I can't put it any better than her NYT Obit, so I'll just post my favorite part:
Maxine’s father, Sir Oswald Birley, was an eminent portrait painter whose subjects included Sir Winston Churchill, Queen Elizabeth II and other members of the royal family. Her mother, Rhoda, an Irish beauty, was considered an eccentric even by the elastic standards of the British Isles. Lady Rhoda often made lobster thermidor, for instance, and then fed it to her roses.
“She would make fish stew and sometimes would forget that she was making it for the garden,” Ms. de la Falaise told The Independent in 2004. “So she would add a bit of cognac, some garlic and spices. The roses would almost cry out with pleasure.”
Ms. de la Falaise’s first marriage, in the 1940s, was to Alain de la Falaise, a French count. During those years, she worked as a model for Ms. Schiaparelli and afterward created clothing for the French ready-to-wear designer Gérard Pipart.
Later settling in New York, Ms. de la Falaise was a food editor at Vogue magazine. A friend of Mr. Warhol’s, she appeared in “Andy Warhol’s Dracula” (1974), an underground film he helped produce, and often cooked lavish meals for him and his retinue. (Ms. de la Falaise helped design the menu for the Andy-Mat, Mr. Warhol’s unrealized plan for an avant-garde automat.)
See the Telegraph's fantastic obit here.
4 comments:
I'm so distraught at never having eaten at the Andymat, though I patronized automats in both Phila. and New York.
I guess tomato soup would have been a staple of the menu.
As always, the "Telegraph" comes through:
"Maxime de la Falaise was born Maxine Birley on June 25 1922 . . . her mother, Lady Rhoda (an eccentric Irish beauty whose diary for 1922 failed even to mention the baby's arrival), later instructed the child in the facts of life by pointing at her father's various body parts as he lay soaking in his bath."
"She recalled her schooling chiefly for the way in which her mother insisted on dressing her in a mixture of clothes made in India with 18th-century buttons and hand-me-downs from the Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli. 'I could have charged other pupils to look at my clothes,' she told the Telegraph magazine in 2000, 'they were absolutely in awe of them.'"
We must know more about Lady Rhoda!
Why do I always seem to discover these amazing people a week or so too late?
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