Читать книгу Fabulous Female Firsts - Marlene Wagman-Geller - Страница 12
ОглавлениеThe décor of the nineteenth century can be described as more is more: windows covered with heavy damask draperies, velvet ensconced furniture, gilt frames, obscured walls. Then came a woman who brought in the light and vanquished Victorian gloom. Elsie de Wolfe left her impeccable mark as America’s first female interior decorator.
The girl who was to be a pioneer of the non-rugged variety was born as Ella Anderson de Wolfe in 1865 to a physician father and Scottish mother in a New York City brownstone, now the site of Macy’s department store. She was the only daughter of attractive parents who bemoaned her homely shoe-button eyes, long narrow face, and frizzy hair. Elsie, as she preferred to be called, described herself as “an ugly child,” an especially horrible assessment for someone forever enamored with aestheticism. In her 1935 biography, After All, she recounted how she once arrived home to discover the new drawing room wallpaper struck her as so repulsive she felt physically assaulted, like “something terrible that cut like a knife.” She fell on the floor in a tantrum, kicking and screaming.
A love affair with Europe began when Elsie was sixteen and left for Edinburgh “for finishing” in the household of her mother’s cousin, a distinguished clergyman, who arranged for her presentation to Queen Victoria. She later described the monarch as “a little fat queen in a black dress and a load of jewels.” Half a century later, Elsie would teach a wishful queen, Lady Wallis Windsor, “how to make a home fit for a king.” In the interval between her introduction to royalty and her friendship with the great queen’s great-granddaughter-in-law, de Wolfe led many lives, even including one that entailed flying with Wilbur Wright.
Her father’s death left little other than debt, and Elsie returned to New York to become an actress, thereby challenging the opinion of high society that the stage was a disreputable profession for a respectable lady. As it transpired, it was her onstage style and wardrobe-couture ensembles from Paris that garnered attention more than her acting ability.
Fortunately, Elsie had better luck on the romantic front when she met Elisabeth (Bessy) Marbury, with whom she entered into a “Boston Marriage” (a term for two single women living together, attributed to Henry James’ The Bostonians); they were romantically linked for the next forty years. Bessy was a scion of old Manhattan money and was the first woman literary agent; her clientele included Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, and Somerset Maugham. Elsie decorated their stately home in Irving Place with brightly flowered curtains and championed chintz (and so became known as “the chintz lady”). Her preferred color was made manifest when she first viewed the Parthenon in Athens and exclaimed, “It’s beige—just my color!” The couple threw parties that made them the hostesses with the mostest; their guest list included Sarah Bernhardt, Mrs. J. P. Morgan, and Mrs. Astor. The designing lady launched her fabulous career when Bessie suggested her new stage should be the dressing of interiors.
With all the drama of the theater she had left behind, de Wolfe swept into the male-dominated upholstery and furniture business and transformed it into an exciting profession; in the process, she made it a domain for women. Soon Elsie was proudly handing out business cards embellished with her trademark wolf-with nosegay-crest in its mouth. The quintessential woman-about-town was readily recognized as the tiny lady with the short white gloves, triple strand pearl necklace, and little dog in her arms.
De Wolfe and Marbury refused to let their era’s prejudice against their lesbian lifestyle dampen their professional and social ambitions. Bessie, at age sixty-two, was an active member of the Democratic Party who campaigned for Franklin Delano Roosevelt; she also served as his personal advisor. Elsie was never apologetic about her unorthodox choices, and her motto “never complain never explain” appeared in embroidery on one of her signature pillows.
De Wolfe’s decorating took off when a group of wealthy ladies, including Mrs. Borden (Daisy) Harriman, later to become the first woman ambassador, and Anne Morgan, daughter of the famous banker, embarked on a radical undertaking—the creation of a club for women based on the model of an English men’s club. By 1905, 550 members had enrolled, and Stanford White, the acclaimed architect, erected a building on Madison Avenue. He convinced its members to take a chance on de Wolfe, saying, “Give it to Elsie and let her alone. She knows more than any of us.” The elegance she lent to the Colony Club made her to design what her contemporary, Emily Post, was to manners. Elsie furnished fabulous interiors from Manhattan to Paris, Saint-Tropez to Beverly Hills. In a nod to noblesse oblige, she wrote columns for The Delineator that later evolved into the genre known as ladies’ magazines. She published her articles in her book The House in Good Taste; it became a bestseller.
The dream of accruing her own fortune arrived in one afternoon. Henry Clay Frick, the multi-millionaire steel magnate, asked Elsie to decorate the private quarters of his Fifth Avenue mansion/museum. Their business arrangement stipulated de Wolfe would receive ten percent of everything she purchased on his behalf. While in Paris, Elsie persuaded Frick, who grudgingly postponed his golf date for half an hour, to visit a warehouse to examine its treasures. In that half an hour, they obtained what is estimated to have cost between two and three million dollars and provided de Wolfe with one of the highest incomes for that year in America. De Wolfe was in charge of fourteen rooms, including Mrs. Frick’s boudoir—complete with eight panels painted by Francois Boucher for Madame de Pompadour. The future Edward VIII invited the celebrated designing lady to decorate sections of Buckingham Palace, but his abdication nixed the project. The debt-ridden doctor’s daughter became the queen of international chic and the arbitrator of taste. Elsie also donned an activist hat in 1912 when she carried a banner in a suffrage parade. However, most felt her participation was more economic than political—the act was good for business, the altar on which de Wolfe worshipped.
It is hardly a tossup which was Elsie’s greater love, Bessie Marbury or her home, the Villa Trianon in Versailles, a deserted Louis XV pavilion on the grounds of Palace of Versailles. The pavilion became a showplace and the crown jewel of de Wolfe’s legendary entertainments. The decadent decorator created mirror-paved galleries; walls held gilt-framed Old Master drawings that surrounded leopard-upholstered furniture. There was even a painted ceiling in the library showing the mistress of the manor as a cloche-hatted, short-skirted flapper leaping across the Atlantic to France with a small dog at her heels. Mirrors were also de rigueur in the dressing room because, “Know the worst before you go out!”
De Wolfe’s days as a businesswoman and hostess continued until 1914; the outbreak of World War I transformed the Villa Trianon from a pleasure dome to a hospital when Elsie offered her home to the Red Cross. She served as a dedicated nurse to burn victims (accompanied by her French maid) and received the Légion d’ Honneur. For two years, never far from the risk of German shells, she put the soldiers’ needs above her own. With the advent of the Armistice, the best-dressed actress on Broadway and the highest paid decorator in the world embarked on her third career as the most feted American hostess in Europe. Her parties were known for their skimpy menus—she was a dedicated dieter—profusion of flowers, and guest lists that included Coco Chanel, Douglas Fairbanks, and a spattering of deposed monarchs. Wallis Simpson observed, “She mixes people like a cocktail—and the result is sheer genius.”
The era’s most celebrated interior decorator was an unforgettable character: she stood on her head at the slightest provocation, posed as Mata Hari, and when Cartier delivered an aquamarine and diamond tiara, an elderly Elsie dyed her snow-white locks pale blue in color-coordinated homage. But nothing the design diva did topped what she orchestrated in 1926 when she became a bride. Figuring money and a title belonged together, she wed Sir Charles Ferdinand Mendl at the British Embassy in Paris and embarked on a month-long honeymoon in Egypt. Their odd union produced the dropping of many jaws. The groom was fifty-five years old and the bride was at least a decade older than the fifty-seven years she claimed as her age. Moreover, her only previous relationship had been with a woman. The nuptial made sense to the couple as Elsie was rich, and Sir Charles gave her the title she used for the remainder of her days: Lady Mendl. The marriage was one of social convenience as was evidenced when, ten years later, Elsie published her autobiography and hubby hardly merited a mention.
Exquisite when it came to decorating, Elsie fell short in other arenas; she chose paintings based on whether they matched a sofa. Upon a visit to Gertrude Stein’s home, she was horrified by the work of Salvador Dali. Her political actions also did not bear too much scrutiny, something not surprising for someone who harbored sympathy for Marie Antoinette. In 1933, in Rome, while watching an Easter parade, she praised the extravaganza, saying, “only Mussolini and Jesus Christ could stage a spectacle like this” and posed for a picture giving the Fascist salute.
In addition to being the Grande Dame of well-appointed interiors, de Wolfe was the winner of the best-dressed woman award in her seventieth year, the originator of blue-dyed hair, and an exhibitionist who, even in her old age, enjoyed her ability to stand on her head. In 1940, with the Nazis goose-stepping into her beloved Paris, Sir Charles and Elsie fled in their Rolls-Royce. Their final destination was California, where de Wolfe commandeered a Beverly Hills mansion that she christened After All (her favorite expression, which was also the title of her autobiography) and transformed it into a palace of mirrors and palm trees. The estate also contained one of her most cherished possessions, a stool from her Versailles home that had once belonged to Marie Antoinette. As was her lifelong pattern, interiors, rather than people, remained her passion. She recognized this character trait when she wrote another book, The House of Good Taste, “Probably when another woman would be dreaming of love affairs, I dream of the delightful houses I have lived in. I think that is why some people like my rooms—they feel, without quite knowing why, that I have loved them while making them.”
In addition to a decapitated queen’s stool, Elsie kept her scrapbooks, time capsules of a bygone era. They record her jewelry, parties, and telegrams from Wallis Simpson. Another memento was a dog tag, estimated at $1,000 to $1,500, that recalls the French poodle that she dyed the perfect shade of blue. A House & Garden cover preserves the living room of the Beverly Hills home where she waited out the Second World War.
with the Nazi defeat, De Wolfe returned to Versailles, where she spent her final years. Her remark illustrated the true love of her life, “If I have done anything really fine, it is the Villa Trianon.” In 1950, Elsie received her final commission: redecorating heaven.
