On a steamy afternoon last week, a team of movers from Christie’s padded quietly about a townhouse on a side street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, yanking strips of packing tape from spools as they began bundling up thousands of artworks and objects for auction. The ripping sound the tape made resembled, in a way, screams of protest.
“Can’t we get them to stop?” asked Linda Wachner, an American businesswoman and friend of Mica Ertegun, the woman whose house, until her death in December at 97, this was. “At least for a while.”
There was a time in the recent social history of New York City when there would have been no necessity to pose the question “Who is Mica Ertegun?” Readers of the tabloid gossip pages, and almost anyone from a certain social stratum, would have known the name of the woman whose New York Times obituary tidily characterized her as “a doyenne of interior design”; wife of a man, Ahmet Ertegun, whom The New Yorker once called “the Greatest Rock-and-Roll Mogul in the World”; a successful decorator named to Architectural Digest’s AD100 Hall of Fame; a celebrated hostess and designated leader of fashion whose dresses were acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
This, of course, was an analogue era. We don’t live there anymore.
We inhabit instead a world in which taste is less developed over a lifetime than acquired overnight through Pinterest boards; a time when the megarich buy trophy art as a form of asset class; when the oxymoron known as “quiet luxury” noisily announces itself in the form of branded clothing or else in houses appointed with arrangements of costly if blandly generic objects approved by arbiters at Goop.
Ours is a sphere galaxies away from the one Ms. Ertegun knew, and, to a certain degree, helped conjure into being. And so the opportunity was not to be missed when, for several hours, this reporter and a photographer were given relatively free rein to wander the paired townhouses the Erteguns inhabited for decades (one for the use of Ms. Ertegun’s successful decorating business, MAC II, founded in 1969 with her partner, Chessy Rayner). We were left to prowl among collections that by day’s end would be wrapped, bundled and carted away, never again to be arranged in that particular manner.
“It’s very contemporary,” Ms. Ertegun said of her residence in House & Garden magazine back in the 1980s. “And yet there isn’t one modern thing in it.”
If there was modernity in an Ertegun house, it was experienced by guests in the unfussy freshness of atmospheres she created. She designed simple, mostly monochrome backdrops for the theater of a hectic social life. (“Thirty for dinner was nothing,” she once said.) The social life of her and her mogul husband was notable for the ambitious juxtapositions of guest lists as likely to include Kid Rock as Henry Kissinger, Joan Didion as Mick Jagger. Framed photographs on the library shelves were signed by Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Jerry Hall, Ray Charles and Fred Astaire.
Throughout the house objects were similarly displayed for the mood they helped set and not necessarily their market value. A monochrome Ellsworth Kelly painting hung above a behemoth of a George IV library table with a Russian silver tankard deployed atop it as an ice bucket. By one fireplace, an enameled elephant the size of a cocker spaniel was set near a tufted velvet pouf. In another area, a gilded miniature version of Pedro Friedeberg’s celebrated hand chair rested on a tabletop alongside a DVD of the 2008 documentary “After the Party,” about the society chronicler Dominick Dunne.
“Collections are the reference of a life,” Marc Porter, the chairman of Christie’s Americas, said. “What’s interesting is, when you have the possibility of buying anything, what you don’t buy.”
Restraint was a watchword for Ms. Ertegun, who once described her houses as “very bare compared with most people’s.” That observation had a great deal to do with the people she happened to know. Still, to a large extent, the quality of the objects the Erteguns collected had a way of reflecting those invited to share the spaces they furnished. It was not merely a matter of high-low decorating. It was an understanding that, while Princess Margaret may on occasion have liked to kick off her shoes, she was always and inevitably royal.
Consider the living room wall where Magritte’s “L’Empire des Lumières” hangs, eerily luminous and emitting its own palpable force field. “If ever there is a house where art is a living force, this is it,” House & Garden wrote. The unsettling Surrealist masterpiece depicting a nocturnal street scene paradoxically set against a pastel daylight sky is a star lot in a multipart sale Christie’s plans in November and December of objects from the Erteguns’ houses in New York, Southampton and Paris. Christie’s estimates the painting’s value in excess of $95 million.
Nearby, at the front-facing windows of the townhouse, stands a pair of decorative and vaguely kitsch brass Regency palm trees, scrupulously depicted fruiting with coconuts. Attributed to the Parisian decorating firm of Maison Jansen, the trees are almost identical to a pair the couturier Christian Dior once installed at La Colle Noire, the Provençal house he built for himself and lived in for barely a year before dying at age 52.
“Mica collected and kept and lent, but didn’t trade,” Ms. Wachner said. Ms. Ertegun’s philanthropies included a $9 million gift in 2015 to create an atrium for Jazz at Lincoln Center; a $1.4 million pledge to help restore a substructure beneath the fourth-century Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, a site that Christian tradition holds is where the body of Christ was entombed; and a $41 million gift for humanities scholarships at the University of Oxford, the largest of its kind in Oxford’s 900-year history.
“She bought because she loved a work of art,” Ms. Wachner added of her friend, who, having fled Communism in postwar Romania and run a chicken farm in Canada before marrying a legend of American pop music, was unquestionably a woman who knew her own mind. She did everything, Ms. Wachner said, with discernment: “She never bought just because she had a space on the wall.”
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