Real Estate: Waking The Tarkington Ghosts.

REAL ESTATE

Q

Q U

Kenneth Roberts (left) and Booth T arkington aboard the Regina.

BY COLIN SARGENT

The Boat Room during the 1985 tag sale. Panels in white wood open as secret closets

J\KING THE TA~

,'50 the portcullis is rising!" It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity . . . to buy a condominium in Seawood, Booth T arkington's summer retreat, one of the few truly unburned literary mansions left in the state. In an age of replicas,

this, Gentle Reader, is the real thing: For $350,000 or so, you can combine your search for lovely living quarters and secure for yourself an immortal spot in literary history in one fell swoop - while you and your family dwell in one quarter of the "house that Penrod .built."

Ah, Booth Tarkington, master of the semi-colon, the first blush of romance, the saturnine!

My father, Wendell P. Sargent, of Kennebunk Beach, remembers seeing the famous novelist zooming out of the Kennebunk River in his 45-foot Zantre, a Rolls Royce of a motor launch, blind

DAN GAIR, YORK COUNTY COAST STAR

CINGTON GHOSTS

as toast, with Capt. Blynn Montgomery (gruff Booth Chick, named for the author, is Montgomery's nephew and former owner of Chick's Marine on Ocean Avenue), standing up at the wheel, in full uniform, heading out to the ocean's blue universe and an afternoon of whale chasing.

"They used to drive that thing right on top of them!" my father recalls.

Tarkington novels lined our cottage bookshelf in the glowing firelight during my own youthful summers: The Gentleman from Indiana, Seventeen, Alice Adams, Penrod, The Guest ofQuesnay, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Two Vanrevels, Mary's Neck, Claire Ambler ... the list swelled to 40 by the time Tarkington died in 1946, and swallowed the memory of Kenneth Roberts's oeuvre as well (it's well documented that Tarkington was the major editing force behind Roberts's fleet of bestContinued on page 28

Continued from page 27 sellers, among them Arundel, Rabble [nArms, Northwest Passage, and Lydia

Bailey). And yes, perhaps Roberts and T ar. kington weren't from the 'real' Maine, because Roberts wrote for the Saturday

Evening Post and Tarkington smoked oversized Emperor cigarettes. But Tarkington was as popular in his day as Steven King is now, and Seawood is eerily and dustily preserved, uncannily unchanged since 1946, when his wife, Mrs. Susannah Tarkington, sold Seawood and the accompanying 33-acre tract to Mr. and Mrs. Oscar

Cox, who in due course left the property to their sons, Peter Cox, former editor and publisher of Maine Times; and

Warren Cox, a Washington D.C. architect. The brothers Cox listed the property with Sotheby's for $1.25 million and eventually sold it to Kennebunk developer Maurice Gendreau for an undisclosed price. Drive up the hill past the purlieus of

Dock Square and Ocean A venue above

z o

ifJ :2

<t: 0:: co

<t: z

<t: u.J o

The Boat Room. Booth Tarkington's stage and screen legacy is also considerable. Katharine Hepburn starred in the film version of Alice Adams,

the Kennebunk River Club and to the right and you'll see it - set back behind an overgrowth of trees but still affording

WINTER 'SALE' WARNING

HIPWREOK & AR GO

Cor. Moulton tI' WhaIf Sts. In the Old Port Poniand,Me.04101 (207) 775-3057 and Orson Welles directed The Magnificent Ambersons. A 1930 New York Times poll listed Tarkington as one of the ten greatest contemporary Americans. views of the Kennebunk River below. . Granite walls and ledges were once brightened by 1,000 pink chrysanthemums grown from seed, along with manicured flowering trees and shrubs sparkling inside a reflection pool and a man-made electric waterfall.

Spotlights, port and starboard redand-green driveway I.anterns built into the lovely stonework ... the garden trees have gone wild, like unedited manuscripts, four times too high, with shrubs hiding the building's white magnificence like an Inca ruin.

But step inside and it's all there - all there - breathtaking chandeliers, ornate plaster moldings, rose marble fireplaces; enormous rooms with vaulted 20-foot ceilings, and decaying, heavy silkdrapes right out of his novels; servants' quarters outside, sun rooms ... room after room (16 in all) it's just the same astonishing but dusty, as if the Coxes never lived there before, and if the lights were just right at night, maybe Booth is still up there, sitting as Kenneth Roberts described him in [ Wanted To Write, "hunched over a drawing board at one end of a high balcony in his lofty Kennebunkport study, consuming quantities of enormous cigarettes, looking down on twenty-odd ship models of various sizes and rigs, and scrawling almost indecipherable words diagonally across extra large sheets of thick yellow paper."

Since 1985, the mansion itself (a summer retreat, though the T arking-

tons would sometimes stay through Christmas) and five surrounding acres have been for sale for roughly $500,000 (a steal when you consider the same price tags extant on Cape Cods in Cape Elizabeth), but, to the sincere disappointment of Kennebunk developer Maurice Gendreau, no one buyer has emerged. In light of this, he is securing approval from the town of Kennebunkport to convert Seawood into 4 luxury condominium units and develop 24 quite elaborate private homes in the shady woods behind the main house.

At $350,000 - $375,000 and up, the four units are easily within striking distance of well-to-do Portland professionals in search of the ultimate prestige address, and the word is that they're going to move very quickly.

Tarkington (who pronounced his first name to rhyme with soothe)' was born in Indianapolis in 1869, came east to attend Phillips Exet<erAcademy, spent a year at Purdue, and then went on to Princeton, where, asRoberts has chronicled it, he won several collegiate literary prizes and emerged with total literary earnings of "$51.07 and half a stick of d "can y.

Visiting his parents in Indiana during this period, Booth was accosted by a lawyer at the local country club, who said, "Well, Booth, your father says you're one of these damned literary fellers."

Indeed he was.

His first big break was The Gentleman from Indiana, which smoldered at 7,000 copies and then burst to 100,000, a book which F. Scott Fitzgerald mentions in the early chapters of This Side of Paradise as an incipient influence (Fitzgerald, whose Minneapolis/Princeton connection echoed Tarkington's Indianapolis/Princeton double two decades later, seemed preoccupied with Booth Tarkington - his posthumous notes for his unfinished novel, The Last Tueoon, include the warning "Don't Wake the Tarkington Ghosts").

Tarkington first visited Maine (Bar Harbor) in 1903. After a decade and a half in Paris and Rome, Tarkington returned, built Seawood in 191 7, and in 1918 won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Magnificent Ambersons, followed by another Pulitzer for A lice Adams (1921).

From 191 7 on the Zan I, Zan II, and Zantre sparkled through the KenneContinued on page 30

~~\~ l~XI ,,0 fL-r t Q laILIJIEI3111~1~{Ala £()"

Prompt, Courteous Service in the Portland Area for over 50 Years. CALL US REGARDING OUR PACKAGE DELIVERY SERVICE 773·1711

Continued from page 29 bunk River chop each summer, and Tarkington wrote two novels in particular -Mirthful Haven and Mary's Neck - humorously debunking K'bunkport society.

He was well loved and instantly recognizable in town, all but totally blind since 1922 (perhaps that accounts for his being willingto listen to Roberts read his rough drafts to him night after night, often beyond midnight), world-travelled, elegant, and wearing white flannels and Palm Beach jackets enroute to hangouts like The Floats; his boathouse, where the celebrated schooner Regina was berthed (she was hauled out to sea and summarily sunk in the early 1950s when she became a danger to trespassing children); or the river world of motorboats and whales.

And nowhere was his flair for the romantic more in evidence than when, in 1935, he imported an entire room from an English hunting lodge: As the York County Coast Star would have it (July 24, 1985), the Jacobean Room "originally was part of a manor house built in 1608 in Wanstead, at the edge of Epping Forest, outside London. In 1935 Tarkington arranged with the Philadelphia firm of Westing, Evans, and Egmore to buy the room, and it was reassembled and appended to the rear ofthe house where a terrace had been ... "

Still in remarkable condition, this hand-carved, dark room (where inexplicably Tarkington often wrote, despite failing eyesight), reports Gendreau associate Fran Harrison, who took us through the house, is going to be moved again and made into a museum display under the aegis of the Brick Store Museum in Kennebunk.

And so now Seawood is going condo.

z o

<Fl :2 <::

0::: co z

uJ o

Seawood, Booth Tarkington's Kennebunkport mansion, where four condominium units are going to be placed in the main house and 24 .free-standing units are planned for the woods to the west. ~~CHANDLER, To developer Maurice Gendreau's credit, plans to alter the original house MASTER BUILDER are inspired (preserving the grandeur of the first floor while creating living spaces above and below). And the 24 cluster homes are of • Restoration of Early Homes superior design; resplendent, in fact, at • Period MJltwork & Cabinet Work least on the fluttering blueprint Fran • Restoration Consulting Harrison showed us on the hood of our car. Old Stage Road. Arrowsic, Me. 04530 443-6473 Walking through Seawood, the three 6-foot chandeliers stall out in a vacuum (although one was stolen the night after

we toured the place), and in the entryway below the original wallpaper, a mound of orange and white gladiolus left over from the Tarkington tag sale (Summer of '85) has turned crispy and brown, more porkskins than flowers.

In the kitchen empty bottles of Mr. Boston Vodka and Holland House Daiquiri remain green hints of more boisterous times at Seawood.

Wavy No.4 glass lets you look at the same undulating views the T arkingtons saw.

The price range for the four units or one of the 24 units behind (1900 ·2600 square feet) is $350,000 to $375,000 and up. And octagenarian Sidney Hooper, gardener for the T arkingtons during the heyday of Seawood, has assured Fran Harrison that he'll be around from time to time to ensure that the gardens, grounds, rose arbor, et. al. are being brought back the way the gentleman from Indiana would have wanted it.

For appointmeRt~ to view this rare property, call Fran Harrison at (207) 985-4620.

ver

DESIGN. BUILD CONTRACTOR

RESIDENTIAL. INDUSTRIAL. COMMERCIAL

• AIR CONDITIONING • REFRIGERATION • HEAT PUMPS, HEATING • HEAT TRANSFER & RECOVERY • SHEET METAL

WE WOULD LIKE TO SERVE YOU

24 HOUR SERVICE 772-8687

7 THOMAS DRIVE, WESTBROOK

Maine's Best Supply of Hondas ...

... and the Best Prices!

LOW PRICES

WE WILL BEAT ANY LEGITIMATE OFFER CALL TOLL FREE

1-800-843-9808

On The Spot FINANCING AVAILABLE HOURS: Mon-Fri 8AM-6PM Saturday 8AM-5PM