Daily News from New York, New York • 98

-TiUNI'A NEWS, MAY30, 197 99 5-1 Society Auctioneers' Gavel Signals End of an American Dream A'C" 4 4 VvV i 1 1 at ft 4 By KIKI 1EYATHES THE TWO grand pianos that Jerome Kern, Oscar Levant, and Flodgers and Hammerstein played 'til the early hours of the morning are out of tune and covered with dark cloths like corpses in the enormous living room. Raccoons live in the large blue-and-white barn that once housed prize livestock and champion Perch-eron draft horses that were the pride of Victoria Dreyfus. Her precious rose gardens have been invaded by brown jack rabbits and wild buttercups. And on the wrists of the dozens of nude garden statues that she loved and her husband thought were immoral are tags and lot numbers. The pianos and statues as well as continental furniture, impressionist painting, a large collection of Oriental art works and other contents of Madrey Farm, the 300-acre summer home of the late music publisher Max Dreyfus in Brewster, N.Y..

will be auctioned on the property by Sotheby i'arke-Bernet June 9 to 12. Furnishings of their home in Brotuc-ville, N.Y., where Victoria Dreyfus died March 9, will be included as well. The sale is expected to bring $2.5 million. An American Dream Dispersed This is where the American liream ends. The fortunes are made, the castles built, the precious things painstakingly collected; and then it is all dispersed again, at the stroke of the auctioneer's gavel.

Few In this land of promise achieved so much in a short period of time a Dreyfus. Son of a German cattle dealer, Dreyfus came to New York with his younger brother Ludwig the later changed it to Louis) in 1S8S at 14 and worked as a musical arranger and piano player. By 1101, he had saved enough money to buy a 2o'e interest in Harms, Inc-, musical publishers, and marry pretty Victoria Brill, whom he had met in a saloon along Tin I'an Alley. Just 23 years later, after publishing the works of Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Vincent Youmans, Richard Rodgers and Cole Porter, he sold the business to Warne Bros, for a price said to be between JS million and $10 million. That same year, 1929.

he purchased Madrey Farms, which had been built about 1000 by Daniel Drew, the 19th century railroad buccaneer, who is buried on the property. "At first, Mrs. Dreyfus bought French furniture. Very plain," remembers I.ina Merz, the Dreyfus cook for 50 years. "She always said that it should look a house tvsit i to a farm which it did." "But then she get in with those antique people and just bought and bought.

I could never understand it. The furniture just piled up. You couldn't move. He never" cared much fir it, but just went along- with her purchases. All of the rooms in the rather strange-looking three-story granite house have twice the furniture they need.

A- small upstairs landing, for example, is crammed with two Dutch rococo cabinets, two sofas back tt seven chairs and an old TV set on a stand. A Study in Contrasts Max Dreyfus bedroom is stark, a mixture of 1950s upholstered furniture, a few Biedermaier fruitwood pieces and a piani. On the walls are. photographs of the composers with whom he worked and severa' landscape and animal oil paintings, of which he was fond. Virginia Dreyfus' room, on contrast, is lined with pink floral chintz, over which hang a half-dozen or more Chinese si'k embroidered panels.

A suite of Louis XVI gilt painted furniture in a delicate print stands among 18th-century French and Italian chests and 19th-century painted Chinese boxes everywhere. Styles and periods clash mercilessly. The Dreyfures were childless and the three ad iitional upstairs bedr. on' were used for their many weekend quests. They also converted one of the barns into a vast playroom with a bowling alley, a fireplace at either end and games of every kind.

The room is nw filled with make-shift cabinets and the hundred of pieces of Chinese porcelain Mrs. Dreylus collected in the 1950s when she was in her 70s and husbands" health was failing. After Max Dreyfus died in 194. Victoria Dreyfus stopped her traveling and compulsive collection. She even stopped buying fashionable clothes at Bergdorf Goodman and went about the house in her bathrob-3 or pants.

Three years ago she fell and broke her hip and never walked again. She- spent her last years largely confined to her bed in Bronxville. Her funeral, March 11 in Brewster, was not announced in the papers, and only her three servants and a grandniece, Mrs. Winnie Pertnov of Washington, D.C., were there. was poor," said Miss Merz.

Mrs. James Miilard Mary Eisennower Becomes Bride 0 Army Officer MAMIE EISENHOWER attended the wedding yesterday of her youngest grandchild, Mary Jean Eisenhower, to Army Lt. James Brewton Millard in Valley Forge, The former First was one of 200 guests, most of them members of the family, at the 6 p.m. military wedding ceremony performed by the Rev. Sheldon Moody Smith in Washington Memorial Chapel.

The bride, daughter of Ambassador and Mrs. Sheldon Doud Eisenhower of1 Valley Forjre, "wore the long- satin gown that her mother wore at her wedding in 1947. She was at. ended by Margaret Carter, the maid of honor; Mrs. David Eisenhower, the former Julie Nixon and ver Mrs.

Alexander Bradshaw. her sister, and Mrs. David Craven, Liza Beth Roos, and Janet Hovey. Caroline Louise Bradshaw was flower erirl for her aunt. The bride's other sister, Anne, who is married to Fernando Exhavarria and lives in Bogota, Colombia, was unable to attend.

Stephen Mitchell Millard was his brother's best man. Michael Kimball Millard and Alfred John Millard also brothers of the bridegroom, were ushers. A Saber Arch LL Keith Holmes. Lt. Renner.

Lt. William Spencer, and Lt. Robert classmates of the bridegroom, who graduated in 1974 from tce United States Military Academy at West I'ofnt, N.Y., formed a saber arch as the couple left the chnrch. A reception then followed in Mellon Hall at Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pa. Mrs.

Millard attended Northern Virginia Community College in Arlington, and was presented here at the International Debutante Ball two years ago. Her father, an author and brigadier general in the Army Reserve, was the former ambassador to Belgium. Her late grandfather, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was supreme coniniarsder of Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe during World War II and President of the United States. The bride was also granddaughter of the late Col.

and Mrs. Percy W. Thompson. Lt. Millard is the sjn of retired Armv Col.

and Mrs. Alfred J. Millard of St. Michaels. Md.

He the grandson of Mrs. Alfred J. Millard of Washington and the laie Mr. Millard and Mrs. Helen A.

Jenkins and the late Brewton. The couple will live in Columbus, where Lt- Millard is stationed. IIMI mXJ iS 'It'' -z, Madrey Farm the estate cf the late Max and Victoria Dreyfus, In Brewster, N.Y..