Endword and Upward

Page 1 2 3 Besides the ranch, the Fogelsons also maintained Dallas and Los Angeles residences, and in all three sites Garson was on every board that could find her at home, this despite a stage, screen and television career that flourished through the 1960s and into the 1970s, with her final soundstage work a made-for-TV production of Little Women.

On the home front, she was personally responsible for talking her pal, Perry Como, into taping his 1977 holiday special in Santa Fe, in which she briefly appeared.

Aside from a vignette in the 1986 documentary Directed by William Wyler, the Como segment showing Garson very much home on the range was her last time on camera.

Not that she wanted it that way. A star in the days when "they made pictures full of amusement, courage, romance, beauty, hope and strength," she complained that "there's very little of that on the screen today."

If she were competing for contemporary roles, Garson elaborated, "I wouldn't be looking for dove women. I'd like a more astringent character. I don't always want to be legato, gracioso, but more allegro, forte. My credo is that I want as an actor to be in productions, whatever medium, that make people feel happier and stronger. Something that makes a man walk out of a theatre and put his arm around his wife."

Nevertheless, performing was but her third love, after Buddy, after the arts. Always she fought to forge a schedule that would allow her to fly triangularly among her three homes, and among her three preoccupations, but almost always to lend her presence to various cultural functions.

Many times the occasions were back to back. When we first spoke, she'd just hosted a College of Santa Fe fund-raising gala for another dear old friend, director Vincente Minnelli.

A few weeks later, in a "hurried note" scrawled in hasty, dramatic black marker across Inn at Loretto stationery, she breathlessly wrote, "leaving in a few minutes to see the Festival [of the Arts] show & then go on to Albq and fly back to big D. . . . (Santa Fe)'s so lovely, I hate to leave - . . . ."

Typically modest, she didn't mention that the night before, the Festival had dedicated its fifth year to her in a special awards ceremony.

As we all must, though, Greer did leave, but only after another 15 years, and when she departed, just her immediate physical presence was lost. Her behest was plentiful, indeed.

For the Fogelsons left behind them a legacy not hooved but roofed: the Greer Garson Theatre (1965), the E.E. Fogelson Library (1970), and the Garson Communications Center (1990) at the College of Santa Fe.

These lasting acts of educational and artistic philanthropy (like her namesake endowment fund at Southern Methodist University) have opened many doors for many people.

Each gift, further, splendidly represents the personality of the giver and the needs of the recipient.

Every library has a performing arts section. But only the Fogelson Library has volumes from the couple's own study. There, one may pull a Louella Parsons book off the shelf, for example, and find the handwritten inscription "To Greer and Buddy, All my love, Louella."