Ellen DeGeneres Takes Paris: Inside the Comedian and Designer’s Whirlwind European Vacation
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"Last time here we didn't buy anything," says DeGeneres. "We are not making that mistake again." Photographed by the author, at Paris's Clignancourt flea market on a 1970s cast-concrete chair.
Photo: Hamish Bowles
As she puts the finishing touches on her ambitious new lifestyle-and-clothing collection, Ellen DeGeneres packs off to Europe for a whirlwind design-inspiration trip—with Hamish Bowles in tow.
"We're in Paree, baby!" says Ellen DeGeneres, exultant, "the City of Romance!" and she plants a kiss on her wife, Portia de Rossi's, softly powdered cheek.
I have joined the happy couple in Europe on a whirlwind visual fact-finding inspiration trip for E.D., Ellen's bold new lifestyle-and-clothing brand, which she is developing with the maverick investor J. Christopher Burch. "We're both very, very competitive," says Ellen of her partnership with Burch, "and we want to break every rule." E.D., incidentally, is pronounced "Ed," Portia's nickname for Ellen, who playfully claims that it stands for "effortless design," one of her creative team's mantras, along with "polished casual" and "whimsical humor." All these concepts are channeled into the collections that will start modestly enough with a capsule holiday line, then build up to a sprawling portfolio that includes everything from cheerful ceramic plates to playful stationery to rugs, bedding, garden tools, and candles. There will be accessibly priced men's and women's clothing that reflects Ellen's enduringly classic, collegiate style (leavened with dresses that suggest Portia's understated, feminine sensibility). All will be sold through the E.D. Web site (launching in spring 2015), retail partners (still to be named), and pop-up shops. Ellen's strategy may not be novel—this is the era of Aerin, Martha, Blake, Gwyneth, after all—but her endgame is ambitious. She envisions nothing less than global brand domination, to reposition herself as the design icon of elevated-lifestyle taste. "When I someday decide to stop doing the show," she has said, "my entire focus is going to be design."
The plan for our long weekend is to hit Paris's flea markets, visit tastemaking friends, take in an exhibit or two in the City of Light, hop on Mr. B.'s plane to the south for a visit to the antiques fair of Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, then dash to Antwerp, a design-centric city that Ellen has long been keen to explore. All this visual stimulation is intended to feed the aesthetic of Ellen's nascent line, still taking shape back in E.D.'s light-flooded Manhattan studios. Her ever-expanding, Williamsburg-cool team, which now includes five apparel designers, five homeware designers, and two textile designers ("All these people work for me?!" queried Ellen on her first visit there), is already addressing the challenging proposition of channeling Ellen's mantras and recherché style into everything from shrunken boyish blazers to fragrance. She reviews their inspiration boards and samples with quick-fire decisiveness.
"I did the Pier 1 thing when I had no money, and I know how to live that life," Ellen tells me, and although she now runs to furniture by Prouvé and Royère, and art by Basquiat and Warhol, "I still understand that everyone should be able to have great design in their home," she says, "so let me do it in a more accessible way."
Ellen's first night in Paris has been a sleepless one, as her cell phone bleeped a symphony of text updates on the Emmys. "As of this morning, we have won 51," she tells me nonchalantly. Not bad for an eleven-year run that began only after a battle with television executives who, as Ellen herself notes, questioned what a perky lesbian comic could have to say to daytime TV–watching Americans. " 'What are housewives going to watch her for? What does she have in common with straight women?' " Ellen remembers them asking. "The first year, we broke records for most Emmys won for a first-season talk show," she adds with a wry shrug and a flash of her compelling glacier-blue eyes.
America's sweetheart finally nodded off at 6:00 a.m. but forgot that she had ordered room service for 7:45. Undaunted by her abbreviated sleep, however, she is more than ready to navigate the famed labyrinth of the Clignancourt puces.
Ellen has always had an instinct for design. "When I think about decorating," she says, "that's when I start to meditate." In the challenging early days of her career in stand-up comedy ("It's horrible. You only do it if you have no other skills to fall back on"), Ellen admits that she made as much money renovating houses and flipping them as through her chosen profession.
She still has an urgent desire to buy, renovate, decorate—and move on. A legacy, perhaps, of an itinerant and unprivileged childhood lived in a series of rented apartments between Metairie, Louisiana, and Atlanta, Texas—years she spent dreaming of the suburban homes that she didn't know were beyond her parents' financial reach.
In Paris we are a ten-person troupe (plus security) that includes several members of her E.D. team and the unflappable Cheryl, here to negotiate les meilleurs prix with the flea-market dealers and handle logistics ("I've had a nightmare shipping stuff to L.A.," Ellen confides. "A year later these things arrive, and I'm like 'What's this?!' "). Ellen is wearing a harebell-blue shirt designed in collaboration with her full-time stylist Kellen Richards, sage-green chinos, a straw porkpie hat, and a vintage Hermès postman's bag slung over her shoulder. Portia is old school–movie star immaculate in a miraculously unwrinkled shrunken white linen jacket and pants from Band of Outsiders, with a silk Hermès head scarf folded and wrapped as a hair band, and a thick-soled Prada sandal with the ergodynamic look of an Olympic athlete's running shoe. "She's wearing white!" says Ellen, laughing. "She's going to be filthy dirty. We are not going to Wyeth!
"Last time we ended up here, we didn't buy anything," she adds when we arrive at the Marché Paul Bert. "We are not making that mistake again. Let the buying begin!" This time, Ellen is not kidding.
In between noting the dense hang of the black-framed pictures covering the wall of a vendor's stand and a young artist's work displayed in another (which makes Ellen ponder the idea of artist collaborations for her line), in short order she has taken a memo on a brace of turn-of-the-century steel bookcases with sliding glass doors and a massive nineteenth-century artist's easel (for her television stand) and invested in a sculptural cast-concrete outdoor seat from the seventies, a set of eight Mallet-Stevens utilitarian thirties metal stacking chairs, a stylish Art Deco garden chair that once stood on the Champs-Élysées, and a grand total of sixteen lamps, mostly of spiky mid-century form.
Ellen has always had an instinct for design. 'When I think about decorating,' she says, 'that's when I start to meditate.'
"I love shopping," she says, "and if I didn't love it so much I'd be crying in the street, crying with my cheek on the concrete. I'm that tired."
Nevertheless, the lure of a visit to the gallery of Patrick Seguin, holy grail of Prouvé collectors, proves too much to resist. One of Portia's first presents to Ellen was Prouvé's Cité chaise, secretly sleuthed as a birthday surprise. A Giacometti cat sculpture followed: "She's expensive to buy for!" laughs Portia.
Beyond its discreetly anonymous warehouse door, Seguin's vastly high-ceilinged, light-flooded space is dotted with Prouvé masterworks: It is a temple to industrial-design chic. Ellen is almost faint with desire. She has the Cité daybed in another color but loves this milky green–and–conker brown version; she has 20 of the Prouvé Standard chairs; she has the Aile d'Avion desk; she had the Tropic 506 table, and now, seeing it again in all its glory, she's mad at herself for letting it go (so much so that she is on the phone later that day, deftly—and successfully—negotiating to buy it back).
Post siesta, we all convene for dinner chez Marco Scarani and Jamie Creel (of New York's Creel and Gow) in their ravishing ancien régime apartment on the Rue de Seine. The anticipated presence of Lee Radziwill has thrown Ellen into a momentary dress-code quandary. "I'm wearing a gown and bonnet," she deadpans. "And a veil." She's in a white shirt and white jeans, of course, and Portia is as arresting as ever in black lace and the black diamonds that Ellen gifted her. The apartment is a compendium of Sixth Arrondissement chic, and star chef Claude Colliot has been enlisted to prepare dinner—his refined pescatarian menu, prepared with great elaboration and invention, is delectable but not quite DeGeneres–De Rossi friendly. (They are both rigorously vegan. "People say, 'Can you eat bread?' " jokes Portia. "Yes, it didn't have eyes and a mother!")
Our dusk view across the dome of the Bibliothèque Mazarine to the Seine and the Louvre beyond, however, is bewitching. The drily engaging Lee Radziwill sits next to Ellen but is paying avid attention to Portia, whom she pronounces "fascinating." (Two weeks later, front row and center at the Giambattista Valli Haute Couture show in Paris, Lee has abandoned her signature French pleat and instead is sporting a radical new back-swept haircut à la Portia.)
The following morning Ellen nixes Isle-sur-la-Sorgue in favor of a lie-in; so, torn between an embarrassment of intriguing-sounding Parisian exhibits, we settle on the acclaimed Lucio Fontana retrospective at the Musée d'Art Moderne.
"Do you have a Fontana?" Ellen asks me ingenuously as we walk in, a sweet thought but one that perhaps reveals only a rudimentary understanding of Condé Nast's pay structure. Inside, we drool over Fontana's little-known early ceramics and swoon for the celebrated slash paintings that revolutionized the art world in the 1950s.
"What is collection particulier?" asks Ellen, who has been carefully reading the exhibit notes. "Private collection? That means they are for sale, right?" Perhaps not, I say. "But they will be one day," says Ellen, undaunted. As we wander through the remaining galleries, Ellen is discreetly busy on her iPhone. Before we leave the museum she has been offered three different paintings from Fontana's slash series by sundry dealers with whom she works. These ladies, let it be noted, are not messing about.
A trip to Colette is nipped in the bud by a surprise invitation to visit Seguin's achingly chic apartment in a seventeenth-century Marais manse, a treasury of Prouvé, Royère, and Le Corbusier masterworks. "You are very inspiring," Ellen tells him. "We are going to go back and redo our home." Then, in a surreal change of mood, it is off to the leafy countryside, to a picnic hosted by William Holloway, who cofounded 1stdibs, and his partner, the decorator Jean-Louis Deniot, in their nineteenth-century faux-Renaissance château in Chantilly (one of their nine properties). Nature-loving Ellen and Portia explore the watercress fields and the stables. If Ellen dreams houses, Portia dreams horses. "Look at all this prettiness," says Portia. "I really am a farm girl." "We have three dogs, three cats, and three horses," explains Ellen. "I would love sheep and goats, and I'd really like chickens," adds Portia. "We need to get a farm."
And thence the magic carpet to Antwerp, where we are installed at the state-of-design Hotel Julien, which exemplifies the sleekly organic Belgian aesthetic. Belgium has just beaten Russia in the World Cup, and the streets are thronged with jubilant soccer fans who lack the reticence of those French antiquaires. Ellen and Portia are nearly mobbed at the restaurant and bid a hasty retreat. They eat at the hotel instead.
Our destination the next day is the Holy Grail: Castle Gravenwezel, the home of Axel and May Vervoordt, a place so sacred in Ellen's mind that Portia once attempted to organize a surprise fiftieth-birthday trip to it for her. Axel's son Boris, a model of courtly hospitality and elegantly proffered knowledge, leads us there in his crocodile-green Rolls-Royce Corniche.
An allée of immemorial beech trees opens to a moated castle of impossible fairy-tale beauty. "She's your biggest fan," Chris Burch tells Axel. "I really am," says Ellen. "It's so inspirational. It was really a dream of mine to meet you."
The interiors, from dungeon basement to attic, are a study in Axel Vervoordt's advanced refinements of taste: walls the color and dapple of tobacco leaves hung with abstract works of Japan's postwar artists; magnificent objects from a Flemish prince's cabinet of curiosities placed on an ancient farm table that celebrates "the beauty of imperfection," as Axel opines. "I love raw," agrees Ellen. "I love anything organic."
The gardens are just as revelatory, and it is here, in the shadow of a low, gnarled apple tree, with views of a wild garden hemmed by hedges clipped like clouds, that we have lunch, feasting on a banquet of garden-fresh vegetables that has been effortlessly orchestrated by Axel's wife, May.
After lunch, Ellen and Portia set off for a cruise of the Croatian coast. As they leave, Ellen takes one last look at the turreted castle, spangled with reflected light from its moat.
"Just beauty everywhere," she says. Now she just has to capture its essence and channel it into a scented candle.
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