“Do you think I’m going to live forever, to watch that thing grow?” she told the deliveryman. The swimming pool was filled in to make room for a mature olive tree, though the first specimen arrived far too small for Lady Mendl’s liking. Begonias and daisies, all white, frothed in the garden, where towering topiaries stood like sentinels and variegated ivy flourished. Grapevines twirled through the Inquisition-style iron window grilles. White paint refreshed the flowerpot-red house inside and out, and green-and-white-striped canvas curtained the front door and arched loggias, the latter wittily nicknamed the Rue de Rivoli. Following months of expert massaging, the 3,500-square-foot dwelling came to embody the kind of youthful vitality that Elsie strove to maintain in herself through plastic surgeries, hormone treatments, headstands, and fad diets. They christened it After All, the title of the decorator’s autobiography. In Brentwood Heights, Elsie’s airy rooms for Gary Cooper and his elegant wife, Rocky, boasted Serge Roche starburst mirrors, an extravagantly tasseled sleigh bed, and soaring screens.įirst bunking with Fred Astaire and his family and then renting a place of their own, Elsie and Charles finally purchased a 1920s Beverly Hills hacienda in 1942. For racy American heiress Dorothy di Frasso she delivered a Beverly Hills mansion where chinoiserie wallpaper met a fluffy rug made of monkey fur (Marlene Dietrich rented the place for a time). The Los Angeles area was the site of some of Lady Mendl’s smartest work, too.
#Clandestiny of elsie professional#
Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks were old friends of Elsie’s he had supervised the installation of professional film projectors at Villa Trianon so she could show the latest movies-and her erstwhile niece Winifred Shaughnessy, a.k.a. Hollywood, she declaimed, was “the new focal point of civilization.”Īctually, the decorator, a onetime stage actress, was no stranger to Tinseltown, as many of its biggest names had attended grand parties at Villa Trianon, the Mendls’ house in Versailles. Still, as far as the general public knew, the globe-trotting Mendls had simply crossed the country to be in the swim of things, always Elsie’s favorite place to be.
Broadcast from the Beverly Hills Hotel, it turned out to be a flop, disappearing after a single episode. (She also had a screen test at Warner Bros., not in the hopes of landing a film role, gossip columnist Louella Parsons noted, but “so she could see herself as others see her.”) Another of Elsie’s moneymaking ventures was a radio show called Breakfast at the Beverly Hills. Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge. Gene Tierney in The Razor’s Edge Lady Mendl served as the 1946 film’s set consultant.įor Elsie’s part, her design expertise made her invaluable as a set-decoration adviser for 20th Century-Fox’s adaptation of W.
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