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Townhouse Manners
The 1948 movie, “The Heiress,” directed by William Wyler, was an adaptation of a play by Ruth and Augustus Goetz that was itself a reworked version of Henry James’s 1881 book, “Washington Square.”

Much of the movie supposedly takes place inside the very handsome Greek Revival townhouse at 16 Washington Square. The film’s production designer, Harry Horner based his design of the house’s interior, in fact, on the Samuel Tredwell House, which is also known as the Old Merchants House, at 29 East 4th Street.

The movie starred Ralph Richardson as Austin Sloper, Olivia de Haviland as his daughter, Catherine, and Montgomery Clift, as Morris Townsend, her suitor. Mr. Sloper considers Mr. Townsend worthless and the critical confrontation between them takes place in the very formal front parlor of the house that is separated by wide pocket doors from the more informal rear of the house. When Mr. Townsend arrives, Mr. Sloper quickly shuts the pocket doors and proceeds to pleasantly but forcefully dismiss Mr. Townsend before Catherine can find out about their meeting. The pocket doors separated the influence of the street from the intimacy of the rear of the house, controlling its public and private worlds. Mr. Sloper has kept the front parlor as something of a shrine for his deceased wife.

Horner was once quoted as stating that “very often houses that have a memory of one kind or another attached to them are able to dominate the inhabitants and mold them with a definite force of their own.” 

Carter B. Horsley