A Big Mouse Moves In
DIANA BURROUGHS sings M-I-C, K-E-Y, M-O-U-S-E all the way to the bank.
She has rented out her family's 145-year-old Federal town house in Greenwich Village for a month to Mickey's handlers, who wanted a place they could turn into a show house selling celebrity curios and Mickey Mouse merchandise for charity. (And of course, to gather good will for Walt Disney products.)
But before Mickey could move in, Ms. Burroughs had to move out, along with her husband, Jason McCoy, who runs an art gallery on East 57th Street, and their three children, three dogs and cat, Gilbert.
The family is accustomed to tiptoeing around photographers and film crews who pay as much as $2,000 a day to use the high-ceilinged front parlor or the sunny garden as a backdrop. The McCoys -- who are known for informal dinner parties that have become regular art-world events after their gallery openings -- have rented the house for magazine advertisements for Macy's, for television commercials for products like Advil, for sections in a Victoria's Secret catalogue, even for scenes in the movie "Jeffrey."
This time was different. Mickey's minions at the public-relations agency for Disney Consumer Products specified that they were renting the house, the whole house and nothing but the house -- no parents or pets, and no children. The agency, Cairns & Company, said it paid $25,000 for the month, including a commission for Ms. Burroughs's rental agent. Disney offered to put the family up in a hotel, but the McCoys decided against the room-service life. "We took the money" for the accommodations, Ms. Burroughs said, "but are staying with friends."
With the family away, Cairns's decorators packed the family's clothes on a rack in the basement. Then they cast a critical eye on furniture and furnishings. "The stuff of theirs we didn't like, we're taking out," said one decorator, Fred Anderson. "They had an all-black sofa. We're bringing something in to brighten that room up."
Indeed. Disney wanted walls that said Mickey without being mousy. That meant a fast paint job in cartoonish reds and blues. The decorators also wanted carpeting that did not look as if it had been laid when Annette Funicello was the star of "The Mickey Mouse Club." Which is, of course, almost any carpet in a house with two adults, three children, three dogs and a cat.
The carpet problem put Mr. Anderson and his partner, Douglas Hannant, under time pressure. "We had to find carpet we could get in a week," Mr. Anderson said. "And we had to go to the people who had done the carpet before, because the steps are uneven and some had to be double-padded."
Under the lease, Ms. Burroughs will keep the carpet. She and the decorators agree that this is unusual; most of the time, any decorating work is removed and the house is returned to its original condition. This time, the decorators also had the library repainted a slightly brighter blue than before; that, too, will be left behind.
But Mr. Anderson and Mr. Hannant did not touch Ms. Burroughs's mint-green kitchen as they turned the house into a mix of Mickey, Ms. Burroughs and celebrities. The bedroom will have 10 paintings by Billy Dee Williams, but it is the McCoys' own bed that will be made up with Mickey Mouse sheets.
Ms. Burroughs does not get to keep the sheets: when the show is over, they will go to Housing Works, the show house beneficiary, which helps homeless people with AIDS. The show house will be seen by V.I.P.'s at a series of parties next week and by the public on Sept. 16. Admission will be $5; information, (212) 407-0745.
In the kitchen are celebrity items like Robin Leach's pasta maker and juicer. In a bathroom are feather boas donated by Ru Paul. Ms. Burroughs's garden now has Mickey Mouse sprinkler spigots, a Mickey Mouse sundial, Mickey Mouse topiary and non-Mickey hibiscus and impatiens that Mr. Anderson added. "She doesn't want us messing up her root system," he said.
Ms. Burroughs said she had had no all-out calamities in previous rentals. "Yes, furniture does get broken and things do get damaged," she added, "but to date, people acknowledge it and you get it fixed."
She was frank about her reason for renting out the house: to augment her income. She had just left the Jason McCoy Gallery, which she ran with her husband, who is a nephew of the artist Jackson Pollock, to become the director of programs for the nonprofit corporation that coordinates the Principal for a Day program for professionals and business people in the New York City public schools.
Ms. Burroughs was the first to admit that the house needed touching up. "The housebreaking destroyed the carpet," she said. "That's why I didn't think Disney would take the house. The carpets were unsightly and the walls . . . well, we've had the house for five years of wear and tear. Also, we have a Weimaraner who scratched down two of the doors."
Mr. Hannant won't be meeting the dogs, who are staying with friends in Cooperstown, N.Y., or Gilbert the cat, whose temporary residence is on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts. This is just as well. "I'm allergic to cats," he said.
As for the family, Ms. Burroughs and Mr. McCoy are camping out at a friend's loft with their daughter, Samantha Clare, 7. Their older son, Sanford, 13, is staying at another friend's apartment in Manhattan; Jackson, 10, is dividing his time between a third friend's apartment and the loft with his parents.
Back at the house, the idea was to repaint doors and moldings in their original colors. "This was like detective work," said Kerry Trueman, whose crew did the painting. "No one had an accurate record of what had gone on the walls. But these people have three kids and I don't know how many dogs. The condition of the walls below chair-rail height was uniformly disastrous. They needed a face lift and all we could do was a facial."
She and a crew of four worked 12-hour days and made some unexpected discoveries. Matching the red in Mickey Mouse's shorts turned out to be as hard as getting a dollar out of Uncle Scrooge. "Benjamin Moore has it, Carnival Red, but it only comes oil based and we weren't going to do oil," she said. She sent to Home Depot for some custom-mixed latex.
Then there was the difficulty of working around antiques and paintings like a geometric black and white canvas by John McLaughlin. "The liaison for the owners said if it gets so much as a nick, it depreciates $100,000," Ms. Trueman said. "I encouraged my workers to be very careful."
Ms. Burroughs said that past make-overs for commercials and photo sessions had intrigued her children. "They find it rather interesting to see how the house changes," she said. "They like to see it happen, but they don't pay too much attention to it."
But they will not see the Mickey transformation, unless they drop in to retrieve clothes from the basement. "We," Ms. Burroughs said, "have not been invited."