Maxime de la Falaise

Early life

She was born 25 June 1922 in West Dean, West Sussex as Maxine Birley. Maxine Birley was born into a family of successful artists, businesspeople, and academics. She grew up in Hampstead, and later at Charleston Manor in Sussex. Her father, Sir Oswald Birley (1880–1952), was a celebrated portrait painter known for his portraits of royalty and others. Her mother was Rhoda Vava Mary Lecky Pike (1900-1981), of County Carlow, Ireland, a celebrated gardener and successful artist in her own right. Maxine's brother, Mark Birley (1930–2007), became an entrepreneur known for his investments in the hospitality industry.

She changed her first name to Maxime after her first marriage, to Alain R. Le Bailly de la Falaise, in 1946. She was known as Maxime de la Falaise McKendry, for a while, after her second marriage to John McKendry, Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Metropolitan Museum.).

Career

During the Second World War, she worked as a minor codebreaker at Bletchley Park, before being invalided out after developing kleptomania.

Fashion

In the 1950s, Maxime de la Falaise worked for Elsa Schiaparelli as a vendeuse mondaine which she explained as "a sort of muse who was supposed to encourage sales to the rich English". She modelled for photographers such as Georges Dambier, Jack Robinson, and Cecil Beaton.

She "dressed with uninhibited chic" and according to The Independent, Cecil Beaton once called her "the only truly chic Englishwoman".

Writing

While living in New York Maxime de La Falaise wrote a food column for Vogue magazine. In 1980, she published a collection of these columns, with her own illustrations, under the title Food in Vogue. In 1973 she published Seven Centuries of English Cooking: A Collection of Recipes. She also wrote the foreword to My Kingdom of Books (1999) by Richard Booth.

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol envisioned Maxime de La Falaise as part of Andy Warhol's Nothing Serious, his 1971 video project designed for television. Warhol included her along with such personalities as Candy Darling and Brigid Berlin in his 1973 black-and-white video Phoney (later incorporated into the 1991 Andy Warhol's Video & Television Retrospective), and in his 1974 film Dracula.

According to the New York Times in 1977, Warhol had La Falaise design a menu for Andymat, Warhol's version of the automat, which included onion tarts, shepherds' pie, fish cakes, Irish lamb stew, key lime pie and a "nursery cocktail" of milk on the rocks. Her association with Warhol was such that one source called her "The Factory mother".

Personal life

On 18 July 1946, Maxine Birley became the second wife of Count Alain Le Bailly de La Falaise, (1905—1977). They divorced in 1950, following a series of her infidelities, including an affair with British ambassador Duff Cooper.[9] His brother is Henry de La Falaise, a film director and third husband of American actress Gloria Swanson, and a son of an Olympic gold medallist in fencing, Louis Venant Gabriel Le Bailly de La Falaise, Georges, Count de La Falaise (1866—1910). They had two children:

Maxime de La Falaise married, as her second husband, John McKendry, curator of prints and photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who died in 1975. During the marriage it has been suggested that he had an affair with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, while she had one with J. Paul Getty III, artist Max Ernst, and film director Louis Malle.)[10][11][12] La Falaise is said to have aided Mapplethorpe's entry "into high society, European and American."

Maxime de la Falaise died of natural causes, aged 86, at her home in Provence, on 30 April 2009.