Phyllis Thaxter play 1,388

 

If Phyllis St Felix Thaxter weren't on METV every 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 lazy boy and fell asleep. No wonder, that show is so 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. Her father and mother were more or less the aristocracy of a town in Portland, Maine.

This fact lent itself to her speech pattern. She couldn’t betray it on TV. To a midwetsern ear, her voice was a cross between Shakespeare and a Bostonian accent. Her diction was perfectly annunciated, unlike those old lobster fishermen she understood perfectly. 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 no more so than modern life in an AI world I guess.

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

Headquartered in the cabin on Cushing Island where Phyllis and her second husband Gil spent many a summer from 1962 to 1992.

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 in her lush Portland accent. 

The Cushing island “cabin” is actually closer to a two storey 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.

Too many memories, too close to the many real loves Phyllis knew on earth. And one place her first husband refused to visit. 

Cushing Island was where Phyllis 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?" I heard a voice say.

That voice, with that unmistakeable Portland accent, sounding just like Phyllis would have sounded in the late 1940's, a mixture of poise, proper Broadway and all the charm of Hollywood. 

"Hello?" the voice repeated upon not hearing an answer. I felt like I was actually speaking to Phyllis St Felix Thaxter. 

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

"Well, so nice of you to call, you've reached the Phyllis Thaxter Museum on Cushing Island. My father had this cottage built in 1924. It's been an absolute favorite haunt of mine since then when I was just 5 years old!

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 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. 

Because it’s not what Phyllis said 

Her voice 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 rich in the Montreal  repertoire 

This is a play about THAT VOICE that Sounded  exactly as I heard on the Alfred Hitchcock hour 

Then wagon train 

Then the Fugitive 

On the TV in my living room 

and then on the phone in my hand 

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 $300 there into a jar to buy a crown for my back teeth 

(my insurance wouldn’t cover it) and that’s when I saw a signed photo of Phyllis available for $499 online at the online museum shop 

and I had to have it

It arrived by mail 3 weeks later. 

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

That’s when the phone calls changed 

It seems my number had been flagged and Phyllis’ voice seemed to know who I was 

“Brian,” she said 

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

I began to ask unusual 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?” and I got real

Answers 

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

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 much less 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 madly in love with her by this point.

“As for Ingrid Bergman, she slept with…” 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 I love you,” 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 it’s getting late Brian, I need my beauty sleep still…I better be…”

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

“I hope you do…by the way…how is that travel agent coming along?” 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 her the details of my credit card. 

I laid in my bed that night, thinking. In just two days I’d be in Portland Maine. 

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

a woman otherwise long dead these last 15 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 look at the line items on my credit card. One of them, $160 dollars  for the phone call I just made with Phyllis Thaxter.

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 Montreal four 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. There was a wheelchair access so people of all ages could gather there and admit the sound of seagulls and the waves (sound effect for radio) 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 maintain. “She herself always said in Hollywood she may as well never worn makeup- that plain was she” 

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 stuck to Broadway.”

 

I went back to my hotel room that night and had dinner and some ice cream 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 3:19 Danforth and for just nine dollars be allowed to go in side to see for myself the first world she knew.. for a $14 ferry ride and another nine dollars … I’d fain access to Cushing Island where  I would see the cottage where she and her second husband spent every summer from 1962 to 1999.