From the moment the ambitious Portuguese beauty married an aristocratic French oil-industry tycoon, almost everything São Schlumberger did caused a stir, from her championing of artists such as Andy Warhol and Robert Wilson to her open affairs (one with a much younger Egyptian), to the wildly extravagant, utterly fearless style of her homes and parties. Three years after her death, the author draws on a lengthy friendship to explore Schlumberger’s bewitching power, her fatal weakness, and the family dramas surrounding her gallant finale.
I bit of the apple. I did not nibble,” São Schlumberger, the wildly extravagant Paris hostess and patron of the arts, told me shortly before her death, at 77, in 2007. As the wife of Pierre Schlumberger, the oil-industry billionaire from one of France’s most distinguished families, the bewitching, Portuguese-born beauty had for nearly 40 years lived a fairy-tale life peopled with names such as Warhol, Twombly, Rothschild, Thurn und Taxis, Kennedy, and Chirac. In her later years, it became a life of high drama, tragedy, and controversy, most of it of her own making. “São wanted to astonish,” says her best friend, the American philanthropist Deeda Blair. “I don’t think it ever entered her thinking to be concerned about how other people perceived her. She was never afraid of being wrong.”
When São married Pierre Schlumberger, in 1961, he was 47 and she was already 32—a well-educated, highly ambitious woman getting off to a late start. Both had been previously married: she for under a year to a Portuguese boulevardier, he for two decades to a French aristocrat who had borne him five children before dying of a stroke in 1959. For the first few years of their marriage they lived in Houston, where Schlumberger Limited, the world’s largest oil-field-services company, had been based since World War II. In 1965, however, Pierre was ousted as president and C.E.O. in a family coup, and the couple moved to New York and later to Paris. It was in the City of Light, in an 18th-century hôtel particulier decorated by Valerian Rybar in a provocative mix of classic and modern styles, that São began to blossom—and people began to talk about her. How could she have signed Louis Seize chairs upholstered in chartreuse patent leather? And what about that discotheque in the basement? By then she and Pierre had two children, Paul-Albert, born in 1962, and Victoire, born in 1968, but motherhood—she once admitted to me—was not her forte.
One of those special creatures who could be both serious and frivolous, São made the contradiction work. On the one hand, she saw herself as a high-minded benefactor of the art of her time, a kind of latter-day Marie-Laure de Noailles, and was daring, farsighted, and generous in her pursuit of that vision. Soon after marrying Pierre, she began to expand his collection of Seurats, Monets, and Matisses by adding contemporary works by Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, and Roy Lichtenstein. She stuck her neck out by backing Robert Wilson’s early avant-garde operas, and she was one of the first to commission Andy Warhol to silkscreen her portrait. Both artists became staunch friends. She sat on the board of the Pompidou Center, in Paris, and was a long-standing member of the International Council of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where she impressed such art-world heavyweights as Lily Auchincloss and Ronald Lauder with her intellectual acuity and discerning eye. She rarely went to an exhibition of a young artist’s work without buying something, so that, she explained, they could say they were in the Schlumberger collection. And she never tired of entertaining artists, starting with her next-door neighbor in the Rue Férou, Man Ray, and including Max Ernst, Yves Klein, Niki de Saint Phalle, François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne, Marina Karella, Francesco Clemente, James Brown, and Ross Bleckner.
On the other hand, São, a sucker for glamour, was determined to be a jet-set star like Marella Agnelli or Gloria Guinness: a regular at Badrutt’s Palace Hotel in Saint-Moritz at Christmas, the Cipriani in Venice in September, the Carlyle in New York for the spring and fall social seasons. At least three A-list publicists were enlisted to smooth her way: Serge Obolensky, Earl Blackwell, and Ghislaine de Polignac. In 1968 she gave her famous “La Dolce Vita” ball for 1,500 guests—everyone from Audrey Hepburn and Gina Lollobrigida to the would-be kings of Portugal and Italy showed up—at the 100-acre estate Pierre had bought for her near the posh Portuguese resort of Estoril. When the main house burned down after the anti-Fascist revolution of 1974, she had Pierre buy Le Clos Fiorentina, in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, one of the most beautiful old villas on the French Riviera, and hired Lord Mountbatten’s son-in-law, David Hicks, to renovate it. In Paris, she became a front-row fixture at the semi-annual haute couture shows and a major customer of Givenchy, Saint Laurent, Chanel, and Lacroix, taking her place in the International Best-Dressed List’s Hall of Fame. She also loved jewelry, the bigger the better, and thought nothing of turning up at Studio 54 after a black-tie party wearing an evening dress and major diamonds or rubies from Van Cleef & Arpels.
In the mid-70s, she embarked on a very public five-year affair with a charming Egyptian dandy who called himself Prince Naguib Abdallah. Though people talked, Pierre, who had suffered serious strokes in 1969 and 1975, went along with it. After that affair ended, she took up with Patrice Calmettes, a handsome French photographer and nightclub promoter in his late 20s. São was then in her 50s, so people talked more. After Pierre died, in 1986, São and her children and stepchildren spent years fighting over his estate, causing yet another scandal.
But nothing shocked Paris—a city where taste is everything—more than her over-the-top new apartment, on Avenue Charles Floquet in the Seventh Arrondissement. Conceived as a neo-Baroque fantasyland by the London decorator Gabhan O’Keeffe, it set São’s contemporary art and 18th-century furniture in a series of rooms that combined France with Portugal, Scotland with Persia, and Egypt with Hollywood. The pièce de résistance was the Andalusian-style terrace, with the Eiffel Tower rising directly above it. Dinner-party debates over whether O’Keeffe’s creation was “innovative” or “abominable” got so out of hand that at one soirée a pair of socialites had to be pulled apart before they came to blows. “It’s simply hideous,” said one visitor, “but totally fabulous!”
São fainted during the unveiling dinner in 1992, the first hint for most of her guests that she was ill. (She had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 1982 and was already taking medication to keep her hands from shaking.) But neither ill health nor family feuds could slow her down. Right up to the new millennium, the pheasant and venison continued to be served, the Dom Pérignon and Château Margaux continued to be poured, and the likes of Sylvester Stallone, Susan Sontag, Betsy Bloomingdale, Gianni Versace, and the Duke and Duchess of Bedford continued to be stunned by her 65-foot-long grand salon, with its gold-leaf ceiling, purple-and-orange curtains held back by giant Murano-glass tassels, an enormous Lalanne sculpture of a fish with a bar in its belly, and mango-yellow walls hung with soaring canvases by Troy Brauntuch, Alexander Liberman, Rothko, Wilson, and Warhol. (“Amazing ... amazing ... amazing” was all that Valentino could say the first time he saw this room.)
“There was a sort of legend around São,” says Jean-Gabriel Mitterrand, a nephew of the late French president and one of Paris’s leading contemporary-art dealers. “Because she became part of this old traditional family, but she did not play that game. She had a strong character, but at the same time she loved to dream, to fill her life with fantasy.”
“Most rich people are stiff and square. São—absolutely not!” says Pierre Bergé, the longtime partner of Yves Saint Laurent. “She was like a gypsy, in a way. She had more than taste. She had audacity.”
“Who had the most interesting parties in Paris? Who had the most interesting artists in Paris?” asks Robert Wilson. “It was a salon. Who else in Paris but São had all of us? Who?”
“Of all those ladies, she got it,” adds the New York photographer Christopher Makos, who was also helped by Schlumberger early in his career. “She was incredibly cool.”
“I always thought she was a bit of a fool,” says Florence Van der Kemp, the widow of the director of Versailles, expressing a view perhaps more representative of conservative high society. “But I liked her.”
fonte/Vanity Fair
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