Sep
4
Jupiter Island’s ‘Gate House’ home to secrets and mystery
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By KATHLEEN CHAPMAN
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
JUPITER ISLAND – In its century-long history, Gate House is said to have been occupied by Katharine Hepburn, Edsel Ford, several donkeys and an acclaimed playwright who did his best work on the front porch, drinking whiskey and wearing nothing but a towel.
The rambling home off South Beach Road is hidden by a dark, tropical jungle and laced with spiral staircases and secret passageways – the mysterious, fairy-tale kind of a place that inspires tall tales and shameless lies.
But most of its stories, island historians say, are almost certainly true.
Dave Phillips, a genial man with a soft Southern accent, said the house was presented to him more than two years ago as a “tear-down,” a relic that would be razed to make room for a modern palace with marble counters and a private theater.
But the existing house is “enchanting,” he said.
Phillips, who owns a North Carolina realty company and specializes in restoration, bought the property in April 1999 for $1.1 million. He is now working to get it on the National Register of Historic Places as a good example of the Spanish Mission Revival style evidenced in many early South Florida homes.
His application already has been approved by the state. If it passes the scrutiny of National Register officials in Washington, the home will be the first from Jupiter Island on the list.
The property, which islanders call Gate House, is actually a collection of buildings, decked in off-white stucco and barrel tile roofs.
Everywhere in the houses, Phillips said, are places for an average-sized man to bump his head.
Phillips has to lean over to shave because his bathroom ceiling slants down dramatically over the sink, to a height of just over 5 feet. In one building, a 20-foot-long passageway – about 5 feet high and 2 feet wide – connects a bedroom to living room.
As the story goes, a midget once lived in the house. He was often chased by his larger brother, and darted into the tiny tunnels to escape, Phillips said. That legend may be based on reality, some island historians say.
The houses were built by the Yateses, a wealthy railroad family from upstate New York, said Vee Chambers, a 93-year-old resident of Hobe Sound who worked on the island beginning in the 1920s.
According to written histories of the island kept at the Martin County Historical Society, their son, Jack Yates, built most of the surrounding buildings with their small halls and low ceilings, sometime before 1927. The main house was built around the turn of the century.
Jack Yates, lifelong resident Nathaniel Reed says, was a dwarf. Chambers, who knew Yates, said he was “a little deformed – a brilliant person, but short, and he looked like he didn’t have a neck.”
The Yateses owned the home when women still wore petticoats and men’s shirts were always starched, according to a history of the island written by Nathaniel’s father, Joseph Reed, an author and financier who arrived with his family in 1931.
In 1914, he wrote, only 12 families, including the Yateses, lived on Jupiter Island, and residents had to travel by boat to Palm Beach for ice to chill their food. During the years the Yateses owned the home, Reed said, donkeys were stabled all over the island, and hitched to carts for rides. Phillips said one of the cottages on the property is named Donkey House, likely because it was a stable.
In the years the Yates family owned the property, rooms divided and multiplied, according to Joseph Reed’s history:
“(The Yateses) had a big rambling house which, because of Mrs. Yates’ penchant for building, became each year more rambling. In consequence, the original core was finally so surrounded by new rooms, verandas, enclosures, connecting passageways, and more rooms that it became a core indeed – lost in impenetrable gloom.”
Joseph Reed bought the Yateses’ home and many others in the 1930s, as once-wealthy residents grew “desperate and destitute,” Nathaniel Reed said. The Florida real estate boom had ended with the hurricane of 1926 and the stock market crash of 1929.
“My father, very wisely, had been long in bonds, short in stocks,” he said.
According to Joseph Reed’s wife Permelia’s history of the island, filed at the Martin County Historical Society, her husband operated a school in one of the buildings for black women from Banner Lake to teach them the principles of housekeeping.
Chambers said she helped with the school, which was free and attracted some white servants as well.
“He trained cooks and maids for about two years, because none of the locals knew how to serve rich people,” Chambers said.
Shortly after buying the home in 1935, Reed sold it to Edsel Ford, the son of pioneering automaker Henry Ford. According to Joseph Reed’s history of the island, Ford removed wooden Indians from the home for his father’s museums, and built a dock for his large yacht.
Few islanders got to know Ford while he was living in the house. “He was a very shy person, and he didn’t mingle very well. He sort of stayed to himself, though everyone thought he was very nice,” Chambers said.
A few years after he bought it, Ford sold Gate House to acclaimed playwright Philip Barry and his wife. Barry wrote The Philadelphia Story, his most famous play, in pencil on yellow legal pads at Gate House, Chambers said.
She was his secretary, and typed the story after he was finished at the house. The 5-foot-8-inch woman remembers bumping her head frequently on a very low, winding metal staircase.
In 1940, the play was made into a movie starring Katharine Hepburn, a friend of Barry’s, Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant.
Reed remembers Barry, a close friend of his father’s, as “brilliant and funny, a marvelous character,” who preferred to write while outdoors, and half-naked.
Barry’s wife, Ellen, survived her husband by many years, and Martin County deeds show she likely kept the house until 1961. The home’s next famous owner, John Walker III, lived there between 1992 until his death in 1995.
The director of the National Gallery in Washington until his retirement in 1969, Walker was “unbelievably educated, one of the great Renaissance men,” Reed said.
Upon his death at age 88, The New York Times eulogized the “patrician art connoisseur,” as the man who “shaped the museum into a world-class institution.”
Walter and Cheryl Forman bought the home in 1997, and sold it to Phillips in April 1999.
Except for renovations to the kitchens and bathrooms, the buildings have hardly changed since the time they were built, said Robert Jones, the state historical specialist handling the National Register application.
He said the house got its name from the words “Gate House” etched in the tile on one of the out buildings, which may have once been the entryway to the property.
Phillips’ favorite story about his house is undocumented, and may be impossible to confirm.
It is rumored on the island that Hepburn and Spencer Tracy rendezvoused at Gate House during their semi-secret 26-year affair.
Hepburn and Tracy first met on the set of Woman of the Year in 1942, and went on to nine movies together, including and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
Though they rented a house together in West Hollywood, the couple had to keep their affair secret. Tracy was separated from wife, but as a Catholic, he did not believe in divorce.
It is certainly possible, Phillips said, that the couple met in secret at Gate House. “I’d put up a plaque over the exact spot where they rendezvoused, if I knew where it was,” he said.
Chambers is much more skeptical. The only time she saw Hepburn on the island was in March 1941, when the actress stayed with the Hildebrandts, down the street from Gate House.
But Jupiter Island has always been a place where famous people go to hide. Gate House itself seems to recede into the trees, withholding its secrets from the road.
Copyright 2001 Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
September 4, 2001
Tuesday FINAL EDITION
SECTION: A SECTION, Pg. 1A
LENGTH: 1320 words