The Magic of House Museums

Transcription

1 The Magic of House Museums By making great people seem more accessible, house museums bring us closer to their creative lives, which is why the campaign to turn Oscar Hammerstein II s Highland Farm into such a place is so worthy a cause. By Terry Teachout Updated July 10, :35 p.m. ET The exterior of Oscar Hammerstein II's former home at Highland Farm Photo: Highland Farm Seventy-six years ago, Oscar Hammerstein II was pacing around the second-story study of the Pennsylvania farmhouse to which he and his

2 family had moved in 1940, trying to figure out how best to set a new Broadway musical in motion. A homely tale of rural life in the Oklahoma Territory, it was to be his first collaboration with Richard Rodgers, and the two men had decided that the show would start out simply, with a woman sitting alone on stage churning butter while a cowboy was heard singing in the wings. As Hammerstein gazed out his window at a cornfield, something clicked in his mind. He soon came up with this plain-spoken couplet: The corn is as high as an elephant s eye / An it looks like it s climbin clear up to the sky. Seven months later, the curtain of the St. James Theatre went up, Alfred Drake sang those words, and Oklahoma! got under way. I stood in that same room last week and looked out that same window. You can, too. The homes of innumerable historical figures have been restored to their original condition and turned into house museums that tell the stories of their owners personal and professional lives. In addition to such familiar examples as Monticello and Mount Vernon, there are countless house museums throughout America that once belonged to celebrated artists of every kind. Augustus Saint-Gaudens s New Hampshire home and studios, Edith Wharton s country estate in Massachusetts, Frank Lloyd Wright s selfdesigned houses in Arizona, Chicago and Wisconsin: All are open to the public and are visited by tens of thousands of tourists each year. Some historic houses that remain in private hands can also be viewed. Highland Farm, Oscar Hammerstein II s country house in Doylestown, Pa., a two-hour drive from the St. James Theatre, was turned into a bed-andbreakfast in It s not open for tours, but you can book a stay there at highlandfarmbb.com. What s more, Will Hammerstein, Oscar s grandson, is now raising funds to purchase the historic property from its present owner and transform it into a full-scale house museum, the Oscar Hammerstein Museum and Theatre Education Center. To do so, he must raise $10 million, with an initial installment of $2 million due in December. If he fails to meet

3 that goal, Highland Farm will instead become an anonymous four-lot subdivision. Mr. Hammerstein showed me around Highland Farm on Friday. Prior to that time, I knew only from old photos and written descriptions what the threestory house looked like prior to Oscar Hammerstein s death in Stephen Sondheim, Oscar s protégé, spent much time there as a boy and has described it as dark and cool and chic. As for me, I d always imagined it as resembling the nearby 87-acre estate of Moss Hart, George S. Kaufman s playwriting partner, a fantastically elaborate residence that a cynical guest is said to have described as looking like what God could do if He had money.

4 The barn at Highland Farm Photo: Highland Farm Not so. Highland Farm isn t small, but the first thing that struck me when I went inside the 19th-century brick-and-stucco house is how modest it looks. It is, above all, a family home: The bedrooms (including the one in which Mr. Sondheim stayed) are low-ceilinged and cozy, and it s easy to imagine the Hammerstein kids clambering up and down the narrow staircases while their father scribbled away at Carousel and South Pacific in his nearby study. Oscar loved it so much that when he learned

5 that he was suffering from a terminal case of stomach cancer, he chose to go back there to die in his own bed instead of submitting to chemotherapy. I m really lucky and never knew how much until now, he told his doctor. Places like Highland Farm are not of interest to tourists alone. I ve written the biographies of two artists, Louis Armstrong and H.L. Mencken, whose homes were preserved for posterity, and my visits there rank among the most valuable pieces of research I did. In particular, I learned priceless things about Satchmo s character from seeing his home, an unassuminglooking brick-faced frame house in a working-class neighborhood of Queens, N.Y. The joyously gaudy interior, which is reminiscent of Elvis Presley s Graceland, looks exactly like what it is: the residence of a poor New Orleans boy who grew up, made good and was justly proud of his hard-earned success. According to William, much of the Hammersteins original furniture remains in the family. His plan is to restore the extensively photographed interior of the house, then turn the nearby barn into a three-tiered museum containing a screening room, a gift shop, office space and two large exhibition spaces that will be used to chronicle Oscar Hammerstein s great theatrical career. (To find out more about the project, visit hammersteincenter.org.) We want this to be a place where everybody can go, he says. To stand with him in the room where his grandfather wrote the words to Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin is to know in your bones that for anyone who loves the American musical, the successful preservation of Highland Farm will be the worthiest of causes. Mr. Teachout, the Journal s drama critic, writes Sightings, a column about the arts, twice monthly. Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.