Lights, Camera, Action: Oliver Smith

By Susan Zehnder, Education Director

Recently, Kelsey Jones, the Chemung County historian, passed along the name of someone buried in Woodlawn Cemetery with impressive Hollywood ties. It’s not Hal Roach, who comes first to mind, but Oliver Lemuel Smith. His story was hidden because he doesn’t have an individual headstone. He is also interred in a family plot that has a different last name. With a little digging, here’s part of his story.

Oliver Lemeul Smith

Oliver Lemeul Smith was born on February 13, 1918, in Waupun, Wisconsin. He was the second of four children, having arrived seven years after an older brother. His father, Larue Free Smith, was a high school principal. His mother, Nina Kincaid, had graduated from Oberlin College and was the only child and heir to a wealthy family who owned a corset-making business with factories around the world. In 1908, the young couple had a lavish marriage ceremony at her parents’ home in Pennsylvania.

After Oliver, two more boys were born, and not ten years later, the couple divorced. Sometime before 1933, Nina married Ivan Max Bernkopf, from Waverly, NY, and moved to Corning. Bernkopf was a co-owner of successful department stores in Waverly and Corning and was active in local civic organizations including the Elks Club.

Despite the Great Depression, Oliver went to Penn State, then moved to New York City. In 1940 he joined other creative people living in Brooklyn Heights in a Victorian brownstone located at 7 Meddagh Street. Since all its residents had been born in February, it became known as the February House. Under the loose leadership of literary critic George Davis, it was to be a utopian commune offering its members a balance between spontaneity and creativity, and structure and domestic routine.

In addition to Oliver Smith, residents included writers A. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, and Jane and Paul Bowles; composer Benjamin Britten; and performer Gypsy Rose Lee. Frequent visitors to the house included Salvador Dali, Anais Nin, and Thomas Mann’s son, Klaus. Smith was apparently responsible for tending the furnace, washing dishes, and generally helping keep various creative tempers calm. Unfortunately, when Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941, vehement disagreements about U.S. entry into the war fractured relationships beyond repair and the commune was disbanded.

Around this time Smith found his career on the rise. He designed sets for the ballets Saratoga (1941) and Rodeo (1942), and his work caught the eye of choreographer Jerome Robbins and composer Leonard Bernstein. Soon he was designing for Broadway and the movies.

My Fair Lady, Sketch and Photo

Like many artists associated with the February House group, Smith was openly homosexual, and his name is connected to many creative men of the time. Eventually he found his life partner, Richard “Dick” D’Arcy, a Broadway dancer, and they would be together until Smith’s death.

In 1944 Smith was hired to be co-director of the American Ballet Theater, a position he held until 1980. He was reappointed co-director again from 1990 to 1992, before being named director emeritus. Over the span of his design career, Smith received more than twenty-five Tony nominations for his work on plays and musicals, and he won ten. This made him the most recognized designer of his time. Shows he worked on included My Fair Lady (1957), West Side Story (1958), The Sound of Music (1960), Becket (1961), Camelot (1961), Hello, Dolly! (1964), and Baker Street (1965). He also designed for the movies, notably On the Town (1949), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), and Guys and Dolls (1955). He was nominated for an Academy Award in the category of Best Art Direction (Color) for Guys and Dolls, but lost to the designer for the movie Picnic.

Guys and Dolls, sketch and photo

In addition to his professional work, Smith was on the faculty of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. For over 23 years, he taught and mentored many young students who went on to become influential designers. In 1981 Oliver Smith was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. The Library of Congress archives contain 305 boxes of his design sketches and notes.

In the studio

In 1994 Oliver Lemuel Smith died of emphysema in Brooklyn at the age of 76. His body was cremated and his ashes were placed with his mother’s grave in Woodlawn. Near her grave is a headstone for his youngest brother, who had died in 1982. Smith’s partner, dancer Richard D’Arcy, lived another eight years. He was cremated and interred elsewhere.

It is curious that Oliver Smith ended up in Woodlawn. His ties seem to be through his mother’s second husband’s family, the Bernkopfs. They were related to the Rosenbaum family, who also owned a department store. When Oliver’s stepfather Ivan Max Bernkopf died in 1951, he was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, not far from the Rosenbaum family plot. Two weeks after his death, Nina lost her mother as well. She moved to Brooklyn, NY, where she died in 1979. She was buried near her husband in the Bernkopf plot at Woodlawn, though no obituary was published. So, no marker for Oliver Smith exists, but at the very least, some of his story can now be retold.

Some of these photos came from a profile on Oliver Smith published by the Waupun, WI, Historical Society. When I contacted them about using the photos, they shared that they do a Ghost Walk and one year, Smith had been a featured character.