The scholars, preservationists and historians had been strategizing for about an hour inside the salon of the charming cypress cottage they were trying to save.
They all agreed that magic had been conjured in this very spot nearly a century ago. That’s when the writers DuBose and Dorothy Heyward invited the composer George Gershwin to visit their retreat, nicknamed Follywood, on the cozy barrier island of Folly Beach.
Gershwin was writing an opera based on DuBose Heyward’s novel “Porgy,” which was adapted into a play co-written with his wife. The story depicted Black life in Charleston, S.C., and the Heywards thought Gershwin should see firsthand the place, people and culture he was writing about. Although Gershwin composed some of the music in New York, his South Carolina visit resulted in eternal anthems like “Summertime.”
“That does bring up the elephant in the room,” said Harlan Greene, an author and historian who has done extensive research on the Heywards and the opera. He looked at those around him in mid-March, taking note that there were no Black people among the hopeful preservationists. “Here we are, a bunch of white people in a very diverse economy and you know, cultural appropriation.”
“Porgy and Bess” is largely celebrated as the Great American Opera. It is also weighted by the country’s historical baggage. The opera is an elevated piece of culture that explores the dynamics of segregated African Americans; in depicting Blacks as fully formed people nearly a century ago — and not as mammies or Mandingos by performers wearing blackface — it was an outlier. Yet it also faced significant criticism for reinforcing degrading stereotypes.
The Heywards were American. DuBose Heyward’s great-great-great grandfather, Thomas, signed the Declaration of Independence. They teamed with George and Ira Gershwin, whose parents had immigrated from Russia. The opera’s brain trust featured no one who looked like the people depicted in it.
The house has been on the market since last June with no serious buyers on the horizon. Folly Beach, just outside of Charleston, has no safeguards for historic homes, raising the question of what a city’s responsibilities, if any, are in safeguarding its own history.
The cottage, which stretches about 1,600 square feet across two stories, is surrounded by a tall wooden fence and is a portal to a bygone era. It stands out among the modern vacation homes that now line the area. “It hearkens back to a history that is visibly being erased on Folly Beach itself,” Greene said.
The home would likely be the spot of one of those nondescript homes if it wasn’t for the current owner, Myles Glick. His motivation is less historical and more personal; the home was cherished by his late wife, Kathy.
“I’m trying to preserve it for one reason,” said Glick, a retired architect. “I want the house to stay exactly the way she knew it, which is the way it is right now.”
It was headline news when Gershwin arrived on the barrier island nearly a century ago. “Gershwin, Gone Native,” read a 1934 article in The Post and Courier in Charleston: “Sleek Composer, Burned by Sun, Lets Beard Grow, Wears Only Torn Pants While Writing the Opera ‘Porgy.’”
“I have become acclimated,” Gershwin declared in the article. “You know, it is so pleasant here that it’s really a shame to work.”
Kathy Glick also adored the region. And she was an enormous fan of the opera. Myles estimates that she saw “Porgy and Bess” more than a dozen times. He knew better than to resist when the cottage was up for sale.
“It was just a matter of finding out how to pay for it,” he said. “When she wanted something, she got it and that’s the truth.”
They bought it for $375,000 in 1998.
The home features small rooms, built-in bookcases, a second-story sleeper’s porch with a two-sided fireplace and an unattached writer’s booth.
“When I walked in here, I could feel the genius,” Kathy told The Post and Courier in 1999.
The Glicks held onto the Heywards furniture and memorabilia, restoring the house by placing fresh wood in the foundation and locating appliances that fit the era when replacing the kitchen and a bathroom.
Kathy opened the house for tours about a decade after buying the property.
She kept index cards that discussed the cottage, the Heywards and “Porgy and Bess.” Inevitably, she’d break into songs with tourists. Kathy never let her husband in for a tour, though. She was worried that she couldn’t keep a straight face with him as a spectator.
The Glicks also purchased another home across the street from Follywood. They dreamed of living in that home to be close to the cottage. But Kathy became ill with Lewy body dementia about a decade ago. Instead, their son moved into the other home.
In 2022, Kathy died at the age of 73. The Glicks were married for 48 years. “I’m glad I married her,” Myles Glick said. “Because I was very happy.”
Glick had planned to work until he was 80. “But Kathy getting sick and taking care of her, it took everything out of me,” he said.
Now 75, Glick spoke a day after he visited the cottage to fix some siding and rails and one day before a scheduled surgery. He is tired, he said, of working on the house.
“It’s a wood house,” Glick said. “Is it going to deteriorate even further? One of the shutters is rotted. I’ve got to get that replaced. The sooner the better to put it into somebody’s hands that will take care of it and maintain it.”
“Porgy and Bess” was one of the first representations of Black life in American popular culture. The opera was exported across the globe when the U.S. State Department selected it to represent the country on an international tour in the early 1950s just as the Civil Rights struggle was taking root domestically.
The Gershwins mandated that only Black performers play roles in an effort to avoid blackface. “Porgy” supercharged the singer Leontyne Price’s career. A young Maya Angelou toured the world in the traveling production. The opera’s music found voice in Black jazz innovators like Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong.
But the praise was far from universal. James Baldwin characterized “Porgy and Bess” as “a white man’s vision of Negro life.” And while Harry Belafonte released a “Porgy and Bess” album with Lena Horne in 1959, he declined a role to star in the film version because he found it “racially demeaning.”
Those complicated dynamics endure and were on the mind of the historian, Greene, when he looked around at those attending the meeting to help save the house. He would have liked to have seen some Black people in attendance. He’d like to have seen some young people. But he was conversing with several well-meaning white adults.
“I do think that that’s an important conversation for us to be really transparent about,” said Layle Chambers, a community organizer who brought the group together. “We’re going to have to reach out and really be diligent in our efforts to bring all people to the table, because I think we’ve got to have it as a cultural arts center.”
Lauren Waring Douglas, a producer who was not at the meeting, said she supports the house being preserved.
Waring Douglas, who is Black, is working on a documentary about the first performance of “Porgy and Bess” in Charleston. That moment did not arrive until 1970 because of local segregation laws.
“Because Charleston could be such a limiting place to so many Black people, saving the Porgy house doesn’t hold the same meaning that it does to white people,” she said. “I say this with all due love and respect: The history is the history. The complicity is the complicity.”
The meeting closed with the promise to convene again soon.
One person who did not attend was Myles Glick. Vince Perna, Glick’s real estate agent, labeled his absence a reflection of the potential for conflicts of interest. Glick wants to preserve the house. He also wants to sell it. Perna’s job is to find him the best buyer.
Perna listed the house in June, and later sliced nearly half a million from the original $3.4 million asking price. There have been offers, but nothing concrete that would preserve it.
Tom Goodwin, Folly Beach’s mayor, joked that he would love for the city to buy the cottage and relocate his office to Follywood. About a year ago, the city talked to Glick, he said, without hearing any numbers on what it would take to land the house. Glick said he departed the conversations with the belief that city did not have the budget to purchase the home.
Now, Goodwin is interested to see what the preservationists will propose.
“As far as the city goes, we’re really in the infant stages of talking about what we would do or not do or can do,” Goodwin said. “That’s all I know right now. ”
As the group met, the irony was not lost that Folly Beach is a short 20-minute drive away from downtown Charleston, widely regarded as the birthplace of the country’s preservation movement. The Preservation Society of Charleston, founded in 1920, is America’s oldest community-based historic preservation organization and Charleston passed the first zoning ordinance enacted to protect historic resources in 1931.
“Unlike the city of Charleston, there’s really no preservation protections,” said Brian Turner, the president and chief executive of the Preservation Society of Charleston. “You can see the character of these beach towns changing very quickly up and down the coast.”
Glick has made indications he wants the home to be preserved, but he has yet to take steps to make that happen, Turner said. “The ball is in his court to an extent,” he said. The city could enact ordinances, but that could take time, Turner added. “And I don’t know if that would work on the owner’s timeline.”
For Glick, the sooner the home is off the market and Kathy’s memory is honored with a preservation plan — the better.
“I’d like to have sold it,” he said. “Last year.”
Jonathan Abrams writes about the intersections of sports and culture and the changing cultural scenes in the South.
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