Sheltering the Ruling Class

Anyone who thinks the United States of America is a classless society should give a big air kiss to the gatekeeper of Mrs. Henry Parish II’s world. Parish, called “Sister” by her family from the time her older brother affixed the nickname in childhood and addressed as “Mrs. Parish” by almost everyone else until her death in 1994, was one of the most influential interior designers of the 20th century.

Having the glamorous young Jacqueline Kennedy as a client, before and after the move to the White House, cemented her status as the grande dame of American decorators. Yet even before Parish began commuting from New York to Washington in 1960 to spiff up the dreary rooms the Kennedys inherited from their less aesthetically aware predecessors, she had established herself as the arbiter of taste for members of a social group whose importance has faded as emphatically as a chintz pillow left in the sun.

Born into a wealthy, blue-blood family, Parish grew up in the sort of sprawling country cottages and attended the exclusive schools and clubs favored by her class. Later, she would substitute the word “character” for “class” in conversation, a graceful and classy thing to do. Think about it: A new money client who suggested something outre would feel less like his hand had been slapped if Parish remarked that liquor bottles displayed in the living room didn’t have the right character than if she had said exhibiting them showed no class.

Parish wasn’t above administering a verbal smack. Described as crusty, imperious and formidable, she could stand up to the rich, royal or simply spoiled. They knew she understood a particular American way of life, in which household staffs and museum-quality family heirlooms were standard.

“Most of Sister’s clients had multiple houses--the summer house, the winter house, the apartment in the city and the apartment in Europe,” says her granddaughter, Susan Bartlett Crater. Along with her mother, Parish’s daughter Apple Parish Bartlett, Crater compiled “Sister: The Life of Legendary American Interior Decorator Mrs. Henry Parish II” (St. Martin’s Press, $35). The recently published book includes excerpts from Parish’s journals, and material she was preparing for an autobiography, as well as memories culled from interviews with clients, colleagues, employees, friends and family members.

“We had four chapters that Sister had written, and then we found other chapters in the attic of her summer house,” her granddaughter says. “She’d kept letters her parents had written each other in a big, iron box, and saved all the correspondence she and her husband had exchanged during World War II. She was quite a good writer, and her memory for the details of rooms was amazing.”

Beyond voyeurism, what made Parish’s home designs for the Rockefellers, Paleys, Whitneys and Gettys of San Francisco interesting to the hoi polloi was a mimetic style that ranked comfort first. She would put a simple, inexpensive item in a formal salon, scatter quilts, flags and needlepoint pillows around to cheer up a room, move repainted wicker next to a fine antique, and cover a sofa that cost as much as a Buick with lowly mattress ticking.

The confident mix of the precious and profane that Parish employed in even the grandest homes has been imitated by shelter magazines, decorator show houses and a generation of interior designers. Ralph Lauren, Martha Stewart and Mary Emmerling are among the most well known in her debt.

“She’s credited with starting the American country look, but I think she just took a lot of American country things and brought them into rooms she was doing,” Crater says. “She always said that she represented the undecorated look. She’d been influenced by the English country-house style, but what she created was very American in its own way, because it was a mix of European and American things. What she didn’t like about houses that looked ‘done’ was she felt they didn’t contain anything personal. Her whole thing was that houses should bear the mark of their owners.”

Jackie Kennedy agreed. When she hired Parish in 1953 to help her decorate a small cottage in the Hyannis compound, and later when they worked on the family’s Georgetown house, Kennedy quickly discovered that their taste and decorating philosophy were the same. After her husband won the presidency in 1960, Kennedy sought less to create a showplace than to fashion a refuge for her family. Considering the state in which she found her new home (Parish pronounced it “appalling”), the elegant first lady and her patrician decorator faced a considerable challenge.

“The White House had been so neglected during the Eisenhower and Truman years,” Crater says. “Before the Kennedys, the families lived there with department store furniture and brass ashtrays.”

Over the years, the place had been stripped of its valuable antiques, as each White House inhabitant had considered it their right to take souvenirs when they left office. The first lady put an end to that by seeing that legislation was passed granting the house and its contents landmark status. With Parish’s help, she then formed a fine arts committee, a group of big donors who funded the purchase of furniture the team felt belonged in the White House. Drawing on her and Parish’s friends, Kennedy had found a way around the budget constraints imposed on the official residence.

Money was an issue from the beginning of the Kennedy-Parish collaboration. “Their house in Georgetown had just been finished,” Parish wrote in her journal about one of her early encounters with Jackie Kennedy. “It had been done by her sister, Lee [Radziwill], and Jackie assured me that it was very pretty. She then ventured to tell me that it didn’t have the charm she longed for, and no color.”

The project was put on hold, however, because a lot of money had already been spent on the interiors, and then-Sen. John F. Kennedy put his foot down when his wife suggested laying out more. Several months later she called Parish again, happily reporting that her husband had given her permission to do the house over.

“Jackie was a spender, beyond belief,” Crater says. “Jack wasn’t, and that was definitely a problem.”

It might have also been a source of conflict between Kennedy and Parish. Crater’s research revealed three possible reasons for a falling out between the two women that occurred after completion of the White House decorating. She believes that Parish, who was accustomed to becoming a close and valued friend to her clients, never felt sufficiently thanked for her efforts in transforming 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. into a cozy family home as well as an impressive national monument. A savvy businesswoman with an instinct for bad credit risks, she was not pleased when Kennedy developed the attitude that not everything she received had to be paid for.

In her journal, Parish also repeated the incident often rumored to have torpedoed their relationship: that Kennedy never forgave Parish after someone tattled that the decorator had kicked Caroline.

Parish’s daughter says, “Mummy probably told the child to just take her feet off the sofa, pushed them off, and the incident was blown out of proportion.”

A little girl’s feet weren’t allowed on the furniture, but Yummy, Parish’s Pekingese, accompanied the decorator on jobs and sat everywhere. He attended every client meeting, visited each house and apartment his mistress decorated. His privileged position was unquestioned, even after he’d bitten a client’s fingers. Such eccentricities made Parish the perfect model for the prickly society decorator in Dominick Dunne’s novel, “People Like Us” (Crown, 1988).

Decorating Offered Added Income

Born in 1910, Dorothy May Kinnicutt was already married to Henry Parish II, son of the president of the Bank of New York, when the Depression slashed his Wall Street salary and devastated his family’s fortune. Neighbors of the Parishes’ country estate in Far Hills, N.J., and others in Maine, where she spent summers with her three children, had always asked for decorating advice. When an additional income became a necessity, Parish didn’t hesitate to hang out a shingle.

“It was important to her to live a certain way, so she was willing to work pretty hard to maintain that,” Crater says. She liked people and money even more than decorating. An accomplished busybody, she would begin designing people’s homes and would soon be getting their children into dancing school and finding the household a proper cook. “You are not just rearranging furniture, you know; you are rearranging lives,” she wrote.

She was aided by Albert Hadley, a New York designer who became her partner in 1962 and helped make New York’s Parish-Hadley Associates the powerhouse it became. Although great friends, their styles couldn’t have been more different. She was a brilliant colorist, his favorite rooms were brown and white. He had a keen awareness of architectural elements, she wasn’t formally trained and worked instinctively. She loved piling pattern on pattern, he preferred minimalism. She gravitated to the traditional, he to the modern.

Nevertheless, Parish-Hadley became a school for legions of decorators who have continued to work for both old-money clients and arrivistes, who hope the right advisors can show them how to telegraph an image of affluence.

Decorator Mario Buatta, a Parish friend and disciple, writes in the Parish book, “There is always the new girl in town who used to work for an airline and has just married the guy from Wall Street. She hires a decorator and has parties, to which she invites all of their friends, and the next thing you know, they are attracting people like flies. Now, because of their decorator, they are socially on that team; they are in ‘the group.’ So the decorator can play a great social role. Sister did some of that, but there were many people whom she wouldn’t invite into her circle.”

The showy, social-climbing ‘80s seem like ancient history now, when association with the right venture capitalist carries more social clout than linking up with an aristocratic decorator. Parish would have enjoyed the proliferation of good design at lower prices that has made decorating more accessible today, her granddaughter says. Because, after all the toile-covered pillows had been trimmed and the rag rug added as clever counterpoint beneath the Picasso, she would want her legacy to be about “continuity,” her word for tradition.

“If there is a theme to my work, it is the theme of my life--continuity,” she wrote. “Things inherited from the past somehow always turn out to be the most interesting and beautiful things we can live with today. Some think a decorator should change a house. I try to give permanence to a house, to bring out the experiences, the memories, the feelings that make it a home.”

Thus, Parish was in favor of preserving an old rocking chair that President Kennedy insisted not be removed when his office was redecorated. Out of earshot, his wife winked at her decorator and said, “We will get it out somehow.”

As the world knows, they didn’t. As much as Parish respected individuality and tradition, she also understood that sometimes the most important thing was that a man who was paying the bills be happy in his home.