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Byline: Laura Jacobs
Cross manners matriarch Emily Post with clever couturiere Elsa Schiaparelli and whom would you get? Interior decorator Dorothy Draper, that's who. Like Post, Draper was a rich girl from Tuxedo Park, New York, raised to society but working to reach the masses through her best-selling books and bites ("If it looks right, it is right"). Like Schiaparelli, Draper had a deep feeling for the surreal, an unblinking eye that saw above and beyond. It was Dorothy Draper who dominated American decorating through the 30s and 40s, her disciplined flamboyance not only rousing housewives in Podunk but influencing high-end commercial interiors, which was a first. She was so much the last word that the press eventually made her a word-a verb, no less: "to Draperize." From May 2 to August 27-with vintage photographs, drawings, company designs, original furniture, and a 1957 television interview with ...