Elsie de Wolfe's Paris: Frivolity Before the Storm

By Charlie Scheips

Photographs and stories of the legendary hostess’s extravagant parties and glamorous guests in the final months before the Nazis invaded France.

The American decorator Elsie de Wolfe 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Charlie Scheips tells the story of these parties using a wealth of previously unpublished photographs and introducing a large cast of aristocrats, beauties, politicians, fashion designers, movie stars, moguls, artists, caterers, florists, party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 “culminates with de Wolfe’s final grand fête, the second Circus Ball, which defined the glamour and decadence of international society before the lights went out all over Europe” (Gotham magazine).

• Language: English
• Publisher: ABRAMS
• Release date: Oct 28, 2014
• ISBN: 9781613129807

Book preview

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE: FRIVOLITY BEFORE THE STORM

1. MY PERFECT EDEN

Elsie de Wolfe’s Villa Trianon

2. WHAT A SWELL PARTY THIS IS

Elsie’s Social Swirl

3. A MARVELOUS PARTY

The Circus Ball, 1938

4. DANCING ON THE VOLCANO

Paris’s Last Grand Season, 1939

5. THE LAST FRIVOLOUS GESTURE

The Circus Ball, 1939

6. THE LAST TIME I SAW PARIS

The Exodus, 1939–40

EPILOGUE: THE LAST QUEEN OF VERSAILLES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

INDEX OF SEARCHABLE TERMS

CREDITS

I know all my friends are bad accountants, but they are very good book keepers.

—ELSIE DE WOLFE

FOR SUSAN TRAIN

This page: This trompe l’oeil painting by Etienne Adrien Drian, created in the early 1920s after Elsie had gained full ownership of the Villa Trianon, graced the villa’s entry hall; below it, arriving guests signed the guest book on a marble-top gilt console table. Elsie lifts a velvet curtain while seated on a footstool draped with her signature leopard skin, as a convoy of limousines approaches the Villa Trianon from Paris.

This page: Within months of her arrival in New York in the summer of 1940 as an exile from Paris, Horst P. Horst captured Lady Mendl, as Elsie de Wolfe was known, at Vogue’s New York studio. She was dressed by Mainbocher and wearing her famous pearls, while perched regally on a Louis XV armchair. Elsie certainly helped style the sitting, surrounded as she is by the key decorative elements of her signature French furnishings and posing against a photographic backdrop of storm clouds. Vogue called Elsie one of Paris’s almost legendary characters … known for her brilliant dinner-parties … for her incisive taste, and her abounding, elastic vitality.¹

This page: Twenty-five-year-old Cecil Beaton met Elsie and Elisabeth Bessie Marbury on his first visit to New York, in 1929, thanks to a letter of introduction from Osbert Sitwell. Though he had been contributing drawings to British Vogue since 1926, his first assignment for the American edition included this drawing of Elsie published in 1930. Beaton called her the sort of wildly grotesque artificial creature I adore.² He would remain friends with Elsie until her death in 1950.

This page: Elsie and Sir Charles Mendl befriended Ludwig Bemelmans during World War II. He had a bedroom at their Beverly Hills house, After All, and accompanied them back to France after the War, in 1946, when Elsie set about restoring the Villa Trianon. Elsie called Bemelmans Stevie and he called her Mother. His charming drawing of himself, Elsie, Sir Charles, and Hilda West (with her menagerie of cats and Bemelmans’s dog Bosey), with the Duke of Windsor off to the right by the pool in front of the villa’s music pavilion, appeared in Town & Country in October 1950, after Elsie’s death earlier that year.

This page: Bartenders await the guests at the 1938 Circus Ball.

Cecil Beaton took this 1938 portrait of Elsie in the bedroom of her apartment on the Avenue d’Iéna in Paris. She sent signed copies of the photo to friends as her Christmas card that year.

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 bal-masqués, al fresco fêtes, parties to inaugurate new parlor games or 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.

—JANET FLANNER, Letter from Paris, New Yorker, January 15, 1938

Prologue

FRIVOLITY BEFORE THE STORM

Shortly after nine on the evening of Saturday, July 1, 1939, a steady stream of taxis and chauffeur-driven automobiles began arriving at 57 Boulevard Saint-Antoine in Versailles, just a short drive from Paris. In all, more than seven hundred of the era’s most fashionable couture-clad ladies and their escorts in formal white tie were arriving at the Villa Trianon, the country home of legendary decorator and world-famous personality Elsie de Wolfe, for her second annual Circus Ball.

The Circus Ball capped the 1939 social season in Paris. Since the late nineteenth century, la grande semaine, or great week, of the Paris season had come at the end of more than a month of lavish parties, beginning in May, after which the exhausted revelers dispersed for their summer holidays around the world—the dominating need of the moment being to get away to seaside, mountain or health resorts, according to the New York Times’s report on the 1913 Paris social season.¹ In 1939, de Wolfe’s extravaganza was preceded by an unprecedented number of garden parties or big cocktail parties every day and balls and some sort of spectacle every night,² for Paris in the late 1930s was, in the words of historian Olivier Bernier, ever more determined to amuse itself.³

The 1939 Circus Ball was the last great party before World War II, and it is the central event of this book, which tells the story of Elsie de Wolfe’s entertaining in Paris in the late 1930s, illustrated largely with vivid, rediscovered photography by French photographer Roger Schall. The annals of twentieth-century society life contain many memorable, and period-defining, grand soirées, ranging from Count Étienne de Beaumont’s legendary costume balls of the 1920s and 1930s; to the fêtes of Charles de Beistegui, Georges, the Marquis de Cuevas, and Baron Alexis de Redé in the 1950s and 1960s; to Truman Capote’s famous Black and White Ball at New York’s Plaza Hotel in 1966; to the Proust and Surrealist balls given by Marie-Hélène and Guy de Rothschild at their Château de Ferrières, just outside Paris, in 1971 and 1972. Given its dramatic setting and timing, Elsie’s Circus Ball deserves a place among them, and perhaps at the front.

Guests mingle around the Stéphane Boudin–designed kiosk bar during Elsie’s 1939 Circus Ball at the Villa Trianon.

From the time of her marriage to British diplomat Sir Charles Mendl in 1926 until her death in 1950, Elsie de Wolfe was known in international social circles and in the press as Lady Mendl. When Janet Flanner penned her lively profile for the New Yorker in 1938, she observed: Lady Mendl has always been known for something—principally for being Miss Elsie de Wolfe.⁴ Lady Mendl has faded from memory in the more than half a century following her death, but the name Elsie de Wolfe remains permanently engraved in the history of interior decoration—a profession she helped create.

The New York–born de Wolfe adored the social status her title afforded her but, always pragmatic, had the good sense, when she published her memoir, After All, in 1935, to choose Elsie de Wolfe for the title page, with Lady Mendl in parentheses below. A search on the Internet today brings up fewer than one hundred thousand hits for Lady Mendl—many are reviews of a tea salon in New York that bears her name—but more than a million for Elsie de Wolfe. For this reason alone, I have chosen to use Elsie de Wolfe in most instances here.

There is a host of authoritative books on de Wolfe, beginning with Ludwig Bemelmans’s charming 1955 memoir of their friendship, To the One I Love the Best.⁵

A troupe of Belle Époque–costumed dancers performs at the gala birthday party that Paul-Louis Weiller threw for Elsie in his Paris mansion in December 1938. The theme of the entertainment was probably a reference to Elsie’s turn-of-the-century career as an actor.

Photographer Mattie E. Hewitt captured Bessie Marbury and Elsie, together nicknamed the Bachelors, during the heyday of their relationship, sometime before World War I in New York. Bessie was a trailblazing theatrical producer and literary agent, and Elsie was America’s best-known decorator. Despite Elsie’s 1926 marriage to Sir Charles Mendl in Paris, Bessie remained loyal, signing over her share of the Villa Trianon to her friend in the 1920s and leaving her entire estate to Elsie when she died in 1933.

In 1982 Jane S. Smith penned the definitive biography, Elsie de Wolfe: A Life in the High Style, which has been an invaluable resource for this book. Elsie figured prominently in Mark Hampton’s 1989 book On Decorating. In 1992 came Nina Campbell and Caroline Seebohm’s Elsie de Wolfe: A Decorative Life, followed by Penny Sparke’s 2005 Elsie de Wolfe: The Birth of Modern Decoration. More recently, in 2010, Elsie’s career was the starting point for Adam Lewis’s The Great Lady Decorators. It seems that every generation finds some point of interest or continuing inspiration from Elsie de Wolfe’s amazing life and career.

Although 1865 is conventionally given as the year of her birth, she was in fact born Ella Anderson de Wolfe, in Manhattan, on December 20, 1858.⁶ Her father, Dr. Stephen de Wolfe, was descended from French Huguenots named du Loup who immigrated to Nova Scotia via Connecticut, and her mother, Georgiana Watt Copeland, was born in Canada to a prosperous family of Scottish lawyers and academics. They married in Huntingdon, Quebec, in 1856 and settled in New York, where Stephen had already opened his medical practice. Ella attended McCauley’s School for Young Ladies on Madison Avenue and was later sent to Scotland for social finishing—staying with her mother’s cousin, whose husband was chaplain to Queen Victoria at Balmoral Castle. This connection led to young Elsie getting her first taste of the glamorous world she aspired to, when she was presented at the court of Queen Victoria sometime in the early 1880s. Afterward, she partook in the pleasures of London society, including, so the story goes, having tea with the Prince of Wales—the future King Edward VII.

Anne Morgan was the only daughter of financier J. P. Morgan. Along with Elsie, Bessie Marbury, and Anne Vanderbilt, she founded New York’s first women’s club—the Colony—whose headquarters, designed by Stanford White and decorated by Elsie, launched Elsie’s career. Morgan became a part owner of the Villa Trianon with Bessie and Elsie, and the trio became known as the Versailles Triumvirate. Elsie was to decorate a cluster of town houses on New York’s Sutton Place for Morgan, Marbury, and Vanderbilt.

After returning to New York, Elsie began acting in the amateur theatricals that were then fashionable among New York’s Gilded Age social set, most notably at the exclusive Tuxedo Club, founded by tobacco heir Pierre Lorillard IV in Tuxedo Park, New York. When Elsie’s father died suddenly, leaving the family nearly penniless, she became the family breadwinner as a professional actress. She gained the attention of theatrical producer Charles Frohman soon afterward and was offered the lead in French playwright Victorien