Further Lane (3 page)

“Where are you?” I asked.

“Manhattan,” she said.

So we had a brief chat. She didn't know me very well nor did I know her. We were impeccably courteous. It was all somewhat surreal and when I handed the cell phone back to Peggy I hoped no one in East Hampton who knew me had witnessed this odd scene.

What with such encounters among others, my life out here last summer wasn't entirely monkish. I took a drink several places. The young schoolteachers and boutique clerks hung out at Santa Fe Junction on Fresno Place and The Grill on Newtown Lane and those were fine places and I went there, enjoying the occasional encounter. But I had two serious hangouts, one The Blue Parrot in the village down a brief alley next to Ralph Lauren's shop, a vaguely Southern California–Mexican joint run by surfers and named for Signore Ferrari's saloon, the Sydney Green-street establishment that competed with Rick's place in
Casablanca.
I wasn't a surfer but I enjoyed eavesdropping on their shop talk, learning that the best lubricant to use on your board was something called Dr. Zog's Sex Wax. The East Hampton Blue Parrot advertised its cuisine as “killer Mexican” and had a battered upright in the corner where not Dooley Wilson, but Billy Joel might drop by and play a few tunes. He and Christie Brinkley had made the place their own. And now that she had moved on, Billy played solo. Movie people and Joe Heller and covergirls and photographers and Jerry Della Femina and Dave Lucas “the lawn-care king” and, for a time, Bobby De Niro hung at the Parrot. And having recently lost a girlfriend, I could empathize with Billy Joel.

My other hangout was out at a marina on the Three Mile Harbor Road, fronting on the water, and was called Boaters. Boaters was rednecked and tough, though it mellowed some in summer when the big cabin cruisers and yachts came in with Wilmington, Del. or Palm Beach or the BVI painted beneath their names on the stern, most of them fiberglass Donald Trump wanna-be boats but a few, the vintage sort. These grand old boats were all highly polished wood and brightwork and shellac and skippered by rich old men, whose faces looked varnished as well but whose ripe younger wives were strictly brightwork. It was these trophy wives who occasionally struck up friendships among the young roughnecks who worked summers around marinas and boatyards and drank at Boaters. In season Boaters wasn't quite the bucket of blood it could be in midwinter. Though even now at Boaters you drank Bud from the bottle and had bumper stickers on your pickup that said things like, “My kid can beat up your honor student.” Or “Forget 911. Dial .357.”

The gossip columns seem unaware of the phenomenon, but, yes, we do have good ol' boys in East Hampton. In ways, the town is as rigidly stratified by caste and socioeconomic class distinctions as anything in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. We have our patrician Sartoris clans, our redneck strivers like Flem Snopes and his idiot cousin Isaac. It said something for the egalitarianism of cash that among our best families were Ben and Bonnie Krupinski. Bonnie was one of the locally famous sand and gravel Bistrians; Ben had been beatified in an inexplicable puff piece by the
New York Times
as “contractor to the stars.” And might still be cringing over it as, for one, Village Hardware on Newtown Lane installed a small, needling sign in its window: “Bernard—hardware purveyor to the stars.” No matter, Ben and Bonnie might be the very richest of East Hampton's humble. Or the humblest of our very rich.

One of the local volunteer firehouses had in addition to a Coke dispenser, another that parceled out cans of Schaefer beer. When too many minor accidents occurred, some that involved simply getting the trucks out the front door, the Fire Department cracked down hard on drinking on the job. They didn't banish the dispensers but raised the price of beer. By fifty cents.

Like the South, we have our rich, have our poor, and in places like Boaters, often they collided.

There were on Further Lane French people from Houston named de Menil. French people from Houston? Never mind. Over the years they went to Harvard and UCLA and collected Picasso, Jasper Johns, Rothko, Twombley, and Rauschenberg. One even converted to Muslim Sufism. And the family built a vast place designed by Charles Gwathmey, which, being droll folks, they christened Toad Hall. My family clashed with them once (they were generally congenial) when they purchased an antique farm somewhere up-island and moved the barns and outbuildings, the whole damned thing, to Further Lane on oversized flatbed trucks that reached out and in rushing past, tore at and damaged our trees, snapping off great limbs.

So we had the de Menils. And we had a gin mill that locals dubbed Club le Bub, “bub” being what natives called themselves and each other.

My father's people, as you know, were old East Hampton. I am a Beecher Stowe IV. They sort of repeated names over and over in our family. Not much imagination. My father's place on Further Lane was hardly the most impressive house in East Hampton. Our house had four acres while most of the neighbors boasted eight or ten or more. But it had been in the family for generations and was a handsome old shingled, chimneyed, and gabled “cottage” with access across the dunes to the beach and ocean, its own badly weathered red clay tennis court my grandfather had put in and where Tilden and von Cramm once played a “friendly,” an efficient little apartment above the garage where my dad's housekeeper, a handsome, sturdy Scandinavian woman, lived, and at the head of the graveled drive a shingled old two-bedroom gatehouse, which he'd long ago decided should be mine. After five years away I'd spent most of the summer pounding on the book and reacquainting myself with a part of the world I thought I knew pretty much all about. And which, it was going to turn out, I no longer knew all that well.

FOUR

The potato farmer's daughter who became “America's Homemaker” …

Meanwhile, there was Labor Day weekend to get through, and one last, big party, a season-ender along Further Lane at Hannah Cutting's spread. Hannah would shortly be closing down her house to return to Manhattan. Before flying to Katmandu with a small reconnaissance party of wealthy female hardbodies, climbers planning their latest assault the following spring on Mount Everest, the first by a largely female team since that tragic, frenzied, and well-publicized fiasco a few years back when eight climbers died. So Hannah was giving a little cocktail on the lawn for a couple of hundred people to bring down the curtain on yet another summer and, incidentally, to take the salute she obviously considered due her own fame and daring.

Hannah was not one to hide lights under bushels.

But having failed to crack East Hampton's WASP Establishment as she desperately hungered to do (she invited the local gentry to dinners and lawn parties and no one came; chums put Hannah up for membership at the Maidstone Club only to be quietly advised to withdraw her name rather than suffer the embarrassment of a blackball), Hannah reached out largely beyond the Old Money set in casting her parties, inviting the new people with their New Money. And snarling her defiance: “I tried to be one of them, tried to be a WASP, played at being ‘that nice Mrs. Cutting, Andy's wife.' But it didn't take and I didn't take. They knew I made the money and Andy didn't and that I hadn't come out of the Seven Sisters but was from Polish Town in Riverhead. And to hell with them!”

Didn't matter to Hannah if some of her New Money guests offended local sensibilities and sent shudders through the Establishment. Hannah was “Tess of the D'Urbervilles” with attitude. And, like the Serbs, she was forever at war with somebody. It didn't seem to matter if Hannah won; it was the hostilities she enjoyed.

As I say, Hollywood and other famous people had long ago discovered East Hampton, so by now it was nothing unusual at a lawn party such as Hannah's to see movie folk, often someone as big as Spielberg. He'd had a place for years. Geffen, too, now was here. Only Katzenberg was missing. Or else you could have convened a board meeting of Dreamworks right there on Hannah's lawn. Ralph Lauren and Betty Bacall had sold up and moved, Ralph a few miles down the road to Montauk. But currency maven George Soros and Mort Zuckerman, who owned the
Daily News,
and Peter Jennings were here, and Don Hewitt of
60 Minutes
and the just-separated-but-dating Kelly and Calvin Klein (how do married people “date”?) and Jann Wenner and his friend and William Simon and Ms. Basinger (she and Alec Baldwin had a house nearby), and Sting, who'd rented the de Menil place on Further Lane for a hundred and fifty grand for the month. Bruce Wasserstein, the merger king, lived on Further Lane. William Simon, former Secretary of the Treasury, just off it on Windmill Lane. Nora Ephron and Nick Pileggi. And lots of beautiful women, some I admired on Further Lane, plus others.

Such as Hannah Cutting herself.

To some she was an American heroine, self-made and courageous. To others, an anything-but-sacred monster, grasping, hard, and appalling. Depended on whom you asked. Sometimes you wondered if they measured the richer of the self-made men as strictly as they did the self-made women. Like Hannah. But never mind. The public adored Hannah, bought her books, followed her on television, wanted to
be
her; people who really knew Hannah, some of those who'd climbed with her on Everest, well, they held contrary views. Jealousy, maybe? Old Money resentment of the New? Pure snobbery? Bitchery? Hannah thought it was all of the above.

I'd go to Hannah's party. Why not?

*   *   *

Hannah Cutting's great green East Hampton estate was called Middlefield.

It was Middlefield long before there was a Hannah Cutting, reference to the fact all of Further Lane had long ago been a pasture called, in geological terms, the Eastern Plain. Farmers for several centuries had worked and fertilized these pastures (no irrigation was ever needed in a place ringed by damp bays and ponds and ocean) and even today, eighty years after the first mansions, like Hannah's, went up, the topsoil is rich and dark and three to five feet deep before you encounter just plain dirt and the local clay. Middlefield sprawled leisurely south for a quarter mile or so toward the ocean, over twelve verdant acres from lovely rural Further Lane to high grassy dunes and then a rickety old wooden catwalk and stairs down to a manicured beach and the Atlantic Ocean beyond. The whole centered on a wonderful old shingled “cottage” with more rooms than are easily counted, twelve-foot-high brick chimneys, broad, shaded verandahs, impressive terraces, tall hedges screening a red clay tennis court and a splendidly boulder-bordered amoeba-shaped pool.

On this pleasant Saturday afternoon in and out of the house and around and across a parklike setting that might have graced Balmoral, beneath lodgepole pines and towering maples and through an array of formal gardens and manicured grounds and across closely cropped lawns in the dappled shade of great elms, strolled invited guests and waiters, wandering minstrels, and, imported from Manhattan for the occasion, a troupe of mimes togged out as tarot cards that cavorted aimiably about, a house of cards in human form. It was left to each of us, even Hannah, to read in their caperings our own future.

Ms. Cutting's guests were a mix of young and old, of East Hampton people and imports from Manhattan, Eurotrash and a few, very few, of the more iconoclastic among the landed gentry. There were the usual pretty girls and journalists; how did you give a party without them? There were the merely rich and the decidedly famous. Well, what else did you expect? Hannah was New Money, you might sniff; East Hampton is like that, WASP and anti-WASP, New Money versus Old. A recent
New Yorker
cartoon captioned “The changing face of East Hampton” pictured an amiable fellow in a business suit, trotting along Main Street under the elms, strewing dollar bills, and cheerily calling out, “New Money for Old, New Money for Old!” This might well be the West Egg of 1925 at Gatsby's place but for the hairdos, the cut of the clothes, the unhummability of the music, the cars without running boards or rumble seats.

Hannah's lawns were of such a perfection, it was said locally in jest, that while most people have theirs mown every Friday, Ms. Cutting had the entire lawn replaced weekly with new sod. The “watchdogs” of The Ladies' Village Improvement Society didn't actually buy the “weekly sod” nonsense, but there had been harsh words over whether Hannah “shoots up” her grass with frowned-upon hormones (she was not much for environmental activism, forever feuding with Brass and his Baymen, and, during chill months, sported sable and mink as if to spite, defiantly, PETA and the animal lovers). There had also been wrangles with neighbors on either flank over when the privet hedges ought to be trimmed and to what height. For all her “good causes,” her admirable energy, and follow-through, Hannah was second only to Mrs. Lawrence (who built that “TWA terminal” building of a house down on the beach, which cut off poor Lee Radziwill's view of the sunset) as the most despised woman in town. Several years back Hershberg the real estate man finally sold out and moved to Boca when she won a lawsuit to have a dozen of his trees removed as obscuring her pond vistas and then promptly planted a dozen mature trees of her own to obscure his.

She was as litigious as the Jarndyce family in
Bleak House
and Sullivan & Cromwell at 125 Broad had a small but expert team of white-shoe attorneys assigned permanently to the Hannah Cutting lawsuit account.

Which was one reason those privet hedges were significant. As the tulip is to Holland and the palm to Beverly Hills, the privet hedge is to East Hampton. There were those who believed in having their privet trimmed with geometric precision by gardeners using plumb lines and surveying instruments; others who preferred their hedge wild and thick and bushy. Whatever its shape, the privet is everywhere, tall and green, dividing up enormous properties. And a good thing: neighbors (like Hannah) can be difficult and a tall privet, like a stout fence, settles more arguments than it causes. What is it they say, good fences make good neighbors?