satin, so were the side chairs, and chances are that your satin drapes would be a solid version of the dominant color as well.”
“Savannah changed all that?”
Pell slid back my door and gave me his hand as I stepped down from the van. “Savannah changed all that. Put the word ‘eclectic’ on everyone’s lips. It was before my time, of course, when Mulholland Studio was only a quarter of the size it is now. I got here ten years later but everyone was still talking about the way she turned things upside down. She was a Sixties Happening right here in High Point. She bought her clothes at a thrift shop, did what she wanted, said what she wanted and made everyone want that look, that style. She used it to talk her way into old Mack Keehbler’s office.”
“Keehbler Couches?” I asked, remembering that his was one of the power names Dixie had linked with Savannah’s.
“And case goods,” said Dixie, who must have known the story by heart.
Pell unlocked the studio door and we walked into another of those drab concrete corridors so at odds with the glitz and glamour of the industry when on display.
“So Keehbler sent over two suites,” said Pell. “A bedroom and a living room, and she mixed them like two decks of playing cards. A bedside table became an end table for the couch. She hung the dresser mirror over the sideboard, put the coffee table at the foot of the bed for a dressing bench, and instead of matching lamps, silver cigarette boxes and neat little bouquets of flowers, she rummaged in the junk shops for off-the-wall accessories: funky lamps, painted boxes, antique toys, a wall display of old hand mirrors.”
“And Keehbler loved the ad she created for him?” I asked.
“Hated it!” Pell said cheerfully. “But Victoria Cumbee of Ashenhurst saw a copy in his wastebasket and hired her on the spot to style their new fall catalog. The rest is history.”
He opened a door at the end of the corridor and I caught my breath in astonishment.
Outside, the place had looked like a warehouse; inside, the resemblance was even stronger. Row after long row of eight-foot-tall gray steel shelves met our eyes and each orderly shelf was full of
At the door where we’d entered, the subject was candlesticks. I hadn’t considered there could be that many different kinds of candlesticks in the world: eight-branched silver candelabras, tall silver, short silver, simple and severe, heavy and ornate, delicate for slender tapers, chunky for thicker candles. And after all the changes had been rung in silver, you had the same thing again in brass, pewter, wood, cast iron, tin, glass of all colors, porcelain, ceramics and crystal. Shelf after shelf after shelf.
There were shelves of cats and dogs of all sizes and all materials; twenty feet of antique painted iron, mechanical banks and toys; a section devoted to teddy bears of graduated sizes and all periods; another to boxes made of wood, paper, leather, metal, glass, marble or plastic, from matchboxes to painted breadboxes; yet another held bowls, from simple Revere silver to reproductions of Chinese porcelain. I saw old-fashioned wind-up clocks, Seth Thomas grandmother clocks, plastic dogs with clock faces for bellies, and even a few hourglasses. Taller shelves held the studio’s extensive collection of table lamps (floor lamps stood in serried ranks along a far wall). Baskets, picture frames, vases, fire screens, books bound in colorful leathers, switehplates, bottles, silk flowers—I was already dizzy from looking at it all when Dixie touched my arm and said, “Look up.”
Hanging from the rafters fifteen feet above our heads was a forest of light fixtures and paddle fans, swinging lamps and chandeliers of faceted crystal, massive wrought iron, polished brass, cartwheels, even a chandelier fashioned from deer horns, which in turn brought us to a macabre section of stuffed animals, fish and mounted trophies.
The aisles were barely wide enough for two persons to pass and as I followed Pell and Dixie through the maze, a woman turned into our aisle pushing a wire shopping cart piled high with miscellaneous articles which she was returning to their proper spaces after a camera shoot. We had to flatten along the side to let her pass.
“Hi, Pell,” she said, holding up a small iron pot “Where do you think it ought to go? Vases or iron cookwares? Jordan used it for dried hydrangeas but I don’t know where she got it and she won’t be back till after Market.”
He upended the pot. “What does the tag say?”
“No tag,” she said. “It must have fallen off.”
“Then I’d stick it in cookwares,” he advised.
“Yeah, that’s the logical place, isn’t it?”
As the woman trundled away with her cart, Pell said, “Before Savannah, design studios wouldn’t have a tenth of these props. She put Mulholland on the map and they should have given her a share of the business.”
We were interrupted by a very tall, very thin young man, who had spotted us from the end of a distant hall.
“Sst! Pell!” he hissed. “Hurry up, they’re waiting for you.”
“Oh, God,” Pell groaned, brushing his hair out of his eyes. “I forgot all about the reception this afternoon.”
“Start SMart’s new art director’s been asking for you for the last twenty minutes. She’s furious,” the young man said in a strident whisper.
“Give her another glass of Rioja and tell her I’ll be right there.” He handed Dixie his key ring, then smoothed his hair again and straightened his vest and shirtsleeves. “You remember where Savannah’s office was? Around the corner from mine, up on the second floor? This key ought to fit.”
“Go!” said Dixie. “We’ll find it.”
Once he’d left us though, Dixie looked around hesitantly. “I haven’t been down here since Evelyn died,” she said, “and they were always moving the interior walls, but I think…”
We turned a corner past a huge stack of colorful carpets in a range of patterns from Persian to English cottage, and I had to watch my step. The space was cavernous, the fixed cement walls were painted light-absorbing black and the floor was crisscrossed with electrical cords that snaked around flimsy temporary walls to portable floodlights, power tools and various appliances.
I heard someone using an electric saw and the smell of wet latex paint hung in the air.
