Though dead for half a century, Elsie de Wolfe remains an icon to this day, revered as America’s first decorator. The key elements of her style are as fresh as ever, and the aura of celebrity she brought to her profession has been passed on from one to another of her successors.

Born in New York City, (“Our home is now Macy’s front door”), ugly little Elsie spent some early years in Scotland and in 1885 was presented at court to Queen Victoria (“a little fat queen in a black dress and a load of jewels”). After having had some success in amateur theatrical circles in New York, she became a professional actress and performed various light comic and historical roles throughout the 1890s. Her appearances, however, were praised more for the clothes she wore than for what she did in them, as de Wolfe enjoyed the unusual arrangement with her producer of being allowed to choose her own wardrobes—usually couture ensembles she ordered in Paris from Paquin, Doucet, or Worth.

As early as 1887 de Wolfe had settled into what was then called a “Boston marriage“ with Elisabeth “Bessie” Marbury, a formidable figure in New York society who also happened to be a wildly successful literary agent and business representative for, among others, Wilde, Shaw, Bernhardt, Sardou, Rostand, and Feydeau; she even brought the play Charley’s Aunt to the U.S.

After having restyled with some panache the house the two women shared on Irving Place—sweeping out her companion’s Victorian clutter, opening spaces and introducing soft, warm colors and a bit of 18th-century French elegance—de Wolfe decided in 1905 to become a professional decorator, issuing smart business cards embellished with her trademark wolf-with-nosegay crest. That same year a group of powerful New York women, named Astor, Harriman, Morgan, Whitney, and Marbury, organized the city’s first club exclusively for women, the Colony Club. Its handsome headquarters at Madison and 31st Street were designed by Stanford White, who, along with Marbury and other friends on the board, got de Wolfe the commission to do the decoration.

When the Colony opened in 1907, the interiors established her reputation overnight. Instead of imitating the heavy atmosphere of men’s clubs, de Wolfe introduced a casual, feminine style with an abundance of glazed chintz (immediately making her “the Chintz Lady”), tiled floors, light draperies, pale walls, wicker chairs, clever vanity tables, and the first of her many trellised rooms. The astonished reaction of the members to her illusionistic indoor garden pavilion put de Wolfe’s name on many lips and led to a number of lucrative commissions across the country.

During the following six years, until her meeting with Henry Clay Frick, de Wolfe did more clubs, a number of private houses, both on the East Coast and in California, a model house (with Ogden Codman Jr.), opera boxes and a dormitory at Barnard College; she also lectured and published her most influential book, The House in Good Taste. By that time she had a suite of offices and a showroom on Fifth Avenue, with a staff of secretaries, bookkeepers, and assistants. She even had imitators.

Sixteen years older than de Wolfe, Frick emerged in the late 19th century from the relative obscurity of rural western Pennsylvania to become one of the greatest industrialists of all time, and one of the richest. Early on he had established a monopoly on the supply of coke, or purified coal, to the growing steel industry in Pittsburgh. Andrew Carnegie recognized his managerial talents and made him a partner in 1881. Under Frick’s sharp-eyed supervision, the firm became over the next two decades the largest steel company in the world. But mutual distrust led to a bitter separation of Frick and Carnegie at the turn of the century. By then Frick, his wife and his two children were living more and more in Manhattan, eventually renting, in 1905, one of the two stately Vanderbilt houses designed by Richard Morris Hunt at Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street.

Quite apart from his brilliant career as an industrialist, Henry Clay Frick had become recognized as one of the most eminent art collectors of his era. Driven by an innate passion, Frick went, as his fortunes developed, from collecting placid landscapes by Pittsburgh painters, through a foray among fashionable contemporary French and Dutch artists, to assembling a remarkable group of paintings and drawings by artists of the Barbizon School—Corot, Millet, Daubigny—and finally buying his first old-master oil in 1899. From then on, until his death in 1919, Frick acquired some 150 paintings that made his collection internationally famous: masterpieces by Bellini, Bronzino, Constable, Degas, Van Dyck, Fragonard, Gainsborough, Goya, El Greco, Hals, Holbein, Manet, Rembrandt, Renoir, Titian, Turner, Velázquez, Vermeer, Veronese, and Whistler, which now constitute the core of the Frick Collection, one of the world’s finest small museums.

De Wolfe’s realm of the decorative arts did not much preoccupy Frick in his youth. Before retiring to New York, he had lived for 20 years in a Loire Valley–style château in Pittsburgh he named Clayton. During its extensive remodeling in 1892, he supervised his architect closely and had a lot to say about the house’s new furnishings and finishes. It has recently been restored to its full Victorian splendor by Thierry Despont and is open to the public (see Architectural Digest , December 1990). De Wolfe would have hated it.

By the early years of the 20th century Frick’s taste in architecture and decoration had evolved much as his taste in pictures had, to a degree of understated perfection. Even the Vanderbilt mansion now seemed a little dated, and, in any case, he wanted to build his own Manhattan residence. One of the most desirable properties in the city—a block along a crest of Fifth Avenue between 70th and 71st streets—became available in 1912 when the Lenox Library, then standing on the site, was incorporated into the new New York Public Library. Frick acquired the lot for $2.25 million, had the library demolished (though he offered to pay for moving Hunt’s architectural gem elsewhere) and hired Thomas Hastings to design him, in his own words, “a small house with plenty of light and air and land.” The result, completed in 1914—a suave, limestone-clad hôtel particulier in the French Neoclassical mode—has come to be considered one of the most impressive buildings in the U.S.

Inside, Frick assigned the decoration of the grand rooms on the first floor, including the 96-foot-long art gallery, to Sir Charles Allom, the leading British architect and interior decorator of the period who had recently redone Buckingham Palace for his yachting pal George V. To Sir Charles, Frick declared: ”We desire a comfortable well-arranged home, simple, in good taste, and not ostentatious.” The grandeur that Sir Charles achieved through a manipulation of imposing spaces, noble proportions, and classical detail, often based on historical precedents, contrasts markedly with the simplicity Frick had requested, but correspondence shows that the client frequently reined in his decorator’s extravagant tendencies.

With the house midway under construction in 1913, Elsie de Wolfe entered the scene, commissioned to decorate the family’s quarters and guest rooms on the second and third floors. How she got the job, nobody knows. Mrs. Frick and her daughter, Helen, might have been familiar with her work at the Colony Club; Sir Charles might have recommended her; or Frick might simply have known of her as New York’s leading decorator. As with everyone else he engaged—architect, butler, chef, chauffeur—for his decorator he would have wanted “only the best.”

De Wolfe was assigned 14 rooms to do, ranging from Mrs. Frick’s boudoir—complete with eight panels painted by François Boucher for Madame de Pompadour—and Frick’s own solemn, walnut-clad bedroom to the daughter’s library, a pair of rooms for their son, Childs Frick, various guest rooms and the housekeeper’s room. Though all the rooms but the boudoir were demolished in the remodeling of the residence after 1931, photographs indicate that for the Fricks de Wolfe adopted a luxurious, comfortable style, a modified Louis XVI classicism reflecting her long familiarity with majestic French houses and châteaus.

What made the job so appealing to de Wolfe, apart from the prestige of working for such a renowned collector, was the hefty commissions Frick was prepared to pay her on everything she acquired for him, from the mundane pieces supplied by W. J. Sloane to major examples of 18th-century French furniture. This he spelled out in a letter: “I am willing to pay you five (5%) percent upon any item purchased below or up to twenty-five thousand ($25,000.00) dollars, and upon such sum by which it may exceed that sum—but not to exceed fifty thousand ($50,000.00) dollars—the sum of three (3%) percent; and upon any sum by which it may exceed fifty thousand ($50,000.00) dollars, two and one-half (21/2%) percent.” He went on to point out cautiously: “Where the sum represents the purchase of a set of rugs, vases, or suite of furniture, etc., the set to count as one item,” and “You undertake not to accept directly or indirectly any commission, trade discount, cash discount, or any other remuneration of any kind, other than your fee from me, and will use all your knowledge and means to purchase to my advantage, both artistically and financially, any and all purchases to have my approval in writing.”

De Wolfe put this policy to good use. Crossing to France with Frick in the summer of 1913, she soon arranged for him to visit the Paris residence on the rue Laffitte of the late Sir John Murray Scott, who had inherited part of the noted collection of French decorative arts assembled by the fourth marquess of Hertford and his son, Sir Richard Wallace. Because Scott’s will was being challenged, his residence was sequestered, but art dealer Jacques Seligmann managed to get de Wolfe and Frick in to make their choices pending the resolution of the lawsuit. Though Frick really wanted to play golf at Saint-Cloud Country Club that morning, de Wolfe captured him for half an hour. Striding through this Aladdin’s cave in his golf shoes, Frick approved one after another of her recommendations, the purchases mounting up into the millions of francs. As she recalled in her memoir, After All, “I realized that in one short half-hour I had become what was tantamount to a rich woman. I was also astounded at the revelation that a businessman, so astute and even cold as Mr. Frick was known to be, could spend a fortune with such nonchalance in order to keep a golf appointment.“

Among the items the two chose that day were a spectacular mahogany bed/worktable with trellis marquetry by Martin Carlin, an equally important mahogany writing table by Jean-Henri Riesener (both of these ended up in Mrs. Frick’s boudoir), a pair of tiny corner cabinets and cupboards attributed to Carlin, and a pair of small Turkish-style console tables supported by Nubian figures. The latter pieces exhibit the miniature scale, whimsy, and hint of the exotic that were important elements of de Wolfe’s aesthetic.

Surviving correspondence shows that de Wolfe did not shy away from speaking up to Frick, nor did he spare her sage advice. For instance, when she learned that Sir Charles was to do Frick’s sitting room and the family breakfast room on the second floor, she wrote:

I have thought a great deal about what you said regarding the possibility of my not doing the two rooms on the second floor. . . .

I feel that all my scheme as planned should go together, and that it will be the greatest mistake if these rooms are not carried out by one person. To take two of the principal rooms right out breaks the harmony, and certainly, White-Allom Co., with all the big downstairs rooms to their credit, should be willing to waive any imaginary claim they may feel they have on the upstairs portion of the house.

I feel very strongly about this, so I write frankly, though it is not in my scheme of creation to fight for work, and I am, believe me, not writing now, impelled by any monetary consideration, but my sincere desire to make for you a complete and harmonious floor, so please, dear Mr. Frick, tell White-Allom that you wish me to do those two rooms on ”my” floor and to confine their energies to the downstairs portion.

She then added cryptically: “Did you ever hear the Arab story about the nose of the camel? If you didn’t, I’ll tell it to you some time.” Frick responded blandly: “I regret exceedingly that we cannot give you the two rooms on the second floor . . . owing to my promise to the other party.” By a curious quirk of fate, de Wolfe was later invited by the future Edward VIII to redo Sir Charles’s work at Buckingham Palace, but his abdication nixed that possibility of revenge.

Frick’s reactions to some of de Wolfe’s choices for his house were expressed unhesitatingly: “I looked at your chairs, but, frankly, I do not think I would like them to live with, but am unable to say just why; would have preferred if they had make a different impression,” or: “The Jonas table did not please me,” or: “I could not approve of the purchase of the writing set. If the suggestion had not been made by you, I would think it rather too flashy.” Repeatedly advising her to “secure better prices,” Frick concluded in a letter of December 24, 1914: ”I thoroughly appreciate your wonderfully good taste, but you are all wrong on values, and the shrewd art dealer is always around to take advantage of that—a little weakness of yours. To my mind, the most of them are robbers.”

To suggest the scope of de Wolfe’s work for Frick, just one bill, dated January 25, 1915, came to $91,351.83. She went on making additional purchases for the house up until Frick’s death in 1919, and correspondence between her and Mrs. Frick continued into 1924. Fortunately, visitors to the Frick Collection today can still view her boudoir (now the Boucher Room) much as it was originally, with its remarkable furniture by Carlin and Riesener; other pieces de Wolfe purchased for her client can be seen elsewhere in the museum. But the harmony of her “scheme” for the private quarters is gone—one more demonstration of the evanescence of the decorator’s art.

Elsie de Wolfe’s career after her adventures with Frick was long and rich. Somewhat surprisingly, she played a heroic role as a volunteer nurse in France during World War I and, even more surprisingly, married British diplomat Sir Charles Mendl in 1926 (she was 61). As the most famous decorator in the world, she counted among her private and most celebrated clients Condé Nast, Paul-Louis Weiller, Cole Porter, and the Duchess of Windsor. Her influence, however, extended to the public as well. She passed along advice to millions through her articles, interviews, lecture tours, and pamphlets.

Excerpts from Henry Clay Frick’s correspondence in the Frick archive are published with the permission of the Helen Clay Frick Foundation.