Frolic in winter: Weymouth still active

George Alexis Weymouth wants you to call him Frolic. If you call him George, he'll know right away that you don't know him.

Another thing about Frolic: He was named after a dog.

When his brother, Gene, was 3, he lost his foxhound.

"Where's Frolic? Where's Frolic?" he kept asking.

It was driving his mother, Deo, batty.

"Shut up!" she finally barked. "Here's your damn Frolic." And she thrust her newborn - little Georgie - in front of Gene.

Gene was delighted with his new human pet. Frolic he was, and Frolic he remained. He was Frolic at St. Mark's. And Frolic at Yale. And Frolic through a succession of society soirees and bibulous escapades and randy trysts.

But he is more than an amiable dilettante, amusing swell and flamboyant eccentric. Future generations may remember him, rightfully, as the Savior of the Brandywine, the Nile of Chester County.

"Thanks to his vision and determination, we can still see the landscapes of Andrew Wyeth, we can still canoe down the Brandywine, and we can still see the stars at night," says Leslie Greene Bowman, the director of Winterthur, which recently honored Weymouth with its Henry Francis du Pont Award, named for the museum's founder (and a cousin of Weymouth's).

Frankly, the whole thing astonishes Weymouth. Though he showed early artistic promise, dyslexia made him an academic washout (Yale then was a glorified finishing school, especially for those who came from old stock). "I couldn't read and write or spell. I still can't," Weymouth says. "I don't know anything but painting pictures and being on a horse."

As a painter, he is no mere dabbler. His portraits and landscapes are exquisite. His skill as a horseman - he hunted foxes and played polo in his youth, and now drives coaches and carriages - is top-rank.

The Brandywine has always been central to Weymouth's life. In his youth, it was his backyard playground and naturalist's lab.

Today, he lives in a gorgeous stone manor house, a part of which was built in 1640 by Swedish settlers. It is carefully restored and presides over 250 acres in Chadds Ford, nestled in an oxbow bend in the Brandywine. Hence its name: Big Bend.

By design, it resides in the 18th century, where Weymouth proclaims himself spiritually at home. Several times a week, he savors Big Bend's delights by horse-drawn carriage. Passengers have run the gamut from Richard Nixon to Michael Jackson. His house is illuminated by candles. He has a television, but rarely turns it on because he's flummoxed by the remote. He scorns computers; they are, he says, a device of the devil, a destroyer of social intercourse.

His first and only marriage was to Anna B. McCoy, a niece of Andrew Wyeth's. It ended in divorce ("I got suitcased," Weymouth confides).

It was Wyeth who refined his artistic talent. "I didn't know what I was doing," Weymouth says with typical self-effacement. "Andy taught me how."

What Wyeth taught Weymouth was how to paint in egg tempera, a medium that dries fast, fixes color, and permits a layering of pigment that produces a fetching luminosity. Weymouth's paintings are Wyethlike, especially in their passionate evocation of the splendor of the Brandywine Valley.

In the late 1960s, when Weymouth learned that the beauty of the Brandywine might be sullied by the construction of several factories in Chadds Ford, he teamed up with others to buy 40 acres of riparian meadowland. Thus began the Brandywine Conservancy.

"Nobody was talking about the environment and conservation in those days," Weymouth says. "Ecology was a whole new dirty word."

Such was the mentality back then that there was actually a proposal to build a six-lane scenic highway along the river from Wilmington north, an abomination that would have desecrated the Brandywine forever.

As we stood by the Brandywine one day recently, I asked Weymouth why it's so special.

"Open your eyes. It's as simple as that," he replied.

The visual appeal - what Weymouth calls "the birds and bees and butterflies" - is obvious, but there's more to the Brandywine than its ability to please the eye and soothe the soul. Because it falls so far so fast, the river flows strong. In bygone times, its current powered as many as a hundred mills. The price of flour milled on the Brandywine set the regional standard. It was the Dow Jones average of its day.

Its real importance, however, is as a supplier of a basic human need: water.

"How goes the Brandywine goes Wilmington, Coatesville, Downingtown and parts of West Chester," Weymouth says. "Without the Brandywine, the water in Wilmington's reservoir would last only three days."

Now, much of the river and some of the county's most scenic vistas have been protected. Mainly through conservation easements, the Brandywine Conservancy, led for the last four decades by Weymouth, has preserved more than 40,000 acres, including the Laurels Preserve, the King Ranch near Unionville, and significant parts of the Great Marsh.

The conservancy also spawned the Brandywine River Museum, a popular shrine to the Wyeths and other artists whose work captures the special qualities of the Brandywine Valley. The conservancy's Environmental Management Center helps citizens be better stewards of their land. It also provides tools to municipalities to deal with developers and channel growth intelligently through regional cooperation.

"It's not enough to lie in front of bulldozers," Weymouth says. "You've got to be proactive."

Jim Duff, executive director of the Brandywine Conservancy and director of the Brandywine River Museum, has watched Weymouth in action since 1973. He cites two qualities in particular that have made Weymouth such an effective leader and catalyst: the strength of his personality and his "amazing intuitive intelligence."

"He has friends of all ages in many, many places and in many walks of life," Duff says. "In his own inimitable way, he is able to bring people together to talk about issues forthrightly."

Ralph Roberts, the founder and former chairman of Comcast who has shown his support for the conservancy and its work by serving as a trustee, says Weymouth "has raised a lot of money for all these good causes, yet you never feel that he's putting any pressure on anybody, and that's quite a trick. I don't know anybody else like him, and I don't know anybody who doesn't like him."

Weymouth downplays his role in the conservancy's success. "We have something good to sell," he says. "What we're doing is so worthwhile, people want to help."

Officially, Weymouth is chairman of the conservancy's board of trustees. It's a paid position. His salary: $1 a year. He is able to live in the manner to which he was born through family investments and the money he makes from his art. His paintings range in price from $150,000 to $250,000, and he sells three or four a year.

The conservancy's current campaign is to save an important part of the Brandywine battlefield. The largest engagement of the Revolutionary War, the Battle of Brandywine involved 26,000 troops. (The Brits won, alas, and proceeded to capture Philadelphia.) The conservancy is seeking to buy a 113-acre property that Weymouth describes as "the hole in the doughnut." It has raised $7 million so far, but needs $3 million more to complete the deal by the end of this month.

Weymouth is as determined to save this precious piece of the county's heritage as he was to ward off industrial development along the Brandywine 40 years ago. At age 71, the old warrior is a physical wreck. Because of a ruined back, a souvenir of so many hours jouncing in the saddle, he walks with crutches. Fifteen years ago, he was temporarily paralyzed when he tried to fling a comely lass over his shoulder while dancing. "That's the one thing I really miss," he says. "Dancing." His eyes are foggy, his hearing is fading. He's had five bypasses, and his heart is regulated by a pacemaker. "My sister told me, if you were a horse, we'd have to put you down."

Yet he has no intention of withdrawing from the fray. "I can't find anyone dumb enough to take the job," he says.

On the daily stage of life, all are performers. Weymouth, in his tortoiseshell spectacles, omnipresent scarf flying, has played his part with uncommon theatricality - the unabashed free spirit who hasn't hesitated to indulge his peculiarities. Yet he has also heeded his breeding and the expectations of his class. His father used to drill him in the three pillars of a successful life: honesty, generosity, and a sense of humor.

His mother was more blunt: "Life is either a . . ., a fight or a footrace," she counseled. "So you've got to just do something." (Her complete advice was more salty than we can print.) Weymouth has managed to follow that advice, while also living up to the name bestowed on him by his brother.

"Are you a bon vivant?" I asked Weymouth.

"What's that mean?" he said.

"A good liver."

"Yes, I love good living," Frolic Weymouth said. "Why have a bad time? It's such a beautiful world, and every day is my oyster. No one has had more fun out of life than I have."

Learn more about the Brandywine Conservancy founded by Frolic Weymouth at http://go.philly.com/brandywine

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