Charlie Chan in Cape Elizabeth

By Steve Luttrell

When you think of that great oriental detective, Charlie Chan, of the Honolulu Police Department, you might think of such exotic locations as Paris, Rio, Hawaii, or even New York City—places where murder and intrigue and a touch of the mysterious are quite common and even expected. The very last place you might think of is the quiet coastal town of Cape Elizabeth, Maine. But wait! There is a connection.

The fact is, the late film star Sidney Toler, who successfully played the role of Charlie Chan in many movies in the 1930s and 1940s, spent many summers in a section of Cape Elizabeth known as Cape Cottage, a neighborhood huddled against the ocean on the Portland side of Fort Williams.

Here, at 21 Birch Knolls, Toler built a charming bungalow right onto the rock ledge.

“The stumps of the trees from which the house was built are still in the basement,” says John Fitzgerald of Coldwell Banker Kennebunkport, a former owner. “Its 23-foot chimney was made entirely from rocks from Casino Beach. Standing on the front porch, Charlie Chan had unobstructed views of both Casino Beach and Ram Island Light.”

Mr. and Mrs. Paul Howell, the latest residents at the house (who report that they’re about to put it up for sale this summer), say that they’d heard that the actor Sidney Toler used to lived there, but admit it came as a surprise when they learned he was the ingenious and pithy detective Charlie Chan. Collette Howell, who likes her Chinese food “sweet and sour, I guess,” says, “I’d seen a few Charlie Chan movies, but I couldn’t remember which ones!”

Which ones indeed! Try Charlie Chan in Honolulu, 1938; Charlie Chan in Reno, 1939; Charlie Chan at Treasure Island, 1939; Charlie Chan in City in Darkness, 1939; Charlie Chan’s Murder Cruise, 1940; Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum, 1940; Charlie Chan in Panama, 1940; Murder Over New York, 1940,
Dead Men Tell, 1941; Charlie Chan in Rio, 1941, Castle in the Desert, 1942, Charlie Chan in the Secret Service, 1944, The Chinese Cat, 1944; Black Magic Meeting at Midnight, 1944; The Shanghai Cobra, 1945; The Red Dragon, 1945; The Scarlet Clue, 1945; The Jade Mask, 1945; Shadows over Chinatown,
1946, Dangerous Money, 1946; Dark Alibi, 1946; and The Trap, 1947.

Asked if she thought the character of Charlie Chan was offensive to Chinese people or politically
incorrect, Collette Howell says, “No, because it’s antiquated. He lived in a time when that sort of
humor was acceptable. It isn’t now, so it’s different.”

The case for Charlie Chan is actually both sweet and sour. Though it was outrageous that Hollywood would choose a non-Chinese actor for the role (Leo G. Carroll and Noah Beery also tested for the part but were handily beaten by Toler) and certainly not much of a help that Charlie reduces life’s ironies to fortune cookie sentiments, Charlie Chan’s image as an ingenious sleuth who triumphed over mannered society people was a boldly positive stroke. In fact, a good deal of the tongue-in-cheek dialogue between Chan and his “No. 1 and No. 2 sons,” both completely assimilated into Western culture,
bring to mind some of the work that novelist Amy Tan would earn praise for as much as half a
century later.

But why again did Charlie Chan make his home in Maine? In the early years of this century, there
were many summer theaters in the greater Portland area, and one of the most popular was the theater at Cape Cottage known as McCullum’s Theatre and later as the Cape Theatre.

Before his role as Charlie Chan, Sidney Toler was a leading actor with the Keith’s Stock Company and performed in many plays and melodramas both at the Cape Theatre as well as the Jefferson Theatre in
Portland, now the location of Blue Cross Blue Shield on Free Street. Many famous actors performed at these theaters at that time, including Ethel and John Barrymore. From 1901 through 1910, a total
of 7,014 separate dramatic programs were offered to the citizens of Portland and vicinity by the various playhouses.

Sidney Toler was born in 1874 in Warrensburg, Missouri. He first appeared on Broadway in 1903. Shortly
after that, he began to appear in theaters in the Portland area. In addition to being a fine actor and singer, he also wrote many plays.Two of them, “Golden Days” and “The Exile,” appeared on Broadway in 1910. His book of poems, “Stage Fright and Other Verses” was published in Portland, by Smith and Sales, and isnow considered a very scarce book. When the actor Warner Oland, the first Charlie Chan, died in 1938, Fox offered the role to Toler and the series carried on, the first film being “Charlie Chan in Honolulu.”

Ironically, in the summer of 1907, both Oland and Toler had appeared in this area in separate roles at the same time. Oland played in a drama entitled “Hands Across the Sea” at the Jefferson Theatre, while Toler was playing in “Orders from Washington” at McCullum’s Theatre at Cape Cottage. It would have been around this time that Sidney Toler made his summer residence at Birch Knolls in the town of Cape Elizabeth.

By the nineteen twenties, Toler was a star of the New York stage and in nineteen thirty he went to Hollywood but for more than a decade, at the turn of the century, he was a major figure in the thriving local theater scene, as well as a summer resident of the town of Cape Elizabeth. On February 12,1947, he died at home in Hollywood. He is buried in Wichita, Kansas.

Published in the July/August 1998 issue.