Tom Hanks Loans Typewriters from His Legendary Collection for Exhibit in Sag Harbor

Paramount to the show, says Fischl, was his recognition that typewriters “with this incredible design evolution” fit the Church’s commitment to devoting one show a year to the intersection of art and material culture. (Last year’s exhibition was “Re-Cycle: The Ubiquitous Bicycle.”) Fischl saw Hanks in California Typewriter, and “realized that this guy was a total typewriter weenie,” he says. Because the two have mutual friends—including Kate Capshaw and Steven Spielberg, Martin Short, and Steve Martin—and have had dinner a couple of times, Fischl was able to approach him. “He was incredibly responsive and generous.”

Doonan, the former creative director of Barney’s—or “the diminutive doyen of display,” as he says Women’s Wear Daily liked to call him—counts himself an author these days. Yet when Fischl floated the idea that he design the exhibition during the tai chi class they take together on Shelter Island, “I leapt at the chance,” Doonan says. “Eric sent me pictures of every typewriter they were going to have in the show. When you see them all together you realize how exquisite they are, from 19th-century Edwardian models to electric ones. The typewriter was the soundtrack to the 20th century. Before,” he adds wistfully, “it peters out.”

This write stuff is personal for Doonan, who grew up in the southern English factory town of Reading, “It changed the trajectory of my parents’ lives,” he says. “My mother left school at 13, my father at 15, and he joined the army. They met right after World War II, and decided they would go to the local Gregg School to learn to touch type. That lifted my mother out of the rural, working class and gave her a passport into a different world.  She ended up working for the BBC. My father wound up at the BBC in a senior position.”

Typewriters also fascinate Doonan “because, until a certain point, every screenplay, final demand, love letter, or hate mail was written on them.” In a rolling video montage assembled for the installation, Ruby Keeler tap-dances on a giant typewriter in 1937’s Ready Willing and Able. “Of course we have Jack Nicholson in The Shining,” Doonan says,  “and the classic scene from Julia where Jane Fonda as Lillian Hellman hurls her typewriter through the window.” Peans to the typewriter from advertising’s golden age provide further background to the shimmering museum-style vitrines enfolding each typewriter. Hanks’s Corona No. 3 evokes Ernest Hemingway, who favored one, and his Hermes 3000 has intimations of Truman Capote, John Cheever, Jack Kerouac, and Sylvia Plath. The design of his IBM Selectric hews to Eliot Noyes’s prototype, and his bright red Olivetti Valentine evokes Ettore Sottsass. On Saturday, February 1, The Church will present The Boston Typewriter Orchestra in… concert.

As closely as Fischl has chronicled a swath of East Coast American life in his art, he admits he has never included a typewriter. On the other hand, as a concurrent smaller show on the main floor makes plain, the painter Sam Messer, initially spurred by a friendship with Paul Auster and the writer’s Hermes of choice, has created over 200 typewriter paintings. “Some Odes: Sam Messer with Paul Auster, Eleanor Gaver, Denis Johnson and Sharon Olds” is an eclectic sampling compiled by The Church’s executive director, Sheri Pasquerella. Fischl says such paintings “symbolize the creativity and ideas about narrative that flow between artists and writers. But typewriters are hard to paint. There’s a lot of positive and negative space, and detail.”

Watch this space in case Tom Hanks induces him to re-think that stance.