The Tastemaker

The suitably named Dorothy Draper is credited with reinventing the profession of interior decorating. Often, such claims are inflated; in Draper’s case, it’s only the half of it. Her commission in 1937 to decorate the entire 37-story Hampshire House apartment hotel in Manhattan broke ground in more ways than one – it was the largest commercial decorating contract ever awarded to a woman. Until then, America’s first generation of professional decorators had conceded the public sphere to architects, invariably male. By the time Draper died, in 1969, scores of hotels, hospitals, offices, restaurants – even the 1952 Packard automobile and the interior of the Convair 880 airplane – were awash in her dramatic trademark colors: sky blues, poison greens, lipstick reds. (“Inferior desecrator,” sneered Frank Lloyd Wright.)Today, television shows and eponymous magazines serve as the tastemaker’s pulpit; in Draper’s time, there were etiquette books. Which is where Draper’s other legacy can be found: In her perky, helpful, how-to manuals she merged the intensifying belief in the importance of china patterns with the burgeoning vogue for self-fulfillment. One of these books, the insipiently titled “Entertaining Is Fun! How To Be a Popular Hostess” (Rizzoli, 268 pages, $26), has just been reissued. First published in 1941, it hints at what has become a very familiar attitude: the idea that everything from our front doors to our candlesticks to the way we lay a buffet isn’t just a reflection or even a projection of who we are, but a psychological manifestation.It’s tempting to cast Dorothy Draper as the original Martha Stewart, but there were plenty of others before her. Draper was a mere babe in tony Tuxedo Park, N.Y., in 1892, when Mary Elizabeth Wilson Sherwood wrote “The Art of Entertaining.” In 1904, when Mary Whipple Alexander published “The Table and How to Decorate It,” the future domestic doyenne was still a student at Brearley. And odds are high that in 1914, when Elsie de Wolf published “The House In Good Taste,” a newly married Draper was one of the legions of female readers to make the book a best seller (thereby earning de Wolf the mantle of America’s original tastemaker), because at that point, Draper was beginning to experiment with curtains and sconces herself. It wasn’t long before Draper was renovating not only her own homes, in Manhattan and Washington, but those of her friends; in 1925, armed with an unwavering confidence in her own taste and a client list drawn from her wealthy social connections, she launched her own company, Architectural Clearing House. In 1929, the firm’s name was changed to Dorothy Draper and Company, and still exists to this day, currently under the direction of Draper’s protege, Carleton Varney (who has appended a new introduction to the reissue).Of course, novelists such as Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton had long recognized the importance of the “superficial,” but for the idea to catch on it took tastemakers to champion the cause, and through utterly unsubversive avenues: etiquette books, how-to manuals, and syndicated columns. (Indeed, Wharton began her writing career with a how-to book of her own: “The Decoration of Houses.”) In the 1910s, de Wolf wrote for the turn-of-the-century “pattern sheet” the Delineator; these were the columns to comprise her best-selling book. Starting in the 1930s, Draper disseminated tips on living through Good Housekeeping, 70 different Hearst newspapers, a radio show, and three books of her own: “Decorating Is Fun!” (1939), “Entertaining Is Fun!” (1941), and “365 Shortcuts to Home Decoration” (1964).The current reissue – which appears to be a perfect facsimile of the original, with whimsical line drawings and pink polka-dotted jacket and endpapers – has all the subversion of a doily. Its chapter headings are the usual: things like “Informal Entertaining: Fun Without Fuss,” and “What To Buy for Entertaining: If You’re a Bride.” And its message – that one needn’t have money, only imagination, to successfully entertain – wasn’t a radical one in a penny-pinching, wartime America; also that year, a Mrs. Marni Wood published “Parties on a Shoestring,” only to be followed by “Parties for Pennies,” by Nancy Webb.But tucked in among Draper’s cheerful tips on how to assemble centerpieces and dye tablecloths is an emphasis that diverges from that of her counterparts. Take, for instance, the notion of charm. By 1941, the idea that charm wasn’t necessarily an inborn quality, but something that could be learned, was an etiquette-expert commonplace. How else would a stenographer from Omaha, say, come to believe that swank cocktail parties weren’t the exclusive birthright of Manhattan society, but hers for the making? How else would she come to be reading Draper to begin with?Draper, however, didn’t advise readers to mimic an accepted role in order to be charming, rather to create one that felt familiar. “Your party begins with you. We have said that before, but one can’t say it too often,” she writes in the first chapter of her book. “So, before you take up a pencil and paper and start making plans for your next party, give a little time to getting acquainted with yourself.” If your marriage brought you from Phoenix to Concord, other tastemakers told you to impress your East Coast mother-in-law by adopting her Brahmin customs. Draper told you to throw a Tex-Mex hoedown.It was a subtle distinction, but Draper was persistent about it. “There’s only one worth-while rule that I know of as regards entertaining: suit your parties to yourself and they will suit your guests,” she claimed. And: “A delighted hostess is a delightful hostess.” By stressing the individual right to happiness, she allowed the then-escalating self-help culture entrance to the etiquette movement – a development most evident in her pet bugaboo: The Will to Be Dreary. “In recent years we have all heard a good deal about the Will to Fail, which sometimes is even more urgent than the Will to Succeed. The Will to Fail isn’t the only enemy most of us have to guard against,” she warned.Were Martha so radical! And that’s not to mention the recent plague of home-redesign reality shows, or even “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” all of which are devoted to shanghaiing personal taste in favor of a stranger’s opinion. Draper’s successors are more along the lines of the new “magalogs,” such as Lucky and Shop, Etc. – tastemakers less interested in dictating standards than helping consumers to discover their own.The fabric Draper designed for the Hampshire House’s bedroom walls and furniture – enormous cabbage roses in brilliant crimsons and emeralds against a white background – became a signature of her style, and as popular as Martha Stewart’s Kmart linens; consumers went on to buy more than a million yards of the chintz. But though Draper’s influence on American decor is indisputable, it’s not easy to find direct evidence of it today. Her chandeliers still hang at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Howard Johnson’s is still recognizable by its Draper-decreed blue-and-orange, but most of the hotels she decorated (save for West Virginia’s Greenbrier) have been redesigned. Rizzoli’s reissue, then, serves as a welcome reminder of where we’ve been, and where we’re headed.

The Tastemaker

The Tastemaker

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