A Love Affair That Defies Age : Master Printer, Actress Are Opposites That Attract

They sat side by side in her cracker-box house in West Los Angeles, knees touching, their shoulders sometimes leaning into each other’s, particularly when one would say something cute or funny. They reminisced--about their past, how they met about 55 years ago on a track field at UC Berkeley; but also about a certain time, when Southern California was both a celluloid Babylon, as one writer called it, and an intellectual mecca. And they teased, about how she misled him when she said she loved baseball and how, now that they’re keeping company, he has to do the dishes.

This is a love story. Filled with silly moments and long looks, fond glances and light touches, giggles and sighs, teasing and endearments.

Both Successful

It’s a story about two people, both successful individually, who now in the later years of their lives are doing exactly what they want to do. Which is much of what they’ve always done--only, they say, more relaxed. They’ve also added something new to their lives in the last three years: each other.

Ward Ritchie and Gloria Stuart. He’s the master printer, recipient of countless awards and accolades, a man who if he weren’t so active today at 81 would nonetheless still be considered a national resource for his participation in a unique era in Los Angeles history.

She’s an actress, 40 films during the 1930s and 24 since she started up again in 1977, an artist whose whimsical primitive paintings and lithographs have been exhibited and sold in galleries throughout the United States, a gourmet cook, world traveler and, at age 75, maybe one of the last great free spirits, a soul sister to Auntie Mame and Isadora Duncan.

An Odd Pairing

Not married, seeing each other mostly on weekends at either her house or his in Laguna Beach, they would seem an odd pairing. He, by his own admission, tends toward shyness, introspection. She radiates energy and even in the 1980s, a certain bohemianism: in the middle of a dinner party, donning an apricot layered-cut wig just to liven things up; a 35-year every-other-Friday poker game with such Hollywood veterans as Fay and Michael Kanin, Julie and Ann Epstein, Nat and Helen Perrin, Norman Panama.

He is a Republican, yet not so much conservative as simply apolitical. She is a Democrat, but even beyond that, a self-admitted “bleeding heart” who dashes off letters to congressmen and joins action committees.

But all this is the allure: Any differences are to be enjoyed, played up. He lets her get away with everything--and nothing, a perfect counterpoint to her playfulness. She is his best audience, enchanted by his wry observations and self-mocking wit.

“I enjoy her as a spectator,” Ritchie said. “I’m rather shy. I don’t expand. She’s so vibrant. She’s a font of delightful information. My friends, the conservative old fogies, they’re fascinated by her.”

“Not me. It’s because I’m an actress. That’s a magic word,” Stuart interrupted. “When he took me down to Laguna Beach to meet his friends, they were all very politely interested that Ward had a girl, then one day somebody said to me, ‘What do you do?’ I said I was an actress and immediately I had this glamour. It’s funny, nobody ever says, ‘Are you a good actress?’

“Anyway, let me tell you about Ward. He’s special. My friends have gone to hear his speeches and they’re hypnotized. . . . I’m just rocked by all he’s done, especially in a field that requires intelligence, an artistic nature, sophistication.”

They looked at each other fondly as she added, “I think what’s special is that we take a great deal of pleasure in each other’s company.”

Sly Smile From Ritchie

This is not to say they don’t have occasional disagreements. They do. And when that happens, Stuart voices her exasperation. Ritchie leaves the room.

That must be maddening.

A sly smile from Ritchie, then, “Yes, I know.”

Well, these disagreements, what are they about?

Stuart: “He didn’t bring me flowers once.”

Ritchie: “You can’t come to her house without a present.”

Stuart: “My mother raised me that every time you visit someone, you bring a gift. Now Ward always appears at my door with a gift.”

Ritchie: “Yes, I knock and she looks through the peephole and checks.”

The presents, what are they?

“Sometimes he gives me beautiful poems that he’s printed himself.”

“That’s when I have time to print. . . . You know, it’s a great chore being affiliated with this girl. She insists that I write her every day.”

“And all I get,” Stuart said, a mock pout to her voice, “is a petit ecrit of his day. ‘I went here . . . I went there . . . I did my laundry.’ I never get any good gossip.”

Of course, besides the gossip and the catching up, there are the poems. Both were friends and admirers of the late Carlyle McIntyre, a teacher at Occidental College who imbued his students with an affection for poetry and even the desire to be a poet.

“I spend a great deal of time on my letters to Ward. Do you spend a lot of time on your letters to me?” she asked, turning to Ritchie.

“Of course, what else do I have to do?”

But they don’t write to each other when they’re together, do they?

“No,” Ritchie replied, “and it’s a great relief. That’s why I come up here so often.” Stuart and Ritchie reminisce and it’s like sitting in on a home movie featuring some of the era’s most creative people. Start with Ritchie at Occidental College, a Phi Gamma Delta fraternity brother with Lawrence Clark Powell, the former librarian and dean of the library school at UCLA, and sculptor Gordon Newell. (But even before that, there’s Ritchie in grade school with bibliophile Jake Zeitlin.) Stuart, who was raised in Santa Monica and had been acting since she was 14, met Newell while he was working in Berkeley. And Ritchie met Stuart while he was visiting Newell.

Missed the Wedding

Newell and Stuart were married in 1930. Ritchie was to be Newell’s best man, except that he got a chance to apprentice with the French printer Francois Louis Schmid and missed the wedding. He returned to the United States a year later, heady with his new printing expertise plus the glamour of “eating, drinking and writing poetry” with W. H. Auden, and M.F.K. Fisher and her husband, Al Fisher. Through a complicated chain of events, he headed west to Carmel where he hoped to see Robinson Jeffers and persuade the poet to write an article that he would then print for the bibliophilic magazine, Colophon. Jeffers said yes, and from that first printing, the Ward Ritchie Press was born.

Meanwhile, Stuart, who was living in Carmel with Newell and waiting for her career to get going, was offered a role in “The Seagull” at the Pasadena Playhouse. She hitched a ride down the coast with Ritchie, did her stint at the Playhouse and was duly discovered.

This was the exciting time. Stuart was one of Hollywood’s belles, making movies faster than you could watch them. Ritchie was one of a number of art printers who flourished in Southern California, all of them stimulating and encouraging each other.

As for the Ritchie-Stuart friendship, “Well, when Gloria was married to Gordon,” Ritchie said, “we saw a lot of each other. She bought Gordon a millhouse on Hyperion across from my studio. But then they separated.”

“Tell what he (Newell) said when he heard we’d gotten together (recently),” Stuart remarked, then told it herself: “He said, ‘Well, they deserve each other.’ ” She burst into laughter.

“But it’s funny to think how it started, how it all comes full circle. I thought of that when we all had dinner together.”

Back to the story, though, Ritchie didn’t see much of Stuart after the divorce. “She was in the affluent Hollywood crowd and I was a starving artist.”

“And besides, my second husband took a dim view of my seeing my first husband.” That was Arthur Sheekman, a writer for the Marx Brothers.

So the years went by. Stuart, urged by her husband, pulled away from acting. They had a daughter, Sylvia. At age 55, she took up painting and very soon thereafter, began having one-woman shows. Ritchie by now was married to the former Marka Dietrich and had five sons, including three from a former marriage.

The two couples rarely saw each other and, in fact, at least 20 years had passed when Ritchie read an article about Stuart in the Los Angeles Times’ Home magazine in April, 1980. There he learned that her husband had died four years earlier (of Alzheimer’s disease).

In 1981 Ritchie’s wife died of cancer. Still, no contact. In 1983 when Carlyle McIntyre--the man they’d all so admired at Occidental--died, Ritchie printed a commemorative book of his poems and sent a copy to Stuart. She responded with a note inviting Ritchie to dinner next time he was in the neighborhood. “I spent about a month mulling that one. But my wife had died and I’d been starving ever since, so the prospect of a good meal sounded good.”

And the moment he walked through Stuart’s door on March 15, 1983--the romance began.

They’ve no interest in making it legal, however. Says Ritchie: “I don’t see any reason for it (marriage). I wouldn’t want to start delving into her financial affairs. As it now is, we’ve separate incomes, separate friends. . . . Though,” he added, with a teasing glance at Stuart, “she’s always regretted that we weren’t married. She’s always saying ‘just think we’d be married 55 years now.’ ” Stuart laughed. “When you’re not married and there are no bonds,” Stuart said, “you try harder.” When they’re apart, they can pursue their separate projects--she her bonsai and painting and acting and the cats, he an assortment of fine printing projects.

When they’re together, they do what any other couple does. They go to movies, though he’s a die-hard John Wayne fan who wiggles and falls asleep in the foreign films she admires. They see friends and their families. They watch television, though she’s incredulous at the way a baseball game can cut into an otherwise productive day. They talk. They print (he’s been teaching her and now she’s collaborating with him on several projects). They make plans: whale-watching in February, a barge trip up the Thames in the spring.

And they allow themselves no regrets--not even that they didn’t find each other earlier.