The piercing blue eyes in the 1964 portrait by Richard Avedon are clearly the same. So is the fair hair with the ruler-straight part and the meticulous bespoke clothing.
With his feet up on a small English tray table, J. Allen Murphy looks relaxed and perfectly at home despite smoking one cigarette after another.
Murphy, a decorator who has spent much of his life in New York City and on the North Shore of Long Island, is accustomed to tasteful surroundings. ”I was born to it,” Murphy says of his privileged life, which included growing up on Long Island`s North Shore, in Manhattan and in Morristown, N.J.; landing on Eleanor Lambert`s men`s best-dressed list for the first time at age 23; and becoming a fixture on Town and Country`s list of the 50 most eligible bachelors in America.
Murphy, often called a Duke of Windsor look-alike as well as the quintessential Ralph Lauren man, also has been highly successful as an interior decorator. ”But that`s mostly all over now,” he says. ”In the past year and a half, I lost my partner, my business, my house and my furniture.” Now, at 56, Murphy is starting over. In a time when it`s fashionable to talk about scaling down one`s life, Murphy has done it to a fare-thee-well.
The decorator dates the beginning of his new lifestyle to April, 1987, when he was working in Palm Beach for Fern Tailer Denney. ”I found myself slipping into a depression and not being able to function,” Murphy says.
Returning to New York, Murphy realized he was ill. ”And after two hospitalizations and continued treatment I developed great financial problems for the first time in my life,” the decorator explains.
Facing his difficulties
But rather than being undone by his difficulties, Murphy faced them realistically and with some aplomb, making what he described as ”big changes.”
After his partner of 22 years, Robert Tartarini, left to establish his own business, Murphy gave up most of his decorating clients, auctioned off most of his antiques and put Wychwood, his 7-acre Long Island estate, on the market. ”In spite of everything,” Murphy says, ”I don`t feel I was forced into any of these changes; I made them out of choice. I knew I had to go on, pull up my boot straps, get well and fight.”
Last August Murphy hired a young assistant, Daniel Nichols, and established J. Allen Murphy Enterprises. He also moved into a 900-square-foot one-bedroom apartment in a modern high-rise on Manhattan`s Upper East Side.
And he is living above the store: a studio apartment about 20 floors below in the same building is now J. Allen Murphy: fine antiques and accessories, by appointment only-a tiny shop crammed floor to ceiling with the furniture, objects and paintings that are the accouterments of his eclectic decorating style. They all have price tags.
”My taste is still there, so I said to myself, `Why not bring all these things to the public at better prices?` ” Murphy explains. He bought nearly all the objects in the shop over the last few months. ”I didn`t want to sell my own personal things there,” Murphy says.
”This is my future and a way of bringing my life under control,” he says. ”I guess I was tired of living the lifestyle my father lived. But it was the only way I knew how.”
Murphy`s mother died when he was 12. His father, John James Murphy, a stockbroker, was left with three children. ”My father was, No. 1, a playboy; No. 2, a family man; and No. 3, a businessman,” Murphy says. ”I was always told to behave like a gentleman and to always keep the best foot forward. When I was 21, he dropped being `father` and we became best friends.` ”
Murphy continued in his father`s tradition, entertaining at dinner dances and sit-down dinners, ”but I never gave cocktail parties.”
The elder Murphy died in 1971. ”I never had a lavish lifestyle to impress other people. It was just what I always wanted. Giving dances, entertaining-it was all for my own personal pleasure,” Murphy says. ”All my life, I got a lot of publicity for being social. But in some ways I`m not that person anymore.
”Success was a very important thing in my family. My father used to tell me, `You make the cake, I`ll give you the icing,` ” Murphy recalls. ”I`ve always worked terribly hard all my life. Most important to me is the money I made, not what I inherited.”
How his career began
Murphy`s career in decorating began when, more than 30 years ago, he was working as what he described as a ”glorified curtain salesman” at the W.&J. Sloane department store in Beverly Hills, Calif.
Living in a chic Hollywood apartment, he started taking private decorating commissions. He also worked as a fashion reporter at the Los Angeles Times before moving back to New York in 1963 as the men`s fashion editor of Harper`s Bazaar magazine and the next year becoming the editor in chief of Men`s Bazaar.
His roster of international decorating clients grew, and over the years it has included such names as Phipps, Vanderbilt, Goulandris, Guest, Niarchos, Tailer and Herrera. ”When you work for a Phipps,” Murphy adds, ”you don`t sell them antiques, you pull things out of the attic.”
”And to be successful,” Murphy says, ”you only need one good client a year. If that client spent $1 million, I made one-third. In my career, I had lots of those.”
In some years Murphy worked for more than 30 clients at a time. ”That`s what you call a nervous breakdown,” he says. ”Now I`ve kept about seven and want to continue decorating on a limited basis.”
Murphy decorated sprawling country estates, lavish winter residences in Palm Beach and sleek apartments overlooking New York or Caracas. He was also called to decorate the first apartments of his clients` children. ”Those were fun,” Murphy says. ”The idea was to do them on the cheap but to ask Mummy for a few good old things.”
As his decorating business burgeoned, Murphy`s entertaining rose to a grand scale. In 1981 he bought Wychwood, an 1860 estate in Muttontown, N.Y., that was once the carriage house of Consuelo Vanderbilt, the Duchess of Marlborough. There he gave high tea in honor of Betsy Von Furstenberg, lunch for the Rajmata of Jaipur and supper for Rex and Mercia Harrison. He was host at coming-out parties for debutantes such as Cornelia Guest, Jenny Bancroft and Tracy Denney.
Going all out for parties
At these lavish, formal occasions, the decorator pulled out all the stops: Venetian lace tablecloths, antique Coalport china, Baccarat crystal and extravagant bouquets of flowers from Wychwood`s vast garden.
”I would do all the decorations and table settings, stripping the house of antique china to create centerpieces,” he explains. ”And because I always had all the food made in my kitchen, I could do a party for $10 a head.”
Wychwood became a showcase for Murphy`s decorating-a look he describes as ”really traditional, with a touch of Belle Epoque.” The spacious rooms were filled to the brim with his myriad collections. ”I collected everything in sight,” he says. ”Antique china, carved Faberge animals, miniature chairs and Russian Imperial Easter eggs.”
Now most of his possessions have been sold at auction. ”I called it my cleansing process,” Murphy says. He looks back at his former life with only a tinge of nostalgia. ”The society part has been fun and amusing,” he says.
”But in some ways I`m not that person anymore.” In two small rooms, Murphy has managed to encapsulate the look he created at Wychwood: the signature glossy walls, artfully cluttered coffee tables, multipillowed bed, plump chintz-covered sofa and antique desk lined with memorabilia.
His deaccessioning did not include his English Staffordshire pieces or his dozens of antique-framed photographs, American Post-Impressionist paintings and extensive wardrobe.
Without the spacious dressing room he had at Wychwood, Murphy has nevertheless managed to fit 84 pairs of shoes, more than 80 shirts and 32 suits and dinner jackets into a standard postwar bedroom closet. Dozens of belts and ties hang on the walls in the minuscule hall, and a tuxedo and velvet slippers are on display on a mahogany valet.
The upholstered bed is still made up with Porthault sheets, a long-standing passion of Murphy`s. ”I always collected Porthault and really loved it,” he says. So did Murphy`s clients.
”But with inflation,” he adds, ”even very rich clients hesitated to outfit everything in Porthault.” Whereupon Murphy started what he calls his line of ”Faux Portault,” deliberately misspelling the name.
One of his shop`s prize wares, these table linens are made from discontinued designer fabrics that recall Porthault flower-bedecked prints down to the scalloped borders, but they are about half the price.
”I started with place mats,” says Murphy, who has the table linens made by a local seamstress. ”And if there are any ends left over,” he says, reflecting his new frugality, ”I ask her to make cocktail napkins.” –
