TODAY'S QUIZ: One Degree of Separation

This is Nathaniel Sparhawk, wealthy merchant of Kittery Maine,  son-in-law of Sir William Pepperell, the only American baronet, as painted by John Singleton Copley in 1764 (Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).

This is a scene from 'Lost Boundaries', starring Mel Ferrer and Beatrice Pearson, which won the award for Best Screenplay at the 1949 Cannes Film Festival.

And these are children of Frederick Woolworth, of those Woolworths, at the former family summer home in Monmouth, Maine, as featured in the August, 2012 issue of Town & Country (photograph by Susanna Howe)

And last, Darryl Hall of Hall & Oates, at his house in Maine (photo via Zimbio)

Do you know the thread that connects these disparate people across the centuries?  No fair using Google if you don't know the answer.

I connect the dots in the October issue of Portland Monthly, beginning on Page 25.  Click HERE for the article.

P.S.  Early on in the article, I use the word bravado.  I meant bravura.  Really I did.  Unfortunately, if I spell my mistake correctly, spell check can't save me from myself...

HOW THE DILETTANTE WATCHES A MOVIE

No matter how engrossed I am by a film,  I will eventually be distracted by the sets.  Such was the case during a recent viewing of 'Giant', the wonderful, wonderful George Stevens production of Edna Ferber's story of Texas rancher Rock Hudson, his refined aristocratic wife Elizabeth Taylor, and their neighbor James Dean.  I'm sure their characters had names, but let's face it:  They were  Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, and James Dean.  Whenever the camera zoomed in on Taylor or Dean, the edges of the screen practically caught fire.  They really don't make them like they used to.

In this movie, the interior sets are as much characters as the actors, and change along with them.  The set design plot goes something like this::  Rock Hudson, back East on business, visits an associate at his old Maryland homestead---I did not get a screen shot of the exterior, but in Hollywood fashion, the set more resembles one of those Georgian country houses so beloved by the fox-hunting set on Long Island in the early years of the last century.  As he enters the front hall, one finds oneself not in Maryland, but instead suddenly in New England, for the set designer has based his design on one of New England's handsomest 18th century interiors, the hall of the Moffatt-Ladd house in Portsmouth New Hampshire.  There are differences---the door heads are Federal, in the style of Salem's Samuel McIntyre, not Georgian Portsmouth.  But, small quibble.  It is interesting to see all the same

In love, Elizabeth Taylor dances in her parent's hall

The original:  The hall at the Moffatt-Ladd house in Portsmouth NH

Later, we find Rock dining with Elizabeth and her family, partaking of Maryland hospitality.  This room was copied from the drawing room of Arlington House, the Custis-Lee mansion in Virginia.  We're getting closer---after all, Arlington is just the other side of Washington from Maryland

Despite a slight difference in proportion, there is no mitaking the historical source for the dining room set.

Two views of the White Parlor at Arlington house, with its lovely Leghorn marble fireplace surround, and reeded over doors.

In short order, Rock and Liz marry, and go home to the gloomy old house built by Rock's father on the family's Reata ranch, in the middle of Nowhere on the Texas plains.

The newlyweds are greeted in the baronial hall by Rock's less than friendly sister, Mercedes McCambridge.  The Old Dominion gentility of Liz's childhood home has been left far behind.

But not to worry, distraction from the brooding decor arrives in the person of brooding James Dean.

But, that doesn't keep Liz from updating the decoration in the hall to something more closely resembling her genteel youth.

After awhile, everyone in the movie seems to strike oil, and the decorating at Reata really takes off---Liz brings things  up to snuff, chic in monochromatic gray to complement her hair (The years have passed, and she's now the mother of nearly grown Carole Baker).

Rooms b y Frances Elkins

A bedroom designed by Frances Elkins

 The Hall gets yet a sleeker treatment also, but I didn't get a screen grab.  However, at some point, Liz and Rock wind up at a new hotel development built by James Dean, who also struck oil.  The set designer really knew what he or she was up to, for the suites in this hotel would do Dorothy Draper proud.

And there you have it---how a design fan sees a classic movie.

 Baz Luhrman's set designer could take lessons.

BEDTIME STORY, PART II

Where would a Dilettante be without his readers?  Tracing design sources is a great interest of mine, but sometimes the answers elude me.  When I mentioned in last week's post that the remarkable bed of former Red Sox owner Thomas Yawkey rang a faint bell, but I couldn't remember why, Toby Worthington stepped up to the plate, as it were, with the answer:

The Yawkey bed was based on plate 41 in Thomas Sheraton's The Cabinet Maker's and Upholsterer's Drawing Book, published in 1791---"A Summer Bed in Two Compartments". (above)

Thomas Yawkey's bedroom at 992 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, photographed in 1935 (MCNY)

Sheraton, along with his near contemporary Thomas Hepplewhite, and the earlier Thomas Chippendale, was one of the three great furniture designers (four, if one counts the architect Robert Adam, who often had Chippendale execute his designs), and like the others, spread his style and fame by publishing pattern books that could be used by other cabinetmakers.   

Designs for bed posts from Thomas Chippendale's  The Cabinet-Maker's  Directory

Just as with the architectural pattern books of the era, like Asher Benjamin's American Builder's Companion, these books provided suggested designs, often with mix or match options, along with rules for achieving correct proportions, that helped many a provincial cabinetmaker turn out pieces of compelling beauty, rarely making a wrong move.

Two bed designs, with suggestions for hangings, by Thomas Chippendale

 The Yawkey bed does not appear to be antique in the photos, but rather a decorator's inspiration carried out by a talented cabinetmaker.   Rather than the neo-classical design of Sheraton's bed, the rococco cornice details are earlier, and more Chippendale in inspiration. as seen in the plates above from Thomas Chippendales The Cabinetmaker's Directory.

Cornice designs by Chippendale

Readers may remember the Chinoiserie bedroom in 'Huntland', the Joseph Thomas house in Virginia, with its dramatic bed later owned by Doris Duke, the design taken directly from plates in Chippendale's Directory.

The bedroom at 'Huntland', and  design sources for the bed, below

Plates from Chippendale's Director from Metropolitan Museum website

MRS. WHARTON GOES CANOEING

NOTE:  January 24th marks Edith Wharton's birthday.  This piece was originally published a year ago in 'New York Social Diary' to commemorate the 150th anniversary of her birth. Young Edith Jones. Significant events of Edith Wharton's early life played out in Bar Harbor, and  naturally those of us who are partisans of this part of Maine speculate about what would have happened had it been Maine, rather than Lenox, where Wharton chose to live after departing Newport. For all we know, Ethan Frome might have been a Lobsterman, and under the influence of the good clean Maine air, Lily Bart might have married a college professor who summered in Northeast Harbor, and lived happily ever after. In 1880, the future Mrs. Wharton's older brother Frederic Jones and his wife Mary Cadwalader were putting the finishing touches on Reef Point, their new summer house on the Shore Path in Bar Harbor.  Their architects were a leading Boston firm, Rotch & Tilden, who designed a number of Bar Harbor's grander estates. That same summer, the senior Joneses and young Edith forsook their usual Newport season, spending it instead at Bar Harbor. Accompanying them was Harry Leyden Stevens, the son of social parvenu Mrs. Paran Stevens. Harry Stevens was rumored to be engaged to Edith, although friends, who called him her 'shadow', felt the romance would not last.

Reef Point, the Frederic Jones cottage at Bar Harbor, as originally built

The Shore Path, like the Cliff Walk at Newport, traversed between the ocean and large estates, a favorite destination for late afternoon walks.

The Jones spent the next two summers in Europe, where it was hoped that the climate would prove beneficial to Mr. Jones' health. It did not, and he died there in March of 1882. Returning to Newport, Edith Jones' engagement to Harry Stevens was officially announced, and nearly as soon ended, apparently due his mother's interference (on this score, Wharton would later exact her revenge by using Mrs. Stevens as the model for the comic Mrs. Lemuel Struthers, the arriviste widow of a shoe polish manufacturer, in The Age of Innocence). In 1883, Lucretia Rhinelander Jones, wishing to put the sad event behind them, took Edith once again to Bar Harbor.

Steamers at the Bar Harbor pier c. 1880. The buckboards transported arriving visitors to the hotels. It is likely here that Wharton & Walter Berry rented their canoe 
(Courtesy Maine Historic Preservation Commission)

That July in Maine, two of the defining relationships of Edith Jones' future life were begun. Bar Harbor was reaching its stride as a major stop on Society's summer rounds, as the anti-Newport, (relatively) simpler, (relatively) less formal, with healthy emphasis on outdoor activities. With less rigid chaperoning of  young people, it was considered an ideal spot for romance. This is the Rodick Hotel, newly enlarged to 400 rooms in 1881, as it appeared when Walter Berry stayed there. Its 500-foot wooden veranda was a favorite spot for flirtation and gossip. Recreational pastimes included dances at the big hotels, notably Rodick's, where the huge lobby was known as 'The Fish Bowl", hiking on the mountain trails, and canoeing in the bay.  It was against this idyllic backdrop that Edith met and fell in with Walter Berry, a well connected young lawyer and budding aesthete staying that summer at the Rodick Hotel, whom she would later refer to as 'the great love of my life'.

Canoeists paddle out to view the visiting Eastern Yacht Club Fleet in Bar Harbor Whether their friendship was ever actually romantic has long been a subject of speculation, as Wharton later destroyed most of her correspondence with Berry.  A surviving letter from Berry to Wharton in 1923 hints cryptically at that summer, and of a previous conversation: "Dearest — The real dream — mine — was in the canoe and in the night afterwards, — for I lay awake wondering and wondering, — and then, when morning came, wondering how I could have wondered, — I a $-less lawyer (not even that yet) with just about enough cash for the canoe and for Rodick's bill — And then, later, in the little cottage Newport, I wondered why I hadn't — for it would have been good, — and the slices of years slid by. Well, my dear, I've never 'wondered' about anyone else, and there wouldn't be much of me if you were cut out of it. Forty years of it is you, dear. W."

A young couple canoeing, illustration from 'Bar Harbor Days' by Mrs. F. Burton Harrison 1886.

Berry's tennis holiday came to an end, and the friendship begun in Bar Harbor was apparently not picked up again until the 1890s in Newport, but no matter, for on the scene appeared an old friend of Edith's older brother Harry, Edward Wharton of Boston, a 33-year-old gentleman of leisure. Though he had known Edith since childhood, it was that summer at Bar Harbor that he began to pay her court, and two years later they were married. Only by chance of timing did another of Mrs. Wharton's great friendships not receive its initial spark. Only days after the Joneses left Bar Harbor that summer, Henry James arrived for a visit. That friendship instead would have to wait until the latter part of the decade to begin. Edith Wharton in at 'The Mount' in 1905 By 1898, Wharton was a published writer, suffering suffering from bronchial complaints and  at odds with her editors over publication of some short stories, She and and Teddy, feeling an escape from the dampness of Newport might help, went up to Bar Harbor for a change of scenery, visiting her former sister-in-law, now divorced from Frederic Jones. To supplement her reduced income, Minnie Jones was managing Henry James' literary affairs in the States (and would soon become Edith's agent also). Wharton's niece Beatrix, later Mrs. Max Farrand, was embarked on her own career as a landscape designer. Though the weather was not always reliable (the very definition of a Maine summer — leaving damp Newport for Maine would be analogous to carrying coals to Newcastle), Wharton recovered from her ailments. While on Mount Desert, the Whartons visited Teddy's cousin Mrs. James Terry Gardiner, whose cottage was to Edith an 'ideal of a country place', inspiring her desire to have a place away from the seashore, which would culminate in the purchase of a farm overlooking Laurel Lake at Lenox, where she would build 'The Mount' (the classical style of which bore little resemblance to the plain shingle style of the Gardiner house she had previously found so ideal). Although this view of the interior of the Gardiner cottage at Northeast Harbor is the antithesis everything Wharton wrote about houses and interiors, she reported that she found it an 'ideal of a country place' Within a few years of course, Wharton the renowned novelist, would give up America entirely and remove herself to France. Although she remained devotedly close to Mary Jones and Beatrix Jones Farrand, her closest relatives, Wharton did not again visit Bar Harbor, although over the more than one of her fictional characters were sent to that "remote island off the coast of Maine" in the course of their navigation through the ever perilous Social waters. Edith Wharton's Bedroom at the Pavilion Colombe, her house near Paris, as painted by Walter Gay in 1926. Wharton died at Pavilion Colombe in 1937

In July, novelist Roxanna Robinson also covered this topic in a lecture at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor. For many of the details in this piece, I am indebted to the works of Wharton's many excellent biographers – R.W.B. Lewis, Hermione Lee, Louis Auchincloss, Shari Benstock, and Eleanor Dwight (who herself summered on the Shore Path in Bar Harbor).   Thanks to Willie Granston for pointing me to the interior view of the Gardiner cottage.