"I picked up Princess Ghislaine de Polignac, who had arranged for me to lunch with the Baron de Redé, a famous French society figure I had read about in Aileen Mehle’s “Suzy” columns for years. His apartment is in the Hôtel Lambert, which is owned by Baron Guy de Rothschild, whose late wife, Marie-Hélène, was Alexis de Redé’s greatest friend. “I used to live right up in that apartment there,” said Ghislaine de Polignac, pointing, as we walked across the cobblestone courtyard to the entrance.It was like stepping into a chapter in Proust. The butler opened the door. The dog yapped. The baron kissed the princess. The princess kissed the baron. They spoke in French, then switched to English. It occurred to me that all the people I had been meeting with had known one another for 40 years or more. I told our host that Princess d’Arenberg had sent her best. He smiled. The baron, who was himself a giver of balls—“I had stairs built from those French doors down to the garden for les entrées,” he said—was charming and easy as he walked through salons, pointing toward the chairs where we would sit. I sat in a chair that I swear to God was silver. Not silver paint—silver silver, with red brocade upholstery. Everything was beautiful, wherever you looked. The lunch was superb, served by the butler in white gloves. My companions waved away seconds without even looking.
By now I realized that everyone remembered Beistegui the same way. He was a great decorator, but he wasn’t nice. He had many mistresses, and he wasn’t very kind to them. But the ball in Venice was brilliant. The Baron de Redé had been part of the Chinese suite of Arturo and Patricia Lopez-Willshaw.
“Would you like to see some photographs?” asked the baron. We went up a stairway to a long corridor with hundreds of red-framed photographs on each wall, depicting a way of life of utter splendor: beautiful people on yachts, at the races, dancing, wearing masks, going to balls, laughing. Walking ahead of me, he would point to a photograph of people on a yacht and say, “Ari and Maria,” assuming I knew he meant Aristotle Onassis and Maria Callas. Or “Wallis,” or “Winston,” meaning the Duchess of Windsor and Winston Churchill.
“This is a very famous photograph—André Ostier took it,” said the baron, stopping in front of a picture of Jacqueline de Ribes standing between Carlos de Beistegui and Raymundo de Larrain. “Charlie hated Raymundo. Look at the look on his face. Have you talked to Jacqueline?”
“She’s in Ibiza...”"
by Christopher Simon Sykes
