by James Brady
That was the threat. But would the tempest actually get here or veer off out to sea? No one yet knew.
By mid-September in a village whose Main Street had been labeled by the National Geographic as the “most beautiful in America,” with its miles of gorgeous ocean beach and scores of bays and ponds and inlets and snug harbors, its pine barrens and green fairways and golden sand, no longer did things seem quite so comfortable and predictable. Instead, everything … and even East Hampton itself … seemed as vulnerable as anyplace else to change, and not always for the better.
As, in a macabre sort of entr’acte, on the beach just east of the Maidstone Club, there washed up one dawn a famous woman’s naked, skewered body.
THREE
A battered upright where Billy Joel might play a few tunes …
My name is Beecher Stowe.
There are plenty of richer people here but our family’s been in East Hampton since the time of the Rev. Lyman Beecher and his children, Harriet Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and her “amorous” brother Henry Ward Beecher. We don’t go as far back as the Phythians or Buells or Hunttings or Gardiners, some of whom can count back eleven or twelve generations, but long enough. And like Ms. Streisand and Martha Stewart and the others, I spent last summer in East Hampton, at my old man’s place on Further Lane, recuperating from that nasty business with the Muslim Fundamentalists in Algiers, and working on a book about terrorism based mostly on my dispatches to Newsweek. And since I’d been a guest at that final cocktail party and knew the victim, it wasn’t entirely unexpected that when her body was found, the cops came to seek me out. Not only might I know something, but with my father having been for so long the chief of naval intelligence, a sort of super spy, a bright cop could be excused for imagining I might possess some potential for information.
I’m a working newspaperman. Have been since Harvard when I got a cub’s job at the Boston Globe, writing about traffic accidents and garden parties and high school football and knifings in the black neighborhoods and drunken brawls in the Irish. Then in my second year on the Globe, driving back from covering a “naughty choirmaster” case in Chatham, I saw a turnoff to the Kennedy compound at Hyannisport and pulled in. I was a nothing reporter on a nothing story but as I rolled up the historic gravel drive and stopped, not knowing just what to do or say, a small, shrunken, and very old lady opened the front door. I’m from the Globe, I said.
We take the Globe already, sonny, Rose Kennedy said, thank you very much.
I explained I was a reporter and not selling subs but was pleased she took the Globe as it was the best newspaper around. Rose Kennedy liked that, confirming her judgment as sound, and she asked me in for an iced tea. Which was how I got what’s believed to be the last rational interview the old girl ever gave. The Globe, delighted to have the story but uneasy with a cub, played it big. If cautiously—good newspapers are always cautious—in the second, metro section, instead of out front, where it belonged.
It was that Rose Kennedy story that inspired Garfein, the assistant city editor (dayside) and a devout man, to inform the staff, “People talk to Beecher. They tell him things. You don’t learn shit like that at Harvard. Nor even here in the city room of the Boston Globe. It’s a kind of gift from God and Stowe has it.”
Now, a dozen years later, as Labor Day neared, I was fully recovered from my injuries and with my book’s first draft nearly wrapped. I’d already resigned from Newsweek and in September was scheduled to join Parade magazine to write six pieces a year at a handsome figure. The Parade editor, Walter Anderson, had read my dispatches, knew I’d tangled with Algerian zealots, had seen my file out of Baku and some of my stuff on Bosnia.
But it was the pieces on Princess Di that I did for Newsweek from their London bureau that drew Walter Anderson’s eye. Not that they were all that difficult to do. After all, my girlfriend at the time was a member of the young royals’ set, like Diana Spencer herself except younger, a Sloane Ranger, one of those chic young people who lived in or about London’s Belgravia and Sloane Square, forever popping up in Nigel Dempster’s column in the Daily Mail—Dempster who styled himself “scourge of the upper classes,” yet lived off their droppings. I’d been born in Paris when my father was stationed there as American naval attaché (my late mother was French, a mannequin for Chanel, and maybe one of the first bulimics) and for the past five years I’d been back there in Europe, working as a correspondent. So I had news sources and hung out in the right places, with a membership at the Hurlingham Club, where I played tennis on grass and rated elbow space in the Connaught bar. Nights I hung at Vingt Quatre and Kartouche’s Basement and other trendy joints along the Fulham Road but could still get into Annabel’s and Tramp and book a table at Langan’s. I’d interviewed the elegant Armani in Milano, the new Prix Goncourt novelist in his atelier on the Left Bank (he enjoyed a Turkish waterpipe; I stuck to Gitanes), and General Lebed in the Kremlin before he was sacked (“A de Gaulle in the making or a future dictator” ran the headline), and spoke pretty fair French. Anderson liked writers who knew stuff like that, had been there and done that, and knew their way around.
You know how Clint Eastwood ducks the press and doesn’t do Letterman or sit still for a lot of interviews? It was Anderson who came up with the idea of sending Norman Mailer out there to Carmel to do the interview. Eastwood was so delighted he drove down himself to welcome Mailer at the airport, drive him out to the house. The most macho writer in America meets Dirty Harry! That’s how they played it; that’s how it was. It was stuff like that that was special about Parade, the Sunday magazine that’s the biggest in the world with a circulation every week of something like forty million, and now its editor had dangled a big money offer. Plus the whole summer off to finish the terrorism book I was doing for Tom Dunne at St. Martin’s Press.
You couldn’t ask for a better deal. And most appealing of all, it would get me out of London, overnight no longer a town I enjoyed, not since an admirably kinky (though very well brought-up) young woman, whom I was convinced was mad about me, ran off with a chinless, but titled, wonder.
So I took Walter up on his offer, and sailed back to the States aboard QE2 to spend July and August out on Further Lane doing the book, before starting work at his magazine. Two months to wrap up a hardcover book wasn’t all that much time and I plugged away pretty diligently, starting each day with a brisk swim in the surf off our own patch of beach, getting fit again after Algiers. But I tried to duck the East Hampton dinner and cocktail party circuit. Not that even if you wanted, you could go totally into hiding.
One morning on Newtown Lane a small black convertible, very nifty indeed, honked at me. Peggy Siegal, the PR woman. I waved instinctively before realizing it was Peggy. Coming back from Dreesen’s with my newspapers, I saw her again, parked at the curb this time and talking animatedly into her cell phone, all the while very carefully detailing the dashboard of her convertible with a long sort of quill, a very precise feather duster indeed, getting into, and meticulously so, every nook and cranny. Quite industrious she was.
Hello, Peggy, I said, who’s on the phone?
I don’t know why I did that. Causing mischief, I suppose.
But Peggy took me literally. Claudia, she said, say hello.
So I said hello to Claudia Cohen, who was a gossip columnist and very rich and for about an hour and a half had been Senator Al D’Amato’s girlfriend. Which no one who knew either of them understood.
“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.
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.
