I had known Ned for ten years in New York and, like many gay men of my generation, had read his Paris Diary. After the war and well into the 1950s Ned had lived in Paris, kept by Marie-Laure, the Vicomtesse de Noailles. She’d died in 1970, long before I arrived in Paris, but among old gay Parisian men Marie-Laure was still famous for her wealth and taste and eccentricities. In fact, these same men constantly discussed “Marie-Laure” and “Marie-Hélène” (de Rothschild). Marie-Hélène de Rothschild was still alive then, but she’d moved to New York, whereas to her dying day Marie-Laure had lived off the Champs-Élysées in a huge modern house on the place des États-Unis. The house was known for its splendor, its cuisine, its Goyas, and its salons designed by Jean-Michel Frank, the walls lined with squares of white fawn leather and the little side tables covered with split straws under clear lacquer. Her husband, the vicomte, turned out to be gay. Marie-Laure was most certainly the most celebrated “fag hag”
