Dorothy Draper instinctively understood the power of rebranding, of a literal or metaphorical fresh coat of paint. After the dual shocks of the crash and her divorce, she ditched the dull-sounding “Architectural Clearing House” and put her central asset out in front, launching Dorothy Draper Incorporated with a distinctive logo of intertwined Ds. In its heyday, her business made and lost eye-popping amounts of money, many times over. In the mid-1930s, DD became the first female decorator to be entrusted with an entire apartment building renovation, signing a contract for just shy of four hundred thousand dollars to renovate Hampshire House, a thirty-seven-story white elephant on Central Park South. Her transformation gave the building an instantly recognizable identity, with a design scheme that pulled together everything from bedspreads to staff livery to matchbook covers. It was a legacy of Tuxedo Park, where the look was equally distinctive and seamless—you always knew exactly where you were, which was exactly where you, and everyone else, wanted to be.
As the upper echelons of the economy rebounded in the late 1930s, DD’s style found more and more elaborate expression, and more and more devotees. Its apotheosis was the resort hotel, where the superrich would spend weeks or months at a time. These rambling, secluded palaces offered a prestigious but cheaper alternative to maintaining one’s own country home or traveling to an insecure Europe on the brink of war. Instead, one might take the dedicated train to White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, to the Greenbrier, owned by the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway—and carry on a life of luxury at the southern estate quite unselfconsciously nicknamed “Old White.” The Greenbrier today is the most complete surviving example of Dorothy Draper’s style, a riot of greens and pinks, wide stripes, and giant rhododendron chintz, a look that’s been aptly described as “Scarlett O’Hara drops acid.” 4
In Southern California, meanwhile, a comfortable distance from Hollywood, the Draper-designed Arrowhead Springs resort became a retreat and a playground for movie stars—its gala opening in December 1939, featuring Rudy Vallee and Judy Garland, was broadcast around the country. During the war, as American belts tightened, a Brazilian gambling magnate came to the rescue of Draper’s company with a project for a lavish casino resort in Petrópolis, outside Rio de Janeiro. By then, DD was over fifty and left most of the details and the stress of actually executing her projects to a loyal staff, although she remained the face of the brand and the wellspring of its vision. Her untrained instincts and her brash colors horrified more intellectual designers like Frank Lloyd Wright, who called her an “inferior desecrator” at a dinner at the Waldorf Astoria in 1952. Draper herself was in the audience, and didn’t turn a hair.
Dorothy Draper was as successful as she was in part because she was that rare member of the truly wealthy who understood just how aspiration worked. It was not the same as envy. She knew that when people hired her firm or saved up to visit the Greenbrier, they were not just buying the trappings of a lifestyle, but the feeling that came with it—that this life was theirs, by divine right. In her Tuckerman youth, you had to have come over on the Mayflower to get into that exclusive club (or, as one matron of Boston high society famously claimed, to have sent your servants over on it). Now, you just had to have the money, and the confidence to stride across the polished black-and-white floor.
Hopeful Hostesses
Despite the fame of her resorts, DD never lost her interest in teaching ordinary people to live their best lives. More and more of those people, especially women, were taking an interest in the way their homes looked—whether or not they were married. Isabel Smart was one such woman. Like thousands of her peers in the mid-1930s, Isabel moved to the big city to make her fortune and found herself a Live-Aloner, by choice and circumstance. In a previous generation, she might have lodged in a boarding house with a motley collection of strangers, in an arrangement of shared meals, strict landladies, and close quarters. (Vogue editor Edna Woolman Chase looked back with nostalgia on her boarding-house days, remembering the setup as more protective and sociable than the “makeshift kitchenette-Hamburg Heaven kind of existence” that was the lot of the midcentury working girl.)6 But although it could be lonely, a studio apartment like Isabel’s spelled freedom: from a landlady’s or a roommate’s surveillance, from house rules and set mealtimes, and not least, from somebody else’s taste in furniture. The living space that’s tiny but all your own has long been part of the romance of the city transplant. For generations, ambitious, domestically minded Live-Aloners have deployed ingenuity and creativity, bolts of cloth and cans of paint, to turn unprepossessing, out-of-the-way apartments into jewel-box hideaways.
For Isabel Smart, transforming her “tiny, dreary little room,” was not just an aesthetic choice but a social necessity. If she wanted to invite a male friend for dinner, things were apt to get uncomfortable, in more ways than one, with nowhere to sit but on the bed. Her inconvenient room was giving her an inconvenient reputation, as “the sort of girl who must always be taken somewhere and not brought home until it’s time to say good night.” But Miss Smart was aptly named. She decided to tackle the limitations of her room, using pillows to transform her bed into a respectable divan, and squeezing a table and chairs into a corner. Before long, her ingenuity was rewarded with more guests and invitations than she had days free in the week.
As it happens, Isabel Smart was not a real person, but a “case history of a young lady who was lonely.”6 She could have sprung from the pages of Live Alone and Like It, but in fact she was Dorothy Draper’s creation, and a character in her bestselling 1939 book Decorating Is Fun! On the hot pink striped cover of the book, a slim figure in high heels and a chic day-dress, who also might have flitted over from Live Alone, was poised halfway up a stepladder to adjust a curtain. Despite the book’s lighthearted title, its author believed passionately that decorating was not a frivolous matter. The home was a stage set for the life you wanted to live, and decorating it with panache and personality was essential to domestic happiness.
Decorating Is Fun! was as much self-help guide as design manual. As bluntly as it set down rules of scale and symmetry, it also took the nervous housewife by the shoulders and gave her a good shake: Don’t be a slave to tradition or to your mother-in-law’s taste. Paint the ceiling, hang your own curtains, and fill the space with what you love. “Your home is the backdrop of your life, whether it is a palace or a one-room apartment,” DD decreed. “It should honestly be your own—an expression of your personality.” If her reader was a single woman, she might have no one to help her hang her curtains, but she’d also have to answer to no one’s taste but her own. If that sounded daunting, the book could help, by teaching the fundamental principles of successful interior design (and successful living). At the top of the list was “courage.”7
The high-society pedigree of interior design was showcased in the preface to Decorating Is Fun!, written by Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt Jr., daughter-in-law of the former president and cousin by marriage of the current one. Mrs. Roosevelt invited readers from all walks of life to participate. “Every woman in her secret heart believes herself to be a potential interior decorator,” she wrote. To cater to this apparently universal feminine trait, a slew of dedicated interiors titles were launched in the magazine-mad 1930s, including Country Life in America, House & Garden, and House Beautiful, while decorating tips and advice columns became regular features in general-interest women’s magazines. Dorothy Draper played her part, contributing an advice column to Good Housekeeping—although according to her biographer and professional heir, Carleton Varney, she tended to think of her column as something that happened by magic, and it was usually up to her loyal staff to get the thing written.8 Even the rash of new movie-star magazines, like Hollywood and Silver Screen, showcased the stylish home interiors and spectacular hotel hangouts of the new celebrity elite.
At all levels of the magazine market, consumers were encouraged to imagine themselves into spaces and lives that were more elegant, coordinated, and luxurious than th
eir own. Advertisers and retailers quickly responded to the aspirational spirit of the times. Instead of lining up wardrobes or dining chairs in uninspiring rows, department stores began to arrange their products on shop floors like miniature stage sets. As they browsed among couches and armchairs clustered around coffee tables, glowing lamps, and sparkling glassware, customers could mentally cast themselves in the role of happy housewife or chic hostess. Well before the era of design blogs and Pinterest, department stores and magazine culture suggested that a beautiful home ought to be displayed to the world as an extension of its inhabitants’ personalities, and that keeping up appearances was as important inside the home as out.
Dorothy Draper’s love of chintz may not now strike us as particularly “modern,” but the ethos underlying all that bright flowered fabric was part of a larger revolution in what a home was supposed to look like and how it ought to function—as well as how it could be achieved. The style on display in department store advertisements aimed at Marjorie Hillis’s readers was selfconsciously modern and suited to city living. Furniture was compact, efficient, and convertible, made of lightweight wood, glass, and the ultimate modern material, shiny “chromium.” It was an Americanized version of the severe and spectacular European modernism of the 1920s, made “livable” during the Depression by a fusion of the forward-thinking ideas of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus with reassuring domestic comfort. In 1934 the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition of modernist American design featured creations by leading homegrown designers like Russel Wright and Gilbert Rohde, the latter praised by Lewis Mumford in The New Yorker as “one of the few designers who realize that ‘modern’ is something that you are, not a theatrical effect you try to achieve.”9
Modern homes both reflected and shaped the modernity of their inhabitants. In contrast to older styles that divided space by gender, separating the masculine library from the feminine parlor, the modern home was centered on an open-plan, companionable space meant to suit both men and women. This unisex space was understood as semi-public and geared for entertaining and display, rather than as a private zone—whether one lived with a family or alone. Etiquette guru Emily Post’s popular book The Personality of a House, first published in 1930, supported the notion that relaxation and social interaction were now the essential purposes of a living room. Its design should be flexible enough to accommodate spontaneous plans, like rolling up the rug for dancing, or pulling out card tables for a game of bridge or dinner around the fireplace. Although open fires were no longer an efficient form of heating, they remained powerfully appealing as a source of comfort and symbol of togetherness—thus Dorothy Draper, with her modular tables set for dinner around the flickering fire, could not have been more up-to-date for the late 1930s.
The modernist spirit in design quickly spread from museums to department stores. In 1936, for its special “Forward House” display, Macy’s showcased ten interiors, including a “twenty-four-hour apartment” with multipurpose furniture. The display emphasized that each room told a story about its inhabitants and about the moment in which they lived: the colors used in the decor drew on contemporary art and fashion, even current makeup shades. “The rooms in cosmetic colors emphasize the fact that room colors can contribute to personality just as cosmetics dramatize feminine beauty,” reported the Herald Tribune, underlying the idea that design was a woman’s particular arena.10 The designs in these interiors included everything from furniture to textiles to table settings. Russel Wright’s hugely popular line of American Modern ceramic dishes, in up-to-the-minute shades of chartreuse, coral, teal, and gray, reflected his belief that informal, modern living began at the dinner table, the center of the home. It was around the dinner table that guests would gather, and through entertaining that the home would be thrown open to outsiders who would see in it an expression of the owner’s individuality.
Entertaining Is Fun!
For Dorothy Draper it was a natural progression from decorating a home to sharing it with guests. Two years after she proclaimed the fun of decorating, she published a companion volume, Entertaining Is Fun!—this time with a cover design of bold pink polka dots. “Decorating and entertaining are halves of the same apple,” DD wrote. “They are important parts of the art of living.”11 Successful entertaining, she went on, was a matter of spirit and attitude as much as money or menus. To invite guests, whether to an intimate dinner or a cocktail party for two hundred of your closest friends, was a sign that you were putting up a good fight against the pervasive Depression-era “will to be dreary,” a gloomy marker of mental failure that echoes the language of Dorothea Brande’s uncompromising Wake Up and Live! As the country slid closer to war, it was becoming harder to sustain the self-help illusion that bad things lay in the mind, not the world. But for a while, Dorothy Draper could just about convince her readers that a coat of paint and a party would make everything better.
That a single woman could entertain at home at all was a modern innovation. Twenty years earlier, the Live-Aloner who was not a wealthy dowager with an army of staff would have taken it for granted that she couldn’t issue invitations. And who to, anyway? She couldn’t have invited a mixed group without raising eyebrows, unless she were a bohemian living on the border of respectability in Greenwich Village. Most likely her social life would be monitored by her family, and it would be in the company of parents and siblings that she’d have to find her fun. Until she married, the idea of being a “hostess” simply wasn’t for her.
But by 1937 things were different, and the Live-Aloner expected not only to feed herself but to throw open her home to guests. After all, what good was a chic apartment if no one else saw it, and what fun was there in preparing a fine meal if you couldn’t share it? In this modern era, “you will find hopeful hostesses in everything from hall bedrooms to penthouses (and printed pyjamas to décolleté gowns) getting ready for guests,” Marjorie Hillis wrote in her third advice guide for the solo woman, Corned Beef and Caviar (For the Live-Aloner). A cooking and entertaining guide that included advice on everything from boiling an egg to the etiquette of inviting men for supper, the book was structured around a collection of menus. These ran the gamut from simple suppers that a girl could prepare for herself alone, to elaborate affairs that required at least one maid, featuring dishes like roasted pheasant with “three indispensable sauces” or a cheese soufflé that “has to be prepared with care and prayer.”12 Taking obvious pride in his extended metaphor, one reviewer praised the book by calling it “as smart as an hors-d’oeuvre, as rich in substances as a two-inch porterhouse steak and as cleverly put together as a club sandwich.”13
To help write the menus and recipes in Corned Beef and Caviar, Marjorie turned to her friend and colleague Bertina Foltz, a Vassar graduate from Indiana who had gone to work at Vogue after college. Unusually for the time, but following the lead of her boss Edna Woolman Chase, Foltz stayed in her job after her marriage in 1923 and kept her maiden name professionally. As a beauty editor at Vogue, Bertina had played a part in easing cosmetics into mainstream respectability in the 1920s and ’30s, endorsing Max Factor makeup and showing readers how to mimic the dazzle of a Hollywood starlet with the company’s eyeshadow, lipstick, and rouge. From there she had become the magazine’s hostess editor, and her qualifications for the job of coauthor of a cookbook lay in the sizzle, not the steak—both authors freely admitted they were more interested in “the fun in food” than the flavor. The idea of their joint cookbook predated Live Alone, but on the heels of Orchids on Your Budget they dusted off the plan and turned the book around in less than six months. When Marjorie wrote in late September to ask if she could have a little more time to check the proofs, Chambers replied that it was impossible, given how fast his production team was already working to set the type, print, and distribute the book.14 With an eye on Christmas gifts, the publishers wanted the book out by November 24, so it could be offered both alone and in a boxed set with Live Alone and Orchids, priced $4.50 for all three.
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br /> Corned Beef and Caviar inspired women to host everything from conventional dinners and cheap buffet suppers to ladies-only teas or Sunday morning breakfasts, and is more inspirational than instructional. An adventurous Live-Aloner might try her hand at exotic “Bortsch” or “Zabione,” stewed okra or white parfait, but the recipes contain little indication of what the finished dishes should look or taste like. The theme, mood, and appearance of a meal mattered more than its flavor—and reviews suggested it was fun to read “even if you have no intention of cooking.”15
The gender of one’s guest, or guests, was of primary importance. In common with many cookbooks of the era, Corned Beef and Caviar assumed fundamental differences between what men and women ate, so that a ladies’ tea “should, of course, be dainty rather than hearty,” featuring nothing more substantial than thinly sliced white-bread sandwiches.16 Men, on the other hand, needed meat and liquor—especially if the hostess wanted him to stick around. The chapter “Getting the Man with the Meal” offers menus tailored to particular categories of male guest—young or old, teetotalers or drunks, crashing bores or potential Mr. Rights. A man who never touches alcohol is “seldom a true connoisseur of food,” and gets a suggested meal of canned mushroom soup, chicken à la Maryland, string beans, and lemon chiffon pie. “We think this menu is TERRIBLE,” the authors admit, “but the teetotaler will like it.” His counterpart, the heavy drinker, is just as uninterested in food, so his hostess (who is strongly cautioned not to regard him as “a prospective beau”) should simply prepare a meal to please herself, “and let him eat it or not as he sees fit.” The uncompromising gourmet requires a serious outlay of time and money, and carries a high risk of failure: “Unless you are a Helen of Troy and a Peggy Joyce combined, a gourmet will float out of your life forever on the first dab of whipped cream you give him.” These menus may lead to “other adventures,” the authors promise, if a hostess plays her cards right. That meant that she must never appear stressed or apologetic; never try to serve a man his “native” dish, whether it’s gumbo, chowder, or goulash; and never, never ask him to balance his plate on his knee—the chaise longue supper spells disaster for romance, and should be kept strictly as a solo affair. 17
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