Charity Robey

Film treatment

COURTESY PHOTO

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on March 28, 2019

When I heard that location scouts have been casing Shelter Island as a possible filming venue, I figured casting professionals were not far behind. So I went straight to the pharmacy lunch counter, because everyone knows that’s where you go to be discovered.

I took a stool and asked grillmaster Bennett Karnis to fill me in. He makes great hash browns, and he also happens to be a movie buff. It was lunchtime, so Bennett was too busy to give me a comprehensive overview, but he confirmed that a couple of TV series and one movie have filmed here. If the makers of the HBO series “The Undoing” decide to film on Shelter Island, they will join a line of edgy dramas filmed here over the years.

If they need extras, the lunch counter at the pharmacy is a good place to start. On a recent Thursday at 12:30 p.m., the first wave of photogenic stool-sitters had just cleared out and the second round (all fabulous) were tucking into lunch when counter talk turned to the possibility of Shelter Island as the backdrop for another major motion picture.

Dave Klenawicus said he remembered being cast as an extra in “An Invasion of Privacy,” the 1983 movie starring Valerie Harper and Jeff Daniels. The film used Shelter Island as the backdrop for a story about a book illustrator who moves to a small island town, is attacked by a local handyman, and then rejected by angry local people when she presses charges. Dave was a little vague about the plot of the movie, but he did say that the job paid $50, and even in 1983 it was probably not enough money for the amount of waiting around he did.

“It was kind of fun, and I would have done it for nothing,” he said.

If the Town Board seems to be seriously considering allowing the filming of a movie on Shelter Island that involves attempted murder, car chases and a helicopter, why not? It certainly wouldn’t be the first time we’ve put up with these disruptions in the interest of entertainment — our own as well as others.

As a carpenter took a stool at the far end of the lunch counter, he heard the reminiscing about Valerie Harper and volunteered that he had served as an extra in the romantic thriller “Masquerade,” a 1988 feature-length film starring Rob Lowe and Meg Tilly, with scenes filmed here. He said that his duties consisted mainly of hanging around the ferry for hours. That movie, which involved a murder plot, also featured an exploding boat.

Ironically, one movie that was not filmed on or near Shelter Island is “Shelter Island,” the 2003 feature-length film about a wealthy New Yorker who retreats to her island estate to recover from an attack, only to be trapped there by a storm, threatened by a disturbingly weird local man and then by a local law enforcement officer. The movie managed to annoy Islanders without having to pay anyone for the privilege.

In fact, the Island has been a backdrop for exploding vehicles and car chases ever since “The Dain Curse,” a six-hour television mini-series starring James Coburn that was filmed here in October 1977. Longtime Island resident Bob Markell was the executive producer of the film, and told me in a 2017 interview that “The Dain Curse” was the first major film made on Shelter Island.

Local people took an interest in the plot of the movie, which involved a curse that brought untimely death to its victims. The New York Times reported that the book by Dashiell Hammett, upon which the movie was based, was sold out at the pharmacy, at the Greenport bookstore, and every bookstore east of Riverhead.

More than 100 local people were hired as extras and Williette Piccozzi rented out her basement for set construction. Louis (The Clip) Cicero gave crew cuts to 60 long-haired Island extras so they would appear authentically groomed — short with sideburns — a do that became known as “The Dain Cut.”

Leonard Bliss was town supervisor at the time and had a bit part as a newspaper reporter. He told The New York Times that the film production company spent close to $1 million on the Island.

So far, HBO has dangled a $15,000 fee and a bump in hotel and restaurant traffic before the town to allow the filming of “The Undoing” during three mid-week nights in late May, with explosions and a hovering helicopter.

It doesn’t seem like much cash, but if they promise Nicole Kidman’s character won’t retreat to a mansion on Shelter Island, to be terrorized during a storm, by a local madman — maybe we can break out of being typecast and show off our range, hoping for better parts in the future.

Bill Persky, seeking the 'nothing fancy'

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO
Bill Persky at home.

In the days when television was something to be enjoyed in the living room with family and friends, Bill Persky was the guy who wrote your favorite shows.

Sitcoms were his specialty. Scripts for “The Dick van Dyke Show,” and his work on “That Girl” and “Kate & Allie” brought him five Emmys, and for those who lived through that particular Golden Age of TV, a lot of joy.

Bill and his wife, Joanna, spend summers and weekends in a house on Burro Hall Lane that they built in the late 1990s after leaving increasingly hectic Sag Harbor. The plot of a sitcom episode is nascent in Bill’s stated reasons for their move to the Island. “You get off the ferry and it’s 1940. No wars have taken place,” he said. “You got nothing fancy. I was going to make risotto and the IGA had never heard of arborio rice.”

Bill made a glorious career writing about the ordinary experiences of his own life in an extraordinary way. “My writing isn’t about jokes, it’s writing about what is going on and finding a twist to it that makes it funny,” Bill said. “I get into situations that look like they couldn’t happen in real life.”

In a sense, he said, his father was in the entertainment business, a seller of estates in auction galleries located wherever wealthy people gathered on vacation.

It meant the family moved frequently from one resort to the next. Bill recalls being the first Jewish person in the school system of Hot Springs, Arkansas, where he attended Ramble Elementary School in a location so remote that during recess, one of his classmates was bitten by a rattlesnake.

Bill’s older sister, Bunny, married Paul Grossinger whose family owned the popular Catskills’ resort.

During summers in the early 1950s, Bill worked there as a lifeguard, soaking up the world of Borscht Belt entertainers who radiated around Grossingers during the high season.

He studied advertising at Syracuse University, landed a job at a New York ad agency, and brought a Brooks Brothers seersucker suit, a straw hat and an attaché case. “The only thing I carried in it was people’s lunch, because I was a gopher,” he said. “My attaché case smelled like a delicatessen.”

Bill met Sam Denoff, who would be his writing partner for many years, when they both worked at WNEW in the continuity department.

“When I took the job, I had no idea what the continuity department was, but for $30 a week I figured you didn’t have to be a brain surgeon,” Bill said.

Bill and Sam had to schedule the show for the DJs, so they would know what came next while on the air. They started writing jokes for the DJs to fill in, mostly to entertain themselves. The head of the station liked what he heard, and told them to write some more.

In the 1960s, Los Angeles had become the center of the entertainment industry, and the writing team moved out to write for “The Steve Allen Show.” When Bill was 32, he and Sam were hired by Carl Reiner for “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” which was the most sought-after writing job in television.

The first episode Bill and Sam wrote is still one of the most influential and best-loved 25 minutes of TV ever recorded. “That’s My Boy??” came from Bill’s experience at the hospital after the birth of his first child.

“We got some flowers that were meant for somebody else and somebody else’s dinner, and finally I said ‘How do you know you get the right baby?’” The episode aired in 1963 and included an African-American couple on an otherwise all-white show.

Director Carl Reiner got the CBS censors in a twitch by threatening to quit if they changed the ending, which was hilarious, and progressive at a time when integration and social change were rippling through American society.

Only eight years older than Bill, Carl Reiner had served in World War II and Bill looked up to him. “I thought of him as a totally grown up older man who could have been my father,” he said. Reiner is now 94 and just finished a book titled, “Too Busy to Die.”

“Sometimes when you work with someone, you take away a piece of them, and it becomes part of your DNA, especially the good ones,” Bill said. “There’s a little bit of Carl Reiner running around in me.”

Bill’s not so sure about the the so-called Golden Age of television because he thinks there’s more than one. “The golden age is any time a new dimension comes to it,” he said. He pointed out that in his day, with three prime-time hours a night and three channels, there were only a handful of shows on the air.

Now there might be 40 shows in the same time period. “It’s a much more lucrative business to be in in terms of getting jobs,” he said.

Bill said some of the best material he’s ever seen is being done now, and there’s an overwhelming volume of easy-access, televised entertainment, “The only place in our house you can’t watch television is on the toaster,” he said.

Bill’s “three amazing daughters,” with his first wife, are a huge source of satisfaction for him. His oldest, Dana, is a neuropsychologist in L.A. Jamie owns the restaurant Plate in Stowe, Vermont, and Liza is a television producer.

When Bill met Joanna Patton, a New York advertising executive, he’d been married twice before. “It was worth all I went through just to be available to her,” he said. They’ve been married for more than 20 years.

Life on Shelter Island is “The Bill and Joanna” show, home-centered, revolving around Joanna’s gardening and the antics of Sassy, an attention-loving red dog who came to them through a Shelter Island dog rescue organization.

“Some people it’s not glitzy enough for them,” Bill said. “Everyone is here for the same reason.”

Annette Hinkle, telling the stories that matter

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Annette Hinkle outside the Reporter’s office last week.

In the Shelter Island Reporter, you won’t often find stories about the staff, even though they are some of the most interesting people you’ll ever meet.

But Community News Editor Annette Hinkle’s story is too good not to be told.

Annette’s life was interesting before she came to the Reporter in 2016 after 20 years at the Sag Harbor Express, and it’s only gotten better. Just six months after a December fire destroyed the Sag Harbor Cinema, Annette has written a history of the beloved theater — “Sag Harbor: 100 Years of Film in the Village,” a 128-page book full of historical photographs, theater history and memories, with an introduction by Jay McInerney. And she did it in six weeks.

“I used to take improv classes at Second City,” Annette said. “It helped me think on my feet.”
Annette had a rough upbringing in the Rust Belt city of Dayton, Ohio, the last of five children, and so much younger than her siblings that by the time she was 11, they had all moved out of the house. “I went from being in a big family to an only child,” she said.

Her father sold restaurant equipment. Annette remembers going with him to call on customers, in commercial kitchens permeated with the mingled smells of bleach and grease, a sensory assault that haunted her later when as a teenager, she worked at a Wendy’s.

“The worst job I ever had,” Annette recalls. “I didn’t have much in the way of confidence, and there’s something about fast food — people think they can be evil.”

The polyester uniform and striped apron didn’t help her confidence either.

In high school in a Dayton suburb, she felt alienated from classmates she considered small-minded and ignorant. “My older sister had moved to New York and married a man who was African-American. Meanwhile, kids were coming to my school dressed as K.K.K. members. I knew I would leave there as soon as I could.”

Her father’s chronic health problems, including mental breakdowns, made it hard for him to make a living. While hospitalized with heart problems, he died on the last day of Annette’s senior year of high school.

When Annette graduated from high school, no one in her family had gone to college. But two weeks before he died, her father told her he wanted her to get a college degree. “It was out of the blue,” Annette said.

With her father’s dying wish in mind, and the Social Security benefit he left her in hand, she enrolled at Ohio University. In the early 1980s, the university had a strong presence of international students, and Annette made friends with people from Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates and Germany. “It was a real eye-opener,” she said.

She decided to study audio engineering and landed an internship with the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour in the fall of 1984. For three months, she lived in Manhattan in the apartment of a friend of a friend, working in a small, exciting newsroom in the middle of a fascinating election year that resulted in a second term for Ronald Reagan. She got to escort Henry Kissinger to the green room.

After graduation, she moved to Chicago where her typing skills got her a job typing commercial scripts at the Leo Burnett ad agency. After two years she transferred to Leo Burnett’s New York office and moved to Hoboken — close to Manhattan, which was her goal.

In New York, she worked in client-sponsored programming and commercial production for Leo Burnett, and soon met a graduate  of New York University’s film school named Adam Flax, who provided equipment for film shoots. They bought an apartment in Hoboken, then moved to the East End in 1995, when Annette began working at the Sag Harbor Express. In 1997, they bought a house in East Hampton and got married. Their daughter Sophie was born in 2001.

When Annette came to the Shelter Island Reporter last year, she said it reminded her of the Sag Harbor of 20 years ago, with a small-town vibe that has disappeared elsewhere.

The conflagration that consumed the Sag Harbor Cinema was the kind of shock that forces people to examine their values, and very quickly Sag Harbor’s arts community formed in solidarity, determined to bring the theater back in a way that made sense for the future.

The Sag Harbor Partnership had the idea to rebuild it as a nonprofit cinema arts center, with classrooms, café and cinema, and they’ve set about to raise the $13 million needed to achieve that vision.

It was in the context of that effort that publisher Pauline Neuwirth approached Annette to write a book about the Cinema for her firm, East End Press. “I was the ideal person to do this because I’d been at the Express so long I was able to tap into some of the historical details,” Annette said. “It takes time to foster contacts especially if you’re talking about a local story going back.”

After some research, she started writing the first week in April and by early May was done. The book grew beyond the story of a single theater, into a history of film in Sag Harbor, told through the handful of cinemas that operated there. The first copies of the coffee-table book came off the press in late June, in time for the July 16 benefit that will raise the money needed to purchase the theater.

“An insanely fast project,” said the exhausted, but happy author.

This won’t be Annette’s last book. She is already planning a history of Sag Harbor’s venerable American Hotel and is almost finished writing a book of Sag Harbor’s “true ghost stories.”
And someday she plans to collaborate with her husband, Adam, a dedicated fisherman, to write a book about fishing and small-town America, which sounds a little like Shelter Island.

Lightning Round

Favorite place on Shelter Island?  Sylvester Manor, it feels like I’m reincarnated there.

Favorite place not on Shelter Island?  Maui. You’ve got to love a place where you see rainbows every day.

Last time you were elated?  Pauline sent me pictures of the book on press and I felt like I was giving birth again.

What exasperates you?  People who put on their left turn signal and then turn right.

Favorite movie or book?  Brazil

Favorite food?  Lebanese stuffed grape leaves with lamb.

Favorite person, living or dead, who is not a member of the family?  Spalding Gray. He always had his eyes open. He was inspirational in my wanting to tell stories.

Most respected elected official?   Elizabeth Warren.

Jules Feiffer-A new chapter in a life filling volumes

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO
Jules Feiffer in his new Island home with piano and favorite drawings.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on March 2, 2017

Jules Feiffer moved to Shelter Island in January to begin his 89th year of life in a house on the edge of Klenawicus Airfield with his new wife, Joan (JZ) Holden.

As I arrived to interview him, a feline welcoming party ushered me into their home, a light-filled place with a commanding view from virtually every room of the grass runway. “The house was just built,” Jules said, “minutes before you got here.” Joan joined the conversation from somewhere upstairs, yelling answers from offstage as Jules explained, “She is terribly shy.”

His life before he had even heard of Shelter Island would fill many volumes. In the comic strip he wrote for the Village Voice for 40 years, he dissected American cultural and political life with the skill of a lox cutter at Zabars. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1986. His play “Little Murders”, brought him an Obie, and “Knock Knock” got a Tony nomination in 1976. His short animation film “Munro” won an Oscar in 1961.

One of Jules’ new Shelter Island neighbors is the writer and Reporter columnist Bob Lipsyte, who said he grew up on Jules’ cartoons, plays, and movies and was formed by them. “He’s a dangerous man. If you’ve read him, you are armed against the worst people in our world,” Bob said. “I feel a little safer with him on Shelter Island.”

The bad behavior of real estate professionals drove Jules and Joan to Shelter Island, where they found a better way. They liked a few houses they saw in the Hamptons, but once the deals began to progress,

“Decency was gone,” he said. “This happened over and over again.” Their broker found a spec house in progress on the Island and introduced them to the builder, Jim Olinkiewicz. “We came to an agreement and he stuck to it,” Jules said.

“Living out here, and living with Joan has changed my life in the best and happiest and most productive form than the earliest years of my life,” he said.

Born and raised in the Bronx, his mother, Rhoda, was a complex muse for him, inspiring the 1958 strip in the Voice he called, “the first Jewish Mother cartoon,” to his 2014 graphic novel, “Kill My Mother,” which, he has said, is not autobiographical.

Growing up in the 1930s and 1940s, his older sister Mimi also influenced him. “Mimi was a commie. She forced me into a drift toward left wing politics,” he said, “and then she forced me to confront what was spurious with the Communist Party line. Which made me nervous because you could never win an argument with a Stalinist. They would make up quotes.”

With eight decades of perspective on American politics, Jules has observed and skewered every public figure from his distant cousin Roy Cohn, an important adviser to Joe McCarthy, to President Trump — who received an early education from Cohn “in the art of ‘my way or the highway.’ Trump is different,” Jules said. “With Nixon and JFK, you knew there was somebody else inside, you knew that was not the real guy. But with Trump you assume this is the real guy. No controls.”

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Revising pages for his forthcoming book, the third in a trilogy of graphic novels.

Although he’s thrilled by the wave of organized resistance expressed by the Women’s March and judicial action on changes to immigration policy, “I think we’re at the scariest period in our history that I have ever known. Whatever you want to say about Joe McCarthy, he wasn’t President of the United States, and he didn’t have power beyond the groups he could influence. He didn’t have an army and a navy and his finger on the button.”

As a child, Jules’ love of comics was inspired by cartoonists Will Eisner and Milton Caniff, the giants of the field. At 16, he looked Eisner up in the Manhattan phone book, went to his office with some drawings and walked out with a part-time, unpaid job. For years he worked in Eisner’s studio, learning the craft.

When Jules began to work at The Voice in 1956 he was also unpaid, a state of affairs he found liberating since it meant he did the work for the love of it, an amateur in the literal sense of the word. “I have never understood properly the idea of getting paid for my work,” he said. “I would do it for free if there was a way of eating.”

Jules didn’t receive an impressive education, although later in life he provided one for others, teaching in the Yale MFA program, at Dartmouth and in the writing program at Stony Brook, Southampton. “I didn’t go to college so I wasn’t taught all the things I couldn’t do,” he said. “There is a great advantage to being stupid.”

It was the teaching gig at Southampton that brought Jules to the East End. In 1998, shortly after a new editor fired him from The Voice in a cost-cutting move, he got a call from old friend Roger Rosenblatt, who was starting a writing program at Southampton College.

Jules recalled the conversation; “Roger said, ‘I’m not interested in your screams of self-pity. What are your health benefits?’

‘Nothing.’

‘We pay nothing, but we give complete health benefits.’

“How often do I have to come out?’

‘Whenever you want.’

‘What should I teach? ‘

‘You are beginning to bore me.’

When he moved out East, he had to figure out how to make money so tried writing a potboiler noir novel, but got bored, He tried to turn it into a graphic novel that somebody else would illustrate. “I’ve tried very hard to be a hack,” he admitted. “I’m lousy at it. I get serious and then I get involved and fall in love with the form.”

At 80, Jules decided to tackle the graphic novel, a form of drawing he’d never done before. “I was reacquainted with what I loved best when I was eight or nine years old,” he said. With every new page he created for the book, he felt doomed to failure.  “I was having the time of my life and a nervous breakdown at the same time. I would have to take a week off because the pressure was so intense.”

His anxiety continued right up to the point that “Kill My Mother” was published by W.W. Norton and got a rave New York Times review.

Last year he published a second graphic novel, “Cousin Joseph” and is currently working on a third book to form a trilogy.

He still feels Will Eisner’s guidance as he works on his new book. “I’m working on a page and I think Eisner would do it this way,” he said.  “He’s standing on my shoulder as I’m doing these pages, more so now than in the 40 years when I was doing the Voice strip.”

He’s also gone back to theater in his 80s, writing the book for a musical based on his 1995 children’s tale, “The Man in the Ceiling.” Slated to open Memorial Day weekend at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, it’s directed by Jeffrey Seller, who produced “Hamilton.”

One of his daughters, Halley, is an actress and playwright. He and Joan just saw her star in “The Front Page” on Broadway. He’s grateful to be close enough to New York to get in to see her work, without having to endure the punishing pace of living there.

“I love the sense, the feeling of the Island. Serenity,” he said. “When I sit at my little table. I’m 25.”

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO “I got up and did a drawing this morning.”

Lightning Round

A favorite place on Shelter Island?  Reel Point.

What elates you?  I’m elated all the time.

Exasperates you?  Everything. You’ve never heard of duality?

Best day of the year on Shelter Island?  I hope tomorrow.

Favorite person living or dead, who is not a family member?  Leo Tolstoy. Reading “War and Peace” affected me, like reading a life.

Most respected elected official?  Obama, a remarkable presence.  He’s not going away, thank God.

Profile: Bob Markell prepared Shelter Island for its first closeup

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Bob Markell in his attic studio with a self-portrait, painted, he said, when he was angry with himself.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on September 2, 2016

When Bob Markell was 8 years old he got the measles, and was treated by a doctor who praised his young patient’s artistic ability. “He was just being nice, but I believed him,” Bob said.

From then on, he was determined to be a painter, but his father objected, “You are going to live in an attic, you are going to starve, and I’m not going to pay for it,” he was told.

More than eight decades later, Bob’s father’s predictions have come true except for the starving part. First came 50 years as a designer, producer and executive in television, five Emmys, and distinguished work such as art director for the film “12 Angry Men” in 1957, and the first televised production of “The Nutcracker.” Since the early 1990s, Bob has focused on fine art, and in August welcomed visitors to his well-lit attic studio filled with sketches and paintings during the ArtSI studio tour.

Bob was born in 1924 and raised in Roxbury, Massachusetts. His mother had emigrated from Russia, but his father’s family was “more Americanized,” and deeply cynical. “My father had a negative view,” Bob said. “He really didn’t believe that when people were nice to him they meant it.”

Bob went to Northeastern University and graduated in 1944 with a degree in civil engineering and some work experience at a Boston architecture firm. He and everyone he knew wanted to go fight Hitler, but asthma prevented him from combat; he ended up at Grumman Aircraft on Long Island doing stress analysis on airplanes. After World War II, Grumman began manufacturing canoes, but lacking the same enthusiasm for peacetime canoes he had for wartime airplanes, Bob left in hope of more creative work.

He and two roommates had been living in a house near Grumman when he found all of his belongings on the porch. The landlady declared she didn’t want foreigners (i.e. Bob, a Jew) in her home. So in 1946, Bob and his friends moved to New York City, and he decided to try his hand at set design.

His first experience was at a summer-stock theater in the Catskills, a bowling alley that had been converted to a theater, where he painted a set but failed to seal it with the adhesive known as “rabbit glue.” By the next day all the paint had run off, and someone said, “You didn’t forget to put the rabbit glue on, did you?”

“I didn’t forget,” he said. “I didn’t know.”

Bob met his wife, Joan Harris, in 1948 when she showed up as a volunteer stagehand for an Equity Library Theatre production in New York. Bob was the scenic designer. A Chicago native, Joan was a Northwestern University theater program graduate and moved to New York to pursue acting. When she didn’t get cast, she dressed the set.

“I said, ‘Listen, any of you guys know how to light a show?’” Bob said. “And she went up the ladder, and was hanging on, and I said, ‘Anyone who would climb up and hang lights for me is worth knowing.’” They married in 1949.

Bob and Joan have two children, Mariana Markell, a nephrologist at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, and Denis Markell, a dramatist and novelist, whose latest book, a young adult novel called “Click Here to Start,” was published in July.

In 1966, Bob was a producer on the classic courtroom drama series, “The Defenders,” when he worked with Dustin Hoffman.

The young actor’s role was a New York accountant, and Bob told Hoffman — at the time considered too homely to play a leading man — that he’d have to cut his long hair for the part. Hoffman insisted that Bob be present during the haircut so Bob could listen to him scream (something about Samson and Delilah). “They gave him a really nice haircut and he looked great,” said Bob. “I think he got the job on “The Graduate” because of the haircut, so he kind of owed me.”

The day Bob got the assignment that would lead to his fifth Emmy, he almost blew it. He said he had been drinking when the call came from CBS higher-ups to come discuss a promotion and new assignment.

“I couldn’t get any ice cubes and I heard myself say, ‘I can’t come now, I’m waiting for my refrigerator to be fixed.’” He managed to make it to the meeting, was promoted to executive producer, and assigned to a project called “Bicentennial Minutes,” a series of hundreds of 60-second historical sketches that aired from 1974 through 1976.

CBS had undertaken “Bicentennial Minutes” as public service announcements; under Bob’s direction they were each tiny dramas with a beginning, middle and end. Norman Mailer, President Gerald Ford, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, and First Lady Betty Ford were among the celebrities who participated, and in 1975 Bob received an Emmy as executive producer of the series.

When Tennessee Williams was asked to do a New Year’s Eve Bicentennial Minute, the hard-drinking writer insisted on writing his own script, but the script didn’t materialize and it came time to shoot. “He was so smashed you couldn’t believe it,” Bob said. “He just looked into the camera and said, ‘This is Tennessee Williams and I want to offer all of you a happy, happy New Year and a happy holiday!’ Someone asked me, ‘Who wrote this thing?’”

In 1960, Bob and Joan were living in Brooklyn Heights when friends suggested a visit to Shelter Island. They visited, bought a house on the Island, and in 1976 they moved into their current home on Midway Road, an antique beauty built by a whaler, Captain Samuel Sherman, in the early 19th century.

In October 1977, Dashiell Hammett’s “The Dain Curse,” starring James Coburn, with Bob as executive producer, became the first major motion picture to be filmed on Shelter Island.

Bob told The New York Times that the absence of traffic lights and antennas and the plentiful supply of photogenic Victorian homes was a factor in CBS’s decision to film here, but more important was the willingness of local people, such as Williette Piccozzi, Louis Cicero and then Supervisor Leonard Bliss to support the production as extras, with haircuts — Louis’ cut, short with sideburns, became known as “The Dain Cut” — and with their tolerance of the weeks-long disruption of Island life.
From his first visits to Shelter Island, Bob felt his creative juices flow.

His friends here were members of the Shelter Island Community of Artists, including Gus Mosca, and Luiz Coelho, now gone.

“They were marvelous, and helped me more than anyone else,” Bob said. “I miss them terribly.”

In his painting, Bob tries to reveal the emotions in his subjects. “You have to feel something,” he said. “Every time I get angry at myself, I do a self-portrait. When I paint someone else, I’m very concerned about insulting them, so I don’t do portraits that well, but I love painting myself.”

Last Sunday afternoon four deer loitered by the screened porch of the house on Midway Road. A six-point buck sat regally in the grass, with two does standing nearby and between them a spotted fawn on long, gawky legs. A cottontail rabbit hopped nearby.

Even by Shelter Island standards, this was an extraordinary assemblage. Did these ruminants sense they were gathered under the gaze of a celebrated designer, and formed this bucolic tableau, hoping to catch the artist’s eye?

Island profile: Frank Emmett, no translation needed

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO | Frank Emmett and his wife, Colleen with one of the many creatures, great and small, sharing their home on Baldwin Road.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on February 4, 2016

Frank Emmett has lived on Shelter Island with his wife, Colleen Smith, for 24 years. But when he speaks, you’re reminded that although Frank is every inch an Islander, he learned to talk elsewhere.

A much-loved teacher for 23 years at the Shelter Island School, Frank was president of the teachers union for seven years, has worked summers as a purser for the North Ferry since 2004, currently teaches 10th grade English at Ross School and is general manager of the Bucks, Shelter Island’s Hamptons Collegiate Baseball League team. If he hasn’t already, he may soon ask you to consider housing a shortstop or pitcher in your spare bedroom this summer.
Frank was born in Keighley, West Yorkshire, England, an area known for beautiful moorland and the textile manufacturing industry that is now mostly gone. His parents both left school at 15 to work.

Frank attended Keighley Boys Grammar School and then became the first person in his family to attend college when he went to the University of Exeter in 1969 to study English and American Studies.

“The faculty thought I was insular in my attitudes,” he said. “They said, ‘You need to see the world and go to America.’”

In 1972, Frank left England to get a doctorate in English at SUNY Buffalo with the help of a Fulbright grant. He did enough coursework to be granted a master’s degree years later and it took him until 2009 to get the Ph.D, but he helped start a Buffalo institution called Everyone’s Bookstore. Still independent, it is now called Talking Leaves and owned by one of Frank’s co-founders.

On St. Patrick’s Day, 1975, Frank met a Buffalo nursing student named Colleen Smith, when her date stood her up. A mutual friend said, “Frank’s not doing anything, why don’t you ask him?” Although neither owned a car, somehow they ended up at Niagara Falls. “Love at first sight,” Frank said.

A year later the couple moved to Bar Harbor, Maine and got married. But Frank’s student visa was about to expire, so they moved to England and settled in York, where Colleen worked as a nurse. Frank got involved with the York Community Council disability rights action group, working on an award-winning initiative to provide access to theaters for disabled people, an effort that pioneered handicapped-access improvements across Britain.

After a few years in England, Colleen had enough of the weather; they moved to the Virgin Islands, where Frank began to think of teaching. He worked as a hotel manager while he got his teacher’s certification at the University of the Virgin Islands and began teaching kindergarten.

In 1986, during their time in the Caribbean, their son Joseph was born. The family lived in “a Puerto Rican prefab house,” Frank said. Joey was about 3 years old when Hurricane Hugo, a category 4 storm, struck the Virgin Islands. The family took shelter for 10 hours with friends who lived on a nearby hill.

“I used my machete to hack my way back to the house,” Frank said. “It was perfect. Colleen had complained before the storm that the door would stick. It didn’t stick anymore.”

In 1992, they decided it was time for their young family to live closer to grandparents. Colleen’s parents lived in Southold and when Frank was offered a job teaching at the Shelter Island School, he jumped at it.

The transition from life in the Virgin Islands — populous, busy, and warm all year round — to Shelter Island was a shock for the whole family.
Frank said that he himself was a bit of a shock for the Shelter Island School community. His first kindergarten class included Jimbo Theinert, who went home after the first day, impressed with Frank’s thick, Yorkshire accent and reportedly said, “Mom, I don’t think my teacher speaks English.”

Joey Emmett’s first grade class included Jimbo’s brother, Joey Theinert, and the two Joeys formed a friendship so enduring that they later vowed to be the best man at each other’s weddings. When Joey was killed serving in the Army in Afghanistan, his family kept his promise, traveling to England to stand up at Joey Emmett’s wedding in Joey Theinert’s place.

Although Frank had taught in the Virgin Islands for six years before coming to Shelter Island, he found deeper satisfaction teaching here. “You see the kids growing and they are always yours,” he said. “That’s a Shelter Island thing.”

Frank taught kindergarten for 11 years and then moved to 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade English language arts and social studies. He employed an unusual approach to teaching the American Revolution, “from the British perspective,” and enjoyed telling his classes: “Oh please, let’s call it the rebellion of King George’s ungrateful children.”

During the years Frank taught kindergarten, he collected and stored items the children brought in for “sharing time.” An eclectic assortment that included numerous seashells and a bloody duck’s wing from a bird shot by a proud child’s father, Frank began to package the items and present them to the children along with a short speech at their high school graduation years later, a practice that became a graduation tradition.

“When I came to the end of the kindergarten stuff, I had to retire,” Frank said. “It just felt like the right time.”

In 2004, Frank began working for the North Ferry as a purser in the summer, as a complement to teaching, and work he continues to enjoy after his retirement from the Shelter Island School. “You see humanity at its worst and its finest, but you only have to see them for seven minutes,” he said.

In Frank’s latest foray into community involvement he’s inherited the mantle of Bucks GM from Dave Gurney. “I’ve been following him around like the sorcerer’s apprentice,” Frank said. “There’s a lot of skepticism that someone who was raised on cricket and rugby can do anything about baseball.”

Empty-nesters, Frank and Colleen have been Bucks host parents for the past two seasons. They’ve had a very good experience, becoming more and more involved as fans and supporters of the summer team.

Located a stone’s throw from school, Frank and Colleen’s house was often a thoroughfare for Island schoolchildren. “Kids actually used to walk through our house,” he said. “Soon after we moved in, kids would open the door and ask, ‘Are you the new teacher? Do you have a kid we can play with?’”

Island Profile: Christine Matthäi | A ‘travel bird’ wings home

Christine Matthäi with two of her works on display at the Alex Ferrone Gallery in Cutchogue.CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO

 

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on September 17, 2015

To the busy and the practical, Shelter Island ferries are utilitarian crafts of steel. Artist and Shelter Island resident Christine Matthäi sees the ferry as her passage to a refuge, a place where she can do work that expresses her hard-won calmness and understanding.

“When you come rushed and you want to go on the ferry, sometimes there is no ferry. You have to sit there, take a deep breath, and wait for the cradle to come,” she said. “And then it cradles you back home.”

Christine grew up in a small town in communist East Germany during the Cold War. Her mother died when she was eight, leaving her father to raise her and her two sisters in an oppressive climate. Since they were not members of the Communist Party, Christine’s family was denied educational and professional privileges available to party members.

She remembers from a young age feeling uncomfortable with the secrecy and ever-present informants. “It started early when our teachers asked us to report on what our parents would talk about. Even as a young girl, I thought, ‘My God there’s something wrong.’”

At 17 she went to Berlin to study at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and although a career in fashion was not her choice, in hindsight she saw it as “a connecting point” to her unimagined future as an artist.

But first, she had to get out from behind the Iron Curtain. A relative in West Germany provided the money to pay for passage, money that had to be paid back. “There were certain organizations that made money getting people across,” Christine said. “There are so many stories and mine is just one of them.”

Christine’s escape in the mid- 1970s resulted in retaliations against her family; her father lost his job, and her sisters’ education was affected. “But it was my life, and I would do it again,” she said. After she got to the West, she said she helped 12 people get out of East Germany. “I have my own little Schindler’s List,” she said.

Christine worked hard to pay her debt and then left Germany to work in Greece for a Berlin fashion company. There she befriended a photographer on assignment and accepted his invitation to travel to New York City in 1982.

She stayed in New York and became part of the art scene, taking courses and working. She met an artist, they fell in love, married and moved to a loft in Tribeca. Christine worked as a foreign correspondent and in 1992, the couple bought a house on Shelter Island as a second home. In 2004, they separated.

For two years, including winters, Christine lived on Shelter Island by herself. “It was really a milestone in my life,” she said. “I threw myself into what I really wanted to do.” Lonely and isolated, “I also created some good work that was sold to Ralph Lauren by a gallery.”

She began to travel, finding inspiration in Antigua, the Bahamas, Italy and Dubai. She even returned to East Germany after the Wall came down: “The only healing thing I could do.”

Although she had helped her little sister escape East Germany, that sister died. Christine still goes to Germany every year to see her surviving sister. “She stayed the whole time,” Christine said. “She’s like an oak.”

“We are the sum of our experiences,” she said. “It all contributes to where we arrive.”

The crises of Christine’s life are expressed in her work: losing her mother as a child, the death of her younger sister and the end of her marriage. “I went through a real turbulent time for quite a while. It took me a long time to find my calmness again.”

Christine’s first solo show was in Munich in 2010, followed by two shows in Italy in 2011 and one in Dubai in 2012. “It went really rapidly,” she said. “If you really follow your bliss, things happen.”
Christine’s art is abstract and her process begins with photography.

She employs time-lapse, long exposure and a computer to manipulate and add layers of complexity and depth, resulting in images that don’t reproduce a scene, but rather suggest it. One of her pieces, currently on exhibit at the Alex Ferrone Gallery in Cutchogue, is called “Moonrise,” and although it evokes the light and feeling of a rising moon, no moon is depicted. “My work is not just what you see, but also what you feel,” she said.

In a series of images created last year, Christine combined body shapes with layers of water. She described these images as a metaphor for an inner sea. “Incorporating forms in my work contributed to a surge in my own sensuality,” she said. “Which I thought was not there for quite a while.”

Christine is working on a new series, influenced by literature, including poetry by Keats and Baudelaire. She continues to travel the world, and when the cold sets in, she will leave, to return in spring.

“I’m a travel bird but always in the back of my mind is little Shelter Island,” she said. “It’s the only place in the world where I feel grounded, the most beautiful place on earth, the good news.”

Works from Christine Matthäi’s Light and Sea Series is part of the show entitled, “Calm Before the Storm” at the Alex Ferrone Gallery in Cutchogue, through September 27.

Shelter Island profile: Jonathan Russo, a life afloat | Shelter Island Reporter

 

Jonathan Russo at ‘Sleeping Foxes,’ the name of his and his wife Deborah Grayson’s home in the Heights. CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on September 10, 2015

In Genesis when new things were created, they got named. Jonathan Russo, advertising executive, talent developer, entrepreneur, sailor and long-time Shelter Island resident is really good at naming things.

For example, at the Shingle-style home in Shelter Island Heights he shares with his wife Deborah Grayson, Jonathan recounted, “I woke up one morning in January, and saw two sleeping foxes in the snow, spooning together. After that we named the house “Sleeping Foxes.”

Born in Brooklyn to Jack and Miriam Russo, Jonathan grew up in Roslyn with his brother, Seth, and sister, Emily. In 1957, his father brought five-year-old Jonathan to Shelter Island for a boys’ weekend at the Chequit that included a motorboat outing in Dering Harbor. It would take Jonathan a couple of decades to return, but when he did, it was boating that lured him.

In his 30s, with little sailing experience, Jonathan decided, “sailing would be my passion in life.” He bought a boat and christened it Wu wei for the Taoist principle that translates, “Go with the wind and go with the flow.” He is now on his fourth boat, Sachem.

Jonathan graduated from Roslyn High School, but just barely. From the age of six, he was plagued with what he termed “fairly severe learning disabilities,” including attention deficit disorder, for which he took medication. Numbers were not his forte, but words and reading books were his retreat.

While many of his high school friends went off to Ivy League schools, Jonathan enrolled at Suffolk University in Boston, driving a cab at night to help support himself. He also learned out of necessity to cook and feed himself, since his college had no dorms or dining hall, and credits this experience with initiating what would be a life-long fascination with meal preparation, wine and farmers markets.

“In 1969, the markets in Boston were frequented by Portuguese and Italian people, “who would not eat crappy processed food,” Jonathan said. “It was for immigrants, but I was down there every week buying food for me and my friends.”

After graduating in 1972, Jonathan came back to New York. “The call of business was very powerful,” he said. “My father was a businessman.”

From 1973 to 1978 Jonathan was in the thick of the New York advertising world just past the height of its power and licentiousness, but close enough for the 23-year-old to experience the three-martini lunch more than once. An account executive at Foote Cone and Belding, he moved to legendary BBDO and finally to the giant InterPublic firm. “I recognize Mad Men very closely,” he said.

Itching to get away from working conditions he saw as too corporate, Jonathan left advertising in 1978 to represent the brothers Albert and David Maysles, documentary filmmakers whose films, “Grey Gardens” and “Gimme Shelter” had brought them acclaim. Six months later, the business relationship ended in total failure.

“I had no prospects. I was backed into a corner,” he said. “I couldn’t believe that this was happening to me, but it was happening.”

Jonathan said the experience changed his approach to work and life. “I never assume I can’t have a setback,” he said. “I was taught the bitter lesson that sometimes things just don’t work out and you can be punished for that, and I was.”

He landed at William Morris, an agency he called, “the heartbeat of show business,” and where he worked until 1983, leaving to start Artists Agency, Inc. with a partner.

At Artists Agency, Jonathan said, they purposefully concentrated on soap operas and reality TV shows such as “Inside Edition,” “Current Affair,” “Hard Copy” and “Judge Judy” rather than scripted television, which was mainly produced in Los Angeles as a strategy for keeping the business in New York. As soap operas faded from television, the agency shifted to developing programming for the Food Network including Sandra Lee, Paula Deen and “The Chew” with Mario Batali.

“We are still at it,” Jonathan said, although “it’s not appropriate for me to sell television shows anymore because everybody buying them is 28. They say, ‘Grandpa is here to sell something?’”

Jonathan’s learning disabilities affected him in an obvious way when he was a kid in school. More subtle was the effect on the kind of work he chose to do as an adult. “I’m not in a fact-based industry,” he said. “I was able to use my intelligence and gift of people skills, insight into human nature and business acumen in a way that is entrepreneurial rather than structured because I couldn’t compete with people with real defined skill sets. I left the factual, brilliant part of the world to my wife.”

Deborah Grayson and Jonathan met in the early 1980s when Deborah was between jobs, working at a company Jonathan was doing business with.

“I couldn’t believe she was the new receptionist, she was only there for a week. We fell in lust,” he said. “Later it turned to love.” They have been married for 26 years.

Deborah is a hospice nutritionist for Visiting Nurse Service in New York and is an active supporter of East End Hospice through fundraising and writing about EEH services to raise awareness of the good work it does.

Jonathan and Deborah started to come to Shelter Island regularly around the time he was starting his business. “We were so poor, I had to drive to my parents’ house to sleep at night in Roslyn,” he remembered. “The next year I did a little better and we could afford to stay in Greenport for $29 a night at the Greenporter, and the next year we did a little better and stayed at the Ram’s Head.”

Next, they upgraded to a one-bedroom cottage on Fresh Pond, where they stayed five months of the year for 14 years, until they built the house in the Heights in 2000.

“I came here to go sailing, and I’m on the water every single minute that I can,” he said.

At Coecles Harbor for almost 20 years and the Shelter Island Yacht Club for the past 16, he credits Coecles Harbor and Steve Corkery with turning him into a sailor. “They taught me everything I know,” he said.
Jonathan calls Coecles Harbor “a fair trade marina.”

To him, that means fair pay for the skilled workers and craftsmen that build, repair and preserve the boats. He points out that the mechanics, carpenters and electricians all have pensions and healthcare.

We’ve all heard of community involvement, also known as giving back. The ad man in Jonathan shows itself when he labeled the give-and-take between him and Shelter Island, “The immediacy of the community.”

For example, Jonathan wrote a boating column called “The Float” for the Reporter for many years. When Amanda Clark became an Olympic champion, he asked to interview her and “the next thing I knew, I was interviewing her and working on her fundraiser.”

Immediacy of the community is also when, in the days before 1991’s Hurricane Bob, Jonathan and Deborah worked to protect their boat, as well as the boats of others, at the Coecles Harbor Marina, volunteering to help in any way they could. It was all hands on deck as the marina prepared for the storm and Deborah and Jonathan were with them, tying lines and getting supplies.

Jonathan described how he and Deborah, with four other families in 2002, helped to preserve Hampshire Farms as a rural horse farm by purchasing the property in a deal that was part of the Open Space initiative with Peconic Land Trust.

In March, Jonathan funded a new benefit called “Honoring the Hands” for Hudson River Healthcare, a network of healthcare service providers that works with the poor and uninsured — people who in Suffolk County are very likely to be farm workers, maids and child care workers. The very first event raised about $70,000 to support the health of these workers.

“I wasn’t particularly religious when I came here, but I am religious now. I’ve become an animist,” he said, referring to the belief that was characteristic of many Native American cultures, believing there are spirits in nature. “In October I watch the sunset while I’m swimming, or I sail around the Island and I feel like I’ve had an epiphany,” he said.

“I can’t believe how lucky I am that in my early 60s , I have a dozen friends I’ve made since I’ve lived here, adult friendships,” he said. “There are so many people here who are interesting and talented. I am so blessed.”

Island Profile: Tim Purtell is keeping things lively in the garden.

Tim Purtell in the pollinator garden that surrounds his home in the Heights.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on August 27, 2015

The garden around Tim Purtell’s Shelter Island home is a hopping place. And that’s just the way he likes it.

During the course of a couple of hours spent talking with him about his life, his work on the Green Options Committee and childhood memories of Shelter Island in the 1950s and 1960s, we were interrupted constantly.

First by a juvenile squirrel who repeatedly popped up from behind a nearby dish of water to peer at us, and then lay across the dish with its front legs spread out like a sunbather at poolside.

“We are probably the only people on Shelter Island who feed the squirrels,” Tim said.

The plants Tim chose for this setting made this a “pollinator garden,” a fact impossible to ignore when a hummingbird got intimate with salvia and wasps and bees, too busy to notice us, flew close. A swarm of butterflies, an American goldfinch hanging upside down on a branch and a spunky chipmunk completed the scene.

“That’s the funny thing about this house,” Tim said. “We’re like St. Francis. All the animals know that nothing bad will happen to them here.”

Born in New York City, Tim first came to the Heights when he was four months old, in the summer of 1948 with his parents, brother and sister.

The family rented at first, and then bought the property next door where his parents later lived full-time from 1974 through the late 1980s. In 2001 Tim and his partner, Robin Drake, built their own home on part of that same property.

Tim and Robin have been together since 1977. As for marriage, Tim said, “Robin likes to joke, we don’t want to rush into it.”

They met in an elevator, when both worked in the same New York office building. “Robin is a lively person, very warm,” said Tim. “It turned out I worked with a woman who had gone to recorder camp with Rob and she said, ‘Oh Robin Drake, he’s wonderful.’”

Tim confirmed that Robin is wonderful — both as a flute player and as a person.

Tim developed an early passion for movies and seems to have skipped Bambi in favor of edgier stuff. He said, “Hitchcock’s ‘The Lady Vanishes’ is the first movie I remember, because I was really puzzled by why the nun was wearing high heels.” (Spoiler alert — she isn’t a nun.)

“My mom was such a good sport about it. She’d take me to some of the worst movies,” he recalled. “We had to stand in line to see a Japanese monster movie, ‘Rodan,’ about flying reptiles.” Tim and his mom went to Greenport twice a week on the “movie boat,” a special movie-plus-ferry price that got you there and back in time for the feature films that were shown all summer.

“Being a child here was terrific,” Tim said.

In the days before backyard swimming pools were common, the Heights Beach Club was the place to be. He rode a bike all over the Island without fear. He learned to sail in a kind of catboat called a Woodpussy, with a centerboard and one sail. “A lot of kids had them,” Tim said. “There was a fleet.”

During a circumnavigation of the Island, Tim found himself surrounded by a school of porpoises off Ram Island. “It was idyllic,” he said, “one of the reasons I’m interested in environmental things now.”

There was abundant animal life in the water when Tim grew up, life that is largely gone today. “If I went swimming in June, the blowfish would nibble my toes, there were crabs, skate, horseshoe crabs, sand sharks,” he said. “In the fall the scallops would scratch my legs and wash up on the shore, there would be so many.”

Tim graduated from Bard College in 1971 and then worked in the city at the Time Inc. editorial research library (aka “the morgue”) and as a videographer with dance studios, where he met Heidi Fokine, a dancer in a small group, who later moved to Shelter Island herself.

In 1990 he went to Entertainment Weekly, where he worked for 21 years as a fact-checker, moving up to become head of the department, a writer of DVD reviews, and later editor of a section of the magazine.

He enjoyed the excitement, fast pace and working with “a lot of fun, smart people.” A weekly, EW’s deadline was Tuesdays and Tim would often work until four or five in the morning. “Your adrenaline would kick in,” he said.

He stayed at EW through many changes of management, but eventually “it was no longer fun so I decided to leave.”

In the early 1990s, the Greenport theater was being renovated, when Rob and Tim, moments before boarding a bus for New York discovered the original marquee letters from the 1930s in a dumpster. It would be many years before dumpster diving became a trend “but this was a must-dive,” Tim said.

The letters, which spell, “Vertigo with James Stewart,” are now mounted over the fireplace in their home. “I saw ‘Vertigo’ when I was 10 in 1958,” said Tim. “I’d actually seen it at the Greenport theater.”

In 2011, Tim and Robin left the city and began to live full time in the house in the Heights that Robin had designed for them. A few weeks after leaving the city, Tim was still settling into the pace of Island life. “Rob was teaching a lot in the city and one day I was at the post office hanging out for what I realized was way too long,” he said. “I was desperate to meet people.”

He met Chris Fokine and Herb Stelljes and they suggested he join the town’s Green Options Committee.

Since then, Tim has worked so diligently promoting a green and sustainable Shelter Island that the bees in his garden would be hard-pressed to match his work ethic.

He became the organizer of the Green Expo, a project conceived by Town Attorney Laury Dowd that has become an annual event to educate and inform Islanders about local environmental issues including the control of invasives, the use of pesticides for tick management, the benefits of reusable shopping bags and the development of open public spaces.

Tim has spearheaded a number of the Green Options Committee’s initiatives, including the reusable bag campaign, advocating for a reduction in the use of plastic one-use shopping bags in favor of reusable bags that don’t get tangled in tree limbs or caught in roadside foliage. He has also worked closely with fellow committee members informing the public of walkable open spaces and produced a map of these places.

Vinebusters, an initiative to target overgrown areas of town land and organize volunteers to clear them of invasive vines, is another project that Tim and Dan Fokine organize and execute.

Encouraged by the success of his own pollinator garden, Tim’s working to establish more of these gardens on the Island. “You don’t have to be extreme,” he said. “It’s a matter of planting things that suppress weeds and attract butterflies, hummingbirds and wasps.”

Informing all his work on behalf of the environment of the Island is Tim’s view of this place as unique and exceptional. “We are not the mainland,” he said. “We have our own rules.”

Recently, he put the disc back in disc jockey, taking his prodigious collection of 45 rpm records to the Shelter Island Historical Society, to DJ the dance party.

“I do like to dance,” he said. “Some people had no idea.”

Profile: A regular at the White House and the Island Library | Shelter Island Reporter

JO ANN KIRKLAND PHOTO Maggie Murphy and her daughter, Maeve, at the family’s Shelter Island home.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on February 26, 2015

Maggie Murphy was enjoying the quiet beauty and significant snow cover of a February Shelter Island weekend with her husband David, daughter Maeve, and a nine-month-old Goldendoodle named Ellie, when two visitors broke trail through a foot of ice and snow, tramped into their home and left dripping boots in a mound by the front door.

“Would somebody throw my pants up to me?” Maggie yelled. David wadded up a pair of jeans and fired them upstairs.

Next to Sundance, the Oscars and the White House Christmas party, all of which Maggie has experienced, her Shelter Island life is less red carpet and more Stainmaster.

Maggie’s distinguished publishing career spans decades as reporter, editor and industry leader at Us, Entertainment Weekly, Life, People, Parade and starting last month, theMid.com. She has told the stories of every kind of American, from single moms working at Wal-Mart to Barack and Michelle Obama working at the White House.

Maggie was born into a large Irish family in Queens. Her four siblings still live within a few miles of where they all grew up in Woodside. “My parents were immigrants in the mid 50s, a good time to be Irish in America,” she said. “People knew us in our small neighborhood, knew my mother, knew who my family was.”

Maggie got her start in journalism at a New York City public school, Bryant High. A self-described “good Catholic girl,” when her English teacher asked to see her after class, she assumed she’d done something wrong. He told her she should join the newspaper, “The Bryant Clipper.”

“I was fascinated by the immigrant story I saw on TV,” Maggie said, referring to Rose Ann Scamardella, an Italian-American woman who anchored WABC Eyewitness News in New York City in the late 1970s. “I had a hardscrabble upbringing, my dad was an alcoholic,” Maggie said. “I didn’t want to be around too many sad things. Rose Ann Scamardella looked like she was having fun. I wanted to do that.”

As for college, “There really wasn’t a path in my everyday life,” said Maggie. In her junior year at Bryant, an adviser asked if she was going to college, and when she demurred, answered the question for her. “I was sort of adopted by the English department, they helped me apply, and I ended up getting into NYU,” she said.

Maggie worked at an NYU school newspaper, an alternative weekly. There she met David Browne, who would later become her husband. “He wanted to be a music critic, and I said, ‘Oh wow, you can do that? I’ll try that,’” she said. “We became very focused on how to make our way in the publishing business.”

At first, Maggie and David struggled the way many college grads do. “We had a series of the most unfortunate jobs,” she said.

But every job had something to teach her. At Teen Beat, Maggie learned not to ruin the magazine cover by using the word “flick,” which creates an unfortunate visual impression when viewed in passing. She said, “Years later, when I worked at Entertainment Weekly, this became the Maggie Murphy rule, ‘Don’t put the word flick on the cover.’”

In the late 1980s when clothing retailers were hiring magazine journalists to study color swatches of their apparel and come up with evocative names, Maggie found herself in the middle of the J.Crew and Tweeds “color war.” She went to work for J. Crew after the defection of a team of writers to Tweeds.

“They liked colors like ‘emotion’ for gray,” said Maggie. “At J. Crew, they’d give you a swatch, and you would think, that’s orange, but orange is boring so let’s call it kumquat, or call it ‘team’ for navy blue. It was a wacky, visual job.”

She and David had married and they had a mortgage, so when a magazine job at Us came her way, she took it. Over the next 20 years, she worked in the intense, competitive, and sometimes glamorous world of publishing. She was named “Hottest Editor of the Year” in 2011.

Maggie interviewed Michelle Obama several times and President Obama twice. “They are both impossibly good-looking in person, very tall,” she said. “The president is hard to interview because you get 20 minutes and his answer to every question is 10 minutes long, and you wonder, do I interrupt the leader of the free world?”

In the early 1990s Maggie and David started coming to Shelter Island on weekends when their friend Kathy Heintzelman, who still lives on the Island, invited them to share a house near North Ferry with a tribe of friends, colleagues and competitors from the city.

“My boss at Entertainment Weekly used to call it the ‘Sleeping with the Enemy’ house,” Maggie said. Since then, they’ve continued to live weekends, year-round on the Island, buying their own place in 2000.
Maggie and David had Maeve in 2002, when Maggie was close to 40.

She found that having a child deepened her ties to the community, especially the Shelter Island Library. “On Saturday afternoons in the winter, we’d go and read books,” she said. “It’s one of my favorite places, a wonderful institution.”

During her time at Parade, Maggie’s professional life and personal life seemed to come together on Shelter Island. “The thing I cherish most is the way the Island is like so many towns that I visited at Parade — the importance of education, the paper, the library to small town life.”

In the fall of 2014 Maggie was displaced at Parade when the company was sold. “This was the first time in 27 years I’d had to look for a job, something that a lot of people my age have grappled with,” she said. “It makes you reassess where you want to live, how you want to live, what your work life means to you.”

With Maeve’s help, Maggie concluded that work outside the home is vital to her happiness. After leaving Parade, she began to meet Maeve at the school bus, and ask how her day had gone. One day after listening for a while, “the boss in me came roaring back and I said, ‘O.K., here’s how this is going to work. You are going to give me 10 minutes on everything that went wrong and then you are going to tell me how you are going fix it.’”

‘Mommy,’ Maeve said, ‘You need to go back to work.’”

Now working at a startup called theMid.com, Maggie described her job as being the adult in a big room of journalists writing about “the messy middle” of people’s lives: jobs, children, transitions and parents.

She sees some of the changes in her decades here on Shelter Island as improvements. “The glue of the Island is its livability 365 days of the year. I’m mindful of that,” she said. “Stars Café changed the Heights. It’s great to have Black Cat Books and it’s been wonderful to see a Farmers Market and Sylvester Manor. The chicken salad at the Eagle Deli is awesome.”

“To become someone who has a great job, who can have a house on Shelter Island, and be able to live in the city, it is the expression of the American Dream,” she said. “I think it’s so much about teachers tapping you on the shoulder and saying ‘you are good at this, you should do this.’ Ordinary people doing ordinary things make the biggest difference in our lives.”