Post by Grubb.
Sunday was spent in the rain, a continuous drizzle that drove us indoors. Connecticut has some famous houses and we visited a couple. First, the Mark Twain house which is next to the Harriet Beecher Stowe house. Both dwellings are large and magnificent, but between these two 19th century heavy hitters, Twain was the obvious choice. I’ve always preferred the overwrought “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” to Louisa May Alcott’s mawkish “Little Women”, but neither escape being trapped in time. Twain’s fiction, on the other hand, is too tongue-in-cheek to suffer from the dated conceits of 19th century melodramatic conventions. His house in Hartford, was built in 1876.
We were given a tour by an actor who could have been Wilford Brimley’s stand-in.
The money that went into building Twain’s Gilded Age estate came from his wife’s inheritance of a coal fortune. “Innocents Abroad” sold well, but he had yet to write “Tom Sawyer” or “Huckleberry Finn”. He penned these classics on a small card table in the corner of the billiard room on the the third floor. The billiard table dwarfs the writing table. I can see him mulling over Huck and Jim floating on their raft as he lines up a shot of the eight ball for the corner pocket. The rest of the house had ornate furnishings, carved bedsteads, imposing fireplaces, stocked bookshelves, and a piano here and there. Outside, it was dominated by a wide veranda. Twain lost everything in 1896 when he went bankrupt. As a fellow writer who went bankrupt, Vonnegut would say, “So it goes.”
Next was the Gillette Castle. I’d never heard of the place. When Sharon and Tom mentioned it, I thought it had something to do with a razor blade fortune. It turns out William Gillette was a turn-of-the century actor who made millions playing Sherlock Holmes. His interpretation of Conan Doyle’s detective became iconic when he added a pipe, deerstalker, and half-cape to the character. The castle made out of locally gathered stone, took a crew of twenty ten years to build. The jutting fieldstone exterior gives the castle a a furry look.
Inside, the heavy wooden broad-beamed motif reminded me of a Texas rancher’s domain. Gillette designed everything himself including the massive wooden door latches as well as runners for sliding tables and chairs in and out from the elaborately fixtured walls. Downstairs, in the spacious living room, Gillette installed mirrors that allowed him to look out from the balcony of his second floor bedroom and catch the reflection of anyone cadging drinks at the bar. The mirror trick also made it possible for the renowned thespian to time his grand entrances. So the man was an eccentric who had the time and money to outfit his castle with structural oddities. Fascinating place, but I would never want to live there. Steep narrow staircases led to closet-size bedrooms, and although the castle overlooks the Connecticut River, the windows didn’t let in much light. I left the actor’s castle feeling as though Gillette would have had no problem taking on the role of Count Dracula.
Gillette’s acting—. “Without seeming to raise his voice or ever to force an emotion, he could be thrilling without bombast or infinitely touching without descending to sentimentality. One of his greatest strengths as an actor was the ability to say nothing at all on the stage, relying instead on an involved, inner contemplation of an emotional or comic crisis to hold the audience silent, waiting for the moment when he would speak again.”
There was a news reel made in the late 20s that had Gillette talking about the narrow gauge railroad he had on his property; He was in his late 70s but his voice was sharp and resonant. It was easy to imagine him in a commanding performance.
Your Hartford and our Hartford were totally different experiences. Our main focus was the Wordsworth Atheneum, a well known art museum. We also visited the old city hall (or was it the old state capital?). Has a Gilbert Stuart of George Washington, and lots of nice old furniture.