A Phoenix Rises in Montauk

Rebuilding the Historic House of Dick Cavett and Carrie Nye

Nearly thirty years ago, when Dick Cavett was the subject of a profile in The New Yorker, the author of the article obscured the location of the Stanford White-designed beach house that Cavett shared with his wife, actress Carrie Nye, by giving Montauk Point the pseudonym East Egg. It was s playful reference to the twin Eggs-East and West-that stood in for two fashionable communities on Long Island in The Great Gatsby. In view of the trajectory of Cavett's career-and the fate of his house, which burned to the ground in a fire in 1997-there is a kind of poignant prescience to the allusion.

It's hard to think of F. Scott Fitzgerald without thinking of his often-invoked maxim, "There are no second acts in American Lives." But while Cavett's career and his house alike have been through some rough times of late, both have emerged from them in surprising ways. "I see myself less as a second-act than an olio sort of fellow, anyway," Cavett says, displaying his characteristic brainy and waggish knowledge of the show business arena. (The olio was the entertainment presented between the acts of a burlesque or minstrel show.)

When Cavett started out, he performed stand-up comedy in small clubs in New York. In 1969 he developed The Dick Cavett Show, which he hosted for about 12 years. His guests-among them Groucho Marx, Bette Davis, W.H.Auden, Noel Coward, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne-gave him access to a now-vanished generation of entertainers, so to this point Cavett himself is a compendium of cultural associations and anecdotes that go far back in time.

In his present olio he is the narrator of the Broadway revival of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. "In Rocky Horror, I follow a script," he says, "but there's a lot of talk from the audience and a lot of ad-libbing to go with it. It's like being heckled in a nightclub, and I did better when I was heckled. I played funnier."

If the story of Cavett's career is more a sequence of olios than a succession of acts, the story of his Montauk house is very much the opposite. Act one: Before the Fire... In the mid 1960s, Cavett and Nye first rented, then purchased, Tick Hall, the last in a group of seven shingle style houses designed by McKim, Mead & White and built between 1881 and 1883 as hunting and fishing cottages for a group of well-to-do New Yorkers. The cluster, at the eastern tip of Long Island, was known as the Montauk Point Association Houses, and Frederick Law Olmsted was commissioned to plan the site. They had wide porches that embraced the sea, generous dormers, exquisite detailing, and abundant light. Originally accompanied by a clubhouse, the houses were among the earliest designed by the firm, formed in 1879 by White and his partners.

Nearly four years ago, Tick Hall went up in flames. Roofers, there to make repairs, were on their lunch break and may have left behind a blowtorch that may have emitted the fatal spark. "No one knows for sure what happened," says Nye. Nothing remained except for the chimney, the shadow of a foundation and a pile of charred rubble. "I lost precious letters and inscribed books, the only arrowhead I'd ever found after a lifetime of looking and my tap shoes, which I treasured because the great Honi Coles had applied taps to them in his own special way," says Cavett, " Irreplaceable things, beloved things all."

Nye lost family furniture, photographs and possessions that spanned five Mississippi generations. Being a native of Greenwood, in the Delta, she moved every stitch of their lives in to Tick Hall after her parents' deaths, "Mississippi furniture, Mississippi silver, Mississippi weird stuff, Mississippi dust," says Nye. But for her, the contents were far less important than the house that contained them. "It was impervious to time, to change," she says. "It was a remarkable piece of architecture, like living with a great painting. It improved you. I had to have it back."

And so a most unlikely act two-reconstruction-came into being. Nye was determined to have Tick Hall again: not a version of the house, not an impression or evocation of it, but the house. Cavett was skeptical. "I couldn't imagine it would be anything like a convincing reproduction," he remembers, "but Carrie was on a mission." "I didn't know if we could pull it off," she says, "but I had to try. I figure, architecture is like music; it's written down. We can't play as well as Mozart played, but we can play. We can resurrect a house from our knowledge and our memory of it. And as long as we used the same materials, as long as we didn't fake or cut corners or Disney-fy, I thought we'd have a reasonable chance of succeeding."

In the case of Tick Hall, however, there was nothing written down. The house was built early in McKim, Mead & White's history, and the plans for it were most likely lost when the firm moved in 1891. No archival or preservationist photographs had been taken. There were the Cavett's informal snapshots-albeit more than three decades' worth-and there were memories and a pole of blackened remains. And that was all.

To oversee the project, the Cavetts hired James W. Hadley, of Wank Adams Slavin Associates, a firm known for its preservation work. "Carrie Nye presented the idea of reconstruction to me persuasively," recalls Hadley, "that I didn't hesitate for a moment, despite the fairly daunting scope of the task."

Project architect Keith Gianakopoilos began by surveying the site, measuring the grades and the remnants of the foundation for their dimensions and measuring the height of the fireplace openings. He proceeded to comb through the rubble, and in this he was extremely fortunate: He found one piece of a wall with the old shingles and another with lengths of the beveled siding that clad the first floor. He found moulding boards, window glass, twisted door hardware and a fireplace tile with a telltale stamp on the back identifying its manufacturer.

Hadley's firm drew plans, inferring the original house from the foundation and from photographs and recollections offered by Cavett, Nye and friends who had been frequent visitors to the place over the decades. They were able to discern ceiling heights from window drawings and measurements that the Cavetts' draper had saved in his files. At one point, Hadley and his team even counted floorboards in snapshots, looking at them through jeweler's loupes. Finally, they generated a computer model, corrected any discrepancies between the model and the picture and the memories, and construction began.

Because Tick Hall had been built largely of original southern pine, which can no longer be lumbered, the architects used reclaimed southern pine and sinker wood, cut from logs that had fallen to the bottom of waterways. They examined the other houses in the association for planning techniques and graining patterns; they made sharper blades off the retrieved scraps of moulding; they recast hardware; they tracked down the original tile manufacturer, which copied the glaze from the old fireplace tiles. The stained glass was reproduced by scanning a photograph of the original window into a computer, blowing it up and adjusting it to produce a template. The team made mockups of doorknobs and the stair rail (which were wood and had burned) and had the Cavetts and their friends test them for size. They were, in short, as much archaeologists and historians as they were architects and builders.

In the end, Hadley and his team had recreated the historic Long Island home, still as charming and remarkable as the original.

Text by Michael Frank

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