That call in 1974 must have been devastating. The voice on the other end of the line saying things about a fire, a home destroyed, and to cap it off, a body found in the rubble.
For decades, Tony Duquette had been one of the premier interior designers to the Hollywood set. He was known for his impeccable taste, his singular imagination, and his ability to create worlds of fantasy and magic—whether that was in a home, on a movie set, or at one of his always black-tie affairs. (“Tonight we’re dressing,” he often told friends when inviting them to dinner.)
He may have spent his life creating the sets for other people’s lives, but his quintessential canvases were his own properties. Now, he was being told that one of them had burned to the ground. It wouldn’t be the last time, nor the most devastating. The 1974 blaze was the first of four fires that plagued Duquette over his 85-year life, sending not only his property but much of his vast collection of artistic treasures up in flames.
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“Tony must have been born under a fire sign,” Hutton Wilkinson, an interior designer and the creative heir of Duquette, told The Daily Beast.
Born in 1914, Duquette’s artistic talent and unique vision were on display from a very young age. One of his earliest jobs was at Bullock’s department store, crafting the window displays that would dupe Angelenos into believing there were seasons in California…and that distinct new wardrobes were needed for each one. When he wasn’t dressing the windows, he was creating decorative sculptures at home.
Duquette’s attempts to get his work noticed by the big names of Hollywood had the characteristic flourish that would come to define his work. One of his first breakthrough clients was the legendary designer Jimmy Pendleton, who Duquette wooed after discovering that he would be at the Beverly Hills Hotel one afternoon.
Wilkinson recalled the gambit: “So, Tony sends to the Beverly Hills Hotel an antique wicker Victorian chair, all curlicued, you know, painted white, upholstered with real gardenias. And on top was a stuffed dove with a note in its mouth saying ‘I’ve always admired your work. I’d like very much to meet you.’ Well who can resist, you know?”
Duquette’s biggest supporter would be Elsie de Wolfe, the mother of interior design, who took Duquette under her wing after they met in 1941. It was around this time that Hollywood director Vincente Minnelli became enraptured with the budding designer’s aesthetic and hired him to work on several of his films. (Duquette would later be named the godfather to Minnelli’s daughter, Liza.) Duquette became a fixture in Hollywood, decorating the homes and stages of some of the most important players.
As formal as Duquette was when it came to social graces (no swearing, impeccable manners, and appropriate dress were required), he was often unconventional in the details. Wilkinson notes that, while black-tie was a staple for the designer, his version of the dress code would often take the form of a “tuxedo made out of ecclesiastical fabric that he’d found in Rome. Or it would be made out of an old Chinese brocade.”
Similarly, his design aesthetic was always original and at the height of style, but that didn’t mean he was only about the expensive antiques. He collected plenty of valuable pieces, but he paired those with his own creations, often made from ordinary materials. “Beauty, not luxury, is what I value,” Duquette said.
“Tony shopped until he dropped. He just loved shopping. When we went to a 99-cent store, he would always say, ‘Oh can I come?’” photographer Tim Street-Porter recounted in Tony Duquette by Wendy Goodman and Wilkinson. “He went whipping around the store, piling stuff off every shelf—he thought he was in Aladdin’s cave. Tony is the only person we know who could spend $1,000 at the 99-cent store.”
While Dawnridge wasn’t the first property that Duquette owned, it was the first that he made completely his own. In 1949, shortly after marrying his artist wife Elizabeth, whom he called “Beegle,” he bought a plot of land in a canyon above Beverly Hills that neither his banker nor his real estate agent thought was a good idea. But Duquette had a vision and he proceeded to build a small chateau on his new parcel.
“My first impression [of Dawnridge] was WOW! And, yes, I could live here very easily. It was one of the most amazing places I had ever seen. It was this magical jewel box of insanity!” fashion photographer Steven Meisel told Goodman and Wilkinson.
Over the ensuing decades, he would transform Dawnridge into a wonderland, including the addition of New Dawnridge on the neighboring plot of land that he acquired in the 1960s.
It was at this sister house that two renters got a little out of control one night in 1974. While the details of the evening are still a little hazy, a girl the two male residents had invited home that night died. It is believed that they deliberately set the fire to cover up the crime and make it appear as if she had perished in the blaze.
“After the fire, Tony, Beegle, my future bride Ruth, and I hightailed it to South America to avoid the coroner’s inquest and get away from all the complications,” Wilkinson writes in his book, Tony Duquette’s Dawnridge. Duquette had taken Wilkinson on as something of an apprentice when the younger man was only 17, and the two men were still working together at the time. While they were in Peru, they received a telegram from their secretary telling them the death had been confirmed as foul play.
While that first fire was high on drama, it was the next that was truly devastating.
In 1985, Duquette purchased what Wilkinson describes as “this huge, old, abandoned, derelict, vandalized, synagogue” in San Francisco. He completely renovated it, brought it up to code, and moved in much of his work. On the ground floor was his interactive sculpture exhibition, Our Lady Queen of the Angels, that he had originally made for L.A.’s Museum of Science and Industry. In the vast attic space was “everything you could possibly imagine” from Duquette’s collection of treasures and antiques.
Wilkinson says most of this trove had previously been housed in Duquette’s L.A. studio, which he describes as “a tinder box. It was a box of matches…a hundred years ago it should have burned up. It never burned up.”
At the time, Duquette was moving much of his life to San Francisco, so Wilkinson convinced him to sell the L.A. studio and transfer his warehouse of goods to the attic of the former synagogue. “And then—whammo!—it’s just gone a year later.”
View of the drawing room of the Beverly Hills house of interior designer, Tony Duquette with an English Regency harp, two large, standing sunbursts on either side of a tall simple mirror, a tall red brocade curtained window with a Baroque-type lambrequin is behind a pair of eighteenth-century Bergère chairs.
Shirley C. Burden/GettyThe cause of this 1989 fire—like most of the Duquette conflagrations—was also manmade. Wilkinson says the designer had a soft spot for letting people live in his houses, often rent-free. The woman who was benefiting from this largesse at the time was in the kitchen making dinner when her dog knocked a space heater in her bedroom onto her bedspread.
The entire building was soon engulfed in flames. Gone were the 18th-century doorways, crystal chandeliers, boxes of silks and brocades, 18th-century furniture, paintings, costumes, vintage books, and entire magazine archives.
It was devastating. And then, eight days later, the original Dawnridge house caught fire. Again, it was one of the occupants who was to blame after a renter plugged eight computers into one socket. The good news was that the house was salvageable; the bad, the damage was extensive and the home had to be largely redecorated.
At this point, one would be forgiven for thinking that Duquette would never again have to worry about fire. How many accidental blazes can a person suffer in one lifetime?
Sadly, when it comes to Duquette, the answer is four. The designer purchased a ranch in Malibu that he named “Sortilegium” and on which he built a creative empire by way of over 20 fabulous buildings. They were, of course, filled with his remaining treasures, including his wife’s paintings that were some of the few things that had been recovered from the San Francisco fire.
Wilkinson owned the ranch next door and remembers one day in 1993 when he looked up from a project in L.A. to see a little plume of smoke, “like the smoke from a cigarette,” in the distance. Early the next morning, his property caretaker called to let him know that fire was on its way. Wilkinson picked Duquette up at 6 a.m., and they talked their way past the roadblock to take cover on their properties and try to save what they could.
After the flames ripped through his land, Wilkinson walked down the road where he “could see Tony’s place and it was entirely on fire.”
Soon after, Duquette showed up and said that the fire had sliced a path through the middle of Sortilegium, destroying everything on one side of the line. The two men rushed back to Duquette’s property to try to save what was in the untouched buildings, but before they had gotten much into the trucks, the fire returned. In less than an hour, the entire property and all of its buildings had burned to the ground in the Green Mountain brush fire.
“Here’s what your readers have to understand,” Wilkinson, who now owns Dawnridge, says. “When these things happen to you, bad things happen to you, just let it out. Cry, yell, scream, curse—whatever you need to do, do it. Because he didn’t. He just—noblesse oblige—he just carried on and did not that I know of cry, curse, scream. And I think that’s what made him sick.”
Duquette died in 1999, six years after the fire. In the years that followed the Malibu blaze, he continued to work, including mounting an exhibition of new sculptures at the Armand Hammer Museum called Phoenix Rising from His Flames. His heartbreak and loss were profound, but he was able to find the beauty in the destruction.
“Even in its last moments each little house and pavilion lighted up in glory and was beautiful. And then they were gone,” Duquette told a reporter following the Malibu fire.
When Duquette was a child spending part of the year in Three Rivers, Michigan, he used to create what he called “estates” in the lot next to his family’s home. The houses and streets of his miniature world were made out of cardboard and twigs and theatrically lit by birthday candles during unveilings he held for friends and family.
“All of the things he did, the ranch especially, were a giant version of his estates, his childhood constructions lighted by birthday candles,” Wilkinson says. “And to him, this [fire] was just as good as when he would light [those] birthday candles when he was a kid. To have it all go up in flames and sparkle for him one last time—it’s so sad.”
