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  Self-help readers desperately wanted reassurance that it was possible to ride the Depression’s raging waves. The success manuals competing with Marjorie Hillis for shelf space rarely concerned themselves with anything as mundane as budgets, but promised instead that a reader could vault over the raging river with the help of mantras and magical thinking. During 1937, the wild ups and downs of the economy seemed to prove once again that fiscal prudence was no more advisable than crossing one’s fingers and hoping for the best. At the beginning of the year, the economy had bounced back to pre-1929 heights, and despite lagging unemployment, the most fortunate Americans were confident that the worst was over. But by the time Orchids was published in June, everything had tumbled again—industrial production fell by 32 percent, unemployment hit 20 percent, and a yearlong recession within the Depression began. The downturn was severe and lasting, and a sign that security was still elusive.30

  In this climate of sudden advances and reversals, it was no wonder that people were willing to believe that any economic situation, wealth or poverty, was temporary and wholly unpredictable. The runaway Hollywood hit of the previous fall was a screwball comedy based on the idea that class and economic status could turn on a dime. My Man Godfrey stars William Powell as a suicidal millionaire, who escapes his former life by disguising himself as a homeless “forgotten man.” He’s living in an encampment on the banks of the East River when he’s picked up as a prize in a scavenger hunt by a ditsy heiress, played by Powell’s ex-wife Carole Lombard. She then hires him as her butler and of course, falls in love with him, unaware of his true identity. When her wealthy father confesses he’s about to lose everything in a bad stock trade, the butler reveals that a clever trade of his own has made him rich and will save the family. He quits his job to open a nightclub called “The Dump,” which will employ his old down-and-out comrades from the East River camp as waiters. At the very last minute, the restored heiress and the restored millionaire get married, but this ending doesn’t feel like a return to order, so much as just another spin on the merry-go-round. The madcap plot of the film was ideally suited to its moment, when no reversal of fortune was too absurd to contemplate, and the difference between a butler, a bum, and a millionaire was just an outfit.

  Hollywood in the 1930s was obsessed with portraying the antics of unruly heiresses, who were given license in a string of comedies to misbehave with a freedom no ordinary woman could enjoy. The middle-class audiences who flocked to those pictures also ate up stories about the actresses who played the heiresses, whose riches and glamour seemed no less a fairy tale. Movie magazines were full of highly manufactured stories of starlets who’d been plucked out of their ordinary lives and given a new look, a new name, and a shiny studio contract. To be an heiress or a movie star seemed like just the same kind of magic.

  At the other extreme of portrayals of women in the middle years of the Depression sits Dorothea Lange’s iconic photograph of Florence Owens Thompson, known as Migrant Mother, of a prematurely aged woman unable to break out of her own despair to comfort the children who cling to her. This photograph, taken in Nipomo, California, in February of 1936, 160 miles up the coast from Hollywood, makes it hard to believe that optimism could be part of the story of the era. Yet for women on their own, especially in cities where there were more opportunities to scrape together a living, there was the promise that they could finally exert control over their money.

  Between those extremes of wealth and poverty, Hollywood and Nipomo, lay millions of women who adjusted to their new circumstances by going out to work, often for the first time. The mass unemployment after the Wall Street crash began in heavy industry, where very few women were employed, and affected men to a far greater degree. The country still needed teachers, nurses, and garment workers; it still needed maids and cooks and nannies, albeit in smaller numbers than before; and it needed the cheapest possible office workers. Women with families, who could get by without working outside the home, saw their domestic roles changed and expanded. A housewife became a household manager, economist in chief, and family morale booster. Her contributions to the economy, as a careful consumer, were valued as never before. And in contrast to the men who suffered the psychological blow of losing the ability to provide for a family, plenty of women found pride in their new responsibilities.

  Marjorie Hillis’s contribution to this new reality was to suggest that a “household” did not have to contain a husband in order to require smart management, and offer insight into economics. Indeed, unmarried women, divorced women, wealthy widows, and single mothers could understand the relationship between what was earned and what was spent all the more acutely because they had no one to whom they could cede that responsibility. Quietly and determinedly they held their households together, took low-paying jobs, and bought cheap cuts of meat. They learned that they could survive, and that pleasure was not out of reach. For more women than ever before, the Depression offered the thrill of independence, of work outside the home and the satisfaction of a paycheck with their name on it. Having never been treated as fully equal or respected members of the labor force, women did not attach the same level of self-worth or status anxiety to their jobs as men, and were therefore able to think more flexibly about the ways that the Depression’s upheavals might be worked to their own, and the nation’s, advantage. Many of them never looked back.

  4

  SETTING FOR A SOLO ACT

  In November of 1936, in one of the last issues of Vogue to which she’d contribute as a regular member of staff, Marjorie Hillis wrote a feature that reads like an extended, illustrated version of one of her Live Alone case histories. Titled “Bandbox by the River,” it brought to life one of her own surest principles for Live-Alone success: trading a large, labor-intensive house for a small, convenient city apartment. Although she admitted that such a move was often not a choice, even for Vogue’s well-heeled audience, she nevertheless invited the reader to enter into the fantasy by imagining that the change was “purely a matter of preference” on your part, and a temporary change that one just might get used to. The woman in the profile has packed her old furniture in storage, rented out her summer home, and now lives in a Manhattan pied-à-terre. “It is a far more modern way to live, she thinks.”

  The new apartment-dweller, like a case study in Live Alone and Like It, wanted “a view—and open fire—sunshine—gaiety—luxury—comfort—and chic,” and has found all of her requirements on the edge of the East River in a small enclave called Sutton Place. The apartment is on the ground floor of a building with a living room that opens onto private gardens, “with the Fifty-Ninth Street bridge hung like a back-drop across the river.” In parentheses, Marjorie added her own defiant note about the beauty of this particular view, which she shared from her apartment a few blocks south in Tudor City. “Some day, when just one more person gets lyrical to us about the romance of the Seine or the beauty of the Thames,” she wrote, “we are going to get up and make a speech about the East River, with its bridges and its boats and its border of fantastic flowers.”

  Inside the one-bedroom apartment, small by Vogue’s standards if not by regular New Yorkers’, there is plenty of ingenuity on display. The “infinitesimal foyer” serves as coatroom, powder room, and even—in an above-board revival of a popular Prohibition-era apartment feature—a hidden bar: “One of the innocent-looking doors opens, and there is a bar with bottles and glasses and shakers in racks, and a shelf lifts up to hold them.” The living room is set up for entertaining, with nests of tables that can be “set with doily and glass and china and silver, as correctly as in the most formal dining-room” and placed in front of guests around the fire. In the bedroom, there is an extreme space-saving setup: two beds stacked to create a “double-decker four-poster” with curtains going up to the ceiling, a ladder, and integrated reading lights. In the corner, there’s a basket for the resident Dalmation. “The result is a small apartment that has everything,” Marjorie enthused. “We mean really s
mall, and we mean EVERYTHING.”

  The most striking feature of this apartment is the décor. Everything is painted a “pale sky-blue,” from walls and ceiling to woodwork, furniture, and picture frames—even “a lovely mahogany secretary” gets a coat of the same shade, so that it “melts into the wall.” There are mirrors everywhere, taking up one entire wall and reflecting the garden by day, and at night, candelight and “the necklace of lights that outlines the bridge.” Even from the black-and-white photographs it’s possible to get a sense of the impact of the wall of decorative plates above the fireplace, the sofa and matching armchair upholstered in a brightly contrasting chintz, pale deep-pile rug on the white floor, tall thin candelabras, and oversized lamp with its two-tone pleated shade. The exposed bricks around the fireplace are painted mauve, while the brass andirons and fender “have been finished in shining chromium.” Even the terrace outside is shaded by a striped pale blue awning.1

  The owner of the bandbox apartment was one of the most famous interior decorators of her day, and a divorcée identified in the article as “Mrs. Tuckerman Draper.” Readers would have known her better by the name she used for her business: Dorothy Draper, or simply “DD.” Like Marjorie Hillis, Draper was a child of the Victorian era in home decorating—a period of clutter and shrouded lamps, brocade and velvet and gloom—and equally eager to cast off its weight. Marjorie recalled with particular distaste the parlor of her childhood home in Brooklyn Heights, with its enormous chandelier, “a large sepia print of Sir Galahad resting on an elaborate brass easel” and “an enormous fern drooping from a tall brass plant-stand.”2 In the early twentieth century, she was far from alone in her desire to tear down the heavy velvet curtains and let in some daylight. No less a luminary than Edith Wharton (a Live-Aloner from her divorce in 1913 to her death in 1937) had begun her career as a writer with a book championing lighter, brighter living spaces. She brought her principles to life in the creation of the Mount, in Lenox, Massachusetts, her home from the turn of the century until the breakdown of her marriage, where she wrote many of the stories, essays, and novels that made her famous. In The Decoration of Houses, which she cowrote in 1897 with her friend, the architect Ogden Codman Jr., Wharton pushed back against the competitive opulence that marked America’s Gilded Age, when millionaires vied with one another to build and furnish more and more garish palaces. Instead, the book took inspiration from eighteenth-century France and Italy, celebrating the balance and symmetry, light and space, to be found in elegant châteaus and palazzos. The authors’ aesthetic preferences—for “sincerity,” “harmony,” and “simplicity”—handily doubled as moral judgments on the inauthentic excesses of the superrich.

  When Marjorie visited Mrs. Draper’s chic modern pad, interior decorating was still mostly an amateur pursuit, and decidedly an upper-class one. In contrast to the male-dominated profession of architecture, the early luminaries of interior design were women of independent means and ideas who shared Wharton’s taste for light and symmetry if not for restraint. Dorothy Draper’s professional trail was blazed by a handful of idiosyncratic forebears, including Elsie de Wolfe, a former actress and socialite who lived for many years with her female partner (and was a keen yogi, renowned for standing on her head at parties). But DD surpassed them all, and by the mid-1930s was on her way to being not only the most famous decorator, but one of the most famous businesswomen in America, guided by her inarguable dictum, “If it looks right, it is right.” She transformed down-at-heel apartment buildings into the most desirable addresses in town, and she established the resort hotel as the quintessential midcentury space of glamorous, see-and-be-seen leisure. Moreover, she did it alone, after her husband made off with another woman (also, as it happened, an interior decorator) in the same week as the Wall Street crash.

  Despite this double disaster, Dorothy Draper was a firm believer in looking on the bright side. When her husband left her, she started to see a psychiatrist, who recommended the teachings of positive-thinking guru Norman Vincent Peale. DD became so convinced of the power of optimism that she sold her brownstone and sank fifty thousand dollars (about three-quarters of a million today) into creating her own self-help correspondence course. The twelve lessons, which she advertised widely, made up a program of self-improvement called “Learn to Live.” Her venture was unusual among such publications and programs for actually fulfilling its promises, and therefore proved to be a financial disaster—nobody saw the need to subscribe beyond the first issue or two, since by then, they reported, Mrs. Draper had solved all their problems.3

  Tall, beautiful, and unflaggingly self-assured, DD’s signature self-confidence was born, not built. Before she married a Draper, Dorothy was a Tuckerman, and the branches of her family tree were entangled with Roosevelts and Astors all the way back to the Mayflower. She grew up in the late nineteenth century in Tuxedo Park, New York, a rustic old-money utopia where staff wore uniforms topped with Tyrolean hats, and children like Dorothy believed they roamed free, until they banged up against the high, hidden fence ringing their kingdom. For the first nine years of her life she was an only child, nicknamed “Star” by her family, and educated only so far as was absolutely necessary. Although later in life she would sometimes regret her lack of schooling, in her chosen profession it hardly mattered—schools could not instill the vision and chutzpah necessary to saw the legs off an antique dining table, slap black lacquer on a mahogany dresser, or line a blue velvet curtain with lime-green silk and edge it with crimson piping.

  Dorothy was a debutante before she was a decorator. In September 1912, she did the expected thing and married George Draper, known as Dan, who was as well born as Dorothy but bored by high society. A doctor from a family of doctors, Draper devoted himself to research instead of chasing the wealthy patients who might cement his social position. He became a specialist in the treatment of polio, at the time a mysterious and crippling disease, which remained a mostly theoretical interest until the mid-1920s, when his childhood friend Franklin D. Roosevelt was struck with its symptoms. Draper became FDR’s personal physician, treating him in secrecy so as not to damage his political ambitions. The Drapers, who had three children, lived near Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt in New York, in an Upper East Side enclave almost as exclusive as Tuxedo Park. Both Mrs. Draper and her neighbor Mrs. Roosevelt chafed against the conventions and restrictions of their environments, and both wanted to make the world a better place. For Dorothy that was a tangible, physical task: a matter of walls and furniture rather than laws and rights.

  DD began her decorating career with her own home, a typically gloomy brownstone at the eastern end of Sixty-Fourth Street, tall and narrow and overshadowed by trees and other buildings. She decided to turn the house upside down by pushing the ground floor out to the back of the property line, swallowing up the dank backyard with a vast living space that could accommodate some two hundred party guests. The garden was simply lifted up to the roof of the extension, into the light. Her friends and neighbors clamored for her help, and being who they were, their interest and their influence counted. DD saw her opportunity to make the sort of money her husband was reluctant to chase. In 1925 she set up a business called the Architectural Clearing House, a kind of matchmaking agency between architects and society women who wanted to renovate their homes. Her social circle included real estate magnates like Douglas Elliman and the partners of the McKim, Mead & White architectural firm, who needed her “feminine intelligence” to shape their visions to female consumers. At first, they understood this intelligence in narrowly practical terms—Mrs. Draper reminded them that lady clients liked their dressing rooms and closets to be deep enough for coat hangers. But DD would not be patronized. She quickly proved that her understanding of what made a home pleasurable—plenty of light, a sense of drama, and above all, color—was not a matter of measuring tape but of soul. Soon, everybody wanted a piece of it.

  In their private homes, however, few people wanted to bring in quite so much color, a
nd quite such color, as Dorothy Draper. She quickly grew impatient with the restrictions imposed by cautious clients who preferred cream to crimson and began to pursue the public spaces that would make her a lasting legacy. In 1928 she took on the lobby of the Carlyle Hotel on Seventy-Sixth Street through her friend Douglas Elliman, and laid a bold black-and-white marble floor, a look that would become one of her signatures. Oversized mirrors, chandeliers, and marble columns heightened the drama of the small, transient space, and, softened with satin and velvet curtains and sofas, it became somewhere to linger. Even though the hotel went bust in the crash before it opened (it was sold and reopened later in the 1930s, when DD was hired to decorate the whole interior), the Carlyle was the first step toward her real life’s work—reconceiving the public spaces of hotels as eye-catching social spaces, rather than bland pass-throughs. Today, chains like the Ace Hotel have revived DD’s concept of the hotel-as-lifestyle, creating lobbies and lounges that look like fantasy versions of the guests’ own homes, where they can hang out halfway between the public and private worlds.

  Soon after she tackled the Carlyle, DD proved she had a knack for big results at low prices when she took on the renovation of a block of tenements at the southern edge of Sutton Place, on the far east side of Manhattan. The owners of the apartments had struggled to rent them, but had little money to spare for a serious overhaul. DD’s renovation was purely cosmetic, and like a good Hollywood makeup artist, she focused on dramatic effects that would photograph well. She painted the grubby brick exteriors a uniform black and set them off with contrasting white windowsills and doors in primary colors. The dingy hallways were brought to life with flowered carpets and wallpaper, and the block was renamed Cannon Point Row. Before long, apartments that the owners had struggled to rent at fifteen dollars a month were fully occupied at more than four times that. After her divorce, the decorator ensured the new stylishness of the address by becoming a tenant herself, in the pale blue “bandbox” apartment Marjorie Hillis had so admired in the pages of Vogue. She shared the apartment and its double-decker bed with her youngest daughter, Penelope, then aged thirteen, and her Dalmation.