Jackie Gleason’s Paranormal Activity
Here is one thing you probably know about Jackie Gleason, the famously “rotund comedian,” to use an old Times description: he was the star and guiding force of “The Honeymooners,” the nineteen-fifties sitcom (and “Flintstones” template) that was spun off from a variety show he headlined in various incarnations from the early fifties into the seventies. Depending on your age, you may also have seen him as Minnesota Fats in the film “The Hustler.”
Here are two things you probably don’t know about Gleason: One, he was an avid reader with a lifelong interest in E.S.P., telekinesis, astral projection, clairvoyance, flying saucers—the supernatural works—and amassed a library of some three thousand volumes on these concerns. Two, in the late fifties, at the height of his fame, he built an extravagant circular house made of wood, marble, and glass which he variously called the Round House, the Round Rock, and the Mothership. The modernist home commands a woodsy eight and a half acres in Cortlandt Manor, a Westchester hamlet, and was more recently dubbed “Jackie Gleason’s UFO-inspired party pad” by a luxury life-style website when the property was listed for sale last summer. (Asking price: $5.5 million. Listing lede: “Off-the-Charts Cool Cool Cool.”)
Gleason lived in the Round House for only a few years, tiring of it quickly and then fobbing it off on his network, CBS, when he relocated his variety show to Miami Beach, in 1964. His widow donated his library to the University of Miami following his death, in 1987. But, on a recent morning, spooky books and saucerlike home were reunited, after a fashion, when Andrew Lampert, the author of a new book titled “Jackie Gleason: Library of the Paranormal,” stood in front of the Round House. Despite the property’s numerous “NO TRESPASSING” signs, the owner was willing to give him a tour.
Lampert’s book is part of a series of monographs that he and a partner, Christine Burgin, publish, devoted to, in his words, “idiosyncratic people” and “niche corners.” “Library of the Paranormal” reproduces several dozen covers from Gleason’s collection, most put out by obscure presses and graced with charmingly awful illustrations. Among the titles: “Is Your Cosmic Radio Working?” and “How to Contact Space People.” Lampert, a cheerful fortysomething with a hipster-dad mien, admitted that his interest in Gleason’s interest was maybe “bizarre” but definitely not “flippant.”
Akie Topal, the homeowner, wore a striped Breton shirt and rolled-up jeans, with an apron tied around her waist. She was accompanied by Heidi Henshaw, her real-estate agent. Greeting Lampert, Topal said, “The architecture here was inspired by the four elements of Gleason’s life—superstition, music, pool, and drinking.”
The entry area was a combination sitting room, library, and command center, with custom-made fixtures: chairs, bookcases, lighting, speakers, and cabinets full of switches, including one labelled “snow melter” and two dimmer knobs the size of salad plates. “Wow,” Lampert said, as Topal twisted a knob. “Those are the best rheostats I’ve ever seen.”
“You will see more switches downstairs,” Topal promised.
“You feel like you’re in a spaceship,” Henshaw said approvingly. That was true: the room looked like the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise, if it had been finished in fine, burnished woods. Nearly every surface and appliance was curvilinear, hinting at Gaudí and also at swanky mid-century hotels and restaurants. The architect was Robert Cika, a disciple of a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright.
Topal explained that her late husband, Ronald Topal, a Manhattan orthodontist, bought the showplace home in 1976. Was he a big Gleason fan? “No,” she said. “He just fell in love with the house.” He kept it largely as he found it. In 1990, Topal moved in, but she’d had a prior relationship with the comedian: she grew up in Osaka, and when she moved to the United States, in 1984, she said, “I learned my English watching ‘I Love Lucy,’ ‘The Honeymooners,’ and those four older ladies living together.” (“The Golden Girls.”)
Topal took Lampert into Gleason’s office, where an organ was built into a wall. There was a drawer with a small jukebox inside and another that once stored a bar and now held batteries. The primary bedroom contained a round bed and a cabinet mounted on the ceiling for a TV set. There were drawers containing another jukebox and another bar.
“How many bars are there total?” Lampert asked.
“Five,” Topal answered, after counting them on her fingers.
“And how many bathrooms?”
“Two and a half.”
Lampert laughed. “The math works.”
The tour descended down a vertiginous circular staircase to the ground floor, which featured a marble dance floor, three marble fireplaces, an indoor koi pond (empty), a game room, and two large bars set within fourteen paces of each other, give or take.
With essentially no right angles or corners—which are thought by some, possibly including Gleason, to attract evil spirits—the architecture had a pleasantly disorienting quality. “Like music, it just flows and flows,” Topal said. “But when everyone comes here they get lost. When they try to leave, they go the wrong way.”
Lampert tried to put himself in Gleason’s shoes. “Navigating this house inebriated—that would be a challenge,” he said. “But that’s why they called him the Great One.” ♦