Living it up in Paris
James Stourton
ALEXIS: THE MEMOIRS OF THE BARON DE REDÉ edited by Hugo Vickers The Dovecote Press, Stanbridge, Wimborne Minster, Dorset BH 21 4 JD, tel: 01258 840549, fax: 01258 840958, www.dovecote press.com, £45 until 31 May, £55 thereafter, pp. 174, ISBN 190434903X The French no longer keep diaries or go in much for social memoirs. They take their secrets with them to the grave, which is why so many of the best accounts of postwar Paris social life are Anglo-Saxon. It is therefore all the more extraordinary to read this memoir dictated from the pinnacle of Parisian social life by the Baron Alexis de Redé before he died in July 2004. Living closeted in the most beautiful of all hôtels particuliers, who was this homme fatal, this silent charmer of such extreme elegance, who might otherwise have been a fictional creation of Jean Cocteau? He was the youngest and last of a group of determined and cultivated rich men who converged on Paris after the war and lived and behaved as if the 18th century had never ended. Nancy Mitford writing to Muv in 1956 summed him up: The Barons Redé and Redesdale have little in common — he lives but for luxury, beauty and social life — La Pompadour de nos jours.
Born in Zürich in 1922, Alexis de Redé’s real name was Rosenberg. His father was a businessman on whom the Hungarian barony de Redé was bestowed by Franz Joseph in 1916 in the death throes of the Habsburg empire. Redé was brought up by an English nanny in a large Zürich hotel suite and sent to school at Le Rosey. Here the Shah of Persia, of all unlikely people, remembered his dreamy languor and the sweetness of his ‘good morning’ as though ‘in a distant dream it seemed to come from the depth of his pupils’. His mother died when he was nine, and in 1939 his father went bankrupt and committed suicide, leaving him at the age of 17 to fend for himself. As a Jewish boy with no prospects, we must read the rest of his life as a search for security. He headed straight for New York, with not much more than a Swaine and Adeney umbrella, and in 1941 the Chilean millionaire Arturo LopezWillshaw saw him across a restaurant. Within a week he had lost his virginity, and soon after Lopez-Willshaw was offering him $1 million dollars to return to Paris with him and his wife. Yes, she was put out.
Redé arrived in Paris in 1946, where he was picked up by the British Embassy Rolls and never looked back. He was to remain for half a century at the centre of Parisian social life which he describes with such intimacy. Here they all are: Lopez-Willshaw, Etienne de Beaumont, Jean Cocteau, Marie-Laure de Noailles, Carlos de Beistegui, Bébé Bérard, Georges Geffroy and a richesse of Rothschilds. The turbulent political backdrop of the Fourth and Fifth Republics finds no place here. Pavilions, fetes, cruises, balls, affairs and couturiers take centre stage. As the photographers and pop stars were to London in the 1960s, so the couturiers were to Paris: Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Cardin all make their first shy appearances in these pages. Out of this Parisian milieu came arguably the four greatest balls of the century, each sharply observed: Beistegui’s in Venice, the Rothschild Proust and Surrealist balls, and Alexis’ own Bal Oriental.
If Alexis de Redé was ever searching for a mission in life he found it in 1949 when he moved into and undertook the heroic and serious restoration of the Hôtel Lambert. This was the romantic former home of the Czartoryski family, a 17th-century palace by Le Vau which sits like an enchanted kingdom on the Ile St Louis. His apartments were his masterpiece and included the Galerie d’Hercule, with its ceiling by Le Brun, probably the most beautiful and atmospheric interior in Paris. Lunch was the Baron’s preferred entertainment with a mis en table of Germain silver, Meissen porcelain and yellow roses (rust in autumn) sprayed with dew that nobody ever managed to imitate. Cecil Beaton laconically observed, ‘In England the taste of the élite is more rugged.’ The Lambert reached the zenith of its splendour when in 1975 Redé persuaded Guy and Marie-Hélène de Rothschild, who had just given up the Château de Ferrières, to buy the freehold and move in beside him. Alexis and Marie-Hélène were already inseparable companions; he played Jack of Hearts to her Queen of Hearts.
Rather surprisingly, the Baron de Redé was good at business, proved to be a shrewd investor and, no doubt as a result of friendship with Rupert Loewenstein, became president of the Rolling Stones’ managing company. What was he like? By his own account, style, elegance and courtesy were his touchstones. And his dislikes? Fervour, enthusiasm, noise, short socks and men who don’t wear white shirts in the evening. Was that the English nanny, I wonder, or simply a Swiss upbringing? The most surprising thing about Alexis to people who didn’t know him — and I knew him quite well — was his lack of malice and unfeigned kindness. That, with his good looks and style, was the key to his extraordinary social success. He never offended a soul but hugely added to the amusement of the capital. He certainly was not a great talker — ‘silent in five languages’ as one wit put it — and it is a miracle that this book got written at all. The credit goes to Rupert Loewenstein who persuaded Alexis to do it, and he despatched the most soothing amanuensis from this side of the Channel, Hugo Vickers, to perform the surgical extraction. The result is, I suspect, more bio than auto but much more enthralling as a result. Vickers has lifted the curtain on a very private production. The Protestant bones of Englishmen may shiver at all this luxury and indolence, but there will also be raised eyebrows in the 7ème at so much revelation.
Perhaps the high point of Alexis’ life was his Bal Oriental at the Hôtel Lambert in 1969, described in hammed-up detail by Nancy Mitford:
If Redé lived in England he would be in prison for race relations. The open courtyard was lined with naked Nubian slaves bearing torches, who had to remain there all night. (One was seen putting on a cardigan but the slave driver had that off him in a jiffy!) Also there were naked black children on elephants. The slaves had telephone numbers in luminous paint on the soles of their feet.
It all goes to show that in England you can write what you want, but you can’t do it, whereas in France you can do what you want but — until this memoir appeared — would be most unlikely to write it.
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