‘Ibit of the apple. I did not nibble,” São Schlumberger, the wildly extravagant Paris hostess and patron of the arts, told me shortly before her death, at 77, in 2007. As the wife of Pierre Schlumberger, the oil-industry billionaire from one of France’s most distinguished families, the bewitching, Portuguese-born beauty had for nearly 40 years lived a fairy-tale life peopled with names such as Warhol, Twombly, Rothschild, Thurn und Taxis, Kennedy, and Chirac. In her later years, it became a life of high drama, tragedy, and controversy, most of it of her own making. “São wanted to astonish,” says her best friend, the American philanthropist Deeda Blair. “I don’t think it ever entered her thinking to be concerned about how other people perceived her. She was never afraid of being wrong.”

When São married Pierre Schlumberger, in 1961, he was 47 and she was already 32—a well-educated, highly ambitious woman getting off to a late start. Both had been previously married: she for under a year to a Portuguese boulevardier, he for two decades to a French aristocrat who had borne him five children before dying of a stroke in 1959. For the first few years of their marriage they lived in Houston, where Schlumberger Limited, the world’s largest oil-field-services company, had been based since World War II. In 1965, however, Pierre was ousted as president and C.E.O. in a family coup, and the couple moved to New York and later to Paris. It was in the City of Light, in an 18th-century hôtel particulier decorated by Valerian Rybar in a provocative mix of classic and modern styles, that São began to blossom—and people began to talk about her. How could she have signed Louis Seize chairs upholstered in chartreuse patent leather? And what about that discotheque in the basement? By then she and Pierre had two children, Paul-Albert, born in 1962, and Victoire, born in 1968, but motherhood—she once admitted to me—was not her forte.

One of those special creatures who could be both serious and frivolous, São made the contradiction work. On the one hand, she saw herself as a high-minded benefactor of the art of her time, a kind of latter-day Marie-Laure de Noailles, and was daring, farsighted, and generous in her pursuit of that vision. Soon after marrying Pierre, she began to expand his collection of Seurats, Monets, and Matisses by adding contemporary works by Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, and Roy Lichtenstein. She stuck her neck out by backing Robert Wilson’s early avant-garde operas, and she was one of the first to commission Andy Warhol to silkscreen her portrait. Both artists became staunch friends. She sat on the board of the Pompidou Center, in Paris, and was a long-standing member of the International Council of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where she impressed such art-world heavyweights as Lily Auchincloss and Ronald Lauder with her intellectual acuity and discerning eye. She rarely went to an exhibition of a young artist’s work without buying something, so that, she explained, they could say they were in the Schlumberger collection. And she never tired of entertaining artists, starting with her next-door neighbor in the Rue Férou, Man Ray, and including Max Ernst, Yves Klein, Niki de Saint Phalle, François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne, Marina Karella, Francesco Clemente, James Brown, and Ross Bleckner.

On the other hand, São, a sucker for glamour, was determined to be a jet-set star like Marella Agnelli or Gloria Guinness: a regular at Badrutt’s Palace Hotel in Saint-Moritz at Christmas, the Cipriani in Venice in September, the Carlyle in New York for the spring and fall social seasons. At least three A-list publicists were enlisted to smooth her way: Serge Obolensky, Earl Blackwell, and Ghislaine de Polignac. In 1968 she gave her famous “La Dolce Vita” ball for 1,500 guests—everyone from Audrey Hepburn and Gina Lollobrigida to the would-be kings of Portugal and Italy showed up—at the 100-acre estate Pierre had bought for her near the posh Portuguese resort of Estoril. When the main house burned down after the anti-Fascist revolution of 1974, she had Pierre buy Le Clos Fiorentina, in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, one of the most beautiful old villas on the French Riviera, and hired Lord Mountbatten’s son-in-law, David Hicks, to renovate it. In Paris, she became a front-row fixture at the semi-annual haute couture shows and a major customer of Givenchy, Saint Laurent, Chanel, and Lacroix, taking her place in the International Best-Dressed List’s Hall of Fame. She also loved jewelry, the bigger the better, and thought nothing of turning up at Studio 54 after a black-tie party wearing an evening dress and major diamonds or rubies from Van Cleef & Arpels.

In the mid-70s, she embarked on a very public five-year affair with a charming Egyptian dandy who called himself Prince Naguib Abdallah. Though people talked, Pierre, who had suffered serious strokes in 1969 and 1975, went along with it. After that affair ended, she took up with Patrice Calmettes, a handsome French photographer and nightclub promoter in his late 20s. São was then in her 50s, so people talked more. After Pierre died, in 1986, São and her children and stepchildren spent years fighting over his estate, causing yet another scandal.

But nothing shocked Paris—a city where taste is everything—more than her over-the-top new apartment, on Avenue Charles Floquet in the Seventh Arrondissement. Conceived as a neo-Baroque fantasyland by the London decorator Gabhan O’Keeffe, it set São’s contemporary art and 18th-century furniture in a series of rooms that combined France with Portugal, Scotland with Persia, and Egypt with Hollywood. The pièce de résistance was the Andalusian-style terrace, with the Eiffel Tower rising directly above it. Dinner-party debates over whether O’Keeffe’s creation was “innovative” or “abominable” got so out of hand that at one soirée a pair of socialites had to be pulled apart before they came to blows. “It’s simply hideous,” said one visitor, “but totally fabulous!”

São fainted during the unveiling dinner in 1992, the first hint for most of her guests that she was ill. (She had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 1982 and was already taking medication to keep her hands from shaking.) But neither ill health nor family feuds could slow her down. Right up to the new millennium, the pheasant and venison continued to be served, the Dom Pérignon and Château Margaux continued to be poured, and the likes of Sylvester Stallone, Susan Sontag, Betsy Bloomingdale, Gianni Versace, and the Duke and Duchess of Bedford continued to be stunned by her 65-foot-long grand salon, with its gold-leaf ceiling, purple-and-orange curtains held back by giant Murano-glass tassels, an enormous Lalanne sculpture of a fish with a bar in its belly, and mango-yellow walls hung with soaring canvases by Troy Brauntuch, Alexander Liberman, Rothko, Wilson, and Warhol. (“Amazing ... amazing ... amazing” was all that Valentino could say the first time he saw this room.)

“There was a sort of legend around São,” says Jean-Gabriel Mitterrand, a nephew of the late French president and one of Paris’s leading contemporary-art dealers. “Because she became part of this old traditional family, but she did not play that game. She had a strong character, but at the same time she loved to dream, to fill her life with fantasy.”

“Most rich people are stiff and square. São—absolutely not!” says Pierre Bergé, the longtime partner of Yves Saint Laurent. “She was like a gypsy, in a way. She had more than taste. She had audacity.”

“Who had the most interesting parties in Paris? Who had the most interesting artists in Paris?” asks Robert Wilson. “It was a salon. Who else in Paris but São had all of us? Who?”

“Of all those ladies, she got it,” adds the New York photographer Christopher Makos, who was also helped by Schlumberger early in his career. “She was incredibly cool.”

“I always thought she was a bit of a fool,” says Florence Van der Kemp, the widow of the director of Versailles, expressing a view perhaps more representative of conservative high society. “But I liked her.”

A Complicated Marriage

She was born Maria da Diniz Concerçao in Oporto, Portugal, on October 15, 1929. Her father was the scion of a minor Portuguese landowning family who grew cork and olives. Her mother was a beautiful German heiress from Hamburg. They had fallen in love at the University of Coimbra, the Cambridge of Portugal, but were not married at the time of their daughter’s birth. According to Victoire Schlumberger, they were never legally married, and they lived separately for long periods, all of which made growing up in pre-war, ultra-Catholic Portugal difficult for São, as she was nicknamed. She was raised mainly by her Portuguese grandmother, an iron-willed matriarch who “had difficulty accepting her as a grandchild,” says Victoire. “She was told terrible things that can hurt a child, things like ‘Your mother is not here, because she doesn’t want you.’ Which was not true.”

Like most members of the extremely private Schlumberger family, Victoire has always avoided publicity. She agreed to be interviewed for this article because she felt that her relationship with her mother has been unfairly represented by society gossips who had heard only one side of the story. She told me she had made a point of getting to know her maternal grandmother, Erna Schröeder, whom São saw infrequently after Erna married another man. “My grandmother explained to me that … it was a heartbreak when she had to leave her daughter to go and take care of her dying father in Hamburg,” says Victoire. “It was during the war, and she got stuck there.”

Eventually São’s father took her to live with him in a small village in central Portugal, where he had inherited property and built an olive-oil factory. He never married and, according to a family friend, “until his last days he said to São that she ruined his life.” (After his death, São gave his house to the local municipality to turn into a community center, and returned in triumph as a billionaire’s wife for the opening ceremony.)

At 10, São was sent to a boarding school run by nuns in Lisbon. In 1951 she graduated from the University of Lisbon with a degree in philosophy and history and enrolled in a three-month program in psychological testing at Columbia University, in New York. Upon returning to Lisbon, she took a counseling job at a government institution for juvenile delinquents, but she found it so depressing that she decided to give up psychology for a career in art. While studying at the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, she met Pedro Bessone Basto, a young man from a well-to-do family, who became so infatuated that he followed her on a trip to New York, where they were married and divorced in rapid succession. Back in Portugal, São was now not only the daughter of unmarried parents but also a divorcée, with little chance of ever rising in the sequestered society of a country where divorce was still illegal.

In 1961 the prestigious Lisbon-based Gulbenkian Foundation gave São a fellowship to research children’s programs in New York museums. In Manhattan, São told me, she was taken under the wing of Kay Lepercq, whose husband was the Schlumbergers’ investment banker. Paul Lepercq was concerned about Pierre, who had fallen into a deep depression after his first wife’s death. Two years later he was still having a hard time coping when Kay Lepercq called São and asked her to join them for dinner with him, thinking it would cheer him up. “It did,” says Victoire. Pierre proposed to São two months after they met. They were married on December 15, 1961, in Houston, the old Schlumberger way, without fuss or fanfare.

‘The Schlumbergers are considered the top of all the Protestant families in France known as the H.S.P., or Haute Société Protestante,” says André Dunstetter, a Paris businessman and host. “But for them to show wealth, or to give a chic, brilliant party, is a sin. You know, they have butlers in white gloves serving boiled eggs.” The family’s roots can be traced back to 15th-century Alsace, the French region closest to Germany and a stronghold of Calvinist severity. Pierre’s grandfather Paul Schlumberger owned a textile-machine business and, according to Ken Auletta’s “was a visionary with rocklike faith in science and in projects like the Suez Canal, in which he was an early investor.” Paul’s wife, Marguerite de Witt, was head of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance after the First World War. Paul and Marguerite had two sons, Conrad, a physicist, and Marcel, an engineer—Pierre’s father.

In 1919 in Paris, Paul and his sons started a company to develop Conrad’s theory about using electricity to explore the earth’s subsurface. The process Conrad invented, wireline logging, is still the chief means of zeroing in on the location and depth of oil deposits all over the world. In 1940, when Hitler invaded France, the company moved its headquarters to Houston. In 1956, three years after his father’s death, Pierre was named president of the newly formed Schlumberger Limited, which was incorporated in the tax haven of the Netherlands Antilles. In 1962 he took the company public; its initial stock-market value was nearly $450 million. Twenty years later that number was about $17 billion, and only three companies were worth more: AT&T, IBM, and Exxon.

The same year the company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange, to celebrate the birth of their son, Pierre surprised São with “the most incredible set of emeralds—the earrings, the necklace, the bracelet, the ring—that anyone had ever seen,” to quote Dunstetter, who was living in Dallas then. Dunstetter recalls meeting São at a gallery opening there in 1962: “She was so incredibly beautiful, and when she arrived everyone whispered, ‘That’s São Schlumberger!’ The crowd parted as if the queen were arriving in the Hall of Mirrors. She was the talk of Texas.”

From the beginning, the vivacious, showy São seemed incapable of fitting into this obsessively discreet clan or getting along with her stepchildren, who were still grieving over the loss of their mother, Claire Schwob d’Hericourt, a reserved Frenchwoman from an old Jewish currency-trading family. Two of the children, Christiane and Jacques, were still living with their father in his Georgian-style mansion in River Oaks, which São promptly set about redecorating with the noted French architect Pierre Barbe. Pierre’s cousin Dominique de Menil, the daughter of Conrad, and her husband, Jean de Menil, who were Houston’s leading patrons and collectors of modern art, were cordial to São, but they never became intimate. Pierre himself was very set in his ways. São told a friend that the first time she made him a drink he said, “We have butlers to do that.” His laconic manner became a running joke in Houston. One local lady who was seated beside him at a dinner party bet a friend that she could get him to say “more than two words.” When she repeated that to Pierre over the appetizer, he told her, “You lost.”

But even São could not lift his spirits. He continued to drink heavily, and, as one relative told Auletta, “Pierre was very fragile and lost his [psychological] balance.” In May 1965, Auletta writes, “the family prevailed on Pierre to resign.” Victoire, who was very close to her father, says he told her his version of this event years later. “Even with my mother, even with having a new baby, he was not recovering. He was very depressed.… [He knew that] he was not doing a good job anymore, and he wanted to retire. He planned to announce it at the next shareholders’ meeting. But three days before that, his mother and sisters stabbed him in the back and announced at a special meeting they called that he was no longer president.” According to Victoire, Marcel Schlumberger had left all of his shares in the company to his only son, and Pierre, out of a sense of fairness, had voluntarily divided his inheritance with his mother and two sisters. That was why he was so crushed when they forced him out. “From that day,” says Victoire, “every relationship with his family was finished. When my father said no, it was no until the end. When his mother died, he didn’t go to the funeral.”

Spoiled Beyond Belief

For the rest of Pierre’s life, he would indulge São’s every whim and allow her every luxury, almost as if he were slapping his uptight Huguenot family in the face. He even allowed Victoire to be baptized a Catholic, with ex-king Umberto II of Italy and Maria Espírito Santo, whose family was the richest in Portugal, as her godparents. When a grand apartment at One Sutton Place South, in New York, came on the market in the early 60s, Pierre bought it for São. He also bought her Quinta do Vinagre, the former summer residence of the bishops of Lisbon, and installed a sculpture garden with works by Henry Moore and Beverly Pepper. “He never refused São anything,” says Hubert de Givenchy, who recalls Pierre bringing her to his couture house and saying, “My wife is so beautiful, I want you to do your best for her.” São told a friend that Pierre once said to her, “Didn’t you wear that dress three weeks ago? Well, never do that again.” Once, he gave her a 51-carat Golconda diamond ring in a brown paper bag.

Perhaps nothing could have upset his family more than the highly publicized ball he and São gave at Quinta do Vinagre in September 1968, which marked São’s big push into international society. The Bolivian tin king Anténor Pati&ntildeo and his ultra-chic wife, Beatriz, had already announced that they were giving a ball at their quinta in Portugal, and many felt that São was piggybacking on their party by giving hers that same weekend and inviting many of the same guests, some of whom she had never met. São had the well-connected Paris jeweler Yvi Larsen stay at Vinagre to help her organize the event, and the planning went on for three months. Pierre Barbe built a pavilion in the garden, and Valerian Rybar ordered two planeloads of gardenias from Holland to hang on the lattice walls. “On the morning of the ball, I looked out my window and saw a man putting more blossoms in the magnolia trees,” recalls Larsen. “And then at the last minute the daughter of the Queen of Holland called and said she and her husband would attend, so we had to do the seating all over again.”

Some say that São made almost as many enemies as she did friends with her ball, starting with the socially powerful Beatriz Pati&ntildeo, whose daughter had been married to the British financier Sir James Goldsmith. “São never made an effort over women,” says Florence Van der Kemp. “She was full of complexes, which handicapped her in a way. She always had an attitude that she was being patronized. She should have become a friend of Beatriz Pati&ntildeo’s, but it was impossible for her.” Countess Jackie de Ravenel, who lived in Portugal at the time, adds, “São gave a hot-pants party and refused to invite Beatriz Pati&ntildeo, because she said she was too old to wear hot pants. So that caused a tremendous row.”

Though São’s relations with other women were often prickly, most men found her irresistible. “She was ravishing,” says V.F. contributing editor Reinaldo Herrera. “She had this wonderful Rubenesque quality about her, with the most luminescent skin. She wasn’t a stick, and everyone around her was. She was like a luscious, ripe peach. And she was a serious person—she wasn’t one of those women who is always jumping up and down and trying to be the life of the party.”

One year after the ball, in 1969, Pierre had a stroke while taking a shower at Vinagre. São was in New York arranging for their son’s schooling, but she flew back immediately. “They found him in the bathroom, half dead,” says Yvi Larsen. “The Portuguese doctors said, ‘You better organize his funeral. There is nothing we can do.’ He was in a coma. But São had a doctor brought in from France.” Florence Van der Kemp adds, “We went to Portugal to be with her. She stayed 24 hours a day in the hospital with Pierre.” Victoire says that she was always told that her mother had saved her father’s life by having him flown to Paris for a brain operation. “The doctor said, ‘It’s 50-50. We don’t know if we’ll succeed or not.’ She said, ‘Well, it’s better to take the risk and try and save him than to just do nothing.’” To everyone’s amazement, Pierre emerged only moderately impaired physically, but he seemed even more withdrawn psychologically and totally dependent on São. “He adored her,” says Dunstetter. “He was really in love, love, love.” As their friends still say, and I often witnessed, Pierre’s eyes would literally light up when São entered a room and follow her every movement.

‘São took Paris very quickly,” says Princess Laure de Beauvau-Craon. “She made a splash. Hers was definitely one of the houses where people were happy to go.” The Schlumbergers bought the Hôtel de Luzy, their five-story mansion on the Rue Férou, near the Luxembourg Gardens, shortly before Pierre’s stroke. Once the home of Talleyrand’s mistress, it had 10 bedrooms, more than a dozen bathrooms, and a small enclosed garden which Rybar mirrored to make it look larger. When I met São, in 1974, they had been living in the house for only about a year, but she had already established herself as one of the city’s most prominent hostesses. “There were three queen bees—Marie-Hélène de Rothschild, Jacqueline de Ribes, and São,” says André Dunstetter. “It was still the old system in Paris; you had the dukes and duchesses, the chic people, a few foreigners—very few. But São loved to surround herself with new people, interesting people, young people—she was more interested in having fun than in having a socially glittering list.”

She also stood out for her extravagance. As Pierre Bergé notes, “When she gave a dinner for a hundred people, she always had wonderful wine, grand cru Bordeaux. People never do that. For small dinners, yes, but not for the big ones.” The Duchess of Orleans recalls “a marvelous Bordeaux of 1887. São said, ‘You like it?’ I said, ‘São, I only drink when I’m with you.’ The day after, I had six bottles of 1887. That was São, you see.”

In those days, as the editor of Interview, I frequently traveled to Paris with Andy Warhol and his manager, Fred Hughes. They were invited to dinner in all the best houses, but Fred explained that Paris society was very snobbish and that until people got to know me I would be asked only for drinks after dinner. “It’s called being a toothpick,” he said. São, seeing me arrive at 11 night after night, soon took it upon herself to tell hostesses that she would be bringing me for dinner in place of her husband, who was always invited but never went out. “A toothpick—please,” she told me. “The French are so ridiculous.”

With the help of Pierre’s money, São set about making herself a cultural force. She and Pierre gave $1.7 million to complete the restoration of the king’s bedroom at Versailles, with its famous gold-and-silver embroidered bedcover and curtains. Robert Wilson met São in 1971, when he staged his first play in Paris, Deafman Glance. “Then I did A Letter for Queen Victoria. She was one of the patrons for that,” says Wilson. “And the next big one was Einstein on the Beach. São was great. I had lunch with her. I said, ‘Would you back it?’ She said, ‘Let me ask Pierre.’ Five minutes later she came back and said, ‘Yes, we will give you $75,000.’” Wilson often stayed at Rue Férou for weeks at a time when he was working on a project in Paris, and he was one of the few who could extract more than a few words from Pierre. But even Wilson could not get Pierre to leave the house. “Pierre told me once,” Wilson recalls, “‘I don’t want to go outside. I’m afraid I’ll meet some of the family.’”

All for Love

In the summer of 1975, on a trip to Ischia with her friends Alexander Liberman, the late editorial director of Condé Nast, and his wife, Tatiana, São met the man who would change the course of her life. Naguib Abdallah was a dashing 26-year-old Egyptian, with seductive green eyes, a beguiling smile, and an air of mystery about him. He introduced himself as Prince Naguib, wasn’t working at the time, and had entrée to Europe’s best nightclubs and casinos. According to Baroness Hélène de Ludinghausen, “Naguib comes from a good family. His father was a pasha, which was like a governor, before Nasser overthrew King Farouk.”

When I reached Naguib in Cairo, after São’s death, he told me he was “trading in oil with Lehman Brothers” and recalled how he and São met. He was in Ischia with his mother, staying in the same hotel as São, and one evening the Libermans got them all together for a drink. “And so we started,” he said.

Deeda Blair told me, “São had invited me to go with her to Tangier after she met Naguib. She was enormously spirited, and there were telephone calls and bouquets of roses. She was someone who had come alive. One night there was a small dinner at York Castle, and everybody was sitting around the pool. Suddenly somebody stripped off their clothes and plunged in. The next thing I knew, São was taking off this stiff, yellow Madame Grès caftan and was in the pool. We then flew to Paris. It was the time of the collections, and São had invited me to stay with her. But after we collected the luggage and got in the car, she said, ‘You’re staying at the Ritz, aren’t you?’ Well, the next afternoon was Dior. São appeared late, hair not coiffed, with Naguib.”

While many questioned the young Egyptian’s motives, Yvi Larsen insists, “I assure you, Naguib was in love with São. I don’t say it was an unselfish love, but he was in love with her. And oh, God, was she ever in love with him. She went to Pierre and said, ‘What do you want me to do?’ Who else does that? It was daring and honest.”

André Dunstetter adds, “São told me that she said to Pierre, ‘I’m ready to go if you don’t want this. I don’t want money or anything.’ And Pierre said, ‘No matter what you do, I don’t care. The only thing I’m asking you is never to leave me. Please, never, never leave me.’”

“São changed my life,” says Naguib. “I was going back to Cairo to start my career. That’s why she wanted a divorce. She wanted to move to Cairo with me and buy a palace for us. But I was too young to think about marriage. And Pierre was grateful to me for not breaking up their marriage. So everything was settled. We did not have to hide the affair.”

Even in a country where extramarital relationships are taken for granted, Pierre’s indulgence of his wife’s lover was considered extraordinary. Naguib accompanied São everywhere, was present at almost all of the Schlumbergers’ dinner parties, and practically became part of their household. Robert Wilson says, “What was very touching about Pierre was that when Naguib came into the picture Pierre loved São so much that he could appreciate her having fun with this young guy. Pierre told me Naguib actually brought new life into the house.” Wilson adds, “But it was really difficult for Victoire. She didn’t say anything, but you could see in the face of this child that her mother with this guy—well, that was complicated for a kid that age.”

Asked if she resented Naguib’s presence, Victoire responds, “No, I didn’t. My father was old, my mother was a woman, and he was accepting all of that.”

Naguib has this to say: “Everything was very cool. Pierre always treated me as a privileged guest. I stayed with them in Clos Fiorentina every summer. I taught Paul-Albert to water-ski and took Victoire swimming. In Saint-Moritz, Pierre had his suite, I had my suite with São, and the children had their suite with the nanny.”

Among the many gifts bestowed on Naguib was a spacious apartment on the elegant Rue de Bellechasse, decorated by the very grand Charles Sévigny with fine French furniture and Orientalist paintings. São went as far as to commission Harold Stevenson to paint a life-size portrait of Naguib reclining nude except for a lily covering his manhood. Victoire recalls, “All of [Naguib’s] expenses were paid by my father. He had his suits handmade in London. Handmade shoes. All of it. Everything was paid.… He got $5,000 a month in pocket money. My father was also paying his casino gambling debts.”

Florence Van der Kemp remembers São asking to bring Naguib to a dinner at Versailles. “[My husband] Gerald said to me, ‘For one and a half million dollars, she can bring an elephant.’ Which is what Pierre had given Gerald [for the restoration of the king’s bedroom]. So São came with Naguib, and I had some royal highnesses—Michel de Bourbon and Maria Pia of Savoy. I took him around and introduced him as Mr. Naguib. And São said, ‘It’s Prince!’ I told her, ‘São, he may be the prince of your heart, but he is no prince.’”

One year into their affair, São gave Naguib a lavish party at Rue Férou for his 27th birthday. “The whole of Paris was there,” says Hélène de Ludinghausen. “As you walked in, you had São and Naguib receiving you in the first salon, and at the end of the library Pierre was receiving. The theme was Egypt, naturally, so the tablecloths were lamé, and the centerpieces were sphinxes, obelisks, and pyramids done in ice. I was sitting at a table with Jacqueline de Ribes, and suddenly we hear the trumpets of Aida, full blast. Everybody got up, half in a state of shock, and what do we see arriving? Four musclemen, bare-chested, with those funny little skirts like the pharaohs wear, and they’re carrying a palanquin on their shoulders, on which is a pyramid of chocolate—the birthday cake. Behind it, arm in arm, were Naguib and São. She looked fantastic, dressed like Nefertiti. She had a smile from one ear to the other, convinced of the magic and grandeur of the situation. And that is where São had something which is quite strange in a person as smart as she was: she believed in that Alice in Wonderland world and never saw the ridiculousness of herself in it. Here was a woman who read a lot, who was aware of everything going on politically, who followed opera and ballet, who had good judgment when it came to events but no judgment when it came to people.”

Three years later the affair was over—done in, São’s friends say, by Naguib’s never-ending gambling debts. “I was with them in the South of France,” says Wilson, “when Pierre finally said, ‘I’ve had it. We’re not going to pay any more of the gambling debts for him.’ São accepted it. She was the kind of person that once the door is closed it’s closed.”

According to Naguib, “People said these things because they were jealous of our great, stylish life. In those days, on the Côte d’Azur, gambling was part of the life. Everyone was going to the casino in Monte Carlo after dinner—Princess Ashraf, the Shah’s sister, all the friends were at the tables. I like to gamble. You could say it was a family tradition. My father used to gamble with King Farouk in Deauville and Biarritz. Sometimes I lost money, but money was not the issue. Money was never mentioned. My money, her money, Pierre’s money—it was there. Sometimes, when I won big, I would go to Van Cleef and get a present for São. We broke up like any couple does, after a certain time.”

Naguib went on to have a long relationship with a wealthy Milanese widow, and also had a son by a relative of the powerful Agnelli family.

The Merry Widow

If São was disappointed, she tried hard not to show it. She was still a lady of leisure with a rich husband who couldn’t go out. People said their annual income was in the neighborhood of $30 million. São seemed to travel more than ever and express her opinions—particularly about other society ladies—more sharply than ever. Where many found Nan Kempner witty, São found her silly and didn’t hesitate to say so among friends. She took Anne Bass’s side when her husband, Sid, left her for the more popular Mercedes Kellogg, even though Mercedes had been a close friend. In 1981, I went on a trip to the Amazon with São and other members of MoMA’s International Council. On our last night in the Colombian frontier town of Leticia, the ladies compared jewelry they had bought in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. One had an amethyst necklace, another an aquamarine pin, a third a citrine ring. São remained silent until her bête noire on the trip, a mousy woman from San Francisco, said, “São, didn’t you buy anything?” São, who had had her entire jungle wardrobe made by Givenchy, snapped, “Yes, I bought a sapphire necklace, earrings, bracelet, and ring.” Then she added, “For my maid.”

A year later we traveled to Bangkok with Doris Duke, the Italian movie producer Franco Rossellini, and the Swiss art dealer Thomas Ammann, on a trip organized by former ambassador Francis Kellogg to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Thai dynasty. São was up for everything, including a couple of sex shows in between the formal events hosted by Queen Sirikit at various royal palaces. But when we got to Phuket, São fainted for no apparent reason in the middle of a dinner given by the island’s governor. On her way back to Paris, via New York, she went to see a doctor. That afternoon we had lunch at costume jeweler Kenneth Jay Lane’s apartment, and São suggested that she and I walk part of the way back to the Carlyle. “I have something to tell you,” she said. “The doctor said I have Parkinson’s.”

Meanwhile, Pierre’s health continued to decline. On Christmas Eve 1984, at the Palace hotel in Saint-Moritz, he suffered a massive stroke during dinner with São, their two children, and two of the children from his first marriage. “He was having his traditional potato with caviar,” says Victoire. “He would have that every night we were at the hotel. For lunch he would have spaghetti carbonara and coffee ice cream. Paul-Albert had just told a story, and we were laughing. Suddenly my father’s head was on the table.”

Pierre hung on for another 14 months, the last 6 at the American Hospital in Paris. “I wanted to go to the hospital when they told me he was dying,” says Victoire. “But my governess, who was my second mummy, said, ‘No, it’s better if you don’t see him like this.’ I had a wonderful relationship with my father, very, very close. I now realize that was quite unusual. My brother, for example, didn’t have this relationship at all with my father. I would always say to Paul-Albert, ‘Go to him. Spend time with him. Watch the TV with him.’ Because he was old and sick, he was taking a lot of medication, and he would just sit there, having his gin-and-tonic and watching TV. He was not a person who would come to you. You had to go to him.”

Victoire’s memories of her mother are of a different color: “Glamorous figure. Always a new dress. Two chauffeurs—night chauffeur, day chauffeur. Going out to parties. La femme fatale. She was the most beautiful woman in Paris for me as a child.”

Several family friends tell a story about Victoire when she was 10 or 11. It seems that some pieces of São’s jewelry were missing. Convinced that it had to be an inside job, she hired a detective, who questioned everyone on the staff as well as houseguests, including Wilson. A few days later the case was solved. As Wilson recalls, “São told me that she had walked down the hallway past Victoire’s room, and there was Victoire standing in front of the mirror with the jewelry on. Victoire always wanted to be her mother. It’s so touching.”

According to Victoire, she took a single piece of costume jewelry, a necklace, to try on and then was afraid to return it. But when her mother brought it up at dinner, she immediately admitted that she had it. “I didn’t want the servants to get in trouble,” she says.

The reading of Pierre’s will came as a shock to São. He left most of his estate to Paul-Albert, who was then 24, and Victoire, who was 17, with the proviso that São would have the use of the property from their marriage—including the residences in Paris, Cap-Ferrat, and Portugal—until she died. “That meant she would keep the same lifestyle until she died, but nothing belonged to her,” explains Victoire. “If she wanted to sell anything or do anything with the estate, she had to ask her children. And that, for my mother, was unbearable. She didn’t accept it at all.”

According to Patrice Calmettes, who by then had taken the place of Naguib in São’s affections, she called him in dismay and said the lawyers had told her, “Madam, you have your jewels, and that’s it.”

To complicate matters further, Pierre left little more than their previously established trusts to his five older children, on the grounds that they had inherited from his mother, who had left Paul-Albert and Victoire considerably less. São’s stepchildren threatened to sue her and her children, who were already at odds among themselves over the terms of the will. After nearly four years of legal wrangling, and with one of the older daughters, Catherine Schlumberger Jones, near death from cancer, the family finally reached a settlement in 1989. The stepchildren received the proceeds from the sale of the house in Cap-Ferrat—where São had planned to retire—part of the art collection, and some of their father’s investment portfolios. Paul-Albert and Victoire took the Portuguese property and agreed to share the rest of the estate, including the Paris house, with São. According to Victoire, her mother got 75 percent. São also kept 100 percent of her jewelry. But the bitterness remained, especially between São and Victoire. Paul-Albert, who married Aldelinda Poniatowski, a cousin of the former French minister of the interior, in 1991, was caught in the middle. “He was tortured by what was going on between São and Victoire,” says Aldelinda.

Rue Férou was put on the market, and São casually turned down an offer of more than $20 million from an American friend of André Dunstetter’s. Nevertheless, she went ahead and paid $9 million for an apartment overlooking the Eiffel Tower, which had been the residence of the Moroccan decorator Alberto Pinto until it had been destroyed by a fire a year earlier. After spending at least $1 million to turn it into a minimalist “loft,” she changed her mind and decided to hire Gabhan O’Keeffe, who had decorated a suite of rooms for her friend Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis in her palace in Bavaria. Soon carpets were being woven in Bangkok, fabrics were being designed in Venice, and craftsmen from London were stippling the walls with feathers.

Characteristically, São, now entering her 60s, found a way to turn a distressing situation into another occasion for grandiose fantasy. To a degree she was encouraged in this by Patrice Calmettes, whose love of luxury matched hers. She took Barbara Hutton’s house in Tangier so that she and Patrice could spend a summer together, and she would have fits of jealousy over his close friendships with Diana Ross and the aging Marlene Dietrich. “She was very tough with me sometimes,” says Calmettes, who also remembers how vulnerable she could be. “On a trip to Florence, she told me she had Parkinson’s and asked me if I minded. I said, ‘No, not at all. I will stay close to you until the end.’”

The first sign that São’s overspending was catching up with her was the announcement of an auction of several hundred lots of her best French furniture at Sotheby’s in Monaco in 1992. The sale brought in about $4 million. She had also given Sotheby’s a nude by Bonnard to sell, hoping it would fetch at least $1 million, but she finally had to settle for $277,500 at Christie’s in New York in 1993. In the meantime the Paris real-estate market was collapsing, and the house on Rue Férou remained unsold. In 1995 she lent it to the then struggling John Galliano for one of his first fashion shows. Eventually the Austrian financier Wolfgang Flöttl made “a very good offer” on the house, according to Victoire, but he withdrew it at the last minute.

One day in early 1996, São called her daughter and invited her to lunch. Victoire recalls that her mother said she was “desperate” because her bank was calling in a loan for several million dollars. She wanted Victoire to deposit money in an account for her so that the bank would extend the line of credit until she could sell some jewelry. “And I said, ‘We gave you all the money.… That was only six years ago. Daddy was one of the richest people in the world. How can it be possible that you’re in this situation?’” That night Victoire consulted with her longtime companion, who told her that, since her mother was clearly financially irresponsible, and probably being taken advantage of, the only thing to do was to go to court and ask for an order of protection. “My mother thought I was going against her, but I was only trying to help her.”

In June of that year, the luxury-goods tycoon François Pinault offered about $9 million for Rue Férou but pulled out three days before the scheduled closing. In August he came back with a bid of nearly $7 million, which São rejected. A few months later she was ready to accept a slightly higher price from the Arabian fashion plate Mouna al-Ayoub, but Victoire refused to go along, and São sued her. Paul-Albert was out of the picture by then, because he had sold his share to his sister after losing most of his money in unwise investments in Portugal. Finally, because of the ongoing litigation, they were forced to sell the house at public auction. It went for almost $10 million to the French singer Jean-Jacques Goldman.

While Victoire’s petition made its way through the French judicial system, her brother’s life continued to disintegrate. Victoire had two children with her companion and restored the Portuguese quinta to its former splendor; Paul-Albert, who had been divorced from Aldelinda for several years, attempted suicide in 2001. In 2002 the Supreme Court of France rejected Victoire’s petition, but São’s victory was overshadowed by the death of Paul-Albert at age 39, of testicular cancer that had been diagnosed too late. “I could have gone on with the legal process,” says Victoire, “but Paul died, and I said, ‘Now let’s stop.’ Going through all these trials trying to protect her was not working. We just had to talk. I had to make her understand that I was not the enemy. I was her daughter.”

Reduced Means

São continued to play the hostess, but the parties became smaller, less frequent, and less grand. She never really worked her way out of her financial difficulties, but she never complained about that or the illness that confined her to a wheelchair, her muscles frozen but her mind intact. One by one, the faithful servants disappeared—including Sebastian, her butler of 30 years—and the high-society visitors dwindled. The Duchess of Orleans still came for tea, and the former U.N. secretary-general Javier Pérez de Cuéllar and his wife, Marcela, occasionally took her to lunch at the Ritz. Nicholas Dadeshkeliani, a Svan prince from Georgia who had been a close friend for years, was a constant presence, as was Patrice Calmettes.

São took occasional calls from Naguib, but she told him she preferred not to have him see her in such bad condition. One day in 2004, Naguib says, she changed her mind all of a sudden and told him to come to dinner. “Sao told me that night, ‘We had it all—the love, the money, the glamour.’ She was fabulous. You know, her favorite expression was ‘The sky’s the limit.’ But I told her once what Thomas Mann said: For the leaves to touch the sky, the roots must reach to hell. Poor São. She had the most terrible time for years and years.”

Shortly before Christmas 2005, São fell and fractured a hip. After that, Victoire began spending half of her time in Paris with her mother, often with her companion and their children. São adored her grandchildren, and once said of the younger, “She’s very pretty, very smart, and very tough—like me.”

In October 2006, I flew to Paris for the lunch Victoire had organized for São’s 77th birthday. There were only two other guests, Hélène de Ludinghausen and Gabhan O’Keeffe. Nicholas Dadeshkeliani was away on business, and Patrice Calmettes, who did not get along with Victoire, had arranged to have dinner alone with São that evening. “I think Victoire was jealous of me, because of my intimacy with her mother,” he says.

O’Keeffe brought São her favorite pastel-colored macaroons from La Durée. His once outrageous décor had mellowed into a period piece, a kind of monument to late-20th-century excess. Salvador Dalí’s portrait of São still hung in the entrance hall, though the image of a pretty blonde lady adrift in a desert strewn with bones seemed more prophetic than surreal. Andy Warhol’s pink, purple, and green silkscreened portraits still dominated one corner of the grand salon, and in the library, where a curt Russian nurse offered us drinks, was the familiar, life-size photograph by Gerald Incandela of São in a Christian Lacroix ball gown taken in the 1980s. When lunch was announced, São insisted on getting out of her wheelchair and, with some help, walking to the table.

There was something almost noble about the way she handled her disability. She had never stopped dressing up for company, and that day she was wearing a gold lace jacket from Chanel couture, gold chiffon pants, a strand of golden pearls, and rose silk pumps with ribbons tied around her ankles. “São, your shoes are dee-vine,” O’Keeffe exclaimed. “Yes, people always comment on my shoes,” she responded with difficulty. As Ludinghausen launched into a description of her recent trip to St. Petersburg, “for the re-burial of the last czar’s mother,” São listened intently. But her own comments were few and far between. “I wish I could see the new Museum of Modern Art in New York,” she said at one point. As always, she was up on current events, and she had lost none of her bite. When a woman she had never liked was mentioned, she lifted her head from her lobster in cognac sauce and snapped, “She’s no good.”

I returned the next day to interview her. She was eager to talk but didn’t want her picture taken. Victoire, looking trim at 38 in a proper Chanel suit, took me to her mother, then left to do errands. “It looks like you’re getting along with her,” I said to São. “Looks like,” she repeated dryly. Inevitably, Andy Warhol came up. I remarked that it was astounding to think that critics now say he was as important as Picasso. “Andy was better than Picasso,” she said, one slow word at a time. “I always said that. Everything that is happening now comes from him. And I am the one who protected Andy in Paris. I protected him from the beginning.” After a long pause, she added, “I’m keeping my Picasso.”

Without prompting, she brought up the affair that many of her friends still consider her biggest mistake. “The fact that I had that affair with Naguib was a very good thing,” she said. “I don’t mean the person himself. But if I didn’t have that experience I would not have had … “

She struggled to find the word, so I said, “You mean with him you found true love?”

“Yes—if one could know what true love is.”

“Weren’t you in love with Pierre?”

“I was overwhelmed by him. It’s such a pity that he was a zero in bed after the stroke.”

I told her that I had seen Naguib the year before at the Venice Biennale with a new lady friend, a rich Mexican art collector. I asked São if she ever had any desire to see Naguib again.

“No.”

São Schlumberger died on August 15, 2007. Paris was empty, as it always is at that time of year, so there were only six people at her funeral, in the Church of Saint-Pierre du Gros Caillou: Victoire, the Duke of Orleans, André Dunstetter, Nicholas Dadeshkeliani, the graphic artist Philippe Morillon, and Maria, São’s last personal maid.

Although São had made provisions for Sebastian and Maria in her last will, written in late 2005, she had been too infirm to sign it after her fall. She had been planning to leave one-half of her estate for the establishment of a foundation for young artists, a portion to a handful of close friends, and the remainder to Victoire. As it turned out, Victoire inherited everything.

On September 25, 2007, some 70 friends attended a memorial organized by Ludinghausen and Dunstetter. “It was very nice, but small—just the faithful ones,” says Dadeshkeliani. The costs were covered by Prince Mubarak al-Sabah, a nephew of the Emir of Kuwait. The former Empress of Iran, Farah Pahlavi, sent a magnificent white bouquet, as did the Friends of Versailles and the Friends of the Centre Pompidou. There were three notable absences. Victoire chose not to attend, Patrice Calmettes says he was not notified, and Naguib Abdallah arrived in Paris the day after, having mixed up the dates.

The Avenue Charles Floquet apartment was sold in June 2009 to a nephew of the Emir of Qatar, for an undisclosed sum. The sale was arranged by Alberto Pinto, the decorator who had lived there before, and who has been commissioned to redecorate it—he has already ripped out Gabhan O’Keeffe’s Pop-Baroque fantasy. Pinto is also said to be re-doing the Hôtel Lambert, on Île Saint-Louis, the former residence of São’s great rival, Marie-Hélène de Rothschild, for the Emir of Qatar himself. Victoire sold the Dalí portrait of her mother at Sotheby’s, but she has kept the Warhol. She has restored Vinagre, the Portuguese estate where São gave her grand ball in 1968, and where Pierre Schlumberger had his near-fatal stroke a year later. She told me that she now regrets not having attended her mother’s memorial service in Paris, admitting, “I was bad about that, I must say.”

Bob Colacello is a Vanity Fair special correspondent.