Talk:Yola Letellier

A fact from Yola Letellier appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 3 September 2019 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that Yola Letellier is widely believed to be the model for the main character in Colette's story Gigi?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2019/September. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Yola Letellier.

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Alive or not?

Is she still alive? Her birth year suggests she would be 111 years old in 2019.Cloptonson (talk) 19:17, 24 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I've looked high and wide, but can't find anything. I don't read French very well and it would be great if somebody could find a French obituary. But certainly 111 years of age suggests that she has passed away. Another 4 years and I believe by a guideline we can put in the death date as "unknown". Smallbones_(smalltalk) 00:44, 27 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

1900-1907

Usually these are the birth and death years of somebody. I can believe that the first number would be in question, but for the death year to be only 7 years letter is not reasonable. 100.15.127.199 (talk) 23:18, 7 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

spy? courtesan background made up?

this Hungarian paper article says she may have been a spy. It also questions if she really was brought up by aging courtesans in a hotel. I could find nothing in one of the best Colette bios (the Judith Thurman one) about Colette meeting Yola. I'll see if there is reliable evidence for it.

https://hellomagyar.hu/2022/07/18/horthy-kormanyzo-fianak-francia-szerelme-yola-lettelier-parizsi-kemno-lehetett-az-egykori-chanel-model/ 92.41.130.216 (talk) 18:57, 11 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I am now writing a biography of Yola, and in touch with her family. Yola's father Henri died in WW1 when she was 10, and she and her older sister Henriette went to live with their opera singer paternal aunt Jeanne Henriquez. The Gigi inspiration story is muddled bc Maurice Goudeket, Colette's husband made several mistaked in his memoir Pres de Colette, written many years later . To cut a long story short, She studied singing at the Conservatoire, and then initially to correct her posture, learnt ballet at the Paris Opera, which she loved. She didn't graduate from either the Conservatoire or the Paris Opera wasn't very good at ballet, so switched to modelling and by early 20s was modelling for Vogue , where she attracted several wealthy men. Jeanne Henriquez's was Henri Letellier's old friend and introduced them. This article could be augmented with info from Janet Morgan's Edwina Mountbatten bio about Yola's friendships with Central European high society, her best friend Mary Jayne Gold's memoir Crossroads Marseille, 1940, and Jean Diwo's Paris-Match 1959 article'We found the real Gigi'. According to Robin Dalton's memoir One Leg Over, Mountbatten's friend Baron was in love with her, and met Mountbatten at a fete she held in Paris. There's no evidence she returned Baron's feelings.

According to info I was given by another historian, around 1926 Yola was friends with the model/cabaret hostess/courtesan Laure Jarny, and best friends with the English actress Irene Wells (presumably the same one who lived in France and appeared in a Sacha Guitry film), who accompanied her to her 1926 wedding in London. After the wedding the sailed back to France and as newlyweds bumped into Colette, inspiring her to write Gigi. Colette wrote for Henri Letellier's Le Journal, and her ex-husband Henri de Jouvenel edited the rival paper Le Matin, so she would've already known him. 92.40.9.242 (talk) 20:37, 20 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]