Page 18 January 25, 2013
DAN’S PAPERS
danshamptons.com
Two Lies (Cont’d from previous page) about what I had seen, because I thought they should know. “And who are you?” one of the blue-haired ladies asked. I told her who I was and the name of my newspaper. “We can run our town quite well without you,” one of them replied. “East Hampton was named the Most Beautiful Town in America by The Saturday Evening Post last year. And we keep it that way.” Preparing for the next issue, I added the slogan to the East Hampton edition. It was just below the masthead. “Selected as the Most Beautiful Town in America by The Saturday Evening Post,” it read. The next year, I wrote it in our guidebook. Soon thereafter it was appearing everywhere. I think it was on the town seal for a while. About 15 years later, however, I was confronted at a party by a man who told me he had worked at The Saturday Evening Post for his entire adult life, including the years I was referring to, and there was never such a contest and it was all a lie. You couldn’t just Google things back then. But I took this sobering thought very seriously. So I went off to the New York City Library Annex, just across from the big main building on 5th Avenue, where they had back issues of every major magazine published in the United States. I spent most of an afternoon looking for this designation. I found articles about East Hampton in Holiday Magazine written by a writer who had spent the summer with two
roommates there. I found an article about East Hampton in Travel Magazine. But there was nothing, absolutely nothing, about any contest the town had won in The Saturday Evening Post or any place else. What had I done? As far as “Home Sweet Home” is concerned, here is what is known. The house was built in the 1700s as a residence for one of the colonial settlers. John Howard Payne was born in Manhattan in 1791 and raised in Manhattan. He mentions visiting East Hampton in a letter he wrote. In 1813, at the age of 22, he moved to London, where he hoped to become a famous actor. He got rave reviews performing Hamlet at the Drury Lane Theatre, but was not otherwise very successful and, while in London, unable to pay debts, spent time in debtor’s prison. He also lived in Paris. He befriended Washington Irving and Benjamin West. He courted author Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein) but failed to win her hand. He wrote comedies and other plays, among them, with Henry Bishop in 1823, Clari, or The Maid of Milan, about a poor peasant girl from a small village wooed by a duke who proposes marriage and takes her away to his chateau, where he rescinds the wedding plans. She decides to leave him, and sings fondly of her memories of growing up in a small village. The song is “Home, Sweet Home.” “Be it Ever So Humble, There’s No Place Like Home.” This song, sweetly sung, soon became one of the most popular in the English-speaking world,
although it did not make Payne rich. It made the publishers of his song rich. C’est la vie. In 1832, Payne returned to America. In midlife, he toured the American west with naturalist John J. Audubon, but he had no further success or fame. He died in hard circumstances in 1852 at the age of 61. The success of “Home, Sweet Home” continued on and on. It achieved its greatest popularity during the Civil War when, it is said, during lulls in the fighting, soldiers in trenches on both sides of the battlefield would sing it, sometimes together, as they considered their awful fates. Then, in the late 1800s, when city people began arriving here for the summer, rumors abounded that the house Payne had supposedly visited in the town was his childhood home. No local groups, including the LVIS, founded in 1895, did anything to dispel that rumor. And so it proceeded. In the early 1900s, wealthy New York businessman Gustav Buek bought “Home Sweet Home,” which was in fallingdown condition, and completely restored it. He introduced it to his friends as Payne’s childhood home. After Buek’s death in 1927, his family sold the cottage to a group of citizens who in turn sold it to the Village. Today, in “the Most Beautiful Village in America,” you can visit “Home Sweet Home,” the childhood home of John Howard Payne. It is filled with colonial era antiques, furniture and firewood which would warm hearth and home. And in the summertime, it is surrounded by some of the most beautiful gardens imaginable.