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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
The ad in the Times real-estate listings said "medieval duplex," which was intriguing, unless "medieval" referred to the plumbing. It was 1987 and I was apartment hunting, so I arranged to meet the broker at a brownstone just off Washington Square. The apartment was four steep flights up, and the walls of the final landing were a rough stucco, with an odd-shaped niche high in the wall for a candle or a skull, just outside a rounded, rough-hewn door with elaborate ornamental hinges.
The apartment in question consisted of the full, narrow top floor, and I was smitten. The theatrical plasterwork continued throughout, and there was a bay window with a window seat, flanked by portholes of thick, leaded Mediterranean-blue stained glass, all overlooking the leafy corner of Washington Square Park where fanatics play chess. There was a micro-kitchen, one tiny closet, and a cramped, nineteen-seventies-vintage Pepto-Bismol-pink tiled bathroom, but none of this mattered, thanks to a vaulted skylight, a fireplace, assorted archways, and a hidden, winding staircase. The stairs led to the roof, where I found a large deck. A sun-bleached oak ship's wheel, six feet in diameter, leaned against the outer wall of a hobbit-scale cottage---one room, with a beamed ceiling. The broker was chatty, and she mentioned that the apartment had once been the home of John Barrymore.
Here's how long ago this was: I didn't snap up the place that very minute but told the broker that I'd phone her the next morning. That night, I called my agent, Helen Merrill, a German woman whose accent had only deepened with her decades in New York. When I told her about the apartment, she remarked, "Perhaps you vill find my hairpins." It seemed that Helen, thirty years earlier, had conducted an affair on the premises with Barrymore's son-in-law, an erstwhile actor married to the troubled Diana Barrymore, whose mother was a poetess aptly named Michael Strange. Helen recalled the apartment, if not the son-in-law, in fond detail, and the karma became overwhelming. The next day, I met with Winston Kulok, the affable owner of the town house, who with his family occupied the first two floors, and the lease on the Barrymore place was mine.
As I settled in, I researched my new home. Barrymore had taken up residence in 1917, just before he began performing his legendary Hamlet uptown. His film career at that point was limited to locally shot silent movies, including an early take on "Moby-Dick," which may have been the source of the ship's wheel. Barrymore had remodelled the apartment as a Gothic retreat, christening it the Alchemist's Corner. He had installed all the false beams, monastery-inspired ironwork, and stained glass, which made his lair resemble a stage set for an Agatha Christie whodunnit in summer stock. The rooftop had been his masterpiece, and had at one time included a garden, with cedar trees, a slate walkway, and a reflecting pool. Tons of soil had to be hoisted up by pulley, and eventually caused a collapse into the rooms below. Of Barrymore's vision only the cottage remained; he'd likened it to a roost overlooking the spires of Paris.
I read up on Barrymore's life--particularly in his entertainingly fraudulent and entirely ghostwritten autobiography and in "Good Night, Sweet Prince," an equally fanciful work, devised, soon after...
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