The William Haines legacy
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Two longtime devotees of iconic interior designer William Haines carry
on his legacy, preserving a glamour-soaked Regency style that defines
Los Angeles, then and now.
By David A. Keeps, Times Staff Writer
"DESIGN is an opinion," declared the opinionated designer William
Haines. "Not a profession."
But Jean Mathison, Haines' administrative major-domo from 1955 until
his death in 1973, begs to differ. She asserts that for Billy Haines,
the Jazz Age MGM film star who became the premier interior decorator
for glamourhungry movie queens and business barons, design was a
profession - and a calling.
"He used to say that if he had been born during the time of Louis XVI,
he would've decorated Versailles," she says. Mathison, an ebullient
80-year-old storyteller from Hollywood's golden age, and Peter
Schifando, a 53-year-old L.A. designer still catering to Haines'
clientele, have joined forces and archives: Hers fill a two-car garage,
and his consist of thousands of blueprints and renderings. Together
they are securing Haines' legacy with "Class Act: William Haines,
Legendary Hollywood Decorator," which hits bookstores this month as the
first major monograph on the designer.
On a recent Friday morning, Mathison pays a visit to Schifando's
Melrose Place studio. She is the historian; he is the practitioner
carrying on the Haines aesthetic, the touchstone of the current craze
for Hollywood Regency design. Schifando painstakingly reproduces
50-year-old Haines furniture designs and does interiors for the
original Haines Inc. A-list, dynasties with the names Reagan, Warner,
Bloomingdale and Annenberg.
As Mathison alights like a midcentury glamour girl on one of Haines'
classics, the low and soignée Elbow chair, Jonathan Joseph,
Schifando's business partner at Peter Schifando & Co., enters the
studio library. He has just returned from a visit to "Mrs. Reagan's"
where, while attempting to replace a tile, he accidentally tripped a
security wire, summoning unamused Secret Service agents.
"It's a complete continuum," Schifando says of his role in maintaining
the glittering legacy of Haines and of the late Ted Graber, Haines'
protégé who redecorated the Reagan White House and whom Schifando
worked with in the late 1980s. For the past decade, Schifando has sold
Haines reproductions to top Los Angeles decorators such as Michael
Smith, who recently redesigned Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica,
and Kelly Wearstler, who put a flashy mod spin on Hollywood glam at the
Viceroy hotels in Santa Monica and Palm Springs.
"Haines is one of the great icons of Los Angeles design," says interior
designer Antonia Hutt, a Haines devotee who is featured in Mathison and
Schifando's forthcoming book. "But there is so little documentation of
his work that it will be an invaluable resource."
Jason Stein, the associate director of 20th century furniture and
decorative arts at Bonhams & Butterfields, agrees. "The period
photographs of his commissions in the original residences cement
William Haines' importance," he says. "It's timeless design, wonderful
modern Neoclassical pieces that have stood up and work well in many
types of environments."
The photographs in "Class Act" (Pointed Leaf Press, $95) prove Stein's
contention. A 2000 shot in Hutt's West Hollywood condominium features
four Brentwood chairs, a 1955 Haines design with 1-foot-high white
leather seats that tiptoe over splayed tapered legs.
With its tightly tufted seat and floating backrest, the Brentwood has
been endlessly aped. Furniture manufacturer Mitchell Gold + Bob
Williams approximates the Haines look with the Astrid chair, $1,000.
Patrick Dragonette's dining chair homage, the Lauren, can be purchased
at his Los Angeles store for $3,600. Schifando's reproduction of the
original Haines design is sold to decorators for nearly $5,000, twice
the price Haines charged 50 years ago. Back then, Haines' silver-spoon
clientele paid for quality and exclusivity. "He did not need to seek
publicity," Mathison says.
Publicity had a way of finding William Haines, nonetheless. Born Jan.
2, 1900, in Staunton, Va., he was a man of the 20th century, leaving
home as a teenager and finding his way to New York City at the dawn of
the Roaring '20s, when the handsome, charming and unapologetically gay
Haines roared with the best of them. After his friends jokingly
submitted his photo to a "New Faces" talent search sponsored by the
Samuel Goldwyn Co. and Haines won, he ditched his job as a runner on
Wall Street, headed to Hollywood and signed with MGM.
Untrained as an actor, Haines designed a screen persona - brash but
immensely likable - that clicked. He starred in silent films with
Joan Crawford ("Sally, Irene and Mary") and Marion Davies ("Show
People") and by 1926 was earning enough to purchase a two-story
Hollywood home at 1712 N. Stanley Ave. A devotee of English
architecture and antiques, he engaged James Dolena, one of the
preeminent architects of the era, to transform the Spanish exterior
into a Georgian jewel box.
Haines and life partner Jimmy Shields entertained lavishly, leading
Tallulah Bankhead to dub their home Haines Castle. In 1930, the year he
topped a poll of motion picture exhibitors as the box office's biggest
male draw, Haines and his movie stand-in, Mitch Foster, opened an
antiques store on North La Brea Avenue. By then, Haines had begun
designing homes for the film colony, notably his greatest champion,
Crawford.
It was a provident move for Haines, who had grown tired of being "the
oldest living college boy in America." In 1933, Louis B. Mayer,
apoplectic over the fact that Haines preferred gentlemen, issued an
ultimatum: Haines could leave Shields or leave MGM. Unperturbed, Haines
became a full-time decorator.
William Mann's 1998 biography "Wisecracker: The Life and Times of
William Haines, Hollywood's First Openly Gay Star" and the subsequent
American Movie Classics documentary, "Out of the Closet, Off the
Screen: The Life of William Haines," focused on Haines' sexuality.
Mathison believes those biographies diminished Haines' four decades as
a designer. "I was unhappy with that book, and that movie was
horrible," she says. "That was not the gentleman of stature and talent
that I knew."
One of Haines' greatest achievements, says Mathison, "was opening up
all these dark European houses and letting the California sunshine in."
In the late 1930s and early '40s, Haines practiced what Mathison and
Schifando call Hollywood Deluxe, a sumptuous amalgam of Deco Moderne
and Regency Neoclassicism for such clients as director George Cukor and
studio chief Jack Warner.
During this period, Haines developed his stylistic signatures:
museum-quality artifacts mounted as lamps, a table with four chairs
under a chandelier known as a gemutlich, an infinite variety of
low-slung tufted and embroidered chairs, and swiveling upholstered
stools. "Haines was a master of proportion and scale. When you sat in
one of his chairs - cigarette in one hand, martini in the other -
you looked absolutely fabulous," says Dragonette, who is mounting a
November exhibition and sale of about two dozen Haines pieces at his
eponymous La Cienega Boulevard gallery.
"He had spent his early life on film sets," says Schifando, who will
display his Haines collection at the Pacific Design Center on Nov. 8.
"So Haines understood what looks good. Ted Graber called it soft
Modernism - very comfortable and clean-lined, but not hard-edged."
After World War II, Haines launched into a Modernist period, working
with great architects such as Paul Williams and A. Quincy Jones. In
1949 he opened a swank, modern Beverly Hills office with terrazzo
floors and cork-lined walls studded with retractable brass rods for
draping fabrics.
Mathison arrived six years later as a temp, sitting on a kitchen chair
at her desk and never thinking that she would stay for three decades.
In addition to typing reams of meticulous job estimates, she also
attended to clients for Haines and Graber when they were on buying
trips in Europe.
"We did Frank Sinatra's office and he was having a terrible time," she
recalls. "People were coming in and asking him what was this and what
was that, and he didn't know. And I had to go coach him: This is a
little Roman head from period so-and-so, and this is a Greek vase."
The Haines treatment, which could prove costly, was wildly creative in
the '50s. He would wrap furniture legs in leather to simulate bamboo or
create a conversation area around an island of recessed carpeting. He
designed elegant outdoor furniture to furnish atriums and lanais,
further blurring the line between indoors and out.
In the late '60s, the Anglophile designer redid Winfield House, the
144-room Georgian mansion in London for Walter Annenberg, the newly
appointed American ambassador to the Court of St. James's.
Through it all, Haines maintained a devilish wit. He joked that an
interior designer had to be "a sociologist, a psychologist and a
proctologist."
"Haines had absolutely no compunction about telling people they had bad
taste," says Scott Roberts of Modern One, a Los Angeles store known for
its Haines-era designs.
"We'd fight like cats and dogs over some of his ideas," Crawford is
quoted as saying in "Class Act." "He always won because of his
excellent taste and knowledge and my lack of both."
Haines died of lung cancer on Christmas Day, 1973. His partner,
Shields, took an overdose of sleeping pills two months later. Says
Mathison: "Jimmy was not prepared to live in the world without Billy."
Mathison stayed on, working with Graber. "At Haines Inc., we were a
family," she recalls, adding that Haines' sister, Anne Haines
Langhorne, lived in an apartment on the grounds of Mathison's West
Hollywood home, a two-story residence filled with Haines designs and
memorabilia including Chair No. 13, the Seniah ("Haines" spelled in
reverse). Mathison retired in 1985, shortly before Schifando came to
work for Graber.
By the time Graber retired in 1989, Haines had all but passed into
obscurity, known only to old money matrons, silent film buffs and
midcentury furniture dealers. In 1990 David Geffen purchased the Warner
estate that bore the Haines imprint from 1937. Christie's shipped the
estate's antiques to the company's New York auction house. The other
lots - all Haines custom pieces - were consigned to A.N. Abell
Auction Co. in Los Angeles.
At the time, recalls Abell's Howard Zellman, "nobody on the East Coast
cared about his contemporary work. It just looked like Hollywood
Modern, except that it was 10- and 12-foot sofas."
Peter Loughrey of Los Angeles Modern Auctions was at the Abell sale. "I
don't think I paid more than $200 for anything," he recalls. "I had a
store back then and put on a show called 'Bel-Air Modern' with pieces
by Haines, Paul Laszlo and Samuel Marx. I didn't sell a thing."
The Haines market has ripened considerably. Some collectors who snapped
up mass-market Eames and Saarinen pieces a decade ago have grown weary
of the look. To stay ahead of the stylistic curve, trendsetters have
moved on to rarer made-to-order pieces by architects and designers.
As the comforts of the 21st century home have come to include tailored
furniture and shiny accessories that tip a top hat to Old Hollywood,
Haines' distinctively elegant sensibility has been appreciably
burnished.
Loughrey notes that a pair of Haines chairs he couldn't sell for $1,200
in 1990 recently changed hands for $15,000.
"The celebrity factor has a lot of appeal to people who may not be
crazy about Modernism or decorator-designed furniture," he says.
"People want things that belonged to a taste maker. One big price
begets another, and there are not a lot of original Haines pieces on
the market. A lot of his pieces, such as the Hostess chairs, were
widely imitated, but they did not copy the quality, only the shape."
As a result, Los Angeles Modern Auctions will accept only consignments
with "a nice strong documentation of ownership." Haines never signed or
marked his work, says Schifando, but it was all done on a custom basis,
so "provenance can absolutely be established."
In fact, for every object Haines designed, there is probably a photo in
"Class Act," a drawing in Schifando's office or an invoice in
Mathison's garage - neatly typed, no doubt, by her.
David A. Keeps can be reached at david...@latimes.com.
copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times