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In the spring of 1947, New York City police found the bodies of Homer and Langley Collyer. In The Dazzle, playwright Richard Greenberg finds the story.
In the first page of Richard Greenberg’s new script, the playwright has inscribed a single but revealing sentence: "The Dazzle is based on the lives of the Collyer brothers, about whom I know nothing."
At first glance this preface looks like a playful jest from a writer who excels at comic nuance. But Greenberg’s innocuous note also points to the great irony of the family story at the center of his play. Although the untimely demise of Langley and Homer Collyer—two of New York’s all-time weirdest residents—created a major media scandal in 1947, their lives remain a mystery, even today. Newspaper accounts of their deaths abound, but even New York’s most intrepid journalists never learned exactly what went on inside the Collyers’ mansion, let alone inside their minds.
Homer Collyer was born in 1881 and his brother Langley six years later in 1887. They were born into one of New York’s oldest and most prominent families, with ancestors who arrived in America aboard the Speedwell (which Langley claimed had "a better passenger list than the Mayflower"). Their father, Dr. Herman Livingston Collyer, was a successful doctor, and their mother Susie was a well-educated woman versed in classical literature. The brothers grew up in Murray Hill but later moved with their family to a three-story mansion filled with tasteful antiques and oil paintings on 128th Street in Harlem, an affluent suburb in 1909. Both brothers graduated from Columbia University, where the gentlemanly Homer studied law (which he later practiced). Langley took degrees in mechanical engineering but quickly refashioned himself as a disheveled musician with long hair and bowties (but no job).
 
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After their parents died in the 1920s, Homer and Langley remained in the mansion. Harlem had turned into a great hub of African-American life and culture, but also suffered from rising poverty and crime; most of the white residents moved away but the Collyer brothers secluded themselves in their home. At first they simply boarded up the windows to stop kids from breaking the glass with rocks. But neighbors began to notice stranger and stranger behavior as they retreated from the outside world: their telephone, gas, electricity, and water were shut off one by one. Langley combed the streets for strange objects, which he hauled home. He tried to generate energy from a car engine inside the house, cooked over a little kerosene heater, and traipsed for blocks to get water from a public park. In 1933 Homer went blind following a stroke and was never again seen in public; Langley tried to "cure" him by feeding him nothing but peanut butter sandwiches and 100 oranges a week.
After a real estate agent (eyeing their property) staked out their house, the press got involved. In 1938 newspaper articles repeated all the neighborhood rumors, calling Langley "the mystery man of Harlem," speculating that the brothers lived in Orientalist splendor, and claiming that they were sitting on piles of cash they were too afraid to bank. Before long curious New Yorkers were jumping over the fence and pounding on the doors; when no one answered they would vandalize the property.
"What had been a mahogany-paneled mansion became a fortress by 1942; the brothers crawled on their hands and knees through tunnels made of boxes and cartons stacked high and tight."
Provoked, Langley put his engineering background to work by concocting an elaborate system of booby-traps throughout the house, using all the junk treasures he had amassed inside. What had been a mahogany-paneled mansion became a fortress by 1942; the brothers crawled on their hands and knees through tunnels made of boxes and cartons stacked high and tight. If anyone tried to enter the mansion, trip wires would set off an avalanche of old newspapers and suitcases.
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On March 21, 1947, an anonymous caller informed the local police that "there is a dead man in the house at 2078 Fifth Avenue." The precinct dispatched a seven-man squad to unhinge the blocked front doors, as crowds gathered in the street to watch. Once they got the doors off, floor-to-ceiling debris prevented them from entering, so they broke a basement window—only to find another tower of furniture, crates, and papers. Hours later, the police officers climbed a ladder and smashed a window into the second-floor room where Homer’s corpse lay. The medical examiner declared that the blind man had been neglected for a long time, with a long mane of beard and a body withering from lack of food and water. He was wearing only a tattered old bathrobe.
The case was a front-page story for weeks, and while the journalists spilled ink guessing what had happened, the police tried to clean up the mess. They searched the tri-state region for Langley, who was wanted for questioning but had disappeared. Professional movers were hired to haul away the junk piles, which filled every conceivable square foot of the vast house, wall to wall and floor to roof. The job took nearly two weeks: there were more than 25,000 books alone (2500 just in the law library), not to mention painted portraits; Mrs. Collyer’s hope chests; tapestries and hundreds of yards of unused silks and fabric; stockpiles of guns, ammunition, bayonets and sabers; 14 pianos (grand and upright), banjos, violins, organs, bugles, and accordions; a gramophone and records; chandeliers; clocks; plaster busts; bikes, bowling balls, and camera equipment. But mostly there was paper and garbage: tons and tons of it, rotting and stinking. The house was also decaying: the roof was leaking and some walls had already caved in, showering bricks and mortar on the rooms below.
By April 8, the movers had excavated no less than 103 tons of debris when they came across Langley’s body—only 10 feet from where the police had found Homer. Police called off the interstate manhunt and the mystery of Langley’s disappearance was solved. Langley had been crushed in his own booby-trap, buried alive as he crawled on his hands and knees to bring food to the sightless, paralyzed Homer. Detectives guessed that the burlap cape Langley wore on his shoulders (over three jackets and four pairs of pants) had caught on a wire, triggering the avalanche-trap. Apparently Langely died long before Homer, who must have starved to death alone and in the dark
When the public shock wore off, the city declared the mansion a public hazard and demolished it. Today a parking lot stands on the site; as in so much of New York, a smoothly paved surface covers a wildly eccentric history.
Like everyone else, Richard Greenberg might know "nothing" for certain about the Collyers, but The Dazzle promises to conjure the secret world of a New York family unlike any other.
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