"DESIGN is an opinion," declared the opinionated designer William Haines. "Not a profession."
But Jean Mathison, Haines' administrative major-domo from 1955 until his death in 1973, begs to differ. She asserts that for Billy Haines, the Jazz Age MGM film star who became the premier interior decorator for glamourhungry movie queens and business barons, design was a profession -- and a calling.
"He used to say that if he had been born during the time of Louis XVI, he would've decorated Versailles," she says. Mathison, an ebullient 80-year-old storyteller from Hollywood's golden age, and Peter Schifando, a 53-year-old L.A. designer still catering to Haines' clientele, have joined forces and archives: Hers fill a two-car garage, and his consist of thousands of blueprints and renderings. Together they are securing Haines' legacy with "Class Act: William Haines, Legendary Hollywood Decorator," which hits bookstores this month as the first major monograph on the designer.
On a recent Friday morning, Mathison pays a visit to Schifando's Melrose Place studio. She is the historian; he is the practitioner carrying on the Haines aesthetic, the touchstone of the current craze for Hollywood Regency design. Schifando painstakingly reproduces 50-year-old Haines furniture designs and does interiors for the original Haines Inc. A-list, dynasties with the names Reagan, Warner, Bloomingdale and Annenberg.
As Mathison alights like a midcentury glamour girl on one of Haines' classics, the low and soignee Elbow chair, Jonathan Joseph, Schifando's business partner at Peter Schifando & Co., enters the studio library. He has just returned from a visit to "Mrs. Reagan's" where, while attempting to replace a tile, he accidentally tripped a security wire, summoning unamused Secret Service agents.
"It's a complete continuum," Schifando says of his role in maintaining the glittering legacy of Haines and of the late Ted Graber, Haines' protege who redecorated the Reagan White House and whom Schifando worked with in the late 1980s. For the past decade, Schifando has sold Haines reproductions to top Los Angeles decorators such as Michael Smith, who recently redesigned Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica, and Kelly Wearstler, who put a flashy mod spin on Hollywood glam at the Viceroy hotels in Santa Monica and Palm Springs.
