Menage A Trianon

Arrangements at Elsie de Wolfe’s villa in Versailles were always going to prove a talking point. First, the famed tastemaker shared the house with her lesbian lover and a young heiress. Then there was the décor, a fantasia of Louis furniture, 18th-century art and mirrored glass – all captured here in a cache of hitherto little seen photographs

By Mitchell Owens

27 March 2023

BW photograph of terrace with birdcage and cockatoo

Photographer André Ostier knew how to make his way from the golden clamour of a recovering postwar Paris to the verdant languor of Versailles. On a summer’s day in 1948, though, he was not heading to the sprawling former royal palace, but to the tidy town that had sprouted outside its park. Specifically, the destination for him and his Rolleiflex camera and tripod was Boulevard Saint-Antoine, a broad thoroughfare lined with chestnut trees and petite maisons tucked behind iron gates, beginning at Place de la Loi and terminating at Porte Saint-Antoine, the back door to the one-time Bourbon domain. His precise coordinate was the house numbered 47. There, an elderly American lady – much older than the 73 years that she shamelessly claimed – lived in a fading twilight. Faultlessly dressed by Mainbocher and swagged with pearls, but wizened, wheelchair-bound, she was plagued by a cascade of ailments, and attended to by doctors, nurses and her faithful personal secretary.

Fond of tented effects, the interior designer outfitted the ballroom with striped curtains both real and trompe-l’oeil. Flamboyant painted-wood and plaster decorations added to the fanciful atmosphere

The woman was Elsie de Wolfe: tireless hostess, retired interior decorator, former stage actress and life-long fashion plate. ‘Even in her frailty, she dominated the scene!’ a visiting Parsons School of Design student recalled in a letter written a month before her hostess’s death. ‘She wore a white dress, with a shawl around her shoulders, white gloves, and had a black ribbon tied around her snow-white hair. Big black flashing eyes – face carefully made up.’ Villa Trianon, as the c1800 house was known, had been De Wolfe’s seasonal residence since 1905, when she and her theatrical-agent lover, Bessy Marbury, had purchased the property after protracted negotiations.

‘Our offer was an insult, a joke, a ridiculous affair to the man who was selling it,’ she told the New York Times in 1914. The couple transformed the rather plain original interiors into a Francophile fantasia. A reporter of the day called it ‘an old, old house in the most beautiful park in the world, sleeping for ages, finally awakened by the magic touch of two American women’. De Wolfe and Marbury outfitted it with boiseries, furniture, fabrics and masses of art – all from the appropriate period. The environment became yet more rarefied with the arrival of heiress Anne Morgan, one of banker J. Pierpont Morgan’s daughters. She was absorbed into the Sapphic household and seems to have become Marbury’s object of affection, if not more, much to her powerful father’s ire. (Her money paid for an extension to Villa Trianon known to the household as the Morgan Wing.)

Conceived as a ‘salle de glaces’ and framed by Ionic pilasters sheathed in engraved mirrored glass, the same space often hosted dances, though during World War I it was used as a ward for wounded soldiers

To Villa Trianon, the fête set flocked: film stars, royalty, magnates. They came à deux as well as en masse, tucking into intimate luncheons or attending grander festivities, such as De Wolfe’s widely publicised 1939 circus-themed ball, the last great private entertainment before the Nazis invaded Paris. (Read all about it and its 700 guests in Charlie Scheips’s Elsie de Wolfe’s Paris: Frivolity Before the Storm, published in 2014 by Abrams.) War over, Ostier motored the dozen miles from Paris to Villa Trianon to record its rooms, sans revellers. Battered during the German Occupation, the house had been exquisitely restored by De Wolfe, who spent the war years in Hollywood with her husband, Sir Charles Mendl, a portly British press attaché, amicable partners in a marriage of convenience. The restoration, though, had been financed by Paul-Louis Weiller, the aviation industrialist. He was the legal owner of Villa Trianon, plus its Louis XV and XVI furniture, 18th-century French paintings, china, antique silver, embroidered bed linens, bibelots and more, thanks to an agreement that he and De Wolfe had worked out in 1933. Weiller would hold on to the property until 1981, when he put the house up for sale and sent the contents to Paris auctioneers.

Once an awninged terrace for dining, the glazed veranda was a glossary of De Wolfe hallmarks, from Chinese rattan chairs to a sofa dressed in leopard-spot chintz to a sweep of mirrored glass. Scrapbooks, at the ready for reminiscing, populated a Georgian table

In the boudoir, ‘boiserie’ painted with trompe-l’oeil cords and tassels brought coherence to the gilt-framed artworks. The sofas and banquettes were accessorised with whimsical motto cushions

For Villa Trianon’s marbleised hall, Etienne Drian painted a heroic oil-on-canvas that depicted Elsie de Wolfe drawing back a curtain to reveal the route from Paris to her Versailles residence

A bust of Marie Antoinette surveyed the Long Gallery, flanked by views painted by Drian in the 1920s of the grand garden stairs at Château de Versailles

More than 60 black-and-white photographs resulted from Ostier’s visits. De Wolfe’s secretary, Hilda West, dutifully pasted them into an album bound in green leatherette and emblazoned with gold lettering. Following the decorator’s demise in 1950 – turns out that she was actually 90 years old – the compilation of images changed hands several times. Seen for the first time on these pages, it is a prized possession of Beth Rudin DeWoody, a Manhattan art collector and patron of breathtaking grasp; she reportedly owns more than 10,000 works of art, from creations by contemporary masters to those of obscure talents. She also happens to be a passionate De Wolfe admirer and of the album in particular. ‘I love ephemeral things that have a story to tell,’ Rudin DeWoody explains, adding that her first De Wolfe acquisition was a signed photograph of the decorator with two of her dogs. ‘Her life and career are fascinating, going against the whole overdone Victorian look of her day and adopting clean lines and no clutter.’

Displayed above a settee in the Chambre Elisabeth suite was Oliver Messel’s painting of De Wolfe as the ringmaster of her 1939 circus ball

Ostier’s atmospheric snapshots – some perfectly in focus, others a bit foggy – bear witness to a philosophy of design that exemplified De Wolfe’s style across her career’s 20-odd years: ‘suitability, suitability, suitability’, she once militantly declared, but spiced with fantasy and idiosyncrasy. Her long, narrow bathroom with the wood-burning corner fireplace, a space as amply furnished with art and antiques as any petit salon. Her boudoir, its wall-hugging banquettes hosting a parade of her hallmark green-silk cushions, each one embroidered with high-relief white-silk aphorisms such as CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU / THERE ARE NO POCKETS IN A SHROUD. Then there is the ballroom, a glass-walled realm of head-dressed African figures and artificial palm trees.

De Wolfe’s bathroom/dressing room was cosily furnished, thickly carpeted and hung with Chinese mirror paintings of Qing Dynasty women from the collection of the Marquess of Ripon

The Chambre Elisabeth sitting room featured various De Wolfe mementoes, among them a WBE Ranken depiction of the treillage music pavilion seen from the adjacent window. Beneath it is a portrait of playwright Clyde Fitch, who made her a theatrical star in the 1890s

The largest of the bedrooms, the Chambre de Parade recalled its 18th-century namesakes, which featured, she wrote in The House in Good Taste, ‘a great bed for the occasional visitors of great position’

The album also records details that few if any De Wolfe books have illustrated. Call it ephemera within ephemera. Lady Juliet Duff, reportedly the tallest peer in Britain at six feet even, was a house guest during Ostier’s visit, since her name is written on a card inserted into a frame on the door of the Chambre de Parade. (Given her stature, the room’s towering canopy bed must have been the longest in the house.) Three images illustrate the terrace off that bedroom, its ceiling painted like a striped tent, its opposing walls bearing romantic landscapes and a make-believe balustrade hosting a birdcage from which a cockatoo is escaping. One guest suite is called Chambre Elisabeth, surely a hat-tip to the cast-off Bessy Marbury, who was stunned to learn of her long-time companion’s wedding in 1926. There, a small portrait of a mustachioed man that appears to be playwright Clyde Fitch – Elsie and Bessy’s great friend and mentor – is mounted above the desk.

Ostier snaps the kitsch, too, from a perky porcelain poodle in a glazed vitrine to the nameplate on the decorator’s bathroom door. De Wolfe was legendarily self-centred, once declaring that she adored the Parthenon because it was ‘my favourite colour – beige!’ So it comes as no surprise to see that the card bears just a single fancifully calligraphed word: MOI.

A version of this article appears in the April 2023 issue of The World of Interiors. Learn about our subscription offers