The Surprising Life of Constance Spry Read online

  Party decor and floral displays were accorded equal critical attention in the press. For Lady Astor’s ball, the house was ‘literally lined with lilacs’. Lady Anglesey’s dining-table held irises floating in shallow silver dishes, and Lady Ribblesdale had her lunch tables decorated with bowls of flame-coloured azaleas and delphiniums. The triumph of flower arrangements that year was the decoration at Simon Marks’s dance at Prince’s Gate: ‘In a niche in the hallway there was a magnificent “set flowerpiece” such as one sees in pictures, and in one of the drawing-rooms stood a huge bouquet of pink azaleas and pink wisteria.’ ‘Of course,’ the writer concluded, ‘all the flowers were done by Mrs Spry.’ Anyone who knew Connie’s work would have recognized the classic Spry principles from these descriptions: her novel use of colours and containers, the single dramatic ‘flowerpiece’, and the influence of paintings.

  Connie had by now become the most sought-after and most fashionable florist (or ‘flower decorator’, as she always preferred) to the highest echelons. Recommendations from clients such as Lady Portarlington and Molly Mount Temple had permeated through the London (and country) social sets until it became the chicest thing to employ Mrs Spry and her staff at Flower Decorations. Connie quickly learned that success with ‘artistic’ decoration relied on the wealth of patrons; on their glamorous lifestyle, their tight-knit milieu and their competitive socializing. Connie’s ascendancy into the most exalted and privileged ranks of fashionable society was remarkable, and she now found herself being lionized by clients desperate to be on her waiting list. But for all the admiration and the constant stream of invitations to the grandest parties, Connie was still ‘trade’. And in 1933 Vogue was quite clear in describing her as ‘one of the essential figures behind the scenes in social life’. Polite society might have become more open, but however charming and skilled one was, breeding still mattered.

  Four London hostesses occupied centre stage at that time. The Hon. Mrs Ronald Greville, a down-to-earth Scotswoman from a hugely wealthy brewing family, specialized in royalty – Queen Mary, a personal friend, often came to tea. Lady Emerald Cunard, an American socialite, collected ambassadors, cabinet ministers and other eminent figures such as Lady Diana Cooper, Sir Thomas Beecham and Winston Churchill. Lady Sybil Colefax assembled the pick of the brains: George Bernard Shaw, Max Beerbohm, Duff Cooper and Virginia Woolf.

  The guests of Syrie Maugham, the ‘Queen of White’, ranged from the scandalously unconventional to the fascinatingly rich and rare: ‘Not at all the same crowd as you’d meet at Emerald Cunard’s.’ She captured her own splendid list of young lions, mostly theatre people, café aristocracy, editors of fashion magazines, writers and artists such as Arnold Bennett, Cecil Beaton, ‘Cocky’ Cochran, Noël Coward, Rex Whistler, Oliver Hill, Rebecca West and the Prince of Wales, who was said to have enjoyed the ‘mock-virgin pallor’ of Syrie Maugham’s white rooms. Her parties had a brilliance and glamour that others could hardly equal, and when she entertained everything else had to be cancelled in order for one to be there. ‘She had a secret recipe,’ recalled her friend Oliver Messel: ‘The stage was set with infinite care, so that as you arrived at the door it was magic . . . She had an individual way of entertaining – creating an atmosphere of delicious charm and comfort and the exquisite flower arrangements concocted by Constance Spry for every occasion made their first appearance in her house.’

  In the early Twenties there had been a momentary attack of black – black-lacquered furniture, black fabrics and objects. Then came a craze for silver-covered surfaces: silver gilt on furniture, silver paint on walls and silver threads woven into drapes and fabrics. After Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 there was a passion for everything Egyptian, while Diaghilev’s newly arrived Ballets Russes and the pre-war Oriental style together evoked Arab and Eastern mysticism and exoticism.

  But now everything was white: white decor, white clothes and white flowers. The all-white ‘Baroque’ style that Osbert Lancaster described as ‘Vogue Regency’ swept through both the fashionable theatres and the houses of the rich. Theatre people like Messel and Norman Wilkinson were trying their hand at interior decoration, and interior designers flirted with theatre and costume designs. Parties too were regarded as a form of theatre. First-night and after-theatre parties were choked with celebrities, and ‘bright young things’ could be seen enjoying a table at the Trocadero in Shaftesbury Avenue where they watched cabarets called Champagne Time, Supper Time, and Going to Town. Messel claimed that it was his designs for the extraordinary all-white scenes in the smash production Helen! premiered at the Adelphi in January 1932 that ‘were carried into the home by Syrie’. But long before then, Syrie had ‘turned everything white’. After the triumphant first night of Cochran’s 1931 Revue she threw a party in her newly decorated ‘sumptuous home with flower decorations by Constance Spry’. Syrie’s all-white drawing-room appeared to guests, as they entered, like a ‘stage on which they were to act and watch others act for them’. Her guests were astonished by the revolutionary room, decorated entirely in off-white and beige or palest green – but never dead-white or cream. A reporter for Vogue wrote: ‘Ever since Mrs Somerset Maugham made her white room in Chelsea one has felt that parties require to be bathed in light: white satin drapes, mirrors in white rococo plaster frames, dining chairs in gold and white, white ceramic cockerels, white electric candles, white birds on rings in the windows, silver and white ceramic ashtrays and white flowers.’

  White made Syrie Maugham famous, and it drew Connie into a different, dramatic and creative world; a new departure from shop windows and the homes of the rich.

  Syrie’s father was the philanthropist Dr Thomas Barnardo, who founded the famous Barnardo Homes for boys and girls. A man of evangelical correctness, he was severe with his children: socializing, books and the theatre were forbidden. Syrie escaped into two disastrous marriages, first to the much older Henry Wellcome, American founder of the great pharmaceutical house. After an affair with Gordon Selfridge, another American and the founder of the London store, during which she picked up an interest in furniture and decoration, she met and fell in love with William Somerset Maugham. During the war Maugham had served as a driver in France, where he met his American lover Gerald Haxton. It is said that Maugham only married Syrie in 1917 as a cover for his relationship with Haxton. Although her friends always claimed that Syrie continued to love Maugham, the marriage was clearly doomed, though it did produce Syrie’s much-loved daughter Liza.

  To survive both financially and emotionally, Syrie turned to her own talents and resources. She threw herself into a decorating business and in 1922 opened her own showroom ‘Syrie Ltd’ in Baker Street. She borrowed £400 from her friend Mrs ‘Winkie’ Phillipson, wife of a wealthy coal merchant and herself an amateur artist and keen exponent of white. Norman Wilkinson had taught Winkie to paint flower pots white for her white flowers and, as a result, Cecil Beaton recalled, she had ‘allowed her mania for no colour to spread indoors, and the house, too, became all-white’. Some would suggest that Syrie Maugham had borrowed more than just the £400. Oliver Hill, another designer friend, wrote that Syrie once said, ‘I am off to India to paint the Black Hole of Calcutta white’, and when she later went to Hollywood Oliver Messel joked, ‘Now she’s white-washing the whole of the film colony.’ There the white craze seemed to be embodied by Jean Harlow, ‘who appeared to have been constructed of equal parts snow, marble and marshmallow’.

  When Connie and Syrie Maugham first met they immediately found mutual interests and sympathies; they became firm friends and collaborated on projects for several years. Despite different backgrounds, there were many similarities in their unconventional lives. Both women were in their forties, had difficult relationships with their mothers, had married to escape unhappy homes and had been divorced. And they both ran their own businesses. Vogue rather perceptively noted: ‘Someone once said that a woman is either happily married or an Interior Decorator. Whether or not the ri
se of the Society decorator can be attributed to the present slump in married felicity, it is certain that it is as fashionable now to be doing up the house of one’s acquaintance as it was to open a hat-shop in pre-war days.’

  Connie began supplying flowers for many of Syrie’s luncheons and dinner parties, where the table decorations might include a central group of white flowers and individual bouquets in white china cabbage leaves at each place setting. One guest remembered pillars of white blooms in the dining-room lit from within. Swept up in the ‘all-white’ craze, Connie’s novel designs became an integral part of Syrie’s decor. She was at last able to put into practice her long-held conviction that flowers are an ephemeral but essential dimension to interior decoration. James Amster, an American interior designer, recalled that Connie showed Syrie how ‘when you do a room, you must “over-scale” it’. He was referring to her practice of using one or two oversized and dramatic displays of flowers instead of several small vases dotted around the room. Thanks to Connie, flowers were no longer the finishing decorative touch but an intrinsic part of the decor. She had come a long way from painted clay pots of marguerites in an East End classroom.

  As the craze spread, more and more of Connie’s clients asked for white flowers to complement their new decor. Her close friend Lady Portarlington was one of the first to decorate her drawing-room in white. It was a superb setting, and Connie responded with all her artistry and skill. She shared the current passion, believing that white and green flowers were the ideal complement to a white room: ‘their infinite gradations of green or cream standing out against white walls, with the right lighting, [appear] almost sculpted.’ Outline and setting, as well as scale, were what mattered, Connie wrote, and if the container and background were right, then ‘all kinds of strange combinations could be achieved. It is in the interplay of light and shade, colour and shape in a thousand variations, that the delight of white flowers lies. It is subtle and distinct, cool yet brilliant, and is a matter for endless experiment and pleasure.’

  Connie used Lady Portarlington’s magnificent collection of celadon vases to build breathtaking groups of white lilies set off with eucalyptus, green hydrangea heads and lichen-covered branches with perhaps one brilliant spike of a scarlet anthurium for drama. The nurserymen who supplied the white lilies and arums were astonished by the sudden increase in demand for flowers more traditionally used for funerals. For one party Connie bought quantities of Lilium giganteum; they had as many as twenty great flowers to a stem and were so tall she had to cut them down to size. The only place they could be successfully accommodated was in a huge Chinese vase at the foot of a wide stone staircase. After the party the hostess gave a stem to each of her guests, who found it necessary to dismiss their cars and send for taxis, which could be opened in the front, in order to carry home their single splendid lily.

  As more and more extravagant parties were held Connie was increasingly called in, often with Oliver Messel or Syrie Maugham, to decorate the venue. One of the most extraordinary was given by the journalist and investor Ronald Tree at his Sussex home. Messel decorated a tent of white muslin with ‘Negro’ heads sporting red and white ostrich plumes and ropes of pearls, Connie filled the drawing-room with huge vases of green and white flowers until ‘the scent of lilies was almost overpowering’, while on the terrace a giant birdcage festooned with white roses housed the orchestra. Every room was lit and the whole house ‘looked like a giant liner, its lights shimmering across the blackness of the ocean’. Guests were asked to wear red and white – Oliver Messel arrived in a white suit with a red tie. His sister Alice heard an outraged peer muttering: ‘Bugger ought to be thrown in the lake.’ The evening ended with a magnificent red and white firework display. The landscape architect Geoffrey Jellico remembered driving back to London in the dawn ‘wondering whether we should ever see the like again’.

  It wasn’t just the fabulous parties that were being noticed in the popular press: fashions in interior design were going through radical changes, and demand for individual forms of expression was growing in the homes of those wealthy enough to satisfy it. The big London stores such as Fortnum & Mason had always supplied expert but conventional decorative services, but now it was considered the height of fashion to invite a leading artist or a personality with creative flair to redesign one’s home. For the first time women were finding greater freedom and responsibility in decorating their own homes, previously the prerogative of the master of the house. Sybil Colefax had joined her neighbour and rival hostess Syrie Maugham in the new profession of ‘lady decorators’, as Madge Garland, then editor of Vogue, called them. But there was nothing ladylike about it. It was a cut-throat business and required the tough-mindedness of a Syrie Maugham if one was to make one’s mark.

  Before starting her business Syrie sought the advice of the American decorator Elsie Mendl, who had introduced the craze for chintz and antiques to America and was thus nicknamed ‘the chintz lady’. ‘You’re too late, my dear, much too late,’ Elsie told Syrie. ‘The decorating field is already overcrowded.’ But Syrie was not too late. Her Baker Street shop was so successful that she opened others in New York and Chicago and went on to decorate some of the grandest houses and country estates in both England and America.

  The art historian Martin Battersby described the small handful of ladies who led the design revolution as ruthless and often unscrupulous in their dealings. They ‘all had an unshakable belief in their own taste and talents’, and ‘Woe betide a client who bought anything from a rival decorator – by the lift of an eyebrow they could insinuate that the object was a shoddy fake, an error of taste, absurdly expensive, and that the morals of the rival decorator were highly suspect.’ Syrie certainly fitted this description. Unlike Connie, she was not a team person: she was high-handed and imperious, with a brusque way of demanding people do what she required. She could be unscrupulous and formidable, but with a steely wit and quick temper, the sort of woman you either loved or loathed. Like Connie, Oliver Messel was an excellent mimic and particularly loved to imitate Syrie with her clipped high-pitched voice – ‘Go and pick up those pelmets at once, please.’

  Connie, though, enjoyed working with Syrie and found her open and experimental mind stimulating. And as the smartest interior decorator in London, Syrie’s support for Connie was invaluable, opening many doors that might otherwise have remained closed.

  Connie adored Syrie’s beautiful house in Chelsea with its huge white salon and pine-panelled dining-room, the pieces of old Chelsea porcelain and other ornaments, any of which could be used for flowers. For one party in Syrie’s drawing-room Connie used a set of large pearly cockleshells. She filled them with masses of Roman hyacinths arranged in a sort of fringe emerging from the shells and drooping onto the tables. The shells were set in informal groups around the tables and in the centre of each table she placed a large green papier mâché dish in the shape of a leaf, made by Flo Standfast. Each one was heaped with fruit – green and black grapes, passion fruit, fresh lychees, plums and peaches – and among the fruit Connie put gardenias and white and purple hellebores. The grapes were raised from the centre of the dish and allowed to fall over the edges; she mounted the passion fruit into loose racemes by fastening their short stems on to thin green twigs. The hellebores emphasized the purple note of the passion fruit and grapes, while the gardenias and green grapes lightened the whole.

  Syrie knew nothing about flowers, but she knew what she wanted; she liked colours to be either muted or brilliant, as in nasturtiums or ‘pegaloniums’ (her floral mispronunciations were a constant joy to Connie). Later, for Liza Maugham’s coming-out party, Connie decorated a room with wild fireweed, which looked exquisite but ‘gave far more trouble than conventional flowers would have done’. Syrie shared Connie’s magpie skills and together they combed flea-markets and junk-yards on the lookout for pieces to transform into their own creations. Syrie is said to have coined the term ‘distressed’. She ‘pickled’ antique furniture by d
ipping it into a bath of lye or acid solution, which stripped the heavy patina of dirt and wax polish and revealed the pale, raw wood grain. She took Chippendale furniture and ‘painted the hell out of it!’ Her speciality was ‘antique white’, a sort of amber glaze on white, with gilt. Some people thought the results were elegant while others regarded her wild methods as vandalism. She was accused of ruthlessly stripping, bleaching and waxing Chippendale, Biedermeier and black coromandel screens. She stripped a French provincial fruitwood commode with a marquetry top and painted it white, with details picked out in gold. Once, when Syrie brought home a Provençal armoire, Noël Coward was a weekend guest; ‘She’ll pickle it before you can say knife,’ he moaned. And Elsie Mendl was heard to say, ‘One day darling Syrie will arrange to be pickled in her own coffin.’

  Syrie introduced Connie to Victor Stiebel, an exciting young couturier. Stiebel had been brought up in South Africa and had studied at Cambridge where he designed costumes for the university theatre, and in 1932 he opened his own fashion house in Bruton Street in London. It was so successful that within the year he expanded his showrooms into an adjoining elegant Georgian ballroom, to which Syrie applied one of her classic all-white schemes: bone-white walls, white curtains and carpets. ‘You must have Constance Spry to do the flowers,’ she told Stiebel. ‘She’s a genius and you’ll adore her.’ He did, and soon became one of Connie’s dearest friends. His first dress show was launched with a lavish midnight party. Cecil Beaton photographed the mannequins for Vogue, which reported that Connie’s ‘bouquets of golden roses and corn bloom together against white walls’. From then on Connie would provide the flowers for Stiebel’s twice-yearly shows; her classic long trail of flowers, usually with lilies among them, flowed down each side of the Adam mantelpieces which stood at either end of the vast ballroom. Like Norman Wilkinson, Stiebel provided Connie with inspiration. She shared his love of unusual colour combinations and his sense of drama, which he expressed with simple elegance and good taste. Vogue wrote: