Cecilia "Sherry" Geyelin, Interior Designer and Formidable D.C. Hostess, 84, Washington Post

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/04/AR2009050403496.html

CECILIA 'SHERRY' GEYELIN, 84

Interior Designer and Formidable D.C. Hostess

By Adam Bernstein, Washington Post Staff Writer

Cecilia "Sherry" Geyelin, 84, an interior designer and gregarious member of
a storytelling brigade who was also the widow of Washington Post editorial
page editor and columnist Philip L. Geyelin, died May 3, 2009, at Sibley
Memorial Hospital of pneumonia.

Mrs. Geyelin (pronounced JAY-lin) was the scion of a Washington family with
a long pedigree in politics and finance. On her mother's side, she was
descended from Sen. John Sherman (R-Ohio), a Cabinet member of two
presidents who also was the principal author of the 1890 Sherman Antitrust
Act, which has been used to combat price-fixing and monopolies.

Her father, Chauncey Parker, was a prominent Washington investment banker
who, after World War II, was U.S. assistant high commissioner for Germany
and a director of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

Mrs. Geyelin had a brief career as a modern dancer before marrying in 1950,
and she retained in later life the nimble and elegant bearing of her years
onstage. She accompanied her husband on his assignments as a Wall Street
Journal foreign correspondent before he was named Post editorial page editor
in the late 1960s. Geyelin, who was awarded the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for
editorial writing for his essays explaining the paper's shift of support
against the Vietnam War, died in 2004.

Mrs. Geyelin established herself as a formidable hostess in the 1960s and
from that grew an interest in interior design and antique furniture. She
started her own business decorating many Washington homes but was best known
for her redecoration of Bacon House, a historic mansion about a block from
the White House. It became home to the association of retired diplomats and
consular officers known as Dacor.

The Dacor Bacon House project, completed in the mid-1980s at a cost of
nearly $2 million, was featured in Architectural Digest in 1988. Mrs.
Geyelin was credited with successfully merging the furnishings, art and
memorabilia from the diplomatic group's collection with the antique
furniture and accessories bequeathed by the hostess, Virginia Murray Bacon,
who had owned the property.

Cecilia Sherman Parker was a native Washingtonian and a 1943 graduate of the
private St. Timothy's School, now in Stevenson, Md. She was a nurse's aide
at Washington's old Emergency Hospital during World War II and subsequently
became a member of Charles Weidman's modern dance troupe in New York.

Survivors include four children, Mary-Sherman Willis of Woodville, Va.,
Emile "Milo" Geyelin of Glen Ridge, N.J., Philip Geyelin Jr. of Raleigh,
N.C., and Cecily "Lili" Geyelin of Minneapolis; a brother; and six
grandchildren.

In her later years, Mrs. Geyelin was a board member of the Washington
Storytellers Theatre, which preserves the art of storytelling through
workshops and performances at area schools, nursing homes and churches.

While performing in January at SpeakeasyDC, a monthly gathering of
storytellers, she revealed the circumstances under which she tried marijuana
for the first and only time.

It was the early 1970s, she said, and her children had tired of listening to
their parents condemn recreational drugs without having tried them. She and
her husband found themselves with a rare evening alone and decided to
experiment with smoking pot.

"Nobody told us we didn't have to puff on it every time it came around," she
said.

The Geyelins did not expect to get a call that night from Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger, and they struggled to suppress their giggles and get
through the call. They vowed never to smoke marijuana again.