It is around 1958, and Elliott Nash of Long Island, New York State, finds his wife unwrapping a miniature gazebo. Nell surprises her husband with the news that this is the model of an eighteenth-century gazebo she has purchased at auction for $500. The gazebo started life in an English garden before being exported to the United States some years earlier. Nell intends to erect the gazebo in their garden and to enjoy views over Long Island Sound, but her husband has murderous intentions…
The gazebo in question, we are told, is eighteen feet high and fourteen feet around, and began life on an estate in Henley on Thames, England. There, the gazebo was said to have been the spot where the Prince Regent ‘dallied’ with his mistresses. ‘Naughty boys, those Hanovers’, observes Nell.
The Gazebo was written by Alec Coppel (based on an idea by Alec and his wife Myra) and premiered on Broadway in December 1958 with Walter Slezak and Jayne Meadows in the lead roles. What Nell doesn’t know is that her husband is being blackmailed, and when the foundations for the new gazebo are being laid in their garden, it provides the perfect opportunity for him to do away with the extortionist and bury the body. There are however twists to this black comedy, which the Flâneuse leaves readers to discover for themselves.
The stage directions for the play stipulated that the Elliott Nash living room had a fashionable and modern expanse of window in their home, which formed the backdrop to the stage. The gazebo can be seen under construction as the play continues.
If the idea of burying a body under a garden building sounds a little familiar, it is because that was the modus operandi of the murderer in Agatha Christie’s Dead Man’s Folly, published in America in October 1956 and in the United Kingdom one month later.
Clearly there was something in the air. In 1956 Patricia Wentworth had also published a story with a garden ornament at its heart. The Gazebo featuring the detective Miss Silver. In this story a body is found in the gazebo, rather than under it, and it is up to Miss Silver to solve the mystery.
A film of Coppel’s play appeared in cinemas in 1959, with Glenn Ford and Debbie Reynolds bringing ‘all the loves, laughs and murderous fun’ of the stage hit to the big screen. A very pretty open gazebo was constructed on the set – you can see it in the trailer for the film here.
A year later the play opened at the Savoy Theatre in London with Ian Carmichael and Moira Lister in the title roles.
As a small diversion… the programme for the London production of The Gazebo carried an advertisement for Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap. In 1960 it was already described as ‘the longest running play of any kind in the history of the British Theatre!’.
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