Arthur and Teddy Edelman: 

Fine Hides and An Old Barn 

When Arthur and Teddy Edelman came to Ridgefield a half century ago, they wanted a home that reflected their many and varied interests and talents that ranged from being leaders in the world  of luxury leathers and modern design, to their love of antiques and fine art, including the Old Masters.

So they bought a barn, took it apart, moved it five miles, and put it back together in a much glassier form. And there they lived the rest of their creative lives.

The Edelmans spent their long careers in the field of fine leathers and fashionable things crafted from them, working with people like Andy Warhol, who was their graphic designer for six years. The company they founded, Edelman Leather, supplies top designers today.

 Born in the Bronx in 1925, Arthur Jay Edelman was a son of Russian immigrants. His father was a leather tanner, but that’s not what the young Arthur wanted to be: After serving in the U.S. Navy in World War II, he studied acting at Sarah Lawrence College, which had been a well-known women’s school.

“He went there when it was the first year they allowed men in,” said a co-worker. “He figured his odds were pretty good to meet a girl!” 

He did just that, meeting Theodora “Teddy” Joffe, a Brooklyn native born in 1928. Four days

after graduating, they were married and, 66 years later, they became the longest married couple to have met at Sarah Lawrence.

After deciding acting was not his forte, Arthur joined Teddy in creating pieces of art from leathers. That didn’t produce enough money to survive on so the two went to work for Teddy’s family business, Fleming-Joffe, in New York, which was to become a leading supplier of high-fashion leathers and reptile skins. The two eventually took over the company’s management. 

Andy Warhol joined Fleming-Joffe as a graphic designer,  producing many posters and advertising art pieces.  In 2016 Arthur Edelman told The Guardian how he first met and hired the artist in 1957. 

“One day I was calling on one of our most important customers...in the Empire State Building,”

he said. “I was waiting in a darkened hallway when a very peculiar-looking man walked in and joined me. He had a white face, hair that was the brightest white — it just didn’t belong to a human being. His suit looked like it had been pressed under his bed overnight, his shoes were paint-splattered with all the colors of the rainbow. And he was holding a portfolio. 

“Now, I’m a big man — six feet six inches — and I was scared.”

It turned out the specter was a struggling artist, there to show some proposed commercial work to Edelman’s customer. Edelman looked at the pictures, which involved snakeskin shoes. They were “most extraordinary,” he said.

The Edelmans had been looking for a promotional designer and Warhol was looking for a full-time job, and thus began a six-year relationship. “He came back to our offices a few blocks over and

shocked our receptionist with his appearance,” Arthur said. “He and Teddy immediately took a huge liking to one another. Teddy was very motherly to him, which I think he liked.”

Warhol and the Edelmans remained friends until the artist’s death in 1987.

In 1971 the Edelmans sold Fleming-Joffe and exactly 10 years later launched Edelman Leather, which today provides luxury upholstery to architects and interior designers for high-end residential, office, hotel, aviation, and marine projects. “We are in the business of art,” the company says.  “Our art is leather.”

     For his old friends in a new business, Warhol created what has become a well-known poster in art circles,  “This is a chair...”

In between their two careers running leather companies, the Edelmans decided to move to the “country,” buying around 30 acres of old farmland on Spring Valley Road. They wanted a custom-designed house with lots of views of the beautiful Mopus Valley, but they both loved antiques and wanted it to have a flavor of the old.

     They decided to fashion a new house from an old barn and

found the barn they liked on North Street, part of the old Stonecrest estate owned by the Conklin family. In November 1968, the huge, 6,800-square-foot structure was carefully dismantled and each piece

labeled before being moved to Spring Valley Road to create a new barn-like house. 

The result is an 8,500 square-foot, seven bedroom home that became the center of their estate. The barnwood walls displayed their collection of paintings by the Old Masters and new talents — from Paul de Vos to, of course, Andy Warhol. They also had many fine antiques that included

priceless Tiffany lamps.

The estate’s name? Something one wouldn’t expect in Ridgefield but would expect from the Edelmans: “Alligator Farm.”

Teddy Edelman died in 2016 at the age of 88, Arthur two years later at 92.

Among their five children, at least two have become leaders in fields related to design.  John, their youngest son, is president and CEO of the contemporary furniture company, Design Within Reach, which has three dozen stores in the United States, Canada and Mexico. The oldest son, Sam, founded Sam Edelman high-fashion footwear.

Kirk Browning: 

From Eggs to Emmys

How does an egg deliveryman get to be a major television director and win a dozen Emmy Awards?

By living in Ridgefield.

Kirk Browning, a Ridgefield chicken farmer, a World War II ambulance driver and, just for fun, a pianist, became the award-winning director of  “Live from Lincoln Center,” the acclaimed series of television concerts on PBS.

He also directed such pioneering works as Frank Sinatra’s first TV show and the world premiere of Gian Carlo Menotti’s “Amahl and the Night Visitors,” the first opera written for television.

Kirk Browning was born in Manhattan in 1921. His parents, William and Elizabeth Miner Browning, had a farm on Spring Valley Road for more than 40 years.

Kirk attended Cornell University but dropped out after only a month and, still a teenager, got a job as a reporter for a newspaper in Waco, Texas.

When he tried to enlist in the Army during World War II, he was rejected. So instead, he served as an ambulance driver in the American Field Service with the Eighth Army. In late 1943 in Italy, he had arrived with his ambulance on the north bank of a river just after midnight, carrying two badly wounded New Zealand soldiers. The river was so swollen by floods that he could go no farther with the ambulance.

“He waded through the swirling, chest-high waters of the River Sandro with stretcher bearers who carried two wounded men,” The Ridgefield Press reported in January 1944. “On the south bank, Browning commandeered a Jeep and raced to the nearest medical post where he summoned an ambulance. The two wounded men were speedily transferred to the medical post and have a good chance of recovery.”

After the war Browning came back to Ridgefield to work on his family’s Ridgebury farm.

It was while delivering eggs to his neighbor up the road, Samuel Chotzinoff, that his “big break” came. Chotzinoff was music director of NBC, the man who brought Toscanini out of retirement to lead the NBC Symphony Orchestra, and the man who commissioned Menotti to write “Amahl and the Night Visitors.”

Chotzinoff saw something in Browning, a fellow fan of the piano, and offered him a job filing scores in NBC’s music library. From there Browning began working his way up, becoming  a stage manager and then being chosen by Chotzinoff to direct telecasts of the NBC Symphony Orchestra, led by Toscanini. 

Browning enjoyed telling how he got that job. 

Toscanini was doing a concert at Carnegie Hall instead of at NBC’s big studio. Since the concert was outside the studio, “they assigned a sports truck and a sports director because it was a ‘remote’ and that’s the team that does it,” Browning said. 

“The sports director, knowing nothing about music — all he was used to was taking pictures of whatever he saw — he read that there was a piece called ‘The Girl with the Flaxen Hair’ [by Claude Debussy], so he goes out and he hires a lovely blonde girl and backstage puts her on a rock in front of a mirror pool...and as Toscanini is conducting, he ‘supers’ over this girl combing her hair. 

Chotzinoff and Browning were watching the broadcast together. Chotzinoff was aghast when the blonde appeared.

“Chotzinoff turned to me and he said, ‘Kirk, from now on, you’re directing.’

“That’s how I got my job. He took one look at what this guy was doing with that broadcast. There were no guidelines then — I mean Shotzi had no idea at that time what should be done and what shouldn’t be done. But he had enough taste to know that when you have Toscanini on, you don’t put a model combing her hair over his face.”

 Browning went on to direct 185 broadcasts of  “Live from Lincoln Center,” winning 10 Emmys. He also directed telecasts of the NBC Opera Company.

 Along with his Lincoln Center Emmys and three primetime Emmys for other productions, Browning earned two Christopher awards, a CITA award and a George Foster Peabody award.

He never retired, and when he died in 2008 at the age of 86, he was beginning work on another “Live from Lincoln Center,” a New York City Opera production of Puccini's “Madama Butterfly.” It had been a favorite opera of another Ridgefielder from the past, Metropolitan Opera star Geraldine Farrar.

Samuel Chotzinoff: 

Music over the Air

Arturo Toscanini, one of the leading conductors of the 20th Century, liked Ridgefield – and his friend Samuel Chotzinoff – enough to give concerts here in 1947 and 1949 to benefit the the Ridgefield Library (on whose board Chotzinoff served for 10 years) and the Ridgefield Boys Club. 

Chotzinoff, who lived on Spring Valley Road from 1935 to 1955 and was known as “Shotzi” in the music world, was music director of NBC and persuaded Toscanini  to lead the NBC Symphony Orchestra in the days when high culture was a part of commercial radio and television network fare.

As founder of the NBC Opera Company, Chotzinoff commissioned Gian Carlo Menotti to write television’s first opera, the now-famous “Amahl and the Night Visitors.”  Menotti and Toscanini often visited Chotzinoff’s Ridgefield home. 

Besides being an executive, Chotzinoff was, in the words of The New York Times, a music critic, a pianist, a novelist, a playwright, a raconteur, a wit, and an urbane and gentle man.”

Born in Czarist Russia around 1889, Samuel Chotzinoff (pronounced “SHOTzinoff) began studying piano when he was 10 years old. He came to America when he was 17, attended City College of New York, and continued piano studies. At 20, he was “ghosting” as piano player when his big break came.

The Times tells it this way: “He was playing a behind-the-scenes piano in a play called ‘Concert,’ while on stage the actor Leo Dietrichstein ran his fingers gracefully over a dummy piano. The scene had been rehearsed so minutely that the audience and the critics thought the actor was really giving a brilliant recital.

“One night Mr. Chotzinoff was either detained by traffic or kept home by illness — the story is told both ways —  and a substitute pianist was rushed in. Coordination was so lacking that Mr. Dietrichstein was still pounding the dummy piano when the music stopped backstage. The secret was out and the critics discovered Mr. Chotzinoff.”

Violinist Efrem Zimbalist Sr., who was to become a noted conductor (and father of Jr., the noted actor), heard about the incident, met with and hired Chotzinoff as his accompanist. Both were 21 at the time, and they toured widely together.

Chotzinoff subsequently became accompanist for another famous violinist, Jascha Heifetz, and wound up marrying Heifetz’s sister, Pauline, in 1925. 

At the time Chotzinoff was music critic for The New York World; later wrote for The New York Post. Famous for his honesty, he once criticized Heifetz’s performance of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata. “He was sore as the devil,” Chotzinoff later told an interviewer. “But I told Jascha that I can only review his concerts as his critic and not as his brother-in-law.”

In the 1930s, Chotzinoff also taught at the Curtis Institute of Music.

In 1936, David Sarnoff, head of RCA, asked him to visit the semi-retired Toscanini in Italy to persuade the maestro to take over the NBC Symphony Orchestra. “Many persons considered Mr. Chotzinoff’s task about as hopeless as persuading Toscanini to play a jazz trombone,” The Times said. “But Mr. Chotzinoff did it.” And the two became fast friends.

Chotzinoff served as a music consult to NBC during the 30s and early 40s, and became music director in 1948. In 1951, he also became producer of NBC’s televised operas.

Chotzinoff also wrote a novel, “Eroica,” about Beethoven, co-authored two plays, and wrote a biography of Toscanini as well as an autobiography, “The Lost Paradise.”  

He also founded the Chatham Square Music School, which in 1960 merged with the Mannes College of Music, now part of The New School.

His daughter Anne Chotzinoff (1930-2002) married conductor Herbert Grossman. She wrote several books and translated many operas and lieder. Her daughter, Lisa Grossman Thomas, is a musician and writer. 

Chotzinoff died in 1964 at the age of 74.

Known for his sense of humor, Samuel Chotzinoff loved a good practical joke. He once hosted a party for Toscanini at which a woman, who was one of his wife’s relatives, dressed as a waitress and donned a blonde wig. 

“When she came in to serve coffee, she astounded the maestro by sitting on his lap,” The Times reported.