by Nate Berkus
Which is why on those occasions that I meet a woman who is so at ease and assured in her own skin, who has traveled so far, and whose stuff tells the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about that entire journey, it never fails to be an unforgettable experience. This is a long way of saying that the only people who aren’t madly in love with Dolores Robinson are ones who haven’t had the privilege of meeting her, or the joy of visiting her lovely, light-filled home in Beverly Hills.
My first encounter with Dolores was in South Africa, during a party celebrating the opening of the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls. At the time, I had no idea that Dolores was a renowned Los Angeles talent manager, as well as the mother of actress Holly Robinson Peete, but I did know that I was in the presence of one of the warmest, smartest, sexiest, most authentic people I had ever met. All my life I’ve been drawn to strong, charismatic women—women who’ve figured out who they are and what they want, and have enough self-esteem to believe they deserve to get it. Needless to say, when Dolores told me she was in the process of renovating her house from head to toe, I was intrigued. Over the next few months, she emailed me questions about paint colors and what rug I thought should go where, and I was more than happy to give her a little advice. But she lives on one side of the country, and I live on the other, so I was left to wonder: How did that house finally turn out?
Just one glimpse of the great, weather-beaten U.S. Post Office bike standing in her driveway, its basket overflowing with blue-and-white hydrangea, and I feel like moving all my stuff into the guest bedroom, or at least dropping by Dolores’s every Sunday afternoon for a glass of iced tea and a long conversation. That’s the thing about Dolores’s house: It may be in a canyon of Southern California, but it reminds everyone who visits of a house they love on the coast of Connecticut, or Massachusetts, or Maine. The interior may be “all about me feeling good,” as Dolores says, but the fact is, her place makes everyone feel good. You walk in and can’t help but feel like you’ve come home.
To truly understand what makes it so special, you first have to imagine the homes she was surrounded by as a 9-year-old girl growing up in Philadelphia, working alongside her mother, a housecleaner. Dolores would vacuum, dust, clean, and mop the upstairs of people’s houses, while her mother did the downstairs. The upper-middle-class homes she worked in had long driveways, and fields where horses grazed behind white picket fences. Inside were hardwood floors, wainscoting, French doors, bead board, crown molding, and marble. Only when Dolores was halfway through decorating her Beverly Hills house did it dawn on her that she was re-creating the look and feel of the places she helped clean as a girl.
But Dolores also wanted to fill her home with mementos that have inspired her over the years and that continue to bring her joy. Things that connect her to her ancestors, her children, and her grandchildren. Not to mention all the people whose lives have intersected with hers, either personally or professionally. Barack Obama, who has unofficially adopted her as his “California mama,” is on that list; Bill Clinton is also a friend, though he skips the formalities and just calls her “Mama”; and Ronald and Nancy Reagan used to invite her to their Santa Barbara ranch on the weekends. Even John F. Kennedy once picked her out of a huge crowd of supporters to point at her and wink.
“I’m just a girl with a dream,” Dolores likes to say. In fact, when her home was finally finished, she lit a fire, brewed herself a cup of tea, and sent a photograph to all her friends with those words attached. If one of those dreams was to create the most welcoming living room in California, I’d say she’s succeeded very well, thanks to the graceful white molding, a trayed ceiling, and beautiful French doors with antique latches that lead into the foyer and dining room. Overstuffed green-and-white-checked chairs surround the fireplace, whose andirons are hidden from view by a three-foot-high cardboard silhouette of a leopard, created by the pop artist Mo McDermott. If she’s in the mood for a fire, the leopard obliges by relocating to the kitchen. Another piece by McDermott—a tall red palm tree silhouetted against the curtains—isn’t going anywhere. Above the mantel, two wrought-iron warriors holding candlesticks flank a California plein air painting, while below, a rectangular glass coffee table showcases her collection of vintage magnifying glasses that she uses to peer into home and decorating magazines. Her favorite spot for that is in an old black leather chair she found on a Los Angeles street corner for $25. It may be losing a little of its stuffing, but that chair helps to create the perfect reading nook.
It’s the three walls of books that make this living room feel so traditional and cozy. Novels and biographies share space with first-edition memoirs by friends Dolores has known since coming to Los Angeles in 1974. Mixed in with her book collection is an assortment of tiny snuff jars she found in Hong Kong antiques shops, and a collection of old baby shoes, including her children’s and grandchildren’s first slippers and sneakers, and, well, just some random baby shoes (Dolores has a thing for baby shoes). Above the shoes is a limited-edition faded purple six-pack of Snapple soda that her daughter Holly created when she was a finalist on Celebrity Apprentice. The soda, known as “Compassionberry Tea,” was created and marketed in honor of her teenage grandson, R.J., who was born with autism. There’s also plenty of Barack Obama memorabilia, from bobble-headed dolls, to a vintage “Obama for Illinois Senator” yard sign, to a photograph of Dolores and the newly elected president, the former smiling that smile, the latter grinning that grin, the combined wattage of the two of them strong enough to light up the free world.
Then there’s the desk, with attached inkwells on either side, which has a place of honor against the wall. It’s hard to put into words how moved I am by this desk, or by the old family pictures in their vintage frames on top of it, including two shots of Dolores’s grandfather, Reverend Jeremiah Lowe, who actually built this piece. If Dolores’s grandchildren feel like digging a little deeper into family history, they can find more old photos inside a cracked leather-bound album. “I remember that desk from my childhood,” Dolores says. “And I also remember standing on my tiptoes to look at those inkwells.” The desk, with its attached hutch, is a jewel box, where Dolores keeps the things that matter most to her, ranging from a stack of miniature leather-bound Shakespeare plays to an assortment of vintage fountain pens that he loves simply because “those days are over—they don’t make fountain pens like that anymore.”
Hanging above the desk is a painting of a handsome young man in a hood, done by the artist Kehinde Wiley. Sharing the wall is Dolores’s large collection of paintings and photographs of African Americans, including a vintage print titled Negros Having Their Passes Checked on the Levees of New Orleans, which a friend gave her right before Hurricane Katrina hit.
“I offend more people than you can imagine by referring to myself as ‘just a little colored girl,’ ” Dolores says. “But, come on—I’ve got plenty of pride.” Her lack of self-consciousness allows her to showcase the African American experience with a healthy mix of irreverence and matter-of-factness. After all, not a lot of black women would be secure enough in who they are to cover the walls of an entire bathroom in bright red Harlem Toile de Jouy, a fabric created by designer Sheila Bridges that, as Dolores says, “shows black people doing every stereotypical thing you can imagine, from playing basketball to eating fried chicken and watermelon.” She has only one rule: If guests come out of the bathroom without laughing, she sends them right back in. For the record, she swears that if she ever sells the house to a Caucasian couple, she’ll make a sign that reads, “We Didn’t Put Up This Wallpaper —Blame the Black Lady Who Sold Us the Place.”
I’m stopped cold by the old wooden washboard that hangs on the wall of Dolores’s laundry room, with its top stamped “Columbus Washboard Co., Columbus, Ohio.” It once belonged to her grandmother. Can you imagine all the hands that have touched it—that spent years of their lives scrubbing clothes clean on it? The washboard sits across the room from a sink, and a sign that
reads, “Colored Women,” while an old black woman in a bright red bandanna advertises “Fun-to-Wash Washing Powder.” The evolution of how a family washboard ended up hanging in a Beverly Hills laundry room complete with two-inch-thick Carrera marble counters is almost impossible to fathom.
The plant-filled dining room is dominated by a spiky, dark green pineapple-shaped chandelier that hangs from a wrought-iron chain over the table, complementing the palm trees on a screen of French hand-blocked Zuber wallpaper. A Queen Anne mirror hangs above a primitive table that serves as Dolores’s bar, while another table, this one with gold legs, plays host to a bucket plant. “R.J.—he’s my grandchild with autism—loves this plant because it’s carnivorous, so I keep it in here for him.” The dining room chairs are slipcovered in simple white cotton. Most of the prints on the walls come from thrifting. One shows two old flower ladies sitting on a little country road in England, while another is a moody desert landscape. “I know I didn’t pay more than $10 for any of these—I’ve just found them at various garage sales over the years,” she says with a laugh. Then there are the bold, color-saturated, 1950s-era Haitian paintings of black people in court dress that hang in both the dining room and the foyer. They were a gift from an art dealer friend. “When I first traveled the world, one of the places I visited early on was Haiti,” Dolores says. “I was kind of stunned by the political climate at the time, but I got to know and love that country, and those paintings always transport me.”
A woven African bowl, filled with white bisque plaster pears, sits on the dining table, a souvenir from the night in South Africa when she and I first met. When we checked into our hotel, there was one in each room—a gift from Oprah. Attached to the basket was a card describing the number of people who had worked on the basket, how many hours it had taken them to do it, and how much they were paid. I’m glad Dolores still has hers, because I’ve still got mine.
But few things give Dolores more pleasure than her vast, airy kitchen, with its white molding, teal cabinets, and eleven-foot-long marble countertop, lined by six red-chrome 1950s-era stools—one for each grandchild. She even built her own baking closet, made from pinewood and overflowing with tins, cupcake baskets, mixers, rolling pins, and a Cuisinart, lit by a bare lightbulb with a single pull string attached to it that is vintage Grandma’s house. If her grandkids would rather watch TV than perfect their pie-crust technique, they can head to the TV watching zone, with its pair of squishy white sofas, separated by a coffee table made out of two wicker doggie beds, where each of her Havanese likes to catch a nap.
An upright piano sits against the wall leading to the back of the house, decorated with a bust of Matthew Henson, the man who accompanied Admiral Peary to the North Pole in 1909 and a distant relative of Dolores’s. Scattered around the kitchen and the back of the house are family Christmas cards she’s sent to friends over the years; photos of her children and grandchildren (yes, that’s her grown son, Matt, beaming beside a just-caught tuna); a poster advertising a children’s book about autism, My Brother Charlie, written by Holly and her then-12-year-old daughter, Ryan; and mounted neon letters spelling out D-O-L-O-R-E-S. (It originally read “Happy 50th Birthday, Dolores,” but the “Happy 50th Birthday” part was a rental, and the store needed it back.) At the base of one photo of her grandchildren is a scattering of miniature rocks. They come from the re-creation area at the Robben Island prison, a yard Nelson Mandela visited every day for eighteen years of his twenty-seven-year sentence.
The first thing you notice about Dolores’s bedroom are the colored beads wrapped around the crystal chandelier. She strung them there last Christmas, and liked them so much she decided they should stay. Her dressing room is similarly homey, scattered with embroidered pillows that say things like “Ask Me About My Grandchildren” and “What a Dump!”, a photograph of Dolores with Oprah, and two chairs that were a gift from her old friend, singer Linda Ronstadt, where Dolores loves to curl up and read. A photo of her grandmother Lucinda looks down from one wall. “She used to tell me, ‘You’ll do all right in the world because you can look people in the eye,’ ” says her granddaughter, who meets Lucinda’s gaze every morning.
A basket of red-and-pink knitting complements a hot pink lawn chair outside her bathroom. That’s no coincidence, either. “The pink came from me getting breast cancer a few years ago,” says Dolores, who is also the proud owner of two titanium knees. “Suddenly in this house, everywhere you looked, there was a touch of hot pink.”
When Dolores wants a breath of fresh air, she can make her way outside, uncage Ike and Tina, her two enormous turtles, and plop down in her outdoor bedroom. You read that right. Pushed up against a stone wall, at the base of a hillside teeming with rosebushes and lavender, is a double bed complete with white sheets and a light blanket. A nearby fountain burbles, and a grill is ready to be lit if the day turns chilly. “When the sun goes down, it is just so heavenly,” Dolores says. I agree, and if my New York apartment had a lawn, I’d be rolling out a bed faster than you can say “Whatever gets you through the night.”
I’ve known many people from modest beginnings who succeeded in life beyond their wildest dreams, and God knows they’re grateful for it. But not many of them are able to find harmony and balance and hop off the hamster wheel long enough to really grasp the meaning of “a life well lived.” To me, it means surrounding yourself with the people and the pets and the things that bring you happiness every day. Dolores is one of those people who really gets that, and the proof is in how happy, and at home, her life makes everyone else feel.
If the people I love come to me in search of a good home-cooked meal, advice on child-rearing, an extra guy for a game of touch football, assistance in deciphering their tax returns, baiting a fishhook, or assem-bling a carburetor, I’m afraid they’re out of luck. But there is one thing I definitely can do for a person I really care about, and that’s help them make a home … even if they’re not exactly looking for my help.
Corin Nelson is used to running the show—and she’s got five Emmy Awards to prove she does it very well. What she didn’t have when she left her apartment in Los Angeles for New York to sign on as executive producer of my talk show was a place to live. That was a major problem—not for Corin, who assured me she’d be fine staying in a hotel or a furnished corporate apartment, but for me. It drives me crazy to see a friend trying to get by without beauty and comfort and at least a few tangible reminders of the things that really matter. I’ve always had a need to make sure my friends feel genuinely at home in their homes. And Corin Nelson isn’t just a good television producer, she’s also a good friend. Actually, for the two of us, it was love at first lunch. If Corin was going to serve as executive producer on my show, the chemistry had to be right because we’d be spending a lot of time together. There would be long days and exhausting nights, stomach bugs and head colds, last-minute script changes and bruised egos, cooking segments that go south and guests that go missing. There would be blizzards and lost luggage and pieces of furniture stuck on a truck somewhere in Buffalo, and the two of us would have to get through all of it, side by side. The first step would be to see if we could get through a Cobb salad and some conversation.
I didn’t need to know about the work that Corin had done; her resume spoke for itself. What I wanted to find out was how she was going to treat the waiter and who she liked spending time with when she wasn’t working. I wanted to know where she was coming from (both literally and figuratively) and why she wanted to be here with me instead.
This is what I found out: Corin grew up in New York, spending summers and weekends between houses in Montauk and Nantucket. She loved sailing and hiking and being at the beach with her sister, Shawn, and she still visits her mother at the cottage in Nantucket whenever she can. Corin also told me all about her mother’s mother, Shirley Polykoff, the legendary copywriter who came up with iconic ad campaigns in the 1950s and ’60s, such as “Blondes have more fun,” “Does she or doesn’t she?,” and �
�Curlers in your hair … shame on you.” Corin’s grandmother was a businesswoman at a time when there weren’t any, and she rose to number 24 on Ad Age’s Top 100 People of the 20th Century list. They say that the Peggy Olsen character on Mad Men was based on Corin’s grandmother. Her mom, Alix Frick, was an editor at Simon & Schuster who went on to have her own column in The New York Times Book Review.
A picture started to come into focus: Here was a grandmother, a mother, and a daughter, each with a deep love for their work, a clear understanding of popular culture, an eye on sales, and bestseller lists, shares, and rating points—three extraordinarily creative women who’ve lived their lives by the numbers.
After lunch, Corin and I headed to a little vintage clothing place on Prince Street. I’m not exactly sure how a job interview became a shopping expedition, but what I was sure of was I liked her eye for detail, I liked her easy rapport with the salesperson, and I liked her laugh. There was only one thing I was worried about: “Won’t you miss your home in Los Angeles?” I asked. Corin lifted the rose-gold charm necklace she was wearing and showed me a bird of paradise, its diamond-studded wings flying off to parts unknown. “LA is great, but my work is my passion,” she explained. “So I’ve built a very mobile life for myself. I want to be free to take whatever job turns me on—even if that job happens to be 60 miles south of Timbuktu. Have passport and shoes, will travel!”