Maxime-um Glamour

Mondain types recount their first sightings of countess, spy, gastronome, designer, author, artist's muse, and Warhol superstar Maxime de La Falaise with the vividness of a holy man's epiphany. "She was a myth before I met her,'' rhapsodizes designer Fernando Sanchez. Sighs Kenneth Jay Lane, "It was at a party at Jacques Fath's in Paris. She had egret feathers in her hair. I'd never seen anything so glamorous or beautiful.''

Having spent a lifetime ornamenting rooms with her presence, de La Falaise is now also adorning them with her furniture-earthy pieces hand-painted in pulsing, neo-primitivist patterns. Avidly collected by such denizens of haute bohemia as her cover-girl granddaughter, Lucie, and actress Sylvia Miles, they go on display this fall at Joseph in London. Explaining how she has leaped about so elastically among the high, low, and domestic arts, de La Falaise says, "It's a question of satisfying one's own curiosity. What will it look like? What will it taste like? The senses are just like a little tribe. You start to use one and all the others get into the act."

AMY FINE COLLINS