More Mamaroneck and Larchmont notables: Read the other parts of the series

This is one of a series of pages on notable residents of Mamaroneck and Larchmont.

Here are the other parts. Tap the links to go to those pages:

• Actors, entertainers, singers: Matt and Kevin Dillon, Joan Rivers, Carly Rose Sonenclar and many more.

• Athletes, including World Series hero Scott Leius.and Yankees ‘Iron Man’ Lou Gehrig

• Artists including Norman Rockwell.

• Community-builders including the man behind Mamaroneck’s ‘Friendly Village” motto.

• List: Local trail blazers - people who achieved local firsts for their gender, race, or ethnicity

• At a glance: 50 celebrities from Mamaroneck and Larchmont, past and present.

  Plus

• Street names: The notable people behind Mamaroneck’s street names

Mamaroneck and Larchmont famous movie directors, producers, screenwriters, makeup artists

Ang Lee: Multi-Oscar-winning movie director

Ang Lee, a resident of Mamaroneck Town (Larchmont mailing address), won the Best Director Oscar for 2005's Brokeback Mountain and 2012's Life of Pi and has directed other notable films including Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Hulk, Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm.

Crouching Tiger earned him nominations for Directing and Best Picture (as a producer). Life of Pi also was nominated for Best Picture – he was a producer. More recently, Lee directed Will Smith in Gemini Man (2019). Next, Lee is aiming to make a biopic of martial artist Bruce Lee. Ang Lee's son, actor Mason Lee, would star. "Neither of us are getting any younger," Lee told Variety in April 2024. "So I hope I get to make this movie soon."

Ang Lee and his family moved from an 800-square-foot apartment in White Plains into a house in Mamaroneck Town, their first house, in 1997. That was two years after his Oscar-nominated Sense and Sensibility made him a hot commodity in Hollywood.

Watch below: Director Ang Lee talks about living in New York and his movies about the American West during Notable Neighbors A Conversation With Director Ang Lee sponsored by the Larchmont-Mamaroneck Center for Continuing Education in 2023. Below is an except. Watch the full 1 1/2-hour conversation here.

(Video from the LMC Archive)

For six years in White Plains, Lee had been an unemployed screenwriter and would-be director and then a maker of low-budget films in Chinese. He was 37 when he directed his first feature film. Two of these early films earned Oscar nominations for Best Foreign Film, The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Eat Drink Man Woman (1994). His wife, Jane Lin, a molecular biologist, supported the family.

Lee, born in 1954, grew up in Taiwan – living in small spaces - and came to the United States in 1978 to study theater. He wanted to be an actor, but his English was not strong enough, so he focused on directing. He earned a bachelor's degree in theater/theater direction from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and a master's in film production from New York University.

Kevin Kline starred in Lee's The Ice Storm in 1997 spoke at that time about Lee's approach as a director: "His direction is terse, compact, even poetic at times – if poetry is a distilled form of the language. He can't beat around the bush. So he just says things very directly."

Lee told Variety in a 2024 interview one way he connects with actors: “Sometimes, instead of giving them direction, I ask them questions. That inspires them to think and shape their character and they just shine.”

Sources:

Ang Lee and family move to Larchmont, The Reporter Dispatch of White Plains, Oct. 22, 1997.

"Larchmont's Ang Lee wins Best Director Award," The Journal News, March 6, 2006.

"Ang Lee Talks Bruce Lee Biopic, NYS Tisch School Honor, and Why Making Movies Never Gets Easier: 'If Anything It Gets Harder,' Variety, April 1, 2024.

"Face-to-face with Marvel's green goliath: Pressure mounts on the Larchmont director as 'The Hulk' nears release," The Journal News, June 15, 2003.

Ang Lee profile, IMDB.com.

Ang Lee’s Academy Award nominations, wins, Academy Awards Database.

D.W. Griffith: made Mamaroneck a movie-production mecca

In the early decades of film, David Wark Griffith (1875-1948) turned Mamaroneck into Hollywood East. He had achieved success with the 1915 Birth of a Nation - decried as racist for, among other things, glorifying the Klu Klux Klan - and then Intolerance and was thinking big. In Mamaroneck, he turned Florida development visionary Henry Flagler's former estate on Satan's Toe at the tip of Orienta Point into a 28-acre movie studio.

Actress Lillian Gish, who starred in many Griffith films with sister Dorothy, describes the studio in her autobiography:

“The estate, which he intended to covert into a studo, was located on Orienta Point, a great peninsula of land jutting out into Long Island Sound and surrounded by a sea wall of rocks and glorious old trees with branches chained together to withstand the sweeping winter winds. It had a pier from which one could swim.

“Mr. Griffith added a big sttage and a projection room to the house and remodeled the old mansion to accommodate offices and dressing rooms for his players. The magnificent old dining room, which was a least thirty feet square, became a rehearsal room. The butler’s pantry was turned into an office for Agnes Wiener, his secretary. There was no kitchen in the big house; the studio restaurant was in a separate building. Mr. Griffith had a cottage built near the beach for his private dwelling.”

From 1919-24, the studio generated more than a dozen films, many of them starring the Gish sisters. Most notable were Orphans of the Storm, which takes place during the French Revolution and features hundreds of extras in period costume, and Way Down East, a melodrama starring Lillian Gish about a cad who deceives a country girl and gets her pregnant. Way Down East includes a blizzard scene that was filmed in Mamaroneck in an actual blizzard - the cast and crew waited for one then rushed to film in the wind-driven, frigid conditions.

Financial problems stemming from his extravagant productions and failure of some lesser films forced Griffith to give up the Mamaroneck operation - and independence - and to work as a contract director as his career went downhill from there. The property was sold to a real estate developer who wanted to subdivide it.

Sources:

• D.W. Griffith: An American Life by Richard Schickel, 1984, Simon and Schuster.

• The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me by Lillian Gish with Ann Pinchot, 1969, Prentice-Hall Inc.

David O. Russell: film writer, director, and producer with 5 Oscar nominations

David O. Russell (born in 1958), a 1976 Mamaroneck High School graduate, has written and directed movies with big-name actors that have earned more than two dozen Academy Award nominations, including five for Russell himself.

Russell was nominated for directing for "The Fighter" (2010) and writing and directing for "Silver Linings Playbook" (2012) and "American Hustle" (2013). Jennifer Lawrence won best actress for "Silver Linings Playbook" and Christian Bale best supporting actor and Melissa Leo best supporting actress for "The Fighter."

Russell also wrote and directed 1999's "Three Kings" and directed and 2015's "Joy," among other films.

At Mamaroneck High School, the Larchmont resident was editor of the newspaper and was voted class rebel, according to the New York Times. He majored in literature and political science at Amherst College.

About his films, Russell said: "I just love real characters; they're not pretentious, and every emotion is on the surface, they're regular working people. Their likes, their dislikes, their loves, their hates, their passions; they're all right there on the surface," according to IMBD.com.

Sources:

• David O. Russell profile, IMDB.com.

• 'Director Examines Ways of the Suburbs,' The New York Times, Oct. 16, 1994.

• Academy Awards database.

Bennett Miller: director, 2-time Oscar nominee

Bennett Miller (born 1966) and Dan Futterman were friends who graduated from Mamaroneck High School in 1985 and were nominated for Oscars for 2005's "Capote," a Truman Capote bio pic, and 2014's "Foxcatcher," about Olympic wrestlers.

Miller was nominated for Best Director and Futterman for screenplay.

Miller also directed 2011's "Moneyball," which received six Oscar nominations. In "Capote," Miller directed Philip Seymour Hoffman, a friend of his and Futterman's from summer camp. Hoffman won the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role.

Video: Bennett Miller talks about the early influence of movies on him in a 2014 interview. (Profile continues below the video)

(YouTube video from Film at Lincoln Center)

After Mamaroneck High, Miller studied theater and film at New York University but left before finishing his degree.

"I wasn't precocious enough to drop out more quickly," IMBD.com quoted him on that decision.

Miller also directed "The Cruise," a 1998 documentary about an eccentric New York City tour bus guide, and "When the Deal Goes Down," a 2006 Bob Dylan music video that stars Scarlett Johansson.

His major movies are based on true stories.

"My nature is to try and look past apparent truths, to pull back layers and understand the psychological motives behind phenomena. A nonfiction subject challenges you, it keeps you honest," he said, according to IMDB.com.

Sources:

Bennett Miller profile, IMDB.com.

'Mamaroneck High School Grads Dan Futterman and Bennett Miller Nominated for Oscars,' Patch.com, Jan. 15, 2015.

Mamaroneck public schools Facebook post on Miller and Futterman's 'Foxcatcher' Academy Award nominations, Jan. 15, 2015.

“Where are they now,” Westchester Magazine, Feb. 1, 2007.

Academy Awards through the years, Oscars.org.

Dan Futterman: Oscar-nominated screenwriter, producer, actor

Dan Futterman (born in 1967), actor, writer, and producer, teamed up with fellow 1985 Mamaroneck High School grad Bennett Miller on the 2005 bio pic Capote and 2014’s Foxcatcher, and both earned Oscar nominations. Futterman was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay for Capote and Best Original Screenplay (with E. Max Frye) for Foxcatcher, about Olympic wrestlers and starring Steve Carrell. Miller received Best Director nominations for both films.

Watch clip below: Dan Futterman talks about revising the Capote screenplay:

(Video from WGA.org)

Futterman and Miller had been friends since seventh grade, the Mamaroneck schools said when the nominations were announced.

Futterman's father, Stan, served on the Mamaroneck school board and in a statement from the district recalled, "We've watched the two progress from school plays through home-made movies, arts camp and college to where they can actually make a living doing what they love."

Dan Futterman broke through as an actor in the 1996 film The Birdcage, in which he played Val, the straight son of Robin Williams. In 2007's A Mighty Heart, he played slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

On television, Futterman played Vincent Gray in 76 episodes of Judging Amy between 1999 and 2005. He was executive producer of In Treatment in 2010 and wrote seven of the episodes, according to IMDB.com.

On stage, he appeared in Tony Kushner's "Angels in America" in 1993.

Sources:

• Dan Futterman profile, IMDB.com.

• Mamaroneck schools' statement on “Foxcatcher Oscar nominations, reported by Patch.com, Jan. 15, 2015.

Danny Jacobson, writer, producer who co-created TV's Mad About You, earned four Emmy nominations

Danny Jacobson, a 1969 Mamaroneck High School graduate, started out as an actor, turning an audition as a "goof" into the role of T-Bird Kenickie in Grease on Broadway. But his major success has come as a writer, creator, and executive producing for television, most notably Mad About You.

At Mamaroneck High, academics were not a priority. "I was very intimidated by school," he told The Daily Times of Mamaroneck in 1985. "If the techer handed me a textbook, the first thing I did was count the pictures. The classroom for me was a place to lounge for 40 minutes, meet girls, tell jokes and draw football plays on my desk."

Nevertheless, he did go to college, several in fact. "I'm the only non-rock star that did a college tour," he joked in the 1985 interview. He attended Northeastern University, Iona, and Manhattanville, and graduated from Hofstra University. He was pre-med for a time. "Until I came to the realization that I hated school and I was entering a line of work that required 10 years of schooling."

Instead, he went into acting, auditioned for Grease on Broadway "as a goof," according to Fandango.com, but eventually won the role of T-Bird Kenickie. Jacobson also played Kenickie in 1978's Grease Live on Broadway video.

While in a Grease touring company, Jacobson formed a writing team with fellow cast member Barry Vigon. They wrote for the comedy duo Stiller and Meara, then for TV's Soap (1981). Jacobson went on to write for Roseanne from 1988-90.

Then, he, Paul Reiser and Peter Tolan created Mad About You (1992-98, revived in 2019) starring Reiser and Helen Hunt as a married couple adjusting to each other's quirks in Greenwich Village. It earned four Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Comedy Series from 1994-97, with Jacobson among the production team. The series also won a Peabody Award in 1994.

Watch: Danny Jacobson’s Peabody Award acceptance speech, plus a Mad About You clip.

In addition, Jacobson co-created and wrote for the Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place TV series (1998-2001) – starring Ryan Reynolds - and The Odd Couple (2015-17) starring Matthew Perry and Thomas Lennon, among other projects. He was also executive producer on some of his projects.

Besides television, the Larchmont native has written for the stage and the movies, including co-writing the 2006 film The Honeymooners. For the stage, he and Vigon co-authored off-Broadway's Surf City, the Beach Boys Musical, in 1985.

Sources:

Danny Jacobson profile, IMDB.com.

Danny Jacobson biography, Fandango.com.

Danny Jacobson Emmy nominations list, Television Academy.

"Surf's up: Jacobson takes Beach Boys on Broadway safari," The Daily Times of Mamaroneck, March 31, 1985.

Danny Jacobson selected credits list, Variety.

"Television: To Be Youngish, Newly Married And in New York," The New York Times, Oct. 18, 1992.

Profiles continue below the list.

List: From Mamaroneck High School to fame

Some gained fame in Hollywood, on stage, or in publishing. Others are notable for their contributions to the community. All 24 attended Mamaroneck High School. Here is a list of these notables by the year they either graduated or approximately when they attended (c. 1983, for example). Tap on a name to go their profile in our Mamaroneck-Larchmont Notables series.

The profiles of directors, producers, and writers continue beneath this list.

2002: Emily Wickersham, actor

1999: Fred Berger, producer

1998: Lila Rose Kaplan, playwright

1985: Dan Futterman, actor, producer, writer; and Bennett Miller, director

1984: Jill Novick, actor

1983: Scott Leius, baseball player

c. 1983: Kevin Dillon, actor

c. 1980: Matt Dillon, actor

c. 1980: Elizabeth Berridge, actor, producer

1979: Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer-Prize winning writer

c. late-1970s: Al Giordano, activist journalist, organizer

1977: Martha Lopez-Hanratty, organization founder

1974: Mike Chiapparelli, coach, teacher

1976: David O. Russell, screenwriter, director, producer

c. early 1970s: Michael O'Keefe, actor

1969: Danny Jacobson, writer, producer

1964: Billy Van Heusen, played 9 seasons for NFL football’s Denver Broncos; Danny Kortchmar, guitarist, songwriter, producer

1963: Carla Maxwell, Jose Limón dance company dancer, artistic director

1954: Gail Sheehy, author

1938: Mimi Jennewein, artist

1935: Robert E. Taylor, Mamaroneck's first Black police officer raised in the village

c. late 1920s: Richard "Bub" Walker, recreation leader

1928: Claire Trevor, actor

1920: Battista 'Busty' Santoro, Mamaroneck mayor

c. 1911: Norman Rockwell, illustrator, left after junior year

Fred Berger: La La Land producer

Fred Berger, a 1999 Mamaroneck High School graduate, was a producer of La La Land (2016), which took home six Oscars, including Emma Stone for best actress.

Very early on, Berger worked for LMCTV, Larchmont-Mamaroneck coummity cable TV channel.

"I directed the town hall meetings, parades, Halloween specials," he told lohud.com in 2017.

He has gone on to produce more than 40 films, including Bad Education (2019), Destroyer (2018) and The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016).

Watch below: Fred Berger talks with Cat Galeano of LMC-TV's The Local Live in 2017. Berger discusses favorite local eateries (starts at time stamp 02:12); telling diverse stories (starts at 03:46); why he decided to make movies (05:10); working with LMC-TV when he was young (7:17); making La La Land and the reaction to it (10:23); and advice on making it in film or another field (12:35).

(Video from LMC Media)

Sources:

• "Fred Berger's Mamaroneck connection," lohud.com, Feb. 22, 2017

• Fred Berger profile, IMDB.com.

Dick Smith of Larchmont, Oscar-winning master of makeup, monsters

Dick Smith (1922-2014), a Larchmont native who as an innovative makeup artist created unforgettable looks for Marlon Brando as Don Corleone in The Godfather, and Linda Blair's demon in The Exorcist, among many others.

According to USA Today, "Widely regarded as the master in his field, Smith helped pioneer such now-standard materials as liquid foam latex and make special effects more realistic and spectacular."

Since actors did not have to wear masks – Smith layered multiple pieces on the face - they could appear more natural even in severe makeup. Other significant Smith makeup transformations included a mohawked Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver, a 121-year-old Dustin Hoffman in Little Big Man, and 44-year-old Murray Abraham as bitter 73-year-old Mozart rival Antono Salieri in Amadeus. Smith won an Oscar for his Amadeus work. (Profile continues below video)

In 2012, Smith was given a second Oscar, an honorary Governor's Academy Award for his contribution to the field. In 2014, he received the Makeup Artists Lifetime Achievement Award.

“Rarely have there been makeup artists with the legendary inventiveness, creativity and artistic excellence of Dick Smith,” Makeup Artists Guild President Sue Cabral-Ebert said of Smith in 2014. “Dick’s transparency and willingness to share the secrets of the craft have been thecatalyst for young makeup artists all over the world to follow their imaginations and dreams.”

Smith was a freshman at Yale University headed for a career as a dentist when he happened across a book, Paint, Powder and Makeup. "Inspired, he began tinkering with some of the materials described in the book and soon found himself more inclined to mangle mock teeth than repair real ones," The New York Times reported in his obituary. "He ended up working out of a low-tech lab in the basement of his home in Larchmont, N.Y."

Smith was NBC's makeup director from 1945-59.

In Larchmont, he lived on Murray Avenue across from the Murray Avenue School, which his two sons attended. Smith lent his talents at the school fair, making up students as Dracula or a werewolf – their choice.

In 1983, he rehabilitated a life-sized mannequin of "Common Sense" author Thomas Paine for the Thomas Paine Cotage Museum in New Rochelle. He gave the Revolutionary War patriot's statue a more accurate face plus acrylic hands, all at no charge, according to The Journal News.

Mr. Smith told the Washington Post about his work: “Even when the characters were fantastically weird, I always tried to make them believable. Actors have to feel like they are the person they are portraying. I think my work has helped many to achieve that.”

Sources:

"Movie makeup master Dick Smith dies at 92." The Journal News, August 1, 2014.

"Dick Smith, Oscar-Winning Makeup Artist," Dies at 92. The New York Times, August 1, 2014.

"Dick Smith Dead: 'Godfather of Makeup' Dies at 92. Variety. July 31, 2014.

Dick Smith biography, IMDB.

Robert Ripley, created ‘Believe It or Not’

LeRoy Robert Ripley (1890-1949) created "Believe It or Not" cartoons, radio and television shows, and “Odditoriums,” featuring odd and amazing facts and artifacts. From about 1934 on, Ripley lived in Mamaroneck Village, in a 28-room mansion on an island on Van Amringe Pond, off Taylors Lane. He called it BION - Believe It or Not! - Island.

He moved some of his collections there, and early on, as Neal Thompson describes it in his 2013 book A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert “Believe It or Not!” Ripley: "At first, it was an absolute mess, the rooms cluttered with javelins, mastodon and elephant tusks, boomerangs, skeletons, and war drums. Turkish and Oriental rugs rose high in piles. The garage held wooden statues and carvings, python skins and stuffed animals."

Eventually, Ripley lived and worked there full time, an assistant organized the exotic items, and Ripley displayed his collections to guests and took them sailing on the pond in a variety of exotic canoes and boats. A Mamaroneck house made it to one of his cartoons as “The Skinniest House in the World,” according to The New York Times. The Skinny House on Grand Street, just 12 feet wide, is still there.

Ripley’s brother Doug also lived in Mamaroneck.

More info:

• Excerpt from Neal Thompson’s book, Vanity Fair, May 6, 2013:

• A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert “Believe It or Not!” Ripley by Neal Thompson, 2013, available in the Westchester Library System.

Spyros Skouras: Greenhaven resident led 20th Century-Fox

Spyros Skouras (1893-1971), son of a Greek sheepherder, came to America with two brothers and ascended to the heights of Hollywood as president of 20th Century-Fox from 1942 to 1962 and chairman until 1969. He lived on Shore Road in Greenhaven from about 1932 until his death.

According to The New York Times, under his leadership, the company produced the first movie in Cinemascope, The Robe. The wide-angle technology looks like 3D without special glasses. Another big project did not go so well: Cleopatra (1963) starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. It cost $30 million, twice as much as planned, and the studio’s losses on this and other films prompted Skouras to resign as president, though he remained chairman.

Skouras and his brothers had settled in St. Louis after coming to America. They got into the movie business by pooling their savings with those of three other Greek immigrants and opening the Olympia Theater there in 1914. They “screened films nearly all day, and charged half of what other movie houses did,” and opened to all races and classes, according to St. Louis Magazine.

By 1926, they had acquired 37 theaters in St. Louis and others in Kansas City and Indianapolis, according to the New York Times. Their success at turning around money-losing theaters was noticed in Hollywood and Spyros Skouras was on his way. By 1932, he took over “Fox Metropolitan Theaters in New York, which had been losing $1 million a year,” the Times said in his obituary. “Mr. Skouras brought the enterprise back from the edge of financial collapse and began to build the 20th Century-Fox empire.” His two brothers also prospered and became heads of theater chains, Charles in the West and George in the East.

The Times reported of Spyros, “At his home in Westchester, Mr. Skouras would view every major film produced by the major studios, and concentrated on his golf game.” He and his wife, Saroula, had four children.

Sources:

• “Who were the Skouras Brothers?” St. Louis Magazine, Feb. 6, 2022:

• “Spyros P. Skouras Dies at Age of 78: Retired in 1969 as Head of 20th Century-Fox,” The New York Times, Aug. 17, 1971.

Lee Shubert: Broadway theater owner, producer

Lee Shubert (1875-1953), a major figure in the theater world for half a century as an owner of theaters on Broadway and elsewhere and a producer of shows, had a home on Alda Road in Shore Acres. And the Shubert Organization owned the 13 acres occupied by the Mamaroneck Beach and Yacht Club at least into the 1990s.

Sources:

• “Lee Shubert Dies in Hospital; Long Ruled Theatre Empire,” The New York Times, Dec. 26, 1953.

• Various articles about assessment-reduction, building permit requests for Shubert property, The Daily Times of Mamaroneck, 1940s-1950s.

Philip H. Reisman Jr.: screenwriter of movies, documentaries, television

Philip H. Reisman Jr. (1916-1999) of Larchmont wrote for a wide range of media, from movie newsreels, to early television live shows, to documentaries, series television, and movies.

He was best known for All the Way Home (1963) a film adaptation of James Agee’s novel A Death in the Family that starred Robert Preston and Jean Simmons.

Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, he grew up in New Rochelle and attended Brown University. Early in his career, he wrote for newsreels and documentaries, then for early television programs like Kraft Theater and Studio One and early TV series like The Hunter, and he was the creator of the I Spy TV series, all in the 1950s. (A different I Spy series aired in 1965). From the 1960s through 1984, Reisman wrote for TV series, mini series and TV movies as well as films, according to an IMDB.com list of credits. These included episodes of the mini series The Adams Chronicles and Sandburg’s Lincoln starring Hal Holbrook, both in 1976.

Sources:

• Philip H. Reisman Jr. profile, writing credits, IMDB.com.

• Lives They Lived Well: Star Behind the Screen: Philip H. Reisman Jr., The New York Times, Jan. 2, 2000.

Mamaroneck and Larchmont famous writers

Edward Albee: Virginia Woolf playwright grew up in Larchmont

Edward Albee (1928-2016), renowned playwright best known for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, grew up in Larchmont.

He was the adopted son of a wealthy family – his adoptive father, Reed Albee, was an heir to the Keith-Albee vaudeville theater chain, and his grandfather, Edward F. Albee, donated the land for the Larchmont Public Library and Albee Court Apartments. So, the playwright “grew up amid much privilege but apparently little love,” The Journal News reported. Edward Albee saw his larger-than-life mother, Frances Cotter Albee, as distant and unloving, but came to terms with her in some of his plays.

“Albee’s plays have long had a corner on a particular style of upper-class, suburban sophistication – whose roots obviously go back to his Larchmont upbringing,” Journal News theater critic Jacques le Sourd wrote in 2005.

Albee attended several schools, including the Rye Country Day School, and graduated from the Choate School in Connecticut, now Choate Rosemary Hall. He attended Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., but did not finish. He then moved to Greenwich Village and joined a circle of writers, painters, and musicians. He first tried short stories and poetry, then finally found success when he turned to writing plays.

Watch on YouTube: Video: Edward Albee talks about leaving home and how he supported himself starting out. He spoke at the New York State Writers Institute in 2001.

Sources:

• ‘Edward Albee, Trenchant Playwright Who Laid Bare Modern Life, Dies at 88,’ The New York Times, Sept. 16, 2016.

• ‘Albee’s still after pitch-perfect pandemonium,’ The Journal News, March 20, 2005.

• “Edward Albee: American author,” Britannica.

• “A Brief History of the Larchmont Public Library”’ Larchmont Public Library,

James Fenimore Cooper: novelist married into Mamaroneck family

James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), novelist best known for Last of the Mohicans and The Spy, married Susan Augusta DeLancey of Mamaroneck. She was the daughter of John Peter and Elizabeth DeLancey, a prominent local family, and the couple were married in 1811 in the DeLancey home then on Heathcote Hill (The house still exists. Around 1900 it was moved down the hill to West Boston Post Road and now houses Rosa’s Cucina Italiana).

The young couple lived in Mamaroneck off and on in their first years together, with the Delanceys and subsequently in their own home. Then, from 1818 to 1822, they resided in a house in Scarsdale, where the Scarsdale Middle School is now. While living locally, Cooper wrote The Spy, set partly in Westchester County, including Scarsdale, during the Revolution. Much of Westchester, including Mamaroneck and Scarsdale, were in the “neutral ground” between the two sides during the Revolution with residents subject to raids from both.

We’re reminded of Cooper’s ties here by some street names: Cooper Avenue off Old Post Road in Orienta, Cooper Lane in Mamaroneck Town, and Fenimore Road.

Some local names also call to mind Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales series of novels, including the Leatherstocking Trail, Leatherstocking Lane, and perhaps Mohegan Road, although the novel was Last of the Mohicans.

The marriage of Cooper and Susan DeLancey is depicted in a mural on display in the Mamaroneck Public Library.

Sources:

• James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years, Wayne Franklin, Yale University Press, 2007.

• “Natty Bumppo, We Need You,” The New York Times, Nov. 5, 1972.

• “Where are you, Natty Bumppo?” Phil Reisman, The Journal News, July 30, 2015.

• Angevine-Hatfield-Morris House (c. 1768) history, Scarsdale Historical Society.

• Sketch of James Fenimore Cooper’s Scarsdale house, New York Heritage Digital Collections, Scarsdale Public Library,

Elizabeth Kolbert: Pulitzer Prize-winning author focuses on environment

Elizabeth Kolbert (born 1961), a writer for The New Yorker magazine who grew up in Larchmont, won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction for her book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.

Five times over the past half a billion years, diversity of life on Earth suddenly and dramatically contracted, the last time when an asteroid doomed the dinosaurs. In her book, Kolbert warns that the next mass extinction could be caused by humans through global warming. She focuses on a dozen species that are threatened with extinction, or already extinct, including the Panamanian golden frog, great auk, and Sumatran rhino.

Kolbert's family moved to Larchmont from the Bronx when she was a child and she graduated in 1979 from Mamaroneck High School, where she was an editor of the Globe student newspaper. After Yale University and a Fulbright scholarship to Universitat-Hamburg in Germany, she went into journalism, becoming Albany bureau chief and later Metro Matters columnist for the New York Times. Since 1999 she has been a staff writer for The New Yorker, focusing on the environment.

Kolbert spoke about her high school journalism experience to an audience including students during a Center for Continuing Education’s Notable Neighbors Series appearance at Hommocks Middle School in 2015. "I was an editor of the Globe. … I had a lot of fun doing it.... And, you know, I don't want to say that set my career path but that definitely it was part of why I enjoyed journalism." She added to the current student journalists, "I really liked hassling the administration. I hope you're still hassling the administration. Are you? It's very important."

Watch below: Elizabeth Kolbert is interviewed in 2015 by Sophia Andrews, Mamaroneck High School Advanced Placement Environmental Sciences teacher, before an audience of students and the community at Hommocks Middle School in the Center for Continuing Education’s Notable Neighbors Series. Among the topics Kolbert addresses are her journey to environmental reporting (starting at time stamp 06:24), the inspiration for her Pulitizer Prize winning book (07:42), the place that made the greatest impression on her (15:17), and Mamaroneck High Globe newspaper's role in her journalism career (31:58). The profile continues below the video.

Kolbert explained why she changed her focus from politics to environmental reporting. Covering state government and national politics "can get pretty old, to be honest. Now we're having another corruption trial in Albany…"

"When I went to the New Yorker in 1999 I actually was hired to cover politics. But I started looking around for other things to write about for a variety of reasons, and I actually went to Greenland in, I guess, it was 2001 for the first time and that made a really big impression on me. That was the moment ... where the U.S. had just withdrawn from the Kyoto protocol, and it seemed like a big moment to me at the time and I went looking for a story to write about climate change at a moment when there was still a lot of quote-unquote "debate" over whether this was really an important subject or not."

The inspiration for her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, she told the Hommocks audience, "came from in part from the previous book that I wrote (Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change), which was exclusively about climage change. And after I wrote that book, people started to come to me with things that should have been in the book, and one of those issues ... is ocean acidification, which is the flip side of climate change.

"So, in a sense I realized that book only covered one of the ways in which we were changing the planet on this geological scale. And so that became one of the impetuses to look for a new book, a second book to look at these issues that hadn't been covered in the first book. And then, actually, I went to Panama to do a story that's the first chapter of the book, on frogs on what's being called the amphibian crisis, and these two strands came together to form the crown."

Kolbert has traveled extensively in reporting for her articles and books. She was asked what place resonated most. "The place that really made the biggest impression on me was going to the Great Barrier Reef.... It is really (an) extraordinary place and reefs are very, you know, endangered now. And to imagine this whole ecosystem going out is really very frightening and sobering."

Her latest book was published in 2024, H Is for Hope: Climate Change from A to Z, consisting of 26 essays on the history and other aspects of climate change.

Kolbert lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband and children.

Sources:

Elizabeth Kolbert appearance, Center for Continuing Education’s Notable Neighbors Series, Nov. 10, 2015.

"Pulitzer Prizes for two Mamaroneck High grads." Larchmont Loop, April 30, 2015.

"Elizabeth Kolbert Visits Larchmont to Discuss the Effects of Global Warming." Patch.com, May 8, 2014.

Pulitzer Prize citation for the Prize in General Nonfiction, 2015: Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History,

"Turning Out the Lights Just Isn't Going to Do It," 2014 interview with Elizabeth Kolbert. Creative Nonfiction Quarterly.

"Elizabeth Kolbert Is Wed in Albany." The New York Times, Feb. 17, 1991.

Lila Rose Kaplan: fell in love with playwriting as Mamaroneck High student

Lila Rose Kaplan (born in 1980), a 1998 Mamaroneck High School graduate, is a playwright whose more than 20 plays “shine light on the stories we don’t tell about women,” according to her biography. “Her heroines live in heartfelt zany comedies, bittersweet comic dramas, and imaginative musicals for young audiences.” Her plays include We All Fall Down about a family Passover Seder that goes awry, and The Villains Supper Club, a comedy about a superhero new mom with unique work-life balance issues.

On her website, Kaplan credits a band trip to A Chorus Line at the Westchester Dinner Theater in fourth grade with igniting her love for theater. “So, on that fateful day … Lila Rose signed away her soul.” As a Mamaroneck High School senior, she saw her first play, a comedy, performed in the high school theater and heard the audience’s laughter as she stood in the back. That’s when she fell in love with playwriting, she recalled. Her plays have been performed Off-Broadway and across the country.

Over time, according to the website, “Much like Lila Rose, her plays have gotten funnier, angrier, and more Jewish.” She now lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, with her husband, daughter, and Siamese cat.

Sources:

• Lila Rose Kaplan’s website

• Mamaroneck High School class of 1998, The Daily Times, June 24, 1998.

Gail Sheehy: 'Passages' author, groundbreaking journalist

Gail Sheehy (1936-2020) grew up in Mamaroneck, went to Mamaroneck High School, got her first typewriter from her grandmother, and explored mid-life crises and turning points in her bestselling 1976 book Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life.

Sheehy was born Gail Henion and grew up amid her parents' troubled marriage.

Of Mamaroneck, she wrote in her memoir, Daring: My Passages: “Our house was across the street from the fat tub of a harbor. Hurricanes could swell it up like a bath with the faucets left on until it spilled over into our street and turned into a river."

Her grandma Gladys, who lived with the family, "let me sit on her lap and punch the keys of her typewriter. I loved the thwock of the keys as they made the words." For Gail's seventh birthday, Grandma Gladys gave her a typewriter.

In the suburbs of those years, Sheehy recounted: "Parents didn't much care where we went on Saturday as long as we were home for dinner. Bicycles made us free. My friends and I had hideouts in the woods. We roughhoused with older boys. When the ice broke up on Mamaroneck Harbor, I would go down with boots and a broomstick and pole-vault from iceberg to iceberg."

In seventh grade, she started to sneak into the city on the train on Saturdays. "Tap class," she told the ticket master as she bought a ticket. Toting a notebook and pencil, young Gail surveyed the crowds in Grand Central Terminal and loosed her imagination. "Why did the bearded man stop when he bumped into the woman with the floppy hat? She must be passing him microfilm; they were Communists...Who was the little lost dog who yapped and yapped and dragged his bottom across the floor? He must have dropped from the aqua ceiling. He needed somebody to put him back among the stars.

"I couldn't wait to ride back to our dozy suburb....I'd punch out little stories on my typewriter."

Gail attended Central School, graduated from Mamaroneck High School in 1954, and went on to the University of Vermont.

Professionally, Sheehy broke ground as a female journalist, covering the kinds of stories that had been generally reserved for men.

For New York magazine, she found herself under fire during "Bloody Sunday" in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1972. A young boy she had just spoken with was shot in the head next to her. The experience shook her. In her mid-30s, "Something alien, unspeakable but undeniable, had begun to inhabit me. My own mortality," she wrote in her memoir. She examined such turning points in Passages. She describes the boy's shooting early in the book.

She went on to write about other passages: menopause (The Silent Passage), life after 50 (New Passages), and men at midlife (Understanding Men's Passges). She reflected on her own life’s stages in Daring: My Passages — A Memoir, published in 2014.

Video: Gail Sheehy discusses Daring: My Passages – A Memoir and why she saw ‘daring’ as the theme of her life in an interview at the 2015 Miami Book Fair. She talks with Jeffrey Brown of PBS News Hour. (Profile continues below the video)

(YouTube video from PBS Books)

She also wrote for magazines, in particular, psychological portraits of public figures. A profile of Jacqueline Kennedy's impoverished relatives helped inspire the Grey Gardens documentary and Broadway show.

After a divorce from her first husband, Sheehy married Clay Felker, founder of New York magazine.

Sources:

• Daring: My Passages, by Gail Sheehy, William Morrow, 2014

• Gail Sheehy obituary, Associated Press as published by the Los Angeles Times, Aug. 25, 2020.

• Gail Sheehy obituary, The New York Times, Aug. 25, 2020.

• "Mamaroneck's Gail Sheehy (1936-2020) on Fishing in Orienta, and 'Daring,'” theloop, republication of a Dec. 4, 2014 post.

Al Giordano: Activist journalist, organizer

Al Giordano (about 1960-2023) grew disillusioned with the traditional procedures for seeking government action after he testified again nuclear power before a state Senate commission as a 16-year-old Mamaroneck High School student. The teen felt ignored, so he pointed his life toward activism, according to a Rolling Stone profile.

His passion led to political organizing and journalism on issues including opposing nuclear power and pressing for the legalization of drugs.

While still a teen, he joined the progressive group Wespac, the Westchester People's Action Coalition, whose causes included opposing the Indian Point nuclear power plant. (The plant closed in April 2021.)

As an adult, Giordano spent years in Mexico running Narco News, a pro-legalization website that carried reporting by Giordano and Mexican journalists on the drug war. A Mexican bank sued over its reporting, leading to a landmark 2000 ruling giving online journalists the same legal protections as traditional print journalists.

Sources:

• "Hot Muckraker: Al Giordano," Rolling Stone, Aug. 30, 2001.

• "Late organizer Al Giordano remembered for fiery spirit, devotion to the cause," Daily Hampshire Gazette, July 23, 2023.

• Al Giordano quoted in obituary on social activist Connie Hogarth, The New York Times, March 7, 2022.

Jean Kerr: humorist chronicled Larchmont life in Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, more

Jean Kerr (1923-2003) won laughs from audiences with books, plays and columns based on her large family’s life in a rambling waterfront Larchmont home complete with a 32-bell carrillon that she set to play a Carmen opera aria to summon her six children from the nearby beach for dinner.

Her 1957 best-selling book, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, was “a series of essays about her children, her house, her diets, her sleep habits (with a) tone of determined buoyance,” according to a New York Times critic. It was made into a 1960 movie starring Doris Day and a 1965-67 NBC TV series starring Patricia Crowley.

Jean Kerr’s husband, Walter Kerr, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning theater critic, and Jean Kerr had a big Broadway hit play with Mary Mary in 1961. It portrayed a divorced couple who were still in love. In 1963, it too became a movie with Debbie Reynolds and Barry Nelson.

“I have two trifling ambitions in the theater,” Jean Kerr quipped to Theatre Arts magazine in 1965, “to make a lot of people laugh and to make a lot of money.”

She once wrote that when asked, “List your pen name,” she always responded, “I just call it Ball-Point.”

In addition to the carillon, the Kerr home on a half-acre on Beach Avenue had “gargoyles, turrets, cupolas, a (non-working) clock tower and various stone lions the Kerrs brought back from Italy,” Journal News theater critic Jacques le Sourd wrote when the house was put up for sale in 2003. The eccentric nearly 9,000-square-foot, six-bedroom, castle-like house had been designed largely by its previous owner, Charles B. King, an automotive pioneer and inventor and friend of Henry Ford’s.

In Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, Jean Kerr recounts her and Walter’s reaction after touring the house in 1955. The real estate agent “turned to us and asked playfully, ‘Well, what did you think of all that?’ Walter and I replied in the perfect unison of a Greek chorus, ‘It’s the nuttiest house we ever saw, we’ll buy it.’ Whereupon she (the agent), faithless to every real estate code, screamed, ‘You’re not serious, you’re out of your minds!’ Walter said, ‘We’re out of our minds, but we’re serious.”

Sources:

• Please Don’t Eat the Daisies by Jean Kerr, Doubleday & Company Inc., 1957.

• “Jean Kerr, comic writer, dies: Larchmont resident wrote ‘Please Don’t Eat the Daisies,’” The Journal News, Jan. 8, 2003.

• “The other seat on the aisle was filled with style,” Jacques le Sourd, The Journal News, Jan. 9, 2003.

• “Jean Kerr, 79; Turned Suburban Life into Broadway Comedies,” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 8, 2003.

• ‘If these walls could talk: In Larchmont, a piece of theatrical history is for sale – the home of the late Jean and Walter Kerr,’ Jacques le Sourd, The Journal News, April 17, 2003.

• ‘A splash of Mystery: You can expect the unexpected from this Larchmont home,” The Journal News, April 5, 2003.

• “Big screen beauty: Property known as the ‘Please Don’t Eat the Daisies’ house is on the market,” The Journal News, March 7, 2020.

Walter Kerr: Pulitzer Prize-winning drama critic

Walter Kerr (1913-1983) of Larchmont, a renowned theater critic, won a Pulitzer Prize and had a Broadway theater named for him.

Born in Evanston, Illinois, Kerr graduated from Northwestern University, taught speech and drama at The Catholic University of America, and wrote for Commonweal, a Roman Catholic weekly. In 1951, based on his Commonweal works, he became the theater critic for the New York Herald Tribune. He wrote for The New York Times from 1966 until he retired in 1983.

Fellow critic Clive Barnes said Kerr “had an enormous gift for making performers and performances come alive on the page. He used to describe individual moments of actors with meticulous care.”

Barnes added, “The other thing that Walter had was a very, very lively wit….He took a lot of solemnity out of drama criticism.”

Fellow critic Jacques le Sourd of Gannett Westchester Newspapers recalled of Kerr: “His manner was courtly and unfaillingly polite, but at the theater Kerr was a sphinx. He took notes so copiously, in a tiny hand on folded bits of paper, that he was accused of seldom looking up at the stage.”

Walter Kerr was honored with the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1978 for “articles on the theater in 1977 and throughout his long career.” In 1990, the Ritz Theater on West 48th Street was renamed the Walter Kerr Theater. Its 2024 show: Hadestown.

Kerr and his wife, humorist Jean Kerr, collaborated on some plays and 1959 their Goldilocks, a musical parody about the silent film era, won Tony Awards for featured actor and actress. The Kerrs had written the musical’s book and Walter Kerr had directed the Broadway production. But Walter Kerr was far more successful as a critic. He also was the author of 10 books.

The Kerrs lived in Larchmont from the mid-1950s in a quirky, rambling waterfront home with their six children. “At home,” le Sourd wrote, “Kerr sat in real theater seats and watched his collection of vintage silent movie comedies (his first love, even before the theater). Each morning, he would unlock a private gate to Lrchmont’s Manor Beach and have a bracing swim in Long Island Sound.”

Locally, Walter Kerr supported the Larchmont Public Library with appearances and in 1983 helped launch a $200,000 expansion fund, according to Gannett Westchester Newspapers.

Sources:

• “Walter Kerr, a Dominant Critic During Broadway’s Full Flower, Is Dead at 83,” The New York Times, Oct. 10, 1996.

• “Author, drama critic Walter Kerr dies at 83,” Gannett Westchester Newspapers, Oct. 11, 1996.

• “Walter Kerr: A model for colleagues,” Jacques le Sourd, Gannett Westchester Newspapers, Oct. 11, 1996.

• Tony Awards winners database.

• Pulitzer Prize winners for Criticism list.

.Marie Killilea: author of Karenfighter for daughter, others with cerebral palsy

Marie Killilea (1913-1991) of Larchmont rejected numerous doctors’ predictions of doom for her premature daughter Karen, born with cerebral palsy – that she would never walk or be able to communicate with others. Marie strove to enable Karen to live independently, and chronicled their story in the best-sellers Karen and With Love From Karen.

Marie Killilea also advocated for others, leading to the founding of the Cerebral Palsy Association of Westchester County. She co-founded a national organization that later became the United Cerebral Palsy Association. The Killileas’ house in Larchmont was called Sursum Corda, Latin for “Lift Up Your Hearts.”

Karen Killea was born in 1940, one of five children of Marie and Jimmy Killilea. Karen was three months premature and under 2 pounds. Marie and Jimmy “vowed early in their daughter’s life that they would not feel sorry for her, or let her ever feel sorry for herself,” physician and novelist Frank G. Slaughter said in reviewing Karen in 1952; it was re-released in 1999. With Love From Karen, a sequel, appeared in 1963. Wren, a children’s version, had been published in 1954.

“The books shared with the world the true story about the strength of family love, a refusal to accept prejudice towards people with disabilities, and the will of a woman who refused to succumb to the limitations of her challenges,” said an obituary notice for Karen Killilea, who lived to 80 and died in 2020.

For 10 years, her family had spent two hours a day helping Karen move her limbs. “By her early teenage years, she was walking with crutches, swimming, typing and going to school,” the New York Times said in her obituary.

Karen Killilea attended Good Counsel High School in White Plains and went on to work for 40 years as the receptionist for Trinity Retreat House in Larchmont. She also conducted obedience training for dogs. Fiercely independent, she lived on her own in a condominium in Larchmont. “Karen never considered herself ‘handicapped,’ instead she classified herself as permanently inconvenienced,” according to her obituary notice.

Sources:

• Karen Killilea, 80, Dies; Turned Disability Into Triumph, The New York Times, Dec. 18, 2020.

• Karen Killea obituary notice, John J. Fox Funeral Home in Larchmont, 2020.

• Marie Joan Lyons Killilea Find a Grave memorial:

• “One Child’s Victory,” review of Karen, Frank G. Slaughter, The New York Times, Sept. 28, 1952.

Samm Sinclair Baker: self-improvement book author

Samm Sinclair Baker (died in 1997 at age 87), a longtime resident of Larchmont and Mamaroneck, wrote more than 30 self-improvement books, including The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet in 1978 with Dr. Herman Tarnower.

Baker also teamed up with Dr. Irwin Stillman on several diet and fitness books, wrote several books on gardening, and also wrote about sex.

He and his wife, Natalie Bachrach Baker, moved to Larchmont in 1946 and Mamaroneck in 1967.

Before writing full time, Baker had a career as an advertising executive.

In 1981, Baker recounted in The Daily Times writing during his commute: “I wrote most of my first nine books on the New Haven Railroad, commuting between Larchmont and my Madison Avenue advertising work. The longer a train was stalled on the tracks, the more pages I was able to write. When I quit for full-time writing in Westchester, a friend suggested that I write while going back and forth on trains all day. Westchester commuters, take heart!”

Sources:

• Samm Sinclair Baker obituary, The New York Times, March 23, 1997.

• ‘All-Westchester team,’ letter to the editor by Samm Sinclair Baker with account of writing during his commute, The Daily Times, May 28, 1981.

• Natalie Bachrach Baker death notice, The New York Times, June 19, 1998.

• Other articles and a Samm Sinclair Baker letter to the editor about The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet in The New York Times.

Frederic Dannay: co-writer of the Ellery Queen detective novels

Frederic Dannay (1905-1982), a longtime resident of Mamaroneck Town (Larchmont mailing address), embarked upon a career as a detective novel writer after he and his cousin entered a McClure's magazine writing contest that required using a pseudonym. They chose Ellery Queen as their pseudonym and as the name of their detective. The entry, "The Roman Hat Mystery," about a death in a crowded theater, won.

In a plot twist, however, before the story could be published McClure's closed. The Roman Hat Mystery ended up published as a book instead in 1929, and Dannay and his first cousin Manfred B. Lee began a collaboration that created more than 35 immensely popular Ellery Queen novels.

The world of Ellery Queen extended to radio, television, and movies. Also, the influential Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, with new detective fiction from various authors, and anthologies edited by Ellery Queen. The magazine continues today.

Writing as Barnaby Ross, the cousins also created a second detective, Drury Lane, a retired Shakespearean actor. In public appearances, Dannay sometimes would pose as Ross and Lee as Ellery Queen. They would wear masks since readers assumed a single writer was behind each pseudonym – until the two were revealed as co-authors in 1936, according to Britannica.com.

They created "fair play" mysteries, giving readers all the clues needed to solve the crime – in fact, including a "Challenge to the Reader" toward the end of the book - but planting enough red herring false leads that made it a fearsome task.

Ellery Queen the character evolved over the decades, as Dale Andrew describes in the SleuthSayers blog: "The Ellery Queen we first meet in The Roman Hat Mystery, published in 1929, is young, foppish, and at times rather insufferable. He wears pince-nez glasses, carries a cane, tools around in a Dusenberg, and spouts erudite but hopelessly obscure references from the classics."

After 1936 "Ellery morphs into a young middle age man and takes on a more vulnerable and likeable character. He ditches the pince-nez and cane and discovers self-doubt."

Between 1945 and 1960, Ellery Queen won the Edgar Allan Poe Award of the Mystery Writers of America five times.

Manfred Lee, who lived in Connecticut, died in 1971 and that marked the end of the novels, but Dannay continued to edit the magazine.

Originally from Brooklyn, Dannay lived locally since 1947 and resided on Byron Lane. He occasionally taught classes at Mamaroneck High School and the Westchester Jewish Center, according to The Daily Times.

Among Dannay's friends was mystery writer John Dickson Carr of Mamaroneck (see profile below), a master of the locked room mystery. Acccording to Carr's biography, John Dickson Carr: The Man Who Explained Miracles, "As editor of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine…Dannay became the leading influence in America on the detective short story. An intellectual who wrote poetry in his spare moments, he was one of the few people who could match and, in some instances, surpass Carr's knowledge of detective fictirion. The two men often stayed up until late into the night discussing obscure books and authors and arguing about the fine points of plot and character."

Dannay published some Carr stories in his magazine.

In 1963 at a time when Carr was 'beginning to doubt myself," Dannay offered advice. "If you can't write a good new book, write a good old one." Carr decided to thoroughly revise Devil Kinsmere, a historical novel he had written 30 years earlier, according to Carr's biography.

Upon Dannay's death, mystery writer Mickey Spillane said the team of Dannay and Lee was "one of the greatest in the detective fiction field."

Sources:

"Author Frederic Dannay, creator of the mystery writer-sleuth Ellery Queen," United Press International archives, Sept. 4, 1982.

"Frederic Dannay, 76, Co-author of Ellery Queen Mysteries, dies, The New York Times, Sept. 5, 1982.

Frederic Dannay obituary, The Daily Times of Mamaroneck, Sept. 5, 1982.

"Ellery Queen's Backstory," Dale Andrews, SleuthSayers: Professional Crime-Writers and Crime-Fighters blog, Aug. 28, 2012.

"Ellery Queen," Britannica.com.

Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine website.

John Dickson Carr: The Man Who Explained Miracles, biography by Douglas G. Greene. 1995, Otto Penzler books.

John Dickson Carr: master of the locked-room mystery

John Dickson Carr (1906-1977) wrote 120 mystery novels featuring two main detectives, Dr. Gideon Fell, an Oxford don, and Sir Henry Merrivale, called “one of the mystery genre’s most beloved curmudgeons” by Washington Post critic Michael Dirda in a 2020 reissue of Carr’s 1934 The Plague Court Murders..

Carr was in the ranks of the greats of the Golden Age of detective fiction like Agaatha Christie, Ellery Queen, and Dorothy Sayers. He lived in Mamaroneck during four stretches between 1947 and 1965. He made the local news in 1948 when he discussed murder mysteries at a Mamaroneck Woman’s Club gathering and the following year when his story “The Gentleman from Paris” earned first prize in a mystery magazine contest.

A 1951 profile of him in The New Yorker described how he worked as he turned out about four novels a year, sometimes more:

"He and his wife and their three children live in a rambling, porch-encircled house he bought in Mamaroneck three years ago. He does all his writing in the attic.

"At home, in harness, he ascends to his attic around 8 A.M.,.... He carries a large percolator of coffee along, and he swills the brew, stepping downstairs for frequent refills, throughout the day. ....Carr smokes cigarettes continuously and tosses the butts aside still lighted. By now, the floor, which in the main is uncarpeted, is liberally pocked with burns, and the atmosphere, despite his air-conditioner, is fragrant with the invigorating smell of scorched pine.

"In practically all respects, his chamber is conducive to the germination of macabre prose." Shelves in the attic, and in several other rooms, bulge with "reference books on every form of crime ... several hundred rare volumes on poison, hangings, throat-slitting, dismemberment, witchcraft, and diverse rascality—that he keeps close at hand while he works....Carr is thought to be the only non-government employee ever to own a copy of the top-secret English Coroner’s Official Handbook of Poisons. "

A collection of swords, rapiers and daggers were displayed on the walls in the living room and attic study.

Carr preferred to live in England, where most of his novels were set, but moved back to the United States from time to time for various reasons, including England's continuing food shortages after World War II, the rise to power of the Labor Party, which he detested, or high taxes, according to a 1995 biography, John Dickson Carr: The Man Who Explained Miracles by Douglas G. Greene.

John Dickson Carr lived in Mamaroneck during these years: 1947-1951 on the 100 block of Beach Avenue; 1958-60 on the 200 block of Beach; 1961-63, mostly in the 300s on Melbourne Avenue; and parts of 1964 and 1965. In that last period, he stayed with his daughter Julia's family in their home on Beach Avenue (Carr had sold her the house on the 200 block) while writing and in 1965 between stops on a national lecture tour. During the tour, he spoke in Westchester in Pelham on March 16, 1965.

Among the Carrs' friends were fellow mystery writer (and magician) Clayton Rawson and his wife, Kate, who lived on a block away on North Barry Avenue. Carr attended Rawson's gatherings for fellow magicians and even helped Rawson stage some tricks, according to the Carr biography. (See Clayton Rawson profile below).

Carr was a master of the locked-room mystery and atmosphere. Dirda writes: “Carr almost effortlessly conveys a feeling of unease and wrongness, of mental vertigo. What is real? What is mere smoke and mirrors.”

The Three Coffins (1935) is considered his masterpiece and one of the best locked-room mysteries ever. In the novel, Professor Charles Grimaud, an expert on vampires but skeptical of their existence, is found dead moments after welcoming a mysterious visitor. But the housekeeper sees no one leave through the door, and snow outside the window is undisturbed. Then, outside, an illusionist is found dead in the street with the revolver that killed Grimaud and himself by his side. The only footprints in the surrounding snow are his own.

Here’s how the novel starts:

TO THE murder of Professor Grimaud, and later the equally incredible crime in Cagliostro Street, many fantastic terms could be applied - with reason. Those of Dr. Fell's friends who like impossible situations will not find in his casebook any puzzle more baffling or more terrifying. Thus: two murders were committed, in such fashion that the murderer must not only have been invisible, but lighter than air. According to the evidence, this person killed his first victim and literally disappeared. Again according to the evidence, he killed his second victim in the middle of an empty street, with watchers at either end; yet not a soul saw him, and no footprint appeared in the snow.

Carr himself said: “The fine detective story…. is a ladder of clues, a pattern of evidence, joined together with such cunning that even the experienced reader may be deceived…until, in the blaze of the surprise-ending, he suddenly sees the whole design.”

Mamaroneck is reflected in some of Carr's novels. A Graveyard to Let, written in Mamaroneck in 1948, is set in "Maralarch," a combination of Mamaroneck and Larchmont. Panic in Box C, a 1966 mystery about a murder in a theater, is set in Richbell, a fictitious town said to be next to Mamaroneck. The merchant trader John Richbell purchased Mamaroneck from the Indians in 1661. Richbell Road is named for him.

Carr moved to Greenville, South Carolina, in June 1965 However, he and Clarice spent Christmases with their daughter and grandchildren in Mamaroneck and showered them with presents, according to his biography.

"When he was living in Mamaroneck, or in later years when he was visiting for the holidays," Greene writes, "he would go to two stores on the main street. The first stop was the toy store, from which he would emerge with an armload of gifts for children under about 15 years of age. Then he'd go to the jewelry store, where he would buy presents for everyone older than fifteen."

Carr died of cancer in 1977 in South Carolina. He was 70.

Sources:

• John Dickson Carr: The Man Who Explained Miracles, biography by Douglas G. Greene. 1995, Otto Penzler books.

• The Plague Court Murders by John Dickson Carr, American Mystery Classics reissue with introduction by Michael Dirda of the Washington Post, 2020, Penzler Publishers. Novel originally published in 1934. The Mamaroneck Public Library has this and some other Carr mysteries.

• The Three Coffins by John Dickson Carr, 1935, reissued by Otto Penzler Presents American Mystery Classics, 2024, Penzler Publishers. The Westchester Library System has this.

• John Dickson Carr profile, The New Yorker, Sept. 8, 1951.

• John Dickson Carr New York Times obituary, March 1, 1977

• The Daily Times of Mamaroneck

Clayton Rawson: The Great Merlini magician, mystery writer

Clayton Rawson (1906-1971), a magician, writer, and editor who performed as The Great Merlini lived on North Barry Avenue in Mamaroneck from the 1940s or so and hosted magicians and mystery writers there. Rawson, born in Elyria, Ohio, wrote four mysteries in the 1930s and ‘40s about Merlini as a magician and detective and he later wrote books about magic.

Every summer from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, the Witchdoctors Club, an informal magicians group Rawson had organized, gathered at his home for a picnic, according to his son Clayton Rawson Jr. The son described the event on Genii: The Conjurors’ Magazine’s Magicpedia website:

“Members performed an evening of magic for the Rawson's neighbors on the stage he had built in the backyard. It had curtains by Mother and spotlights in the trees... In additional to the regular Witchdoctors, others performers included: Milbourne Christopher, Harry Blackstone, Jr., Dai Vernon, the Amazing Randi, Harry Lorayne... I wish I had photos of those shows but I was too busy assisting back stage. Merlini performed many illusions at those shows notably Pepper's Ghost and the Levitation. I was featured in the former, my sisters alternated in the latter.”

Watch below: The Great Merlini performs the Floating Lady levitation with Sarah Rawson in his Mamaroneck backyard, 1964. Crew often included Rawson family and friends. Then, Clayton Rawson Jr performs "The High Sign" using Merlini's patter. He also inherited his father's stage name.

Clayton Rawson also hosted a yearly picnic at his home for the Mystery Writers of America, of which he was a founder.

He worked an editor of detective magazines and mystery books for Inner Sanctum Mysteries for Simon and Schuster and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine..

Sources:

• Clayton Rawson obituary, the New York Times, March 2, 1971

• Son’s description of Witchdoctors Club picnic in Mamaroneck, on the Magicpedia website of Genii: The Conjurors’ Magazine.

• Clayton Rawson feature with photo of him levitating his daughter Sally, The Daily Times of Mamaroneck, March 7, 1964.

Rest of the series: Mamaroneck and Larchmont notables

Here are the other parts. Tap the links to go to those pages:

This is one of a series of pages on notable residents of Mamaroneck and Larchmont.

Here are the other parts. Tap the links to go to those pages:

• Actors, entertainers, singers: Matt and Kevin Dillon, Joan Rivers, Carly Rose Sonenclar and many more.

• List: 21 from Mamaroneck High School who became famous

• Artists including Norman Rockwell.

• Community-builders including the man behind Mamaroneck’s ‘Friendly Village” motto.

• List: Local trail blazers - people who achieved local firsts for their gender, race, or ethnicity

  Plus

• Street names: The notable people behind Mamaroneck’s street names

Share your tips, info on more Notables

The Mamaroneck-Larchmont Notables project is ongoing. Share suggestions for others to include by emailing the Mamaroneck Historical Society at MamaroneckHistory@gmail.com.