---I
had never met Mr. Rodgers, but the summers of my childhood
had his exotic (to me) handiwork as a backdrop: black
baseboards and Aubussons, tasseled silk curtains, and
walls painted pale yellow and a ubiquitous murky sage
green. These interiors were so different from those in
my Mississippi Delta hometown, which were all English
furniture and cotton slipcovers and Oriental rugs, that
in Nashville I felt I was in a glamorous movie (Carole
Lombard in "My Man Godfrey," maybe).
---History, in fact, played
a big role. Most of what we had to work with had been
in my grandmother's house, and, before that, in my great-grandmother's.
And all of it - the furniture, their fabrics, the "things"
that came with them (a life-size painting of a boy with
a cricket bat, lamps, even the pile of porcelain "ashtrays")-had
been chosen by one man, the legendary Nashville decorator,
A. Herbert Rodgers. In a sense, I had two decorators,
one very much alive and one long dead. |
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