Phyllis Thaxter 1843

 

 Phyllis Thaxter Radio Play

Narrator: If Phyllis Thaxter weren't on METV every other night, you'd never hear the tale I'm about to tell. Ironically, she insisted on calling herself the plainest heroine in Hollywood. 

I was watching Perry Mason from my couch and fell asleep. No wonder, those scripts can be dull. It went off the air at 11:30pm. When I awoke, my eyesight was blurry and the tv screen was more or less a glare. Through these conditions Phyllis Thaxter appeared in an Alfred Hitchcock episode, in a glowing halo, or was it my blurry eyes. 

In the morning I went online to learn about her. Born in Portland, Maine to what might be the aristocracy of the town were it in the upper Midwest.

This fact lent itself to her speech. She couldn’t betray it on TV. To a Midwestern ear, her diction was perfectly annunciated, unlike those old lobster fishermen she must have understood perfectly. Her voice was made, not adapted for Broadway and Hollywood, She did not need to raise her voice to be heard.

My tale tonight may seem outrageous, sound outlandish and all around strange, but such is modern life. Do fish that ply the chilly waters off the coast of Portland think the water is strange?

My name is Brian, I found the Phyllis Thaxter Musuem online rather easily when I woke up. 

Headquartered in the cottage on Cushing Island where Phyllis spent many a summer from 1962 to the late 1990’s.

I dialed the 1-800 number I found and a recorded voice answered. 

"Hello this is Phyllis, thank you so much for calling," she said. 

The Cushing island “cabin” is actually closer to a two story mansion. The physical cottage on Cushing was the one property between Beverly Hills, Cumberland and Vero Beach that Sky Aubrey (her daughter) could not merely sell and dissolve upon her mom's passing in 2012.

It held too many memories, between the structure itself, the beach and the well maintained forested trails, Cushing was too close to the real loves Phyllis knew on earth.

Cushing Island was where she retreated to when she needed a break from all the kindness and politeness she offered an indifferent mean world. 

"This is Phyllis, may I help you?" The voice repeated when I didn’t say anything.

That voice sounded just like Phyllis Thaxter would have sounded in the late 1940's, a mixture of poise, proper Broadway and all the charm of a Hollywood star on the rise. 

"Hello?" the voice repeated upon not hearing an answer. I got over my surprise and disbelief at modern technology. 

"Oh hello," I blurted out. Phyllis instinctively sought to reassure this caller as the real Phyllis Thaxter would have. Her nature was to return fear with kindness and show true Christian empathy.

"Well, so nice of you to call, you've reached the Phyllis Thaxter Museum on Cushing Island. This cottage was built in 1884. It's been an absolute favorite haunt of mine since then when I can remember!

The beach is closeby but in case you're here to learn more about my life, there is a museum on the first floor and tours are conducted on the hour every hour. The entrance fee is $9.00 for adults and free for children under 7. There is a restaurant, Granny's, next door as there has been since 1935. They still serve the best chowder I ever had!"

I slouched back in my seat in Chicago, a thousand miles from Cushing Island but the impossible to dismiss “invitation” had been made. I called a travel agent at once.

Things changed dramatically for me after the first phone call with Phyllis’ automated voice. 

This is not a play about AI. At first it was not what Phyllis said but how she spoke, addressing me by name after I told “her” who I was.

Her instructions, what she said,  only directed me to buy cheap ferry rides and cheap  tickets to get into her museum,  the thing was HOW her voice sounded, so real so true to her New England accent and rich from years learning the full inventory of theater skills in nearby Montreal.  

This is a play about THAT VOICE that sounded almost exactly as I heard on the Alfred Hitchcock hour the night before, then Wagon Train where Phyllis nearly brought me to tears as Vivian Carter.  

Then the Fugitive where her role seemed so effortless to play.  

I should update the reader about the months before I first called the Thaxter museum.

I had a separate bank account and for weeks and months I’d been putting $100 here $200 there “into a jar” to buy a Crown for a sore tooth 

(my insurance wouldn’t cover it) and that’s when I saw a signed photo of Phyllis available online at the online museum shop for just $499.00.

I had to have it

3 weeks later the package arrived. 

I had a special frame for it by then. The day it arrived my tooth ache went away .

I knew what it was at once, shipped from Tijuana Mexico with a Hollywood photographer’s return address.

I called the Museum at once.

“Brian,” Phyllis’ said, “I’m so glad you called! this is Phyllis” 

I began to ask less standard questions now.

Not just when were the bookstore hours but for example, 

“Why did you turn your back on Hollywood and return to humble Maine?”

“It was a mysterious move Brian wasn’t it …but then we’re all rather mysterious aren’t we?” Phyllis’ voice replied.

I guess I had a dozen or so more questions for Phyllis. She took her time answering each one. It frightened me when I realized I forgot I was talking to AI, for so patient was she answering me and she answered them all like a real person, like the real Phyllis Thaxter.

When I asked if she’d have been as big a star as Ingrid Bergman if Polio did not strike in 1952 she laughed the same laugh I heard in Wagon Train and said, “Brian, you know as much about me as my second husband whom I loved so…”

 

My second husband Gil was much more comfortable on the East Coast and by 1962 I was rarely in Hollywood. We fell in love at first…oh but Brian you don’t want to know all this do you?” Phyllis said mirthfully, as if to shield my feelings. She had to know I had fallen in love with her by this point.

“As for Ingrid Bergman, she…” and Phyllis realized she would be guilty of gossip and stopped herself, I only had two men in my life….well maybe 3…”

“Three?” I said with a lump in my throat dispensing all my disbelief.

“More than most”, I said “I’m familiar with the agony of not being loved back by one I love.” 

“Today,” Phyllis said into my ear …” all that is changed Brian” Phyllis said.

 

“You take such an interest in me, and I’m much older than you,” Phyllis said.

“Not that much older, just 45 years…”

Phyllis burst into a laugh. “Well its getting late Brian, I need my beauty sleep still…I better be…”

“Ok,” I said with sheer joy, “I’ll call you again.”

“I hope you do…” Phyllis said.

 

We hung up.

 

 

The travel agent in Chicago confirmed me at $4,999 for airfare, rental and lodging in Portland from June __ to June __ and all tickets to the Phyllis St Felix Thaxter museum in Cumberland and Cushing Island plus tickets to the Phyllis Schuyler Thaxter theater in South Portland.

With the earpiece still warm in my ear, I gave the agent the details of my credit card. 

In just two days I’d be in Portland Maine. 

Meanwhile, tonight I’m confined by the charms of a woman named Phyllis Thaxter or by AI?

A woman otherwise long passed on to a better world these last 14 years? Or modern technology?

 

 

 

In three days I owed the “minimum” on my credit card, 3,019 dollars, but for 40 dollars the illusion continues. 

 

I refused to think about that…

 

 

After an uneventful flight from O’Hare to LaGuardia, and then a turbo pop up to Portland I arrived at the Portland airport “international” because there were some flights to Quebec a few hours away.

After settling into my hotel room, I realized I had a few hours of daylight left and I thought I’d explore the town that produced Phyllis Saint Felix Thaxter

 

 As a journalist by trade, I thought I would conduct an informal survey and see if I could find Portlanders who heard of Phyllis or potentially even knew her.

 

 So I went to the environment where she grew up, 319 Danforth in the still fashionable West End of Portland all these 100 years later.

There are no parks in the modern for its time street grid by Danforth street but it’s not far from the beach and on this hot sunny day that’s where many people were.

 

In fact there was a wheelchair access so people of all ages could gather there and amidst the sound (FX here) of seagulls and the waves I met some native Portlanders and canvassed the crowd with my questions about their most famous resident. 

 Many had never heard of her because she passed away in 2012 in Florida and had not been to Portland since the late 1990s but a group of older people on an excursion from the nursing home had.

To a person they all vouched for Phyllis’s character and how practical, realistic, unpretentious, and easy to relate to she was in real life. 

“Not just for a Hollywood starlet” they were quick to posit. “She herself always said in Hollywood she may as well never worn makeup- that’s how plain she felt there…” 

 

One woman who was in her 90s and knew Phyllis in person told me if Phyllis knew I was out here conducting the survey she would turn red. She was that unaware of her charm.

“Oh here in Portland she could even be glamorous among us pale lobster eaters, but she always said she should have only done one picture in Hollywood and returned to her beloved Maine.”

 

I went back to my hotel room that night and had dinner and left my windows wide open to hear the ocean and let my room fill with fresh Atlantic air right off the beach.

I fell into a deep sleep, the first good sleep I had since I woke up to see Phyllis on my television screen back in Chicago in the Alfred Hitchcock hour.

 

Tomorrow I would stand at the doorway of the home. She grew up in a colonial revival mansion at 319 Danforth and for just nine dollars be allowed to go inside to see for myself the first world she knew.. for a $14 ferry ride and another nine dollars … I’d access to Cushing Island home where  I would see the very structure where she spent every summer from 1962 to 1999.