20 FEBRUARY 1993, Page 39

A taste that mattered

Nicky Haslam

ELSIE DE WOLFE: A DECORATIVE LIFE by Nina Campbell and Caroline Seebohm Aurum, f19.95, pp. 143 It appears that not long ago the Queen was asked what she felt about taste. 'Well', she replied, 'I don't think it helps'. This somewhat dusty answer reminds me of being told, long ago, that she and Prince Philip were being shown the newly- decorated lakeside house of the then Lord Porchester. Little Prince Charles was told firmly to stay in the car. 'You see, we don't want him knowing about anything pansy like taste', even that particularly close friend was told. So perhaps it is fortuitous that some years before, the Queen, due to her uncle's abdication, had dodged a massive dose of dreaded taste. Had things been different, as Princess Elizabeth she would have had to wait until 1972 to move into a Buckingham Palace remodelled and decorated to the nines for Wallis Windsor by her great friend and mentor, Elsie de Wolfe. To Elsie, taste was absolutely all that mattered.

The career of this remarkable woman is much less well known than it was in her lifetime, because it dealt in ephemera. Fifty years ago every pronouncement and action by Elsie de Wolfe, later Lady Mendl, was newsworthy, copied and quoted. She was the first person to be publicised for having taste, which she had uniquely realised was a marketable commodity. In 1915, her first book The House in Good Taste put her visual ideas before a vast, hungry public. Twenty years later, in her autobiography, After All, she cooked up what is now called life-style'. Both, imitated worldwide, made her the precursor of the combined powers of Ralph Lauren and Min Hogg.

She was born in New York around 1860, and even the neighbours considered young Elsie noteworthy for her plainness. Despatched by embarrassed parents on a long visit to cousins in England, she fell in with an Anglo-American actress Cora Pot- ter, whose houses she would later decorate (and whose daughter, Fifi Potter Rocke- feller Stillman McCormick, I used to visit in Arizona. Her idea of decor was soundly sleeping papooses hung on the wall). Here Elsie de Wolfe became enamoured of European houses and the American stage. For some years the stage prevailed: by the age of 30 she was celebrated as the best- dressed star on Broadway: by 50 she had invented the profession of Interior Decora- tion and made her million: at 60 she mar- ried for the only time and as Lady Mendl, clinched her reputation as the world's pre- mier purveyor of glamour and chic. In her great old age she was a legend for her youth.

Her style watchwords — not always even loosely adhered to — Suitability, Simplicity and Proportion, were in an age of super- abundance, startlingly new. She began by knocking the stuffing out of heavy Victori- ana. Pulling back the dusty drapes, she let in light. She stopped the all-engulfing advance of nostalgic clutter dead in its tracks. She looked back to the 18th centu- ry, where she found beauty, and forward into the 20th, where she perceived a grow- ing need for comfort. Her genius was to amalgamate the two. Simple rooms deco- rated in the French taste became her per- sonal favourite, her villa at Versailles the epitome of it. 'She was the first woman you could talk a million dollar deal with' said Diana Vreeland, and Henry Clay Frick did, buying through her what is now the Frick Collection (though it is rumoured that for later clients the fine french furniture was made up in Brooklyn). Later she invented a kind of bandbox/rococo style for clients in the South of France, which took on a posi- tively surreal look in her Californian peri- od, where she was to spend the war (and incidently, where she had 'family'. Her niece, the film star Natasha Rambova, born Winifred Hudnut, was the wife of Rudolf Valentino).

This book, a Nescafe table biopic, is oddly twee, making Elsie de Wolfe into a kind of Mrs Delaney de nos fours. There are some recently taken colour photographs of what is left at the Villa Trianon (still owned by de Wolfe's great champion Paul Louis Weiller, most gener- ous of men, who paid happily for Elsie's taste and society introductions), and a few evocative paintings of these rooms in her heyday, plus Julian Latrobe's enchanting visual recreations of her most famous inte- riors, in the style of Vertes or Dufy. Sadly, and space-wastefully, these are padded out with many pages purporting to illustrate the de Wolfe influence on later — some of these are perfectly OK — and contempo- rary decorators, most of which are pretty grim, particularly a truly terrible section on trompe l'oeil, proving how the lightness of Elsie de Wolfe's technique can be scup- pered by the merest hint of a lumpen hand. The text contains no new material since the biography by Jane B. Smith of a decade ago, and is largely a précis of Elsie's own two books. The tone is wide-eyed reveren- tial; five decades after their subject's death the authors seem unaware of the fact that Elsie Mendl was the be-all and end-all of camp.

If much of her life was coolly devoted to selling herself and her taste, her innate charm, chat and fun made her a legion of genuine friends. Elsie, who had known everyone from Queen Victoria to Proust (whom her contemporary Helena Rubin- stein found Nebbishy looking — smelled of moth balls and asked endless questions about make-up'), now dined in Hollywood with Marilyn Monroe. And sometimes the fun was unintentional — she corpsed one dinner party by saying 'In this garden I'm going to have hundreds of arseholes covered in white roses' (she'd put an English plural onto the french arceau). At 80 she was still going strong, standing on her head daily, going to, or giving her Cora Potter's apartment, decorated by Elsie. Painting by Julian Latrobe. Courtesy of Aurum Press. beloved parties nightly.

One of the sayings she used to embroider on those little cushions (an idea, Charles Higham reports, copied from that most frivolous of men, Adolf Hitler), was 'It takes a stout heart to live without roots'. Stout as her American heart was, France called, and she went back. Cecil Beaton dined with her towards the end. Seeing her in the Villa Trianon, the pale rooms glow- ing with mirrors and candlelight, her entirely green garden, her blue hair and simple elegant clothes, her perfect food (the Hay Diet), the scented white flowers, the epigrammatic conversation, wondered if 'the old girl hasn't beaten the 18th- century at its own game'. This book does not establish that she did the same for the 20th.