HORTON FOOTE by Wilborn Hampton

Author:Wilborn Hampton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: FREE PRESS
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

New Hampshire Exile

IN THE MID -1960s Foote and Lillian began thinking about buying a house in the countryside as a weekend retreat. They both loved to take excursions into New England, driving back roads and looking at antiques and Early American art and artifacts. They had looked at several houses on weekend trips, but never found one they thought was quite right. On one such visit they met a couple, Roger and Ruth Bacon, who ran an antique shop. The Bacons also loved the theater, and the two couples became friends. Foote and Lillian had just about given up their search when the Bacons phoned one day and said they had seen a house on the market they thought the Footes should look at. Foote and Lillian drove up to New Hampshire the following weekend and found their dream house.

It was located outside a small town called New Boston. It was a 1740 frame house with three floors, located at the end of a road on fifty acres of woods. The nearest neighbor was a mile away, and it was so secluded that in years to come visitors trying to find it invariably had to call, often twice, to ask directions. They bought it on the spot for nineteen thousand dollars and began furnishing it with a few small items they brought up from Nyack and some other pieces they bought in antique shops in the area.

They had spent only a few weekends there when Foote received Preminger’s offer to go to England for the summer to work on Hurry, Sundown. When the family returned from England, they had a call from the Bacons informing them that in their absence there had been a small fire in the New Hampshire house. They drove up immediately and discovered that in addition to the fire, several of the items with which they had furnished the house had been stolen.

Fortunately, the thieves were inept as arsonists. The fire was contained to one room, the keeping room, as it is called in New England, and had not spread to the rest of the house. The perpetrators weren’t much better as robbers, either. Only a few antiques were stolen, and not the most valuable ones.

The fire and robbery, however, prompted Foote and Lillian to contemplate a permanent move to New Hampshire. They had become disenchanted with Nyack. They found its upper-middle-class competitiveness, especially in the schools, and its country-club mind-set unappealing. In addition, the drug culture was making inroads in the town, and several of the children’s classmates were falling to drugs. The setbacks in Foote’s career were weighing heavily on him, and he felt increasingly estranged from a theater that was rejecting him. The isolation of the New Hampshire woods was a lure.

In the fall Foote and Lillian decided to put the Nyack house on the market and live full-time in New Hampshire. They were in the process of making the move when Foote left for California to work on The Stalking Moon.

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