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Memphis loses leading light of interior design as Margie Polk moves to Washington Margie Polk's house is in disarray, and she is distressed. As one of the city's most venerable interior designers -- "I suppose I've retired now," she says -- it pains her to have visitors see boxes and crates piled in her living room. Polk is 88, and she is moving to Washington, D.C., to live near her son, Burkey Belser, a well-known graphic designer. Her daughter Gigi Belser, from Chicago, is supervising the packing. "I don't want to go," Polk says, "but I couldn't turn down the invitation. He thinks I shouldn't live on my own now." Polk came to Memphis in 1959 and spent most of the intervening years as an innovative interior designer not averse to mixing traditional and modern styles for a sophisticated and elegant effect. An important supporter of the arts, Polk served for many years on the board of trustees of Memphis College of Art and was active for 30 or more years in Art Today, the defunct contemporary art support group for Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. A legendary benefit organizer and fundraiser, Polk's name was often seen in The Commercial Appeal's social columns. Now, she describes her physical condition this way: "I shake, and I don't walk very well, but I have many ways of not falling down." One of those ways includes an attendant who gently helps the beautifully turned-out Polk move slowly around her house. Paintings hang on the walls, marked with the mover's stick-on dots; half the books have been removed from the shelves in the living room. With her red hair and signature oversize glasses with thick frames, Polk still cuts the unmistakable figure she has for decades as a patron of artists and supporter of the city's museums and galleries. Ask Polk why she surrounds herself with art, and the reply comes with a bit of astonishment at the questioner's slow wit: "Why," she says, "would I surround myself with anything else?" Polk had what she calls "a wonderful childhood" in Tacoma, Wash. "Our house was filled with music and art and so much laughter. People wouldn't stay with us or have dinner with us because my father always asked so many questions. He was a wonderful intellectual. He quizzed everybody, but it was so much fun!" Polk moved to Memphis with her second husband and her two children from her first marriage to a Navy commander with whom she had eloped. Her third husband was Judge Greenfield Polk, who died in 1978. She describes her profession with a refreshing blend of the passionate and the blasé. "Oh, I've picked up peoples' ashtrays and moved them around all my life," Polk says, "and thank God, if you don't mind my saying it, I'm good at it." The way she speaks about interior design makes her sound like a combination artist, psychologist and couples therapist. "I only do houses for people I like and whose motives are good," she says. "If they want a nice house for the preacher to visit, they can forget it, I'm not interested. My favorite clients are the modest ones, the ones who don't want to be showy or display their money in their things." Polk makes the selection of a sideboard or dining table seem incidental to the task of understanding her clients, particularly in the area of husband and wife conflict. "I hate it when women treat their husbands as if they're dumb just because they're men," she says. "Men are so misunderstood because they're hiding a lot. They're hiding shyness and honesty. It's my job to bring them out, to find the thing that I know about a man that he doesn't." What was important to Polk was "the fact that I could do something for artistic people who had no money. The point is not the money or the mark-up but the virtues of the object itself. To see people blossom, to see them fall in love with their home and feel more intellectual -- my dear, that has nothing to do with satin draperies." The difficulty lies in balancing two impulses, the necessity to "crawl into the being" of one's clients and "to leave yourself completely out of it." Polk admits that "it's a hell of a way to work," but the reward is "to see people rise above their own feelings of themselves, to do things for them that they believed they weren't good enough for." In one instance, as Polk tells the tale, she was working on a house for clients who handed her a check, gave her complete freedom and went on vacation. "Well, the wife was very feminine," she says, "and I'm not, I've always been homely, so I'm wondering how I was going to get inside her, and I had to pray a lot to get feminine and get into her soul. And so I did the house, and the day they came back, I didn't know whether to hit the bottle or go to church." Polk is equally passionate about the city's creative potential, believing that "there's so much art in Memphis, and there's no reason for it to lie dormant." She became involved with Art Today, "a long time ago, probably 30 or more years. I threw myself into it, organized parties and fundraisers, everything. I have friends and I'm pushy, and so I got them to do things." And now it's time to move on. "Packing up books," Polk says. "It's like having your fingernails torn out." She makes friends easily, she says, "but, gosh, I love my friends here. They have been so kind. My household is upside-down, but my friends have been just wonderful, all coming to see me. I'll spend the rest of my life writing notes." To the question of how she wants to be remembered, Polk replies with another story. "I was walking Downtown -- this was years ago -- and a big car came zooming by and it was some of my clients from a town in Mississippi, and the wife leaned out the window and shouted, 'We still have those drapes from 18 years ago and we love them,' and I shouted back, 'They have five years to go.' You see, I made sure that things lasted." -- Fredric Koeppel: 529-2376 Impressions of Margie "When I arrived in Memphis in 1968," said Rogers Menzies, former owner of what is now Headley Menzies Interior Design, "Margie was well-established in a business with John Larry, and it just oozed style. Everything coming off Union Avenue then was very, very traditional, and Margie marched to a bit of a different tune. Her design to me always had a flair and a sense of something different than most of the others." "It always seemed remarkable to me," said Derita Coleman Williams, a private dealer in American paintings and decorative arts in Memphis, "that Margie set up shop Downtown (in the 1852 Pillow-McIntyre House) when other people were abandoning the area. That says something about her sense of style. I mean, there was that moment when she defined style in Memphis. Her eye for design included great pieces of American furniture. The effect wasn't eclectic, which can imply a jumble of things put together, rather it was classic with a contemporary twist." "Margie Polk is a brilliant woman who always made an immediate impression of style in her over-scaled glasses and flaming red hair," said William R. Eubanks, owner of the interior design firm that bears his name. "She is marvelously talented and independent. She lived in a design world of predominantly strong male designers, but she held her own with great energy and flair; she was cutting edge for her time." http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2008/nov/28/a-passion-for-design/

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