ANCHOR BABIES: Francis with husband Wray Thorn and their sons Greyson (left) and Thompson.
ALL BUSINESS: The living room features delicate, soft lighting but also sturdy, comfy furniture that can stand up to two boys. (
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A painting made from a photo of her husband, Wray, and their son, Thompson, that she gave to Wray as a gift (
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Fox Business Network’s Melissa Francis smiled at the jumble of boys, toys and just a bit of mayhem. Her sons — 6-year-old Thompson and 2-year-old Greyson — were almost too excited to stand it. A New York Post reporter and photographer were in their home, taking their pictures, and they were happily — and loudly — showing off their rooms.
Francis, the host of “Money with Melissa Francis” and co-anchor of “Markets Now,” wasn’t fazed by all the noise. “I’m the anti-Tiger Mom,” she says.
Her anti-Tiger sensibilities are a result of her career as a child actress (one of her roles: Cassandra Cooper on “Little House on the Prairie” when she was 8), when she and her older sister, Tiffany, were stage-managed by her relentless mother. Francis has just released her harrowing memoir, “Diary of a Stage Mother’s Daughter,” about that time in her life.
And so she’s taken a very different approach when it comes to her own children. Like when Francis and her husband, private equity executive Wray Thorn, gave up a Chelsea loft they were perfectly happy in because of their sons.
“We loved being downtown,” she says, “but the boys go to school up here and we wanted to be closer to it. We were looking for an open floor plan, and that’s hard to find uptown. And then we saw this Carnegie Hill condo. It was still under construction, and it had just seven single-floor units. We walked in, and I was sold.”
That was July 2010. They ended up buying raw space with cement floors and, at the time, no walls. “They had a floor plan,” Francis says, “but they let us change it to what we wanted.”
Her decorator, Celerie Kemble (a Harvard classmate and still a close friend), helped devise the space. They ended up with four bedrooms, four bathrooms, an office, a playroom for the kids, an open kitchen and a huge, nearly 1,000-square-foot living/dining room. The total is 3,100 square feet, and for that they paid $4.2 million, including the renovations.
“[Celerie] was very much in the design process right from the beginning,” Francis says. “She did everything — down to picking the tiles in the bathrooms.
“I had Thompson at the time and was seven months pregnant with Greyson,” Francis recalls. “We were closing on the apartment, I was anchoring my shows, I was putting together my book and I had a very tough pregnancy. My plate was full.”
So Kemble stepped up. “She was able to figure out what my style was, and she would send me pictures,” Francis says. “I don’t hem and haw about anything; I just make a decision. So I would pick, pick, pick. All the furniture — every chair, every lamp, every table — is new.”
Francis really loves the lacquered walls. “They were very expensive,” she says, “but Celerie said it would be worth it because they’re such a design focus.
“Celerie also suggested having black floors. We decided on that for dramatic contrast. I hate clutter. So rather than have a lot of things everywhere, we made a dramatic statement with the floors and the walls.”
They added soft lighting (lots of small sconces with their glow reflected in the walls and on the ceiling), two chandeliers over the large dining table, two mirrored armoires and comfortable chairs and couches in the living area.
But the design element that Francis is happiest with is the open layout.
“It’s partly our layout that makes our Thanksgivings so special,” she says. “The best part is coming home from the parade, walking in the door and smelling the turkey wafting from the open kitchen. The kids can watch the game in the living room with my dad and Wray’s mom and still chat with me in the kitchen. Because of the open layout, we’re all doing our things and we’re all together.”
Her life wasn’t always full of such simple pleasures.
Francis was already performing before she turned a year old. “I had the super intense Tiger Mom,” says Francis, who hasn’t spoken to her mother in a decade. “It was the Hollywood version — the stage mother. That’s why I wrote the book. I want to tell people where I came from and what happened. A lot of those stories are startling. When my husband read it, he looked very shocked. I hadn’t shared with him half of what’s in the book.”
Those days were filled with good times turned bad, then sometimes turned good again. One of the more pleasant stories is about her eighth birthday. She was working that day on “Mork & Mindy” and had been given a teddy bear to play with for a scene. Excited, Francis no sooner had the bear in her arms when the prop man took it back. She had to watch while he ripped one eye out of the bear’s socket. That was to justify the bear’s name for the scene: “Mr. One Eye.”
But then the good thing happened. “Robin Williams insisted that they let me keep the bear for my birthday,” Francis says. “The prop man wanted it back, but Robin insisted.
“It’s the only thing I have from my childhood. So it’s very precious to me.”
Melissa Francis’
FAVORITE THINGS
* The coffee table
* The “art gallery” with the kids’ artwork hanging on a corkboard in the kitchen
* The lacquered walls
* The teddy bear Robin Williams gave her on her 8th birthday
* The armoires
* The crystal bathroom chandeliers. “I call them jewelry for the bathroom,” says Francis.
* A painting made from a photo of her husband, Wray, and their son, Thompson, that she gave to Wray as a gift