THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019 19
nearby was making so much noise with
a pack of Twizzlers that he grabbed the
wrapper from her and threw it into the
aisle. “That’s how he got kicked out of
‘Tootsie,’” she said. “If I’d been there, I’d
have felt mostly proud.”
Before the musical began, Sadie sat
sidesaddle in her aisle seat and stud-
ied the playbill. Her mother said, “I
think part of Broadway etiquette should
also be keeping your shoes on. What
do you think?”
Sadie had slipped off her sandals.
She thought for a moment and said,
“My feet are sweaty.”
—Patricia Marx
more letters, and a tally of prizes won by
Yaddo alums (some seventy-nine Pulit-
zers, sixty-nine National Book Awards,
a Nobel, etc.), they gossiped a bit.
“Howard Doughty—he was whose
boyfriend?” Dafoe said.
“Newton Arvin’s, and then Truman
became Newton’s lover,” Elaina Rich-
ardson, Yaddo’s president, said.
“It’s where it all happens,” Jenkins
said.
“It’s like a Tinder for artists,” Liu said.
Allan Gurganus writes in his essay
“The Ghosts of Yaddo” that, according
to legend, a young, “satyr-like” Cheever
was caught creeping between bedrooms
late one night, naked, when he was hap-
pened upon by peers. Cheever froze and
assumed a glassy-eyed expression. “I am
a ghost,” he said.
Gurganus claims to have seen a fe-
male, skirted ghost at Yaddo; other
atmosphere-enhancing visitations come
from bats. “It’s, like, total Preston Sturges
absurd,” Jenkins, a Yaddo alum, who set
part of her film “Private Life” there, said.
“You’re all having cocktails and some
writer runs through with a net.”
“I am famous at Yaddo for catching
bats,” a writer named Boomer Pinches
said, at the benefit. Pinches worked on
a seven-hundred-page novel at Yaddo.
“They made me a T-shirt about how
many bats I caught.” He mimed wield-
ing a net. “In the mansion, they fly in
figure eights,” he said. “There’s a method
so you don’t hurt them.” (Use two nets.)
“Nothing bonds you faster than grab-
bing sheets and chasing bats for two min-
utes,” Doug Wright said. He wore a glitzy,
vaguely Masonic dinner jacket. At Yaddo,
he worked on his play “I Am My Own
Wife,” and a new play about castrati. His
Yaddo adventures include playing a prank
with Rick Moody and having Martinis
at the racetrack with Joy Williams. Ghost-
wise, he said, “People—and not people
you’d expect to watch ‘Ghost Hunters’
on A&E—have told me about sightings
of the children. But they had a consol-
ing air—kind of a copacetic coexistence.”
“Artists getting along with ghosts is
not really that weird,” the novelist and
performer James Hannaham, a “total
colony rat,” said.
“A ghost is nothing compared to a
long day of typing and only getting three
sentences,” Wright said.
—Sarah Larson
Sadie Markowitz
1
THE CREATIVELIFE
VISITATIONS
O
n a recent Thursday, in a library-like
speakeasy at a labyrinthine event
space in Chelsea, the actors Rufus Col-
lins, Willem Dafoe, and Kathryn Hahn
sat around a coffee table strewn with
scripts and bananas. They were conduct-
ing a read-through for a performance,
guided by the writer-director Tamara
Jenkins. The actor Lucy Liu was on her
way. Hahn wore a dramatic skirt. (“It’s
just an old fisherman’s net.”) She read,
“I’ve lived chiefly in Alabama, Louisi-
ana, Connecticut, New York City ...
have never attended college, or taken a
formal course in writing. Though Capote
(pronounced Ca-Po-Te, more or less)
is really a Spanish name, my mother
is Dutch, my father Scotch-English.”
“Dear Miss Ames,” Dafoe read. “I
am writing to ask whether there would
be any possibility of a place at Yaddo,
sometime this winter, for James Bald-
win, a very gifted young writer of my
acquaintance.” He concluded, “Sincerely,
Lionel Trilling.” The script consisted of
letters sent to and from Yaddo, the writ-
ers’ and artists’ retreat in Saratoga Springs,
New York, founded in 1900 and cen-
tered on the fifty-five-room Tudor man-
sion where its founders, Spencer and
Katrina Trask, summered with their four
children, who all died young. Paintings
of the Trasks hang on the walls, and their
silverware and photographs remain in
the house; ghosts, literary and familial,
have long infused the Yaddo experience.
That night’s performance, for a Yaddo
benefit, aimed to conjure a few.
As Collins read from Katherine Anne
Porter’s description of the Trasks (“as
wildly romantic as any two Babes in the
Woods you could ever expect to find”),
the lights in the room dimmed sudden-
ly—“Ooh!” the actors said—then bright-
ened again. A few minutes later, Liu ap-
peared, looking tidy and practical: smart
bob, eyeglasses, striped turtleneck, over-
alls, pumpkin-colored raincoat. “I was lost
in the basement,” she said. Hahn squealed
and reached out, wiggling her fingers.
“Do you know each other?” Jenkins
asked.
“No, but I want to!” Hahn said. Liu
took her seat and a script. “I am a com-
poser studying music at Harvard,” she
read. “I am ready to come at any time,
and at very short notice. ... Very sin-
cerely, Leonard Bernstein.” They contin-
ued on. Dafoe: “I am sitting here at my
desk drinking a queer but rather good
mixture of tea, red wine, and orange juice.”
(Carson McCullers.) Liu: “I am trying
to write a handful of good short stories.”
( John Cheever.) Hahn: “At Yaddo I would
like to work at completing a first volume
of poetry.” (Sylvia Plath Hughes.) Flan-
nery O’Connor wrote that she was look-
ing forward to Yaddo, and not just be-
cause it wasn’t Georgia. “Lately we have
been treated to some parades by the Ku
Klux Klan,” Collins read. “It’s too hot to
burn a fiery cross, so they bring a porta-
ble one made with red electric light bulbs.”
“Oh, my God,” several actors said. After
