Assumption

"When I found this romantic house next to a small river, it was almost in ruins. Four years have succeeded in making it comfortable, but it hardly looks new. That suits me, for I have a good deal of provincial Louis XVI furniture inherited from my family. And I spend lots of time in the antique shops and flea-markets of London and Paris. I live in what seems to my interior designer friends a rather Dickensian 'Old Curiosity Shop.'

"The walls are covered in old damask or in East Indian printed materials from the eighteenth century. I also have a large tapestry made from a design by Rubens. A light touch is added by fuchsia and geraniums in blue and white china pots. There are books everywhere and pictures too: prints along the staircase and in the gallery, Chinese paintings and bamboo furniture in the bathroom.

The Drawing Room - Baroque marble statues on a wooden Louis XVI mantel; the golden damask hangings are from a Rothschild house.

"There is always a big fire in the living room to keep out the dampness. These are some of the ingredients which give my house a kind of charm, since I have made no particular effort to use a consistent color scheme or any careful interior arrangement. The house is twenty-five miles east of Paris, and it is where I write all my books. It is always filled with flowers from my garden."

The Garden Room - an Empire bust, porcelain vases and a mirror to reflect the park outside.

The Library - once part of the old barn, this room is filled with my books and many old prints. There are Japanese cabinets, a Victorian church carpet and a Dutch brass chandelier. 

My Bedroom - the Louis XVI fireplace, with a terra-cotta bust on the mantel and the brass bed warmer leaning against it, is my favourite part of the room.

Not necessarily being of an enquiring mind, Philippe Julian's name didn't strike a chord for me. I'd seen the pages before on my hikes through piles of old magazines: pages appearing to be from an album of small paintings torn from a sketchbook and surrounded by the kind of handwritten text that, irritatingly, brought to mind those occasions in my youth when, because I was thought to be "artistic", it was assumed I could and would write the gothic black letter thought to be special enough for the dedication of the moment. Those days, a mumbled apology for not being able to oblige was all I could muster but, looking back, my problem was with the assumption more than the request - much like that made two decades ago by a client who, because I'm queer, thought I could and would sew her net curtains for her.

What I have just written might, if one made such an assumption, indicate a long memory for affront but I lean towards the notion that such memories are steps in the creation of personal morality; and if the memories, on occasion, float to the surface then there's something still to learn. It could also mean, of course, I need to step up the dosage of what the Celt calls my "niceness" pills.

So, Philippe Julian – the man asked to ornament the first Château Mouton Rothschild "artist" label, illustrator of Angus Wilson's For Whom the Cloche Tolls, author of The Snob-Spotter's Guide and, amongst many a celebration of the fin-de-siècle, a suitably overwrought biographical essay about Adolph de Meyer – is not, despite the fact he began as such, the subject of my post.

On Friday I had lunch - my glass of wine bringing to mind a long-remembered phrase, not so much a pretentious little wine, more a mendacious little paint-stripper - with a man who had written to me about my essay about Michael Greer - a man he'd shaken hands with at the age of eleven, and who, like Greer is a native of Monroe, Georgia. Greer, known in his home town as Joe rather than Michael, famous in his time as one of America's grandest decorators, and whose murder provided friends with opportunities to show just how easy it is to speak ill of the dead, was, after a private cremation service, as one might assume, buried with his parents - but not quite as one might expect - between his parents' graves in an unmarked place.

So, on this day celebrating one assumption, I wonder if shame - that emotion from which we can learn so much, and one which I believe (as my long memory suggests) we should never cause another to feel - is the reason why there is no headstone for Michael Greer.

Watercolours and quotation from Architectural Digest, March/April 1975

Image of Château Mouton Rothschild from here.

A purchase a day keeps the blues away

So said Michael Greer, about whom with a certain inevitability, I write today. Yesterday I mentioned a book by Greer I had bought a while back - the book being Inside Design by Michael Greer, published in 1962. The book, as I also said yesterday, contains clippings, so dry and fragile with the tape used to stick them in the book gone brown with age, from newspapers and magazines, some French, even one about his own New York apartment with the date 1957 written under the title. This article, two magazine pages back to back is inserted in the book as if it were a page that belonged, and clearly for the previous owner that page belonged.

Despite wanting to write about Greer, a native of Monroe, Georgia, who died in the 1970s and who is relatively unknown today, the person I'm most fascinated with is that previous owner. Who was it that used what must have been an expensive book as a scrap album about Michael Greer? Many of us have files, boxes, and digital albums in which we squirrel away images we like, rooms we covet, ideas for curtains, etc., but this book goes beyond that. It has the feel of an icon before which a candle was lit; a refuge in a life that needed glamour; a nurturing source of daydreams in which the quotidian round, so featureless, was raked with the light of what could have been.

If I'm not careful I could work myself up to a tear-jerker of a tale but, really, who knows? It's just a old book, after all.

So, Michael Greer, one of the grandest of decorators, and if these rooms, his own, are any indication he was pretty grande, doesn't quite fit in my declared range of interest. He was a life-long bachelor (those codes!), died when he was 60, and thus off the stage when the men I've been writing about began to be known. But, still, he was a gay man and he died in a horrible, if not the same way, as my other subjects.

Let me quote a 1976 People magazine article, the likes of which I would hope thirty four years later could not be written:

At the height of his career, Michael Greer had everything. He was rich, handsome and celebrated. A decorator of considerable fame, he volunteered to beautify the diplomatic reception room of the White House. Actresses Joan Fontaine, Mary Martin, Geraldine Page and Ethel Merman graced his list of clients. He supped with the Queen of Denmark and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. He drank from Baccarat crystal and travelled in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. With his French cook-butler, he entertained the Vanderbilts, Revsons, Bette Davis and Gloria Swanson.

Mr Greer was found strangled, clad in a short kimono, ankles tied with a red cloth (seemingly his favorite color) laying on a highly valued possession, a steel-framed bed. His bedroom dressed in red faille hangings was soundproof - he said he wrote a lot in there.

I come thus to the point - how are we to be remembered?

How cruel is it, in Michael Greer's case and even that of Mr Crispo of whom I wrote a couple of weeks ago, that they are remembered for the ill they did rather than the good they have done. A so-called old friend, when there must have been so much else that could have been a better epitaph, reduced Michael Greer, the grandest of decorators, to: Once Michael was stunning - tall, slender and witty. He died blotched, fat and bloated. His clothes didn't even fit him. Some friend!

The real friend, and the one we should all hope for, is the one who kindly puts away, as if between the pages of a book, all that is best of us and then when the circle is complete, those good memories pass on, too.

Let's Mutiny

1 1/2 dark rum

1/2 Dubonnet Rouge

2 dashes bitters

Shake well with ice, strain and garnish with a maraschino cherry.

Photos by Max Eckert for Architectural Digest, January/February 1974