The Stone Farmhouse in “Christmas in Connecticut”

by HOOKEDONHOUSES on DECEMBER 25, 2008

Ilove old black and white movies. Especially romantic comedies. And if there’s a little Christmas thrown into the storyline, all the better! One of my favorites to watch at this time of year is Christmas in Connecticut with Barbara Stanwyck.

I’ve been in love with the stone farmhouse that it takes place in ever since I saw it as a girl. I love the vaulted ceilings, the walls of windows, the built-in bookshelves, and the big stone fireplace in the living room.

Elizabeth Lane (Barbara Stanwyck) writes a popular column in Smart Housekeeping, describing her daily life as a wife and mother, an accomplished cook and home decorator, on a farm in Connecticut. But the truth is, Elizabeth is a single woman living in NYC who needs a recipe to boil water.

Her “Uncle Felix” (played by Hungarian-born S.Z. Sakall, who fled Europe because of the Nazis) runs a successful restaurant in the city, and she uses his recipes for the magazine column. The Connecticut farmhouse she writes about is actually her architect boyfriend’s.

When her boss, Alexander Yardley, invites himself to Christmas dinner and wants to bring along war hero Jefferson Jones as a sort of publicity stunt, Elizabeth and her boyfriend–now fiance–have to pretend to be married.

The curving stone fireplace is almost larger than life with the opening stretching above their heads and niches built-in for books and things.

I tried to get a good shot of the fireplace, but it was difficult. The camera was always panning past it, or people were standing in front of it…

In this shot you can see the built-in bookshelves on the other side of the fireplace, too:

She brings “Uncle Felix” along to the farmhouse to cook, and they borrow a neighbor’s baby to play the part of baby Roberta. But then Elizabeth meets Jefferson Jones (Dennis Morgan) sparks fly, and complications ensue. Maybe she won’t marry John Sloan after all. . .

John’s den with bar:

Sydney Greenstreet, a well-known character actor, played Alexandra Yardley, Elizabeth’s publisher. I love when he says, “What a Christmas!” at the end of the movie and can’t stop laughing.

Jefferson helps Elizabeth bathe the baby in the bathroom. “Are you sure the baby’s name is Robert?” Oops. “I mean, Roberta!”

This looks like the perfect place to spend Christmas to me…

Jefferson wins Elizabeth over by singing Christmas carols while she trims the tree:

Her fiance John starts to feel a little left out, though…

According to the IMDB website, the set was the same one used in the Cary Grant-Katharine Hepburn rom-com “Bringing Up Baby” in 1938. I found that interesting because I loved that house, too. I’ve got to rent it again so I can compare the two! The exteriors were similar, as I recall, but I clearly remember the entry and staircase in “Bringing Up Baby,” and it was completely different from the one in this film. They must have changed a lot around.

12/10 UPDATE: I wrote a post about “Bringing Up Baby,” so you can see how the sets compare here.

Jefferson and Elizabeth in the upstairs hallway. (These are the kinds of outfits I like to hang out in when I’m in my Connecticut farmhouse, too.)

Felix teaches Elizabeth how to flip flapjacks:

Love the Dutch door in the kitchen. So does this cow, which has wandered to the house from the barn:

Sitting around the kitchen table:

Housekeeper Norah proclaims this “The best kitchen in Connecticut!”

A shot of the pretty guest bedroom:

I like the fireplace in the bedroom with the slanted wall above it. Gotta love all the dormers in this house!

The war hero’s fiancee shows up to complicate things further:

But everything gets straightened out in the end and Elizabeth and Jefferson fall in love. Unfortunately, when Elizabeth chooses Jefferson, she must leave John’s farmhouse behind, so the ending isn’t a totally happy one (in my opinion!).

Elizabeth’s character was supposedly based on popular Family Circlemagazine columnist Gladys Taber, who lived on Stillmeadow Farm in Connecticut. But unlike Elizabeth, Gladys was the real deal who wrote something like 50 books about cooking and homemaking.

4/10 UPDATE: Susan Turnley says that Taber was not really the inspiration for the movie:

Apparently this rumor came about many years ago when the IMDb.com website began annotating movies for readers. There were paid-by-the-hour workers who had to come up with newsy notes about the movies. One of them cooked up the line: “…Gladys Taber, whose column ‘Butternut Wisdom’ ran in Family Circle Magazine from before World War II until the 1970?s…” Fans of Gladys know that the Butternut Wisdom column didn’t start until 1959, 14 years after the movie.

From late 1937 to the end of 1957, Gladys had a column entitled “Diary of Domesticity” that ran in Ladies Home Journal. BTW, Gladys always said that the title of that column was forced on her and “it was a bad title but a pretty good column.” The family says they are sure the character of Elizabeth Lane was not based on Gladys, but the rumor has gone viral on the internet. I do feel that it doesn’t hurt getting her name out to more people: our goal is to get more people reading her books.

8/10 UPDATE: I just got this note from Anne Colby about the Gladys Taber connection to the movie:

Taber was my grandmother, and my family still owns Stillmeadow Farm. But I have to correct Susan Turnley’s post a bit, since my family actually has always believed- and hoped- that the movie was indeed loosely based on my grandmother’s Ladies Home Journal column “Diary of Domesticity”(I know, what a title). We’ve never tried to pin this down, however, so we’d welcome any confirmation/thoughts.

Taber’s column was one of the Journal’s most popular columns ever, and in 1945, the monthly essay was nationally well-known and at the height of its success. Apparently during the war, copies of Ladies Home Journal were sometimes included in care packages sent to troops overseas, and my family has a wonderful fan letter sent to my grandmother from a WWII soldier who had read her columns while in the service, and wrote that the soldiers had found comfort in her portrait of hometown America.

Beyond the basic plot point, however, the similarity ends– since Gram really lived on her (very simple) CT farm, and her cookbooks, while delicious, were not exactly low-fat– so she would have envied Barbara Stanwyck’s glamorous look!

Thanks, Anne!

Visit my TV/Movie Houses page to see more, from Gone with the Wind toMr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.

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Katharine Hepburn’s Country House in “Bringing Up Baby”

by HOOKEDONHOUSES on NOVEMBER 28, 2010

The classic 1938 madcap comedy Bringing Up Baby featured Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn on the big screen as David and Susan, a zoology professor and a flighty heiress thrown together in a series of crazy mishaps involving her pet leopard Baby.

I’m a Katharine Hepburn fan and enjoy all of her movies, but this is one of my favorites because of Susan’s charming country house in Westlake, Connecticut. I remember watching it as a girl and deciding I would move to Connecticut and get a house just like it when I grew up. (Any day now…)

Susan’s terrier George barks and barks and barks his way right through the movie, adding to the sense of comic mayhem:

Director Howard Hawks liked his comedies to move fast. His characters talk fast, walk fast, and take pratfalls fast. He never paused for laughs in his movies, saying, “If they miss it, they can watch it again.”

Howard Hawks and Dudley Nichols were inspired to create this movie by Katharine Hepburn’s real relationship with the director John Ford during the making of Mary of Scotland. She was the only person who was ever able to tease him on the set and get away with it, Peter Bogdanovich says in the DVD commentary. Grant even wore similar round glasses to Ford’s in this movie.

The gossip was that Hepburn and Ford had an affair, but there has never been any real evidence that it was anything more than friendship.

I found it interesting to learn that Howard Hawks was born in Goshen, Indiana in 1896, a town that had been founded by his family about 60 years before his birth. We have family living in that area and visit it often.

This was the first movie Grant made with Hawks, but it wasn’t the last. They went on to make four more, including my personal favorites, I Was a Male War Bride and His Girl Friday.

The Bar Behind the Stairs:

Grant did all of his own stunts in the film, including the part at the end when he pulls Susan up onto the scaffolding with him with one arm. (A stunt double was used for Hepburn in that scene, however.)

The Hall Leading to the Two Bedrooms:

Guest Bedroom:

Hepburn was reportedly happy to work with the young leopard ‘Nissa (II)’ who played Baby, but Grant preferred to use a double for his scenes with her. Did you know Baby was originally written as a panther? I guess a trained leopard was easier for the filmmakers to find.

You can learn more about Nissa the leopard, who retired after making this movie, onAll Creatures Great & Small.

Hawks said he made the mistake of making everyone in this movie “screwball characters,” and that it was an error he never repeated. He believed it would have done better at the box office if there had been at least one “normal” person in the movie.

The Second Bedroom:

When Susan’s aunt asks David why he’s wearing a woman’s dressing gown, Grant ad libbed the now-famous line, “I just went gay all of a sudden!” Movie historians believe that was the first time the word “gay” was used in a film in a way that didn’t mean strictly “happy and carefree.”

The Kitchen:

This is a strange picture, but it was only when the gardener runs up behind the cook and surprises her, making her drop everything, that we get a quick glimpse at the entire stone wall in the kitchen with the range:

I love that there is a back staircase off the kitchen, and that it appears to be a spiral one:

The Dining Room:

Cary Grant never said, “Judy, Judy, Judy,” in a movie, but he did say, “Susan, Susan, Susan,” in this one.

Howard Hawks’ wife Nancy (a model known as “Slim”) liked this house so much that when they built a place in New England, plans were based on the “Bringing Up Baby” sets. UPDATE: A reader tells me that Nancy’s autobiography says their house was actually built in Bel Air, not New England. Thanks, Mary!

This is the best shot we get of the exterior of the house. Oddly enough, it looks like a one-story house here, even though there are two sets of stairs leading somewhere inside (we never do see the second story, though):

Bringing Up Baby was only a modest success in its day, and around that time Katharine Hepburn was famously labeled “box-office poison.” After this movie, she made another comedy with Grant called Holiday. It didn’t do well, either, but both films are now considered among her best.

Some sources claim that the same sets were reused for the Barbara Stanwyck romantic comedy Christmas in Connecticut in 1945. While they do have similarities–lots of stone walls, Dutch doors, a Connecticut farm setting–they look substantially different to me. Check out the photos and decide for yourself!

Any other Katharine Hepburn fans out there?

Visit TV/Movie Houses to see other Cary Grant movies I’ve featured, likeNorth by Northwest and An Affair to Remember.

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