Maxime de la Falaise led a life that was, as WWD wrote on July 22, 1976, “an extroverted zigzag from an English, Irish and French childhood” to modeling and design stints at Schiaparelli, Givenchy, Jacques Fath, Michael Sekers and Blousecraft to writing about food for Vogue. There were her friendships with Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Bob Rauschenberg, her love affair with painter Bernard Pfriem and her starring turn in the 1974 film “Andy Warhol’s Dracula” as la Marchesa di Fiore. “That’s not the half of it,” reminded the paper. “Maxime has partied herself around the world, from hysterical post-war carrying-ons in Europe to equally lively after-hours trips to New York’s under-underground dance palaces.”
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When WWD caught up with the multihyphenate personality, she was tucked quietly into a cinnamon velvet couch at her daughter Loulou de la Falaise’s Paris apartment. The subject at hand? New York. “I think I enjoy myself more in New York,” she said. “The atmosphere is a little more ‘up.’ In Paris, I feel a slight depression when I arrive.” Which isn’t to say her Manhattan home on the Upper West Side was in the most luxurious of locales. “I’m happier in neighborhoods that aren’t really the place to live,” she continued. “In New York, I’m three blocks away from 94th Street — it’s the sort of street where black pimps pimp for second-class drag queens. There are drunks and the OTB. I don’t think we have a methadone clinic though.”
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Family ranked high for de la Falaise, especially daughter Loulou. “If she weren’t my daughter she would probably still be my closest friend,” she remarked, adding that “since she has worked with Yves Saint Laurent, she has learned things about taste. Her father and I are very proud of her.”
As for her own style, “[de la Falaise] has clothed her public self in everything from all-out extravaganza Givenchy gowns, ‘held together with safety pins,’ to the zenith of Bohemian chic,” noted WWD. “She is usually braceleted, earringed, necklaced, ringed and scarved to the hilt. It usually works.” The daughter of Sir Oswald Birley and Lady Rhoda Birley even admitted to sometimes borrowing the same couture looks as Françoise de la Renta. “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 time,” de la Falaise recalled. “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 — cigarets, wine, you know.”