For the past seventy years Lady Mendl has always been well known for something—principally for being Miss Elsie de Wolfe. When she was a child in the then stylish West Thirty-fourth Street quarter of New York, neighbors considered her noteworthy for being so plain. Thirty years later, on Broadway she was celebrated as the best-dressed star on the American stage. Twenty years after that, she had made a million and an international name by inventing the new fashionable profession of interior decorating. And for the past thirty years at least, she has been famous for her youth. She has also intermittently caught the public eye by having tinted her hair green, by having given a lavish Gold Ball at the Paris Ritz during the depression, and by having learned to stand on her head at the age of fifty.
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. Certainly few women alive have so spanned the epochs and their representative social contents. She was presented at Court to Queen Victoria, and is a firm friend of the Duchess of Windsor. Stanford White got her her first big job decorating the newly founded Colony Club with old-fashioned chintz, and Oliver Messel, the English artist, has made her portrait in the form of an ultramodernist mask. Her first theatrical coaching was in Paris with Victorien Sardou of the Comédie-Française, and one of her pet friends in the theatre today is Clifton Webb. Jean de Reszke wouldn't believe she couldn't carry a tune till she sang him a hymn to prove it, and Cole Porter and his jazz are now her favored companions. In Washington Irving's old house on Irving Place, which she and her friend the late Miss Elisabeth Marbury took in 1887, the two entertained on Sunday at tea for such world celebrities of the nineties as Calvé, Oscar Wilde, Mrs. Humphry Ward, and Sarah Bernhardt, and such local notables as Henry Adams, Mrs. William Waldorf Astor, who thought Mrs. Edith Wharton was bohemian, and Mrs. Wharton, who thought "only eight people in New York were worth dining with and so only had eight dining room chairs." The then Miss de Wolfe also graced the glittering cotillions led by Harry Lehr, Lispenard Stewart, Cooper Hewitt, and Ward McAllister. Dressed as Gismonda, she danced at the Bradley Martins' famous costume ball; costumed as the hoop-skirted Camargo of the portrait by Nattier, she attended the $50,000 ball given in 1905 by James Hazen Hyde for Réjane at Sherry's. The ballroom was decorated for the occasion to imitate the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles. The real Galerie figured with more actuality in her later life when, during the Peace Conference, Miss de Wolfe kept open house in her Villa Trianon at Versailles for such decisive figures as Lord Northcliffe, Balfour, General Pershing, Maréchals Foch and Joffre, and Clemenceau. It was from her house that several of the signatories departed for the Galerie to sign the Treaty of Versailles. Without political tastes, she has enjoyed the big national figures rather than bothered about their theories of government; she has been close to events by being next to their leaders at dinner. In the boom, crash, and New Deal periods she has gone to, when she hasn't given, what have been reported as the smartest parties, on both sides of the Atlantic. She has been called a monster of frivolity. Certainly the postwar hedonism which moralists now deprecate has gone strongest in Lady Mendl's so-called international smart set, who were not only suspected of being the gayest grigs on earth but had themselves photographed being gay to prove it. Because a certain public liked to hear about them and they liked to be heard about, they've been the most publicized high-society unit of the past fifteen years.
Whatever Lady Mendl's life has been, it has been founded on her phenomenal energy. Activity and discipline have dominated her existence. She has had three long careers as actress, decorator, and international hostess, all highly competitive jobs, and she has worked vigorously at each. She is physically incapable of doing nothing, systematizes herself like a businessman, has a mania for orderliness, punctuality, and concise motions and notions. She has a poor memory, and to check against it she carries a memorandum book, in the house or out. (At dinner parties it is a gold one.) Her energy draws her to people who've had the energy to succeed. She is fun to talk to because she loves to laugh and in conversation unexpected odd things pop out of her; her conscious humor is apropos rather than witty. (In both French and English her accent is old-fashioned New York.) Even her enemies admit she's never said a scandalous thing about them or anyone; not being imaginative, she has no capacity for innuendo and has to see to believe. She likes fine French furniture, white flowers, watching acrobats, travelling, pearls (she has three good strings), and reading French memoirs. Above all, she loves having people about her and things going on around her. She has a passion for parties the way some men have a passion for race horses, yachts, or cards. The degree of hospitality and gregariousness normal to most people has in her curious case been increased so that she enjoys two hundred guests to dinner, counts her friends in crowds, and is pleased not by intimacies but by numbers. By long practice and a flair for novelty and luxury, she has created a sort of social gigantism of which she remains the expert manipulator. No one except Lady Mendl ever wanted Lady Mendl to create what she did, but a lot of smart people of New York, Paris, Rome, Vienna, and what's left of royal Russia have enjoyed the result. They are the ones who have happily attended the long succession of bals masqués, al-fresco fêtes, parties to inaugurate new parlor games or parlor personalities, dinners, dances, cocktail and tea parties which she has given at her Villa Trianon, or in her Paris flat, or at the Paris Ritz, which is a second home, or on the Riviera, where she generally summers.
Though her parties are ostentatious in their elaboration, preparation, and ocular details, they are never stuffy. She has a healthy theatrical taste and prefers a witty exhibitionist to a dull duke. Having once been an actress, she has the old trouper's dash in putting over a party as if it were a Saturday matinée. This theatrical sense, probably even more than her social ambitions, is what has made her career as a hostess. Furthermore, to her parties she nearly always adds some element of novelty which gives the habitués something to look forward to. She plays fair with old friends; if a stunt fails to mature, she warns them not to bother to come. On the other hand, on one occasion when her friends the French Rothschilds objected to her giving a private preview of the film about their family which the English Rothschilds had, along with royalty, attended in London at its première, she pointed out that she couldn't disappoint the rest of her guests and that the Rothschilds, to her regret, had better not come. She has her own sense of justice and isn't afraid to use it.
In the garden of her Villa Trianon she built a Louis XV pavillon de musique which has since been used for jazz and has recently been wired for sound under the direction of her friend Douglas Fairbanks. She was the first hostess in Paris to show movie previews and she was the first to introduce in France the famous parlor murder game. She was also one of the first women to fly, going up with Wilbur Wright at Le Mans in 1908; she still finds in airplane travel the unearthly speed she has always longed for. She was one of the first in New York to believe physically—and financially—in the fox trot, and in 1913 bought some shares in Irene and Vernon Castle's famous Castle House, of which Miss Marbury was the chief backer. Lady Mendl will probably never be able to get over her fondness for dancing; not long ago she danced her young friends off their feet at Florence's Montmartre boîte, and at a ball in her Villa led the dancing till 2 a.m.
At her age, whatever it is, such activities are, of course, phenomenal. For the last twenty years her age has been legendary. Her passport gives the date of her birth as 1870, because a passport has to give some date and Lady Mendl enjoys a joke. The 1920-21 American Who's Who gave data which would make her now seventy-two years old; unprinted authorities say she is seventy-six; some grandmothers who went to school with her claim that she is eighty-two. Lady Mendl tells everybody that perfect health and a lifelong preference for youthful company are the secrets of her looking and acting so young today. Her much-publicized daily setting-up exercises, whose special importance, she thinks, consists in her never omitting them, are vaguely yoga, to which she's added Westernisms such as turning cartwheels and standing on her head to stimulate circulation. She has the proportions of a perpetually adolescent jongleur, and acrobatics, once she got round to them in middle age, proved irresistible. After she had married into the British Embassy circle, she scandalized diplomatic Paris society by making her entry at the Comte Etienne de Beaumont's costume ball turning handsprings and dressed as a Moulin Rouge dancer.
She spends an hour each morning on complicated skin foods and makeup. This is not because of vanity, which she thinks is the proper perquisite of beautiful women only, but because she realized, as a child, that her face was not as good as her body and resolved to make the best of both. Her Paris flat's bathroom is a combination office, boudoir, and beauty parlor. The room, in which no plumbing is visible, is a fabulous agglomeration of beautiful black etched glass, pictorial decorative panels, screens, divans, correspondence files, checkbooks, face lotions, and cold creams, and is furnished also with a desk, a telephone, and a dentist's spray machine which she uses daily. (The main interest in educating some French war orphans she adopted was in seeing that they went to the dentist regularly.) She early realized that diet was important; before the Hay regimen was a fad she had her own suspicions about mixed starches and proteins, declared for written menus at dinner parties so guests could know what course to major in, and took up raw vegetables from the late Dowager Marchioness of Anglesey, one of the first fashionable vegetarians. Lady Mendl is the type of hedonist who is not physically self-indulgent; she eats lightly—one main meal a day, with a simple fish or chop and green vegetables, and frequently ice cream, which she dotes on. She has no patience with soup, says no meal should be built on a lake, drinks no liquid with her repasts, takes an occasional Martini and a biscuit before, sometimes a half-glass of champagne after, dinner.
For over thirty years Lady Mendl worked for her living. Even as a child she was familiar with financial problems, because her father, Dr. Stephen de Wolfe, alternated his family between extravagance and debt. His ancestors, named du Loup before they Anglicized the name, were French Huguenots who came to Nova Scotia. His wife, Georgiana Copeland, was born in Scotland. When Elsie was still a little girl, her parents moved from West Twenty-second Street, where she was born, to a brownstone house on the site that Macy's now occupies. She was educated at Mrs. Macauley's School for Young Ladies on Madison Avenue, and was later sent for polish to Scotland and stayed with her mother's cousin, who was Queen Victoria's chaplain at Balmoral Castle. There Elsie became religious and wrote home, "A few more years of my frivolous existence and I would have been a ruined woman." She was soon, however, presented at Court to Queen Victoria—rare for an American miss in the eighties—and her first silk stockings, embroidered corset cover, and evening gown changed her mind about frivolity. Even as a child, Elsie had longed to look lovely, though she was then adorned only with an odd, eager little face and hideous, huge garments. Her Court clothes removed her inhibitions and gave her the idea that hereafter her policy would be to put her best foot forward. On this impetus, she met the Prince of Wales at tea, visited castles and duchesses, fell in love with fine period furniture, and in general made her first contacts with the top-drawer European existence. Returning to New York, she made her début in private theatricals, then the rage, at the opening of Pierre Lorillard's exclusive Tuxedo Club. Shortly after, her father died leaving nearly nothing. Charles Frohman, impressed by the high-society following she had achieved as an amateur actress, offered her the lead in Sardou's "Thermidor," and in 1891 she opened at Proctor's Theatre with Forbes-Robertson at a salary of two hundred dollars a week, on which she supported herself and her mother. For six of her thirteen years behind the footlights, Miss de Wolfe was a member of the Empire Stock. She starred in New York and on the road with John Drew, Viola Allen, Maude Adams, and Henry Miller; Ethel Barrymore was her understudy. Clyde Fitch wrote a play for her, and she dropped her savings in it. Her adequacy as an actress was always buried under her reputation as the only local leading lady with a Paris wardrobe. In 1904 she left the stage. She's not easily fooled, even by herself. She knew her career had been mediocre.
That same year she opened a decorating shop, and within a week was a success. It was the precise moment for anyone who could furnish an appropriate background for America's accumulating wealth and increasing female influence. The future Lady Mendl knew the wealthy, knew the women, and was familiar with fine furnishings, since she and Miss Marbury were by now summering in Versailles at their historic Villa Trianon, whose outbuildings had been part of Marie Antoinette's hameau, and were restoring the place to its original décor. Under the name of Elsie de Wolfe, Inc., she set up her first New York office in the old Manice house on Fortieth Street at a rent of sixty dollars a month, which terrified her, as it's her principle never to run into debt. Her first big private client was Mrs. William Crocker, for whom she did New Place in Burlingame, California. Soon after, Miss de Wolfe was buying antiques in Paris from the Wallace collection for Mr. Henry Frick, the second floor of whose mansion, now the Frick Museum, she furnished with its magnificent pieces—at the customary ten-per-cent commission. This gave her the financial margin needed to swing a business which had started almost without capital, though Mrs. Frederick W. Vanderbilt, Otto Kahn, Jules Bache, and others had raised a backing of one hundred thousand dollars for her which she never had to use. Frick's was the first of her many big deals in unique antiques. To Edward McLean of Washington she sold a seven-thousand-dollar bed which she said was the next to the most beautiful in the world. (She had earlier sold the most beautiful bed in the world to Frick.) For her rich clients, she unearthed the lovely objects made for the rich of the past. Hers was a de-luxe business. By her affectionate knowledge of French furnishing periods, she put the Bourbons, the Directoire, and some of the Empire into millionaire Republican homes. She also specialized in the re-doing of brownstone houses. In buying, she knew what she wanted—her first choice or nothing. She was a wizard saleswoman. She made money because she likes money and is vulnerable to it, because she has a true, talented eye for color, because she loved the job, and above all because the time was ripe for the work. Women clients liked her because she planned plenty of closets and was practically the mother of modern lampshades; also, she had an inventive efficiency unafraid to mix the practical and lovely. For the industrial kings, old and new, she decorated far and wide over the country: for R. M. Weyerhaeuser in Minneapolis, Joseph Crane in Dayton, J. Ogden Armour in Lake Forest, Zalmon Simmons in Greenwich, Mrs. Earl Dodge on Long Island. With the boom after the war came the modern decorative manner, which she indubitably influenced. Her office was now on Fifth Avenue, her home was in France, and she used the Atlantic Ocean as a corridor between, sailing back and forth to see the houses she was to do, and then working on their plans several thousand miles away. European houses she decorated, through the collaboration of Jansen of Paris, include the magnificent Vaucresson country residence of the banker, Fritz Mannheimer; in England, she did Mrs. Leo d'Erlanger's London house on Upper Grosvenor Street. One of the last big American places she decorated was that of her friend Gary Cooper at Brentwood, California. Here the Elsie de Wolfe-Lady Mendl modern style is as recognizable as a signature, with its dramatic use of black and white, zebra skins, Venetian starred mirrors, and its cardinal colors in upholstery against near-white walls or near-white upholstery against colored walls. Two years ago she sold her New York shop but retained some stock in the firm. In the summer of ’36 she came again into decorating news when it was reported that she was about to modernize Buckingham Palace for King Edward VIII. This she denied, stating she had merely executed models, which had pleased His Majesty, for the redecoration of three rooms at Fort Belvedere.
She did brave war work. An ardent Francophile, she first toured America to raise money for French ambulances, then became a Red Cross nurse in Mme. Henri de Rothschild's Compiègne pavilion, which specialized in giving the Ambrine treatment for burns. When America joined, she demonstrated the Ambrine treatment to American doctors at the front. When the Germans threatened Compiègne she helped evacuate the pavilion's eighty patients. After the Chemin-des-Dames attack she was awarded the Croix de Guerre with two citations “for bravery under fire," and was later given the Légion d'Honneur at Strasbourg, on which occasion there was a prises d'armes in her honor by a regiment of Alpine Blue Devils. She cried. She must have been one of the few women who courageously went through the war accompanied by a French maid.
After so many years of spinsterhood, she surprised her friends by marrying Sir Charles Mendl in 1926. She even married him again three years later, since, as she recounts in her ghost-written memoirs, "After All," their first marriage at the British Consulate in Paris, though witnessed by two ambassadors and one vice admiral, was eventually discovered not to be valid in France, where marriage must take place on French, not extra-territorial, soil. Sir Charles, now Conseiller Spécial of the British Embassy in Paris, was knighted for his social liaison services in the war. He had a talent for meeting and liking all kinds of people, and thus knew everybody at a moment when relations which had hitherto been merely a pleasure became of diplomatic importance. He had built up his vast acquaintance as a popular bachelor fond of singing Schubert Lieder after musical dinner parties in his Avenue Montaigne flat. The Mendls are a sensible pair who married for the sociable companionship they both enjoy. Sir Charles still maintains his Avenue Montaigne apartment; their official entertaining together is done in her Paris flat on the Avenue d'Iéna, which is a sumptuously formal residence. Its salon is decorated with fine pieces of the French haute époque. There are excellent boiseries throughout; chairs, signed by Cressent, covered with sixteenth-century blue velvet, and a small, highly personal collection of eighteenth-century grisailles and wash drawings by Boucher, Watteau, Fragonard, and Carmontelle.
Her Villa Trianon, however, is her real pride. Its property deed, dated 1750, reserves a right-of-way for all time for the King of France. Lady Mendl has spent twenty-nine years and a considerable fortune restoring the place, which had formerly belonged to King Louis-Philippe's son, the Duc de Nemours, and she has made it a model of perfection in period furnishings, terraces, gardens, and the landscape perspectives so precious to the old French ideal. The Savonnerie carpets, the Louis XV marquetry, General Murat's iron camp bed, a Clodion nymph and faun, and copies of the famous Mille Grâces curtains (whose originals she possessed till they dropped to dust) are some of the house treasures. Through her vegetable garden, she has a private entrance into the Parc de Versailles; she is the only resident with such a privilege, and to obtain it and the vegetable garden, which belonged to the State, Lady Mendl had to put in twenty years of astute political wangling. The Villa's guests have been distinguished and mixed—French politicians, princes, Papal nuncios, artists, writers, vaudeville actors, Egyptian beys, snobs, academicians, royalty, cinema stars. The Villa was offered to the King of England as a refuge after his abdication. In his privately circulated post-abdication poem, "National Rat Week," Osbert Sitwell mistakenly named Lady Mendl as one of those who had deserted the ship. As a matter of fact, her loyalty was so outspoken that the disloyal warned her she would find every important door in London closed against her. She replied that at her time of life there was only one important door—her own.
The person she probably has the most affection for today is Miss Elsa Maxwell, though their friendship dates only from after the war. Her older friendship with Miss Marbury and Miss Anne Morgan was such that the three bachelor ladies were fashionably known as The Triumvirate. In 1933 Miss Marbury died and subsequently the two others separated because of a falling out over finances. Miss Morgan had for some years previous been part owner with Lady Mendl of the Versailles villa. Lady Mendl is said to have made a million in her decorating business, which she invested in public utilities, and to have a fortune today of about two and one half million dollars, invested principally in English holdings managed through the Mendelssohn bank of Amsterdam.
She is today a lively little figure with artfully coiffed pale green hair, squirrel-brown eyes, an alert, inquiring, small chic face, and neat tiny feet in low-heeled shoes. She has an air of being an eccentric, entertaining, highly compact, energetic personality. She has been called one of the world's best-dressed women and probably is, since she sensibly gets beautiful Parisian clothes which are simple, fit perfectly, aren't ephemeral or startling in style, and which she generally wears two or three years. She wears chiefly blue or black, and used to adore beige. When she first looked at the Parthenon in Athens, she cried, "It's beige—just my color!"
She has given the best of her energy, ambition, and endowments to social relations and worldly labors. As she herself recently said, she still asks so many people to her house that she often forgets to invite those she really likes. Among the fashionable friends who know her best, there's a feeling that she could have done more with herself than go around with them. ♦
