Los Gatos Weekly-Times file photograph

This roomy mountain home belonged to the Raymond family of Los Gatos, who welcomed guests who came to dinner as a chance to make extra money.

Picture from the Past

'The Man Who Came to Dinner' should have come to Los Gatos

 

By John S. Baggerly

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Lizzie Borden took an ax and gave her mother 40 whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father 41.

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The reader should keep this ditty in mind because it has bearing in the movie The Man Who Came To Dinner, starring Monty Woolly as Sheridan Whiteside, a brilliant and cantankerous public speaker and radio show host. Speaking of dinner guests--early locals, particularly those in the hills above Los Gatos and en route to Santa Cruz, were often set upon by entire families, particularly at meal time.

One such victim of drop-inners was the Raymond family. These hill dwellers offset the freeloaders and made money by taking in entire families for extended visits to enjoy the farm animals, take walks and go horseback riding in the hill country. Tired of being dropped in upon, many other local property owners did the same thing--sometimes ending up with boarders for several months at a time.

Woolly, as Whiteside, became a star boarder by accident. After a speaking engagement in an unnamed Ohio town, he is somewhat forced to dine with a Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Stanley, a prestigious family by local standards. At dinner, Whiteside takes a mouthful of extremely hot potatoes. He quickly spits it out, barking, "Some damned fool would have swallowed that!"

When dinner is over, he is led outside to be taken back to his hotel, when he slips on the ice-covered front steps and is brought back in with a broken hip. A vocal patient, he insults one and all, calls his nurse "Miss Bed Pan" and urges the grown children of the household to leave "horrible Ohio."

Another situation contributes to Whiteside's nasty side when his cherished secretary Maggie--now a part of the household--falls in love with a local newspaper reporter. Whiteside is not the only one with frustrations: a pretty daughter of the household wishes to marry the man of her choice but is thwarted by her stuffy parents.

All through the unpleasantness, a silent, mousy elderly woman passes through the living room where Woolly resides and holds court. It suddenly occurs to him that the quiet woman is the notorious Lizzie Borden, living unrecognized in the home of her Ohio relatives. Armed with this information, which he threatens to divulge, Whiteside whips the household into line and the daughter is permitted to marry her beau.

Triumphant and well again, Whiteside and company leave the house by the front door to await transportation. Offstage there is a crash and great commotion. Whiteside is carried back into the living room with--horror of horrors--another broken hip. Final curtain.

As for the real Lizzie Borden, she never left New England. It was a fact that she was tried in June of 1892 in Fall River, Mass. for killing her well-to-do father, Andrew Jackson Borden, and her stepmother, the former Abby Durfee Gray. Lizzie had been seen taking an ax from a barn into the home on the day of the murders. Her father's skull was crushed and his wife's body was found upstairs on a bed, beaten to death. Lizzie was acquitted by an all-male jury in her June 1892 trial. She lived out her life in riches in New Hampshire.

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