{"id":90638,"date":"2015-10-07T15:51:14","date_gmt":"2015-10-07T19:51:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=90638"},"modified":"2015-10-07T15:51:14","modified_gmt":"2015-10-07T19:51:14","slug":"ham-on-rye","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/07\/ham-on-rye\/","title":{"rendered":"Ham on Rye"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_90643\" style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/portrait_of_john_barrymore.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-90643\" class=\"wp-image-90643\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/portrait_of_john_barrymore.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"600\" height=\"466\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/portrait_of_john_barrymore.jpg 2994w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/portrait_of_john_barrymore-300x233.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/portrait_of_john_barrymore-1024x795.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-90643\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">John Barrymore in 1920.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Some years ago, a friend who works in real estate let me see <a href=\"http:\/\/www.iamnotastalker.com\/2009\/10\/29\/john-barrymores-apartment-building\/\" target=\"_blank\">the Greenwich Village apartment that had belonged to John Barrymore<\/a>; I had read about it and was thrilled to see the interior. Today its rent is beyond the reach of most mortals, but even when Barrymore moved there, in 1917, the building had a distinct bohemian chic\u2014it had been remodeled by the architect Josephine Wright Chapman. Still, the nineteenth-century row house was modest by matinee-idol standards. Barrymore took the place while he was appearing on Broadway in\u00a0<em>Hamlet<\/em>.\u00a0He was not yet considered tragic or ridiculous or a parody of himself, though he was on the way.<\/p>\n<p>To the modern eye, the light-filled studio with its window seat, skylight, and fireplace are magical enough, even with a tiny bedroom and no real kitchen\u2014indeed, this sort of adds to the charm. Up a narrow ladder, on the roof, was a hut that Barrymore had built: a single weatherproofed room with a vaulted ceiling. The playwright Paul Rudnick rented the studio in the 1980s, and as he wrote in the\u00a0<em>New Yorker<\/em>, he was \u201csmitten.\u201d\u00a0<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Barrymore had remodeled the apartment as a Gothic retreat, christening it the Alchemist\u2019s Corner. He had installed all the false beams, monastery-inspired ironwork, and stained glass, which made his lair resemble the stage set for an Agatha Christie whodunit in summer stock. The rooftop had been his masterpiece and had at one time included a garden with cedar trees, a slate walkway, and a reflecting pool. Tons of soil had had to be hoisted up by pulley, and eventually caused a collapse. Of Barrymore\u2019s vision, only the cottage remained; he\u2019d likened it to a roost overlooking the spires of Paris.<\/p>\n<p>Living there, Rudnick was inspired to write the play\u00a0<em>I Hate Hamlet<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>The apartment inspired in me the sort of painful longing that any resident of an overpriced city will understand. It\u2019s not just that the studio was charming and magical and located in a beautiful neighborhood and, in its inconvenient way, completely perfect. It wasn\u2019t just that there was\u00a0<em>a cottage on the roof<\/em>. It was that, at one point, this was a place where a playwright could afford to live. It was a paean to eccentricity. And this world was gone.<\/p>\n<p>I didn\u2019t want to live there, not really. I mean, the hut has no bathroom\u2014and one can\u2019t imagine the notoriously alcoholic thespian climbing the steep, wooden stairs easily. (On the day we went, it was raining, and the wood was slippery even for the sure-footed.) I like a kitchen, not to mention being able to afford my rent.\u00a0I just wanted it to be there, quixotic and absurd. I wanted to live in a world where it was. It seemed a terrible truth that anyone who could easily live there would want something more convenient. It made sense that it should be expensive\u2014what could be more precious?\u2014and yet terrible, too.<\/p>\n<p>It all made me feel fiercely protective and angry and sad: filled with the almost physically sickening nostalgic envy that lodges in your gut. You almost want the relief of its obsolescence.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><em>Sadie Stein is contributing editor of <\/em>The Paris Review<em>, and the <\/em>Daily<em>\u2019s correspondent.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some years ago, a friend who works in real estate let me see the Greenwich Village apartment that had belonged to John Barrymore; I had read about it and was thrilled to see the interior. Today its rent is beyond the reach of most mortals, but even when Barrymore moved there, in 1917, the building [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[19261,1180,1657,2199,2861,19702,125,44,19703],"class_list":["post-90638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-actors","tag-apartments","tag-architecture","tag-greenwich-village","tag-history","tag-john-barrymore","tag-new-york-city","tag-theater","tag-thespians"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>In John Barrymore\u2019s Old Greenwich Village Apartment<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Sadie Stein on the unusual home of the actor, who lived there from 1917 to 1920.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/07\/ham-on-rye\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Ham on Rye by Sadie Stein\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"October 7, 2015 \u2013 Some years ago, a friend who works in real estate let me see the Greenwich Village apartment that had belonged to John Barrymore; 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