The Case Of The Missing Manuscript: A Weston Mystery

WESTON, CT — If you have spent any time at all in Weston you've likely come across the name Alice DeLamar, whether from her 7,000-book behest to the Weston Public Library, in association with her former estate on Norfield Road, or any number of other, lighter, footprints. If you were intrigued enough to research a little deeper, you probably didn't make it very far, for heiress and arts patron DeLamar was determined to keep to the shadows. But where most researchers would be discouraged, one tenacious local historian instead jumped at the challenge.

Nona Footz says she was researching the biography of actress/producer Eva La Gallienne, the godmother of Off-Broadway Theater, when she first came across Weston's woman of mystery.

"I saw a reference to Alice DeLamar in Eva's biography, and I stopped in my tracks. It said this heiress, suspected lesbian, arts patron, Alice Delamar lived in Weston! And I thought, 'Oh, I've never heard of her, who is she?'"

That was the start of an eight-year descent into a rabbit hole that would consume Footz, now the world's leading authority on the quintessential "mysterious benefactor." She learned that DeLamar was a major, however silent, patron to the American art world throughout the mid-century. Choreographer George Balanchine and sculptor Isamu Noguchi were just a few of the dancers, sculptors, writers, painters and glitterati who had benefited from DeLamar's charity.

"It just hooked me," Footz told Patch. "I thought, 'I've just got to know about this woman.'"

The historian learned that DeLamar, the daughter of a fabulously wealthy mining magnate, had written her own memoir, which had mysteriously disappeared in 1983, the year she died at age 88 in Weston.

And so the game was afoot.

The circumstances of the vanishing manuscript were "quite suspect," Footz says, as all good vanishing manuscript circumstances should be.

"Her private secretary disposed of all of Alice's papers and personal belongings the night of her death, threw them out in black garbage bags, and a neighbor went through it and took everything."

At the core of the Alice DeLamar conundrum is a woman who surrounded herself with the elite of the New York art world, was staggeringly generous, yet equally reclusive. She never married, never had children, but had "a lot of girl friends," Footz said, and she believes the mores of the time may have prompted DeLamar to seek the shadows.

"Yet she had the gumption to write her life story, and that of her father!" Footz said. "Then somebody swiped it."

Everyone still living who has had any connection with the missing manuscript has been extremely tight-lipped about it, according to the historian. That makes her think there is more at play than an out-dated embarrassment over the author's sexual orientation. The arts patron's suspected connection with the White Russian movement has fanned the mystery's flames without shedding any useful light.

Footz figured the manuscript had to be around someplace, and has been chasing it for eight years. She's now sitting atop a six-foot pile of photos, diaries, letters and other clues she has gathered from around the world, and is ready to tell DeLamar's story. The historian is currently shopping that book around to publishers. Although she hasn't yet found the missing manuscript, Footz has let on that she is close. She suspects now that she knows where it is, but won't reveal that until she has it in her hands.

In the meantime, she's kept a blog of her quest at The Manuscript Hunter, and is working to get the New York Times to publish an obituary on the heiress.

At 7 p.m. on Jan. 22, Footz will present "The Missing Manuscript – In Search of Alice DeLamar’s Life Story," a lecture and slide show, at the Weston Historical Society, 104 Weston Road. The event is free and open to the public. RSVP at info@westonhistoricalsociety.org or call 203-226-1804.

If that doesn't scratch your Alice itch, the enigmatic heiress is one of the extraordinary women featured in the Weston Historical Society’s current exhibit, "Three Women Who Made Weston Weston," which is on view through the end of January.