Less known than her storied husband, author W. Somerset Maugham, Syrie Maugham (shot by Cecil Beaton, above) is still a legendary figure in the worlds of high style and interior design. With her signature “white on white” palette, she single-handedly revolutionized the look and business of decorating, helping to cure high society in the 20s and 30s of its addiction to Victorian clutter and move it into a sleeker, more sophisticated, “moderne” mode. Most people in the field, however, know little about Syrie Maugham as a person. Her life on many levels was shrouded in secrecy, as were aspects of that of her husband, who divorced her and then spent the rest of his life maligning her.

While there have been two previous biographies of Syrie Maugham that I know of, they are relatively obscure and pricey. One of them, Syrie Maugham, by Richard B. Fisher from 1978, sells for a fortune online. And Gerald McKnight’s The Scandal of Syrie Maugham from 1980 is nearly as scarce. A new bio by Pauline C. Metcalf is due out this coming spring. Perhaps the best known book about Syrie is the one by her friend Beverley Nichols — A Case of Human Bondage — published in 1966 that purported to pull back the pink silk curtains on Somerset’s “beastly” behavior towards her. It was a decidedly one-sided view of Syrie Maugham, painting her as a martyr and a saint, the queen of high style. And it was dismissed by Somerset’s acolytes as the work of a slightly balmy hack (even Nichols’s friend Noel Coward dubbed it “ghastly.”) But Nichols certainly knew where the bodies had been laid (and by whom), presenting a view of Somerset Maugham and his homosexual affairs that was well ahead of its time. But his cri de coeur in defense of Syrie Maugham lacked substance, being more an exercise in vitriol and catty gossip. We never got to truly know the real Syrie Maugham.

Now a new biography of W. Somerset Maugham by Selina Hastings, above, has come out in England that is the latest profile of this much-analyzed author to study the strange ties that bound him to his wife, Syrie Maugham. Published by John Murray this fall, The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham runs to over 600 pages and is as easy to read as one of Maugham’s novels. Known for her bios of Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford, Selina Hastings combines an engaging prose style with ample amounts of gossip and insight. With unprecedented access to Maugham’s extensive private correspondence, much of which he had hoped would never see the light of day, Hastings has blown the lid off his life story, and shown those of us more interested in his wife Syrie, a side to her that has not been unveiled before. But in doing so, she raises as many questions as she attempts to answer.

The high-living Syrie Maugham, Hastings says, “was not quite the conventional society woman that she appeared.” Born in Hackney, England in 1879, Syrie was the daughter of the renowned reformer, Thomas Barnardo, above, founder of the Dr. Barnardo’s homes for destitute children. Born in Ireland, Bernardo and his wife, also called Syrie, but known in the family as “the Begum,” were members of an obscure American religious sect, the Open Plymouth Brethren. Barnardo was devoutly evangelical, a strict taskmaster and Bible-thumper, and advocate of the temperance movement. Young Syrie however (she shucked her unwieldy birth names Gwendoline Maud) wanted nothing to do with this sheltered life and showed little interest in her father’s charity work. While he hoped she would become a missionary and go to China, she longed to establish herself in London’s lofty circles and to escape the suffocating life she had known.

She found her means of escape in Henry Wellcome, above, a self-made man, some 25 years her elder, whom she’d met in Khartoum on a trip with her father. Wellcome, who’d been born in a log cabin in Wisconsin, had made a fortune in pharmaceuticals with his company Burroughs Wellcome (now part of GlaxoSmithKline.) They were married in 1901. As Hastings makes clear, the marriage was a disaster from the outset. Wellcome was as cold and strict as her father and expected Syrie to be a simple, dutiful wife, traveling with him to remote sites in Europe, rather than the social hubs she craved, while he conducted business or bought arcane medical instruments for his vast collection. Two years later, they had a son, Mountenoy, who is said to have had learning disabilities. Hastings describes Wellcome, who had been strikingly handsome in his youth, as a brutal boor with a walrus mustache and a paunch who had sadistic tendencies in the bedroom. In 1909, while the two were traveling in Ecuador, Wellcome accused Syrie of adultery and they soon separated upon their return to England. It was during this period as a wealthy married woman on her own that Syrie met and fell in love with W. Somerset Maugham, below, who was already a successful playwright on London’s West End.

Hastings is of the opinion that Syrie really did love Somerset, but that doesn’t stop her from painting her as a gold digger right from the start. Here we see a new Syrie emerge, a shrewd, sometimes shrewish, schemer who uses her then trim good looks, charm and social connections to woo Maugham, then corner him into submission. As Hastings sees it, Syrie set up a snare to lure Maugham into marriage by deliberating getting pregnant (although the first time she tried, she miscarried). She gave birth to Liza (Mary Elizabeth) in Rome while still married to Wellcome. Not long after, Wellcome sued for divorce, naming Maugham as co-respondent. The parentage of the daughter was never brought up in court. Maugham, she argues, did what he felt was the honorable thing and married her in New Jersey in May, 1917 during a trip to the States. Hastings suggests he might also have been moved to pity since his own mother had died in childbirth.

Syrie’s master plan seemed to unfold as she had hoped. Or so Hastings argues. The details seem to fit together, but one wonders if the biographer’s image of Syrie as a cold, calculating adventuress isn’t too colored by Somerset’s own jaundiced spin on the issue. Maugham could easily have dropped her after the miscarriage, but he continued to see Syrie. One has to ask why? It’s possible that he might have been as captivated by her as she was by him. And it’s just as likely that Somerset was using Syrie as a beard to mask his homosexual nature. (Maugham, below, with his daughter Liza at her wedding to Lt.-Col. Vincent Rudolph Paravicini, 1936. She later married John Adrian Louis Hope, 1st Baron Glendevon.)

Maugham, at the end of his very long life, and perhaps on the verge of dementia, later accused Syrie of merely pretending that the child she’d had with Maugham, while still married to Wellcome, was actually his. He cited numerous lovers as potential fathers. Hastings also makes the bold assertion that Syrie threatened to expose the names of Somerset’s male lovers if he did not marry her, just as years later she would threaten to reveal them if he did not divorce her. Hastings also claims that Syrie staged a dramatic suicide attempt by swallowing an overdose of pills. But Hastings’s “Notes” cite Maugham’s memoir Looking Back, which he wrote at the end of his life, and which has been universally dismissed as being unfair, if not deliberately misleading.

Around the time Maugham wrote those memoirs (which were printed in Show magazine in the States) he attempted to disown his daughter, Liza, arguing that she had no legal right to his estate since she was not actually his child. He demanded that she return some paintings he had given her. He hoped to leave everything to Alan Searle, his male companion, who may have been behind the strange turn of events. The scandal that ensued was pretty shocking stuff for the time. Somerset lost his case and the daughter retained her rights. And it is generally believed today that she was in fact Somerset’s flesh and blood. Perhaps his unconscionable behavior to her had more to do with his own desire to rewrite history than his attachment to Searle. (Maugham with Alan Searle, below.)

Hastings recounts how shaky the couple’s marriage was from the start. Somerset, for all his charm, was not that different from the other two men of Syrie’s earlier life: her stern father and her demanding former husband. Somerset’s aloofness may have been inspired by misogyny, due in no small part to his then-repressed homosexuality, which he had shared with Syrie, but also from his intense shyness. His stammer was an outward sign of his fumbling timidity and feelings of inadequacy. He turned a cold shoulder to Syrie’s demands for physical attention.

Hastings takes the view that Syrie Maugham was overly needy: “the frequent scenes Syrie staged, the endless reproaches, the daily testing and questioning of Maugham’s feelings for her, maddening to him, were all symptoms of her emotional insecurity, her huge desire to be loved.” She was “desperate for any show of affection.” Her sexual demands, he told a friend, “were insatiable, intolerable.” Hastings uses Maugham’s own comments as evidence. But it seems obvious that he was a prejudiced observer. He most likely loathed having sex with his wife, not because she was overly demanding, verging on hysteria, but because he was gay. Hastings seems to underplay Maugham’s own assessment that he was 90% homosexual and 10% heterosexual. One can not fault Syrie Maugham for wanting more than a fraction of her husband’s affection, especially since he basically stopped sleeping with her after they were married.

None of this, of course, is news, but what Hastings does do well is to show us Syrie Maugham, above, the mercantile wizard, the innovator in interior design. Her new life as a designer began when she and Somerset moved into a Regency mansion at 2 Wyndham Place in Marylebone. She channeled her restless energy into refurbishing the spacious house. When that was completed, she approached her friend, designer Ernest Thornton-Smith at Fortnum’s, asking him to take her on as an unpaid apprentice, something women of her class at that time would never dream of doing. “It quickly became apparent,” Hastings writes, “that Syrie had found her vocation, not only in decor but as a businesswoman, tough, tenacious, and with a keen eye for a bargain.” She’d inherited something of her father’s zealotry, and her ex-husband’s marketing skills, but used these to help the rich improve their lives, rather than the poor.

In 1922, Syrie Maugham opened a shop with capital she borrowed herself. Called Syrie Ltd, at 85 Baker Street, it was stocked with the contents of the Maughams’s previous residence in Regent’s Park. “With the strength of a typhoon,” Cecil Beaton wrote, Syrie “blew all colour before her… turning the world white…White sheepskin rugs were strewn on the eggshell surface floors, huge white sofas were flanked with white crackled-paint tables, white peacock feathers were put in white vases against a white wall.”

Hastings states that Syrie actually first conceived of her innovative all-white decors after visiting the house of Mrs. Ralph Philipson, one of her main investors. The white motif may have been Philipson’s idea, but it was Syrie Maugham who saw its potential. Part of the legend of Syrie Maugham is that she would “pickle” and bleach rare antiques, such as black lacquer Coromandel screens, or valuable Louis Seize pieces, stripping them until they were as pale as sun-blanched bones. But Hastings reveals that this part of her legend is probably apocryphal since Syrie more often than not used period reproductions that gave the same effect, yet generated a sizable profit.

Somerset took his wife’s success in stride, although he was not above teasing her about it when they had guests at their home. He warned the invited to sit down as quickly as possible before their chairs were sold out from under them. He, apparently had good cause to be nervous about such things. Hastings relates how he returned to his office one day to find that his beloved writing desk, which he had an almost supernatural attachment to, had been sold by Syrie without his permission or knowledge.

Syrie Maugham later moved her establishment to Duke Street, then opened satellite shops in New York and Chicago. Along with Elsie de Wolfe, whose style was a bit more theatrical and camp, and Sibyl Colefax, the classic English decorator, Syrie Maugham set new standards for chic. Beaton, a devoted fan, took his pal Stephen Tennant, below, to Syrie’s. The exquisite aesthete was smitten with her plaster-cast palm trees, artful rugs by Marion Dorn, and whimsical ornamentation. He hired her to redo Wilsford, his grand country house, as well as his rooms in London. “She made great use of Regency furniture, often decorated with shell motifs; and Venetian grotto furniture, with its bizarre gilded oyster and barnacle-encrusted rococo forms,” according to Philip Hoare’s biography of Tennant, Serious Pleasures.

It was a look that was visionary and inspiring, and soon, contagious. Everyone who was anyone wanted a Syrie Maugham room. Wallis Simpson, Marie Tempest, Mona Williams, Rebecca West, Elsa Schiaparelli, and Tallulah Bankhead all relied on her good taste. Even Belle Poitrine, the star of Little Me (a literary spoof by Patrick Dennis) brags about hiring Syrie. Evelyn Waugh immortalized her as Mrs. Beaver in his 1934 novel, A Handful of Dust. (Syrie Maugham-designed bedroom for Celia Clark, below.)

Syrie’s style captured the spirit of the Roaring 20s and its freedom from stuffy repression. Much of the look we associate with Hollywood glamour of the early 30s owes its simple elegance to Syrie Maugham’s pared-down, almost surreal, aesthetic. Edward Molyneux, who was the cutting edge of chic then, called her “the greatest designer of all.”

Outside her work, Syrie’s life was anything but simple. She and Maugham were barely speaking to each other, except when it came to the theater for which she had an uncanny appreciation. He often relied on her opinion. But at home there were endless arguments. In 1922, she hit a female cyclist while driving her car and the woman died from her injuries. Luckily she was found not to be at fault and was not charged. But the incident further alienated Somerset who feared Syrie was a liability. He, by now, was laying down his rules of engagement. They could remain married but he would lead his own life, which consisted mostly of spending all his time with Gerald Haxton, his controversial, and not very popular, lover. Beverley Nichols claimed he was a sex-crazed cad who “stank” and bragged of seducing a 12-year-old girl in Thailand. And Hastings confirms an incident in which Haxton hurled a dog out of a moving car because he found it annoying. Luckily it lived, although Liza, Maugham’s daughter, who was in the car at the time, did not know this and was traumatized by what he did.

Things came to a head in August 1925 when Syrie finally met Haxton at the Villa Eliza, above, she was renting in Le Touquet, a fashionable resort in France. Somerset brought him at her request. Among the guests were Beverley Nichols, Noel Coward and Gertie Miller, a famous musical comedy star, now Countess of Dudley. Syrie, understandably on edge, was perhaps too effusive in making her rival comfortable. She seemed hyper. The odd threesome, constantly on eggshells, raised eyebrows among the guests. Nichols described it as “Design For Living as written by Tennessee Williams.” Soon sparks were flying, words were exchanged (mostly over Syrie’s billing her husband for the laundry) and Syrie left her own party early for London, creating a mini-scandal at the time. The tense weekend became the focal point of Beverley Nichols’s later screed, A Case of Human Bondage, in which he felt Somerset had behaved like a scoundrel, flaunting his idiosyncrasies in Syrie’s face. The marriage, for all intents and purposes, was over, although the final official divorce decree was not granted until 1929. (Maugham, below, with Gerald Haxton and friend.)

Hastings chronicles another cause for scandal: an incident in which it appeared that Syrie had pretended to lose a valuable necklace for insurance purposes when in fact she had sold it. For Somerset it was the final nail in the coffin since he felt her mercenary approach to money might undermine his reputation. Or so we are told. It’s hard to know what really happened. And a lot of Hastings’s versions of events comes straight from Somerset’s side. Syrie had a nervous breakdown at this point, while traveling with her daughter on a business trip to the States. She told Cecil Beaton that she’d spent “three whole nights in Central Park too miserable to go home.”

Somerset bought the Villa Mauresque, above, in the south of France and began the free-wheeling, bachelor life there that has been so well-chronicled. With her daughter in hand, a Rolls Royce and a handsome alimony, Syrie stayed in London, redoing a four-storey Georgian manse on King’s Road, Chelsea and became one of the preeminent hostesses of the day.

Syrie’s life continued in high style until her death in 1955 at 79 years of age. She never remarried and always claimed she was still in love with Maugham. Somerset, of course, lived on until his 90s. His mean-spirited attempt to disown his daughter and to tarnish Syrie’s reputation blackened his name with some. But Liza luckily was raised by Syrie, not Somerset, and turned out all right in the end. And that, in my book, says more about Syrie Maugham’s character than any amount of speculation or innuendo ever could.

These days with everyone and his grandmother holding up the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Meryl Streep and Martha Stewart as the great arbiters of literature, acting and design, respectively, it pays to hark back to another time when three unusual ladies, all named Draper, also excelled in these fields. Muriel, Ruth and Dorothy Draper defined their era, and yet are hardly household names today. Lately I’ve found myself delving into books by and about them, including a relatively new one called In The Pink, a lavish biography of Dorothy Draper by Carleton Varney, below.

Dorothy has always had the upper hand when it comes to coffee table books. Her work demands extravagant attention. But the legacy of Muriel and Ruth can also be found in used bookstores and on eBay. Muriel wrote her memoirs, Music at Midnight, in 1929, an ode to her life as a “saloniste.” The latter didn’t write any books that I know of, but there is a lively book of letters and a marvelous biography, The World of Ruth Draper, by Dorothy Warren.

MURIEL DRAPER

Let’s start with Muriel Draper, above, as shot by Carl Van Vechten. Born in 1886, this tiny sparrow, graced with little in the way of looks or natural ability, simply used her wits and charm to seduce the greatest minds of her generation. It’s hard to imagine any other person who could count among her close friends Henry James, John Reed, Max Ewing, Osbert Sitwell and Gertrude Stein, or Lincoln Kirstein, Artur Rubinstein, e.e. cummings and Paul Robeson among her lovers. (Photo below from Beinecke Library collection. Link here: Yale.)

She was to the manner and the manor born, growing up at Birchbrow estate in Haverhill, MA. Her father, Thomas Sanders, had his ups and downs in the livestock and leather businesses (he was also one of the earliest backers of Alexander Graham Bell) and money flowed in and flowed out. But they lived well. Her mother was a Saltonstall. Both parents had long lineages among the old guard of New England dynasties.

Determined to see the world, Muriel married Paul Draper, a Harvard-educated lieder singer, who also had money, and who happened to be the brother of monologuist Ruth Draper. This was before the Great War, at the height of the era of luxury ocean liners, of Americans descending upon London, Paris and Rome with piles of greenbacks and letters of introduction. Muriel took Europe by storm, befriending Bernard Berenson, violinist Albert Spalding, heiress Mabel Dodge and the aforementioned revolutionary John Reed who later wrote Ten Days That Shook the World about the Russian Revolution. One could argue that Muriel Draper started her own revolution, of style, taste and Culture with a capital C.

By 1911, Muriel was in London where she started a salon at Edith Grove to which John Singer Sargent, Norman Douglas and Henry James were frequent guests. It was a long way from her father’s cow pastures and saddlery shops. Music was her passion. She sat at Pablo Casals’ knee while he played his cello. Artur Rubinstein tinkled the ivories while Chaliapin crooned. Soirees often lasted until dawn when champagne and raspberries were served. It was a life of careless luxury and leisure, but one that she worked very hard at.

As World War One began to rage, Muriel returned to America with her two sons Paul and Sanders, soon divorcing her husband, who was an incurable alcoholic. He’d run off with legendary actress Jeanne Eagels. He died at 38 in 1925. She struck out on her own, taking a cue from Elsie de Wolfe and another Draper, unrelated, Dorothy, who had started her own interior design business around the same time. The Beinecke Library at Yale has archived much of Muriel Draper’s work in this area, but a photograph by Walker Evans, below, and comments by friends about her personal surroundings also give the impression of whimsical simplicity, a banishing of Victorian clutter with an emphasis on the telling objet d’art or gifts from famous admirers. Edmund Wilson described her decor as “stale white calla lilies in a big white vase, cameo china ashtrays with cupids on them, and a white skull of a cow hanging on the wall.”

In the ultimate “shabby chic” flat, over the old Coach House in Manhattan, she continued to entertain on Thursday evenings, becoming the preeminent hostess of her day. She had, as one writer noted, “an uncanny ability to link the right people.” She even tried to get Irving Berlin to write her a jazz opera dealing with “skyscrapers and bad whiskey.” Sadly, it never came to pass. Later she lived in high style in a townhouse at 312 East 53rd Street next door to Edmund Wilson. The house had its own garden in back.

Draper also voiced her opinions on fashion and the arts, writing for Vogue and Town & Country, and penned commentary for The New Yorker under the nom de plume “Repard Leirum,” her name spelled backwards. She was a key figure championing the Harlem Renaissance, even attending a drag ball at the notorious Savoy Ballroom. Some dubbed her “the white negress” for her devotion to the cause. Sketched by Romaine Brooks, she was pals with opera’s Mary Garden, Hart Crane, T. S. Eliot, and Florine Stettheimer. By 1929 she wrote her memoirs Music at Midnight, captivating critics and readers with her zany adventures in high and low Bohemia. Thanks to its success, she took off on a lecture tour across the States, wowing the hoi polloi with tales of international cafe society.

Her later years were less merry. During the Depression, she became devoted to the cause of Communism, traveling to Russia in 1934. Like many under the influence, she misread Stalin’s largess as a liberal ticket to progress. She did not see clearly the cruelty beneath his grand schemes. Nevertheless, she stood by the cause even when it was no longer fashionable. In 1937 she began her own radio show on NBC, “It’s a Woman’s World.” In 1949 she became the president of the Congress of American Women which did not put her in good stead with Senator McCarthy. Perhaps it was the fact that she attended pro-communist rallies wearing the latest creations by Clare McCardell.

Muriel Draper died in 1952, nearly forgotten. Obituaries referred to her as the mother of Paul Draper, (shown leaping above), since he was then a well-known dancer. The golden age of the salon was long gone. And yet Muriel Draper’s name lives on in books being penned about timeless figures such as James, Kirstein, Van Vechten and mystics such as Georges I. Gurdjieff. Even as a footnote, she radiates chic.

RUTH DRAPER

In a similar vein, Ruth Draper, above, born 1884, used her enormous charm and talent to embody exotic characters she created for her stylish monologues. As Muriel Draper’s sister-in-law, she must have attended her fair share of literary and artistic salons where she could study the soaring language, speech patterns and tics of the high Bohemian set. Born into money (her father William H. Draper was a noted doctor), Ruth was the granddaughter of Charles A. Dana, editor of the New York Sun. She decided to become an actress on the advice of Ignaz Paderewski, a family friend who visited her home in 1913.

At one of these house parties, she entertained her young friends by impersonating a Jewish tailor. The effect was electric. From there she tackled diverse characters, including one based on a family dressmaker. She often used the people around her for inspiration. She did, in fact, perform in one play: A Lady’s Name starring Marie Tempest and Beryl Mercer. That was in 1916. Two years later she was in London entertaining the troops for seven months after the Armistice.

But never one to follow in anyone’s footsteps, Ruth blazed a bold new trail as a monologuist, delivering her mesmerizing scenes on an almost bare stage with minimal props and sets. She claimed to have been inspired by Beatrice Herford, who did comic satires of women. But Ruth took this type of humor to a whole new level. The world she created lay entirely in her voice, her mannerisms, her inflection. She first made her mark at the Aeolian Hall in London in 1920, variably introduced as a “reciter,” “diseuse,” “impersonator,” and even “elocutionist.” But she didn’t like being pigeon-holed that way. “I am not any of those,” she said in one interview. “I am an actor.”

To hear her render The Italian Lesson, which is almost a mandatory rite of passage for most gay men of an artistic bent, is to hear a genius at full tilt. Each tone, each pause, each syllable as carefully delivered by Draper is a piece of a brilliant puzzle, leading to a fully realized portrait of a very complex and hilarious personality — a rich socialite who treats translating Virgil like just another appointment in her society date book. But she invented many types: A Maine coastal villager. A Scottish immigrant. A Slavic grifter, spouting gibberish. A German governess. A social-climbing hostess. (Could she have been poking fun at her sister-in law?) Her lesser known incarnation The Actress is a study in psychological deceit. How people, not just those in the theater, use language and rhetoric as a kind of ever-evolving disguise. It is a hauntingly brilliant performance.

Ruth Draper performed for over 40 years, touring schools, colleges and clubs. She traversed the United States for four years straight in the 20s and then South Africa in 1935. In 1938 she dazzled audiences in Ceylon, India, Burma, Java and Australia. She went to South America in 1940. Perhaps for this reason she never married. She was forever on the road.

In 1954, after giving one of her farewell performances, she was given an honorary degree by Cambridge University. She died two years later of a heart attack at 72 at her East Side apartment, during a run at the Playhouse Theatre on Broadway. No one has ever approximated her uncanny ability to create stage sketches with such thrilling precision and insight into the human soul.

DOROTHY DRAPER

While not a member of the same family as Ruth and Muriel, Dorothy Draper, above, certainly had their uncanny sense of style. Born Dorothy Tuckerman in Tuxedo Park, New York in 1889, she was the daughter of Paul and Susan Minturn Tuckerman. Dorothy attended Brearley School in Manhattan, then married George Draper in 1912.

By the early 20s, Dorothy was anxious to break out on her own. She opened a design firm in 1923, having begun to refurbish apartments for the firm of Douglas Elliman, an upscale real estate agency. Her company developed wallpaper, fabric designs and designer sheets. Her look was modern, sleek, clean and vibrant. No fuss, no muss. But, like the woman herself, bustling with energy. Most of all, her aesthetic exuded a cool glamour that society women clamored for. Soon she was asked to do the interiors for the posh Hampshire House on Central Park South; the Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, above, and numerous Newport estates.

Her goal was always to upset the apple carts. She demanded to know why American women were some of the best-dressed in the world, but their homes were some of the worst-dressed — dreary and dull. She dove into her profession with a revolutionary zeal, forcing women across the spectrum to “think pink,” to reexamine their tired attitudes, to break out of the mold.

Author of three books, including the effervescent Decorating is Fun! Dorothy Draper is credited with pioneering the notion of “total coordination” in room design. But it was her radical use of color that distinguished her from other society decorators. Dorothy had an artist’s eye, using vivid black and white tiles, red carpets with black accents, stylish moldings and fixtures in a theatrical way that had never been done before. And has rarely been achieved since. Dorothy Draper died in Cleveland, Ohio in 1969 at the peak of the mod craze. It’s a testament to her timelessness that even then she was considered very much in vogue.

So there you have it. Three unique women. Three extraordinary lives. Three very different viewpoints. But one shared goal: seek revenge — live well.

(This month, I have been hosting my annual High Style sale at Brooks Books Etc on eBay. It is a celebration of all things glamorous and chic, focusing on books relating to the Beautiful People, High Society and American aristocracy: the Vanderbilts, Astors and Whitneys. Such divas of elegance as Diana Vreeland, Millicent Rogers and Slim Keith. I’ve also included a batch of tomes on interior design and architecture, offering works by Billy Baldwin, Elsie de Wolfe and Dorothy Draper (all sold by now, alas). I met Billy Baldwin back in the 70s while staying in Key West. I invited him and his friend Michael Jardine to dinner back at my guest house. I nearly killed them both with a jambalaya I concocted that was so heavily spiced, they had to leave the table and lie down upstairs in my bedroom. You can’t help but laugh about such things in hindsight.

Another of those stylish figures that I got to know back when was Mark Hampton, the legendary interior decorator. I wrote the following article about him in March 1988 for Quest magazine. It was an early piece for me and admittedly not one of my best. But I guess he didn’t mind it too much since he agreed to pose for the cover of another issue of Quest a few years later when I edited its New York Look special issue. Sharp-eyed visitors to this website might even notice that the trim on my front page is derived from one of Mark’s books. I later worked with his lovely wife Duane Hampton on a separate piece for Quest. She was a bright spot in a difficult time for me. I’ll always be grateful to both of them for their kind friendship and good will.)

Master of the Drawing Room

The first thing that strikes one upon meeting the celebrated interior designer Mark Hampton is that his personality is as lavishly decorated as any of the world famous houses, museums, clubs and public places he’s worked on around the globe. Like a character from a Wildean drawing room comedy, each comment he makes is deliberately phrased, furnished with clever bons mots, embellished by amusing anecdotes. One will note, too, a mellifluous Anglo lilt to his voice — an inflection that is definitely Upstairs, not Downstairs — that obscures his midwestern roots. His vocabulary as well is adorned with ornate expressions such as “wonderful,” “marvelous,” “fabulous,” and “gorgeous.” If, as Wilde insisted, life is an imitation of art, then Mark Hampton’s carefully constructed image mirrors his talent for design beautifully.

“I always wanted to be a decorator,” Mark Hampton says, sitting in a natty suit at a massive white marble travertine-top table situated dramatically in his attractive penthouse office. As he speaks, Mark sketches an imaginary decor on a sheet of white drafting paper. His pencil strokes are swift and effortless. A room takes shape, curtains are created, a tablecloth is added. One gets the impression he’s envisioned just such a room ten thousand times before. Without skipping a beat, the conversation continues. The drama of his childhood unfolds. As a young boy living in Indiana, Mark “grew tired of making jack o’ lanterns, valentines and seasonal drawings” like the other kids in school.
Forging a friendship with his teacher, he graduated to grander toys. “She taught me the difference between Greek Revival and Georgian,” he explains. Soon he was sketching “lots of Victorian houses with towers,” like those he saw in Charles Addams cartoons in The New Yorker. “I’ve always adored haunted houses,” he adds, especially the one Dickens so vividly depicted in Great Expectations. “I always wondered how Miss Havisham could be miserable living in that house!”

By the age of thirteen, Mark was eager to train his burgeoning aesthetic eye on his own surroundings — so with his parents’ permission he redid his room. “I installed wonderful antique walnut shutters which I lovingly stripped down and carefully refinished.” He’d discovered his medium of artistic expression. After attending De Pauw College in Indiana and spending a year studying at the London School of Economics, Mark received his masters in art history from New York University. Soon he was apprenticing with David Hicks in England and Sister Parish here in the States. The next six years he devoted to the firm McMillen, Inc., breaking away in 1976 to found his own company, Mark Hampton, Inc. During the last twelve years, he’s toiled on residential projects in West Germany, France, Ireland, Mexico and Venezuela. In America, he’s established his reputation by restoring many of the nation’s most important buildings: the Naval Observatory (home to the Vice-President and his wife), Gracie Mansion, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Academy of Design. A true professional, Mark is much admired for his attentiveness and dedication to his clients, although a former assistant nicknamed him Louis XIV because of his fiery temper.

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