Elementary, my dear fellow...
by
Sonya M Fitzmaurice
- Monday, August 22, 2016
Though looking at the viewer ever so slightly distant, an elegance emanates from the photo. Equally casual, the seated man asserts gentle eyes and proper poise. His genteel charisma hints a depth of character. Yes, I feel he is most certainly an artist. Creativity is a masterful trait often subtly divulged in these simple black and white photos of yesteryear. William Gillette, American actor, playwright and stage manager, was indeed a creative chap. After all, we have his ingenuity to thank for our imperishable image of Sherlock Holmes, deerstalker cap, pipe and all.
Curiosity sent us driving one hundred and twenty-three miles to Connecticut. Though hot that high summer day, the climb to the castle was quick. Before us stood this massive building, facade of cemented stones, medieval fortress feeling, as if something needed to be protected, secrets hidden. The huge wood door opened and a docent emerged beckoning entry with promises of revelations within. So our adventure began...
Known as the Seven Sisters, Gillette designed his home and all of the many details personally. This man's home was his castle, and it took five years to build in the early 1920's. We were told the home had forty-seven doors, all hand-hewn southern white oak, no two exactly alike. Each door's latch mechanics resembled train wheel engineering, revealing Gillette's love of locomotives. To watch each door open stirred a childlike wonderment of the creativity and fine craftsmanship.
This man thought of everything, evident in the added secret passage in the entrance hallway. In case he spied a visitor approaching outside whom he wasn't interested in seeing, he would make a quick escape through the doorway into the workshop below, or if eager to entertain them, magically appear in the hall to promptly greet with swift surprise.
He had been known to keenly entertain many friends during the course of his established career, as well as a feline family of fifteen he called to dinner with the ring of a bell.
In the great living room, mirrors were placed strategically hidden in plain view below actual windows so that he would be able to view guests from many vantage points upstairs and down, seemingly anticipatory of their moves, perplexing them with his wit. What a performer!
At his study, in an effort to protect the beautiful wooden floors, he had his office chair mounted on a glider track so that positioning could be adjusted without scraping the wood surface to do so. Even the chair's back was adjustable so that his tall lanky frame would be comfortable in multiple positions while writing plays or conceptualizing patents for realistic staging effects in sound and lighting he made famous.
Gillette was married only once to the love of his life, Helen Nichols, a fellow stage actor. Losing her only six years into their union to a ruptured appendix, he never remarried. His modest bedroom displays reminiscence of his Sherlock Holmes character traits and quiet remembrance of his beautiful wife taken too soon.
In a major step toward modern theatre, Gillette introduced realism into the sets of his first Civil War drama, Held by the Enemy. Successfully creating a wholly American themed play, it was a commercial achievement on British stages. Later, he created the well known adaptation of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes scripts. Gillette's Sherlock Holmes consisted of four acts combining elements from several of the original stories. All the characters in the play were Gillette's own creation except for Holmes, Watson and Moriarty.
The entire estate was purchased by the state of Connecticut in 1943 including the castle and surrounding woodlands. Trails and vistas are open to the public as Gillette would have wished, sharing an extant life of invention, imagination and ingenuity.
It is quite elementary, my dear fellow... xoxo-Sonya
