by Mark Dery
The threatening lettuce leaves derived from the title, Tinned Lettuce, whose vaguely Victorian ring and eccentric English silliness were classic Gorey. Where he’d stumbled across the phrase he couldn’t remember, but he was “a firm believer that it exists somewhere.”10 Asked what it meant, he said it meant nothing—always a virtue, in his estimation. Elsewhere, he said the phrase captured the very essence of the ephemeral, a concept dear to the Gorey heart. “Thinking about his title after the fact, Mr. Gorey wondered what tinned lettuce, if it existed, would look like,” Mel Gussow wrote in the New York Times. “His answer: Ghastly Brine…”11 Like Gorey Stories, Tinned Lettuce was a vaudevillian musical revue consisting of dramatic vignettes with songs and dances interspersed throughout. The playlets had names like “The Frozen Man, or, Going Farther and Faring Worse,” “The Towering Rage,” and “The Black Lobster.” They were drawn, with the exception of “The Object-Lesson” and “The Nursery Frieze,” from Gorey’s unpublished writings (“things I haven’t gotten around to doing drawings for”), a strategy he’d employ when he turned his hand to amateur theater on Cape Cod.12
From the first, Gorey proceeded on the Balanchinian assumption that psychology was irrelevant to his plays. His works for the stage were about Victorian nonsense, mock moralizing, surrealism, silliness, absurdism—anything but psychological motivations and character development. “They wanted to know what their characters’ motivations were,” he said of Tinned Lettuce’s undergraduate cast. “There are no motivations. There is nothing underlying.”13
“He wanted flat characters…almost like a drawing,” says Jane MacDonald, a trained actor who’d worked in the professional theater in New York and LA before becoming a stalwart of Gorey’s Cape Cod troupe. “It’s hard to make a drawing. I wanted to make this character come to life and sometimes I would fill it up or give it more of an attitude or a twist than he wanted.”14 “Less acting,” Gorey would admonish from the director’s chair.
He was more involved in the production, at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, than he’d ever been in a show based on his work. “Edward attended every audition and every rehearsal, just about,” Wulp recalls. “He just adored Tinned Lettuce.” Kevin McDermott, then a twenty-one-year-old acting student at NYU, later to perform in a number of Gorey’s works, remembers auditioning for the revue. While a pianist played a tango, he and a gaggle of actors struck Egyptian temple–frieze poses. “With a combination of deathly seriousness and total nonchalance,” he recalls, “we moved across the floor. Huge gulps of laughter filled the room. Sounding like a cross between a large gull and a hyena, it was coming from behind the table. I had never heard anything like it. It was Edward Gorey’s giant, infectious laugh.”15
Gorey enjoyed himself mightily at performances, too. Irwin Terry sat behind him at one of the shows. “It was general admission,” he recalls, “so we sat right behind him on purpose. He hooted, whooped, and generally had a gay old time watching his work on stage. It was almost more entertaining watching him than the performance itself—but the combination was priceless.”16
Tinned Lettuce was scheduled to run from April 17 to 27 but was held over through May 4. Gussow, as always, was enthusiastic: “The Throbblefoot Spectre loiters in a distraught manner, a wedding is held in the Church of the Whited Sepulchre and people fall mysteriously from balustrades or fling themselves into Yawning Chasms.”17 Gorey had a ball, which was all that mattered as far as he was concerned. “We had so much fun,” Wulp remembers. “He loved to laugh.”
Over the next decade and a half, Gorey would invest much of his prodigious creative energy in writing, producing, and directing productions of his theatrical work all over the Cape, uncategorizable affairs with unimprovably Goreyesque titles such as Lost Shoelaces (1987), Useful Urns (1990), Stuffed Elephants (1990), Flapping Ankles (1991), Crazed Teacups (1992), Inverted Commas (1995), and Moderate Seaweed (1999). He had, he told an interviewer in 1996, contracted a serious case of stage fever: “In the last 10 years, I’ve done a lot of very local theater. I write, I direct, I design, I do everything. I even act if something happens to somebody in the cast. A lot of the actors I use are people who look like I might have drawn them. I even choose the music. That’s really what I enjoy. People sometimes say it’s such a pity this isn’t going somewhere else and I say, ‘Well, where would it go?’”18
As one nonplussed audience member noted, these productions were often impenetrable to the uninitiated. “The very mystery and understatement that makes for good visual art and reading made for terrible theater,” a theatergoer recalled. Take Useful Urns, he said: “There were these big stage pieces shaped like urns that would move about the stage with actors popping out saying various unconnected phrases. I read an interview with one of the actors who admitted that Edward Gorey himself was one of the few appreciative audience members. Even though many people would walk out of these shows, he would remain undaunted and the actors were carried on by his chortling laughter and their sense of camaraderie.”19
* * *
Snug in the attic at Millway, Gorey proceeded—in fits and starts, as funds allowed—with the renovation of 8 Strawberry Lane. From time to time, he made forays into Manhattan for infusions of culture, staying at 36 East 38th Street. Sometime around ’86, however, the person he’d sublet his apartment to ratted him out, informing the landlord of Gorey’s largely absentee status so that he, the new tenant, could take over the lease—an act of jaw-dropping perfidy, though hardly an uncommon one in New York’s cutthroat real-estate market. Gorey’s apartment was rent-controlled—a real plum. In the end, his sublessee’s treachery forced his hand, putting a period at the end of his New York years.
There was a fittingly Goreyesque denouement to the whole affair. He’d asked some friends to move everything out of his apartment (“because I was already back up here on the Cape”) but had neglected to tell them about the mummy’s head gathering dust in his closet.20 “It didn’t occur to me to say, ‘And don’t forget the mummy’s head!’” As it happened, they didn’t notice the mysterious object swaddled in brown paper on the top shelf. The super, however, did. “I got a call from a detective at some precinct or other who said, ‘Mr. Gorey, we’ve discovered a head in your closet,’ and I said, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, can’t you tell a mummy’s head when you see one? It’s thousands of years old! Good grief! Did you think it took place over the weekend?’ They said, ‘Well, you can have it back,’ and then they never sent it back to me, so I don’t know what happened to it. I had the detective’s name and phone number and I lost that so I’ve never been able to get it back—not that I’m really desperate to get it back.”
* * *
Gorey had always been “a terrible creature of habit,” as he was the first to admit, and at sixty-one was only more so. Ensconced at 8 Strawberry Lane, he soon laid the rails for his daily routines, without which he would “go to pieces,” he claimed.21
He settled into the habit of eating breakfast and lunch, day in, day out, at Jack’s Outback, a café minutes away from his house. (The authors of The World of Edward Gorey wryly note that he simply switched his “allegiance from New York City Ballet to Jack’s Outback, where, ‘all things considered,’ he…maintained an almost perfect attendance for breakfast and lunch.”)22 Jack’s served comfort food: pot roast, chicken potpie, eggs Benedict. Compulsion dictated that Gorey sit in the same spot every day: at the far end of the counter, near the door, for breakfast and on the long bench on the right-hand side of the dining room for lunch, unless he was eating with friends or conducting an interview, in which case he would sit in the third booth on the right. His menu selections were set in stone, too. His guest checks for the month of June 1998, preserved for posterity at the Edward Gorey House, are a case study in repetition: “2 poached in a bowl, ham, white toast” (breakfast, 6/6); “2 poached in a cup, ham, white toast, fruit cup in a bowl” (6/7); “egg salad, white toast butter only, fruit cup in a bowl” (6/9); “2 poached in a bowl, ham, white toast�
�� (6/11); you get the idea.
There’s an existential comfort—purchased at the price of monotony—in knowing where you’ll be eating breakfast tomorrow morning and every tomorrow thereafter and that, barring Acts of God, it will involve poached eggs. “Life is distracting and uncertain” was a Gorey maxim; repetition imposes order on an unpredictable world. (His wardrobe, like his daily dining habits, reflected his preference for predictability, at least in mundane matters: shopping for clothes, he’d buy half a dozen copies of a shirt if it caught his eye.) It’s hard not to see Gorey’s beloved routines as a bulwark against the unpredictable and the unsettling, a lifelong reaction to a childhood marked by constant disruption.
Jack’s proprietor was Jack Braginton-Smith, one of life’s character actors. His long-running role was that stock type the Lovable Curmudgeon. He looked the part, with the rumpled features of a wizened codger, his white hair permanently mussed, like ruffled feathers. A staunch Yankee who “was of the mind you would need a passport and shots to go off Cape Cod,” as his daughter Dianna Braginton-Smith puts it, he served up insults as an amuse-bouche, in a New England accent thick as chowder. “The jibing and the repartee was part of the performance—his way of interacting with the people in his community,” she says.
Like the cocktail parties in Eliot F-13 or the intermission confabs in the State Theater lobby, Jack’s would become a social stage for Gorey. A community watering hole frequented by quirky locals, it was Yarmouth Port’s answer to the bar in Cheers. Customers took their own orders, poured their own coffee, bused their own tables. When the lunch rush overwhelmed him, Braginton-Smith would scrawl an exasperated note and slap it on the door: GO AWAY. They never did.
Braginton-Smith, who died in 2005, was hopeless as a businessman but a born conductor of collective mood, creating a bantering, gossip-swapping vibe that made his restaurant “the heart of the town,” says Dianna, a place where “a bunch of people who were on their own” could be “comfortable being alone together”—a singularly Yankee trait, in her opinion. (Gorey, never one for Garrison Keillor sentimentality, said that Jack’s Outback provided “the illusion of what most people think of as village life. You hear everything that’s going on and a lot of things that aren’t going on.”)23
In time, Gorey shed his New York persona. His fur coats had been synonymous with his gothic-beatnik image, so it’s fitting they went first. Making a grand entrance was outlandish on the Cape, especially in a double-breasted otter coat with sable trim; Yarmouth Port had an artsy element, but it leaned toward Yankee eccentricity, not Wildean aestheticism. Besides, animal-rights activists had made wearing fur an act of moral turpitude. Gorey put the coats in storage for good.
“His whole New York City getup with the jeans and the jewelry and the fur coats and making big entrances and waving bejeweled hands around was, by his own admission, a bit of a put-on,” says Ken Morton. “He was acting.” When Gorey hung up his furs for the last time, what remained were his unfeigned idiosyncrasies: the stagy delivery, the obscure passions, the unpredictable opinions on everything under the sun, the obsessive routines—“the certain flamboyances that were always there, that were not an affectation,” as Morton puts it.
Mothballing his natural diffidence took a bit more doing. “When he first came in here, he’d come in with a book,” recalled Braginton-Smith. “He’d read his book, eat his food, out the door, he’s gone. But the people that come in here have a sense of humor, and they have an affinity for one another, and…it began to get to him so that he wasn’t as aloof.…And then it got to the point where he was really friendly, didn’t read his book anymore, intruded in private conversations, told people his opinion—and he was very opinionated, and he had the statistics to back up his thoughts—so that, at the end, he was a tyrant!”24
Before long, Gorey was one of the gang, taking his personalized coffee mug from the rack reserved for regulars. Getting into the swing of things, he started ringing himself up, recording lunch totals of, oh, $14,028—acts of everyday Dada that gave Braginton-Smith fits when he went over the day’s receipts. Taking note of the oversize bowl for gratuities near the door, Gorey made a sign calculated to wring a tip from the flintiest heart. Framed by distrait children and women in widow’s weeds, the hand-lettered text beseeched, PRAY FORGET NOT THE WIDOWS AND ORPHANS. (It counterpointed another sign that warned, UNATTENDED CHILDREN WILL BE SOLD AS SLAVES.)
The two men struck up a ribbing, riffing friendship that was resolutely unserious. In all the years he and Gorey knew one another, said Braginton-Smith, they “never had one serious discussion, not one, because he was on such an intellectual level that I couldn’t reach. So we did fantasy all the time, little vignettes back and forth. I didn’t intrude in his life and he didn’t intrude in mine and it was a perfect relationship because we didn’t owe anybody anything.”25 “They were both deeply reclusive and guarded people,” says Dianna, “and they recognized that in each other and respected each other’s need to be unavailable. They could be unavailable in the same space together, and that is a great gift if you are somebody who feels that discomfort but still wants to be known.”
Gorey and Braginton-Smith went to antiques auctions, a favorite pastime, and took in shows at the venerable Cape Playhouse in Dennis, since 1927 the epicenter of a thriving summer theater scene. (The Playhouse was one of the birthplaces of summer stock, attracting A-listers such as Bogie, Bette Davis, Henry Fonda, and Gregory Peck.) Braginton-Smith’s friends the Broadway set designers Helen Pond and Herbert Senn did the scenery for Playhouse productions, and Gorey began socializing with them and Braginton-Smith, often at the couple’s breathtaking home, a deconsecrated Unitarian Universalist church built in the Gothic style in 1836, where they hosted unforgettable parties.
The building’s austere white clapboard exterior belies a ravishing interior, tastefully appointed with antique furniture and Goreyesque curios—deer horns mounted on plaques, cast-iron tassels from Victorian cemetery fencing—and stage-magic illusions: the carved Gothic tracery on the ceiling and lustrous marble flooring turn out to be hand-painted trompe l’oeil.
Senn, an Anglophile whose tastes ran to Gothic revival, christened the house Strawberry Hill in homage to Horace Walpole’s Twickenham mansion of the same name.26 Unsurprisingly, he and Gorey got on swimmingly. A supremely cultured man, Senn, who died in 2003, had an encyclopedic knowledge of design history, was an aficionado of classical music, and was entranced by Russian art, from Léon Bakst’s opulent costumes and scenery for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes to Palekh, the folk art of painting miniatures on lacquered boxes. His library ranged over such topics as decorative antique ironwork, Klee, Klimt, and the carceral nightmares of Piranesi. Pond, the quieter of the two, liked to listen while Senn and Gorey talked. As they chatted, Ted fed potato chips to their black Labrador, Lucky, a violation of house rules impermissible for anyone but him. What did they talk about? “Usually nothing after 1750,” quips Rick Jones, who was sometimes part of the group.
Pond and Senn inaugurated a tradition of inviting friends who might be spending Christmas morning alone—Gorey, Jones, and Braginton-Smith—over for breakfast. Gorey was famous for not bringing gifts (“He would give you a gift any time he wanted to give you a gift,” says Jones, but “not for any specific time”) and for his obscenely rich scrambled eggs. In truth, they were the surrealist painter Francis Picabia’s eggs, prepared according to Alice B. Toklas’s recipe for “eggs Francis Picabia”—stirred constantly over very, very low heat for a very, very long time with copious amounts of butter.
Despite never eating in, during his New York years, Gorey had become a dab hand in the kitchen after many a summer cooking for his relatives. When the Garveys moved into Millway, he “decided he wanted to learn how to cook,” Skee Morton recalls. Her mother, Betty Garvey, “sort of coached him along, and then it got so that he was cooking all our dinners.” He stocked up on cookbooks—Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Craig Claiborne’s Kitch
en Primer, The Shaker Cookbook, The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book by Fannie Merritt Farmer, first published in 1896—and tried his hand, when the mood struck him, at surrealist cuisine. “A couple of times, he made us completely blue dinners,” says Skee. “He dyed the mashed potatoes blue and had a casserole they put curaçao in that made it bluish, and there were probably blueberries involved.” No blue aspic, oddly enough.
On occasion, he had friends or family over for dinner. “He loved big tureens,” Pond recalls, perhaps for the theatricality of the presentation, possibly because they resembled urns. “We used to go to his house to dinner, Herbert and Helen and I,” Braginton-Smith remembered, “and we were in the kitchen one time—he was cooking—and he flambéed his beard. We killed ourselves laughing. That was the last time we got invited to dinner—Herbert, Helen, or myself. He was an absolute joy.”27
* * *
Mel and Alexandra (“Alex”) Schierman were around, too, with their kids, Anthony and Annabelle. Ballet friends going back to the City Center days, they’d bought a vacation house in Yarmouth Port, and Gorey seemed to regard them as family. He’d drop by without warning, flopping down on the couch and making himself at home. “I remember him storming into the house, saying, ‘I’m starving! When’s dinner?’” says Anthony. Gorey would sit around, sipping Campari, while Annabelle’s dog, a Lab–border collie mix, snuggled up against him, its head on his lap. “I do feel like he felt some kind of refuge with my parents,” Anthony reflects. “They didn’t want anything from him except friendship. They really liked and respected his work, but that was never a topic; they bonded over shared interests in cultural things, like movies and music and TV shows.”