, Osbert Lancaster, ⁶ Derek Hill⁷ and Cecil Beaton, especially lovely in a straw-colored linen suit. Now we’re going to discuss our most favorite meal, Rhoda announced. Darling Cecil, why don’t you begin? Cecil mumbled something about his Bolivian aunt.

If the catering van with the platters for a party broke down, Rhoda thought nothing of serving the sixty-five chickens she’d prepared from a stone birdbath. Mia Farrow, who knew Rhoda through Rhoda’s protégé, the composer John Tavener, is said to have likened her to a Picasso whore. When it came time for Rhoda’s portrait bust, the sculptor of George V’s effigy for his tomb at Windsor did the honors. William Reid Dick showed Rhoda not just with her eyes downcast but closed shut, in high disdain.

Her pull was enormous. Other Charleston festivals featured the culinary writer Elizabeth David, the literary biographer David Cecil, the Borodin string quartet, an exhibition of Rhoda’s own antique Indian coats and saris, Desmond FitzGerald on Irish gardens, Kenneth Clark on The Questionable Concept of Good Taste and Sir Sacheverell Sitwell—brother of Edith—on roses. Quentin Bell, son of Bloomsbury’s Vanessa and Clive Bell, held forth on the other Charleston, nearby Charleston Farmhouse. John Tavener performed sacred cantatas. Princess Margaret might be in the audience.

JOHN TAVENER I never took drugs… No, that’s not quite true, my godmother [Lady Birley] was very wild and gypsylike, and Loulou de La Falaise—I was briefly involved with [her]… I remember going to lunch there, at the manor … The cook came out and said, Whatever you do Mr. John, don’t eat the vegetables. But I had already drunk quite a lot of cider and wine with … these vegetables, which were laced with hashish, and I collapsed underneath the dovecot… I just waved [good-bye to Loulou], lying flat on the floor…

LADY ANNABEL GOLDSMITH This is Rhoda for you, actually: Mark and I were newly married and staying at Charleston. There was a big do at the Brigh-ton Pavilion, and I’d forgotten my dress in London. Rhoda said, Wear this one of mine. There was only one thing wrong: The front had gone missing. I’ve never been strong on bras, and the one I was wearing was particularly hideous, a nursing thing. The bra was literally spilling out of the dress.

Rhoda, I can’t wear this.

Darling, it’s charming. You go just like that.

Rhoda’s maid Jackie gave me a wink and sewed a chiffon scarf inside the bodice.

Oh darling, what have you done?

But Rhoda, I couldn’t go out showing my underwear.

Well, you’ve ruined the whole dress.

ARABELLA BOXER There is a mixture of Irish vagueness and practicality about Lady Birley that, together with her exotic beauty, makes her irresistible. Her secretary told me that when people rang up to ask whether they should wear jackets for the Borodin evening, Lady Birley, worried by the cool weather, said, Blow the dinner jackets—be warm. On another occasion, when … asked her advice about how to suggest tactfully to people that they might dress tidily for Glyndebourne,⁸ without actually forcing them to wear dinner jackets, she said, Why not just say, ‘Come clean’?

HUBERT DE GIVENCHY I saw Rhoda every year in Palm Beach. Our’s wasn’t the Palm Beach of Marjorie Merriweather Post. Our group was artistic: Jerome Robbins, George Balanchine, Alice DeLamar,⁹ Tanaquil Le Clercq.¹⁰ Lady Birley made belts and jewelry with shells that she sold from a friend’s boutique on Worth Avenue, standing in front with her wild gypsy hair and baroque pearls, waiting for customers, looking like she was about to read your palm.

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KATE BERNARD I’d been invalided out of my job as features editor of Tatler and went to Provence, where Maxime was living, to help her with her never-published memoirs. We celebrated her eighty-fifth birthday, so it was 2007. Her papers were everywhere, in complete and utter confusion, files stuffed under a cushion in her bedroom.

She was extremely deaf but refused to wear her hearing aides. Like a lot of old people, she was selectively deaf. She wanted to talk when she’d had a few drinks. She didn’t want me to take notes, which hardly suited the task.

Oswald had painted the notoriously acquisitive Queen Mary. One day, Maxime said, the queen came by the house in London. Eying a set of chairs, and finding Maxime, who was just a girl, alone, she attempted to persuade her: These chairs are a gift to me from your mother! Maxime had a randy nursemaid who liked to be spanked with a Mason Pearson hairbrush, and she took ballet lessons from Lydia Sokolova¹¹.

JOHN STEFANIDIS Maxime and Clarissa Eden¹² took dancing classes together as girls. Clarissa told me Maxime was so beautiful, the other children were frightened of her.

MAXIME DE LA FALAISE It is quite true that I was brought up as a beauty… Being promoted as a beauty gives you a certain self-confidence… I had no feeling as a child of anything towards my parents, except terror and laughter. There was none of this stuff the Americans cheerfully call bondage. I was rapped on the knuckles [by my French governess] with an ebony cane if I couldn’t remember every coal mine in France… [My parents] were like Edwardian parents. They thought that children and dogs could be taken care of by servants… My mother had a wonderful solution for teenage children at parties. I would wear the dress she had chosen until she said goodnight to me, and then I would go upstairs, change my clothes, and for the rest of the night she wouldn’t officially recognize me… She spoke fluent Russian and said she had remembered it from an earlier incarnation. She became passionately religious; she was a Christian Scientist and then a Buddhist. Instead of a nanny we had a resident yogi… We rented a villa [in France] every summer… Everything interesting my parents had to say to each other was said in French, so I picked it up very quickly… [My father] liked to meet politicians and army people and went off to Scotland to shoot all kinds of little birds. It wasn’t any more of a life for my mother than it would have been for me… She was a bitch. Not at all with her friends, but with her family. A manipulator. I think she was unhappy with my father. He was wonderful but never wanted to have any fun. She was very beautiful. As she got older she became less beautiful, ruined by her expression. If I tried to kiss her she simultaneously drew me to her and pushed me away. When I turned my back she made the sign of the cross. I felt like a witch, like I was being burned. I screamed with rage… There’s some of her character in me. It’s sort of like when you carry a bad gene.

LOULOU I was petrified of my grandmother. There were so many rules, dos and don’ts, what was U and Non-U. She hated physical contact. When you approached her, she backed away… In England, we’re not very physical.

JOHN STEFANIDIS The Birleys were undemonstrative and uptight, as only the Brits can be. Two of Rhoda’s grandchildren went to school near her, and she never once asked them to lunch in five years.

JOSÉPHINE RINALDI When I was little my mother pushed me down the stairs, and more than once, Maxime told me. Rhoda had a passion for roses, but not her daughter.

LADY ANNABEL GOLDSMITH Rhoda was totally lacking in any kind of maternal feeling whatsoever. None. Forget it. Women who have a complete antipathy to their children do exist. Mark and Maxime didn’t see much of her. Rhoda would pit them against each other. Mark was never mad about Maxime, to be honest.

AMY FINE COLLINS John Richardson always said that Maxime raped Mark, when they were teenagers. Now that doesn’t make any sense. It must be the other way around, if anything like that happened. I don’t think it’s possible for a woman to rape a man, or is it?

MARK BIRLEY My relationship with my mother … wasn’t so much a strange relationship, more the absence of any normal relationship… an absence of affection … We were rather a divided family … a pretty good mess … The fact that my father was fifty when I was born must have made for some remoteness in the relationship there. I was extremely fond of him, but he was almost like a grandfather… I never really thought of my nanny as being a kind of surrogate mother figure, but … I suppose … she was… Frankly I was glad to leave that period of my childhood behind me, although I’ve wiped my mind pretty clear of all the bad things that happened.

MAXIME DE LA FALAISE I think this upbringing makes one independent. One judges for oneself what one does. One has one’s own morality, which has nothing to do with religions, or with anyone else. That’s what eccentricity is. We’re like a family of orphans. It’s because my children broke with this ghastly tradition that they became such good parents… We’re more like a tribe than a family. We’re close, but we’re Bedouins. We choose our own oasis, and we have our ins and outs. …

LADY ANNABEL GOLDSMITH Rhoda and Oswald had actually met my parents in the twenties at Dunrobin, my paternal grandmother’s castle in Scotland, the seat of the Sutherlands. Oswald was there to paint the duke. Rhoda was a deeply disappointed woman. The one major affair outside her marriage, with Victor Bruntisfield, ¹³ hadn’t gone right. He wouldn’t leave his wife. When it was breaking up, Rhoda would walk slowly and miserably downstairs to breakfast, looking like a ghost, her face thickly covered in talcum powder. She took a strange interest in the falling apart of my own marriage to Mark and in my affair with Jimmy Goldsmith.¹⁴ If I’d let her, she’d have asked about our sex life! … [My] breakup [with Mark] was because of Mark’s infidelities, not because I fell in love with Jimmy … [Mark] was a serial adulterer.

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Maxime attended Owlstone Croft finishing school in Cambridge. She was seventeen in 1939 and decided to join the Women’s Royal Naval Service. But the recruiting office was shut the day she went to enlist, so she lied about her age and joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF)instead, becoming, she said, a corporal in intelligence. Maxime preferred the WAAFs anyway because of the uniform.

MAXIME DE LA FALAISE I liked blue close to the face. I didn’t think khaki suited me.

KATE BERNARD At some juncture, she worked in a Red Cross hospital and told me she’d had an accident, an out-of-body experience, and died, but then came back. Bletchley Park was code-breaking headquarters in England in World War II. Maxime worked there, catching kleptomania. Anything with a bit of shine, she took. This led to a nervous breakdown, and she was discharged. The kleptomania was shook off like a cold.

There was a snob element to Bletchley: lots of debs, girls with posh names and from secretarial colleges, Old Etonians, admirals’ daughters, or those of a general’s friend who were considered suitable. Coming from a good family, as Maxime did, implied that the candidate could be trusted not to betray king and country. Qualifications were beside the point. Interviews were along the lines of, Do you mind typing things you don’t understand? Camilla Wallop and the future Elizabeth II had been Girl Guides together. Sarah Norton was a goddaughter of Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India.

Not that the work at Bletchley was frivolous. By the end of the war, ten thousand people were employed within its gates. Maxime was an Enigma girl, operating a German cipher machine, an Enigma, that decrypted double- and triple-scrambled messages tracking U-boats. WAAFs received four weeks of training, mostly drills to improve stamina. Maxime’s French was a plus, likely earning her the classification multilinguist. She traveled fifty miles north of London to Bletchley, a fifty-three-acre estate whose lugubrious late-Victorian redbrick pile combined the atmospheres of a home-county country house and a detention camp, barbed wired discouraging any thoughts of escape. Inmates wore apple-catchers, the long, baggy black underdrawers that were standard issue for British servicewomen, and received a stiff lecture on security. Maxime signed the Official Secrets Act and would have been told that should she be tempted to talk, even to her family, she could look forward to thirty years in prison. If anyone asked, best to say, I’m a clerk in the Foreign Office. Addressed by their surnames—it was always Miss Birley, never Maxine, her actual given name—WAAFs were teleprincesses, typing out intelligence reports on convulsive telex machines, or else indexers, cross-referencing U-boat numbers and the names of German naval officers. They complained of working in huts that were deathly cold, mittens and overcoats worn against coke stoves that heaved smoke. Billets were the luck of the draw. You could get a sympathetic couple with a lovely Queen Anne cottage or hostile hosts who forbid you to use the bathroom. Maxime wasn’t the only one who found Bletchley unhinging, who cracked. To forget her isolation, there was the drama club and passing performances by the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company and the Ballet Rambert, the same Marie Rambert whose dance school Loulou would grudgingly attend in the sixties. Bletchley’s culture of indulgence was a fillip to Maxime. Angus Wilson, the novelist, could be openly gay and no one cared. The budding computer scientist Alan Turing cycled to work in a gas mask because, he said, he had allergies. On leave days, Maxime could take the milk train down to London to go dancing, catch a play, or have a decent meal. There was sex, of course, consummated under the cloud that no man would marry a girl who was shop-soiled. American and RAF airmen from neighboring bases were invited to social evenings in the main house’s ballroom.

PAMELA GIBSON We gave what we thought were splendid parties. A girl called Maxine Birley, the Comtesse de La Falaise as she became, was a great beauty and mad about France, and I remember her giving a party at which we all had to be very French. People would change partners quite a lot. We were rather contained in a way-out place and you could only travel if you managed to get transport, so there was a good deal of changing of partners.

PETER BLOND [Mark Birley and I] first met … at Eton in 1944… One great Eton highlight was his sister Maxime’s visit… A breathtaking beauty, boys were literally hanging out of their windows to glimpse her, and an awful lot of people seemed to want to borrow a book that day.

SARAH ST. GEORGE The war over, Maxime announced to her parents that she was moving home. They quickly bought her a ticket to America, one-way.

1 Contributors’ biographical notes can be found on pages 435–458.

2 Millicent Rogers (1902–1953), Standard Oil heiress.

3 Oliver Messel (1904–1978), stage designer who, in his work and for the affections of the art collector Peter Watson, was a frenemy of Sir Cecil Beaton.

4 Marjorie Merriweather Post (1887–1973), General Foods heiress.

5 Gloria Guinness (1913–1980), fabled clotheshorse.

6 Sir Osbert Lancaster (1908–1986), cartoonist who skewered the British upper classes.

7 Derek Hill (1916–2000), painter of Irish landscapes.

8 Opera festival near Charleston founded by Rhoda’s friend John Christie.

9 Alice DeLamar (1895–1983), gold-mine heiress.

10 Tanaquil Le Clercq (1929–2000), principal dancer with the New York City Ballet.

11 Lydia Sokolova (1896–1974), Ballets Russes ballerina.

12 Clarissa Eden, Countess of Avon, widow of British Prime Minister Anthony Eden and niece of Winston Churchill.

13 Victor Warrender, 1st Baron Bruntisfield (1899–1993), Churchill’s wartime coalition admiralty secretary. A godson of Queen Victoria, Bruntisfield did eventually divorce and remarry, a blow to Rhoda.

14 Sir James Goldsmith (1933–1997), billionaire financier who married Annabel in 1978.

2

A Tribe Called Falaise

Maxime arrived in New York in 1945, breaking off her engagement to an American GI she’d met in England and working as a reader for the publisher Cass Canfield at what would become Harper & Row. The Birleys and Canfield would have been on the same cocktail-party circuit when Canfield worked in London in the twenties; Maxime was probably given his name so she could look him up in New York. Flitting on the margins of the book world, she met Alain de La Falaise, a divorced French translator and, he said, a count. They married the next year and moved to Paris. Alain’s bloodlines stretched back to fifteenth-century Normandy. There were other suffixes and prefixes he could have used, but he went only by La Falaise, after an estate in a locality hemmed by a falaise—a cliff—facing the Channel, fifteen miles north of Le Havre. The La Falaise clan had come within a blade’s breadth of extinction in the French Revolution, soldiering on afterward as land-rich cash-poor petite noblesse rurale locale. Their propects changed with Loulou’s alleged grandfather Gabriel, a three-time Olympic gold medal fencing champion who had successfully evaded the rules at cavalry school by living with a woman. In 1893, Gabriel wed Henriette Hennessy in the only church in Paris equal to marrying the heiress to a great cognac fortune: the Madeleine. Henriette was two times a Hennessy: Her parents, Martha and Richard, were first cousins. The La Falaises were unfamiliar with the kind of pungent scandal that trailed Martha: Through a second marriage, she was the sister-in-law of none other than the man who brought down Oscar Wilde, John Sholto Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry. Wilde was arrested in London at the Cadogan Hotel on Pont Street, the same street where Loulou would live as a rapturously clueless nineteen-year-old bride. Martha Hennessy practiced motherhood to a yet lower standard than Rhoda, abandoning Henriette to relatives in France when she moved to London, caring so little that she did not even attend her wedding. Henriette and Gabriel were mal assorti from the start. Their first son, Henry, future Hollywood lady-killer, was born in 1898.

EMMITA DE LA FALAISE [Henry had] an English governess, dry as an old olive, prickly as a bramble. He was six years old when one day the governess said: Today’s your mother’s receiving day. You’ll go into the salon and greet everyone—and you had better stand up straight! … Bundled up in a black velvet suit with a wide lace collar, Henry felt ridiculous… When his mother ordered, Henry, go and greet the ladies, he was so terrified he wet his pants. His mother saw what had happened, slapped him, then called the governess. Since Henry behaves like a dog, put a collar and leash on him and tie him to a bench in the garden. The governess did as she was told.

GEOFFROY GUERRY The La Falaises were a traditional aristocratic family, plus royaliste que le roi. La Barre, their estate in the Vendée, a département in west-central France, was lined with portraits of all the French kings, the fireplace painted black in mourning for the royal family. Then starting with Loulou’s grandfather, they become progressively show biz. The glamour and money came from the Hennessys. They owned real estate all over Paris.

After his first win in 1900, Gabriel began traveling for the Olympics. Cheating on Henriette was easy. She took comfort in the attentions of a young officer, Count Antoine Hocquart de Turtot. Loulou’s father, Alain, was born in 1903. Of stronger stuff than Henriette was rarely a woman made. She founded the first home for young unwed mothers in France. Women of Henriette’s class didn’t do this sort of thing. She silenced her critics by receiving the Legion of Honor. She was an original. Loulou gets a lot from her grandmother. All in one year, 1910, Henriette suffered the death of a daughter for the third time; gave birth to a third son, Richard, the future Resistance leader; and buried Gabriel, clearing the way for marriage to Hocquart.

Gabriel had a country funeral at La Barre. A pillow at the foot of his casket displayed his decorations, the Order of the Lion and the Sun from the shah of Persia and the Military Cross from the king of Belgium. Henry, twelve, was a man now, his English uncle James told him. The cortège was made up of the wagon that carried the body, pulled by a victoria, followed by a file of broughams, six pairs of steers and the tenant farmers in black.

Loulou’s great-grandmother, Martha Hennessy (later Lady Douglas, of Oscar Wilde infamy), founder of the Harwood Stud, Hampshire, pictured with Gainsborough. The Triple Crown winner made her the first woman to capture a Derby in her own colors, in 1918. © Carlos Pérez de Jáuregui Hennessy. Courtesy of the holder.

Loulou’s alleged, official paternal grandfather, Le Captain Comte [Gabriel] de La Falaise, a three-time Olympic gold medal fencing champion, 1901. Despite the caption, he is almost certainly on the right.

RICHARD DE LA FALAISE To understand our family, read At God’s Pleasure by Jean d’Ormesson, about an ancient clan of conservative blue bloods tied to the land. For me, Henry is our bedrock. Seventeen years old in the Great War. Wounded in the Somme. Dunkirk in ’40, then an escaped prisoner. The Croix de Guerre. Class but no capital. He lived honorably.

Henry’s first job coming out of World War I was with Lloyd’s in Paris. Henriette held the purse strings and was not inclined to loosen them. By night, he squired Mistinguet and the Dolly Sisters, music-hall stars, waiting for his ship to come in. In 1924, Gloria Swanson arrived in France to film Madame Sans-Gêne. Henry Le Bailly de La Falaise, Marquis de La Coudraye, was presented to her as someone who could help with interpreting, a factotum. Henry’s title, baisemain, brilliantine, suede gloves, walking stick and the carnation in his lapel worked their magic. The only thing he lacked was an amber cigarette holder. Which Gloria bought him. Eighteen inches long.

Henry married the world’s highest-paid actress in a Paris town hall wedding. As they were planning it, Gloria learned she was pregnant. She hid the news from Henry and booked an abortion. Through no fault of his own, he scheduled the wedding for the day before the procedure. This was already Gloria’s second career-saving abortion. Whatever she may claim in her memoir, she seemed unfazed by it all, chatting with her new brother-in-law, Loulou’s father, at the wedding luncheon and spending the rest of the afternoon making the rounds of the couture houses. The abortion almost killed her. Henry only learned of it when Gloria was diagnosed with tetanus she’d contracted during the operation.

GEOFFROY GUERRY The newspapers questioned Henry’s title, saying it was made up by Gloria’s studio. To settle the matter, Henry and a much-put-out Gloria held a press conference in their Paris hotel suite. The papers bought their story.

In 1925, the year they married, The New York Times ran a story under the overheated headline MARQUIS DEFENDS RIGHT TO TITLE: Gloria Swanson’s Husband Says It Was Conferred by Queen of Poland in 1707. Henry laughed off the skeptics, claiming that his title was, in fact, Marquis de La Coudraye, bestowed on an ancestor, Baron de La Falaise, when he was ambassador to Rome by Marie Casimire, the widowed consort of John III Sobieski, king of Poland. In any case, there were dozens of estates whose names he might choose for his own, he said, but his patronymic was Le Bailly. Gloria played it like the great actress she was, as a theater piece, receiving reporters in a gold silk peignoir while professing to be greatly pained by an issue she wanted resolved once for all. As a matter of fact, she pointed out, she had never used the title for moneymaking ends: Hadn’t she forced movie houses to remove posters calling her a marquise?

Henry’s charm offensive worked as smoothly on Hollywood as it had on Gloria. Lillian Gish would never get over the image of him in a bathing suit. Henry was a model war hero, she said. Never had she seen a man so cut up.

GEOFFROY GUERRY Henry was on Gloria’s payroll until she caught the attention of Joe Kennedy, owner of Pathé studios. Kennedy took charge of Gloria’s crumbling finances—and of Gloria. To clear the field for their affair, Kennedy offered Henry, and Henry accepted, the job of running Pathé’s European operations in Paris.

None of this stopped Joe and Rose Kennedy and Henry and Gloria from socializing as couples. Rose found Henry maah-velous. Gloria took her dress shopping at Lelong. It’s unclear who cuckolded whom first. Kennedy asked Henry to woo Constance Bennett and acquire her for Pathé, which he did—also acquiring her for himself. For a second time, Henry found himself married to Hollywood’s top-earning star, though Constance was never known as the Marquise de La Falaise. Henry and Gloria had botched their French divorce. The title was blocked. Gloria was delighted.

Henry brought Alain to the States to work with him in the production company he’d formed with Constance. Before leaving Paris, Alain’s head had been turned. For a while, Bettina Shaw Jones, a wily and footloose Long Island socialite, couldn’t decide between him and Gaston Bergery. She married Bergery, the architect of Vichy France. In 1931, Alain took a bride, a twenty-three-year-old Philadelphia girl, Margot Webb. Margot married up. Before being crowned Miss Atlantic City 1927, she’d been clerking on the boardwalk. In New York, she was spotted by Jean Patou, who brought her to Paris to model for him, grumbling to the press when she deserted to wed Alain. Rating the chic of women two decades apart is usually a dead end, but moue for moue, Margot was Maxime’s equal. Until 1938, when Margot and Alain divorced, she appeared in Bergdorf Goodman ads, photographed by Horst, not as an anonymous model, but as the Countess de La Falaise. Alain was drawn to capricious, not to say flaky, women with a strong sense of entitlement. In 1941, Time reported that Margot was in night court after slapping the owner of La Rue restaurant in Manhattan because she was charged three dollars for a meal she said her bulldog Dukie was never