Did you happen to catch the bedroom farce Pillow Talk on television the other day? If you’ve never seen it, Doris Day plays an interior decorator who gets revenge on her scheming boyfriend, Rock Hudson, by deliberately transforming his cool bachelor pad into a nightmare.
As payback for his lies, she turns his apartment into a garish, kitschy, pillowed, be-tasseled homage to Eros- complete with fertility god statue. And when he opens the door for the “unveiling,” Rock gets a shock.
Don’t worry. It all comes out right in the end. Their marital bliss- babies, symbolized by three little pink and blue pillows in the closing credits- is assured in traditional Doris/Rock fashion.
And however did she manage to surprise her client with this makeover? Two words. Carte blanche. A free hand regarding all monies spent and all aesthetic decisions made.
Who would be so stupid- or so cowed- by their decorator to agree to that one-sided arrangement?
Uh, that would be me- and my ex. And the correct word here is “designer” s’il vous plait. The word “decorator” is more passe than the conversation pit.
That was the first lesson I learned from Bruce Gregga. And it was “on the house.” He had much more to teach us but the price went astronomically up from there.
Bill and I had met in 1975 when he walked into the furniture store on Michigan Avenue where I had just started working. We met my third day on the job.
He had hired a guy there to give him a spiffy bachelor pad- not unlike Rock’s. And when he saw me getting ready to take my thirty minute lunch break, he suavely asked me “Which way are you going?”
I took a good look and replied “Whichever way you are.”
How prophetic and now how ironic.
(Sidebar: I had absolutely no interest in and/or knowledge of furniture back then. I only got the job because, after I bought a headboard there, the salesman asked me if I needed anything else. I jokingly said “Yeah, a job.” He looked me up and down and then said “Our receptionist just quit. Why don’t you see the manager?” The manager told me to come back downtown for a formal interview. My father had to drive me to it. When Dad asked how it went, I motioned “thumbs down.” “You didn’t get the job?” my father asked astonished. “No, I did get it,” I dispiritedly replied. But that hiring led me to the father of my children so it must have been beshert*.)
* “Fated” in Yiddish for my non- Yiddish speaking readers
Two months later, we were married and I was now living in the same apartment Bill had gone in to decorate.
The bachelor pad was banished, along with the decorator. (Along with all the deposits that the guy had taken. He said that he had “forgotten” to order the furniture. Bill sued him but the crook declared bankruptcy and we didn’t get a dime. I was told that he had done it before.)
So now I had the free hand to decorate the apartment. I was twenty-five and clueless, but I thought I did a great job. It was a masterpiece in pink and blue- not unlike those closing-credit pillows in Pillow Talk.
I used tons of Scalamandre silk, and the result was luxe and glamorous. I was enormously proud of my handiwork.
But when Bill and I bought a house in Barrington Hills, we needed more than Scalamandre silk to fix it up. The house required a total makeover and that led us to Bruce.
He was highly-regarded, immensely sought-after and notorious for only working with clients and projects that pleased him. He had to approve you – not the other way around. The power monogrammed black velvet evening slipper was very much on the other foot from the get-go.
To see if we qualified, he squeezed us in with a quick meeting at our apartment. When he walked into my masterpiece, he laughed. Well, alright, he stifled a snicker. But it amounted to the same thing.
There was a new Bruce in town who was “The Boss” but his name wasn’t Springsteen.
We happily gave him carte blanche for the next nineteen years. First he redid Barrington Hills. Then he did Bill’s offices. He helped us pick out and redo our last home, the co-op in Chicago, and most importantly, he gave his blessing to my dream house in Winnetka.
“Buy it,” went the royal edict. “It’s perfect.”
And it was.
That didn’t preclude Bruce from making the necessary renovations, however. We jackhammered out the stone floor in the foyer, put in new chair rail and dados, rebuilt the kitchen wing, redid the bathrooms, latticed in the sunporch, relandscaped the grounds and gardens, recontoured the driveway, (It used to be lowly asphalt. Now it was crunchy bluestone chip.) and bought art and furniture- all beautiful antiques. (Except for chairs. Bruce never liked antique chairs. He thought them frail and untrustworthy.) When the rehab was completed, we faux-finished every wall in a style worthy of the Duke of Devonshire’s Chatsworth House. The whole thing took about seventeen years.
(True, the day the kitchen wing was finished, the painters, torching off layers of old exterior paint, set the house on fire. Another post for another day.)
And throughout the years, Bruce’s brown envelopes never stopped coming. Their mere appearance could reduce my powerful husband to a quivering aspic faster than you could say “Billy Baldwin.”
His taste was legendary and so were his fees. Once, when we heard about a prominent Chicago businessman indicted for embezzling, Bill looked at me and sighed. “Poor guy. He’s a client of Bruce’s. You almost can’t blame him for stealing. I know just how he feels.”
Another acquaintance of ours had a wife and a mistress who he had illicitly- and simultaneously- set up in another lavish Bruce-done establishment. Bill was in awe. Not with the mistress- who was a knockout, but with the fact that the guy could afford two sets of brown bills every month. “He must be richer than God,” whistled Bill.
Bruce’s laws were immutable and instantly obeyed by his high-profile clients. He believed in the classic beauty of symmetry, round dining tables, functional kitchens and bathrooms, and no family photographs anywhere but the bedroom.
He had us all trained in the Tao of Bruce.
On rare occasion the master- with very little advance notice- would stop by for an impromptu room check. This commando raid would cause maids, housekeepers, housefraus and tycoons of industry world-over to go into full Bruce Def Con One Alert.
Instantly, framed photographs would be whisked back to their Bruce-sanctioned former bedroom-only spots. Any other household bibelot, objet, cachepot or bagatelle had to be hustled into their original positions STAT.
He had us all in his thrall.
Bruce retired and moved to his home in Santa Barbara about the same time that Bill retired me.
I catch up with him once in awhile in old issues of Architectural Digest. He looks exactly the same. He never ages.
The Devil never does.
