THE NUT LADY RETURNS

The New Yorker
Issue of 2005-04-18

By Tad Friend

Filbert by filbert, the Nut Museum is once more taking shape. For
thirty years, Elizabeth Tashjian ran the museum out of her house, a
Gothic Revival mansion in Old Lyme, Connecticut. Millions of Americans
knew her as “the Nut Lady” from her periodic guest appearances on the
“Tonight Show,” where she would expound on the metaphysics of the
nut. In both roles, she wore silk robes from her Armenian
grandmother’s trousseau, to underscore the point that many of the
“popular” nuts originated near Armenia, in Asia Minor. (Not everyone
made the connection.) At home, after pocketing the museum admission
fee-three dollars and a nut-Tashjian would show visitors paintings
she’d done of walnuts menaced by bullying nutcrackers and her “Mask of
the Unknown Nut” sculpture. In an early visit to the “Tonight Show,”
in 1981, she carried a thirty-five-pound coco-de-mer from the
Seychelles that resembled a woman’s buttocks. The existence of such a
sexually provocative nut, she informed an enchanted Johnny Carson,
utterly refuted Darwin. Away from the cameras, however, Tashjian, who
never married, lived an increasingly reclusive life with her cats,
Dinky and Pinky. By 2002, she was nearly indigent and quite frail. She
fell into a coma, and awoke several weeks later in a hospital to find
that the probate court had put her house on the market (it was later
sold to pay her debts). Her nuts and paintings and pricky-burr
sculptures, meanwhile, had been rescued by a sympathetic Connecticut
College professor named Christopher Steiner, who purchased them from
the town for the sum of zero dollars, but they were now the college’s
property. Worst of all, she herself had been declared incapable and
was a ward of the State of Connecticut.

Tashjian, who is now ninety-two, told a recent visitor to her room at
the Gladeview nursing home, in Old Saybrook, that although she never
liked being called the Nut Lady, it was vastly preferable to being a
state-certified nut. A small, stooped woman, she has a habit of
darting a shoulder forward to underline a point. “I’m in a
predicament!” she said. Still, she has allies. Professor Steiner, a
soft-spoken art historian who has featured Tashjian’s work in his
museum-studies classes, curated a show of her paintings last year. In
March, he arranged for her to perform for a local Cub Scout troop with
a few nuts he’d brought from the college’s storage locker. Tashjian
turned the scouts to making hazel-husk hats. She also told them about
the little bearded dwarf that dwells within every peanut embryo.
“There were some hardened kids there who wore black T-shirts and
looked really irritated,” Steiner said. “But after twenty minutes they
were totally into it.”

Tashjian had just learned that Steiner was going to bring ten of her
paintings to hang in her room at the nursing home. Buoyed, she was
planning a new painting about Eden: “I’m saying Eve gave Adam a nut,
and not an apple. Making a joke about sex and origin. Down with the
apple and up with the nut!” She laughed. “It’s a fresh idea, a
newie. Gauguin was attracted to the nut, and he carved on nuts. But I
use the form directly. Take this black walnut,” she continued, holding
one forward. “The fragrance of its shell would be a wonderful cologne
for a man. It’s very pungent, like Old Spice. So there’s another new
idea.”

Steiner is working on a book about unusual museums, titled “Performing
the Nut Museum.” He sometimes has difficulty discussing it with
Tashjian, because, for one thing, it’s not solely about her, and, for
another, she would prefer to be writing it herself. Don Bernier, the
director of a documentary called “In a Nutshell: A Portrait of
Elizabeth Tashjian,” which had its New York première last week,
capitulated on a similar issue: he had planned to make a film about
several roadside museums, but Tashjian insisted that he narrow his
focus. Genius demands its due. Years ago, at a Christmas Eve lunch at
the home of Katharine Hepburn, who was Tashjian’s neighbor, Tashjian
began to sing her composition “Nuts Are Beautiful.” Before too long,
“away flew Kate into the kitchen,” she recalled. “It irked her that I
was a polished artist-she didn’t want the attention not on her.”

Tashjian is distressed that Bernier’s film reveals the untidy state
her house was found in while she was in the hospital. “Liz Taylor
never showed you the interior of her house,” she said. “Whereas
showing the museum proper leaves a happy taste, showing those dirty
dishes in disarray belittles me, as though I am”-her voice
faltered-“insane. But it happened that my kitchen drainage was stopped
up, and I was ill. I was dillydallying, let’s say, gaining my poise to
call a serviceman.”

In February, after a doctor examined her, the probate court declared
Tashjian capable of managing her affairs. Next, if she can find an
obliging attorney, she hopes to reclaim her home. The woman who bought
it hired Martha Stewart’s plasterers to spruce up the place, renamed
it Garden Roads, then resold it. “She cut down all my nut trees,”
Tashjian said. “Carpathian walnut, black walnut, chestnut, filbert-all
gone. All.” Tashjian also wants to sue the State of Connecticut. One
of her planned causes of action is that while she was comatose the
state’s conservator took nearly six thousand dollars from her bank
account to buy her a casket and a funeral policy. “They want to bury
me in their plot,” she said, “but I’m not allowing that.” Her
shoulder jumped. “I’m increasing my identity. I’m complicating the
plot. I’m going just the other way. The Nut Museum marches on!”

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress