Betty Sherrill, elite interior designer with New Orleans roots, dies at 91

Betty Sherrill, a New Orleans native who became the doyenne of Manhattan interior designers has died. For more than six decades, she led the prominent New York design firm McMillen Inc. She was 91.

Sherrill died on May 12 at her home on Manhattan's East Side, her grandson, John Pyne, said. The cause was pancreatic cancer.

As McMillen's president and later chairman, Sherrill oversaw interior design for a roster of clients that included titans of industry, celebrities and families of wealth. Among them were Laurance and Mary Rockefeller, CBS Chairman William Paley, singer Diana Ross and Alice Walton, billionaire daughter of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton.

Sherrill, a graduate of Louise S. McGehee School and a Newcomb College dropout, understood that listening and diplomacy were an important part of a job that put her on intimate footing with clients.

"You get to know their children, their pets and really everything about them," she said in a 1991 interview with The Times-Picayune. When Sherrill decorated palaces for Queen Noor of Jordan and the ruling family in Kuwait, for example, she "learned to eat olives for breakfast."

Sherrill wasn't fazed by clients whose style differed from her own. In that same 1991 interview, she emphasized the importance of tact: "You can say something like, maybe we don't have the same taste, but let's see what we can do."

Sherrill cut both an imposing and charming figure in New York society - and never lost her New Orleans accent.

She was a longtime resident of 1 Sutton Place South, a co- operative apartment built in 1927 with views of the East River. As chairman of the co-op board, Sherrill acted as a social gatekeeper at the building that has been the home of designer Bill Blass and socialite C.Z. Guest. Sherrill also had residences in Hobe Sound, Fla., and Southampton, N.Y., where she planted 40,000 daffodils.

McMillen, described by Architectural Digest as the oldest U.S. interior design company, was founded in 1924 by Eleanor McMillen Brown. Her firm's work soon became fashionable among New York's elites.

Sherrill arrived in the city in 1952 as a recently-married and lightly-schooled former design student.

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Betty Sherrill, elite interior designer with New Orleans roots, dies at 91