Suzie Frankfurt

Her clientele included Robert Redford and Robert Mapplethorpe, and her own Manhattan townhouse interiors were featured in Home & Garden and Architectural Digest. A friend and one-time collaborator of Pop artist Andy Warhol, she co-authored the tongue-in-cheek cookbook Wild Raspberries (1959) with him.

• Name — Suzie Frankfurt • Birth Name — Suzanne Allen • Born — 21 August 1931 • Birthplace — Los Angeles, California, U.S. • Died — 1 July 2005 • Place of death — New York City, U.S. • Occupation — Interior designer • Spouse — Stephen Frankfurt (1956–1968) • Children — 2

Suzanne Allen was born on August 21, 1931, in Los Angeles, the daughter of Eva and Isidore Allen, who owned a linen distribution company. Through a cousin who married a son of industrialist Norton Simon, she became part of a well-connected extended family that included actress Jennifer Jones, Simon's wife, and Simon's sister, Marcia Weisman, a prominent art collector. She graduated with honors from Stanford University in Stanford, California, before moving to New York.

Frankfurt began her professional life in New York with the help of her cousin-in-law, Norton Simon. In 1955, she joined the research department at the advertising agency Young & Rubicam, where she was assigned the task of redecorating the company's lobby and executive conference rooms in 1967. Although she initially decorated only occasionally for friends, by the late 1970s Frankfurt had become a prominent interior designer, known for her distinctive use of vintage Russian furniture, Biedermeier antiques, and traditional European styles. "I like anything that's a little out of the ordinary," she said. "That's why I'll place an eighteenth-century marriage chest from Damascus under an eighteenth-century mirror, top it with a thirteenth-century Tibetan Buddha — and then flank the whole effect with two Japanese military chests." Her clients included actor Robert Redford, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, and producer Lester Persky, and Sotheby's furniture expert Thierry Millerand. David L. Paul, a Florida bank chairman who was convicted of fraud in 1993, was accused of having paid Frankfurt approximately $389,000 in bank funds to decorate his home. Frankfurt was a close friend of Paige Rense, the editor-in-chief of Architectural Digest, and interviewed her at her New York townhouse for Andy Warhol's Interview magazine in 1977.

In 1956, Frankfurt married Young & Rubicam art director Stephen Frankfurt; the couple had two children and divorced in 1968. Her son Jaime Frankfurt is an art dealer, and her second son Peter Frankfurt is in the film business.

In 1959, while pregnant with her second son, Frankfurt saw an exhibition of Andy Warhol's watercolors at Serendipity in New York. Captivated by his work, she arranged to meet him for lunch at the Palm Court of the Plaza Hotel, with her husband, Stephen Frankfurt, serving as an intermediary. This encounter began a close friendship between Frankfurt and Warhol. "The only reason Andy liked me was because I was raised in Malibu with movie stars like Myrna Loy all around. I liked Andy because I'd always felt my whole life that I was an outsider. It may not be the fact, but it's how I feel. For some strange reason, I felt that I fit in with him," she later recalled. Together, they later created the illustrated cookbook Wild Raspberries, with Frankfurt contributing the recipes and Warhol the illustrations, offering a playful satire of contemporary French cookbooks. Warhol's mother Julia Warhola did the calligraphy for the book. In 1997, Little, Brown & Company's Bulfinch Press reissued the book. In the 1960s, Frankfurt distanced herself from Warhol because she couldn't "cope with the Factory scene. It was too horrible for me. I was trying to be an Upper East Side wife." She did not see him again until after he was shot in 1968. They remained friends until Warhol's death in 1987, and his diaries frequently mention Frankfurt. Among the diary entries are her and Warhol's partner, interior designer Jed Johnson, preparing his Montauk estate Eothen for prospective renters in July 1977; Warhol attending her baptism after her conversion to Roman Catholicism in February 1978; Frankfurt bringing fashion designer Gianni Versace to the Factory for his portrait in January 1980; and Warhol hosting a birthday lunch for her in August 1980.

In 1974, Frankfurt’s parents died within 10 days of one another. She later recalled coping through heavy drinking and prescription drug use, saying, "I consoled myself in my garden with lots of gin and Valium." She subsequently entered Silver Hill Hospital, a private treatment facility in New Canaan, Connecticut, to detox from Valium. After her release, her drinking continued until 1976, when she was hospitalized following a fall at home that resulted in a broken collarbone. Reflecting on that period, Frankfurt joked that she could "write a book called Tipsy in the House." In 1997, she said she had been sober for 10 years, calling her sobriety "my greatest achievement, other than my sons."

Frankfurt died on January 7, 2005, due to complications from a brain tumor in the Hebrew Home for the Aged in the Bronx, New York. She was survived by her two sons and four grandchildren.