Elsie de Wolfe

Elsie de Wolfe (also known as Lady Mendl^[1]) (December 20, 1865?^[2][3] – July 12, 1950) was a pioneering professional interior decorator in the United States, nominal author of the influential 1913 book "The House in Good Taste,"^[4] and a prominent figure in New York, Paris, and London society. During her married life, the press usually referred to her as Lady Mendl.

She is often credited with inventing the profession of interior decoration, though this is an exaggeration. In the 18th century, interior decoration was the purview of upholsterers (who sold fabrics and furniture) and architects (who employed a variety of craftsmen and artisans to complete interior design schemes for clients), while in the 19th century, the skills of designers such as Candace Wheeler and design firms such as Herter Brothers were well known. De Wolfe did however reap an enormous amount of publicity and doubtless was the field's most famed practitioner in the early 1900s, a period that also saw an increase of interest in interior design in the popular press. Among her clients were Anne Vanderbilt, Anne Morgan, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and Adelaide and Henry Clay Frick [15] . She transformed the design of wealthy homes from the dark Victorian style into designs featuring light, fresh colors and a reliance on 18th-century French furniture and reproductions.^{[5][6][7][8][9]}.

In her autobiography, de Wolfe calls herself a "rebel in an ugly world." Speaking of herself in the third person, she says that her mother said often that she was ugly, but "just what ugly was she did not know... Now she was to know." Arriving home from school, she found that her parents had redecorated the drawing-room:

She ran [in]... and looked at the walls, which had been papered in a [William] Morris design of gray palm-leaves and splotches of bright red and green on a background of dull tan. Something terrible that cut like a knife came up inside her. She threw herself on the floor, kicking with stiffened legs, as she beat her hands on the carpet.... she cried out, over and over: "It's so ugly! It's so ugly."^[10]

Hutton Wilkinson, president of the Elsie de Wolfe Foundation, notes that of course many things that De Wolfe hated, such as "pickle and plum Morris furniture," are prized by museums and designers; he believes that “De Wolfe simply didn’t like Victorian—the high style of her sad childhood—and chose to banish it from her design vocabulary."^[11]

De Wolfe began her professional career in theatre, making her debut as an actress in 1890. She was a member of the Empire Stock Company, then formed her own company. On stage, she was neither a total failure nor a great success; one critic called her “the leading exponent of . . . the peculiar art of wearing good clothes well.”^[12] She became interested in interior decorating as a result of staging plays, and in 1903 she left the stage to launch a career as a decorator.^[13]

In 1905, Stanford White, the architect for The Colony Club and a longtime friend, helped de Wolfe secure the commission for its interior design. The building, located at 120 Madison Avenue (near 30th Street), became the premier women's social club. (It is now occupied by the American Academy of Dramatic Arts) The success of this endeavor was a turning point and launched her on a financially successful career.^[14][15]

De Wolfe's 1926 marriage to diplomat Sir Charles Mendl was page-one news in the New York Times. The Times said that "the intended marriage comes as a great surprise to her friends," perhaps because since 1892 she had been living openly in what many observers accepted as a lesbian relationship; as the Times put it "When in New York she makes her home with Miss Elizabeth [sic] Marbury at 13 Sutton Place." Elisabeth (Bessy) Marbury, like de Wolfe, was also a career pioneer; she was one of the first theatrical agents, and her clients included Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. During their years together, Marbury, the daughter of a prosperous New York lawyer, was initially the main support of the couple. Dave Von Drehle speaks of "the willowy De Wolfe and the masculine Marbury... cutting a wide path through Manhattan society. Gossips called them "the Bachelors." ^{[16][17][18][19][20]}

In 1926 the New York Times described de Wolfe as "one of the most widely known women in New York social life," and in 1935 as "prominent in Paris society." She was immortalized in popular songs of the day. In Irving Berlin's Harlem On My Mind the singer professes to prefer the "low-down" Harlem ambience to her "high-falutin' flat that Lady Mendl designed." One of the color schemes she popularized was the inspiration for the Cole Porter song "That Black and White Baby of Mine" (whose lyrics include the lines "All she thinks black and white/She even drinks black and white").

Her morning exercises were famous. In her 1935 autobiography, de Wolfe wrote that her daily regimen at age seventy included yoga, standing on her head, and walking on her hands. Shortly after her marriage she scandalized French diplomatic society when she attended a fancy-dress ball dressed as a Moulin Rouge dancer and made her entrance turning handsprings. A guest chided her: "Elsie, it is wonderful to be able to turn handsprings at your age. But, after all, you are, you are Charlie's wife, and do you think it is in perfect taste for the wife of a diplomat to perform acrobatics in a ballroom?" A Cole Porter lyric observed that "When you hear that Lady Mendl, standing up/Now turns a handspring landing up-/On her toes/Anything goes!"^[21][22][23]

In 1935, Paris experts named her the best-dressed woman in the world, noting that she wore what suited her best, regardless of fashion.^[24]

De Wolfe had embroidered taffeta pillows bearing the motto "Never complain, never explain."^[25] On first seeing the Parthenon, De Wolfe exclaimed "It's beige—my color!"^[26][27][28] At her house in France, the Villa Trianon, she had a dog cemetery in which every tombstone read "The one I loved the best."^[29]

American Decades opines that "she was probably the first woman to dye her hair blue, to perform handstands to impress her friends, and to cover eighteenth-century footstools in leopard-skin chintzes."^[30]

Books by Elsie de Wolfe

• de Wolfe, Elsie (1913). The House in Good Taste. New York: The Century Company. 
• de Wolfe, Elsie [1913] (2004). in Hutton Wilkinson: The House in Good Taste. Rizzoli. ISBN 0-8478-2631-7.  (Reprint)
• de Wolfe, Elsie (1934). Elsie de Wolfe's Recipes for Successful Dining. New York: D. Appleton-Century Company. 

• de Wolfe, Elsie (1935). After All. New York: Harper and Brothers. 

See also

• The Decoration of Houses a manual of interior design by Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman
• Anti-Victorianism
• Victorian decorative arts

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