AD Remembers Decorating Legend Betty Sherrill
Betty Sherrill, who died on Monday at the age of 91, was American decorating’s grande dame, the chairman of McMillen Inc. , the country’s oldest operating interior design firm, which she ran from 1972 until 2002.
Petite, perennially blonde, and flirtatious yet steely, the former Betty Lewis Stevens was the child of a Louisiana plantation aristocrat and a New Orleans engineer/contractor. In 1949 she relocated to New York City, following a surprise marriage to H. Virgil Sherrill, a Louisiana-born Yale graduate turned World War II flying ace turned investment banker. (He eventually retired as senior director of Prudential Securities.)
The change of scenery was dismayingly abrupt, geographically and emotionally. “I don’t think my mother really wanted to get married, but she and my father had been engaged for four or five years, and he gave her an ultimatum: ‘Either marry me this weekend or I’m out,’” says their daughter, Ann Pyne, the current president of McMillen. “So they basically eloped, and she ended up in New York, where she just wept and wailed.”
Seeking some equilibrium, Sherrill took a class or two at the Parsons School of Design and opened a small decorating firm called Elizabeth Sherrill Interiors. (Elizabeth, she felt, sounded more proper and professional than Betty, though she had been named for an ancestor, George Washington’s sister Betty Lewis.) When that endeavor quickly failed, Sherrill’s mother-in-law, a McMillen client, urged her to get a job there. Eleanor Brown, who had founded the company in 1924, initially balked at taking the energetic Southern beauty onto the payroll, tartly observing, “You’ll talk on the telephone all the time, and you’ll go out every night.” Which, Sherrill admitted, was true. But she firmly told Brown, “I want to anyway.”
Hired in 1952 for $50 a week (about $430 today), Sherrill needed no professional skills, only a ready smile, for her first assignment—passing out pamphlets for McMillen’s groundbreaking exhibition of modern French furniture. Her colleagues looked on her with skepticism; all of them were Parsons graduates, her daughter notes, and considered Sherrill “a social gadabout and untrained.” Eventually, she began assisting the august McMillen decorator Ethel Smith (her projects included the private quarters of the Johnson White House) and quickly acquired her own roster of devoted clients.
Sherrill’s chronological youth and personal vivacity proved to be a boon in her early years with McMillen, attracting women like herself, typically 30-something wives and mothers who weren’t quite ready for McMillen’s hallmark formality. “My mother’s style was spunky, with bright colors and country looking,” says Pyne, who is writing a history of the company for Acanthus Press and who has helped loosen McMillen’s aesthetic stays to a considerable degree. That being said, Sherrill told The New York Times in 1977, stately relics of the past remained a mainstay in the firm’s vocabulary: “We always advise our young clients to buy one fine antique—perhaps a red-lacquer secretary, which can make the whole room come alive.” She also had no patience for people who failed to take an interest in household niceties. “I hate to see people not fix their own flowers,” she once told a reporter. “Don’t you think it’s sad?”
Sherrill became president of McMillen in 1972, when Eleanor Brown retired, and she raised its public profile through the development of branded furniture lines for Baker, fabrics for Lee Jofa and Robert Allen, bed linens for Springmaid, and carpets for Stark. In 2002 she handed over the reins to her daughter and became its chairman. A third generation, Sherrill’s granddaughter, Elizabeth Pyne, oversees the 90-year-old company’s design division, McMillen Plus, which caters to a younger clientele. Sherrill’s son, Stephen C. Sherrill, is the chairman of the board of B&G Foods (which makes Cream of Wheat, Static Guard, and Mrs. Dash seasoning, among other brands) and a managing director of Bruckmann, Rosser, Sherrill & Co., a private-equity firm.
Under Betty Sherrill’s direction, McMillen remained largely a bastion of Social Register propriety. Its typical client was defined by New York Times reporter Virginia Lee Warren in 1965: “the person with rather conservative taste, a predilection for luxury, a feeling for period furniture—especially French, which is the most expensive—and an imposing amount of money to spend.” Which meant, for the most part, businessmen and society figures with grandly scaled houses and apartments, among them automotive titan Henry Ford II, cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, and television magnate William S. Paley.
Sherrill had no qualms, however, about rejecting a plutocrat whose taste she considered irredeemable or whose personality she considered tiresome. As the decorator told HG in 1992, the abrasive hotelier Leona Helmsley “dragged me up to her apartment at the Park Lane [hotel] and said, ‘Look at my antiques.’ And I said, ‘You have no antiques.’” Those four little words meant only one thing: The house of McMillen would not be doing business with the house of Helmsley.