Remembering the mighty Quinn

BRISTOL, R.I. - Who knew?

Who knew that in 1995, then-80-year-old actor Anthony Quinn retired to an 18-acre estate in this gorgeous corner of the Rhode Island coastline, to raise the last two of his 12 children and spend the last six years of his life painting, sculpting, and gazing out on Narragansett Bay?

Who knew that, in celebrity-starved New England, Quinn, whose face once graced the front of a Kellogg's Corn Flakes box, used to leave his gated community and walk the 2 1/2 miles down Poppasquash Road to have his morning coffee in Bristol? And no one paid him any mind?

Who knew that Quinn, who died in Boston in 2001, once apprenticed in Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture firm and assembled a pretty darned fair art collection during his 86 years on the planet? His private hoard of Renoir paintings, Matisse prints, and sculptures by Jacob Epstein and Henry Moore was mostly domiciled here in Bristol, and is now heading for the outside world.

A curious assemblage of bona fide movie stars (Patricia Neal) and Ocean State eminentoes (two ex-Providence mayors - Buddy Cianci and Joseph Paolino; Clintonista Ira Magaziner) gathered at the Quinn estate Sunday evening to announce the creation of an Anthony Quinn Teaching and Research Center at Roger Williams University, just up the road.

The stated purpose of the Center is one big mouthful: To "house Mr. Quinn's library and archives, and provide a context and place for a wide range of programming opportunities to include guest lecturers, exhibitions, films and conferences focusing not only on the life and art of Mr. Quinn but the intercultural issues and approaches to human exploration embodied in his life and interests."

It's all hypothetical at this point, admits RWU president Roy Nirschel. The newly created Anthony Quinn Foundation hopes to recruit 86 "founding members" with a buy-in of $25,000 each, to pay for a special annex at the Roger Williams library for the new materials. That's one for each year of Anthony Quinn's life. "We're an entrepreneurial outfit," Nirschel assured me. "We'll raise the money."

I was amazed that the larger-than-life Quinn, he of the two Academy Awards, the three wives, the 12 children, and the amazing career that included a Hope-Crosby road picture and a Spike Lee feature, hunkered down in Little Rhody and was more or less left alone. "He just wanted to raise children in a healthy atmosphere, next to the ocean, and do his painting overlooking the bay," explains his widow, Katherine Quinn. With little prompting, Ms. Quinn volunteers that "I have 10 stepchildren," many of them considerably older than she. Quinn is still here. He is buried in a bucolic, flagstoned shrine facing west, over the bay. One of his neighbors let slip that Cianci helped out with the special permits required to bury a body next to a private residence, rather than in a cemetery. But Cianci was the mayor of faraway Providence, I observed; wouldn't the governor be the person to turn to?

Cianci just laughed. "The governor? Are you kidding? I'm the guy who had license plate number one around here." Anthony Quinn would have played him in the movie, if the movie ever got made.

Free plug

A friend sent me a copy of Katie Hafner's book, "A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould's Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano." I couldn't put it down.

It helps to be obsessively interested in the obsessively interesting Gould. The one review I found ("workmanlike" - The New York Times) seemed to miss the point entirely. Yes, this book freights itself with a certain mania for detail, but if you are into Gould, there is hardly any detail of his life that isn't fascinating, with the possible exception of its sad end. What's not to wonder about a man who crossed the US-Canadian border with the 5-foot-long guts of his beloved Steinway CD 318 in the back of his station wagon, and who favored rural Holiday Inns over swank Manhattan hotels?

Maybe I am biased. I realized only after finishing this book that I have seen Gould's favorite piano, the CD 318, and his famous pygmy piano chair at Canada's National Library in Ottawa. Yes, I made a special trip.

Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.