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The Castle of Otranto. All of this goes on in something that is not to be believed. The Kerr-Hilton, as Jean Kerr calls her home, is both the sum and summary of its contents, a brick and half-timber Tudor-Spanish architectural error on the edge of Long Island Sound. Like the Kerrs, it sits squarely in the suburbs, but its outlines are in fairyland. Built by a rich automotive inventor on the original foundations of the Larchmont Shore Club stables, it looks like the Castle of Otranto, reaching high with turrets and towers and a cupola. It also looks as easy to clean as the lower Bowery, and Mrs. Kerr moans that a Cunard liner could run back and forth across the Atlantic all winter on the oil it takes to heat the place.
The front door is a' massive triptych of oak and brass with a 20-lb. knocker that sports Venus and Neptune hanging from the jowls of a metacanine beast. If you walk in hurriedly, you are instantly outdoors again in a huge courtyard, having passed through a small hall with flooring that is a mixture of Pennsylvania linoleum and Spanish tile. The courtyard is full of rosebushes, boxwoods, a grape arbor, and mirrors on an inland wall that reflect the sea. A statue of St. Francis stands in the center in a filled-in pond that once, in another era, brimmed with gallons of champagne. At one end is a playpen big enough for a growing mastiff, but it only contains one tiny Kerr.
The Bells Toll. Indoors is a dining room with a broad-beamed oak floor, no rug, and a table placed so strategically that it would take a center fielder's throw ing arm to get a porringer full of Pablum to the wall. The kitchen's casement windows are ornamented with stained glass. On a counter is a Teddy bear in an electric frying pan, and a copy of Meals for Two that hasn't been opened in 15 years.
At the other extreme of the house is Walter Kerr's study, where 16 theater seats are screwed permanently into the floor; there he shows old slapstick silent films to guests ("Walter thinks nobody should have to be adorable right after dinner," says Jean). The adjacent living room—like every other room in the house, half the niches and all the floors—is filled with books, everything from Boccaccio to Beerbohm, plus a slim volume called Per Piacere, Non Mangiate Le Margherite (Please Don't Eat the Daisies). In the room next door, a television set peers out from the interior of an enormous iron stove, symbolically lighting no fires in this particular house. High above it all, bolted to the eaves, is a functioning 28-bell carillon that, at the touch of a switch, tolls out something from Carmen, which, in the Larchmont libretto, means "Come home." Whether for dinner, discipline or to greet a visitor, the Kerr boys head in when they hear the bell; so, in fact, did their late, spectacularly lamented cat.
Jean Kerr herself stopped tintinnabu-lating once just long enough to get married. It was a wise decision, since the groom was a careful, analytical college professor who has always looked after her with extraordinary attentiveness. That and nearly everything else about her was summed up a while ago in a quick exchange while the Kerrs were crossing a Manhattan street—her swift-rising wisecracks, her devotion to her husband, the graceful way she wears her fame.