The book on which the 1964 film “Lilith” was based is primarily set in the Chestnut Lodge mental institution on West Montgomery Avenue in Rockville, Md. This beautiful brick building did not appear in the film, but some scenes were shot at a house in Rockville, and a scene was shot near Great Falls as well. Can you locate the Rockville home the movie was shot in?
— Michael Lloyd, Rockville
“They had a call for extras and everybody and his brother wanted to be in the movie,” said Patricia Ebrahimi, who grew up in Rockville. She wasn’t in the movie, but her great-aunt Lucy Neville Smith was — and so was her great-aunt’s house: 108 Forest Ave.
“She lived there for 92 years, from birth to death,” Patricia said. Patricia owns the house now, meaning it has been in the same family since it was built in 1890.
The house caught the eye of a film crew that came to Maryland in 1963 to scout locations for the screen version of J.R. Salamanca’s 1961 novel “Lilith.” The book tells the story of Vincent, an Army veteran who goes to work at a high-end mental hospital and falls under the spell of a beguiling patient, the titular Lilith.
Chestnut Lodge and Rockville stand in for the hospital “Poplar Lodge” and “Stonemont,” respectively, in the novel. Salamanca knew what he was writing about: He was a former GI who worked at Chestnut Lodge. “Lilith” was his second book. He went on to become a creative-writing professor at the University of Maryland. (Among his students: a callow Answer Man.)
The director of “Lilith” was Robert Rossen, fresh off the success of “The Hustler,” for which he’d received Oscar nominations as director and co-screenwriter. “Lilith” starred Warren Beatty and Jean Seberg as Vincent and Lilith. Kim Hunter played a psychiatrist and Peter Fonda a patient.
We still get excited when movies are made in our backyards. That was rarer in 1963, especially in Rockville and in Barnesville, a sleepy village that was the setting for a long carnival and jousting scene. (It is the state sport of Maryland, after all.)
Many extras were recruited — at $10 a day — from Poolesville High School. Paul Sisler, a Rockville postal employee, was hired to hold a fishing pole in scenes shot at Great Falls and the C&O Canal. “I’ll say this,” Sisler told a journalist. “It’s not the most money I ever made. But it’s the easiest.”
Others, though, were bored by the endless retakes and complained about having to wear the same outfit for days on end, lest the continuity be ruined.
It wasn’t only extras who were local. A few veterans from Arena Stage appeared in the film, including Anne Meacham and Rene Auberjonois in an uncredited role.
At first, all the producers wanted of Lucy Smith — “Aunt Sis” to Patricia and her family — was her house. But after meeting her, they changed the role of Beatty’s grandfather to his grandmother and gave it to Smith.
The scenes set in the hospital were filmed at a mansion in Oyster Bay, N.Y., on Long Island, as were some of the interiors. A 16-year-old Patricia accompanied her great-aunt. “It was fabulous,” she said. “I met Warren Beatty. Peter Fonda took me for a drive in his silver Stingray.”
In the movie, Smith’s house is the home of Beatty’s ex-girlfriend and her husband: Jessica Walter, later to play Lucille Bluth on “Arrested Development,” and a young (and creepy) Gene Hackman.
It’s fascinating to compare today’s Rockville to what’s in the film. There’s the G.C. Murphy five-and-dime, the Villa movie theater, the Confederate statue . . .
Most of the old downtown no longer exists, having been demolished to make way for the abysmal Rockville Mall, which was itself eventually torn down. The Confederate statue is now in White’s Ferry.
Though it doesn’t appear in the film, Chestnut Lodge is gone too. It closed as a mental hospital in 2001. There were plans to transform the main building into condominiums, but a fire destroyed it in 2009. There are single-family homes on the grounds today.
While Salamanca’s novel had garnered glowing reviews — “polished prose of luminous beauty,” wrote the New York Times — Rossen’s film was less enthusiastically received. Local audiences who caught the D.C. premiere at the Dupont Theater on Oct. 14, 1964, enjoyed looking for familiar faces and places, but many found the film unsettling. It was no “My Fair Lady.” It was dark, with — spoiler alert — implicit sex (hetero- and homosexual), suicide and an entirely inappropriate relationship at its core.
The Post’s Richard L. Coe called “Lilith” an “absorbing, haunting story on the limitless unpredictabilities of love,” but faulted its leading man. “Had Beatty made a few more pictures before coming to this role,” Coe wrote, “he might have been equal to its demands.”
Rossen apparently was disappointed by the reaction. He never made another film and died two years after the release of “Lilith.” Salamanca died in 2013.
As for the house on Forest Avenue, said Patricia: “The movie paid enough money to Miss Lucy Neville Smith that she got the entire interior wallpapered.”
Twitter: @johnkelly
For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/john-kelly.