Becoming an Event Planner by Armand Limnander

Author:Armand Limnander
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2021-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

De Beistegui may have been the king—or doge—of his social set, but of all the bon vivants of the postwar era, it was Alexis von Rosenberg, Baron de Redé, who raised the most eyebrows. The baron started his adult life as a kept man, a fact that he never denied. He was the scion of a prominent banking dynasty, but his mother died of leukemia in 1931, when de Redé was nine, and his father committed suicide eight years later, after going bankrupt. The young de Redé made his way from Zurich, where he was born, to Los Angeles and New York, and at the age of nineteen he met the Chilean-born Arturo LÓpez-Willshaw, who had made an enormous fortune in guano fertilizer, otherwise known as bird droppings. Eventually, de Redé moved in with LÓpez-Willshaw, who was twenty years his senior, and his wife, Patricia, settling in their Versailles-esque property in Neuilly, on the outskirts of Paris. (“I was not in love,” he famously said of the arrangement. “But I needed protection, and I was aware that he could provide this.”) The three of them would often appear together at balls and other social engagements, but at the end of the night LÓpez-Willshaw and de Redé would repair to a palatial apartment in the Hôtel Lambert, a seventeenth-century hôtel particulier in the heart of Paris owned by social stalwarts Guy and Marie-Hélène de Rothschild. Patricia headed back to Neuilly, where she was free to pursue her own romantic entanglements.

LÓpez-Willshaw died in 1962, and his vast wealth was divided between his wife and lover. De Redé did not rest on his laurels: he became a partner in a bank, invested in art, and oversaw the Rolling Stones’ financial portfolio. But that was not what made him famous. A consummate tastemaker, he decorated his rooms at the Hôtel Lambert in red and gold and became a modern-day saloniste, described by many of his contemporaries as the best host in Europe. He befriended all the swells of his time, including the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Brigitte Bardot, Yves Saint Laurent, and Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

In 1969, de Redé gave a Bal Oriental at the Hôtel Lambert, which made news across continents. “An enchanting reprise of the great costume balls held in Paris in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,” is how Vogue described it, noting that de Redé had hired live extras dressed as characters in a Veronese fresco to lean over a balcony and applaud as his friends arrived, while Indian musicians serenaded them on zithers, flutes, and drums. Also of interest to the magazine was a jeweled and turbaned maharaja who accessorized his robes with a hand-carried lion cub; another guest, outfitted like a mogul hunter, sported a large falcon on his wrist. Sadly, there was no reporting on whether the two creatures became acquainted later on at the salon that had been converted into “a discotheque with a gold-starred blue ceiling, low divans strewn with Turkish cushions around the dance floor, and alcoves lined in red velvet, dimly illuminated by multi-colored Turkish lamps.

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