A Love Letter to the "She-Devil" Mansion, a Barbie Dreamhouse Turned Villain’s Lair

This essay is part of a collection of love letters celebrating personal design obsessions.

My dream home is a New England farmhouse full of lovingly weathered wooden furniture and handsome antique rugs, or maybe a beautiful midcentury rectangle with enormous windows perched high on a forested ridge. My actual home could best be described as "practical, kid-friendly vintage via Facebook Marketplace." But every now and then, I dream of something different. Something pink, and appallingly 1980s, with an overwhelming number of wrought iron benches and a lot of pastel florals. Something that looks quite a bit like Meryl Streep’s chalky-pink Long Island monstrosity from the 1989 comedy She-Devil.

She-Devil is a story of revenge: Roseanne Barr plays a long-suffering, downtrodden suburban housewife named Ruth, whose caddish accountant husband runs off with a client—a wealthy, best-selling romance novelist named Molly Fisher (played by Streep). Fisher dresses exclusively in shades of pink, in styles that veer chaotically between somewhat matronly skirt suits and sexpot satin nightgowns. She slinks in and out of every scene, speaking at all times with a highly affected breathiness, like she might swoon. Ruth finds her spine and gets payback. 

Of course, an over-the-top villain needs an over-the-top lair. So naturally Molly is introduced sweeping down her grand staircase on an episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, with the familiar voice of Robin Leach touting her "lavish Long Island palace." It’s a complete design atrocity, a Barbie Dreamhouse made flesh. Give me the keys, please.

The whole place is absurd flourish upon absurd flourish, each one more delightfully extra than the last. It was shot at a real mansion, too, one that’s since been demolished: the Long Island home of Countess Nadia de Navarro-Farber, whose colorful life veered from Bulgaria to Monte Carlo to Belle Terre, New York. (Exactly the type of character who’d appear in a 1980s romance novel.) Let me start with the sheer amount of trellising: it’s in the living room, all over the exterior, and in the cavernous indoor pool room. That pool is surrounded by lush greenery straight out of a mall in the late ’80s and a bunch of white rattan furniture. The room is mostly white (with some sort of metallic-streaked wallpaper), save for the pink-carpeted entry stairs and some pink pillows and towels. There are so many wrought iron benches scattered across the lawn outside you begin to wonder if they’re reproducing via spores. Even her pink mailbox is mounted on a stand of white wrought iron curlicues.

But the real showstopper is—obviously—Molly’s bedroom. It’s a boudoir, really, and a cross between vintage Laura Ashley and a Poconos honeymoon hotel. The whole room is a landscape of delicately and wholly unsubtly layered pinks. The walls are covered in pleated pink fabric that almost perfectly matches the bubblegum hue of the plush wall-to-wall carpet. Pink marble columns frame the alcove where her built-in vanity (painted pink, obviously) sits below a gilded mirror framed by sconces and a halo of wall-mounted porcelain plates painted with roses. Ornamental columns also set off the circular platform on the far side of the room where her bed—her absolutely astonishing bed, a round number with an enormous scalloped headboard—is staged beneath a massive oculus. Pink gauze curtains descend from the ceiling to cover the tall windows and French doors. Her bedspread is quilted pink satin. The crystal lamps on her matching wood side tables somehow look like both lilies of the valley and also a uterus and ovaries. This is not the home of somebody who does her own dusting. It is the bedroom of somebody who lives full-time in fantasyland. It’s like a terrarium, but built for stagey human horniness rather than reptile survival.

Now, to be clear, the movie as a whole is extremely dismissive of the romance genre, which I love immensely. Though Mary Fisher is written as an absurd man-stealer and overall traitor to her gender, her aesthetic is obviously based on that of the very real and very ludicrously camp romance writer Barbara Cartland. The prolific 20th-century author nicknamed "the crusader in pink" once, briefly, had her own line of homewares at Macy’s in the early ’80s. A New York Times review described it as: "Pink and gray…lots of hearts and flowers and frills. Frills on the bed, on the chair, on the curtains, on the dozens of pillows, even on the plates." Sounds familiar.

Molly Fisher’s pink palace by the sea is presumably meant to symbolize how unserious and absurd and out-of-touch with reality the character is. In that sense, She-Devil is pitch-perfect illustration of how romance writers were, until very recently, often dismissed as kitschy hacks who were simultaneously over- and under-sexed. A 1987 New York Times review of Where the Heart Roams, described in the article as "a good, informative documentary-feature about romance novels, the women who write and edit them and the women who, by buying and reading them, have turned paperback junk into a $300 million-a-year industry" is a great example of the ways that critics, often men, felt completely comfortable writing about the genre, its fans, and its authors. Another line in the review, written by Vincent Canby, the outlet’s then chief film critic, reads: "Where the Heart Roams is as much about barren lives as it is about living happily ever after."

Ultimately, Molly Fisher’s romance writing career tanks when she’s saddled with her new beau’s children as part of Ruth’s elaborate revenge plot—turns out, she just can’t sustain the fantasy once she’s forced to do laundry. Humbled at least temporarily, she pivots to memoir and swaps her pastel skirt suits for a more somber color palette and big, Gloria Steinem-style glasses. She loses the battle. In reality though, romance writers eventually won the war; now, romance fiction is booming, and dedicated romance bookstores are popping up across the country filled with pink fixtures and pink book covers.

Ironically, Molly Fisher’s house is a perfect distillation of all the things I love best about the genre, and all the unrestrained impulses that make it so beloved. Romance is never afraid to be over-the-top and frequently totally disregards the rules of the wider world. You want an enormous portrait of yourself framed by pastel chintz curtains in your living room, an altar to your own greatness? It’s yours. You wanna date an alien or a minotaur? Honey, have fun. In the end, Molly Fisher puts her house on the market. She’s a chastened woman who’s at least somewhat seen the light. Maybe I could get a deal.

Top photo courtesy Everett Collection

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