Perhaps you’ve seen a sign, as you drive along Interstate 94 or Wisconsin Highway 83:
TEN CHIMNEYS
What’s that all about?
In the mid-twentieth century, Ten Chimneys was the home of America’s foremost theater couple, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. A charitable foundation has preserved it, just as it was in that heady era. In case you’d like to visit.
But don’t just drop in, as Noël Coward might have done. These days, you need to schedule a tour.
“Hang on a sec, O New Favorite Writer. What did you say this was? A lunch place with a fountain?” No, no, O Gracious Reader: Alfred LUNT and Lynn FONTANNE. You know, “the Lunts.” As in . . . well . . . Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. If you don’t know the names, it’s because you were born fifty years too late, that’s all.
The Badger State has spawned or attracted much entertainment royalty, that’s for sure. The Ringling Brothers, circus entrepreneurs of Baraboo. The Ameche brothers, actors Don and Jim, of Kenosha. Erik Weisz of Appleton, who became escape artist Harry Houdini. The great guitarist/inventor Les Paul of Waukesha. And the late comedian Chris Farley of Madison.
But none could outshine the luster of the Lunts, Alfred and Lynn, of Genessee Station.
Alfred Lunt, Jr., was born in 1892, the son of a Milwaukee timber baron. The senior Lunt died when young Alfred was two, leaving him to be raised by his eccentric spendthrift mother and her second husband, a physician. The family lived in the small village of Genessee Depot when Alfred was in his teens, before moving for three years to a Swedish colony in Finland. Later, after returning to Wisconsin, he launched an acting career that took him to New York. About the same time, he came into an inheritance from his father and used it to puchase land on the edge of Genessee Station, where he designed and built a small but stylish house.
Meanwhile, Lynn Fontanne, an English actress, had come to America in 1918 to join Laurette Taylor’s acting company in New York. As successful young actors on the rise, Lunt and Fontanne were bound to meet. When they did, they fell in love. The two were married in 1922.
As top-shelf actors, they performed in plays from autumn through spring but had some time off in the summer. When Alfred and Lynn came “home” to summer in Genessee Depot, where he had installed his widowed mother and his step-siblings in the little house, the place became cramped. Besides practical space limitations, friction was inevitable between the new bride and her willful, imperious mother-in-law. So Alfred and Lynn set to work expanding a chicken coop into a charming cottage big enough for them to inhabit in the summer months.
In later years, they added a log-built Swedish-style “studio,” which became a favored rehearsal space for them and their actor friends. Eventually, they greatly expanded the main house, moved back into it, and moved Alfred’s mother into the cottage. Altogether, the three buildings—main house, cottage, and studio—had ten chimneys. That will give you a clue how they named the property. They also dug a small, L-shaped swimming pool complete with poolhouse, and they had a few other practical buildings.
The place has been described as a “gentleman’s farm.” They did have chickens, and for a while during the Second World War they got around rationing by having their own cow. But nobody would ever describe Ten Chimneys as a working farm.
It was a sanctuary—a refuge for hard-working creative artists needing to recharge their batteries after a brutal working season. Upon arrival in early summer, Lynn would sit on the terrace for days on end, just gazing into the woods and feeding snacks to her three dachshunds.
Many friends from among the theatrical and literary glitterati appreciated the opportunity as well. In the days before interstate highways and jet air travel, famous New Yorkers would arrive in Milwaukee by train or plane and be driven the thirty miles, mostly on gravel roads, to spend a few days, or more, relaxing with the Lunts in their bucolic retreat. In the rarefied circles they traveled in, you knew you had “arrived” if you received an invitation to Ten Chimneys.
Actor and playwright Noël Coward, actress Helen Hayes, critic Alexander Woollcott—the real-life model for the irascible Sheridan Whiteside in Kaufman and Hart’s 1939 play The Man Who Came to Dinner—and younger actors such as Carol Channing, Montgomery Clift, Dick Van Patten, and Laurence Olivier all visited whenever they could.
The hospitality was first-rate. Lynn was a demon seamstress, often whipping up dresses and other items for friends on the spur of the moment. Alfred had a flair for cooking and a large kitchen in which to exercise it. Think of the dinner-table conversation!
To visit Ten Chimneys is to step back into an era of glamor and a level of wealth and comfort, despite Depression and War, that most of us can hardly imagine. Lunt, besides cooking, was obsessive about the design and décor of the estate, painting many of the distinctive murals and embellishments himself. He also had the help of prominent scenic and costume designer Clagett Wilson. And wherever in the world he went, he collected interesting and classic bits of furniture, and other conversation pieces, which were then designed into the ongoing project which was the house.
Ten Chimneys is not just an old house tour. Unlike most such tours, in houses furnished with pieces “typical of the era” or “such as [the principals] would have used,” restored to appear “much as it would have looked”—at Ten Chimneys, everything is original and unchanged. About all they have done is dusted, polished, and refreshed.
After the widowed Lynn Fontanne died in 1983, her caretaker, brother-in-law George Bugbee, simply shut up the house. Thirteen years later, Madison-area restaurateur Joseph W. Garton purchased the estate and launched the Ten Chimneys Foundation to restore it, open it to the public, and operate it as “a world-class museum and national resource for theater and arts education.” It opened to the public on May 26, 2003, which would have been the Lunts’ eighty-first wedding anniversary.
In addition to public tours, the estate is opened for a week to about ten journeyman actors from America’s regional theaters, who get what amounts to an intensive tutorial from a first-magnitude star such as Alan Alda, Joel Grey, or Marsha Mason. This year’s special guest instructor is Phylicia Rashad.
So in many ways, Ten Chimneys perpetuates the cultural legacy of the Lunts. We visited last week and found it a treat.
By the way, the Cornerstone Restaurant is a good place for a spot of lunch after your morning tour or before your afternoon tour. Tell them Your New Favorite Writer sent you.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers
Your New Favorite Writer
