IN the movies, love always seems to find its way: opposites attract, the hard-working guy marries the girl next door, and coincidence has a way of intervening at just the right moment. Life doesn’t always imitate art, as Lucille Masone Smith knows, having spent a career helping to create the artifice of film. But sometimes it comes surprisingly close.
Ms. Smith has worked on more than 30 films as producer, production manager or controller for both the big screen and television and divides her time between her Upper West Side apartment and her five-fireplace saltbox house, built in 1710, in the small town of Scotland in northeast Connecticut. She bought the house, with its beamed ceilings, plank floors and 100 acres of lush pastureland and forested hills, for $335,000 in 1986 and uses it as a place of refuge when she isn’t on location or in Manhattan.
She brought in furnishings gathered in her workplaces around the world, like the Fortuny lamps purchased in Venice when she was there in 1994 for the filming of “Only You” with Robert Downey Jr. and Marisa Tomei. Her bed is the one that was in Cher’s dressing room on the 1996 film “Faithful.” (Ms. Smith’s acquisition style, she said, is “a treasure a movie.”) Martin Scorsese gave her a bichon frisé that romped over the property. In the silence of the surrounding hills, Ms. Smith marked holidays with her brother and nephews, mourned the deaths of her parents and healed from a divorce.
Then, one day in 2004, she found what appeared to be remnants of crack cocaine use in a shed on the edge of her property. Unsure of what to do, she called a neighbor, Robert F. Brautigam, a former police chief then working as the director of basic training for the Connecticut Police Academy.
Mr. Brautigam, who somewhat resembles the actor Ed Harris, lived across the road in a former hunting lodge on 50 acres. Although their houses were only an eighth of a mile apart, and in one area their properties even abutted, the two neighbors had exchanged only occasional pleasantries. She left a message on his answering machine that began, “Mr. Brautigam, this is your neighbor, Lucille Smith.”
He was away on a vacation — a change of pace for him and an attempt to lighten a life that had been subdued since the death of his wife, Ruth, a year before on the day before their 42nd wedding anniversary. Soon after her funeral, facing heart bypass surgery, he had told his children: “If I die on the table, don’t worry about it. I’d be better off.”
After he returned from his trip, Mr. Brautigam investigated Ms. Smith’s shed and declared that it hadn’t been used in months. Relieved, and learning of Mr. Brautigam’s interest in antiques, she offered him an old safe that had been a prop in “Pieces of April,” a 2003 movie with Katie Holmes. To thank her, he began to leave by her kitchen door vegetables and fruit grown on his property. To thank him, she made a ratatouille. He stopped by and said, in his plain-spoken way, “Look, I don’t cook. But, if you like, I’ll take you out to dinner.”
They married in October 2005. A momentary sticking point was the question of where they would live in the country. Mr. Brautigam wanted Ms. Smith to move into his house. But his father, Frederick, now a lively 90-year-old, gently intervened, saying, “You can’t expect Lucille to live in another woman’s home.” Mr. Brautigam yielded (he still owns the property, however). Ms. Smith suggested that he design his own addition to her place, and their joint history in the saltbox began.
On a bright day in late April, Mr. Brautigam was putting the finishing touches on the new addition, a large, graceful study with recessed lighting, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and space for his collection of 19th-century maps and diaries. The room’s windows overlook gardens and a pond. Outside, the air was spicy with the smell of pine, and magnolia trees bloomed pink and white. Birds crowded the feeders — goldfinches, a scarlet cardinal and an indigo bunting with royal blue feathers.
Ms. Smith made tea in a silver teapot and took it to the parlor, where wood paneling that dates from the Colonial era frames the fireplace. The walls are a subtle rose color done with a technique called ragging, in which paint is applied with a rag rather than a brush. The color matches the border of the Art Deco rug.
“In the film industry, it’s important to have another life because it is so consuming,” Ms. Smith said, and even before she met Mr. Brautigam, she added, “I worked hard to have that other life.”
The house was in good condition when she bought it in the 1980s, but, like any nearly 300-year-old structure, it has always been a work in progress. Ms. Smith hired contractors to replace wood damaged from termites; she replaced every door in the house and had a cedar-shingled roof constructed. After working on the first season of “Law and Order: Criminal Intent” in 2001, she had a garage constructed in a post-and-beam design to match the house.
THE furnishings brought home from movie locations are sprinkled around the house. Ms. Smith bought the antique Chinese mirrors while working in South Carolina on “Once Around,” a film in which Holly Hunter falls for Richard Dreyfuss. The silver-framed quotes from Yeats that adorn the kitchen and a bedroom hallway came from Ireland, where she went for the filming of “The Devil’s Own” (1997), which had a cast led by Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt. Kitchen drawers hold sterling silver from Baltimore, the location for the 1994 film “Guarding Tess” with Shirley MacLaine.
The couple teased each other about all the ways they shouldn’t be able to get along. The list is lengthy. She’s a liberal; he is, he said, “very conservative.” She’s a night owl; he goes to bed early. She’s an urban sophisticate; he likes nothing more than working on the orchards he has planted on his 50 acres.
“Bob had no idea who Brad Pitt was when we met,” Ms. Smith said. “Now he does.”
“And I don’t mind shooting a deer who is ravishing my orchard,” Mr. Brautigam said. “She would put down napkins for him.”
She nodded. “The neighbors say that, as far as the deer are concerned, this is the safe side of the street.”
They laughed every few minutes. Mr. Brautigam, who retired soon after their marriage, tends to the 600 apple trees and hundreds of blueberry bushes on his property. Ms. Smith sells his harvest from a roadside stand and oversees the pick-your-own operation when she isn’t working on a film.
She is still meticulous about furnishings. For the master bedroom, one of three bedrooms and two sleeping lofts in the house, she’s ordered a rug from Nepal.
The dining room is unique. Ms. Smith commissioned an artist, Will Perkins of Ipswich, Mass., to paint the walls gold and then paint a different, delicate Asian scene on each. The walls glow, each looking like a Japanese screen.
When Ms. Smith stepped away for a moment, Mr. Brautigam leaned forward to make a point clear. “I had no desire to live after Ruthie died,” he said. “Lucille saved my life.”
Later, walking near the pond on her property, Ms. Smith grew misty on being told about this remark. “Well, I know he saved mine,” she said.
If movies were like life, they might celebrate more frequently the wisdom of love in later years, the easy affection that laughs at differences and evaporates loneliness. And if life were like the movies, one might cast two unlikely characters — a police officer and a producer, say, and put them on opposites sides of a quiet road, where they would meet out of need and make a life together out of choice.
But, of course, life isn’t like the movies.
