Jackie Gleason’s Paranormal Activity

Illustration by João Fazenda Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story Here is one thing you probably know about Jackie Gleason, the famously “rotund comedian,” to use an old Times description: he was the star and guiding force of “The Honeymooners,” the nineteen-fifties sitcom (and “Flintstones” template) that was spun off from a variety show he headlined in various incarnations from the early fifties into the seventies. Depending on your age, you may also have seen him as Minnesota Fats in the film “The Hustler.”

Here are two things you probably don’t know about Gleason: One, he was an avid reader with a lifelong interest in E.S.P., telekinesis, astral projection, clairvoyance, flying saucers—the supernatural works—and amassed a library of some three thousand volumes on these concerns. Two, in the late fifties, at the height of his fame, he built an extravagant circular house made of wood, marble, and glass which he variously called the Round House, the Round Rock, and the Mothership. The modernist home commands a woodsy eight and a half acres in Cortlandt Manor, a Westchester hamlet, and was more recently dubbed “Jackie Gleason’s UFO-inspired party pad” by a luxury life-style website when the property was listed for sale last summer. (Asking price: $5.5 million. Listing lede: “Off-the-Charts Cool Cool Cool.”)

Gleason lived in the Round House for only a few years, tiring of it quickly and then fobbing it off on his network, CBS, when he relocated his variety show to Miami Beach, in 1964. His widow donated his library to the University of Miami following his death, in 1987. But, on a recent morning, spooky books and saucerlike home were reunited, after a fashion, when Andrew Lampert, the author of a new book titled “Jackie Gleason: Library of the Paranormal,” stood in front of the Round House. Despite the property’s numerous “NO TRESPASSING” signs, the owner was willing to give him a tour.