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The
Unsinkable Albert Hadley
A new biography unfolds the brilliant career of the
84-year-old dean of American interior designers and
longtime partner of the late Sister Parish. |
By
Kim Waller |
Albert Hadley. |
Babe and William Paley's New York City apartment
drawing room, designed by Parish-Hadley. Below,
Lewis's book on the interior designer. |
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This
October, Albert Hadley is having another opening —
not a handsome room in a decorator showhouse as so often
has been the case, but his own stunning story between
the covers of a book. For those who know the modest
Mr. Hadley, the mere fact that it is his story, much
of it in his own words, is remarkable in itself. Hadley
is not known for talking about himself. And he is far
too tactful to indulge in idle chatter about clients
ranging from the John Hay Whitneys to Happy Rockefeller
to Vice President Albert Gore and his wife, Tipper.
Yet Albert Hadley, The Story of America's
Preeminent Interior Designer (Rizzoli, October
2005, $65) is filled with wonderful anecdotes about
his work with such people, who often became his friends.
Although as teacher, mentor and, for years, the name
after the hyphen in Parish-Hadley, he liberally shared
his professional wisdom, Hadley is inherently a very
private person. “You can write the book after
I'm dead,” he initially told biographer
and interior designer Adam Lewis.
Luckily for the history of American
design, he changed his mind. “Getting around his
reserve was difficult, but he allowed me to do it,”
says Lewis, who befriended Hadley while researching
a previous book on Van Day Truex, Hadley's revered
mentor and friend. (Van Day Truex: The Man Who Defined
Twentieth-Century Taste and Style, Penguin Putnam).
“He had to trust me right down to the core of
his being.”
The current book unfolds Hadley's
story through his vivid recollections—including
details of houses he lived in before the age of six!
Along with 200 color photos of beautiful rooms he has
designed, there is a catalog of hundreds of articles
and references to Hadley's work, “for the
sake of future scholars,” says Lewis. “I
believe he will go down as our most important postwar
interior designer.”
Many would agree. Orderly, engaging
and timeless, a Hadley room never screams of his signature.
Notes Annette de la Renta in an introduction to the
book, “He instinctively knows what's important
and eschews the pompous. Where lesser talents seem always
to want to add, Albert subtracts.” Perhaps that
is one key to his uncanny ability to create freshly
through many changing decades. Yet his point of view,
he insists, has remained the same: “To be representative
of the time and place, and to make the work as personal
for the client as possible.”
Hadley can study a room and see how
the arrangement, style and scale of furnishings within
the space should be, a concept he'll jot first
in a rough sketch. “Like these,” he says,
showing a visitor to his East 64th Street office in
Manhattan his recent “scribbles,” as he
calls them. “I'm much more interested in
the space,” he adds, “than in the color
of the curtains!” Nearby walls are crammed to
the ceiling with his elegant finished drawings, representing
a half-century of transforming notable homes for some
of the country's wealthiest families — and,
now, for some of their children. Just as awesome, perhaps,
is the wealth of design history he holds in his head
and has passed on to former assistants Mariette Himes
Gomez, David Kleinberg, David Anthony Easton, Thomas
Jayne and Bunny Williams, to name some of the top talents
he generously fostered.
This sunny morning, Hadley looks
fit and relaxed in a crisp blue oxford shirt. Seated
at a big worktable in the middle of an office filled
with personal mementoes — a little ceramic dog
commemorates a long-ago Chinatown dinner with friend
and fellow legendary decorator Billy Baldwin —
he admits that telling his life story to Lewis was,
after all, “a pleasure,” especially talking
about his exciting early days in New York.
The fact that Hadley soared at the
two most socially eminent decorating firms of their
time — first McMillen, Inc., and later with Sister
Parish — was no accident. Even as a youth in Nashville,
he had his eye on the pacesetters of his day. And when
he got himself to New York for a few months in 1946,
he boldly sought them out for advice. “Go to the
Parsons School of Design,” they said. To that
rigorous experience, both as a student under Van Day
Truex and, later, as his teaching colleague and friend,
Hadley attributes both his encyclopedic knowledge and
enthusiasm for such early 20th-century designers as
Jean-Michel Frank. Later, with Eleanor Brown at McMillen,
Inc. (“very much the neoclassicist”), he
was well equipped to take on such major work as completely
restoring Rosedown Plantation, an antebellum mansion
in Louisiana, with McMillen senior designer Ethel Smith.
Thinking of Rosedown today, however, he sighs. “It
has all been changed. I recently spotted a fabulous
set of 19th-century decorative lacquered furniture that
had been used in the breakfast room attributed to the
Brighton Pavilion, in a Palm Beach antiques store.”
The decoration of houses is an ephemeral art.
Then, in 1962, came Parish-Hadley,
Inc. Unlike Hadley, Sister Parish had grown up in the
same pedigreed social circles in which she worked. Unlike
Sister, Hadley was a businessman who brought order to
a chaotic office and an architectural viewpoint to the
firm. She could be old-guard imperious; he is known
for his perfect Southern manners. An anecdote about
doing up Brooke Astor's home in Northeast Harbor,
ME, early in their collaboration reveals their different
ways of working. Both were there to meet the truck laden
with their purchases, Hadley — as he continues
to do today — with his precise plan for every
placement in hand. As the furniture came in, Sister
started distributing things by sheer instinct, abruptly
consigning a lamp or chair to the next room. Out went
the plan and, of course, it all worked with the comfort
and charm that was her hallmark. “Like two flints,
they struck sparks off each other,” said biographer
Lewis recently. “That, for 32 years, was the fire
of Parish-Hadley.”
Sister Parish died in 1994. And though
Hadley admits “I miss Sis every day,” this
dean's December remains as focused as his springtime
and summer. He is at his office from 9 to 5, working
closely with three design assistants and two loyal helpers,
mother and daughter, who've been with him for
years. And tomorrow? “I'm flying to Florida
to see three clients — in Palm Beach and Hobe
Sound.” |
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| Kim
Waller, a former features editor of Victoria and Town
& Country, is a New York-based freelance writer
and editor. |
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Photo
credit:
Image 1: Debraanne Cingari, Image 2: William P. Steele. |
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