Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With help from Allie Bice. Send tips | Subscribe here| Email Eli | Email Lauren In the annals of unexpected wedding toasts (a topic of personal interest for your author), the one JOHN FRANK delivered at the recent wedding of his daughter, CARLA FRANK, and ROB FLAHERTY was probably unique. The father of the bride went on for several minutes – about a chair. He wasn’t discussing a metaphor but, in fact, a real piece of furniture. And not just any piece: it was a speech about a long lost White House antique he’d recovered. The couple, who both worked in the Biden White House at the time of their November nuptials, had brought together a room full of family and friends. Their colleagues from the West Wing, seated together at one of four long tables on one side of the room, delighted in Mr. Frank’s lengthy description of the roughly 200-year-old French chair he’d discovered, bought and donated to the White House in honor of the wedding. “That wasn’t on my bingo card for the night,” one staffer said. Others joked that their own wedding gifts had just been rendered lame. “I just got them some salad plates,” senior Biden adviser ANITA DUNN told those around her. But at the long table on the opposite side of Union Station’s Grand Hall, where the friends of Frank’s parents were seated, guests couldn’t have been less surprised. When Carla was 3, her parents moved to Paris. Over the next several years while living there, her father, now a senior vice president at Microsoft, developed an interest in French art and furniture – in particular, the work of PIERRE-ANTOINE BELLANGÉ, a Parisian ébéniste (cabinetmaker) of some notoriety at the beginning of the 19th century who made furniture for Napoleon I and other European courts. After an 1814 fire that destroyed much of the White House, Congress gave President JAMES MONROE $20,000 to refurnish the residence. In 1817, he spent nearly all of the money on 53 mahogany Bellangé chairs and sofas, upholstered in crimson, according to the White House Historical Association. Twenty years later, when President MARTIN VAN BUREN refashioned the oval drawing room as the “Blue Room,” the pieces were re-done in blue. But in 1860, desiring something more modern, President JAMES BUCHANAN had the chairs auctioned off and replaced with a Victorian Rococo Revival suite. Even with presidents, there’s no accounting for taste. Only a century later, under first lady JACQUELINE KENNEDY, did the White House begin to reacquire the Bellangé chairs, returning them to the Blue Room alongside several replicas. In 2005, the White House curator’s office began a 10-year initiative to restore the Blue Room to its original grandeur. Part of the restoration focused on finding and restoring more of the original Bellangé chairs using all of the traditional fabrics, silks and even horsehair filling for the cushions. In 2018, first lady MELANIA TRUMP revealed that 10 of them had been painstakingly refurbished — at a cost of $450,000 to the White House Historical Association. In 2020, John Frank got an alert from an auction site that another Bellangé chair might be available for sale in Harrisburg, Pa., and called the White House curator’s office, which went up to inspect the item. Once the chair’s authenticity was confirmed, Frank decided to purchase it (he declined an interview request; the cost remains unclear) and donate it to the White House. With his daughter working on JOE BIDEN’s campaign at the time, he decided to wait until the election had ended before turning it over to the White House after Biden’s inauguration. The chair, which will be the 11th original Bellangé piece returned to the Blue Room once it’s fully refurbished, is currently in the custody of a Baltimore furniture restoration firm that specializes in historical gilding and painting. It could be another two years before the chair is ready for its return (it takes that long to restore). With Carla having left her post as deputy political director in February and Flaherty, Biden’s digital director, in the mix for a job with the president’s likely reelection campaign, it’s possible neither of them will still be at the White House when the chair donated in their honor arrives. But like diamonds, some chairs are forever. MESSAGE US — Are you IN POSSESSION OF A BELLANGÉ CHAIR? We want to hear from you. And we’ll keep you anonymous! Email us at westwingtips@politico.com. Did someone forward this email to you? Subscribe here!
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