The House in Good Taste
Elsie De Wolfe
“What surer guarantee can there be of a woman’s character, natural and cultivated, inherent and inherited, than taste? It is a compass that never errs … If a woman has taste she may have faults, follies, fads, she may err, she may be as human and feminine as she pleases, but she will never cause a scandal!” — Elsie De Wolfe
On an unseasonably brisk evening in July 1939, more than seven hundred of the international fête-set gathered in the grounds of the Villa Trianon in Versailles. The occasion was the Bal-Cirque, the second-annual themed party given by the storied decorator and society figure Elsie de Wolfe (1865-1950). Lady Mendl (as De Wolfe preferred to be called after a mariage blanc in 1926 to Sir Charles Mendl) had organized a suite of performances to amuse her guests, who were mixed in a way that would be unthinkable today: left wing, right wing, Hollywood stars, artists, playwrights, actors, royals, future Vichy collaborationists, Otto Abetz, the Nazi ambassador to France, Rothschilds, as well as Cecil Beaton, Coco Chanel and soigné representatives of Paris’s South American smart set. As Wallis Simpson, a close friend of de Wolfe’s, observed, “For bringing together all kinds of people in a gay, airy, but flawless setting, I have never known anyone to equal Lady Mendl. She mixes people like a cocktail—and the result is sheer genius.” Among the night’s entertainments were a troop of all-white Lipizzaner horses in jewelled harnesses (which Vogue called “quite the most beautiful creatures of the Paris season”) and a miniature circus of trained ponies and dogs led around a ring by de Wolfe, still nimble at the age of 81, who was dressed in a black cire evening gown by her beloved Mainbocher and an aquamarine-and-diamond headdress by Cartier. De Wolfe responded to the geopolitical circumstances with sangfroid, joking that she might have to replace R.S.V.P. on her social invitations with I.F.N., for “If No War.” The only guests who didn’t get the memo that it was the event of the season were the elephants, who were supposed to assist de Wolfe in making her grand entrance; the New York Herald Tribune reported that after the elephants had been “made presentable to meet some of the more eligible people of Paris society” they had stubbornly refused to move any further than the Versailles train station platform. The elephants couldn’t have known the significance of the event they were missing; two months later, Hitler would invade Poland, and Britain and France declared war on Germany, making de Wolfe’s big-top theme extravaganza the very last such legendary ball of the era.
Born in New York, the only daughter of a Canadian doctor, De Wolfe was a self-pronounced “rebel in an ugly world.” Even at a young age, acutely sensitive to style and colour, she had decisive ideas about design; one of her earliest memories, recounted in her 1935 ghost-written memoir, After All, was of arriving home from school one day to find her parents had redecorated the drawing room in a drab William Morris wallpaper. Despite the fact that such decor was then considered the height of fashion, the pattern of grey palm leaves and splotches of bright green and red on a tan background struck her as so repulsive that she felt physically assaulted. “Something terrible that cut like a knife” came up inside her, she threw herself on the floor and flew into a tantrum; “It’s so ugly! It’s so ugly,” she cried, kicking and screaming. Talented, tenacious, and absurdly energetic, de Wolfe has been credited as America’s first interior designer; a taste-maker who was determined to change the heavy Victorian aesthetic that was the look du jour in the late 19th century. She brought an aura of celebrity to an otherwise unknown profession, that would reward her with fame, fortune and lasting renown as “the mother of interior decoration”. In her 1913 book, The House in Good Taste, she wrote, “I’m going to make everything around me beautiful — that will be my life.” De Wolfe’s modernist décor represented a radical break with the past and ushered in a new age of lighter, brighter interiors, and a more functional approach to living.
Elsie de Wolfe (1950) photographed, with one of her poodles, in her bedroom at After All
A table setting at de Wolfe’s Hollywood Residence where ivy leaves serve as place cards, names written in white ink
As a teenager, de Wolfe was sent to live with a well-placed aunt and uncle in Scotland for “finishing”, and then to England where she was presented at court to Queen Victoria (“a little fat queen in a black dress and a load of jewels”). She later returned to New York, where she began to participate in amateur theatricals — a move that was en vogue for young ladies of a certain class — as a way into New York society. In the summer of 1887, still an amateur ingenue, she met Elisabeth “Bessie” Marbury who would remain her devoted lover and mentor for the next forty years. Nearly a decade her senior, Marbury, a formidable figure in New York society, was also a wildly successful literary agent and theatrical impresario, with Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Bernhardt, Rostand, and Feydea, among her clients. In much the same way as de Wolfe, Marbury had effectively invented her profession, having convincing Victorien Sardou, the president of the French Society of Dramatic Authors, that she should collect royalties on behalf of the French writers whose plays in translation were Broadway hits. Hailing from one of Manhattan’s most prominent families, Marbury enjoyed a comfortable fortune, and as early 1887 the two women set up house together at Seventeenth Street and Irving Place in what was then called a “Boston marriage” (a term for two single women living together, attributed to Henry James’ The Bostonians). Not long after their relationship began, de Wolfe’s father died, leaving her family penniless; Marbury helped de Wolfe secure work as a professional actress. Neither a beauty nor a theatrical talent, all de Wolfe had going for her as an actress was a petite, willowy figure ideally suited to the fashions of the day. She made the most of this asset, traveling to France every summer with Marbury to order couture ensembles from Paquin, Doucet, or Worth to wear in the next season’s productions. During these trips, de Wolfe became enamoured with the architecture and interior design of the 18th century, even though the style was considered hopelessly passé, replaced by the Victoriana that she detested. De Wolfe came to see in these interiors the very qualities she found lacking in heavy, embellished Victorian décor.
Performing various light comic and historical roles throughout the 1890’s, de Wolfe received more notoriety for her onstage wardrobe than for her performances, with one critic describing her as “the leading exponent of … the peculiar art of wearing good clothes well.” Captivated by her fetching outfits, female theatregoers began ordering the same styles or having them copied, turning de Wolfe into a trend setter. Years later, in 1935, de Wolfe was voted the best-dressed woman in the world. Encouraged by Marbury, de Wolfe used Irving Place as a canvas for her rapidly developing aesthetic of “light, air and comfort”. Eschewing the stuffy, cluttered Victorian design standard, the patterned wallpaper, velvet curtains, dark woodwork, and heavy furniture were replaced with 18th century French elegance; luminous ivory and pale gray walls, light muslin curtains, an abundance of mirrors, floral upholstery and pale painted Louis-style furniture. In all these efforts she was guided by a vision of refined yet comfortable living. “The little table must hold a good reading light, well-shaded, for who doesn’t like to read in bed?” she commented on the bedroom furnishings. In the dressing room, an abundance of mirrors and electric lights is essential: “Know the worst before you go out!” The new look caused a sensation amongst her society friends, including the likes of Wilde and Sarah Bernhardt, Stanford White, and J.P. Morgan’s daughter, Anne. As de Wolfe recounted, when her stage career hit a standstill, it was Marbury who suggested, “Why not go ahead and be America’s first woman decorator?” Requests for de Wolfe’s decorating counsel quickly followed, enabling her to abandon acting for good. Under the name of Elsie de Wolfe, Inc., she set up her first New York office in the old Manice house on Fortieth Street, and following her decorative gospel of simplicity, suitability and proportion, she opened up the horizons of decorating.
Her big break as a “professional decorator” came in 1905, when Marbury, along with a group of powerful New York women (Madeline Astor, Anne Harriman Vanderbilt, Anne Morgan and Payne Whitney) founded the Colony Club, the city’s first elite social club exclusively for women: complete with swimming pool, roof garden, card room, Turkish bath, gym, library, bar, and guest rooms. Its headquarters at Madison and 31st Street were designed by architect Stanford White, who, along with Marbury, helped de Wolfe land her first big commission to decorate the club’s interiors. Considered a radical project at the time (the socialite founders were mostly suffragettes), de Wolfe created a suitably revolutionary décor. In a departure from the stiff, heavy atmosphere of traditional men’s clubs, de Wolfe decorated the Colony with pale walls, light draperies and an abundance of chintz upholstery, then used only in country houses (immediately making her “the Chintz Lady”), its rooms peppered with delicate, elegant antiques. It was de Wolfe’s illusionistic indoor garden pavilion that most dazzled visitors; furnished with wicker chairs, it featured trellis-work on the walls and ceiling, interwoven with ivy and lights to approximate filtered sunlight. It became her signature style. When the Colony opened in 1907, the startling originality of the design put de Wolfe’s name on the map, leading to numerous lucrative commissions and the acclaim of the national press. As de Wolfe said: “I opened the doors and windows of America, and let the air and sunshine in.” De Wolfe blazed a trail as she became the most popular decorator of her time, and over the following six years, until her meeting with the industrialist Henry Clay Frick, one job followed another; she made over more clubs and private homes, on the East Coast and in California, abolishing the strict Victorian hauteur and reinvigorated tired buildings with light, open spaces and soft, comfortable upholstery.
After All’s card room, which was decorated with high-gloss green walls, panels of mirror, and Lady Mendl’s favorite fern-pattern chintz
With the boom after the war came the modern decorative manner, which de Wolfe indubitably influenced. As her fame grew, she was enlisted to write a column on domestic style for The Delineator, one of the turn-of-the-century “pattern sheets” that evolved into the genre known as the women’s magazine; her counsel ranged from how to select an apartment to simple do-it-yourself projects, advising women to buy good reproduction furniture, give “great dignity” to rooms by adding “moulding at a few cents a foot,” and entertain according to a few cardinal rules: “Plates should be hot, hot, hot; glasses cold, cold, cold; and table decorations low, low, low.” De Wolfe believed that everyone, no matter their background, could create a delightful room “where the colours blend and the proportions are as perfect as in a picture.” Good taste was as important as good manners, she advised her readers, since “you will express yourself in your home, whether you want to or not.” In what might be taken as her artistic mantra she wrote: “I believe in plenty of optimism and white paint, comfortable chairs with lights beside them, open fires on the hearth and flowers wherever they ‘belong’, mirrors and sunshine in all rooms.” The articles were later collected and published in the bestselling 1913 book The House In Good Taste, full of pronouncements that still remain applicable today: “Let me beg of you to demand only the actual essentials: a decent neighborhood, good light and air, and at least one reasonably large room.Don’t demand perfection, for you won’t find it.” By that time de Wolfe had a suite of offices and a showroom on Fifth Avenue, with a staff of secretaries, bookkeepers, and assistants. De Wolfe soon became known as much for her Cartier jewels, blue rinse and the cushions she had embroidered with her motto, “Never complain, never explain”, as for her revolutionary interiors.
Sixteen years older than de Wolfe, Henry Clay Frick emerged in the late 19th century from the relative obscurity of rural western Pennsylvania to become one of the greatest industrialists of all time, and one of the most eminent art collectors of his era; until his death in 1919, Frick acquired some 150 paintings that made his collection internationally famous: masterpieces by Bellini, Bronzino, Constable, Degas, Van Dyck, Fragonard, Gainsborough, Goya, El Greco, Hals, Holbein, Manet, Rembrandt, Renoir, Titian, Turner, Velázquez, Vermeer, Veronese, and Whistler, which now constitute the core of the Frick Collection. In 1912 Frick hired architect Thomas Hastings to design him, in his own words, “a small house with plenty of light and air and land” that would be “a comfortable, well-arranged home, in good taste, and not ostentatious”. With the house midway under construction in 1913, de Wolfe was assigned 14 rooms of the beaux-arts mansion, ranging from Mrs Frick’s boudoir — complete with eight panels painted by François Boucher for Madame de Pompadour — and Frick’s own solemn, walnut-clad bedroom to the daughter’s library, a pair of rooms for their son, Childs Frick, various guest rooms and the housekeeper’s room.
What made the job so appealing to de Wolfe, apart from the prestige of working for such a renowned collector, was the commissions Frick was prepared to pay her on everything she acquired for him, from domestic necessities to important 18th-century antiques. To suggest the scope of de Wolfe’s work for Frick, in Paris she took him to the residence on the rue Laffitte of the late Sir John Murray Scott, who had inherited part of the noted collection of French decorative arts assembled by the fourth marquess of Hertford and his son, Sir Richard Wallace. In a single morning, Frick spent between one million and three million dollars on paintings, sculpture, tapestries, furnishings, and other objets d’art. Whatever the final figure, her commission of ten per cent gave her one of the highest incomes in America that year and has since become a standard in the industry. As she recalled in her memoir, “I realized that in one short half-hour I had become what was tantamount to a rich woman. I was also astounded at the revelation that a businessman, so astute and even cold as Mr Frick was known to be, could spend a fortune with such nonchalance in order to keep a golf appointment.”
In 1903, on a summer trip to Paris, de Wolfe and Marbury discovered Villa Trianon, a deserted eighteenth century pavilion in the grounds of the Palace of Versailles (it’s property deed, dated 1750, reserves a right-of-way for all time for the King of France), that had formerly belonged to King Louis-Philippe’s son, the Duc de Nemours and whose outbuildings had been part of Marie Antoinette's Hameau de la Reine. De Wolfe transformed the house into an evocation of life in the age of Louis XV: Savonnerie carpets, a Clodion nymph and faun, copies of the famous Mille Grâces curtains (whose originals she possessed till they dropped to dust) and an iron camp bed that had belonging to General Murat (Napoleon’s brother-in-law) were amongst some of de Wolfe’s treasures. Among her many improvements to the property were the addition of a music pavilion looking out onto the pool — which doubled as a theatre where she and Marbury would host movie screenings — and five bathrooms, one for each of the four bedrooms and one for the servants: “If the ghosts should be confronted with the electric lights their surprise would not be greater than was the consternation of our builders when we demanded five bathrooms,” de Wolfe quipped. “They were astounded, and assured us it was not necessary, it was not possible.” Villa Triannon became a lab for de Wolfe’s decorating ideas for the rest of her life, even after her relationship with Marbury soured and “the bachelors”, as they called themselves, drifted apart: de Wolfe’s bedroom featured a nameplate that said simply, “Moi.”
Lady Mendl’s bedroom had the atmosphere of a garden, with flowers and leaves on the fabrics and carpet, all reflected in a mirrored chimney breast.
In 1926, aged sixty-one, de Wolfe shocked le Tout-Paris by marrying Sir Charles Mendl, the press attaché for the British Embassy in Paris: the New York Times ran a front page story calling de Wolfe’s wedding “a great surprise” because “she makes her home with Elisabeth Marbury at 13 Sutton Place.” The couple entertained together, but kept separate homes: whatever the explanation, the marriage was largely one of status and convenience — by wedding Mendl, de Wolfe gained not only a title but also tax-free status in France. Her biographer Jane S. Smith called their relationship a “mariage à raison,” explaining that “Charles was charming and Elsie was rich,” and that “they shared the same enthusiasms for people, parties, and the fine art of luxurious living.” (Shortly after her marriage, de Wolfe scandalized diplomatic society when she made her entry at the Comte Etienne de Beaumont's costume ball turning handsprings and dressed as a Moulin Rouge dancer.)
The Second World War forced de Wolfe and Mendl into exile in California. There she would decorate her last great house, a derelict Beverly Hills mansion, turning it into a place of palms and mirrors and christening it “After All” (a favorite expression that was also the title of her autobiography). The flower-pot red exterior was painted white and the swimming pool filled in to make way for a mature olive tree: “Do you think I’m going to live forever, to watch that thing grow?” she told the deliveryman, upon arrival of the first specimen. “Take it away and bring back something bigger.” As the war raged on, laying waste to the French countryside, de Wolfe labored to rescue a cherished stool (that had once belonged to Marie Antoinette) left behind at Villa Trianon; when it arrived in California she spent a morning moving it around the room so that it could get air and sun after its traumatic voyage. De Wolfe knew the house had been annexed by German troops and that General Eisenhower and the Allied Command had used it for some months after the Liberation, so she was aware of its derelict condition: “With the Liberation of Paris word filtered through to me that my Villa in Versailles was “intact”. That was the word used. A most antagonizing word! Very likely the walls are standing; perhaps most of the windows are in good condition; but the contents are probably missing. The beautiful Villa Trianion, shamed and humiliated by the treatment of brutes! Furnishings acquired through the years for their beauty and rightness, packed up and carried away. Friends who went to investigate reported the condition of the house and told of the Germans in the days and nights past wearing my clothes!” De Wolfe spent the last four years of her life returning it to its former glory. A new age arrived with the end of the war, and the ever-youthful de Wolfe — who was still known to stand on her head at parties and tinted her silver hair blue or lavender to match her jewels — immediately embraced its possibilities.
“I can’t paint, I can’t write, I can’t sing. But I can decorate and run a house and light it and heat it and have it like a living thing and so right that it will be the envy of the world, the standard of perfect hospitality.” — Elsie De Wolfe
De Wolfe’s style became more free and eclectic. She mixed animal prints with French antiques; added Regency and Chippendale to her stylistic repertoire; employed monochromatic schemes; and became enamoured of the colour beige: reputedly, when she first saw the Parthenon in Athens, she exclaimed “It’s beige — just my colour!” De Wolfe has been credited as America’s first interior designer. Vogue called her one of Paris’ “almost legendary characters … known for her brilliant dinner-parties … and her abounding, elastic vitality,” while the New Yorker referenced her as “a monster of frivolity,” and her friend Cecil Beaton found her to be “the sort of wildly grotesque artificial creature I adore.” She may have been born before the Civil War, but in many ways de Wolfe was a very modern woman: she built a career through hard-work, ingenuity and networking, and if not openly gay, there was no pretense at hiding her relationship with Marbury. She practiced yoga and plastic surgery — before either were de rigueur — and understood the power of branding (her logo was a wolf with a nosegay in its mouth). She based her style not on material goods but on her own principles of taste: a vision of refined yet comfortable living that she insisted was attainable by all. Whilst her proclivity for chintz might seem dated, her streamlined aesthetic and the principles underpinning it are as relevant now as they were at the turn of the century. In the gilded age, when the act of conspicuous consumption reached new and dizzying heights, de Wolfe redefined taste as achievable for the middle classes, a synthesis of comfort, practicality and tradition. “Lady Mendl has spent her long life as an animated and animating member of a form of society Socialist prophets assure us is vanishing. This gives her a certain historical quality,” wrote Jane Flanner in a profile of de Wolfe in the New Yorker in 1938. “Certainly few women alive have so spanned the epochs and their representative social contents.”
Ben Weaver