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| Tony Duquette |
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| RR Corniche |
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| Billy Baldwin AD |
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| Mary Wells Lawrence, Great Book! |
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| Mary Wells Lawrence |
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| La Villa Fiorentina when the Lawrences owned it |
Mr. Baldwin's role in Mrs. Lawrence's domestic education was inestimable. ''Billy was very naughty, but so amusing,'' she said. ''He'd say things like: 'You don't know anything about this -- I'm going to tell you how to do it. This is how you sit in this chair. This is how you eat at this table.' He'd tell us how to live in a certain room. He thought dining rooms were boring, and you should eat everywhere.''
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| Blonde beach boy |
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| Nantucket |
Mr. Baldwin had already left for Nantucket, the secretary said, when my chaperone for my grand tour, Robert Morring, an antiques dealer from Atlanta, phoned his office. So, we left our hotel and went to a very smart party at the Sutton Place apartment of Joseph Braswell~ this was back in 1977 or so...three years later I was back from Europe, and living in Manhattan, studying interior design with the old Parsons faculty ! My life was terribly exciting, dangerous even~
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| Billy Baldwin |
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| New painted brick masonry, made to look old |
When Mary Berg, later to become famous as Mary Wells Lawrence, was growing up in the small town of Poland, Ohio (near Youngstown) she had a recurring dream about a white house perched on a cliff above an ocean~ thirty-five years later she purchased La Villa Fiorentina, on the French Riviera and spent the next thirty years entertaining there.
But it was ten years of work before she got to spend even a two week holiday in the house, since she had become the top advertising executive in the United States, as head of Wells, Rich, Greene. (NYSE) I've always been intrigued by her Pygmalion-like success story. Inspiring! Cheers! DF *****
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