Decoratings Great Dames

For almost 50 years Sister Parish and her English counterpart, Nancy Lancaster, decorated the drawing rooms of bluebloods and big money. Until their deaths this year, they were taste arbiters for the English gentry— and for Kennedys and Rockefellers. AMY FINE COLLINS recalls the reign of two rival design divas who, from opposite sides of the ocean, invented the country-house look and knocked the stuffing out of the world of interior decorating

Even before the September burial of decorating legend Sister Parish at the high-Wasp summer colony of Dark Harbor, Maine, numerous versions of her final words were burning up Manhattan telephone wires. Since her July 15, 1910, birth, Parish, nee Dorothy May Kinnicutt, had passed each summer at the resort, but it was clear that this season the ailing octogenarian had gone up to her yellow clapboard house to die. On September 9, along with her daughter Dorothy "D.B." Gilbert and her sister-in-law, she had taken her lunch on a porch overlooking the heliotropes and the water. Parish then retired to her hospital bed, set up next to the same four-poster where her mother had given birth to her 84 years ago. Parish was overheard bantering with her nurse. "You'd better listen to me," she growled. "I'm a tiger." The nurse countered, "I'm not afraid. I'm a lion!" Not to be bested, Parish proclaimed, "And I am king of the jungle!" And, as one socialite put it, "then she cooled."

Parish was king of the drawingroom jungle, if only because the one other contender, Nancy Lancaster, her Anglo-American counterpart, had just died in her well-appointed lair, the Coach House of Haseley Court in Oxfordshire, England, three weeks earlier, aged 96. Over the decades, the two grandes dames had led parallel, and sometimes intersecting, lives, shared tastes, furniture, and friends—if not clients—and enjoyed a very amicable rivalry. Pioneers in their profession, both were bom to the privileged class they advised, and both broke the mold that formed them.

"It is not fashionable to speak this way anymore," says Annette de la Renta, whose mother, Jane Engelhard, was an early Parish client and whose own New York apartment is furnished with treasures purchased from the London apartment Lancaster gave up in 1982. "But both women were products of the upper strata of Wasp society. Their backgrounds gave them a certain innate assurance and taste. The difference was Sister was a Yankee, and Nancy a southerner."

Lancaster was the daughter of Lizzie Perkins, one of the fabulously beautiful, witty, and athletic Langhome sisters from Virginia. One married Waldorf Astor and became the acid-tongued first female M.P. in Britain, Nancy Astor; the most exquisite, Irene, literally embodied the era's ideal, the Gibson Girl, when she wed the artist Charles Dana Gibson. Invalided out of the Civil War, Lancaster's grandfather Chiswell Dabney Langhome went on to sell tobacco and then to help build the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, where he made his fortune. These funds enabled him to buy what would become the family homestead in Greenwood, Virginia, a red brick Georgian manor called Mirador, which was "always the house my mother loved best," says Lancaster's son Michael Tree. Just before her death, Lancaster spent days with her sister Alice, "talking nonstop about Mirador, and the parades of Civil War veterans that used to march down Monument Avenue when they were girls," her niece Elizabeth Winn says. So large do the Langhomes loom in Virginia lore that across from Mirador, in the Emmanuel Episcopal Church, built by Nancy Astor in memory of their mother, "there are more references to the Langhornes, Astors, and Gibsons than to Jesus Christ," one native notes.

Parish's lost Eden was Mayfields, a handsome stone behemoth of a house in the foxhunting country of Far Hills, New Jersey. There, surrounded by rolling hills, tennis courts, and the English furniture collected by her Wall Street-banker father, Sister Parish "absorbed [her] standards for perfection," she wrote in HG magazine in 1990. "She was always extremely sentimental about Far Hills. But she could hardly bear to look at Mayfields after it was sold," says a New Jersey friend. Albert Hadley, Parish's partner of 32 years, says she once screwed up the courage to show him the house. "Drive in," she commanded peremptorily. "And now—drive away!"

Unlike the chiseled-featured, auburnhaired Lancaster, who aged into, biographer Robert Becker states, "the sexiest 90-year-old you'll ever meet," Parish was, she claimed, "a hideous baby" who matured to resemble, says her hairdresser of 30 years, "a female George Washington" in Ferragamos and pearls. Nevertheless, having been brought up around three brothers (hence her enduring nursery name, "Sister"), Parish got on famously with the fellows and "had plenty of beaux," says a Far Hills friend. Like Lancaster before her, Parish was sent to Foxcroft, founded by a Lancaster cousin (Nancy entered in its first class). Sister was by this time "curvy" and "a nifty number," say friends. A few years after her 1927 debut, Sister married Henry "Harry" Parish, a Harvard man and, like her father, a banker. Nan Kempner (whose husband, Thomas, worked with him at the investment firm Loeb, Rhoades) remembers him as "a handsome man with broad shoulders, an attractive voice, and beautiful manners, who didn't mind being upstaged."

Always family-minded, Parish remained devoted to her husband until his 1977 death. "She babied Harry like a child," says Jane Engelhard, for whom Parish decorated three houses. Doing her part to help support their three children when Harry and her father suffered serious reversals during the Depression, she opened a Far Hills decorating shop in 1933. This bold expedient initially did as much harm as good; Harry's uncle and aunt, mortified that she had gone into trade, immediately disinherited him. Yet the establishment of Mrs. Henry Parish II, Interiors, was an inevitable transition for her. The cottage they occupied on the grounds of the Dillon estate—done up with white painted furniture, pleated valances, cherry-red and white floors, an Aubusson rug, and a Steuben glass fireplace—had become a local marvel. And before going professional she had already been solicited for advice on decorating the Essex Hunt Club and the original Howard Johnson's restaurant. "I've never done a thing in aqua since," she later wrote.

Lancaster's fondness for her family extended more to blood relations than to husbands. Out of Foxcroft and orphaned, she went up north to live with her aunt Irene Gibson, who duly launched Nancy into New York society. Summering in the Gibson house on Seven Hundred Acre Island, Maine, Nancy accepted a marriage proposal from Marshall Field's heir Henry Field while—in a remarkable quirk of fate—the six-year-old Sister, on holiday with her family nearby, eavesdropped on the porch. Married in New York at the Gibsons' (Cole Porter was an usher), the couple leased the Manhattan house of Ogden Codman, co-author with Edith Wharton of The Decoration of Houses. Six months later Field died from a botched operation; his body was buried in the Langhorne plot at Emmanuel Episcopal Church. Enriched with an income that would long support her taste for living in high style, the young widow set sail with her sister Alice to visit their aunt Nancy Astor in England.

Both women were products of the upper strata of Wasp society. Their backgrounds gave them a certain innate assurance and taste.

Sister Parish's greatest celebrity came from the work she did for the Kennedys: "A newspaper ran the headline KENNEDYS PICK NUN TO DECORATE WHITE HOUSE."

On shipboard, the Virginia belle caught the eye of a new suitor, diplomat Ronald Tree, Field's Anglo-American first cousin. The couple married and moved into Mirador as Tree bid unsuccessfully for a Stateside political career. To Lancaster's everlasting regret, they abandoned Mirador for the English countryside in 1927, when Tree accepted a post as joint master of the Pytchley Hunt in Northamptonshire. Thrust into a society that unquestioningly understood her Virginian's passions for foxhunting and genealogy, Nancy adjusted at once to English country life. They rented Kelmarsh, an early-Georgian house, and after Tree was elected a Conservative M.P. in 1933 they bought the Palladian Ditchley Park, in Oxfordshire-complete with its William Kent and Hepplewhite furnishings, school-of-Van Dyck portraits, Elizabethan paneling, and 3,000 acres— from the family that had occupied it for 300 years. Ditchley had such an illustrious past that the walls were still adorned with a set of heads of stags killed by James I on his visits there. Beneath the trophies hung brass plaques "telling in verse the sad little stories of how and where each stag had met its end," Tree wrote in his memoirs. The house became Nancy's first major decorating project: the couple spent two years renovating what he called their "Sleeping Beauty waiting to be called back to life." In addition to painting rooms "the color of air," as Nancy liked to say, and dragging in such treasures as a cut-down Tiepolo and a chandelier made for a Russian noble family, the Trees introduced central heating, bedrooms with carpeted bathrooms, and a modem kitchen.

Cozy, eclectic, well lit, and adjoined by a spectacular Italianate garden, Ditchley soon became known as "the most attractive and comfortable house in England," according to a onetime guest. "You can't imagine how forbidding the other houses at the time were—linoleum floors, high ceilings, suits of armor, drafts, dampness, and no place cozy or comfortable to sit. Nancy was one of quite a few American women—Wallis Simpson, the Cunards—who came over around that time and really loosened things up."

"England hadn't known such good plumbing since the time of the Romans," says Michael Tree, the older of Nancy's two sons (her younger son, Jeremy, died last year). At its peak, he recalls, Ditchley "was very much at the hub of the world. Winston Churchill first met [F.D.R. confidant] Harry Hopkins there. I remember my mother one night at dinner talking like mad to try to interest Churchill, and he just kept staring down at his plate. He then raised his head to announce some very bad news: H.M.S. Repulse and Prince of Wales had been sunk by the Japanese that day."

Nancy's impulsiveness, however, cut the Ditchley idyll short. For several years she had been not so secretly carrying on an affair with Colonel C. G. "Juby" Lancaster, the Tory M.R from whom the Trees had rented Kelmarsh during their first years in England. After her 1947 divorce from Tree, she married Lancaster and returned to Kelmarsh. Legalizing their union was a cold spoon in their souffle; the marriage fizzled at once. "He was physically unattractive, and very self-important," recalls Nancy's Virginia niece Betsy Varner. "Nobody liked him." An acquaintance echoes, "He was a terrible, thundering old bore."

Michael Tree says, "My parents, from a decorating point of view, were a marvelous pair. But she was never really interested in politics, which were practically my father's whole life. Later she had her regrets." Supplanted at Ditchley by Marietta Peabody FitzGerald (whom Ronald married in 1947), Nancy, in a role worthy of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, amused herself by torturing the great house's new chatelaine. On her first night there, Marietta pulled open a drawer in Nancy's old bedroom to discover a note in her predecessor's scrawl: "How does puss feel in my boots?" it read. The stationery, some claim, was marked "Bitchley."

But Nancy did take away from her second marriage one consolation prize. As a sort of parting gift, Ronald Tree bought her an interest in the venerable decorating firm Colefax & Fowler. "It was purchased for a trifle," recalls Michael Tree. "Not more than £10,000." For Nancy, the arrangement was ideal. She provided John Fowler, the company's decorating whiz, with otherwise inaccessibly lofty social connections and emboldened his somewhat prissy, professorial style. In exchange, he worked with her on her next house, Haseley Court (purchased in 1954), and accompanied her to house sales around England. Their penchant for staging explosive public rows about nothing in particular induced her aunt Nancy Astor to call them "England's unhappiest unmarried couple." Though she acted as eminence grise while Fowler transformed such grand properties as the Earl of Pembroke's Wilton, Michael Tree's Mereworth, Lord Rothermere's Daylesford, and Lady Aucastor's Grimsthorpe, "she never really worked," says Imogen Taylor, who joined the firm soon after Nancy assumed ownership. "She was a lady of leisure, to say the least. She was always dressed exquisitely in Paris clothes from Schiaparelli or Balmain. She was John's inspiration, an arbiter of taste, if that's the word for it. And as neither she nor John had any business sense, the firm was always running in debt. At the end of each year she would write a check for a few hundred pounds to pay off our debts." Lancaster was simply carrying on in the tradition of her Civil War-veteran grandfather, who retired as soon as he had made his first pile of money. "He believed work was strictly for 'Negroes and northerners,'" says Michael Tree.

Aristocratic idleness was antithetical to the Yankee work ethic of Sister Parish, who toiled daily in the office. By the 40s and 50s, Mrs. Henry Parish II, Interiors, had expanded its client roster well beyond the Far Hills gentry to include the uppermost echelon of the New York Social Register set. Operating on an honor system that precluded such conventions as purchase orders, she added on huge jobs from such clients as Jane Engelhard, Bunny Mellon, Babe Paley, Happy Rockefeller, and Brooke Astor. Women from her oLd-money class felt at ease with her, and newer money sought her out for the blue-blooded, pedigreed atmosphere of her work. "She attacked a house completely intuitively. It was in her blood," explains decorator David Kleinberg, a Parish-Hadley associate. "She had no formal training, no patience for the architectural schemes we drew up. But she had an instinctive feeling, more expert than any architect's, for how a room had to be put together to function." Mark Hampton, a Parish employee in the 60s, says, "She revived the fat, downy sofas of her mother's generation, which had gone out of fashion with the arrival of thin, dinky modernist upholstery. She loved patterns, pillows, elaborate armchairs, brilliantly glazed walls, ornate English curtains—in short, luxury and overstatement without pretension or vulgarity." Says decorator Bunny Williams, who worked for Parish for 21 years, "She introduced a new, upbeat palette—extraordinary whops of blues, reds, pinks, and yellows that simply hadn't been seen in New York apartments. She intentionally mismatched colors and furniture," going as far as to cut the fabric for each chair from a different part of a chintz to create a more glamorously haphazard effect. In a humbler mode, Parish revived such country-crafty bits of Americana as rag rugs, quilts, knitted throws, and painted furniture. The result of this imperious offhandedness, says Jane Engelhard, was "simplicity and homeyness. What other decorator could have created a house appropriate both for me and my 15 grandchildren?" Like Lancaster, who always insisted she was a mere "percolator of ideas," Parish loathed the idea of decorating. "Once, when I had some photos of my work published in a magazine," Hadley remembers, "Sis eyed me suspiciously and asked, 'Is this decorating?' "

In spite of her unscientific, slapdash approach to flinging a room together, Parish could be alarmingly precise when it came to money matters. "One day, it must have been in the 40s, Sister was having lunch at my mother's," Reinaldo Herrera recalls. "As they were sitting in the dining room my mother asked her, 'Do you think that orange or yellow is better in here?' Sister suggested orange, and the next thing she knew, my mother had received a bill for *$50. She sent her five $10 bills, and a note saying, 'Please send me $40 for lunch!'" At least one client remembers trembling in terror as Sister commandeered a tea cart, ladening it with every lamp, picture, and cushion that she disapproved of, then making additional rounds until the apartment was nearly stripped bare.

While Nancy accepted a marriageproposalfrom Henry Field, the six-year-old Sister Parish, on holiday with her family nearby, eavesdropped on the porch.

When, across the Atlantic, Lancaster got wind of how Sister's business was prospering, she decided Colefax & Fowler should get a piece of the action. She dispatched a number of choice items—a screen painted with birdcages, some oval-back chairs with swans—to Sister, convinced she had found the perfect sales outlet abroad. "Then she received a shock when she happened to see some pictures of Sister's New York apartment," says Mario Buatta. "Everything she had sent over had immediately entered the American decorator's private collection. And that was the end of their partnership." It never stood in the way of their friendship, however. On buying trips abroad, Parish always shopped at Colefax & Fowler, and she regularly visited Haseley Court— the most admired of all Lancaster's houses. D. B. Gilbert, Parish's younger daughter, remembers a trip to Haseley not long after Lancaster moved in: "Mummy was so excited by everything she saw, pointing out furniture, objects, and arrangements to me. She never did that with her own work. In fact, she never talked about decorating at home at all—we really had no idea what Mummy was up to."

There was a lot at Haseley to thrill any sentient visitor. A triumph of quixotic imagination over academic correctness, the decor was "simply marvelous, a slight parody of the English country house," the art historian John Richardson notes. "Nancy was like a great cook who has no need to measure. She dragged all kinds of stuff into Haseley—lamps with broken parchment shades, old fabrics, Regency furniture that had seen better days. And somehow, with her magic touch—and this was the brilliance of her decorating—she'd create a romantic, cozy, and distinguished atmosphere." It always looked, Colefax & Fowler archivist Barrie McIntyre says, as if there were a man in residence as well. "She had an incredible sense of color and a particularly generous sense of scale," Richardson continues. "The things she liked were never the most costly, but they always had some unusual twist. She loathed that gleaming museum-quality look. John Fowler had one theory— that there should always be a touch of what he called 'P.P.F.,' 'poor people's furniture,' to take the curse of grandeur from a room." Michael Tree explains, "My mother was born only 35 years after the Civil War. Everything was still pretty well smashed up. She loved the mood of slight decay, sadness, and nostalgia. Virginia bit very, very deeply into her psyche." She painted the planters and garden furniture at Haseley Confederate gray, and whenever she was in residence she flew a Confederate flag above its entrance.

Oddly, the influence of Haseley's decor, and that of the apartment Lancaster kept next to the Colefax & Fowler offices on Brook Street in London, has been so widespread that most decorators credit her with having invented "the English-country-house look"—a mixed bag composed of furniture of various nationalities and epochs, acres of faded chintz, and plump upholstery lightly dusted with dog hairs. (Such was the state of "pleasing decay" in the "buttah yellah" library in her London flat, decorator Nicholas Haslam says, that when she gave a coming-out ball there for the Duchess of Beaufort, Lancaster claimed rats were scurrying underneath the floorboards where Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret danced.) Explains Haslam, "It took an American, someone with a fresh eye, to bring chintz downstairs, where you used to find only velvets or brocade. She also introduced fresher colors"—rich apricots, cerulean blues, and, of course, butter yellow. "And she invented the English garden as we know it. Sweet peas among the roses, clipped yew trees, a chintz garden—everything tumbling out of the borders, as Nancy said, like 'an old lady's petticoat.'"

Such was the state of "pleasing deacay" in her London library that Nancy Lancaster claimed rats were scurrying underneath the floorboards where Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret danced.

If Lancaster's fame arose almost exclusively from her own houses and gardens, Parish's greatest celebrity came from the work she did for the Kennedy White House. When the plans to renovate the president's private dining room, the oval drawing room, and the children's bedrooms were first revealed, "a newspaper ran the headline KENNEDYS PICK NUN TO DECORATE WHITE HOUSE," says Albert Hadley, who joined the firm at this time. Though it has also been reported that Jacqueline Kennedy fired Parish for scolding Caroline for putting her feet on the chintz, Hadley maintains there was never a rift. "When Mrs. Kennedy was widowed, Sis helped her get settled into 1040 Fifth Avenue. We worked on the drawing room and dining room." (Later, Parish grew fascinated with Kennedy's companion, Maurice Tempelsman, convinced he was "the kind of man every woman needs." When Jacqueline Kennedy died, she exclaimed, "I'm going after Maurice Tempelsman before Betsey Whitney gets him!")

In the late 60s even Parish momentarily lost her bearings and succumbed to the reigning youth culture. "She covered her walls with eggplant vinyl and hung an abstract painting," Hadley says. An aberrant phase, it passed mercifully quickly, and soon enough "her apartment was Sistenzed again." Inevitably, Parish attracted the idolatrous curiosity of Andy Warhol and Halston. Likewise inquisitive, she invited the pair to her ladylike, heirloom-embellished maisonette at 960 Fifth Avenue, "but only for drinks," Hadley qualifies.

While Parish's work for such longstanding patrons as Jane Engelhard and Betsey Whitney continued unabated, the 80s also laid at her lacquered doorstep a new generation of clients, such as Henryk and Barbara de Kwiatkowski. While visiting them in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1987, the Duchess of York, desirous of all she surveyed, called Parish to ask if she would accept the job of decorating Sunninghill Park, the house then under construction for her and Prince Andrew near Windsor Castle.

During the first meeting at ParishHadley, Sister, scrutinizing Sunninghill's bizarre architectural plans, turned to the Duchess and asked, "What style do you call that?" "New York," Fergie quipped. With a facade like a hotel, and a plan that included no bathroom for Fergie, Sister reported, but a library with a clear view into the conjugal bedroom, Sunninghill was forevermore referred to by Parish as "that hideous house." For a follow-up conference at Buckingham Palace, Sister made her entrance wearing, to Hadley's horror, a slightly crushed leopard-trimmed hat. "What have you done to your hat?" Hadley whispered. "I sat on it," she retorted, soldiering on. When Parish-Hadley lost the York commission shortly thereafter, British newspapers reported that the firm's estimates were too costly. "Not true," says David Kleinberg. "We hadn't even made up a budget. The royal family decided it was bad form to hire an American decorator. Sister anticipated this problem from the start." Hadley adds, "Fergie was headstrong and assumed she could get the Queen to agree to whatever she wanted because at the time she was the favorite."

On Sister's last trips to England she continued to see Lancaster, who in the meantime had adjourned to Haseley's coach house, having sold Haseley Court (now owned by Fiona and Desmond Heyward). In need of money, requiring less space, and dispirited by a fire in the 70s at the main house, Lancaster later gave up her London apartment as well. "My mother never felt bitter, never had any regrets," says Michael Tree. "She felt very privileged and lucky to have had what she did. She always cared much more for furniture—its life and its history—than for people. It was much more real to her. People were necessary only to fill the theater, so to speak. And she still had her garden, which she loved better than anything."

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When Sister came for a visit, Lancaster dismounted from her wheelchair and asked Parish to hop aboard— she zoomed straightaway into her hostess's roses.

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Lancaster took to touring her garden (which included a topiary chess set made of boxwoods) in an electric wheelchair, her trademark Gainsborough hats still perched rakishly askew on her head. (The Irish couturiere Sybil Connolly remembers that at balls in years past "she even wore her tiara on the tilt.") She feigned the need for an ear horn when she wasn't keen on conversation, made faces at bores behind their backs, insisted to everyone that she was so old she resembled a man, and remarked that the bun at the back of her head had thinned to "the size of a raspberry." When Sister came for a visit, Lancaster dismounted from her wheelchair and asked Parish to hop aboard—she zoomed straightaway into her hostess's roses. The year before Lancaster's death, the BBC filmed a documentary of her in her gardens (the most visited in England after Blenheim Palace's). The broadcast opened with a shot of her butler, Fred Field, taping the early-morning birdsong and ceremoniously carrying the recording back to her on a breakfast tray— "completely staged for the camera crew," says British writer Hugo Vickers. During her last months Prince Charles paid a call, and Lancaster, sitting bolt upright as always, received him in her sitting room. "I'm not going to curtsy," she warned. "I might drag you down with me."

Melissa Wyndham says her great-aunt Nancy had hoped she would never live to reach 100. Her wish was granted. She died on August 19 in her Coach House bedroom, which was lined in the Angouleme-pattemed paper she had first seen at Sybil Connolly's. The funeral took place at the Little Haseley church, among flowers cut from her garden, family from both Virginia and England, and farmers from the village. On the coffin, inside a wreath, Michael Tree placed a miniature Confederate flag. In October, her ashes were buried in the family plot at Emmanuel Episcopal Church across the street from Mirador, beside her first husband and an infant daughter from her second marriage.

Debilitated by an unspecified illness that would not remit, Sister, from her hospital bed, watched the Lancaster documentary, which had been videotaped for her by Mark Hampton. She had long been depressed by her only son Harry's sudden death from a heart attack. Barbara de Kwiatkowski says that she suffered another devastating setback when Betsey Whitney's plantation house in Georgia suddenly burst into flame while the two ladies were staying there to celebrate Sister's just-completed redecoration. (Whitney and Parish, narrowly escaping in their nightgowns with their dogs, were airlifted out of the cinders by a de Kwiatkowski plane.)

Parish had thought long and hard about her funeral. "She wanted to be buried in front of my father and brother in the cemetery at Dark Harbor to make sure she could watch how the people going into church were dressed," D.B. says. On one of her last drives up to Maine in her Ford Country Squire (a speed demon, she had her license suspended at least once), Parish was pulled over by a cop who had been disturbed at the sight of an old lady flying by, talking animatedly to the air. "I was talking to Yummy," she explained to the policeman, pointing to her Pekingese. "I was telling him all about my funeral." Parish also chided her older daughter, May Appleton "Apple" Bartlett, convinced she would never be able to deliver her funeral elegy. For once, Parish was wrong. "When I was little," Apple told the assembly of friends and family, "Mother didn't like it when I was scared of thunder. She'd say, 'Apple, that's just God bowling with the angels.' Now I know that whenever I hear the sound of thunder it'll be Mummy up there moving around the furniture."