TRY TO REMEMBER
The place was a once-grand resort hotel in Branford called the Montowese House, on the Connecticut shore of Long Island Sound, built by one William Bryan in 1866, for affluent people from New Haven and Hartford seeking healthful sea air and cool breezes during the summers. The Connecticut shore never attracted the disgustingly-rich during the Gilded Age, because New Haven and Hartford weren’t a patch on New York and Boston when it came to big money. The Bostonians vacationed on Cape Cod and the New Yorkers built their palatial summer “cottages” in Newport and on Long Island’s North Shore. But there had once been enough well-heeled people to make the Montowese House a going concern which attracted repeat guests through two World Wars with a Depression thrown in, clear into the 1950s. But in 1963, coming up on its 100th birthday, it had fallen on hard times.
The shingle-style hotel was missing a good many of its shingles, and the entire third floor was closed off. The long verandah facing the sea still had a few of its wicker rockers and chairs, but their brittle caning was springing loose here and there, their once-white paint was worn and gray, and their cushions were mildewed from years of being left out in the damp. Some of the planks of the verandah were spongy, and at one end of the long porch some boards had given way altogether, and there was a scrub-pine sapling growing through the jagged hole.
There was a rickety barn behind the hotel, once a mews for carriages, with stalls and a tack-room for the horses, and a hay-loft on its second floor which still held a few ancient, tinder-dry bales. At one end of the echoing space, lit only by sunlight filtering down through cracks in the roof, there was a store-room, mostly full of broken furniture and other junk. But it also contained a few dusty treasures, notably a still-functioning Edison gramophone with a big flared lily-form speaker, its original curlequed lacquer paint-job not even much faded, and several boxes of wax cylinders, along with a brittle little paper packet of needles.
The stableyard, once the terminus of the Montowese House’s carriageway, wide enough to turn a team and carriage around without unharnessing the horses, had been asphalted over, probably before World War Two, to convert it into a car-park for the guests and the hotel staff, but the asphalt hadn’t been renewed for many years of seacoast winters; and a large area had entirely reverted to dirt and weeds, dotted here and there with a few of the original cobblestones.
And to the left of the main building, down a low rise, was a little theater on a wide swale of overgrown lawn which swept down to the low bluff overlooking the water. The theater wasn’t the usual summer-stock converted barn. It had always been a theater, seating perhaps a hundred people, built first for the hotel guests’ amateur theatricals, and later, when the Montowese had been forced to open its doors to a more bourgeois clientele after the Victorian and Edwardian ladies and gents who made their own amusements had vanished, featuring third-circuit traveling vaudeville acts for awhile, stage magicians and baggy-pants comedians. By the Thirties the movies had mostly killed vaudeville, so the theater had been equipped with a screen and a projector, and it ran scratchy prints of Hollywood films which had already been shown in the movie palaces of nearby New Haven. But it still must have been a pleasure for the Montowese House’s guests to stroll down after a plain but ample supper in the enormous dining room to watch “Gone With The Wind,” even if the color was faded and the sound-track was out of synch, in a theater whose windows were kept open so that the sea breeze could cool the air, and the susurrus of gentle surf rolling in to the hotel’s stretch of beach underlay the crackling roar of the burning of Richmond.
The Montowese House was owned by a pair of women. They might have been sisters, the last survivors of the Bryans, or of the Phipps family which was running the place by 1895. Or they might have been lesbian partners with no prior connection to it, who picked up the poor wreck for a song and nourished a dream of restoring it. We didn’t know, because we were lowly actors, and the women- I’ll call them Jane and June, because I can’t remember their names- had as little to do as possible with us.
It was their snobbishness about us which persuades me that my first guess was true, although if they were sisters they were the sort which used to be called spinsters, ladies who never married, but seemed content enough with one another’s company. So they might have been lesbian sisters, a sort of two-for-one which was quite common in Victorian and Edwardian days, although never mentioned in polite society, an arrangement which still persists occasionally among WASP ladies of a certain class (and still isn’t mentioned). In any case, they were inseparable, and I could never tell them apart. They seemed very old, two scrawny creatures who dressed in unfashionable clothes, but it was 1963, and I was 21, so everyone over 30 looked decrepit to me. They might have been no more than 40.
I’d just finished my third year at Yale as a drama major, and an enterprising third-year student in the Drama School’s director/producer program named Joe Nassif had rented the Montowese’s theater for the summer. The rental provided June and Jane with vital cash, and I think Joe’s agreement with them also included a percentage of the box-office take. They also rented rooms in the hotel to Joe, his assistant, and the stage manager, but they were barren little cells off the kitchen, fronting on the bleak stableyard, originally intended for scullery-maids. Joe didn’t care: it was his first producing venture, and he was a happy, hustling guy who had hired a troupe of very young actors at non-union chump change, and had scheduled a bill of plays carefully chosen to appeal to people on vacation who just wanted to have fun. He’d sold Jane and June by promising that the entertainment in their theater wouldn’t upset anyone.
And it didn’t. We did Bus Stop, which had already been turned into a hit movie starring Marilyn Monroe. We did “Black Coffee,” an Agatha Christie mystery. We did a rousing Victorian melodrama called “Under the Gaslight.” And we did “The Fantasticks,” which had opened in New York in 1960 and was still one of the hottest tickets in town. Our production was pretty bad- The Girl could sing, but I played The Boy, and I didn’t exactly have the vocal chops for it. The guy playing El Gallo didn’t even try to sing. He just talked the lyrics rhythmically, the way Rex Harrison did Henry Higgins in the original production of ” My Fair Lady.” And because Joe couldn’t find a harpist he hired a young Lionel Hampton wanna-be vibraphone player to back up the piano. Unfortunately the guy was a junkie. He didn’t show up at all if he was hurting and trying to score, and was prone to wild improvisation when he drifted in mellow to the eyebrows, leaving the pianist frantically vamping and the singers standing around looking like stunned mullets for moments on end. But it was maybe a cut above a high-school or college production, and the audiences were appreciative, bless them.
The whole season was all cut-rate, cheap-scenery, seat-of-the-pants, heart-in-the-mouth classic summer stock. I enjoyed every minute of it. We began rehearsals for Black Coffee in the barn loft while the scenery was being constructed in the theater. We all smoked, and I still don’t know why we didn’t set the dry hay on fire and burn the place to the ground. During breaks we found the Edison phonograph, cranked it up, figured out how to screw in a needle, and played the old wax cylinders. I remember that none of us were much impressed by the scratchy music which came out of the big horn. It was mostly operatic arias and ricky-racky orchestral dance tunes, hopelessly old-timey and quaint. Of course it’s quite possible the cylinders were recordings of Caruso and Melba in their primes, and of Scott Joplin rags conducted by Joplin himself. But they belonged to somebody else’s past. We lost interest in the phonograph after a few days and put it back in the storeroom.
After we opened our season, every one of the hundred uncomfortable seats in the Montowese Theater was filled every night, despite the fact that bats had taken up residence in the open rafters, and every night when the stage lights came up full they’d panic and swoop around over the heads of the audience, adding a little extra thrill the customers hadn’t bargained on. The nightly shrieking and yelling as each play began prompted Joe to remark that it was too bad he hadn’t scheduled Dracula instead of Under the Gaslight. “Free special effects,” he said wistfully.
But June and Jane kept their distance. They didn’t come to our openings, and I’m not even sure they attended the plays at any time during their runs. We certainly didn’t have our opening-night parties in the Montowese House. Joe would lay on a keg of beer and a couple of gallons of Gallo Hearty Burgundy, send out for pizza, and we’d do our celebration in the theater.
The reason that summer has stuck with me has little to do with the plays we did, however. The only reason June and Jane had hired us to perform in the theater was to attract new guests to the hotel. They took out out ads in the New Haven papers advertising the Grand Opening of the Historic Montowese House (with the presence of the “Montowese Summer Players” noted on the line below “Private Beach), and they had the hotel’s dining-room floor waxed and its walls repainted, with a glitter-ball hung from its ceiling, to turn it into a ballroom. They laid on a caterer, and hired a five-piece orchestra of ancient musicians to play standards in their rusty tuxedos.
Even before the Grand Opening there were a few guests already ensconced in the rooms they must have retained for decades (perhaps they lived there year-round), wraiths who tottered out to sit on the verandah in the decaying wicker chairs staring at the water, too feeble to climb down the stone steps leading from the bluff to the Private Beach. We were the only people who used it, eating our brown-bag lunches there, or going down after the day’s rehearsal to take a dip before heading back to New Haven for the night. All of us were affiliated with the Yale Drama School in one way or another, and the resourceful Joe had managed to finagle summer-student housing for the company, on and off campus, at very little money, by presenting The Montowese Summer Players to his faculty advisors as his MFA thesis project.
The beach was delightful, precisely because it had been neglected for many years. The sand wasn’t raked and groomed, spartina flourished here and there; and at low tide the footing underwater was mucky. But the water was clean, and sea-birds of all descriptions wandered around without fear. It was as pristine and natural a stretch of beach as could be found in southern New England back then, because June and Jane were simply too impoverished to “improve” it.
We’d loll about on the beach during lunch-breaks from the Black Coffee rehearsals, tossing sandwich-crumbs to the gulls and exaggerating the already bogus British accents we’d cobbled up for Agatha’s cast of English country-house types by remarking, “I say, Millicent, how smashing to be heah by the oceahn, where there are wahves!” Our accents would have made a real Brit wince, but Joe didn’t care and we knew the audiences wouldn’t, either- the fruitier the better. New Haven boasted two theaters where Broadway-bound plays cast with stars were tried out, but the Long Wharf Theater and the Yale Rep wouldn’t come along for another decade. The pickings were thin for summer theater in the New Haven area, and our audiences endured our performances as they endured the bat-strafings, applauded with every evidence of enthusiasm, and actually said nice things to Joe as they left the theater.
It occurs to me that the shows we put on that summer may have been much like the amateur theatricals put on by the Montowese House’s 19th century guests. We may have had better lighting, but the Victorians and Edwardians could have fielded actors, not much worse than we were, who were actually old enough to play the character roles without caking on heavy makeup or donning wigs and fake whiskers. And like the old aristos playing dress-up to amuse one another, we made up with enthusiasm what we lacked in technique. It’s sad that Jane and June never deigned to attend one of our plays, because in a sense Joe’s Montowese Summer Players were re-enacting, however accidentally, an aspect of the hotel’s past. And the two of them lived entirely in the past, whether they really were sisters descended from the Montowese House’s founding family, or eccentric gay partners obsessed with a longing to return to what they imagined was a more decorous era.
The night of the Grand Opening arrived. We’d finally finished our tech rehearsal for “Black Coffee,” scheduled to open in two days. It was the usual chaos: actors still uncertain in their lines trying to get in a good run-through, constantly interrupted by the lighting and scenery technicians (they were as young as we were, all D-school people) who stopped the action of the play for long moments as they barged onto the stage to rearrange things, with Joe trying to arbitrate the hissy-fits which broke out between his cast and his crew, and of course it ran much longer than planned. We’d had a lunch break and we’d gobbled our sandwiches, but it was well after suppertime and full dark when Joe finally set us loose. We were all ravenous and weary and grumpy as we got to the rough parking lot looking for our cars. The old stableyard was still pretty empty, but there were a few cars we didn’t recognize. One of them was a caterer’s van. And there was music coming from the hotel. Prompted by hunger- if there was a crowd inside and a buffet, we might be able to slither in and snag some snacks before June or Jane recognized us and kicked us out- we headed around to the verandah to peek through the large windows that gave onto the dining room, to see if the coast was clear for a raid on the food.
The big room was beautiful, transformed into the sort of hotel ballroom we knew from old movies, only in color, not black and white. It was lit by wall-sconces we didn’t even know were still wired, the bulbs covered with red shades which muted their light to a dusky rose. There was a baby-spot focused on the slowly-turning glitter ball, and the waxed floor and the freshly-painted walls were picked out by moving blips, as if the room was full of fireflies. Another set of spots lit the musicians on their low bandstand: clarinetist, trumpeter, stand-up bassist, pianist on the hotel’s ancient upright, and drummer whose bass drum was inscribed with what I assumed was the band’s name. But the drum was as old as the drummer who was swishing away with his brushes on the top-hat, and I couldn’t make out the writing. The band was playing a tune I recognized from my father’s collection of Frank Sinatra records, Irving Berlin’s “Dancing Cheek to Cheek.” But without ol’ Blue Eyes’ suave, snappy voice the music sounded mechanical and a little off, as if all the instruments were out of tune in exactly the same way.
Along the back wall of the room a buffet table was indeed set out, with gleaming stainless-steel pans and bowls full of food and an array of wine-bottles, plates, glasses, flatware and folded linen napkins. Three caterers in chef’s whites stood a little wearily behind the buffet holding serving utensils. There were a number of small round night-club tables covered with blue tablecloths and adorned by tapers, a little burnt down, and narrow vases, each holding a single rose and a spray of baby’s-breath.
Two of the little tables were occupied by some of the hotel’s permanent guests, a handful of barely animate mummies who were picking at their food and muttering to each other, ignoring the music. I think one was asleep, or dead. The other tables were vacant. And the dance floor was empty, except for June and Jane.
They were radiant. They wore elegant dresses I associated with the sort of high-society women the young Katherine Hepburn played in her first films. Their hair was gathered up sleekly on their heads, with a few long tresses artfully allowed to cascade down to their shoulders, framing their faces. The kindly roseate glow erased the furrows in their faces and banished the gray from their hair. They looked as they might have when they were my age. Wearing half-smiles, eyes locked raptly, they danced with serious grace. Jane, or maybe June, was slightly taller, so she led, but since they were two women, there was no frisson of dominance. They twirled, dipped, came up, lengthened their steps to do little circles around the floor, but they never separated, holding each other close in the traditional ballroom manner. It was art; it was artless; it was beyond sexy; it was an act of love.
We watched through the window, barely breathing, as the pair flowed over the empty floor. When the musicians ended the number, we walked quietly off the verandah without a word, found our cars, and went away.