Sex and the Single Girl: The Unmarried Woman's Guide to Men (16 page)

The outside of the building needn’t be fancy; but if it has a greasy look, look further; the owner is probably mean and stingy and not a good landlord.

Pass up places that have playpens and children’s toys around the front door. You want sophisticated, adult surroundings.

Before you move in, have a firm understanding with the management about painting. If the place has just
been
painted but in nauseous colors, insist they paint over—don’t be shy. A good tenant is worth her weight in paint. To encourage the painting, tell the owner you plan to stay forever. You will also be doing extensive decorating which wouldn’t be worth your while if the walls give you migraine.

If they agree to supply the paint providing
you
do the painting, don’t! Painting is miserable work! I have never had a beau or boy friend who was willing to help, and I decided long ago all the slave labor was the lot of the married women! Fortunately men have other qualities to enjoy.

If for any reason you
are
forced to paint, try to hire a high school boy or other nonprofessional who’ll paint up a storm for ten dollars.

Don’t sign a lease for more than a year. You might want to go to live in Portofino for a year.

What Color Walls

It’s a matter of personal taste, but why should I stop imposing my personal taste on you
now
?

I like oyster white or off-white walls. Everything, including
you
, looks divine in them. White walls are very vogue-ish now, and I think their beauty will survive the trend.

My next choice would be something in the beige family—possibly soft taupe or honey. Gray beige is beautiful. Plain gray is also neutral but a little cold.

Forest green and chocolate walls were the rage a few years ago and probably lost out because they made people feel hemmed in. You need something soft and lovely you can live with.

Apple green, powder blue or pink walls are too froufrou for my taste. These colors in a living room remind me of cheap dresses and cheap candy. In a bedroom they’re fine.

Painting every room in your apartment in the same color isn’t a bad idea.

Some people like crazy orange bathrooms or a chartreuse kitchen. These bathrooms and kitchens seem to be
trying
too hard! Anyway, that’s one paint job you’ll have to do yourself. Managements go apoplectic over deep colors.

Wallpaper can be beautiful, but don’t worry—you’ll never find it coupled with modest rent. See if you can get the management to scrape off the faded jungle vines you
will
find, and if not paint over them.

Inside the Castle

Now for the real challenge. Your walls are freshly painted and you’re ready to move in. Or the walls are freshly painted in the place you’ve
been
in for a while. You have some furniture or you haven’t.

How do you turn this pristine area into the poshest little arena in town … with no money?

It’s very simple.

You can’t.

There is
one
thing you can do without money. You can throw out, give away or sell everything that is junky and impossible of the stuff you already own. Out with it! If you give it to the Salvation Army or other charity, which isn’t a bad idea, get a receipt. It’s tax deductible.

There is one approach to decorating that costs very
little
money—the Greenwich Village approach. Make everything gay and colorful and warm and cozy, and no single item of furniture or refurbishing costs more than ten dollars.

This is a fine approach for the very poor or very young … college girls and young working girls.

Why isn’t a crazy, colorful, cozy apartment good enough for
you
? Because you can’t be a star sapphire among early Sears overstuffed and late-painted orange crates.

If nothing in your entire wardrobe, including coats, cost more than twenty dollars, it wouldn’t be much of a wardrobe, would it? Neither can an apartment furnished completely on the thrift plan pack much of a wallop.

If you are into your thirties marching straight toward forty or forty gaining on fifty, you need a place with enough elegance to say successfully “up your backside” to society. You can
say
it living in a dormitory room at the Y.W.C.A., but nobody is going to believe you.

It’s possible you’ve never even seen the kind of apartment I have in mind! There aren’t very many of them around. I had only seen one when I did my single-girl place—the jewel in the rabbit-hutch building we just mentioned. Your apartment doesn’t need to be a corner of Versailles—you’d probably hate it—but I think the kind of taste and bezazz and verve and elegance those boys poured into that apartment
is
what an exciting single woman needs in hers. When you see one of those places, you’ll understand instantly the social and emotional good it can do you.

How can I be more specific about the elegance I think you can’t live without? It doesn’t involve Lorenzo de’ Medici gilt commodes with gargoyles around the legs, though I think those would be divine! Elegance can be a couple of dog-eared volumes of Dostoevsky on a table (dog-eared because you
read
them). It can be a crystal bowl of real apples and oranges catching the sun—or a Ming vase worth $5,000. I can only explain by saying that an elegant apartment has unmistakable traces of grandeur about it … like a lady shopping in a supermarket in Bermuda shorts and a striped silk shirt just like everybody else, but the hand that pushes the shopping cart rests under a four-carat diamond!

Many of the so-called “elegant” effects are achieved for pennies … just exactly as they are in the Greenwich Village apartment.
But you must be prepared to sink money into some of the pieces.

You can’t afford to do this at twenty. You don’t
need
to at twenty. And maybe you think you can’t afford to at thirty. But unless you are under analysis five times a week or putting a little brother through college, I think you
can.
Follow the saving rules in Chapter 6 for everything
but
your apartment. You may also have to go into hock for a year or two while you acquire the major items for your
ménage.
Then you can retrench and live in quiet glory among them. No investment will bring you more daily pleasure.

How Much Will It Cost?

Depending on whether you have furniture that can be recovered and refurbished, depending on how many resources you can scare up for buying things wholesale or at a discount, depending on how much sleuthing you are willing to do to track down treasures at a price, depending on whether you can sew and refinish things yourself—the investment I am talking about will run between $500 and $3,000. But you can take ten years to complete it. The important thing is to begin.

How To Get the Work Done

There are three methods of furnishing this elegant little fun-bin:

1. Hire a decorator.
   
2. Get advice from friends who know a lot about furniture and decorating and could do most of the job themselves.
   
3. Acquire the essential knowledge and do it yourself.
   

You think I’m going to recommend doing it yourself, don’t you, but I’m not! Decorating is an art you may not have the wish, the time, the energy, the ability to learn. I never did. I can’t even hang a picture without making a big hole in the plaster.

My single-girl apartment was decorated for me by the friends with the Versailles corner. They finally just couldn’t stomach one more overcooked hamburger in my overstuffed mud hut. One windy night they removed two red and chartreuse flowered pull-up chairs that had originally cost nine dollars and gave them to a needy friend. I was allowed to bequeath a large faded red davenport to
my
needy friends as well as two dwarf lamps with bases carved like pineapples. Mark and Schuyler (I shall call them) threw out some other stuff which they said nobody was needy enough to need. They then took $400 away from me. I had recently won a contest conducted by
Glamour
magazine, and my prize was a trip to Honolulu.
Glamour
had generously given me $500 spending money, of which—you know me—I had used about $35. They also sent money for a first-class round-trip ticket to New York for the finals of the contest. Naturally I had gone coach and pocketed the difference. God bless
Glamour
!

My friends invested this fortune in two enormous white rococo lamps, a low travertine marble table that went the length of one wall, having my one good print, a Dufy, re-framed in something knock-your-eye-out, and several satin pillows.

I asked what they were going to buy with the rest of my money. They said there wasn’t any rest, and there was a brief period during which we didn’t speak. I moseyed around decorator shops pricing pillows to confirm that between them Mark and Schuyler had enough of my money to spend Christmas in Acapulco. All I found out was that pillows cost only slightly less than a good used Cadillac.

We made up. Gradually over the year, a few dollars and a few deeds at a time, the boys stole, cajoled, borrowed, coaxed, begged, painted and polished my apartment into something pretty terrific. It was moss green, hot pink and white. Since the rent was only $72.50 a month, I poured everything I could inside. People talked about that apartment. It brought me great pleasure.

My second apartment (which I took for the sole purpose of living near David and wearing him down to a frazzle, so he would marry me—and he did) was done by a decorator. “Done by a decorator” isn’t as fancy as it sounds. She recovered a couch, put up draperies and bought a few new things.

By now I think you get the gist. Dumbbells—but smart enough to know they’re dumb—get a decorator or smart friends to help them with their apartment.

My husband and I fight the decorator fight to this day, and I’m sure many people agree with
him.
He thinks decorators impose their own elaborate taste on you so that a place looks like the inside of a candy box but not
your
house … that they scavenge up a junky old chair worth $2 and sell it to you for $200 … that anybody with good taste can do things just as well as a decorator. Well, my husband is crazy! You can wear beautiful clothes and not have the foggiest notion how to sew them together yourself. You can adore crepes suzette but not be able to make up your own recipe.

It’s an art to know what furniture to buy big and what to buy small, what to pay a lot for and what to cheat on. It isn’t larceny, it’s genius to recognize beauty in a broken-down cane-backed Jacobean chair, have it restored, then put it in just the right corner. Maybe it’s worth $200 by then. A first-rate decorator has learned a million tricks to give your rooms that ooh-la-la which sets them apart from the do-it-yourself, loving-hand-at-home, didn’t-quite-make-it look!

Decorator Fees

As for prices, a decorator usually buys wholesale—40 to 50 per cent off your retail price—then adds a fee on top of that (20, 30, 40 per cent) which brings the price back up! Decorators are usually more expensive than buying retail, however, because the stuff they come up with is more fabulous. They have very little truck with mass-produced furniture. Also the labor charges for making draperies, refinishing furniture, wiring old fixtures, is anything but cheap; and decorators charge a commission on those too. Occasionally they will do a room for a flat fee. Sometimes they work by the hour. Whatever their system, no doubt about it, they
cost
!

If you can’t afford that professional polish for a whole apartment, you might at least call in a decorator for consultation. Some work for as little as $10 or $25 an hour, and in that time they may be able to whip up a plan you can follow yourself.

If you do work with a decorator, put yourself in his or her hands and don’t interfere too much. All major purchases will be checked with you first, and you’ll have lots of choices. It’s possible that a sympathetic decorator will take an interest in you even with your small budget if you are lavish with appreciation.

Many stores supply a decorator with purchase, and that’s better than no professional advice at all, I guess, but I’m not
sure
! Those stores are pushing their own merchandise, and I can’t recommend buying too deeply from them. The dream apartment—even one room of a dream apartment—is never assembled from one store even if it’s the best store in town. Objects that contribute that “memories could be made here” look to an apartment are lovingly assembled from all over!

I’m Decorating Myself

Suppose you can’t or won’t afford a decorator and have no friends who know more about the subject than you do.

I’m willing to concede you can furnish an attractive apartment with your own good taste, imagination and money. But if you want one that really goes into orbit—a yummy but not
gaudy
place that is totally sexy—you must do some of the things a decorator does. You
can
do them—and have a ball—but you’ll have to work hard and get educated.

Although I regretfully admit I can’t decorate the inside of a linen closet without help, I’ve assembled some decorating rules from professional and gifted friends that should help you.

1. Creep up on decorating as you would any new skill. Remember how long it took to learn shorthand? Immerse yourself deeply in the world of cherry wood and Chippendale. Don’t be in a rush to buy anything.
   
2. Take basic courses in decorating in night school. You can learn textiles, woods, traffic patterns, scale of furniture, etc.
   
3. Borrow library books until you can tell Duncan Phyfe from Duncan Hines.
   
4. Make your second home in furniture stores, furniture departments, junkshops, secondhand stores, antique shops, and thrift shops of the Salvation Army, Junior League, etc. (These contain discards people have given to charity as a tax write-off rather than sell for a pittance. They are sometimes terrific.) Just look a lot and get the feel of furniture.
   
5. Attend decorator shows, home shows, auctions, and get the look and feel some more.
   
6. Visit museums containing rooms of period furniture. Talk to the curator or attendant on the floor. They are gold mines of information and often like to chat.
   
7. Get acquainted with the owners of antique and secondhand stores. Tell them you’re planning to furnish an apartment without much money but are determined to put beautiful things in it. You are just getting your bearings, and visiting their store is helpful and inspiring to you. Most antique dealers would have opened a liquor store if they wanted to make money. They deal in treasures for love and a modest livelihood. If you show genuine interest, they will probably become expansive and give you a valuable education. They can’t sell to you wholesale unless you have a decorator’s license, but a dealer who “adopts” you may eventually tell you
   his
   source of supply. And you can slither over there and buy for a pittance.
   
8. See the inside of as many beautiful homes and apartments as you can. Soak up décor like a sponge. If there’s a showplace you’re longing to see but don’t know the owner, try writing a charming note. Ask if you might drop by at an appointed hour for ten minutes. Say you are decorating an apartment and have in mind to see, first, as many beautiful and inspiriting houses as you can. Tell where you work and what you do, so nobody will think you’re coming over to case the place for a burglary. Write on office letterhead. Enclose a self-addressed stamped envelope for reply or say you’ll telephone in a few days. Some wealthy homeowners will be flattered and like to show off a bit.