The late Yves Saint Laurent with his partner Pierre Bergé 
(Photo: John Van Hasselt/CORBIS SYGMA)

Trying to imagine the late Yves Saint Laurent as “a strange, shy boy” is nearly as difficult as imagining paintings by Claude Monet being consigned to one’s lavatory. Celia Walden unveils a tale of genius and depression and triumph and the fifty year relationship between a Colossus of couture and his partner in life, Pierre Bergé.

Bergé, who co-founded the YSL couture house with Saint Laurent in 1961, recalls his life with Saint Laurent as he prepares to sell the couple’s art holdings — including Old Master drawings, Renaissance bronzes and works by Ingres, Géricault, Frans Hals, Picasso, Léger, Matisse, Braque and Mondrian.

From The Telegraph:

Why Yves Saint Laurent was never happy
As Pierre Bergé, partner of the great designer, prepares to auction their art collection, he reveals YSL’s struggle with depression

By Celia Walden

There are few female pleasures more finely distilled than slipping on a jacket or dress made by a truly great designer. As one of the most revered stylists of the 20th century, the late Yves Saint Laurent dispersed that joy liberally and will continue to do so, through his designs, despite his death in June last year. Now, the man who spent half a century as his lover and business partner has revealed the cost of that creativity on the designer’s mental health.

“Designing made him deeply miserable,” says Pierre Bergé, who co-founded the YSL couture house with Saint Laurent in 1961. “Sadly, Yves was not built for joy. He was an unhappy person who didn’t have a taste for life. Occasionally, he was happy, but life was difficult for him. The depression ran deep.”

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Throughout their fractious relationship, Bergé was often assigned the role of decision-maker. The son of a tax official and a Montessori teacher from Bordeaux, he is described by writer Alicia Drake as being “fascinated by the idea of the artiste, the creator and the creative spirit”. Small wonder, then, that when he first met 22-year-old Saint Laurent, then working as the head designer at Dior, Bergé instantly fell in love with him.

He was, he recalls, “a strange, shy boy. He wore very tight jackets as if he was trying to keep himself buttoned up against the world – he reminded me of a clergyman, very serious, very nervous.” Six years older, with an established reputation in le grand monde, Bergé had his own potent appeal. “Everything I didn’t have, he had,” Saint Laurent later said. “His strength meant I could rest on him when I was out of breath.”

Conscripted in 1960 to fight in the Algerian war, where he was brutalised, the delicate Saint Laurent was committed to a mental hospital for electric shock treatment and psychoactive drugs, something both Bergé and Saint Laurent blame for his later drug dependency.

Only an appreciation of art provided any respite. “We never disagreed on what we liked,” says Bergé, “and because it is all of such exceptional quality, it all goes well together, despite being very different in style.” The collection seems to epitomise Saint Laurent’s lifelong yearning for joy. Legend has it that the flat on rue de Babylone was so packed full of treasures that there were Monets hanging in the lavatories. True? Bergé shrugs. “Well, yes.”

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Bergé is unemotional about the couple’s decision to become civil partners shortly before Saint Laurent was incapacitated by brain cancer. “We did it not for romantic reasons but because we had lived 50 years together: it was about achievement, and I had fought for it to be possible, so that homosexuals would be allowed to leave things to their partners.”

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Bergé refers to his lover as Yves when we discuss his personality, and Saint Laurent, (even, on occasion, Monsieur Saint Laurent) when we discuss his achievements. This tells you all you need to know about the nature of their relationship, where the pride and respect are so strong that banal, sentimental love seems belittled in comparison.

“Next year, I plan to throw a huge retrospective in his memory at the Petit Palais,” he says, shifting a little on his chair to show that the interview should be wrapping up now.

In what ways does he miss Saint Laurent, eight months on? “In the little ways,” he says. “Like the other day, I went to the opera and it was so beautiful – and I missed him then because I couldn’t share that with him.”

Despite the depression, Bergé stood by his partner for fifty years. It’s immeasurably important that tales like theirs, along with the stories of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, James Ivory and Ismail Merchant, and countless other loving couples be told, retold and remembered, because certain elements in society would have the world believe that long lasting GLBT relationships are impossible and they don’t exist.

Au contraire; they do.