A visitor once accused my mother of having a house full of junk.
This was not a knock on Mum’s housekeeping. Mum was the granddaughter of German immigrants, after all, which meant the house was clean to the point where you probably could have performed a delicate and life threatening multiple organ transplant on the dining room table. No, it was because the house was full of stuff.
And not just any stuff, oh no. The bookshelves were full of books ranging from a Henrik van Loon biography of Rembrandt to a gorgeously illustration edition of Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. There was a lamp made from a ginger jar, a small collection of Hummel figurines, my paternal grandmother’s ancient Blue Willow Ware cake plate, plastic busts of famous composers on the piano, family pictures, the rug that Toto Barbarossa wrapped himself in when I played Bach’s French Suites, a Mission-style library table…
All of it was good quality. Much of it was old. Every single bit of it meant something to Mum, Dad, the dog, or me. All of it was lovingly tended, and despite my catalogue of non-ships in the last paragraph, it was neatly arranged and not simply shoved into whatever space was available.
No, the items themselves weren’t the problem, nor was Mum’s keeping of them. It was the mere fact that they existed that seemed to bother this guest. Her own home was slightly less clean than ours, had somewhat more modern furniture, and was notably free of heirlooms, knick knacks, antiques, or rugs suitable for a music-loving Cairn terrier to roll himself in.
This was certainly her right. Not everyone has antiques (or Cairn terriers), and not everyone is a devotee of the Eero van der Wilton School of Minimalist Modernity and Cake Decorating, LLC. Tastes are as varied as humans, and what pleases one person may not please another.
At the same time, it’s not precisely polite to walk into someone else’s home, wrinkle one’s nose, and say, “Good heavens, how can you stand to live with all this junk?” in a voice that could (and likely did) carry into the neighbor’s knotty pine rumpus room.
Mum, who would have stabbed herself between her toes with a vibranium spork before so abusing someone else’s hospitality, went very, very still.
“Junk?”
Ms. Van der Minimalist seemed to realize she had made a mistake. “Martha, I’m sorry. That came out the wrong way. It’s just that – “ she made a hopeless, helpless motion with her shoulders and hands “ – I couldn’t stand living with so much – “
“It may be junk,” Mum said, back straight and head up. “But remember. It’s my junk, and I like it.”
Tonight I bring you not books, either good or bad, but two stories of Americans who were associated in some way with, well, junk. The first concerns two brothers who inherited wealth, a fine home, and lovely things, yet ended up dead thanks to their own junk. The second is the tale of a charming, shy, talented artist whose life’s work was almost discarded for being junk:
Homer and Langley Collyer — I’m the first to admit that I’m not a great housekeeper – I have better ways to waste my time, including writing these winsome bagatelles you inflict upon yourselves each Saturday night - but however messy or cluttered certain areas of the Last Homely Shack become, they will never approach these legendary New Yorkers. Born into wealth, expired thanks to a freak accident, Homer and Langley Collyer achieved posthumous fame for their stunning collections of everything from books to rare silks, old newspapers to family portraits, a Model T Ford chassis, music instruments, their mother’s hope chest, glass chandeliers….
Well. Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?
The Collyers were the fruit of the union of two cousins, Herman Collyer and Susie Frost. The family claimed descent from the Speedwell, the ship that made it to Massachusetts only a week after the Mayflower, and the New York branch of the Livingstons. Blue-blooded and eminently respectable, the quartet enjoyed a genteel lifestyle thanks to Herman Collyer’s work as a gynecologist. The boys both attended Columbia University, studying admiralty law (Homer) and engineering (Langley, who was also a fine pianist), and were active at Trinity Church, where assorted relatives had been pew holders since 1697.
All of this sounds very normal, if a bit on the over-bred side…except that a strain of eccentricity ran through the family alongside the Pilgrim DNA. Dr. Collyer, who occasionally moonlighted at the city-owned hospital on Blackwell’s Island, enjoyed commuting from his brownstone in Harlem by canoe, paddling across the East River in the morning and paddling back to Manhattan at night before a brisk hike across the island with the canoe on his shoulders. Neither Homer nor Langley ever married or moved out of the family brownstone, despite their involvement in the church, Homer’s law practice, and Langley’s musical career.
Again, this all sounds very normal, if a bit on the overly homebound side…except that Homer and Langley didn’t like change. They didn’t leave the family home to make their own way in the world, either while their parents were alive or after their deaths. They didn’t like the social changes of the 1920’s and early 1930’s, or seeing their nice upper crust part of Harlem go to the dogs thanks to the Depression and the sudden influx of dark-skinned folk of the African persuasion into local apartments. “We don’t want to be bothered,” Langley once remarked, and if that meant withdrawing more and more into their still-impressive brownstone and spending less and less time with other human beings, so be it.
Then Homer suddenly went blind thanks to retinal hemorrhage. Langley, who’d worked as a piano dealer in between concert gigs and occasional appearances at Carnegie Hall, quit his job to tend to his brother. Rumors began to grow that something wasn’t quite right in the Collyer brownstone…and thus it was that the Collyer brothers, who’d started out with every advantage of birth, breeding, and money, kept more and more to themselves, went out less and less, and accumulated more and more stuff.
Some of this stuff was the consequence of being their parents’ sole heirs; when Dr. Collyer had died he’d left everything to his sons, which included all of his medical books and paraphernalia. Others were left over from Langley’s business, which is how they ended up with fourteen pianos (one a Steinway), a clavichord, two organs, a banjo, several violins and bugles, and an accordion. Still others were relics of the seamy side of their thoroughly respectable youth (a collection of Victorian pinups, hubba hubba!), their mother’s life (her stash of several hundred yards of fine fabric and several dressmaker’s dummies), and Langley’s original training as an engineer (the aforesaid Model T chassis). And others, like antique tapestries, a small cache of baby carriages and children’s furniture, a collection of guns, and a collection of plaster busts of famous people, seem to have made their way home with Langley during nightly walks. No one’s quite sure.
What is certain is that Langley was so convinced that his self-designed diet of peanut butter, black bread, and 100 fresh oranges per week would cure Homer’s blindness that he kept every single newspaper going back to 1933 so his brother could catch up on current events once he could read again. After all, oranges were full of Vitamin C and peanut butter was packed with protein, so surely 100 fresh citrus per week and as many peanut butter and black bread sandwiches as he wanted would set Home right as rain, wouldn’t they?
And wouldn’t all the booby traps and trip wires and tunnels Langley designed against intruders keep Homer (and Langley) safe from threats of burglary and other disturbances? After all, those nasty new neighbors had tried to break in, lured by rumors of great quantities of jewelry and cash, so wasn’t it reasonable to wire all the doors and windows shut, block the entrances with stacks of newspapers, and enter and exit through the roof? The world was a dangerous place full of dangerous people, so wasn’t it safer to live coccooned in cozy little nests surrounded by beloved possessions?
So reasoned the Collyers, and despite the occasional brush with the law over unpaid taxes and the occasional tabloid photograph of Langley climbing over a fence to get home, their unusual existence continued undisturbed for the next fourteen years.
Then the police got a tip from someone calling himself “Charles Smith” that there was a dead body in the Collyer home,at least if the pungent stench emanating from its decaying walls was any guide. A patrolman tried to get in and failed thanks to Langley’s defensive measures, and eventually it took a squad of seven beefy officers working in the front hallway and yet another of New York’s Finest smashing a second floor window before anyone could get in and start looking for either of the Collyers.
Which, after several hours of backbreaking labor, they did.
Poor Homer was the first to emerge, slumped over dead in an alcove, wearing nothing but a bathroom. He’d died of starvation and heart failure less than a day before the cops arrived, and except for eight live (and presumably unhappy) cats, he was the only mammal in the house.
Arrangements were quickly made for Homer’s funeral – it was only right – and the police posted a guard outside the house in case Langley showed up. There was speculation that he’d simply abandoned his brother, especially after reports that he’d been spotted on a bus headed for the Jersey Shore, but as the days passed, it became increasingly clear that the younger Collyer was almost certainly dead.
But how? They ad no enemies – living entirely in one’s home, surrounded by astonishing amounts of found objects, heirlooms, and the desiccated peels of thousands of oranges, doesn’t lead to death threats or feuds – and what friends they’d once welcomed had dropped away as the years passed. Besides, who besides Langley (and possibly Homer) knew how to navigate the access tunnels through the newspapers and chandeliers and furniture? Or would willingly set foot in a place so cluttered it took almost three weeks to clear out enough of the contents to learn what had actually happened to Langley?
Which was quite horrible, in its own way.
For it seemed that Langley, clever and mechanically gifted, had eventually been hoist on his own petard. He’d been crawling through a tunnel he’d constructed out of old breadboxes, a chest of drawers, a suitcase, and several rusty bedsprings when he’d evidently activated a booby trap. The tunnel collapsed, Langley was unable to move, and he quickly suffocated only ten feet from his helpless brother. He’d died about two weeks before Homer, and one can only imagine the horror of slowly starving to death, alone and blind, surrounded by pianos and cats and bread crusts and –
- are you sitting down? You really should be -
- between 120 and 180 tons of trash.
As hard as this is to believe, that is the estimated weight of what the city authorities eventually dragged out of the Collyer brownstone. Jaded New Yorkers, curiosity piqued in new and exciting ways, gathered by the thousands over the next few weeks to see what else would emerge from what had once been a fine home owned by a fine family. Some were drawn solely by curiosity, others by pity and/or disgust, while others hoped that the rumors of vast wealth were true and they’d get to see (or possibly acquire) some of the Collyer fortune.
Alas, there was no fortune – whatever the Collyers had inherited or earned was long since gone – and most of what was actually in the house was either worthless or in such terrible condition that no one wanted it. Five dozen people claiming to be relatives filed notices with the court that they wanted a share of whatever was left, and eventually twenty-three lucky (?) heirs were allowed to split the jewelry, securities, and whatever knick knacks hadn’t been gnawed by rats, peed on by cats, or otherwise decayed amongst the newpapers and pianos and busts and automobile parts. The Collyer home was not included in the estate because it was completely unlivable – who would want to live there, even if there’d been enough in the estate to repair it? – and it was condemned and razed* a few months after Langley joined Homer and their parents in Cypress Hill Cemetery.
Needless to say, the Collyers’ Lifestyle So Bad It’s Appalling has become the stuff of legend, urban and otherwise. Firefighters call trash-stuffed homes “Collyer Houses,” the brothers themselves have become a by-word for bad housekeeping and clutter, and New York mothers still admonish their messy offspring not to be like the Collyers. And then there are the fictional versions of Home and Langley, which range from a Spirit comic book to films, TV episodes, documentaries, sitcom jokes, plays, and of course books.
Ah yes, the books.
The best known of these is probably E.L. Doctorow’s Homer & Langley, even though Doctorow took numerous liberties with the facts. This was noted by almost every reviewer, and stoutly defended by Doctorow on the grounds that he was writing fiction, not biography. The book still made the bestseller list, but compared to, say, Ragtime or Billy Bathgate, it wasn’t Doctorow’s best effort.
Nor was it the best book about the Collyers. That honor goes to Franz Lidz’ eccentrically named but impeccably researched Ghosty Men: The Strange but True Story of the Collyer Brothers, New York’s Greatest Hoarders: An Urban Historical. Even better, Lidz, whose uncle Arthur had grown up near the Collyer home and based his own life on theirs, included Arthur’s story in his book…and wouldn’t you know it, Arthur’s life in turn became the subject of a film, the 1995 opus Unstrung Heroes starring Andie McDowell, Michael Richards, and John Turturro.
The most recent appearance of the Collyers in popular culture is Richard Greenberg’s 2015 play The Dazzle. This production, which premiered in a former art school in London, starred David Dawson as Homer and Andrew Scott as Langley. Whether the set was as cluttered as the actual Collyer mansion is not clear – theaters are subject to building codes, you know – but playing two such eccentric, and interdependent, men must have been a real challenge regardless.
At the same time, the company’s prop department must have been ecstatic. When was the next time they’d have an excuse to trot out every single prop, costume, piece of trash, discarded script page, old newspaper, or broken piece of crockery they owned, all at the same time?
The Nut Lady — Elizabeth Tashjian had lived a long and full life when she passed from this vale of tears in 2007. Born the year Woodrow Wilson won the slugfest between the Bull Mooses (Meese? Meeses? Mice?) and the Republicans, she'd been in an atmosphere of wealth and privilege. Her parents, who'd left behind a real, genuine castle when they emigrated to America from Armenia, had more than enough money to make sure that their daughter had every advantage.
Music lessons (she played the violin with unusual skill and was a sometime composer), art lessons at the National Academy of Design - even though her parents divorced when she was in elementary school, young Elizabeth was recognized for her talent early on. She won a prize for her art in 1929, and though she never married or held a paying job, she seemed content. There was enough money for her mother to replace the lost Armenian homestead with a huge Gothic Revival mansion in the seaside town of Old Lyme, Connecticut, and had it not been for a childhood hobby that took on a life of its own, she might have died as she'd lived, quietly and without leaving much of a mark on the world.
Fortunately for her, devotees of pop culture, and those of us who love Things So Bad They're Good, Elizabeth Tashjian decided to combine her fine arts training with her hobby, open a museum, and try to reclaim a pejorative from the slang that had denigrated her beloved inspirational objects.
The museum, which began as a Renaissance-style "cabinet of curiosities," made her famous. The objects it housed became the subject of ridicule, fascination, and academic interest. And Elizabeth Tashjian, who had enough money to do as she pleased, became a legend.
For it seemed that young Elizabeth had always been a bit…how do I put this delicately?…a bit, ahem, obsessed with nuts.
It had begun in her childhood, when she'd played with nuts, then painted them. The passage of time only made her love nuts more, to the point that her prize-winning art school opus was a huge, elegantly painted canvas that showed several hapless Brazil nuts fleeing from a ravening nutcracker. She began collecting nuts, drawing and painting nuts, and writing songs about nuts, and by the time she opened her museum in1972 she had enough of a collection that the admission fee (a nut, what else?) seemed cheap compared to the wonders within.
And what wonders! Elizabeth herself created a surprising amount of nut art over the years, including a sculpture she called "The Mask of the Unknown Nut," but that wasn't all. Her collection soon came to include items made of nuts - nut toys, anyone? Maybe some nut jewelry? Or a nut Nativity scene? - and a variety of unusual, rare, or just plain weird looking nuts presented to her by admirers. Visitors received a cup of cider and a slice of coffeecake, then were treated to a tour, stories about nuts, nut lore, and a mini-concert of Elizabeth's nut songs ("Nuts Are Beautiful" was a staple).
The glory one of the collection, Elizabeth's pride and joy, was an enormous coco-de-mer she claimed was the largest in the world. It weighed in at thirty-five pounds, or probably a third its bird-boned owner's body mass, and she frequently brought it along on visits to late night talk shows (Chevy Chase was her favorite host, since he'd gallantly kissed her hand, but she'd also been the guest of Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, and Howard Stern). She also posed with it for interviews with the Washington Post and Roadside America.
That the coco-de-mer bore a startling and unmistakable resemblance to a pair of shapely, sun-browned, nicely oiled human buttocks wasn't her fault, nor was the occasional snigger from the juvenile-minded. She did think its unusual shape disproved Darwin in some way, and once said, "I'm using this nut to make a joke of the material origins of Man. I say, 'out with the apes and in with the nuts!'"
Is it any wonder that the coco-de-mer had a place of honor on a rare Chinese chair? Or that the site owners at RoadsideAmerica.com prominently featured her songs and art, and championed her against claims that she was a little squirrelly?
Unfortunately for Elizabeth, Old Lyme is a typical petty small town, with rivalries and in-fighting. Neighbors grew to resent Elizabeth and her nuts, and spread rumors that her house was infested by squirrels. It wasn't - she didn't want her collection threatened - and if there were squirrels in the garden, well, why not? They were cuter than mice, after all, which is why her dream project was a nut-themed pleasure park with a squirrel mascot and a restaurant called "Nutcracker Sweet." It would be shaped like a nutcracker - "To reveal its inner self, the nut needs the nutcracker," she said in 1999, which made perfect sense - so why not?
Alas, the attention did not prevent Elizabeth from growing old, or the courts from eventually declaring her incompetent and ordering her home sold to pay her bills. Only the intervention of art historian Christopher Steiner saved her collection for posterity. He was convinced that Elizabeth's eccentric behavior was as much performance art as anything else, and at last report he was working on a book about her life entitled Performing the Nut Museum: Elizabeth Tashjian and the Art of the Double Entendre.
As for why this title is so appropriate, and why this outwardly gentle, dreamy, slightly strange old woman may well have been putting us all on for forty years, one only has to take a good close look at her and her beloved coco-de-mer.
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Do you have junk in your house? A collection of odd objects? A Mask of the Unknown Nut? Did your mother ever compare you to the Collyer Brothers (mine sure did)? Is there an oddly anatomical coco-de-mer in your knotty pine rumpus room? Brush aside the cobwebs, shove the Model T chassis aside, and share…..
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