Yola Letellier

Yola Letellier (born Yvonne Henriquet (also spelled Henriquez or Henriques), 28 June 1904 – 5 June 1996) was a French socialite and the wife of a newspaper owner.

Yola is widely credited as the model for the main character in Colette's 1944 novella Gigi. As such, she became the basis of a 1949 French film in which Gigi was played by Danièle Delorme; a 1951 stage adaptation by Anita Loos, in which Colette cast the as-yet-unknown Audrey Hepburn to play Gigi; and an Academy Award-winning 1958 musical film starring Leslie Caron with a score by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe.

In the novella, Gigi is a teenager educated to be a French courtesan, to provide companionship and intellectual stimulation as well as sex, who marries an older wealthy man. In real life, Yola married , 36 years her senior, who was a wealthy investor, owner of Le Journal, a stylish Parisian newspaper, and mayor of Deauville from 1925 to 1928. Letellier's family also owned hotels and casinos in Normandy.

Yola had affairs with other men, including one with Lord Louis Mountbatten, from 1932 until his death in 1979.

Marriage

Yola was Letellier's third wife. Colette observed the newlyweds Yola and Henri in 1926 at a hotel near Saint-Raphael, where they all were guests.

The Letelliers reportedly maintained a normal family life in the French upper-class tradition, in which extra-marital affairs were accepted. Mountbatten claimed this was his first extra-marital affair. Yola was to be his principal mistress until his death in 1979. Mountbatten, according to one story, installed a pull-out double bed in his 1931 Rolls-Royce Phantom II to entertain Yola.

Louis Mountbatten and his wife, Edwina, maintained an unusual family relationship. Soon after Mountbatten's affair with Yola began, Edwina confronted Yola in Paris with a surprising result. "Your girl is sweet," Edwina wrote to her husband "and I like her and we got on beautifully and are now gummed and I am lunching with her at her house on Tuesday!!!" "Yola did not live with us but would visit frequently, bringing us charming gifts," according to the younger daughter, Pamela. The gifts included a French peasant dress and a short-hair dachshund. Edwina and the children even visited Yola and Henri Letellier at their home in France.