Dorothy Liebes | 2. Elsie De Wolfe II

In her unpublished autobiography, Liebes interspersed memories of historic events of the early 20th Century with more intimate details of family life: the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, watching the spectacle of Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet steaming through the Golden Gate in 1908 (30 years before the iconic bridge was built); and riding to her grandparents’ ranch in the family’s bright red Rambler with its enormous whitewalled tires. 

The Great White Fleet

The Family's Rambler

Liebes loved her classes at school, especially drawing and painting, and absorbed her favorite art teacher Elizabeth McDermott’s “exquisite color sense,” wrote Liebes. She filled her sketchbooks with everything from cacti to “hats that would startle Lilly Daché,”  Hats would become one of Liebes’s signature accessories in adulthood. 

In 1916, when she was a senior in high school, Liebes predicted in the Santa Rosa High School yearbook that she would become “Elsie de Wolfe II.” Elsie de Wolfe was widely acknowledged as America’s first interior decorator, and her column “Our Lady of the Decorations” in The Delineator, a style-setting magazine of the day, was likely on teenage Dorothy’s reading list.

Decades later, in 1963, Liebes received the American Society of Interior Designers Elsie de Wolfe award, fulfilling her prophecy to an extent she could only imagine. She also recognized de Wolfe’s signature - beige - decorating motif in the posh apartment of her first husband Leon Liebes when they married in 1928.