Magic Show

For Tony Duquette, there is no such thing as a simple noun. “House,” “yard,” “necklace,” “hat,” “party”--he uses these words just as everyone does, in predictable context, but they don’t really mean the same thing for him as they do for the rest of us. For example, he might say “Why don’t you come over to my house?” So off you go, and from the street, it looks just like a house. An emerald green house, which is slightly unusual among the ode-to-Jordan-almond palaces of Beverly Hills, but still, just a house. There is a garage and a garbage can. There are three front steps flanked by two stone sphinxes, but still, they are normal stone steps leading to a normal doorway.

Then the door opens, and “house” does not even come close.

There are trompe l’oeil walls; there is a mirrored ceiling; there is a circular balcony; there is gilt and jade and feathers. And that’s just the entry. Stepping down into the living room, you experience a “Through the Looking Glass” sort of displacement. The colors are so vivid, so myriad, so incongruous that it’s difficult not to check the soles of your shoes to see if any have rubbed off on you. There are no bare walls; there are murals and, hung over parts of them, there are paintings in huge gilt frames. There is a secretaire, the famous one he made for socialite and decorator Elsie de Wolfe, green, white and black lacquer, inlaid with shells, mirrors and emerald Peking glass and topped with dancing figures. There are sofas and chairs of all periods and designs, covered in jewel-tone fabrics and scattered with pillows in leopard and ladybug prints. There is fake coral stuck in the plants, there are gold-leaf umbrellas and lamps made from fruit pickers and fantastic figurines and trinkets. There are shells everywhere.

Room after room is like this--ceilings swathed in Chinese tapestry in one, a dozen bird cages hanging in another, an antlered mirror here, an abalone shell-encrusted mirror there.

Then you are asked if you would like to see the yard. The yard. Yes, there are plants, normal plants, but then there are also Balinese-inspired pavilions, Thai spirit houses and scrollwork bridges, statuary and sculpture, pools and fountains, lanterns and totems, and tiled torch holders. There are things that don’t even have names, and things that do--foil pie plates and electrical conduit, oil drums and cable spools, and ‘50s skateboards, all looking like something completely different from what they are. And serving as molding or tables or just decorative objects.

It is impossible to take it all in, to make it make sense. It is possible only to stand and stare and walk and stop and point and exclaim and laugh and point again. This is not the effect of most things that fall under the definition of “house.” Or “yard.”

“Tony doesn’t believe in limits,” says Hutton Wilkinson, his longtime business and design partner and friend. “He believes that more is more.”

Duquette, who got his start creating window and store displays at Bullock’s and Robinson’s, is, technically, a designer. But there is that noun problem again. “Designer” doesn’t begin to describe what it is he does. He is an interior designer, a set designer, a costume designer and a jewelry designer. He is also a sculptor and painter. He was the first and, until recently, only American to have a one-man show at the Louvre, in 1951. He worked as a decorator for, among others, J. Paul Getty, David O. Selznick, Mary Pickford, Elizabeth Arden and the Duchess of Windsor. He designed the movie set for the “This Heart of Mine” segment of Vincent Minnelli’s “Ziegfeld Follies” and costumes and props for the director’s remake of “Kismet.” He shared a Tony with the late designer Adrian for the costumes in the original Broadway production of “Camelot.”

The house in Beverly Hills is the first one he built, but it is by no means his only personal Shangri-La. Sortilegium (Latin for “enchantment”), Duquette’s 150-acre residence in the Santa Monica Mountains--it’s been called a ranch, but most ranches have neither Venetian gondolas nor Oriental pavilions--was destroyed during the 1993 Malibu wildfire. Since then, he has conjured from the remains a weekend house of turrets and gates and more bedazzling innards on the property next door.

Four fires have claimed much of Duquette’s work, including an exhibition pavilion that burned in 1989 in San Francisco, hence his signature symbol, the phoenix rising from the ashes. There is something mystical about Duquette. It has been said that his work has overtones of the Orient, of the Baroque, of the primitive, of opulence, of whimsy, of spirtuality, of New Age, of Old World, of worldiness, of otherworldliness. Certainly, his work is a bridge between the sacred and profane, between the glamorous and the mundane. He is referred to as the master of the objet trouve. Even his gardens were collected over the years from curbs and trash cans. “It got to the point that no one would drive with me,” he says. “Because if I saw something, I would have to stop . . .”

“No matter where he was off to,” Wilkinson adds, “even if he was in dinner clothes.”

Duquette believes, quite literally, in the diamond in the dustbin. But most of all, he believes in wonder. Wonderful, wonderment, wonderstruck, wonderwork, wondrous.

It has been his life’s work, this wondering. And it has made him an L.A. legend. Who is what most legends are not--still working. In fact, with the help of Wilkinson, Duquette is in mid-renaissance. His aesthetic of excess, a merciful antidote to the dreariness of minimalism, is back in vogue: For the past two years, Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman have both showcased a collection of 18-karat gold Duquette jewelry. Tom “Mr. Modernist” Ford had the spring Gucci campaign shot at Duquette’s Beverly Hills house and had Duquette design an as-yet-unveiled collection of vermeil brooches. Oscar de la Renta showed a collection of vermeil necklaces with his spring couture designs for Pierre Balmain and still another collection of 18-karat gold jewelry with his own ready-to-wear line for fall. And Duquette was named to this year’s International Best Dressed List.

“We’ve come out of a decade that encouraged austerity in dress and design, and in so many areas, things have become so homogenized,” says Hamish Bowles, Vogue’s European editor at large. “So it’s great to have such a maverick still working because I think people are now seeking the unique, the handcrafted, the couture finish. And Tony has an absolutely unique point of view.”

Bowles flew to Los Angeles to attend Duquette’s 85th birthday party. Of course, there was a party. You know what sort of party, right over the top, that’s what sort. Thrown by the Decorative Arts Council of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Duquette’s bash took over every rentable square inch of Union Station last month and transformed it, on one side, into the Mocambo (the famous Sunset Strip club that Duquette helped designer Billy Haines decorate), and on the other, into his fashion-show finale from the movie “Lovely to Look At.”

Seated at a table under an arched entry to the train station’s courtyard, Duquette was resplendent in lapis and aquamarine brocade shaman robes, a Nepalese hat of turquoise and seashells, and an atomic blue-eyed smile.

Around him fluttered friends and admirers, many of whom had forsworn traditional dinner-party black for more Duquettian jewel-toned hues, like a migration of monarch butterflies in beads and feathers and gold-stitched silks.

Some wore pieces from the designer’s latest oeuvre--the handmade, one-of-a-kind jewelry he began working on with Wilkinson after the San Francisco fire and, again, following the death of his wife, Elizabeth, four years ago. Duquette doesn’t call his pieces “jewelry.” He calls them “talismans of power,” and that comes pretty close. Fistfuls of precious and semiprecious stones, slabs of quartz and agate, chunks of turquoise and coral and amber strung together into necklaces that look either like the breastplate of a high priestess or the bib of some fairy-tale princeling. Friend and neighbor Sharon Stone made a last-minute entrance before dinner, wearing her enormous Duquette necklace of abalone shell, turquoise and malachite, which drew just as much attention as she.

Spectacular in their own right, these pieces are weighted with more than their artistic value--they may well represent the final phase of this particular brilliant career. Duquette and Wilkinson are putting the finishing touches on a Venetian palazzo for socialite Dodie Rosekrans and her husband, John, and, says Wilkinson, that will, in all likelihood, be the last Duquette interior.

But who knows? Someday he could come across a tempting bit of debris tumbling off a curb, and then he will just start all over again.