Inside a Pearl (22 page)

People in Europe liked to talk about American “puritanism,” by which they meant not only prudishness, but also distaste for luxury. The French liked clothes and interior decoration for their own sake, not as status symbols alone but also for the comfort and pleasure of contact with fine things. Americans, especially ones who fancied themselves intellectual like me, found it hard to believe in this obsession. A typical compliment, if one were nicely dressed with some care, was “
Comme tu est chic!
”—which always embarrassed an American. We wanted to look presentable, not
coquet
. We hoped to look respectable, not
séduisant
. We imagined our personalities consisted of our thoughts and words, not our looks, yet we paid a lot of attention to working out at the gym so we could gain bulk and definition, which would be apparent when we were undressed. Frenchmen wanted to look slender, since that made them ideal mannequins for hanging beautiful clothes on.

Working out was a form of discipline and virtue, changing our bodies or ourselves, but to the French staying slim was an art of civilization, a mere look rather than a fundamental identity. One was a way of adding muscled weight to the self, the other a way of subtracting weight and weakening the body. Whereas we Americans thought we were offstage in the wings as we walked the streets, entering onstage only as we stepped across the threshold into an office or a friend's apartment, a French man or woman was onstage the minute he or she left home. A woman would never wear gym shoes on the street, then step into her high heels the instant she went into her office, as women did in New York; a French woman had to look her best anywhere in public.

Nor did any of the Americans I knew like to follow the latest or most extravagant fashions. You'd often hear one American woman say to
another, “No one would wear that—it's ridiculous.” Younger French women
wanted
to cause comment, even court ridicule. I remember that in
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
, Alice is pleased the workmen are hooting at her small hat and Picasso's mistress's larger one: “Here come the sun and the moon!” the men joked. Alice saw the comments as proof their hats were a success. In my day older French women had figured out what showed them to advantage, and they stuck with that. Americans made the mistake of imagining that the outfit made the woman and that anyone wearing something beautiful would look good. French women knew how to suppress and benefit from their bodily peculiarities—how to deemphasize a fat ass or disguise a flat chest or thick waist. All things being equal, a French woman would like to look stylish, but not if the new styles emphasized her weak points.

The Sunday magazine of the
Times
in London asked me to write a piece about Yves Saint Laurent. In those pre-Google, pre-Wikipedia days it was more difficult to research someone, even someone as celebrated as YSL. I was given an appointment (or
rendezvous
, as the French say routinely, not knowing that the word in English always suggests a romantic meeting) at his avenue Montaigne headquarters. I was shown into the study of the great man. He seemed to be heavily doped, probably high on the tranquilizers to which he was said to be addicted.

YSL had been discovered by Michel de Brunhoff, editor of French
Vogue
and a relative of Laurent's. Brunhoff had introduced the young YSL to Christian Dior, because the young man had done designs resembling those of the master and Brunhoff had seen the newest designs of both men the same day and there was no way YSL could have copied Dior's. At first the young man was a huge success, becoming head designer for the Dior company when the master died, but then he had a bad year: he was conscripted into the army, Dior fired him, and he had a breakdown and was administered electroshock and tranquilizers—which began his addiction. His lover Pierre Bergé sued Dior for breach of contract and won. With the settlement they opened their own couture house and it was an immediate success.

He continued to put out great collections season after season—both haute couture and ready-to-wear, fall and spring—but he began to
appear so bewildered during the
defilés
that the models sometimes had to lead him off the catwalk.

YSL was known for his fresh and shocking color sense and for his “world” fashions—drawing on every ethnic tradition. He was the first designer to use black or Asian models. He was the first to popularize women in tuxes (a tux in French is called
un smoking
).

Here he was in front of me. Being interviewed was obviously a torture for him—
une supplice.
He didn't exactly answer long questions with a “yes” or “no,” but I felt he wanted to. He of course was beautifully dressed. I was tired of reading interviews in which the interviewer never mentioned his own problems, so I brought up my own past alcoholism (and spoke of it in my article), but my candor was not rewarded. I wondered how long he could go on, and I wasn't surprised when he retired in 1990.

Later I was asked to write an article about his Russian-style dacha, on the grounds of his large house near Deauville, the Château Gabriel. The dacha was full of bric-a-brac, designer-bought mementos (photos, icons, furniture) from someone else's past, not his; nor was YSL present.

After his death, everything from his Paris apartment and the Château Gabriel would be auctioned off in a spectacular sale. His lover and business partner, Pierre Bergé, was impatient with Saint Laurent when I interviewed him—“I complained he never read anything and so, guess what, he reread
Proust!
” he said with great exasperation—but after his death Bergé wrote a beautiful homage to him,
Letter to Yves
, which he sent me and asked me to translate, though I turned him down (I don't know how to translate). Yet years later when I asked him to help subsidize the translation of Claude Arnaud's biography of Cocteau (Bergé was the head of the Cocteau society), he immediately agreed. During his years with YSL, Bergé had made no secret of having outside affairs, and he was the owner of the trendy gay magazine
Tetû.
After an early affair with the kitschy painter Bernard Buffet (who'd left him for a woman), he had shared his life with a great force of nature, and he never forgot that privilege, exasperating as YSL could be.

Christian Lacroix was the last couturier
Vanity Fair
sent me to interview. An editor, Marie-Paule Pélé, drove me to Arles, where Lacroix
was renting a villa, perhaps in order to lend credibility to his first collection, which derived its motifs from bright Arlesienne patterns. I was skeptical about his reputation as a heterosexual (at last, a couturier who loved women—as if the others didn't), and I was curious to meet him. As it turned out he was a soft-spoken art historian born in Arles who'd married his wife, Françoise, in 1974. In the walled garden of their villa they were attended by two young brothers from Champagne who were kept in the nude. Not that I mentioned that.

My article swooned over his heterosexuality and his courage in launching the first major Parisian house of couture in years. (His business is now closed, having never turned a profit. He turned to costume design; the theater had been his first love.) I remember seeing various ladies around Paris wearing that first collection with its loud colors and embarrassingly short, bouncy skirts that made it difficult for a woman to get into a car.

When Gaby Van Zuylen, an American and the sister-in-law of the Baron Guy de Rothschild, came out of her luxurious building on the avenue Foch, a
poule de luxe
(high-priced prostitute) huddling in the doorway timidly asked her where she'd bought her dress.

Gaby proudly said, “It's a Christian Lacroix original.”

The next day the woman was wearing one of her own.

(I once asked a taxi driver how much it cost to buy a
poule de luxe.
He said he was much too handsome to need to pay—“Nor would you, with your charming accent,” he said. “Anyway, you can seduce a woman seventy percent of the time if you can make her laugh. You must make women laugh.”)

On our way to Arles in a jeep Marie-Paule had rented, we stopped to see some interesting Americans she'd been told about. We rang the bell at the gate and were greeted by a handsome, distinguished man who spoke French and English falteringly. We were kept waiting a moment then were led into the courtyard where the amplified strains of the
Don Giovanni
overture were playing. At last a chubby woman tightly laced into eighteenth-century robes slowly descended the outside stairs, wrapped like a package in yellow silk ribbon. Her husband, outfitted with silk stockings and a silver cane, simultaneously
issued forth from the salon doors—and soon enough we'd learned their story. The couple were antique dealers from San Francisco who liked living in a make-believe century. They gave us a tour of the estate, where life-size nineteenth-century dolls with porcelain heads dressed in nineteenth-century clothes sat on every available chair, dozens of them.

The same distinguished man who'd answered the door then served us tea, with his wife assisting. We asked our hosts who these elegant servants were. The chubby wife, clawing at her silk ribbon, said impatiently, her words in character for a period novel, “All our visitors ask us about them. If you must know, they're a penniless Spanish duke and duchess; they wait on us the two weeks a year we're here and then they have the run of the place the rest of the year. The neighbors have told us they entertain heavily.”

Each time I left Bernard Minoret's on the rue de Beaune, I'd walk home. I'd go past my favorite building, the Académie Française, with its Italianate cupola (to join the academy is “to be received under the cupola”). The only part of the academy I had ever visited was the library, an astonishing seventeenth-century interior built by Mazarin.

I'd known two or three members of the academy. Through Bernard I'd met Jean-Louis Curtis, a postwar novelist who adopted an American-sounding pen name and also became the pet academician of the American millionaire Seward Johnson, the sculptor, and his novelist wife, Cecilia. A more colorful academician, who was a friend of Diane Johnson, was Jean Dutourd, the author of
The Horrors of Love
. Diane had met his scatterbrained, nearly demented wife one day when she, Diane, was apartment hunting. The empty apartment and theirs were on the same landing. Diane could see that Madame Dutourd was very lonely and she felt sorry for her. When Diane discovered her husband was an academician and a fine novelist (whose reputation was on the wane because he was a right winger), she invited them to dinner. The wife made screwball comments and the husband would growl. He had published more than thirty books—including
The Horrors of Love
, which I'd read in America because a friend of mine wanted to make a movie out of it. It was a very long novel about two worldly men strolling through Paris one afternoon talking about love.

I asked Dutourd over dinner what the academicians actually did besides wearing their pretty historical uniforms and swords at
ceremonies, and he replied that they worked constantly on their dictionary. They were up to the letter C.

“What will happen when you finish it?”

“We'll print it and start all over again.”

“How many copies do you sell?”

“About five thousand.”

“Would you say your dictionary is descriptive or prescriptive? That is, do you describe how people actually talk or do you tell them how they should talk?”

“Of course we tell them how they should talk. We set the rules.”

“What if they don't do what you tell them?”

“We fine them. In fact we monitor all broadcasts and publications for irregular usages or foreign words or inadmissible back formations, and then we fine the culprits.”

“What else do you do?”

“We elect new immortals and give literary prizes.”

(Members of the academy are called immortals.)

“Do you have any special perks?”

“The right to put on a title page that the author is an academician. They have several nice apartments in their gift, and of course there is the use of the Bibliothèque Mazarine.”

I wanted to see the main assembly hall with its cupola. I knew that one day a year, all the locked doors in Paris were thrown open so that one could visit every secret place or exclusive establishment. One winter day Raymond Carver, wearing a leather jacket, and I had our picture taken in front of the Academy, knowing that we would never get any closer during his stay.

Once I met the young heir to Arthus-Bertrand, the jeweler on the square in front of the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and next door to the café Les Deux Magots. He told me that all the future academicians had to choose their swords, but if they selected diamonds and their friends, who sponsored their ceremonial regalia, were cheap, it was his duty to steer them diplomatically toward the zircons. Sometimes an academician was especially well loved. When oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, for instance, was invited to “pass under the cupola,” his
admirers all over the world put together a coffer to pay for his custom-made sword of glass waves in crystal. When Pierre Nora, the historian and companion of Gaby van Zuylan, became an academician he named his sword “Gabrielle” in her honor.

My translator Marc Cholodenko said that the academy had decided once to induct a writer of real talent, but it hadn't worked out and they never tried that again. They went back to the usual art historians, auctioneers, scientists, bankers and so on—cronies. Every businessman and lawyer in France has written a book and wants to be considered a writer, which means that in theory at least every businessman and lawyer and politician who deigns to pick up a pen and call himself a writer is eligible to join the academy.

Of course, the French are masters at lighting their own monuments—lights that not only illuminate the mass of imposing buildings but also excavate and articulate their ornamentations. On my walks home from Bernard's, I was conscious that this was a “miracle mile” of beautiful buildings reeling against usually stormy skies filled with big, shifting clouds. I walked across the wood-planked pedestrian bridge, the pont des Arts, which connected the Academie Française in the Palais de l'Institut with the Louvre—specifically its oldest part, the ravishing Cour Carrée. Then I'd saunter down the Right Bank, past the church of Saint-Gervais across from the Île de la Cité, with its lit statue of Henri IV, and the medieval-turreted Conciergerie, where Marie Antoinette was imprisoned just before she was beheaded.