by James Brady
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?
I don’t mean to sound patronizing or smug about Hannah’s crowd. I knew some of them. Liked a few. I even had a sneaking, contrarian admiration for my hostess. Hannah Cutting was a grand story. The Czechoslovakian potato farmer’s daughter from Riverhead who’d become “America’s Homemaker.” Hard work, guts, taste, an instinct for what Americans wanted, an enormous vitality, a physical toughness that had driven her in her thirties to become something of an alpinist. Meanwhile, left behind in her luminous wake, a weak and malleable husband bearing an old East Hampton family name. To some, she was a self-made success story of heroic proportions; to others, Lucrezia Borgia. As a reporter, I delighted in colorful originals like Hannah Cutting.
Which didn’t mean we were pals.
Unless they were strictly Maidstone Club, High Episcopalian, Ladies’ Village Improvement Society, and all that, Hamptons parties in high season, even along Further Lane, occasionally had their freak-show aspects, not quite up to Fire Island or Key West standards, but still.
Hannah Cutting’s season-closing party was campier, more outrageous than most. The man who was then editing New York magazine (and would shortly be sacked on account of falling subscription renewal rates, down from 71 to 67 percent) was something of a genius who had sent out a virtual SWAT team of reporters and photographers to capture on paper that final weekend of summer at Hannah’s. As industrious were their efforts, what the occasion really called for was William Hogarth. Only a Hogarth of Gin Lane and The Harlot’s Progress could do justice to this bunch. Maybe the Hogarth who painted A Representation of the March of the Guards Toward Scotland, with its magnificent chaos of weeping and roistering, drunken kisses and brawling, a portrait of his countrymen and women that was chaotic and ludicrous, ghastly and insolent.
Hannah’s invited gallery of grotesques, her real-life imagining just who were truly the rich and famous, was everything Old Money found wrong about East Hampton last summer:
Ross Bleckner, the artist, showed up with his latest Boy Toy who went about assuring people, “but I have a real job! Really I do. I know you despise me. But I work! I work!” Demi Moore came in with her head shaved for a role, compulsively spanking Donna Karan on the ass. And what was that all about? Bianca Jagger lectured people about poverty in Central America and denied she was a fag hag. Yoko Ono ran back and forth to a car, opening and slamming its doors as a pretty boy sprinted after her, calling out, “Mother!” Susan Sontag, of the skunk-streaked hair, sat silent and staring at walls. A man who poured drinks on people until they threw him out. Another fellow who said he kept a tiger shark named Smiley in his swimming pool. But didn’t swim, himself. A third who pugnaciously challenged people to hit him. “Hit me! Go ahead! Take a swing at me. Maybe I’m HIV-positive. How can you know until you hit me?”
One husky blonde with a crew cut who’d driven up on a Harley introduced herself, possibly mistaking me for someone important.
“My name is Ralph,” she explained. “I’m meeting my girlfriend here. Have you seen her?”
A woman named Precious Mommy told anyone who’d listen just how she loved animals but admitting that very morning, “I ran over a squirrel!” And the trippy Jesus in pirate earrings who kept telling other guests how he began life wearing a gorilla costume delivering invitations to parties such as this one, “but now I know these people. And they know me!” A famous covergirl, slightly out of it, sat in the backseat of her own Mercedes parked halfway up the gravel drive, upright but fast asleep at five in the afternoon. Murphy, the book promoter with an uncanny knack for getting authors on the morning shows and even Oprah, and had a place somewhere out here, came at me wrapped in his accustomed wreath of cigarette smoke, muttering, “fabulous. Just fabulous.” I had no hint of what he was talking about but to Murphy, understatement was a sin. Anything even marginally “good” deserved “fabulous” or better adjectives.
All of these folk and more would have made the New York magazine cover story if it hadn’t been scrubbed in favor of the murder.
I worked the lawn, glass in hand, the grotesquerie made tolerable by the champagne, mingling with fashion designers and actors and TV news anchors and other stars, feeling like a blend of Robin Leach and Nick Carraway. I was marginally enjoying the show when Hannah’s corporate keeper came along, Hideo Hegel, U.S. rep for what was nicknamed the Seven Samurai, the huge Japanese conglomerate that bought Hannah and Hannah’s company for millions and paid her other millions each year to front for them; Hegel actually ran the thing. He was big, ugly, and competent. Oh, but he was competent, an interesting mix, half-Japanese, half-German, his late father a Nazi general who spent World War II in Tokyo as German military attaché. People played on his name, snidely referring to him as “Hideous.” Not Hannah. “The Axis Powers,” that’s what she called him, and to his face, rude and dismissive. Hegel took it; I don’t think he liked it. Having to account for Hannah to his masters in Tokyo, the Seven Samurai, he seemed to me to be leading a humiliating life of quiet exasperation. Except for those hours he whiled away with his girlfriend.
“Hallo, Stowe. You know the Countess, of course.”
“Of course.”
I’d met them before, had seen them in Manhattan and around the boroughs in Europe, an
d he knew my father by reputation. The Countess, a blonde invariably described by Liz Smith as White Russian, was nearly as tall as Hideo Hegel but much better looking. She belonged to him and provided services at which one could only, and pruriently, guess. The Samurai paid Hegel to keep an eye on Hannah Cutting. The cynical suggested they also paid the Countess to keep an eye on him.
“Hello, Beecher,” said Howard Stringer, the television supremo. That was a shock, seeing him at Hannah’s, and I said so. Stringer grinned, a big, amiable Welshman. “I know, I know. She’s a piece of work. Three networks in five years and she screwed every one of us. I should know; we stole her show from Ted Turner and Barry Diller stole it from us. One of these days Murdoch’ll steal her from Barry. You live by the sword, you die by the sword. If she pulled that stuff on CBS in the old days, Bill Paley would have sent someone to bump her off. Someone classy, Frank Stanton or Murrow, so that it would be done properly, even elegantly so.”
Stringer was at her party, he admitted, “for the food and drink, since that’s the only profit I’m ever going to get out of the woman.”
Beyond Stringer, a knot of men crowded around a slender young woman with dark brown hair down to the small of her bare and very lovely back. You couldn’t get close without being pushy. “She’s some sort of publishing hotshot from London. Works for Random House,” I was authoritatively informed by a man I knew from the Maidstone Club. “Out here for the care and feeding of one of their best-selling authors, I suppose. Got some sort of title.” I assumed he meant this in the corporate sense. In the crush of admirers I couldn’t tell if the girl was with anyone in particular. She was awfully pretty, with a wonderfully husky Belgravia voice, slurring her speech in a London manner I knew by now pretty well and found irresistible (could I still be carrying a small torch?) and I was considering whether just to barge into the scrum, when someone else came along and said “Hi.”
This was Hannah’s grown daughter, Claire. Her “plain daughter” was how the unkind put it.
Claire had her mother’s coloring and good bones and a vigorous twenty-something body bordering on the spectacular, but the wire-rim glasses and a sulky, resentful look spoiled the effect. I don’t know if Claire squinted because she had the wrong lenses but it scrunched up a face that could have been a lot more attractive. Hunched up her shoulders as well, forcing her to peer straight ahead by bending forward. The peerless Hannah clearly had a set of East Hampton values to which her only child was not even attempting to live up. And when someone told the girl, “Your mother’s looking for you,” Claire’s shoulders slumped and she cringed slightly, as if anticipating a blow.
Hannah, it was said, demanded of her daughter a certain standard.
As a journalist, I was interested in relationships, curious about this one; as a polite guest I said to hell with it and took a fresh glass off a waiter’s tray, enjoying the spectacle of rich people queued up for the free lunch at buffet tables, nudging each other for advantage at the smoked salmon and toast; the small, chilled local lobster with stiff homemade mayonnaise; the caviar being spooned up. As we waited our turn at the Beluga, one sleekly tailored gent introduced himself as “Donna Karan’s orthodontist.” Now what the devil do you respond to that, “I’ve long admired her molars”? I nodded and half-grinned instead and he took his caviar and went on across the lawn, quite pleased and introducing himself to other fortunate folk.
“Oh, champers. Do let’s have some, Teddy; there’s a good fellow.”
It was the English girl, the one with the Belgravia voice who worked for Random House. I was about to say something when I recognized the man with her, the one on whom she was urging the champagne.
“And D.P. at that,” she was going on. “I say, this Hannah does have style.”
I looked over her shoulder at the bottle from which they were filling the young woman’s flute and, she was right. The champagne was Dom Perignon. The flute wasn’t shabby either, Waterford at a glance.
Her escort was Crossman, the Wall Street man. Odd, according to the columns he was attached at the hip to that pretty Foley girl. Well, when you’ve got that much money …
The young Englishwoman was right about the champagne. And about Hannah’s having style. Further Lane wasn’t chardonnay-in-plastic-cups and never had been. Even the New Money people seemed to understand and be happy about it; having earned their way up to Waterford and Dom from chardonnay and plastic. I wished I knew Crossman better; then I could have said hello and been easy about it, and he would have had to introduce me and … but by now they’d wandered off and I watched her go; even in departing, she was lovely.
I took mental notes on the more notable guests; you never know when you might have to write a piece and it’s better to have taken notes and not use them than to need notes and not have them.
There were plenty of names from the columns; you know who they were.
Then there came a rather ugly moment over the buffet. Hannah had made her appearance, daughter Claire obediently tagging along, while around Hannah was a half circle of flatterers and the curious, asking her about Nepal and climbing and this upcoming Mount Everest recon. Will you be going along with your mother? someone asked Claire, but it was Hannah who answered crisply for her daughter in a voice that carried. “Not my Claire, she’s afraid of heights.” It was a cruel thing to say publicly and you could see the girl recoil and redden.
I felt badly for Claire but then exactly at that moment Hannah saw me and gave me the benefit of that wonderful broad-mouthed smile and an extended hand. For a microsecond I thought of not taking it, because of what she’d just done to her own kid. But that would have been rude, stupid as well. So I grabbed her hand and shook it vigorously and we exchanged a pleasant word or two as I thanked Hannah for including me in her invitation.
By eight the sun was falling into Hook Pond across the fairways of the Maidstone Club course and the young beauty who worked for Random House had vanished (I assumed with the very fortunate Mr. Crossman), so I got out of there. I hadn’t brought my car. I lived pretty close and why bother with the parking ritual. Even though there were neatly dressed young men in identical khakis and white polo shirts parking the cars and, now, unparking them. The sleeping covergirl’s vehicle was still there but she wasn’t. Perhaps some caring person had taken her away to … rest. That was where I saw Claire Cutting again, down by the parked cars, hanging out, I guess, more comfortable with the boys parking cars than with her mother and her mother’s friends, no longer cringing like a beaten cur. I wondered if Hannah always treated her daughter that way, wondered why her former husband, Cutting, punished himself by attending her parties as he had this one, hanging about on the fringe and quietly getting soused. Did Hannah enjoy having him there, pinned in his misery like a specimen butterfly, to the corkboard? Did she derive pleasure from humiliating Claire? As I walked up the gravel, turning once to be sure a following car wasn’t about to nudge me into the hedge, I could see Claire necking with one of the car-parkers, bent backwards and splayed halfway across the hood of a pickup I recognized as Claire’s, her arms around the boy’s neck, his hands moving. A bumper sticker on her pickup said, “I’m not driving fast; I’m flying low.” Claire and the boy seemed to be on the verge of doing both.
Hey, end of summer romance, not unknown out here.
I walked home along Further Lane, passed by limos headed for Manhattan, or to the miniature East Hampton airport that could, just, take the smaller private jets; and by the Range Rovers and custom Hum Vees and less pricey Chevy Blazers and Jeeps, by BMWs and ragtops and other local cars leaving Hannah’s, their red taillights burning holes in the summer night. I watched a little tube, tossed a salad and burned a steak, drank most of a bottle of a nice Lynch Bages Pauillac 1990, and went to bed early. Tomorrow was a Sunday but I’d be putting in another long day at the laptop, rewriting and editing the damned book.
I confess to having had absolutely no sense of dread or foreboding about tragedy to come nor did I dr
eam that night of bodies on the beach. So much for my being such a hotshot reporter. But as I fell asleep I told myself I’d been right to thank Hannah for asking me and to take her hand.
* * *
And now we had a killing in the village. On a beach where I swam as a boy. Not more than a few hundred yards from where I now lived.
FIVE
The night swimmer among the sharks …
Two o’clock in the morning is a dangerous time to swim alone in the sea. Anyone around here can tell you that.
Some hours after that season-ending Labor Day weekend party at one of the great East Hampton oceanfront “cottages” that adorn Further Lane, the beach is empty and stilled.
The noisy shore birds sleep, terns and plovers, cormorants and gulls, as the usual sea fog of these hours drifts onshore, masking rather than concealing a disciplined, rhythmic line of low waves. There is little breeze; no surf to speak of. The early September moon is already down and scattered stars peek through the thin fog. Dawn is hours off, even false dawn. Fitzgerald once, and famously, called Long Island Sound a great wet barnyard, the most domesticated body of salt water in the hemisphere. That’s all very well. But the Sound is up there brushing Connecticut twenty miles north of here. For us on the south shore of Long Island, it’s no docile, domesticated sound, but a real ocean out there, the Atlantic itself. Beyond the modest surf line there is in the darkness the occasional swift swirl of disturbed water as a big fish, a striped bass, maybe a big blue or a school of feeding blues breaks the surface in hungry pursuit of baitfish. Further out, even in these latitudes, much larger, more dangerous fish hunt.
