Dec 01, 2011 - Sale 2263

Sale 2263 - Lot 272

Price Realized: $ 1,920
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500
LETTERS FROM HENRY FONDA, JOAN CRAWFORD, AND MORE (THEATER.) Archive of Day Tuttle and the Westchester Playhouse, a pioneering summer stock theater. Thousands of items in 16 boxes; 16 linear feet. Vp, 1855-1989, bulk 1932-39 and 1970s
Set Alert for Similar Items

Additional Details

Frank Day Tuttle (1902-1989), who generally went by his middle name, was the founding director at the Westchester Playhouse in Mount Kisco, NY from 1932 to 1940. One of the first prominent summer stock theaters in the United States, it helped launch the careers of many successful actors, including Henry Fonda, Vincent Price, Anna May Wong, José Ferrer, and Frances Farmer. After the Westchester Playhouse, Tuttle had a long career in theater and radio.
This collection consists largely of official records of the Westchester Playhouse, interspersed with Tuttle's later extensive efforts to write a history of summer stock theater in America. The records include scrapbooks and files compiled during and after the 1930s, containing programs, photographs, clippings, and summary notes that document the theater's existence year by year. Also included are financial records spanning Tuttle's time at the theater, and three boxes of drafts and notes for Tuttle's unpublished The Golden Age of US Summer Theatre and related projects.
The correspondence files include some of the most interesting material. One of Tuttle's former actors, Henry Fonda, writes to recommend another young actor, and adds "How is your family? As one father to another, I think the guy who thought of having children has really got something there. I've got a prize." This places the letter not long after the birth of his first child, Jane Fonda, in 1937. Also included are two payrolls signed by Fonda from 1933 and 1934. The collection also includes Autograph Letters Signed by actresses Joan Crawford (undated) and Olivia de Havilland (1951), and Letters Signed by Elia Kazan, Harold Pinter, José Ferrer, and Alfred Lunt.
The collection also includes some material not relating to the Westchester Playhouse, including Tuttle's personal diaries from his time at the Hotchkiss School and Yale, 1920-21; manuscripts of numerous plays and stories by Tuttle; typescript plays by other authors, including a carbon of The Fugitive Kind by Tennessee Williams; a binder of playbills collected by Tuttle circa 1915 with his critical notes; a large signed photograph of Ethel Barrymore; two early playbills from the mid-19th century; and Tuttle family photo albums and other papers from 1887 to 1926.
The collection is not fully inventoried, and is still organized largely the way Day Tuttle left it. However, a rough box listing is available upon request.