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"Betty Sherrill, who died on Monday at the age of 91, was American decorating\u2019s grande dame, the chairman of McMillen Inc., the country\u2019s oldest operating interior design firm, which she ran from 1972 until 2002.\n\nPetite, perennially blonde, and flirtatious yet steely, the former Betty Lewis Stevens was the child of a Louisiana plantation aristocrat and a New Orleans engineer/contractor. In 1949 she relocated to New York City, following a surprise marriage to H. Virgil Sherrill, a Louisiana-born Yale graduate turned World War II flying ace turned investment banker. (He eventually retired as senior director of Prudential Securities.)\n\nThe change of scenery was dismayingly abrupt, geographically and emotionally. \u201CI don\u2019t think my mother really wanted to get married, but she and my father had been engaged for four or five years, and he gave her an ultimatum: \u2018Either marry me this weekend or I\u2019m out,\u2019\u201D says their daughter, Ann Pyne, the current president of McMillen. \u201CSo they basically eloped, and she ended up in New York, where she just wept and wailed.\u201D\n\nSeeking some equilibrium, Sherrill took a class or two at the Parsons School of Design and opened a small decorating firm called Elizabeth Sherrill Interiors. (Elizabeth, she felt, sounded more proper and professional than Betty, though she had been named for an ancestor, George Washington\u2019s sister Betty Lewis.) When that endeavor quickly failed, Sherrill\u2019s mother-in-law, a McMillen client, urged her to get a job there. Eleanor Brown, who had founded the company in 1924, initially balked at taking the energetic Southern beauty onto the payroll, tartly observing, \u201CYou\u2019ll talk on the telephone all the time, and you\u2019ll go out every night.\u201D Which, Sherrill admitted, was true. But she firmly told Brown, \u201CI want to anyway.\u201D\n\nHired in 1952 for $50 a week (about $430 today), Sherrill needed no professional skills, only a ready smile, for her first assignment\u2014passing out pamphlets for McMillen\u2019s groundbreaking exhibition of modern French furniture. Her colleagues looked on her with skepticism; all of them were Parsons graduates, her daughter notes, and considered Sherrill \u201Ca social gadabout and untrained.\u201D Eventually, she began assisting the august McMillen decorator Ethel Smith (her projects included the private quarters of the Johnson White House) and quickly acquired her own roster of devoted clients.\n\nSherrill\u2019s chronological youth and personal vivacity proved to be a boon in her early years with McMillen, attracting women like herself, typically 30-something wives and mothers who weren\u2019t quite ready for McMillen\u2019s hallmark formality. \u201CMy mother\u2019s style was spunky, with bright colors and country looking,\u201D says Pyne, who is writing a history of the company for Acanthus Press and who has helped loosen McMillen\u2019s aesthetic stays to a considerable degree. That being said, Sherrill told The New York Times in 1977, stately relics of the past remained a mainstay in the firm\u2019s vocabulary: \u201CWe always advise our young clients to buy one fine antique\u2014perhaps a red-lacquer secretary, which can make the whole room come alive.\u201D She also had no patience for people who failed to take an interest in household niceties. \u201CI hate to see people not fix their own flowers,\u201D she once told a reporter. \u201CDon\u2019t you think it\u2019s sad?\u201D\n\nSherrill became president of McMillen in 1972, when Eleanor Brown retired, and she raised its public profile through the development of branded furniture lines for Baker, fabrics for Lee Jofa and Robert Allen, bed linens for Springmaid, and carpets for Stark. In 2002 she handed over the reins to her daughter and became its chairman. A third generation, Sherrill\u2019s granddaughter, Elizabeth Pyne, oversees the 90-year-old company\u2019s design division, McMillen Plus, which caters to a younger clientele. Sherrill\u2019s son, Stephen C. Sherrill, is the chairman of the board of B&amp;amp;G Foods (which makes Cream of Wheat, Static Guard, and Mrs. Dash seasoning, among other brands) and a managing director of Bruckmann, Rosser, Sherrill &amp;amp; Co., a private-equity firm.\n\nUnder Betty Sherrill\u2019s direction, McMillen remained largely a bastion of Social Register propriety. Its typical client was defined by New York Times reporter Virginia Lee Warren in 1965: \u201Cthe person with rather conservative taste, a predilection for luxury, a feeling for period furniture\u2014especially French, which is the most expensive\u2014and an imposing amount of money to spend.\u201D Which meant, for the most part, businessmen and society figures with grandly scaled houses and apartments, among them automotive titan Henry Ford II, cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, and television magnate William S. Paley.\n\nSherrill had no qualms, however, about rejecting a plutocrat whose taste she considered irredeemable or whose personality she considered tiresome. As the decorator told HG in 1992, the abrasive hotelier Leona Helmsley \u201Cdragged me up to her apartment at the Park Lane [hotel] and said, \u2018Look at my antiques.\u2019 And I said, \u2018You have no antiques.\u2019\u201D Those four little words meant only one thing: The house of McMillen would not be doing business with the house of Helmsley."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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