Elsie de Wolfe's Paris

Frivolity Before the Storm

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• Publisher: Abrams
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781613129807
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Artist Biographies

The American decorator Elsie de Wolfe (1858–1950) was the international set's preeminent hostess in Paris during the interwar years. She had a legendary villa in Versailles, where in the late 1930s she held two fabulous parties—her Circus Balls—that marked the end of the social scene that her friend Cole Porter perfectly captured in his songs, as the clouds of war swept through Europe. Charlie Scheips tells the story of these glamorous parties using a wealth of previously unpublished photographs and introducing a large cast of aristocrats, beauties, politicians, fashion designers, movie stars, moguls, artists, caterers, florists, party planners, and decorators. A landmark work of social history and a poignant vision of a vanished world, Scheips's book belongs on the shelf with Abrams' classics such as Slim Aarons: Once Upon A Time and Tony Duquette.

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You are not a modern woman; you are a ghost who has come back to us from the Court of Louis XV.

—PIERRE DE NOLHAC, Curator of the Palace of Versailles

My Perfect Eden

ELSIE DE WOLFE’S VILLA TRIANON

The Villa Trianon’s early history is obscure. The land was part of the royal patrimony of France, and the main house is believed to have been built in the early years of the nineteenth century. Prince Louis, the Duke of Nemours, King Louis-Philippe’s second son, was its last royal occupant; he abandoned the property during the Revolution of 1848, when he narrowly escaped capture and fled to England with his wife, who was first cousin to both Queen Victoria and her consort, Prince Albert. Legend has it that what in later years became the gatekeeper’s lodge, at the entrance to the property, was originally built as a small pavilion for the daughters of Louis XV seeking rest and refreshment as they traveled between the palaces of Marly-le-Roi and Versailles by carriage. There was also a small cottage that Elsie eventually made into a guesthouse, which was said to have been built for Marie-Antoinette’s doctor in the same rustic style as her nearby hameau, where the queen played milkmaid with her courtiers as France teetered toward revolution.¹ By 1903, when Marbury and de Wolfe finally managed to bribe their way in to inspect the Villa Trianon property, it had been neglected for over six decades.

Once Elsie and Bessie took possession, in 1905, Elsie set about transforming it. Simultaneously, she began work on the interiors of the Stanford White–designed Colony Club in New York—the project that made her reputation. Elsie had enormous projects on either side of the Atlantic decades before the existence of transatlantic telephone calls—and during an era when it took eight days, rather than eight hours, to travel between New York and France.

Once the roof was repaired and the house cleared of decades of debris, Elsie could see the simplicity of the old house’s sixteen-room floor plan. As she described it:

There is a broad hall that runs straight through it, with dining-room and servants’ hall on the right, and four connecting salons on the left. These salons are charming rooms, with beautiful panelings and over-doors, and great arches framed in delicate carvings. First comes the writing-room, then the library, then the large and small salons. The rooms opening on the back of the house have long French windows that open directly upon the terrace, where we have most of our meals.²

VILLA TRIANON

1. GATEHOUSE

2. DANCE PAVILION

3. MORGAN WING

4. ORIGINAL HOUSE

5. SUNROOM

6. GUEST HOUSE

7. GARAGE

8. KIOSK BAR

9. CIRCUS RING

10. POOL

11. MUSIC PAVILION

This plan of the Villa Trianon property illustrates the estate as it was at the time of the 1938 and 1939 Circus Balls. Elsie’s tapis vert, or great lawn, was the setting for the circus ring, while Stéphane Boudin’s kiosk bar, built around the trunk of an enormous tree, was situated near the dance pavilion. Plan by Zach Chapman / Parallel Design.

The ground-floor plan of the Villa Trianon in 1926, before the dining terrace was glassed in to create the sunroom and the marble-columned loggia was enclosed and incorporated into the 1938 dance pavilion. Created for a book about houses in Versailles, the plan calls the long gallery a “music room.” The villa had a dining room, although Elsie preferred to have meals on the terrace. At her larger parties, Elsie would greet guests in the library.

A rear garden view of the Villa Trianon in 1926. The wrought-iron-and-metal structure that replaced the original trellis on the dining terrace would soon be glassed in to create the sunroom.

This broad, awning-covered terrace was Elsie’s creation, and sometime in the late twenties she turned it into a glass-enclosed sunroom. She shocked her French builders when she demanded five bathrooms—an excess of amenities then unheard-of in France. Each of the house’s four bedrooms had its own bathroom—the fifth was installed for the servants.

Elsie expressed her priorities when she wrote in The House in Good Taste that “we determined to make the house seem a part of the garden.” Her friend Pierre de Nolhac, curator of the palace of Versailles, located the property’s original garden plan in the palace archives, and she was largely faithful to it. Still in situ was a garden enclosure created by a double ring of trees, where there remained a statue by Clodion of a nymph holding a baby faun in her arms. The back of the garden, with its stone wall bordering the grounds of the royal palace, was originally left in its “tangled woodsy state,” but eventually the landscape architect Achille Duchêne was commissioned to build a massive wooden wall of trelliswork, centrally aligned with sightlines from the villa’s terrace, with an expanse of lawn covering the distance in between. Elsie had the trellis painted a “soft green” and planted ivy to trail up and over it, and she felt that it “represents (to me, at least) my best work.”³

In 1909, Anne Morgan paid for a large octagonal building to be constructed at the far end of the property. Elsie envisioned it as a masterpiece of the art of treillage, once again employing Duchêne. A large, stone-lined reflecting pool, which was later turned into a swimming pool, was installed in front of it, and the whole was enclosed by hedges and topiary. They named it the music pavilion and had it wired for electricity so that breakfast or tea could be served. There were dressing rooms for large outdoor musicales, and in the 1930s Elsie held film screenings there.

In 1913, thanks again to Anne Morgan’s generosity, a new two-story mansard-roofed extension, dubbed the Morgan wing, was added to the villa. When World War I began, Elsie, Bessie, and Anne worried about how to secure their valuable investment in the Villa Trianon—particularly the still-empty new Morgan wing. What became known as the long gallery of the Morgan wing was transformed into a twenty-six-bed hospital ward operated by the Sisters of Compassion. Outbuildings were also requisitioned, with the stables used to store ambulances that Elsie and her friends were having donated to support the French war effort.

View of the long gallery in 1948. Drian’s murals of the grand staircase at the Palace of Versailles, on the wall facing the windows, survived the war, as did the bust of Marie-Antoinette that once graced the mantelpiece of Elsie and Bessie Marbury’s dining room at the house they shared on Manhattan’s Irving Place three decades earlier. The dance pavilion can be seen through French doors at the end of the gallery. Valentine Lawford recorded his impressions of the room in the late 1930s: “There was a noticeable absence of bright colour; instead, a general suggestion of oyster-white and pale brown, gold flaking off old mouldings, a marble fireplace surmounted by a marble bust, low, ivory velvet seats along the wall, little armchairs of zebra and leopard skin, vases of the ubiquitous lilium candidum, crystal chandeliers; and outside, reflected in a vast mirror through a portico beyond the windows, a garden wholly green.”¹ Photograph by André Ostier.

The sitting room off the long gallery (identified as a “bed room” in the plan on this page), as it was maintained by Paul-Louis Weiller after Elsie’s death. The square zodiac table in the center was originally in Elsie’s famous bathroom at her apartment on the Avenue d’Iéna in Paris. Pillows embroidered with aphorisms of Elsie’s line the L-shaped upholstered couch. Photograph by David Massey.

The drawing room of the Villa Trianon in 1926, looking on to the writing room and the long gallery before the installation of Drian’s murals. The eighteenth-century ale-blue and white boiserie paneling was purchased from Elsie and Bessie’s great early friend in France, Georgia-born Minna King, Marchioness of Anglesey. Above the lamp, a Walter Gay painting of the same room circa 1910 shows the view before the construction of the Morgan wing.

Elsie’s upstairs bedroom at the Villa Trianon, painted by William Ranken in the 1920s. The brass plate on the room’s door featured a name card with “Moi” written in El...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• CONTENTS
• Dedication
• PROLOGUE: FRIVOLITY BEFORE THE STORM
• 1. MY PERFECT EDEN
• 2. WHAT A SWELL PARTY THIS IS
• 3. A MARVELOUS PARTY
• 4. DANCING ON THE VOLCANO
• 5. THE LAST FRIVOLOUS GESTURE
• 6. THE LAST TIME I SAW PARIS
• EPILOGUE: THE LAST QUEEN OF VERSAILLES
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• NOTES
• INDEX OF SEARCHABLE TERMS
• CREDITS
• Copyright Page