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New Canaan There & Then: Martin Mull, Actor/Painter/Musician/New Canaanite

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‘New Canaan There & Then’ is sponsored by Brown Harris Stevens Realtors Bettina Hegel, Joanne Santulli and Dawn Sterner. 
“The town where I grew up has a ZIP code of E-I-E-I-O.”
“Show business is just like high school, except you get paid.” 
There are celebrities who have sought fame since childhood, and others that have had it thrust upon them later in life. And then there are those rare individuals who seem to have wandered into celebrity-dom by mistake. 

Martin Mull belonged in the last category. He was an actor who preferred to be known as a painter, a musician who made a career out of songs that were funny for reasons that sometimes took a moment to appreciate, and a comedian-satirist whose greatest gift was making the ordinary American look just a tad ridiculous. He was also a New Canaan resident and a graduate of New Canaan High School. Mull became familiar to millions of television viewers through roles in hit shows like Roseanne, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Arrested Development, Two and a Half Men, and the cult movie comedy Clue.

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New Canaan There & Then: The Story of Huguette Clark and Le Beau Chateau

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‘New Canaan There & Then’ is sponsored by Brown Harris Stevens Realtors Bettina Hegel, Joanne Santulli and Dawn Sterner. 

For years the rumors about the 52-acre property at 104 Dan’s Highway were rampant. The purported owner bought it as a wedding gift for a husband who died on their honeymoon. It served as a family bomb shelter in the event of nuclear war. It was owned by the CIA as a safe house. It was owned by a daughter of Donald Trump resulting from his illicit affair with Tricia Nixon (OK the last one was totally made up; for the record AI would never do that).

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New Canaan There & Then: The New Canaan ‘Town Beach’ (RIP)

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‘New Canaan There & Then’ is sponsored by Brown Harris Stevens Realtors Bettina Hegel, Joanne Santulli and Dawn Sterner. 

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“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.” — Mark Twain

“Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda” — Oxford English Dictionary (1606)

On the north shore of Long Island Sound, nestled east of a long sandy stretch comprising Rowayton’s public Bayley Beach and the exclusive Weeburn Beach Club, lies 12.8 acres of spectacular geographic beauty. That is the property of the Roton Point Association, since 1984 a recreational condominium club serving as the summer go-to place for its limited number of 400 members. From the 1870s through 1941, Roton Point Park, where the Association is now located, was one of the preeminent attractions along the shores of the Sound, home to an amusement park and venue for countless legendary musical acts of the big band era, including Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and Billie Holliday. 

From its elevated shady picnic grove overlooking the water to its sandy beaches, hotel, dance floor, carousel, roller coaster, and midway rides, Roton Point attracted thousands of visitors each season. It even had its own steamer that would ply the waters between Rowayton and New York City to facilitate attendance. When the park fell on hard times following the Hurricane of 1938, which wreaked catastrophic havoc throughout New England, and the onset of the Second World War a few years later, its proprietor, Neville Bayley, put the park up for sale in 1942. 

The acreage of the Roton Point Park that today comprises Weeburn Beach Club had already been sold to the private club in 1934.

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New Canaan There & Then: Before ‘Johnny,’ There Was ‘Jack’

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‘New Canaan There & Then’ is sponsored by Brown Harris Stevens Realtors Bettina Hegel, Joanne Santulli and Dawn Sterner. 

On Feb. 11, 1960, Jack Paar, America’s first late-night television king and the second host of NBC’s Tonight Show, on the cover of both Life and Time magazines and at the height of his fame and power, did the unthinkable: He quit his job. In tears. And in front of a live studio audience in Studio 6B of the NBC Studios at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York. But back to that moment a bit later .

New Canaan There & Then

New Canaan There & Then: John & Carolyn Kennedy, the New Canaan Couple That Might Have Been

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‘New Canaan There & Then’ is sponsored by Brown Harris Stevens Realtors Bettina Hegel, Joanne Santulli and Dawn Sterner. 

Within days of the tragedy that summer of 1999, the New York Post carried the intriguing story that the beautiful young couple were under contract to purchase property in New Canaan. 

The story, titled in the Post’s inimitable way, “Estate Would Have Been Great for Kids,” was uncharacteristically fact specific:
“John F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife Carolyn were building a Connecticut dream house with everything a Camelot couple could wish for – even llamas grazing nearby. The spread has lots of rooms, lots of land, a tennis court, a swimming pool. And it’s in New Canaan, the tony town where Carolyn Bessette Kennedy spent part of her childhood and where her sister Lisa Ann lives.”
The Post story identified the property as 65 Barnegat Road, a large parcel of land at the northern tip of New Canaan, on the border with New York State. Construction there was well underway continued the story, and the Post identified the owner as Alex Kaali-Nagy, a respected architect and local builder responsible for a number of high-end construction projects in Greenwich and elsewhere in Fairfield County. Two days later, the New York Daily News threw water on the story of its arch competitor.