Friday, March 30, 2012

Going to the Dogs with Earl Blackwell

"Raffles is the latest and gaudiest of the private clubs around Manhattan, and when I report that Cecil Beaton designed and decorated it, perhaps I have said everything. Mr. B. is the most aesthetic of men and in his photographs, drawings and stage settings, you can almost hear the flapping of Peter Pan's wings. Although, with the new club, he has check-reined his gossamer flights a bit.

Cecil has not always been closely related to men's clubs, but for this one he says he took a long look at 'men's clubland' and proceeded accordingly. Most of the colors are dark - the carpeting has a black pattern on deep reds, blue and browns - and the dining room walls are covered with dark velvet. There is a kind of informal bar, including such anachronism as letter racks, fly whisks and caviar sandwiches as a sort of free lunch, and even a dozen portraits - some of them Beaton's own - of beautiful women. He has no plans, he says, to hang Twiggy. 'Her features are lovely and so are her proportions (what's he say?),' he notes 'but she gets herself up to look like a mess.'

"As private clubs in New York go, the tariff is about par for the course. Five hundred initiation fee, annual dues of $350 - and, of course, the old standby of having a speaking acquaintance with at least two board members. The board roster is a gasser: Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Count Teo Rossi, George Plimpton, etc. The name Raffles, was not Beaton's original choice. He wanted to call it 'Dogs,' because it 'would have been such fun to say 'I'm going to the Dogs tonight.' "


Not what one would expect, but amusing, nonetheless, an image of Cecil Beaton up a ladder flinging down paint to create the design for the splattered, splotched carpet that covered the floor at Raffles. More expected, perhaps, is the idea of him and his aide Robert LaVine* touring Second Avenue in a limousine looking for antiques to decorate the club. Beaton, still in his My Fair Lady Edwardian manner, created an interior lit, or so it looks at this remove, with the glow from many a table-side flambé.


Other than noting my initial surprise that Beaton was the decorator of Raffles, I don't really want to add more to the already deep pool of blogger gush about him or his mildly repellant generation - Wallis Windsor, Beverly Nichols, et al.

I'd rather concentrate, instead, on Earl Blackwell, who as Chairman of the Board of Directors gave a party "... for Noel Coward at Raffles, which is full of photographs of celebrities. I removed every photograph in Raffles and replaced them with photographs of Noel taken through his entire career. It was a great thrill so see him go from picture to picture, some of them taken when he was very young, some of them with Alfred Lunt, Merle Oberon, Beatrice Lilly, Cary Grant and many more. They were all there."

Earl Blackwell, editor of Celebrity Register; founder of the publicity agency Celebrity Service; the man behind Marilyn Monroe's singing of Happy Birthday Mr President; and the happy owner of the most beautiful ballroom in Manhattan, was a native of Atlanta - the city where, when in town, he shared a Michael Greer-decorated, eight-bedroomed carriage house with his sister and her four children.

"The party I enjoyed most, recently, was my first party in my Atlanta home. Ginger Rogers was in Atlanta for the first time so she was guest of honor. I invited forty of my friends in Atlanta for a seated dinner. I had five tables of eight and I named each one after a Ginger Rogers film. One table was 'Top Hat,' one was 'Flying Down to Rio,' etc. When my guests arrived, each was given a card with the name of his table. Then during the evening, Ginger moved from table to table, starting with 'Kitty Foyle.' "


Blackwell's twenty-feet-high ballroom, his party room, originally the solarium of the penthouse at the Briarcliffe apartments, was painted with Venetian-style murals in 1958 by William Hankinson - murals** that were damaged by water in succeeding years and then finally destroyed in a 1999 reconstruction when the building became a condominium. The room was recently redecorated by Mario Buatta.


Earl Blackwell, famously, did a lot of entertaining in the ballroom and in an interview said that his guests ".... leave the elevator, come into the entrance hall and immediately see a bar. That represents security for many people. And, you know, people don't like to walk into an enormous room until others are already there. If you have a little bar area where they can immediately go for a drink, several groups will gather then drift into the large room.


"No one likes to be the first guest to arrive but someone has to be the first, so you must offer the courageous early-comers confidence. I do think lots of effort should be made at the entrance in every way possible. I always have more flowers there, usually pink carnations or pink and red roses to give my guests a lift the moment they arrive. If they feel 'up' in the beginning, they can sustain that feeling throughout the entire evening."

William Hankinson's murals only lasted about forty years, and instead of restoring work that was a proud descendant of a tradition going back at the very least to Tiepolo, why anyone would sweep away such beauty and replace it with - and this is no slight against Mr Buatta - late-twentieth-century traditional decoration beats me.

Going to the Dogs, indeed.




Photographs of Earl Blackwell's ballroom and entrance hall by Max Eckert to accompany an interview by "The Editors" of Architectural Digest, September/October 1972.

Quotation from My New York written by columnist Mel Heimer for Reading Eagle, November 12, 1968. Source: Google here.

Photographs by Alexandre Georges to accompany uncredited text, from which I took notes, in Architectural Digest, September/October 1971.

* 1970 Tony Award© winner for Best Costume Design for Jimmy?

** Source here.

17 comments:

  1. Perhaps Earl Blackwell had ultimately made too many social enemies and association with the striking decorative painting was too overpowering to allow reproduction. But I was thrilled to see these pictures of the penthouse in its heyday, undoubtedly even more special filled with swells.

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  2. The Devoted Classicist, thank you. There is a photograph on the NYT link that is from an advertisement for whisky and it shows Blackwell and swells of the day in front of one of the walls. There is also another modern photo of the room that decreases its scale.

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  3. Oh so exquisite! I can only imagine the parties in this iconic space! A man very sensitive to his guests feelings as well.

    I hope you will Come and enter my amazing Cross Bottle Guy Giveaway!

    xoxo
    Karena
    Art by Karena

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    1. Karena, thank you. The parties were pretty good, I understand.

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  4. Regarding Beaton's work at Raffles, I suppose that if I can't say anything nice, I shouldn't say anything at all. However, I do find the mural in Blackwell's apartment smashing. Such a shame that it's gone.

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    1. The Peak of Chic, thank you. Beaton's decoration of Raffles is banal and that's why I'd looked at the photos a number of times when searching for something else and not realized until last week who the decorator was.

      The murals in Blackwell's penthouse were pretty terrific and I cannot understand why someone would get rid of them.

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  5. Mr. Buatta's redesign of the apartment is the second iteration since the murals were taken away, so even though I find the architectural details that he added to be ill proportioned and poorly detailed, that's between he and the owners. It was the previous designer and owners who swept away the murals, and I too find it completely beyond comprehension, that one could have such a stylish and airy take on Tiepolo up in the clouds above Manhattan, and instead substitute something predictable and ordinary (albeit at great expense)---quite possibly far more than restoration of the murals would have cost.

    We have become a very strange country, in our quest for constant destruction and change for change's sake.

    sigh.

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    1. The Down East Dilettante, thank you. I've seen a photo on another blog of the first redecoration that took away the murals and it was as shinily grand and banal as one might expect. To have refurnished within those walls would have been my choice - and I would not necessarily used traditional decoration.

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  6. Restoring a water-damaged interior to a pristine state can be ruinously expensive, but wasn't there a third option between the choices of full-blown restoration on one hand & wholesale demolition on the other--one that would have stabilized & conserved what had survived, while replacing the destroyed areas with honest new materials? It's been done with Greek vases & Roman mosaics, but never to better effect than at the BAM Harvey Theatre, where the dreamlike juxtaposition of ravaged Beaux-Arts decor & state-of-the-art technology makes for an unforgettable evening, totally apart from the onstage talent. Of course, that kind of project requires vision & sensitivity, which, these days, are in far shorter supply than is mere money.

    When, I moved into a big Victorian house in Peoria, I found a veritable museum of Thirties & Forties wallpapers hidden inside the closets, and all of them still vibrant in color because they'd been protected from the light for most of the last century. Were any of them to my own tastes? Not really, but I left them as I found them. I don't need to put my own stamp on everything. And one of my favorite things about Thomas O'Brien's house in upstate New York is the way, in a few areas, he left the worn linoleum just as he found it--dull & scuffed.

    Anyway, Earl Blackwell's ballroom was a beauty in its time & it's too bad Camilo Jose Vergara or Robert Polidori didn't get a chance to document its final days for The World of Interiors before it was obliterated in favor of Ghastly Good Taste.

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    1. Simply Grand, thank you. Stabilization and conservation, I agree with you, would have been the way to proceed. Your mention of WoI reminded me of something similar - a mural decoration either removed and stored, or obliterated, - either way, lost - to make room for the musings of an artist. You have set me thinking and searching, and I thank you for it. I shall also research the BAM Harvey Theatre.

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  7. Blue, thanks for pointing out the NY TIMES reference. In that photo of guests around the piano, I think I recognized Peter Duchin, Gig Young, and Hermine Geingold, but I am sure all were celebrities of the day. I second D.E.D.'s comments about the current state of the apartment. And by the way, the apartment on a lower floor of decorator Brian McCarty (featured in an earlier post on my blog) was the site of the 85th birthday party for Albert Hadley.

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    1. The Devoted Classicist, thank you. The photograph is part of an ad for a brand of whiskey, if I remember rightly. On another blog (??) it is shown in full and people are named I think.

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  8. This room was much discussed in EEE's blog a year or so (or more) ago, in a post about Mario Buatta's decoration of the apartment for the current owners. Supposedly, the murals were painstakingly restored by the recent developer of the building, only to be ripped out by the owners of the aparment before the ones who hired MB acquired it. I agree with DED, the moldings added by the Prince of Chintz are unfortunate, but he is to be commended for doing a decent job at reviving the spirit, if not the actuality, of the room. Notwithstanding, the desecration of the murals is a loss, indeed. RD

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    1. Reggie Darling, thank you. I realized this morning I had not replied to you and apologize for it. I think Mr Buatta's redecoration, moldings apart, are very good. I have always liked, though never wanted it for myself, everything he does. There are photos somewhere of the previous incarnation - the one between Blackwell's and the Buatta incarnation.

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  9. How did I miss this fascinating post? Glad I found it now though. Now this Earl Blackwell character sounds like a man after my own heart. A bar as soon as one enters a room to put guests at ease. So true, everybody needs something to "do" at the beginning of a gathering, although I guess our now more informal open kitchens do exactly the same thing. If not nearly as elegantly.

    And what a room, ye gads! What a tragedy! Even if they were peeling and falling off the wall with moisture, the murals would perhaps have been even more beautiful in a decaying state.

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    1. Glamour Drops, thank you. Blackwell is an interesting character and like many celebrities took a lot of criticism for his attitude and success. I've talked to people in Atlanta who know someone who knew someone who had met him and no-one has a good word to say.

      I wonder how the murals would have looked today -stylistically speaking. The 'statue' in the hall looks very dated to my eye and having said that, I wonder also, if they looked too dated to the people who destroyed them.

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    2. I worked for Mr. Blackwell in the early 90s, a few years before his death.
      His Parkinson's was quite advanced and while we didn't have many long conversations, he appeared to be a good-natured man.
      In all honesty, I wouldn't expect new owners to keep the murals. This is a multi-million dollar Penthouse.

      In the first photo, if you were to move to the right, you would see a painting of a young man holding the drapes open.
      Some might say they murals were almost gaudy and quite flamboyantly Gay.
      To each their own.

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