Minimalist they’re not
Before InStyle and “MTV Cribs” turned celebrity home invasions into one of our great national pastimes, the movie colony lived and played behind closed doors. Life photographer Eliot Elisofon seemed to have an all-access pass, and “Hollywood Life: The Glamorous Homes of Vintage Hollywood” (Greybull Press, $65) is a lavish portfolio of the interior decor fancies of the stars he called his friends. During his 24-year reign as court photographer to the stars, Elisofon captured house-proud Hollywood at its most glamorous.
Not to mention vainglorious. Who, other than Tony Curtis, would have the nerve to strike a macho pose with both fists defiantly on hips in front of his butch iron-doored manor, followed by a leg-crossed moment enjoying breakfast at a table draped in a fern print fabric? Who but Kirk Douglas would outfit a screening room with a sliding map that concealed the projection booth, a jukebox and a wall of mounted big game heads? Who would cloak the walls of a den with pictures of Natalie Wood, other than Natalie Wood?
Not that we could blame them. They were, after all, American royalty, people who might one day play French monarchs and then decide to live with them. They were homeowners given to feathering their nests like set designers, building opium dens, Japanese rooms, solariums, billiard parlors and libraries lined with Old Masters or new Moderns.
The legacy lives on, though far less grandly, in any number of today’s shelter magazines that show celebrity digs with what is usually described as Old World charm and modern sensibilities. Few if any of the stars in “Hollywood Life,” however, embraced sensible “great rooms” over formal dining rooms set for 12.
While the 190-page, largely color book documents the work of some of Hollywood’s great architects -- Wallace Neff, Paul Williams, Cliff May and John Woolf -- it is the interior designs that dazzle.
Elisofon’s photographs of director George Cukor in his 1930s Mediterranean villa are a crash course in the diverse decorating style of William “Billy” Haines, whose hand-painted Chinese wallpapers, updated European furniture and Art Deco curves defined gracious movie star living. By contrast, the 1960s photos of James Coburn’s “engagingly over the top Arabian Nights fantasy” are dizzying examples of the brazen work of Haines’ discovery, former costume designer Tony Duquette. With a love for green bordering on a fetish, Duquette created garden-like interiors sprayed in gold and bejeweled with sequins and shells that turned an ordinary room into Versailles on helium.
Some of Elisofon’s subjects, however, lived in spaces that seemed to be the manifestation of their work. In his s’wonderfully ornate Regency home by Woolf, Ira Gershwin’s thin-legged furniture punctuated rooms like quarter notes on the sheet music of one of his compositions. Eternal cowboy Will Rogers lived under wood-beam rafters, surrounded by Monterey furniture and Native American textiles, with saddles thrown over banisters and horse gear lining the walls, all of which looked perfectly at home under the light of a wagon-wheel chandelier.
Not every home jibed with its owner. Sitting in her rustic Mexican cocina, costume designer Edith Head looks as out of place as her severe French tailored suit. Bain de Soleil poster boy George Hamilton’s insignia-encrusted bedroom with red floor-length drapery would seem more at home in the White House than in Grayhall Manor, the massive stone dwelling built in 1909 as a hunting lodge that was Beverly Hills’ second-oldest estate. And despite the simplicity of May’s stone-clad villa, Steve McQueen’s master bedroom is a hideous explosion of brown, with rust wall-to-wall, tan and blue wallpaper, crewel tub chairs and wrought-iron light fixtures. With a fur bedspread no less.
Whether tacky or tasteful, simple or excessive, the often narcissistic details of these homes pose burning questions: What possessed Gypsy Rose Lee, former burlesque queen, to display a portrait of herself clothed over her fireplace? Was Cukor’s poodle always allowed to sit on his master’s velvet sofa? Why did “Gone With the Wind” producer David O. Selznick and his second wife, actress Jennifer Jones, have a gilt picture frame around the fireplace in their Duquette-designed master suite? Did Charlton Heston always bring a script into his tiled sauna? Couldn’t Wood put her phone on the nightstand rather than leave it on the bedroom floor?
Though “Hollywood Life” doesn’t answer these puzzlers, it is more than just a coffee-table pictorial. Ushering us through the gates of the rich and famous, it opens an engaging time capsule bookended with pithy “behind the movies” text. The introduction, by Hollywood and Natalie Wood biographer Gavin Lambert, recounts the fabulous indulgences of the silent-era stars and their obsession with provincial decor and opulent dining. The epilogue is a juicy dialogue between Brooke Hayward, daughter of theatrical producer Leland Hayward and actress Margaret Sullavan, and Leonard Stanley, former assistant to Duquette.