Letting go: such sweet sorrow

A blast of ocean-scented air cuts through the passenger window of the sports car heading along Pacific Coast Highway, ruffling the silvery strands of Horton Foote’s hair. The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter, nattily dressed as ever, is on his way to dinner in Santa Monica after an afternoon of working on his new play, “The Tax Assessor.”

Is he comfortable, his driver and hostess asks, is there enough leg room? “Oh, goodness yes,” he says, “I just love it” -- a sentiment Foote expresses in one way or another with emphatic conviction about so much of what he encounters in the world.

At 89, he seems curiously untainted by the spoils of success -- decades of it. He wears his gentlemanly manner as naturally, and as unwaveringly, as he wears his proper attire. You feel like a rotten scoundrel around him for so much as complaining about the heat.

Foote loves it in Pacific Palisades, where he has spent the last six months at the home of his daughter, actress and producer Hallie Foote, and her husband, writer and actor Devon Abner, writing “Main Street USA,” his first feature movie in seven years. “I’ve fallen in love with film all over again,” he says.

“It’s wonderful here, very quiet, very comfortable,” he says of the Spanish-style duplex and of the guest bedroom in which he also wrote his 1999 play “The Carpetbagger’s Children,” sitting in an easy chair and composing longhand on a yellow legal pad. “And I can go out for walks in the neighborhood. I love that.”

“Dad knows more about the neighbors than I do,” Hallie says. “He waves and talks to them and comes back in and reports little bits of information they’ve told him.”

There has been the occasional trip back to his apartment in New York and, most recently, to his birthplace of Wharton, Texas, the inspirational setting for most of his plays. “I’ve known the beginnings and ends of so many people in that town. I loved their stories.”

Earlier this month he made the difficult journey to Wharton with Hallie to pack up and ship off most of the furniture and all of the paintings he collected when he lived in New England that filled the house where he was brought up. On Aug. 6, the bulk of his collection of late 18th to early 19th century antiques and American folk art -- more than 200 pieces -- will be auctioned by Northeast Auctions in Manchester, N.H.

Foote’s “great passion in life” is for theater and film writing, he says more than once but to no one’s surprise given that his output includes at least 60 plays (he’s not sure of the exact number), 14 scripts for movies and another 14 for television. On this particular evening, and later, on a warm afternoon in Pacific Palisades, he speaks with equal ardor about his love for antiques and folk art, which he has collected diligently for almost half a century.

“I thought I could never find anything that would hold any interest for me except one thing, writing. But I discovered I had a passion for antiques and especially for paintings. It absorbed me greatly. At one time or another as I’ve gotten mad at the theater, I’ve thought, ‘I’m gonna be an antiques dealer.’ But of course I don’t know enough. It takes a lifetime to learn it.”

His decision to sell his beloved collection did not come easily, and is still not easy for Foote to contemplate for too long. “Even talking about it, I get a little queasy in my stomach,” he says. The day the appraisers came, he wanted to say, “ ‘I’ve changed my mind.’ I just had this sinking feeling that a part of my life was about to be taken away.”

And the day the pieces were finally moved out: “Oh, Lord have mercy,” he says, his euphonious voice diminishing to a murmur. “I almost went to bed.”

Foote began collecting antiques in the late 1950s with his wife, Lillian, who died in 1992 after 47 years of marriage. They had just bought their first house in Nyack, N.Y., and money for furnishings was scarce.

Everything they looked at in furniture stores that in any way appealed to them was too expensive.

One day they happened by a small building off a highway with a sign that said simply, “Antiques.” They went in, and discovered, to their wonder, that they not only liked what they saw, but could afford it. “The owner told us that what she had was mostly cottage antiques” -- in other words, he says, “attractive but not great craftsmanship. What I found out later is that they were furnishings for less affluent people. We filled our station wagon that afternoon.” Eventually the Footes began to buy paintings, and eventually they got more sophisticated in their knowledge and tastes.

“Pretty soon our house became more and more filled with antiques. And then I became passionately fond of early American architecture. I wanted badly to have an 18th century house.”

In 1964, they bought a 1760 house on 50 acres in New Hampshire. By then Foote had written the screenplay and won his first Oscar for “To Kill a Mockingbird” (his second Oscar was for “Tender Mercies” in 1983) and the teleplay for “The Trip to Bountiful,” later adapted for the stage and big screen.

They continued to buy antiques, but Foote’s “great and abiding interest,” as he wrote in the auction catalog “Horton Foote Collection of American Folk Art,” was in the paintings, particularly the portraits.

In the early 1980s, the Footes had a yearning to return to New York City, where they had lived before moving to the suburbs of Nyack to rear their two daughters and two sons. Their rented apartment in the West Village was their primary residence until 1990, when they moved to Wharton, into the house Foote’s parents built in 1916, the year of his birth. “I will never sell it,” says Foote. “Never.”

Two years later, Lillian died after a brief illness. Foote kept the New York apartment, sold the New Hampshire house, and continued to buy paintings.

Often, he says, he would wake at night and “go sit with the paintings and they would calm me down. It was as if those faces were waiting for you. Depending on how I was feeling, I would have a different relationship to the paintings. At other times I would look at them in a very practical way. Why is this good? Why did this person paint in this style? I thought they were beautiful. But a lot of times when people would come in, I could just tell they were thinking, my God, how ugly.”

As he was spending more time in New York and California and less in Wharton -- “it got too lonely just by myself,” he says -- and with no caretaker to look after the place, Foote realized that it no longer made good sense to hang on to the collection. It is both freeing and wrenching for him. He still wonders whether he’ll be able to go to the auction and watch the pieces disappear, one by one.

“There’ll be that awful moment when it’s all done,” Foote says. “There’s that emptiness, you know. It’s like when I would go home from school after my grandmother died -- there’s something missing, and it’s irreparable. All this makes you think about how fragile life is and how it’s not permanent, none of it, and we must get used to change.

“I’ve thought a lot about what this lady New Englander, a dealer, said to me: ‘Horton, they’ve served their time. And now it’s time to move on.’ ”

He nods, grows silent, then points to the night sky: “Don’t you just love a full moon?”

Barbara King can be reached at barbara.king@latimes.com

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Auction details

What: Horton Foote Collection of

American Folk Art

When: Aug. 6, 11 a.m.

Where: Americana & Folk Art Weekend Auction, Manchester, N.H.

Information: Northeast Auctions may be reached from Aug. 4-7 at (603) 627-6200; www.northeastauctions.com.