Tony Duquette, the iconic decorator, artist, magical set designer, costumer and landscaper lived in a world of glamour and imagination. In a forward to a new book, More and More (Abrams, $75), that highlights Duquette's glittering legacy, Christian Dior designer John Galliano, writes: "If I could switch places with anyone for a day, it would be as the dashing Tony Duquette. We shared a mutual love of beauty and creating dreams."
Author Hutton Wilkinson began working for Duquette as a teenager and ultimately became his business partner. After Duquette died in 1999 at 85, Wilkinson carried on the legacy as president and artistic director for Tony Duquette Studios Inc. He lives in Dawnridge, the unique house Duquette created in Beverly Hills. In Houston to speak at the Greenwood-King design lecture series, Wilkinson took a few minutes to talk with CultureMap.
Q: What was special about Tony Duquette?
A: Tony Duquette is considered by museums to be an American design icon. He was the first American to have a one-man show at the Louvre in 1951. It included furniture, watercolors, jewelry, costumes, sets and sculpture. Everything he did was one of a kind. As a young man he was doing costumes and sets for Fred Astaire musicals at MGM, then in his 80s with me he was doing jewelry for Tom Ford at Gucci.
Q: What was the response to the Paris show?
A: It was so startling that the great French poetess Louise de Vilmorin wrote: "The works of Tony Duquette are no more preconceived than dreams. These works are dreams caught in the net of reality." That was the way he worked. He didn't make sketches, he would take the fabric and cut it. Sometimes it was a little maddening, because we were working with extremely expensive valuable things, like 18th century embroidered Mogul fabrics set with precious stones and he just cut them. I was a little bit of a curb on his enthusiasm, because I said: "We are going to measure before we cut them."
Q: How did you get to work with him?
A: I first read about him when I was in seventh grade. The Los Angeles Times had a wonderful home magazine and Tony and his wife Elizabeth lived in a former silent film studio. It had a ballroom that was 150 feet long, 28 feet tall and 28 feet wide (featured on the cover of More is More.) I said to my father, who was a very square architect in Los Angeles: "This is what I'm interested in." And he said, 'You are 100 percent crazy'." When I was 17, my art teacher said that Tony was looking for volunteers to do a big art installation. I knocked on his door and worked two years for free. We ended up working together for 30 years.
Q: Where did he get this talent and knowledge from?
A: His mother and her sisters were concert musicians and some of her family had been involved with the pre-Raphaelites in England. So he had these artistic genes from his mother's side, not his father's. They were a middle class family and lost all their money in the depression, so Tony realized at 18 that he would have to be the head of the family and make the money. He began by decorating store windows in a local department store. Eventually he worked with designers William Haines, James Pendleton and Adrian. But Tony always said that if it hadn't been for World War II, he would be nothing. Europeans came to Beverly Hills to sit out the war, like the Rothschilds, Baron de Rebay and Elsie de Wolf, whose home in Versailles was taken over by the Nazis for their headquarters. They wanted to meet the Hollywood stars and the stars wanted to be ladies and gentlemen. Through his work, he brought the two groups together.
Q: How do you carry on Tony Duquette's legacy?
A: I talked to a young designer in New York recently who was trying to break in to the business and I said, "Just be true to your vision...the only thing I can tell you from first hand experience is that you must never compromise." I'll never be the great artist that Tony was, but that's the message I learned from him.
