The Fall of the House of Twain
Mark Twain's last years remain brooding, confusing, misanthropic. But one thing seems clear: Twain played billiards. Lots and lots of billiards.
In 1906, a wealthy friend, knowing that Twain had been without a billiards table for years, decided to buy him one for Christmas. Twain heard about the present and demanded it early. So, together, they selected a top-end table, and Twain installed it in his bedroom, which, in the four-story townhouse he was renting at 21 Fifth Avenue, he considered the best spot for playing. Twain took to sleeping in the study. The table's green cloth set off the (now former) bedroom's walls, which were painted, in Albert Paine's words, "a deep, unreflecting red"perfect for Christmas in November.
Most readers locate Twain in the world of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, but he lived all over. In fact, when Twain first left Hannibal, Mo., in 1853, he ended up at a Manhattan boardinghouse. In a letter home, he admitted that "I have taken a liking to the abominable place," and Twain would frequently return to New York, making friends (Helen Keller knew him by touch) and, as he grew older, losing them (he spent five hours watching Ulysses Grant's funeral procession pass by Union Square). "Make your mark in New York," Twain affirmed, "and you are a made man." He would know: his breakthrough story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," was first published in a New York newspaper.
Twain's longest layover came when, as the white suit-wearing don of American letters, he lived in the Fifth Avenue house from 1904 to 1908. Twain gave lectures, attended luncheons, ambled around Greenwich Village, received so many visitors he had to hire a secretary to turn them away.
One visitor Twain did see was Paine. At their first meeting, Paine found the author in his enormous oak bed, propped up by pillows and wrapped in a Persian dressing gown, his feet pointed toward the headboard, "the atmosphere semi-opaque with cigar smoke." Paine, clearly nervous, managed to ask if he might write a biography of Twain. "Turning those piercing agate-blue eyes directly upon me," Paine remembered, "he said: 'When would you like to begin?'"
That was a Saturday. By Tuesday, Paine was back at 21 Fifth Avenue and interviewing Twain, the first of 242 such sessions. Twain, with a wife and three daughters dead, quickly welcomed Paine into his inner circle, giving him a key to the house and access to his personal papers. Paine eventually moved in, though it's not clear whether this was to facilitate the biography or the billiards. After each morning's interview, the two men started playing and didn't stop until past midnight. Clara, Twain's only surviving daughter, put a sign in the room: NO BILLIARDS AFTER 10 P.M.
In 1908, Twain left New York for the Connecticut countryside. He made sure his new house included a red billiards room, too, and it was there that Mark Twain died, 100 years ago this week.
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New Yorkers referred to 21 Fifth Avenue as the Mark Twain House even while he lived there, but it didn't become official until 1925. That year, at the corner of Fifth and Ninth, the Greenwich Village Historical Society unveiled a bronze plaque commemorating Twain and Washington Irving. Irvingwhose first book, A History of New York, is an unacknowledged classic in the city's literary canonhad shared a close friendship with James Renwick. When Renwick built the house in 1840, he made sure his son, the architect behind the Grace Church and St. Patrick's Cathedral, among others, designed it with a room for Irving, and Irving made use of it until his death in 1859.
1925 was also the year that the Mark Twain House was first parceled into apartments, a sign of the pressures to come. No one was surprised when a major construction firm finalized a deal to demolish the block encompassing the old Brevoort Hotel, the Twain House, and nine other townhouses and to replace them with, in the New York Times' description, "a tall ultramodern apartment building."
What did surprise was the frenetic reaction to the Times' January 15, 1954 story on the efforts to save the Twain House. Stanley Josephson, a 24-year-old law student at NYU, emerged as a spokesman for the resistance. Along with the Greenwich Village Chamber of Commerce, where he was also executive secretary, Josephson developed a plan to move the House off Fifth Avenue and turn it into a Greenwich Village Historical Museum. The Associated Press did a short item on Josephson and the Twain House, and it was reprinted around the world. A few days later, Moscow Radio chose to highlight only the House's impending destructionand to suggest that it was all part of a "sinister plot" to erase Twain from American history. (Twain's political books, it's worth noting, found a huge audience in Cold War Russia.)
The Times' continuing coverage of the battle over the Twain Housesix more stories from January to April 1954marks an important moment in the history of real estate porn. Josephson needed $70,000 to save the House, and he had only two weeks to get ituntil, as the Times breathlessly reported, the House's lone remaining tenant sued to extend his lease to March 1. Casty Palmieri, a car salesman and occupant of the second floor, also donated $100 to Josephson's group. Palmieri even offered another $500, providing the building could be savedand that he could keep his apartment.
Despite the initial optimism of Josephson and the others, though, the relief efforts stalled by mid February. They'd drummed up only a few hundred dollarsand, even worse, the only New York donations, outside of Palmieri's, had come from three women, all of whom worked at Time magazine, all of whom had given one dollar each. The rest of the House's block had already been razed. Someone had even stolen the Twain-Irving plaque.
On Feb. 19, however, hope revived via telegram. Ronald Neame, a British film director who'd just adapted one of Twain's short stories into The Million Pound Note, sent word from London that he had instructed his New York office to donate $100 to the Twain House and that he would "solicit British authors to join the cause."
No one heard anything else from Neame until Feb. 28the night before Palmieri had to move outwhen a second telegram arrived. Neame, it seemed, was now on board the RMS Queen Elizabeth and would arrive in New York on March 2. Neame also offered to give the Twain House the first $10,000 in sales from The Million Pound Note, and Josephson used the telegram to convince the salvage company to hold off for another 48 hours. He then headed to the docks to wait for the Queen Elizabeth, his faith renewed by Neame's latest promise: "The necessary money will be raised in the nick of time, as it would be in a Twain story."
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Ronald Neame had always enjoyed impeccable timing. His very first job was as an assistant cameraman on Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail (1928), which was itself the first talking picture made in England. The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Neame's biggest commercial success in more than fifty years in film, inaugurated the disaster movie genre.
Neame, in short, lived a life as incredible as you might expect: his memoir, Straight from the Horse's Mouth, which he wrote in 2003 for the Scarecrow Press's Filmmakers series, includes chapter titles like "Alec Guinness" and "Judy Garland." But Neame's book never mentions the Mark Twain House. So, with the help of his publisher, I tracked down Neame, who now lives in Beverly Hills and happens to be celebrating his 99th birthday this week.
Neame answered the phone on the third ring and spoke in a great, gravely accent. He seemed more than a little surprised that someone was asking about The Million Pound Note, which, even in his own estimate, was "a reasonably good picture at the time, though not exceptional." Not even Gregory Peck, who possessed enough star power to earn $350,000 for his leading role, could save the film from critics and audiences. (At least Pauline Kael liked it.)
I started by asking Neame if he was a lifelong reader of Twain. "No, I wouldn't say that," he replied. "The Twain story was sent to me as a good idea for a film."
The myth of the Twain House and its British knight quickly unraveled from there. It turns out that, in early 1954, MGM had asked Neame to direct Spencer Tracy's next film. (The working title: Digby's Highland Fling.) Neame scheduled a trip to Los Angeles for this reason, and only then did United Artists decide to set up a press screening of The Million Pound Note in New York.
Neame did travel on the Queen Elizabeth, where he enjoyed "huge tins of caviar" and a fast friendship with newlyweds Michael Wilding and Elizabeth Taylor. "When I was half way across the Atlantic," Neame told me, "I had a telegram from United Artists in New York saying they were helping to save a Mark Twain house, and would I cooperate with them in trying to save it?"
Neame agreed to help, then returned to Liz and the luxury grub. "When I arrived in New York," Neame said, "we went straight to the site of the house, but the whole thing was too late. They had scaffolding and all the other equipment set up and were going to knock it down the next day. There was nothing we could do."
Slightly bewildered, I decided to read Neame some of the Times' obsessive coverage of him. What about that "nick of time" quip? "That must have been given by United Artists. I was in the middle of the Atlantic, and all I saidand I meant itwas that I'd cooperate on my arrival." What about the earlier telegram sent while he was still in London? "I don't know anything about that." Well, did he at least get his $100 back? "I never wired anyone any money. The studio must have done that."
After we'd managed to reconcile our respective versions of history, Neame became more reflective. "It's a shame. Where I live in California, when a house is more than 20 years old, it shouldn't be there any more. Unfortunately, in this part of the world there's no sense of tradition."
Neame sighed. "Where I come from, a 500-year-old house is only just old."
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The Twain House finally fell on April 9, 1954, at the barely pubescent age of 114. Josephson and the Chamber had raised only $15,756hardly enough to stop the rise of an eighteen-story apartment building with air conditioning, basement garage parking, and monthly rents of $152.50.
But the battle over the Twain House was far an isolated incident. As early as 1929, a local bank had tried to lease the House, with residents blocking it through a lawsuit. By the 1950s, Greenwich Village had devolved into a three-way spat between developers, NYU, and cultural atavists. Casualties included landmarks like the Brevoort Hotel, which had hosted everyone from Abraham Lincoln to Annie Oakley, and the "House of Genius," where Catherine Blanchard had been less of a landlord than a patron to Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, John Dos Passos, and many more. By the end of the decade, NYU had poured well over $20,000,000 into developing Washington Square, and there were more than 20 apartment complexes in the works.
None of this was lost on residents, who protested with enough frequency that [Jane Kramer], then a young reporter for The Village Voice, filed them under "A Cause A Day Keeps the Ennui Away." And yet the Mark Twain House, in large part because of the Mark Twain brand, was always different. One measure of this was how the House's destruction reverberated beyond the city limits. An Oregon contractor politely requested its 150 feet of iron fence; a group calling itself "Authentic Americana" salvaged the wooden ceiling beams. Even within the city, NYU nabbed the House's front door for a planned Mark Twain Room in its library, and the Greenwich Village Chamber of Commerce saved a marble fireplace and an ornate mirror for its proposed museum. (Neither project actually happened.)
The Twain House also became a call to action. A week after the House's demise, the Greenwich Village Association organized a special town meeting, which the Association's president promised would be "the opening gun in the campaign for adequate laws to safeguard the Village for the future." Those laws wouldn't arrive for another fifteen years, but, already, the Mark Twain House had become the latest twist in the "Village isn't what it used to be" plot.
On the (very) rare occasion that the Twain House gets mentioned today, it's in this capacity. But it seems clear that the most high-profile attempts to save the House were as driven by late capitalism as the attempts to destroy it. There's no way to verify Neame's story since, as he puts it, "I'm the only one still alive." But there's also no reason to doubt it. Throughout our conversation, Neame remained incredibly lucid and charming. The only parts of the story that confused him were the ones he was hearing for the first time. Certainly, he seemed convinced on the issue of motivations: "It brought a certain amount of publicity to the film. United Artists must have known that it was too late, but saw it as a bit of publicity. You know what film distributors are like."
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The developers of that tall ultramodern apartment building decided to name it The Brevoort, and it still stands at Fifth and Ninth, looking terribly dated. Most of the surrounding blocks have been scrubbed of their historical charm. At least the bronze plaque of Twain and Irving has returned, though you have to look for it. Much easier to spot is a sign for The Brevoort's Fifth Avenue Service Entrance. ------
Craig Fehrman is working on a book about presidents and their books. You can find more of his writing at [www.craigfehrman.com](http://www.craigfehrman.com)