Broadway's Country Home
Joe Garton ’69 was a man with big dreams and the passion to make them real. Before his death in August 2003, he made sure that his most ambitious dream could be shared with the whole country.
Through the first half of the 20th century, the most prestigious destination for entertainment luminaries like Laurence Olivier, Montgomery Clift and Helen Hayes was not any of the capitals of Europe or penthouses of New York, but rather the tiny dairy farming community of Genesee Depot, Wis. Today, the town is again a major travel destination, this time for crowds of local farmers, East Coast theater buffs and baby boomers. The attraction, then and now, is the country estate of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, the most celebrated acting team in the history of American theater.
For modern visitors the trek is not a pilgrimage, exactly: The estate, called Ten Chimneys, is no shrine. Neither is it a celebrity tour: Many visitors know next to nothing about the couple that dominated the English-speaking stage between 1920 and 1960. Nor is Ten Chimneys a museum: it’s too idiosyncratic to reveal much about conventional homes of the period. It’s something much more ephemeral: an essence, a sensibility.
It’s just as Joseph Garton ’69 imagined it.
The superlatives assigned to Lunt and Fontanne are dramatic even for theater folk: As their biographer Margot Peters wrote, “Critics called them the Fabulous Lunts, the Great Lunts, the Lustrous Lunts, the Magical Lunts, the Incomparable Lunts, the Infallible Lunts…. London dubbed them Duke and Duchess of the West End.” They helped usher in the modern style of acting, pioneering techniques such as overlapping dialogue and turning one’s back to the audience, anathema to the old, oratory style of theater.
In the mid-1920s, at the height of the Lunts’ stardom, the Celestials, as Olivier called them, began placing two stipulations in their contracts: They would act only together, and they would take every summer off to spend at Ten Chimneys. Until they retired full time to the 160-acre estate in 1972, the actors split time between New York City and southeastern Wisconsin.
The Lunts’ celebrated hospitality made Ten Chimneys the unlikely refuge of a generation of theater notables. Playwrights, directors, actors and set designers traveled by train via Milwaukee to the rolling Kettle Moraine of rural Wisconsin, where they collaborated intensely, practiced incessantly, romped, wrote and nightly donned black tie for dinner. Alfred, a first-class chef, cooked elaborate meals. Guests picnicked on fine china and sipped martinis poolside. Noel Coward reportedly lounged naked, shocking the maids. Helen Hayes stayed for a month every summer. Coward and Olivier had their own rooms. Frequent visitor Carol Channing said you knew you “had done something right” when you received an invitation to Ten Chimneys. She also declared, “Genesee Depot is to actors what the Vatican is to Catholics.” Katharine Hepburn recalled: “Every time I was visiting the Lunts in Genesee Depot I was in a sort of daze of wonder. The dining room, the table, the china, the silver,
the food, the extraordinary care and beauty and taste…a sort of dream, a vision.”
Garton, the man most responsible for the restoration of Ten Chimneys, somehow intuited that dreamlike vision, though it had faded by the time he first toured the estate in 1995. A Madison-area restaurateur, philanthropist and arts advocate, Garton heard tales of the fabled retreat as a boy in Sheboygan, Wis. His mother was active in community theater, and every year the family traveled to New York City to see the opera. At Amherst Garton majored in religion; he then received his doctorate in theater studies from N.Y.U. He wrote his thesis on John Barrymore, often cited as Lunt’s primary rival for top actor of his generation. Back in the Midwest, Garton taught film history in Wisconsin museums and chaired the Wisconsin Arts Board. His widow, Deirdre, says he was an “almost professional theatergoer.” His cousin Dianne Edie says, “After being at the lake in Sheboygan County, his next favorite thing was going to Broadway.”
It was only natural, then, that Garton would be interested in seeing Ten Chimneys shared with the public, so around 1993 Garton began conferring on the property’s potential with the state historical society, where he had contacts after restoring an old barn and farmhouse in Fitchburg and turning them into a popular restaurant. He also contacted Lunt’s brother-in-law George Bugby, who had lived in and maintained Ten Chimneys since Fontanne’s death in 1983, to arrange a tour of the home. Bugby was in his early 90s and nearly blind, and the estate lay in musty neglect, but neglect in this case had a happy byproduct: Ten Chimneys was a virtual time capsule. With the exception of the Lunts’ clothing, which had been removed, nearly everything was intact. Furniture, silver, rugs, draperies, artwork, even cereal boxes in the cupboards remained. Notes from royalty, snapshots of the Lunts with Charlie Chaplin and the Queen Mother, original scripts, first-edition signed copies of works by Edna Ferber and Alexander Woollcott were stashed haphazardly in drawers and on shelves. On one occasion Bugby greeted a visitor with a bottle of aquavit that Carol Channing had presented to the Lunts years earlier.
Garton returned from his tour enthralled, more by Ten Chimneys’ aura than its grandeur. “He was blown away; he couldn’t stop talking about it,” his wife recalls. “He talked about how quirky it was, how whimsical and personal it was. And finding out more about it, the kind of work that went on in those wonderful summers when everyone would come and visit and rejuvenate, that just spoke to Joe like crazy.”
Though dedicated to the appearance of naturalism, the Lunts were incurable perfectionists. They rehearsed indefatigably, starting in the summer at Ten Chimneys and tweaking right up to the final show. Their epic rows over the minutia of each scene are said to have been the inspiration for Kiss Me Kate. Newsweek once captured the pair reciting dialogue, in a virtual trance, their legs and eyes locked. Over and over they practiced overlapping, until they mastered the trick of interrupting without stepping on the other’s lines. The Lunts’ dedication to their craft seeped into their daily lives; acting was inseparable from who they were. Ten Chimneys, then, served not as a retreat from the theater but a continuation of it.
Garton immediately recognized this quality, understanding Ten Chimneys as a gigantic stage, a theatrical backdrop for the Lunts’ daily routine. A large spiral staircase leading to the reception hall allowed Fontanne to make a dramatic entrance when greeting guests. A vanity to rival a backstage dressing table allowed Fontanne to prep for “candid” publicity photos of the couple under a haystack or next to a white picket fence. Broadway designer Claggett Wilson spent more than two years painting murals on walls, ceilings and furniture. As if on a set, he created illusions, employing faux marble walls, wallpaper cutouts of architectural columns, shading to approximate molding, gold tape in place of gold leaf. The Flirtation Room, as it was called by the Lunts, serves as a theatrical inside joke, mimicking the setting of a French farce with its series of doors leading upstairs and downstairs.
The Ten Chimneys estate includes a rambling, three-story, 35-room main house, plus a two-story Swedish cottage, studio, pool house and the anticipated 10 chimneys. Yet, despite its expansiveness, architectural and decorative sleights of hand confer intimacy. Wilson’s floor-to-ceiling murals of English gentry bearing food, wine and pineapples—a symbol of welcome and hospitality—cover the entry foyer. And he playfully interspersed murals with familiar likenesses: Biblical characters in the drawing room murals bear a strong resemblance to the Lunts, and the portraits on the dining room ceiling were modeled after Fontanne’s sister. Fontanne and friends did the needlepoint on the dining room chairs.
With styles, eras and geography overlapping, the only unifying theme is the Lunts’ personal taste. Unabashed aesthetes, Lunt and Fontanne simply purchased objects that struck their fancy. Swedish design abuts Parisian Art Deco, Queen Anne furniture and pre–Civil War oil lamps. “It’s very much a home,” says Sean Malone, the president of the Ten Chim-neys Foundation that Garton formed. “It’s fun and eclectic. You’re not going to say, ‘This is quintessential colonial blah, blah, blah.’ What surprises me over and over again, and delights me, is people talking about how relevant it is. People find it so personal.”
The connection visitors feel to Ten Chimneys is in some ways a testament to Joe Garton’s own connection to it. As extraordinary as the Lunts were, Ten Chimneys could have been just another house museum where famous people once lived, but Garton created a paradigm through which others could appreciate it. He didn’t simply introduce people to the Lunts and Ten Chimneys, he introduced people to a way of thinking about them. Garton felt the restored Ten Chimneys should be about good food and good friends; surrounding yourself with natural beauty and beautiful things; commitment to the arts and commitment to excellence; graciousness and the art of living well. “Joe put the whole thing in an entirely different light for us,” says Joan Hardy, who, with her husband Buzz ’50, was friends with George Bugby and had visited the estate after its glory days. “He really made me aware of how truly extraordinary the place was, and he just kept convincing more people.” After talking with Garton, the Hardys signed on as fundraisers for the new foundation. “Joe was wonderful at getting people excited about something that excited him,” Dianne Edie says. “Things that he thought, he stimulated others to see.”
But even with Garton’s influence, the estate almost disappeared. Not long after Garton first visited the property, George Bugby died, and in 1995 Ten Chimneys passed to Bugby’s daughter, who had agreed to sell the estate and all of its contents to a developer. The developer planned to turn the land into a subdivision. When Garton heard about the plan, Deirdre recalls, “He went into overdrive.”
Garton met with the developer, thinking perhaps he could purchase the land back from him. After several unsuccessful encounters, Garton launched a publicity campaign to save Ten Chimneys. The developer began dragging his heels, talking about problems with buried oil tanks and hang-ups with the Department of Natural Resources. After months of such excuses, it became apparent that he was stringing Bugby’s daughter along, hoping to delay putting up the money for the estate.
Garton had no such reservations, and with the developer’s plans rendered moot, he stepped into the gap, taking out a seven-figure loan in 1996 to purchase Ten Chimneys temporarily. That same year he formed the nonprofit Ten Chimneys Foundation to save and restore the estate. Part of Garton’s plan was to construct a program center, where art and theater groups could hold retreats or fundraisers. As David O’Fallon of the Minnesota Center for Arts Education put it at the time, “Ten Chimneys could become the Camp David of the arts.”
To raise funds for the foundation, Garton hosted a series of dinner parties, more than 200 in all, Deirdre estimates. He would take people on a tour of the estate, talk about the significance of the home and try to channel the couple’s peculiar mix of hospitality, Dairy State sensibility and artistic flair. The dinners became the basis of a capital campaign that eventually exceeded the initial $12.5-million goal by $300,000.
In 1998, the Ten Chimneys Foundation repurchased the estate from Garton and began a five-year process of restoring it. On May 26, 2003, Ten Chimneys opened to the public— on what would have been the Lunts’ 81st wedding anniversary. Two months later, Joe Garton died of cancer, just before his 57th birthday. At the time of his cancer diagnosis, he was training for a competitive master’s swimming endurance competition in Hawaii.
The Lunts famously rejected the idea of acting in movies, saying, “We can be bought, but we cannot be bored.” As a result, nearly all of their performances are lost to history. But the Lunts themselves are not, thanks to Ten Chimneys. “This house is as personal as a diary,” says foundation president Sean Malone. “I have to remind myself that not only did I never meet them, I never saw them on stage. You go through the tour, and you just know what they were about.”
And what Joe Garton was about.
Emily Krone is a reporter for the Daily Herald in Chicago.