From The Vault Of Art Shay: The Greatest Acting Couple Ever

By Art Shay in Arts & Entertainment on Jun 27, 2012 7:00PM

Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne just before their marriage in 1922. Noel Coward, a lifelong intimate, wrote \<em\>Design for Living\<\/em\> for the couple, based on their colorful lifestyle.\r\n

I egoistically thought this fabulous couple would care about my play, \"A Clock for Nikita,\" about what happened to a creative Russian inventor dragged down by the officiousness of the system. My wife Florence, who snapped this picture, kept gesturing with slashes across her throat- for me to shut up. That\'s our 1959 Mercedes. (Credit: Florence Shay)\r\n

The affable Lunts pause from their gardening.\r\n

Lynn passes some tea roses from her hothouse to Alfred for their huge living room.\r\n

View from the Lunts balcony of a corner of their sitting room.\r\n

Alfred gathers some eggs to give us.\r\n

The Lunts entertain some visiting relatives.\r\n

Lynn Fontanne designed and sewed stage and streetwear for herself and numerous lucky actresses.\r\n

Alfred, a lifelong sportsman, was an expert marksman.\r\n

While playing cribbage (their board game passion) in their living room, Lynn casually mentioned that the chair visible at left was Noel Coward\'s favorite. in it, Coward broke up repeatedly at the cleverness of his lyrics for \<em\>Mad Dogs and Englishmen\<\/em\>, especially the line about \"every Malay rabbit makes it a habit\" to find shelter from the sun... but not Englishmen. She also noted the great critic and raconteur Alexander Woolcott preferred the chair on the right: \"the one you are occupying, Arthur.\" I was thrilled and honored.\r\n

The couple enjoyed their private lives, to quote Noel Coward. Here Alfred enjoys their tea roses alone.\r\n

At a local downtown Genesee Depot bar, Alfred enjoys a smoke while awaiting his Guinness.\r\n

Albert was happiest \"Downtown\" with workingmen. The kind he had hardly played all career long.\r\n

Alfred and Lynn study their parts in a proposed \<em\>Masterpiece theater\<\/em\> play, in separate rooms\r\n

(Legendary Chicago photographer Art Shay has taken photos of kings, queens, celebrities and the common man in a 60-year career. In this week's look at his photography archives, Art tells us the story of American theater's first great couple.)

Before I introduce you to Alfred Lunt (the whilom lover of Noel Coward) and Lynn Fontanne who enjoyed her own lesser secret enthusiasms during their half century of marriage surprisingly based in Genesee Depot, Wisconsin and, oh, becoming the greatest theatrical couple of all time. I should confess that at the time I met them in 1963, just before the bluebird of fame began nesting in my career as a photographer, I had written an about-to-be produced comedy about life in the Soviet Union. I was and still am a theater nut. [For example I'll be appearing at UP Comedy Club at Piper's Alley
(230 W. North Ave.) tomorrow, June 28, being interviewed by Rick Kogan.]

From a friend living in rural Wisconsin I learned about the Lunt branch of the American theater spending its twilight in a charming Old World place they called Ten Chimneys. As I was always on the hunt for interesting picture stories to sell to magazines I suggested that Life let me visit these Royals with my camera and they quixotically gave me the assignment, drawing sneers from their snooty NY theatrical department and its (I imagined, in the hostility of youth) unspoken wishes that I bombed in the sticks.

I had departed from Life's elite correspondent staff after three wild years of working as an idea man, schlepper of camera cases and writer of captions for such great Life photographers as Ralph Crane, Walter Sanders, Francis Miller, Ralph Morse, Lisa Larsen, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Leonard McCombe and Philippe Halsman. (Halsman would do 101 Life covers but the shadow of murder hung over him. Before immigrating here, he stood in a Latvian court and was acquitted of having murdered his father. The only "proof" was that my friend Philippe -whom I had encouraged early on in his project to photograph celebrities such as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor to jump for his strobe lights- had taken his father on an extensive mountaineering trip, and had only bought one return ticket.)

Back to the Lunts: Alfred and Lynn came out of their vastly French provincial manor to welcome Florence and me .Alfred was wearing a peach colored scarf that set off his patrician gray head, Lynn a peasant blouse that was lime flavored, tucked into a Sound of Music hopsack-colored dirndl. We would later learn that Lynn designed and sewed her own clothes and had somehow acquired Alfred's scarf from a visiting Estonian horse breeder's wife. Alfred's enthusiasms were now horses and chickens. (They would give us two dozen eggs to take home.)

Who the hell, I can picture my readers outside Chicago wondering, were these Lunts?

Well, he was born in Milwaukee in 1892, she in England in 1887, and—before and after their 1922 marriage—starred as stage couples in myriad plays ranging from Sweet Nell of Old Drury (1923) to The Visit on Broadway in 1958. In between, there was The Guardsman, Anna Christie,Arms and the Man,The Goat Song, Idiot's Delight, Elizabeth the Queen,The Doctor's Dilemma, Amphitryon 38, Marco's Millions, and The Pirate. They came out of retirement in 1965 to do Magnificent Yankee for Hallmark's TV Theater. How thrilled I would be when they promised to come to my opening night at the Stagelight Theater in Buffalo Grove. (Lynn caught the flu and they sent a gracious note.)

But my Life story "got in" for four pages and I still get requests for their pictures; not the least from the Ten Chimneys group running the Lunt estate as a tourist attraction and museum. I gave them some outtakes for a popular exhibition.

Their dignified, talented likes will not be seen again.

If you can't wait until this time every Wednesday to get your Art Shay fix, please check out the photographer's blog, which is updated regularly. Art Shay's book, Chicago's Nelson Algren, is also available at Amazon.