Here comes the night

Diane de Beauvau-Craon has a way of being at the right place at the right time – well, as far as she is concerned. Her parents, her beloved father, Prince Marc de Beauvau-Craon, and her mother, daughter of the Bolivian copper magnate Antenor Patiño, may have had a different view. Diane was in New York during the Studio 54 years. She was in Tangier during the ’80s when tout le monde descended. She was in Paris when the hippest club, Le Palace, was in full swing. It’s as if her and the zeitgeist were magnetically linked. “I like extremes,” as she puts it. Moreover, she has survived: “I’m probably one of the last living figures of the swinging ’70s and ’80s. At one point, I literally threw all my address books into the fire because 90 per cent of my friends had died. I would say most from AIDS, and 20 per cent had OD’d. So that’s why sometimes I find it very, very unfair. Why the hell am I still here?”

Diane, whippet-thin, a slick of black hair and red lipstick, is sitting in her apartment off Boulevard St-Germain. She is infectiously warm, with exquisite manners, irrepressibly curious and only too happy to serve up a feast of information. There’s a saying that if you remember the ’70s, you weren’t there. But Diane, who has just published her memoir Sans départir (which is based on the family motto: ‘Without Fail’), recalls quite a lot, all things considered. She evokes a world of drugs ’n’ decadence, of working for the fashion designer Halston, of living with Robert Mapplethorpe, and of partying with Steve Rubell, the owner of Studio 54 – all of which was overseen by the ringmaster, Andy Warhol.

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She was particularly close to Warhol. “A lot of people at that time didn’t really consider him an artist – they thought he was a publicist. He had to battle to be respected. I think what people underestimate was how disciplined he was. I would say that his mind was on work all the time. He didn’t take drugs, he didn’t really drink, but the world of excess certainly interested him as an observer. There was, well, a bunch of courtesans that surrounded him, all these boys were beyond beautiful, but it definitely wasn’t for the looks of Andy that they were there. It was for the spirit that was coming out of the Factory. Who created that spirit? That was Andy. He was at the epicentre.” She adds, “He was also very kind and protective towards me.”

This magnetic attraction to charismatic figures began at an early age. Her parents probably thought the 14-year-old Diane would be safe in a Swiss boarding school in the middle of a deep dark canton. But no. This was someone who could get into trouble in a sweet shop – for this was where she bumped into none other than Timothy Leary, the guru who exhorted a generation to “turn on, tune in, drop out”. I mean, what were the chances? “I bought so many sweets that he asked if I wasn’t overdoing it a bit.” Leary was on the run from the FBI and the Black Panthers, so he was holed up in the chalet of an arms dealer. “He probably found that I was quite funny with all my bundles of sweets in my arms. We walked out of the store together and he invited me for tea. It just happened like that – as with all my most memorable encounters.” Being seen in public with an older man who was wanted by the FBI was an encounter too far for Diane’s school. She was invited to leave. But meeting Leary gave her “brilliant ideas for the future”, as she puts it.

One of those brilliant ideas was to turn up in New York, aged 17, on the arm of her fiancé, a gay scion of an industrial fortune. He went home, Diane stayed. Needing a focus – Diane always wants to be in the midst of the action – she was hired as a ‘consultant’ to the fashion designer Halston. She was paid in jewellery. At a dinner party, Warhol came up with her soubriquet, Princess BoBo, and the cover of Warhol’s Interview magazine followed, with portraits of Diane taken by Robert Mapplethorpe. Diane moved in to the artist’s loft for a few months, and the two began to explore the ripe Meatpacking District, where fetish clubs such as the Mineshaft were. As Diane says, “I was one of the few women that went there. I have always been more comfortable around homosexual men. I asked a friend why this was. He replied: ‘You’ve got a mind of a homosexual in the body of a woman’.”

As the ’70s turned into the ’80s, the party began to pall. Diane went on honeymoon to Tangiers with her second husband – and got pregnant by the man who became her third. She explains this change of scene in a very matter-of-fact way. “I find it extremely boring to have the same life, or to try to repeat the same life in a different place. In that case, why the hell do you move? And I never, never, never compare places.”

Which brings us to Paris in the ’80s, which is the theme of a sale at Bonhams Cornette de Saint Cyr on 21 September that celebrates that decade. The city of lights had been a bit of a backwater in the ’70s, but by the ’80s clubs such as Le Palace and Privilège were having their moment in the limelight, with demi-monde figures such as Cuban DJ Guy Cuevas. “Guy was extraordinary. Paris had never seen or heard anything like him,” said Diane. In many ways, she feels that Paris experienced the same sense of release as New York in the ’70s. “It was like having a double dose of freedom.” One of her defining relationships in Paris was a polyamorous affair with Jacques de Bascher and Karl Lagerfeld. “Jacques came to Tangier to bring me back to Paris – I was the only woman he ever loved. It wasn’t even a conversation piece that he was a homosexual.”

The music stopped – abruptly – when, in 2001, she almost died in a Parisian hospital, having being admitted unconscious. She took a decision to renounce drink and drugs – although not smoking (“It’s my only vice”) – and to keep the story going. “Because I’m curious about life. I adore people, I find that the human being is fascinating. There’s always, always, always something good to get out of somebody.”

Lucinda Bredin is Editor of Bonhams Magazine