16 September, 2008

Marie-Hélène ... de Rothschild

PARIS: If the job were on offer, the ad might read like this:Supremeorganizer with wacky imagination, charm, substantial private means - preference to titled applicants.

But La Baronne de Rothschild - Marie-Hélène, as she is universally known - is not about to relinquish her role as the most influential mover, shaker and fixer in the social universe, even taking into account the redoubtable Brooke Astor.

At the soirée she gave last week in Paris, the baronne proved a far bigger draw than the queen of England, who had been on a four-day state visit to France. Those paying homage to the slight figure in black and white lace at the bottom of the grand staircase at the Opéra-Comique included royalty and aristocrats - the former Empress Farah of Iran, Prince and Princess Michel of Greece, Princess Michael of Kent and too many counts to count; the politicos - Edouard Balladur, the ex-finance minister, and Bernadette Chirac, the Paris mayor's wife and the baronne's confidante; intellectuals such as her pet philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, and artists from Claude and François Xavier Lalanne to the high-profile decorator Jacques Grange. Only Foreign Minister Roland Dumas failed to show.

Then there were the international socialites who had come to see the brief Rossini operetta and eat dinner in an Italianate setting of verdant topiary tracing gilded arches, trails of ivy round the painted ceiling, drapes from peach through nectarine fluttering at the windows, and table-settings of miniature cypresses clustered round a pond in which swam real goldfish. As the couturier Marc Bohan says: Marie-Hélène has "le sens de la fête," or knows how to give a party.

"She is the genius - the catalyst who makes us all come," said a Saint-Laurent-clad Nan Kempner, who had flown over from New York.

"And she's very brave to do it - it's not easy for any theater," said Lacroix-dressed Marina de Brantes, whose own Rossini event the previous evening at the Palais Garnier had been called off because of a strike.

"She is outstanding, everything is perfection," said São Schlumberger, whose Paris home offers mild rivalry to Marie-Hélène's salon at the Hôtel Lambert on the Ile Saint-Louis. Like her hostess, Schlumberger was wearing a vintage black Givenchy - with rubies once owned by the Duchess of Windsor to Marie-Hélène's turquoise and diamonds.

Yet another Givenchy dress was worn by Lynn Wyatt, who summed up the mood of the evening."I came just for this all the way from Texas - and I knew it would be worth every mile," she said.

Baron Guy de Rothschild claims that it is ridiculous to call his wife the social queen of Paris. But how else to describe the role that Marie-Hélène has played on the social stage since she married into the famous family in 1957 and became, in her husband's words, "more Rothschild than me"?

"I was very young - the youngest of the Rothschilds, I wanted to learn and I opened my eyes wide," said the baronne over a quiet dinner at Ferrières, in the modest chalet - but still decorated with sumptuous coziness - looking out on an ornamental pond. This country pad was built by Baron Guy in the woods surrounding the Château of Ferrières, his childhood home, which was turned over to the state in 1975.Marie-Hélène had brought the château magnificently back to life after the German occupation and held the first of her famous balls in 1959, when the Sleeping Beauty of a castle was covered in silvery spiderwebs and a ghostly galleon floated on the lake.

"It will never happen again - it's a different time," she says of those costume parties - to celebrate the centenary of Marcel Proust in 1971 and the following year the Surrealist ball with its mink-covered plates, its table settings inspired by de Chirico, Magritte and Dalí - who arrived at the ball in a wheelchair.

"It's a very healthy thing to give parties, don't you think?" she inquires. "But people don't know how to dress any more - it breaks my heart. People have even lost the taste for perfumes. Nothing is done now for good taste or for the beauty of things, but to appeal to people's lowest instincts."

Each party is envisaged with the help of her good friends Comte Etienne de Monpezat and the Baron Alexis de Redé, tenant of the Hôtel Lambert before the Rothschilds took over in 1975. Marie-Hélène describes de Redé's Bal Oriental of 1969 as the role model - and the one she enjoyed the most "because I didn't do it."

Her "magic circle" - which includes Gregory Peck and his wife Véronique, Rudolf Nureyev and Elizabeth Taylor, especially when she was with Richard Burton - now party at the Hôtel Lambert. Dinner in the Labors of Hercules gallery under Le Brun's painted ceiling means buffets piled with a sophisticated mix of lobster and pasta, caviar with potatoes or the baked potatoes with truffles that "everyone talked about for weeks." When the party is reduced like a fine sauce to 6 or 10, the hostess's "ball of anxiety" finally unwinds.

"I have terrible stage fright," she admits. "I enjoy myself from three in the morning."

A party starts, she says, with the invitation, which is designed "to inspire people." For the Opéra-Comique, that meant scouring the Bibliothèque Nationale for an engraving of Rossini receiving an ovation and for the musical scores decorating the dinner menu. For the Surrealist ball, the invitation was printed back to front on a backdrop of Magritte clouds so that it had to be deciphered with a mirror. The next step is to plan an arresting entrance: an Alice-through-the-looking-glass mirror and white-rabbit-costumed servants at the Hôtel Lambert for the 1987 Bal des Fées for her 18-year-old niece Vanessa; Ferrières glowing fiery red for the Surrealist ball.

"She busies herself with every smallest detail - everything has been thought about," says Henry Racamier,one of the small group of Friends of the Opéra-Comique trying to restore the bijou theater to its baroque glory. Friday's soirée was executed by the party planner Pierre Celeyron, as her parties are now since the death of her faithful designer Jean-François Daigre. It included cooking the dinner of feuilleté of truffled salmon and spicy rabbit in the Rothschild kitchens and busing it across Paris. It should bring 1.5 million francs (about $280,000) for the cause.

Her dogged determination brings grudging admiration even from those who have caught a rougher edge - the hairdresser whose rollers were flung to the floor when his coiffure failed to please; the guest who found herself banned from the photographic studio at the Bal des Fées because the photographer was "tired" (the baronne wanted to pick the prettiest and best-dressed guests and not to waste money on duds). Others speak of being badgered, even harangued by telephone calls up to the early hours of the morning by this creature of the night.

What nobody disputes is her Mother Courage attitude to a debilitating illness - believed to be a complex form of arteriosclerosis - which she does not discuss but which often confines her to bed in her private apartment at the top of the Hôtel Lambert, where a maid in white gloves feeds her pills. Her hands are gnarled and knotted like old trees.

"Just the fact that she goes on wearing rings on those hands - what a will!" says an acquaintance who sees her out in Paris with a coat flung over her nightdress when she has struggled from her sick bed. A friend watched her sitting at an Yves Saint Laurent couture show gasping for breath. The baronne no longer counts the champagne socialist Pierre Bergé, Saint Laurent's partner, as a best friend to invite to her December birthday party (when the highlight is the present she offers "de moi à moi" - to herself). She remains good friends with Yves Saint Laurent and with his protégés the Lalannes.

"I like artists, I don't like conventional people," says the baronne, although a critic accuses her of being interested in art only to create a ritzy Rothschild setting, and of "playing at being Marie-Laure de Noailles."That refers to the salon in the 1930s and '40s held by the Vicomte de Noailles and his wife, who were patrons of Cocteau and Dalí.

The baronne's persnickety perfectionism can seem ridiculous: scrambled eggs for 400 re-made because they weren't the requisite buttercup yellow; or the hanging-gardens of catleyasto recreate the world of Odette de Crécy. Yet she could genuinely claim to have re-invented for her own era with wit and style a tradition that goes back at least to the Proustian salons of 19th-century Paris. The writer Françoise Sagan once described Marie-Hélène's "blonde, pink and blue side that Proust attributed to the Guermantes."All her regular guests talk of an extraordinary ability to mix people, weaving the political with the social. They speak, too, of her endearing enthusiasm coupled with a steely will.

"The mixture of fragility - the vulnerability of a child and the force of a woman of conviction," says Etienne de Monpezat.

THERE is something else that distinguishes Marie-Hélène from eager New World society hostesses like Susan Gutfreund (a friend and protégée of the Rothchilds) or the stuffy courtesies of Europe's old money set.

"A sense of quality?" says Baron Guy, trying to define the instincts of his wife, brought up by an exotic Egyptian mother who married a member of the Dutch Van Zuylen family.

"I want to create beauty, I want to convince people, to open their eyes, to help people who don't know how to dress," says the baronne. "I have got a good eye. And I was trained by Chanel. Coco was a friend of my mother and I went and sat on the floor and watched her work. 'Hide those armpits, they are hideous!' she would say. She had a wonderful sense of proportion." That couture sense of harmony, proportion and perspective is brought to the parties.

In the albums at Ferrières are the photographs - many taken by Cecil Beaton - of transient moments seared into the memory of guests. Here is Audrey Hepburn at the Surrealist ball with her gamine face trapped inside a Magritte bird-cage; Marie-Hélène in an aquamarine Saint Laurent dress wearing a stag's head with diamond tears dripping from its eyes; Alexis de Redé in a Mona Lisa mask inset with portraits of Marie-Hélène.

"There is never the same magic when you see it again in pictures or on cassette,"says de Redé. "It has to be part of a dream."

Who could take up the flame in a new generation where women go for career status rather than social clout? Few aspiring socialites have both the ambition and the means. Parisians suggest Béatrice, the Italian-born wife of Eric de Rothschild. Marie-Hélène does not believe that her children will take over "not as long as I am there - I am sure they will afterwards."

She would be a hard act to follow. She may indeed turn out to be the last of a grand line.


by Suzy Menkes JUNE 16, 1992