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The Château was purchased in 1938-39 by the French aesthete Carlos de Beistegui, who enlarged it, with the professional help of Emilio Terry. Cecil Beaton's inspiration for Henry Higgins' library in My Fair Lady was the library at Groussay.
Beistegui created new gardens, inspired by the Anglo-Chinese gardens of the 18th century and by an 18th-century copper tent in the royal gardens of Drottningholm Palace in Sweden. They feature a Chinese pagoda, a labyrinth, a theater of verdure, a Tartar tent, and other follies. The Gardens are classified by the French government as one of the Remarkable Gardens of France.
After Beistegui's death in 1970, the Château passed to his brother, and then his nephew, who sold it in 1999, realizing $26.5 million for the contents alone, many of which had come from another of Carlos de Beistegui's homes, the Palazzo Labia in Venice. In 2012, it was sold again and the owner is Rubis International managed by Bekhzod Akhmedov.
The château and park of Groussay appeared in Marc Allégret's last film Le Bal du comte d'Orgel (1970).
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| Photograph by Cecil Beaton |
The Chateau de Groussay was built in 1815 for the Duchesse of Charost, the daughter of Madame de Tourzel, the governess of the children of King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. Brought in 1938 by Charles de Beistegui, inspired eshete, Groussay was expanded in 1952, when two wings were added, one leading to the theatre, and the "Folies" were devised by collaborating artists Emilio Terry et Alexandre Serebriakoff and architects Desbrosses et Costi. The transformation of the Chateau and the creation of the "stone monuments" were carried on until the death of Charles de Beistegui in 1970. The entire Chateau and park has been classified as a "Historic Monument" since 1993.
The History of Charles de Beistegui :
Charles de Beistegui born in 1895, into a family of Basque origin, emigrated to Mexique in the 19th century, when it made a fortune in silver mines. Carlos of his Christian name, or also known as "Charlie" to his friends, Beistegui studied at Eton college in England, a country whose taste and lifestyle influenced him alot. As a young man he began a tour with his brother of the world during several years, which lead him across Europe, but also in India where he lent a wagon loaned by the Viceroy, and China where he brought back collections of poems illustrated from his hand.
His uncle who died in 1953, brought together a large collection of master paintings and he bequeathed a portion at the Louvre Museum, giving his name to one of the galleries in the famous institution. Elegant and aloof, his eyes deep blue, permanent guest of a cosomopolitan society, vouageant from Londres to Madrid passing by Ireland and Veince, he inherits a mansion that his parents owned in Paris, Rue Constantine. Asecthetic inspiration, a lover of poetry, and passionate, to the point of losing his fortune, through the creation and development of places that will shape his legend, along with the design of a bold taste neoclassical and baroque baptised in the world "taste Beistegui".
In the thirties, influnced by his friends Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles, that control Mallet-Stevens a Cubist villa in Hyéres, he sacrificed to modernity and does not hesitate to ask Le Corbusier, at the dawn of a promising career, in his instructions to design a highly dirigiste futuristic apartment on the Champs- Elysees. A white spiral staircaise, a patio lined with grass and decorated with a rock fireplace, furnished with Louis XV furniture, Beisteguil combines modermism of Le Corbusier with its surreal taste already, all the windows overlooking the Champs-Elysees operate electrically. He manages to create in spite of tense negotiations with Le Corbusier, a medley strange and original. The core of friends is the writer Jacques de Lacretelle, Noailles, Salvador Dali, Nathalie Paley. Photographer Cecil Beaton in her memoirs that has seen anything more extravagant for Louis II of Bavaria. But Charles de Beistegui do not flirt with the long contemporary architects. He dreams of a place available to build a hymn to neo classicism revisited until his death to be his trademark.
beistegui en gondoleIn 1938, Jacques de Lacretelle, who owned a house in Montfort l'Amaury in the "Yvelines", an historic village 45kms from Paris (sung by Victor Hugo, inhabitied by Maurice Ravel, frequented by Colette, Paul Morand and others) advised that the Chateau de Groussay was for sale. Former estate of the Duchesse of Charost, daughter of Madame de Tourzel, governess to the children of King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, Groussay, surrounded by a park of thirty acres , surrounded by walls, resembles a country house from the early nineteenth century. The building is not yet listed a " Historic Monument" and Charles de Beistegui appreciates the freedom that he would use to radically transform the Chateau, extended by two wings, one theatre and a ballroom called "Dutch Room".
During the second world war, when things do not seem to have been taken over his projects, he began a series of works that collosale non stop until his death in 1970. He modifies the interiors of the Chateau dramatically creating a monumental mahogany library, a gallery dressed in unique designed tapestries from cartoons in Goya in the Prado Museum in Madrid, a dresser inspired Riesener library, a gallery which marry the style of Louis XII and Dutch chandeliers, a 240 seated theatre decorated with flamboyantes fabrics and Murano chandeliers, not to mention the guests room, where the English fabrics compete with the colours of carpert ivy leaves straight out of his imagination teeming. It was not stamped furniture and masterpiece paintings that interested Beistegui,even if he possesses exceptional ones, but rather the unexpected mix of Russian offices of Roentgen, empire beds, Louis XV armcharis and pans from Austria. He would prefer the effet, the trompe l'oeil, the great theatrical decor sometimes boring to the authenticity of French Castles. Its against the current he decided to line the windows of the "Dutch Room" Delftware blue and white, to blend the green and blue, to cover the chairs of the librarywith white cotton and create medaillons embedded in the mahogany doors, containing only false medals with plaster historic profiles...
All That Glittered
Mexican silver-mining heir Charlie de Beistegui was perhaps the greatest party giver this century has known, and his 1951 costume ball at the Labia Palace in Venice—attended by the Aga Khan, Gene Tierney, and Jacqueline de Ribes, among others—made social history. As Sotheby’s readies Beistegui’s magnificent Château de Groussay, near Paris, to go on sale for $10 million, the author penetrates the heart of French society, visiting barons, countesses, and princesses, for a portrait of a master of illusion who created a world of utter splendor.
BY DOMINICK DUNNE
AUGUST 1998
It was not my first visit to the Château de Groussay, a magnificent stage set of a château which was the artistic creation of the elegant, theatrical Carlos de Beistegui, scion of a grand Hispano-Mexican [#image: /photos/54cbfcfc2cba652122d92be3]family who chose to live in France although their fortune came mainly from silver mines in Mexico discovered at the beginning of the 19th century. In October 1997, during a visit to Paris to attend a wedding, I was taken to the château quite by chance, in a sort of sneak preview, by Mrs. Alfred Taubman, the wife of the chairman of Sotheby’s, the auction house, on the day it was announced to a select group of journalists that the famed Château de Groussay—scene of some of the grandest weekend parties of this century—was going to be sold.
The château, which is an hour’s drive from Paris, has an impressive history. It was built in 1815 for the Duchess of Charost and subsequently modified during the Second Empire by a Russian princess. The day we visited was rainy and cloaked in mystery. We went in buses, not knowing our destination until we got there, so secret had been the negotiations between Sotheby’s and Juan de Beistegui, the nephew and accidental heir of Carlos. The elder Beistegui, who never married, bought the 74-acre walled estate in 1939 and proceeded to enhance it by adding wings to the house and building follies. He died in 1970 at the age of 74, without a will. His brother didn’t want the château, so it went to the brother’s son, Juan, who is said to have disliked his uncle and to have never invited any of his uncle’s friends to the château after he inherited it. Juan de Beistegui, known as Johnny, had married a daughter of the Duc de Rohan—a union that greatly pleased his socially conscious uncle—and spent weekends with his six children at Groussay in a family atmosphere, very different from the milieu of the pleasure-bent court that had always surrounded Carlos, who was called Charlie by his friends. Juan, now in his early 60s, had recently married off his last daughter at the château and was ready to move on with his wife to smaller quarters in a house in the nearby village of Montfort-L’Amaury, after each of his children had declined to take over the showplace, with all the incumbent responsibilities of ownership.
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No amount of bad weather could diminish my initial excitement over that wonderful house. Rarely have the sensations of “grand” and “cozy” been so artfully united. The place was a masterpiece of comfort, inviting you to linger in each room, sit in all the chairs, and stare at the pictures on the walls, hung one above the other from floor to ceiling. The famous two-story library, with its twin spiral staircases and thousands of leather-bound books, has been often photographed and even copied. I looked through Carlos de Beistegui’s scrapbooks and albums, which depict a life of pleasure on an exquisite level. No mere party giver, he was the producer of brilliant social events, works of art with themes, and he had the money to carry them out to the last expensive detail. Sitting in a red damask box in the 150-seat theater, which had been inspired by the Margravine Opera House in Bayreuth and which Beistegui had built in a wing he added to the château, I could easily imagine the 18th-century experience he provided for his bejeweled and bemedaled guests as they watched a play or listened to a concert there. On the opening night of the theater, he presented a play in which the actors onstage portrayed guests in the audience.
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Later, with umbrellas provided by Sotheby’s, we walked through the gardens and looked at the seven follies, including an outdoor theater, which Beistegui had designed in collaboration with society architect Emilio Terry. The opening of each had been an occasion for a festive event.
“How much is it?” I asked the Princess de Beauvau Craon, the deputy chairman of Sotheby’s in Europe.
“Ten million,” she replied, meaning dollars, not francs.
“Furnished?”
“Oh, no. The furniture will be sold separately, although certain pieces designed for specific places will stay with the house.”
When I returned to Groussay seven months later, it didn’t have quite the same hold on me. It was no longer lived in. Change was in the air. There were no flowers in the vases. Framed family photographs had been taken away. Some pieces of furniture had been removed by the family to their new house in the village. Everything—every piece of furniture, every picture, every object—was tagged with a lot number in preparation for the auction. Even in the guest lavatory beneath the double mahogany stairway in the entrance hall, there were tags on the silver hand mirror and brush on the dressing table. In the entrance to the theater, a video crew had set up lights so that they could shoot every object in the rooms, one by one. It was a bit like viewing a corpse in a casket after the soul has left the body.
Johnny de Beistegui remembered me from my previous visit. We began our house tour in a blue salon off the library. He was affable, full of stories, and very eager to have the sale over and done with so that he could resume a normal life. “The video people and the photographer always say they will put everything back where it was, but they never do, or they don’t put it back correctly,” he said, closing the door of a cabinet holding porcelain bowls and tureens. He said that the house and grounds had been in a terrible state when he took over. His uncle had suffered a stroke 10 years before he died and ceased to notice things he had once been meticulous about. “What wasn’t seen didn’t matter,” Johnny said.
He talked about his uncle as if he had been someone he had read about rather than been related to: “My uncle was very cosmopolitan. He was brought up in Spain and France and England. He was educated in England. He never lived in Mexico. He went there only twice in his life. He was European completely. During the war, Groussay was an oasis. Guests came. There was good food. The château was warm. It was heated with stoves.… It amused my uncle to build something. He used it for the opening. Then he lost interest. There were two parties for the opening of the theater. First was for the ambassadors, et cetera. The second was for his friends.”
We looked at a portrait of Henry VIII in the dining room. “Lord Brocket sold it to him. My uncle had his pictures made bigger or smaller to fit the frames.”
At one point Madame de Beistegui came in, wearing rubber boots. She was pleasant but distant. She is the sister of the current Duc de Rohan, I was told later. I had the impression she was sick to death of people like me traipsing through her château, asking questions and taking pictures. There was a garden club from Brittany outside that day, which she was taking through her gardens, and she wanted to know if Johnny was going to be able to have lunch with them. He declined. “My children didn’t wish to go on with the house,” he said, “so I decided to sell.”
It is not possible to have a conversation about Charlie de Beistegui without some mention of his 1951 ball at the Labia Palace in Venice, which he had bought in 1948 and restored and refurbished with priceless antiques and tapestries. After his stroke, he sold the palace and disposed of the contents. His Venice ball stands in social history as one of the—if not the—most famous balls of the 20th century. “It was the first big party after the war,” Johnny told me. “The invitations went out six months before for people to have time to get ready. They had to have their costumes made. To get to Venice in 1951 was not like today. There was still gas rationing. The boat and train to Venice took five days. People had to prepare les entrées,” he said, referring to the guests’ elaborate entrances into the ball. “They rehearsed for days before.”
The guests arrived from the wide canal that flows into the Grand Canal, where the waiting crowd cheered them. The great collector and party giver Arturo Lopez-Willshaw, costumed as the emperor of China, and his wife, Patricia, disembarked with their retinue from a Chinese junk. The couturier Jacques Fath, dressed as the Sun King, had to remain standing in his gondola because “his posture [was] dictated by a costume so perfectly fitted and heavy with embroidery that he could not sit,” wrote Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge in his book Legendary Parties. Lady Diana Cooper, famed English beauty and wife of the former British ambassador to France, made her entrée as Cleopatra. Receiving his guests at the top of a giant staircase, Beistegui was a conspicuous presence in an 18th-century sausage-curl wig and platform buskins which elevated him two feet above everyone else, so that he could see and be seen on the night that was probably the most important night of his life. Everyone from the Aga Khan to the actress Gene Tierney, at the peak of her Hollywood career, was there. The stunning event was photographed by Cecil Beaton for Vogue.
“The ball was the beginning of mass media,” Juan de Beistegui said. “No one realized what the media could do until that time.”
I saw a crack in a wall on our tour. I touched it. It wasn’t real.
“This is a house of illusion,” he said. “Even the cracks in the walls are painted on.”
‘Is there anyone still around who knew Carlos de Beistegui?” I asked Rod Coupe, an American expatriate who has lived in France for more than 40 years, during dinner at the Ritz. I wanted to learn something more about the personal life of the man who had created so much fantasy. There turned out to be quite a lot of people still around who had been guests at Groussay as well as at the ball in Venice. Call Nelson Seabra. Call Ghislaine de Polignac. Call Gaby d’Arenberg. Call Alexis de Redé. Call Hélène Rochas. These were the enduring names of Paris society, written about in the columns for years.
“The one you have to talk to is Jacqueline de Ribes,” said several Parisians of high rank. The Countess de Ribes has been a mainstay of both French and international society for decades—written about, photographed, talked about. She is the quintessential society celebrity. I met her at the wedding of the actress-model Marisa Berenson and businessman James Randall in Beverly Hills in 1976. Later I interviewed her for an article for this magazine on the questionably titled Marquis Raymundo de Larrain, a Chilean protégé of the Marquis de Cuevas, the impresario of the Ballet de Monte Carlo, who later, after de Cuevas’s death, married his very rich widow, the Rockefeller heiress Margaret de Cuevas, 38 years his senior, to whom he gave a wheelchair and new teeth for their wedding while making off with her $30 million fortune.
“Jacqueline’s in Ibiza,” said Laure de Beauvau Craon, who is the Countess de Ribes’s great friend, when I called for her number.
‘There were three big hosts and party givers of that period,” said Princess Ghislaine de Polignac, a witty and outspoken raconteur, who is about to celebrate her 80th birthday with a dinner given by her children and grandchildren. An intimate friend of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, she can recall with precise detail social events from past decades. Her eyes lit up. Her hands and shoulders moved as she remembered and described the world of Charlie de Beistegui. “Antenor Patiño, Arturo Lopez, and Charlie de Beistegui—they all gave wonderful parties in those days.”
We were having lunch at the Relais-Plaza with Nelson Seabra, a cultivated and very popular Brazilian who lives in Paris and moves in high circles. Seabra said, “They weren’t friends with each other, those three. There was competition between them. But they went to each other’s balls and gossiped about each other’s parties. I was sick at the time of Charlie de Beistegui’s ball and couldn’t go. Charlie didn’t speak to me for five years.” About 15 years ago Seabra gave his own ball in Paris, known as the Red Ball, where everyone wore red, including the waiters.
The Princess de Polignac had brought one of her scrapbooks with pictures of Charlie de Beistegui’s parties to the restaurant, as well as one of his Christmas cards with a lithograph of the Château de Groussay. She pointed to a photograph of herself as a young and very glamorous woman in jewels and a beautiful dress. “This was at the opening of Charlie’s theater at Groussay,” she said.
“During the war he had the protection of the Spanish Embassy,” said Seabra.
“He had weekends at Groussay,” said the princess. “People took the train from Paris. There was no gas. His guests were picked up by horse and carriage. There were always interesting people.… Charlie reinvented the 19th century here in France. He turned Groussay into an English château. It’s not a Louis château at all. The English didn’t care about mixing centuries. The French did. Charlie created a style that became fashionable.”
“He had pairs of everything,” said Seabra. “One would be real, one a copy. He said they were all real. In the dining room at Groussay, there is a portrait of Henry VIII. Charlie used to say that his was the real Holbein, that the Queen of England had the fake.”
“Charlie was not a nice person,” said the princess. “He liked to hurt people. He was not a great gentleman. He tried, but he wasn’t. He was very snobbish.”
“He pretended to be more Spanish than Mexican,” said Seabra.
“You must talk to Jacqueline de Ribes,” the princess said.
“She’s in Ibiza,” I replied.
“The nephew didn’t particularly like him,” said the princess. “But he inherited everything.”
“Charlie was a lady-killer,” said Seabra. “So many mistresses. He liked people to think he was having affairs with important ladies.”
Lady-killer? I thought. Mistresses? That hadn’t been my take on him at all. At the risk of being politically incorrect, I should say that I had always just assumed, in hearing about Carlos de Beistegui—his constant decorating, his balls, his fêtes, his weekend parties, his theater, his concerts, his exquisiteness, his perpetual bachelorhood—that he was as gay as a pink hairnet. Mais non—absolument pas!, everyone assured me. Just the opposite. The effete Beistegui was a swordsman of major proportions, in a league, apparently, with the Dominican polo-playing playboy Porfirio Rubirosa, whose sexual exploits—not to mention his marriages to two of America’s richest heiresses, Barbara Hutton and Doris Duke—were so legendary that tall pepper mills became known as Rubirosas, in homage to his personal equipment.
Moreover, no one actually seemed to like Charlie much. In fact, several people told me he was a real shit, and they used the English word. Not all his moments were exquisite, either. At a Paris party, I heard the story of a grand lady, who must remain nameless, who called on Beistegui after his stroke and was dismayed by his disagreeable habit of placing his hand beneath him under the covers and then smelling his fingers during their conversation. I was ashamed of myself, I laughed so hard. At the same party, I heard about another woman who berated Beistegui on his sickbed after his stroke for the way he treated women.
Iwent to dinner at Jimmy Douglas and Rod Coupe’s apartment on the Rue du Bac to talk about Charlie de Beistegui. Jimmy Douglas, a rich American expatriate who once had a famous romance with the Woolworth five-and-dime heiress Barbara Hutton, and Rod Coupe have been figures on the international party circuit for decades and remember all the stories and all the balls. Rod Coupe, on whom Henry James would have based a character if their times on earth had overlapped, said that a famous duchess was Charlie de Beistegui’s illegitimate daughter, a story I had already heard several times. The duchess is said to be displeased with the connection, although a number of people told me that in photographs she is his spitting image.
A blue Porthault candle burned on the mantelpiece. We looked at pictures from scrapbooks. In one, Jimmy Douglas and Barbara Hutton, wearing masks, were dancing at a long-ago ball in somebody’s palace.
‘Charlie was a friend of my mother,” said Princess Gabrielle d’Arenberg, who is known to her friends as Gaby. We were sitting in her lovely drawing room in Paris, looking out on a garden below. A maid brought in a tray with coffee and cookies, which the princess waved away. “I’m rarely in Paris anymore,” she said. These days she spends most of her time at her château in the country. “I met him first when I was still at school. He had a Rolls-Royce with wicker doors and a very well-styled chauffeur, whom he spoke to on a telephone from the backseat. During the war, he benefited from Spanish immunity. That kept Groussay from being occupied by the Germans. He came to us for Christmas. He was very different in the country than he was in Paris. He had an enormous sense of humor, very funny, and he caught things at once about people. He never went to confession at Christmas, but once he did. He went to the village priest. ‘What did he give you for penance?’ I asked him. ‘I got nothing,’ Charlie replied. ‘You are so innocent,’ I said. ‘I was so scrupulous,’ he replied.
“He used to ring me up every morning at a quarter of eight,” she continued, “to talk about the day before—what he had done—and what he was going to do that day. I never had an affair with him—not that he didn’t propose having one. He had lots of affairs in his life. He was a great success with women, but he had a bad influence on women. It amused him to make trouble with his ladies. I can understand why a husband wouldn’t let his wife see him. I knew of his affairs. He told me about them, but I never discussed them. He was not at all … on the other side.”
“Other side?” I asked. “Meaning gay?”
“Oh, not at all,” she replied. “Once, in Spain, at the Ritz hotel, someone said to me, ‘Who was that pansy you were with?’ I said, ‘He’s not a pansy at all.’ He would say things like ‘Come, take your siesta with me.’
“He would say that a certain famous duchess was his daughter. He kept a photograph of her at Groussay.… He had a girlfriend for many years, but he never gave her a present. He was very mean and stingy, except for himself.
“His nephew, Johnny, didn’t like him, but he inherited his money. He would never see his uncle’s friends afterwards.
“During the war Groussay was a refuge, a paradise. He had chocolates and wonderful food and soap sent through the Spanish Embassy. Even curtains for his drawing room were sent from Spain. It was absolutely glamorous. Cocteau would be there, and Christian Bérard, and all the people who were interesting at the time. I never saw Germans there. He wasn’t at all a collaborator.
“I was with him when he visited the Labia Palace in Venice for the first time, and I went every year to the Labia.
“I’ve never seen anyone so talented as Charlie. He influenced 20th-century decorating. I had to do up a big drawing room after the war. Charlie told me what to put on the walls, how to paint it. He knew how to place the pictures. There were so many, and he knew exactly where each should be. He had a great sense of color. He was the first one to put green and blue together. He didn’t mind about authenticity. Most grand French houses are uncomfortable. Not his. He was very influenced and inspired by English country houses. He said that English houses weren’t comfortable until the great American heiresses married into the aristocracy and put in bathrooms and cared about comfort.
“He would do a sketch of something he wanted and show it to Emilio Terry, who carried out all his ideas.
“He admired elegance. He was like a Professor Higgins—he liked to make women glamorous. He did not have much heart, but he was a good friend.”
Ipicked 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.”
Right in the middle of all this talk about balls, there was a costume ball, at the American ambassador’s residence on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, given by Elizabeth Rohatyn in honor of the 70th birthday of Ambassador Felix Rohatyn. The theme was Casablanca. Rick’s Café was constructed on the grounds. Gentlemen were requested to wear white dinner jackets—Humphrey Bogart–style—or Moroccan dress, and ladies were requested to wear 40s evening dresses. There was Vernon Jordan in a white dinner jacket; there was Barbara Walters in a golden caftan; there were Henry Kravis, Ismail Merchant, Bill Blass … all of them set against ceiling fans, potted palms, rattan chairs, and an orchestra that kept playing “As Time Goes By.”
Then into Rick’s Café walked the Countess Jacqueline de Ribes, back from Ibiza, dressed perfectly in the period, with the best 40s hairdo at the ball, all puffed up in front. She is still one of those ladies whom people turn to look at when they walk into a room.
“Do you like my dress? Do you like my hair?” she asked me. “I hated that picture of me with Oscar de la Renta that you ran in your article about the couture. I heard from Laure de Beauvau Craon you were here in Paris. Call me after four tomorrow and we’ll talk about Charlie de Beistegui and Groussay.”
For a couple of days we kept missing. When we finally connected, she was in Venice and I was back in Connecticut. “I met Mr. Beistegui at the last ball given by my uncle, Count Étienne de Beaumont, in Paris,” she began without a moment’s hesitation. “My uncle was a very famous man, who gave wonderful costume balls.” The socially exquisite Étienne de Beaumont gave his last ball, known as the Fashion Plate Ball, in 1951.
“I was 17 at the time of the ball and had just gotten married. Across the room I saw this man with very blue eyes and white hair looking at me and coming toward me. ‘Who are you?’ he asked me. Instead of saying Jacqueline de Ribes, as I then was, I replied, ‘I am Jacqueline de Beaumont.’ Charlie was used to pursuing new beauties. The next day I received an invitation to the ball at the Labia Palace in Venice. We became great friends. He wanted to be my mentor. I was very young, recently out of convent school, brand-new married, and he made me feel that I was an important woman. Charlie introduced me into the international life. At Groussay, where I would go, I was always the youngest by far, and I met all those ladies of myth, like Daisy Fellowes and Louise de Vilmorin and Léonor Fini. Louise was sweet, but Daisy was a bitch.
“Charlie was a perfectionist. For the longest time he couldn’t find the right material for the curtains for the Flemish wing that he added to the Château de Groussay. Finally, walking down the street, he saw a nun from the St. Vincent de Paul order, with her giant headdress. Charlie was struck by the color and the structure of her habit and engaged her in conversation. The nun gave him the name of the mother superior of the convent to find out where the fabric of her habit had come from.”
This guy was straight? I kept thinking to myself.
The countess continued. “I said to Charlie, ‘Did you give a check to the nuns?’ He said, ‘No, I never thought of it.’ So I said, ‘You better think of it or you’re going to have bad luck with those curtains.’ He gave the nuns a check, and the curtains were a great success.
“When Charlie wanted to build his theater, I became very involved in the project. I saw all the drawings. It was wonderful. I think he was in love with me. Yes, definitely. But he became very possessive of me at the Labia Palace. After dinner I wanted to go out, of course, but he locked all the doors. He didn’t want me to go out. Nathalie Paley—Princess Paley—was staying, and she used to give me a key to escape after midnight. You see, Charlie was a man who wanted to have power over a young lady. But the group of people around him was fascinating.
“I had two children by the time I was 20. Soon I had my own house, and I gave my own parties, and I saw him less.”
From what I gathered, Charlie de Beistegui would have enjoyed the fuss that is being made over his life, his château, and his possessions. His name has come back into fashion. After Groussay has been sold, and every antique and its fake copy have been auctioned off, the name of Carlos de Beistegui will be right up there with the other big names of 20th-century social history, such as Ari and Maria and Wallis and David. For what he wanted out of life, the guy was a great success.
Dominick Dunne is a best-selling author and special correspondent for Vanity Fair. His diary is a mainstay of the magazine.
