Philistines at the Hedgerow

by Steven Gaines

  The plight of the clueless mother and daughter became a national cause célèbre and eventually the subject of a fascinating film by Albert and David Maysles, called Grey Gardens. The attention motivated Jacqueline Onassis and a few other embarrassed relatives to cough up enough money to make the house habitable for the Beales. When Big Edie died in 1985, Little Edie finally decided to sell the place, and Allan Schneider was enlisted to find a buyer.

  “It didn’t take me long,” he said, “because the house was a gem, really. The Bradlees bought it for the bargain price of eight hundred and forty thousand dollars.” The day Bradlee bought the estate, he discovered that the legend of Grey Gardens was so great that the front door had been stolen off its hinges. It turned out that an overzealous fund-raiser for Guild Hall, the local East Hampton cultural center, had used the door as raffle prize. The woman who won it was disturbed to learn that it had been stolen and refused to claim her prize. Bradlee only discovered what happened to his front door from reading an account in the New York Times. Unfortunately for him, a more troubling legacy than the house’s notoriety was the stench of cat urine that had soaked into the wood of the house, forcing him to rip out a portion of the floors and walls in the east end in an attempt to get rid of the odor.

  As Schneider drove farther down West End Road, the gravel top narrowed protectively and the hedgerows grew higher for privacy. The houses could be glimpsed only in the brief hiatus of a driveway, if at all. “That’s Iona Dune, the writer Ring Lardner’s old house,” he said, “which was a play on another house called Ona Dune. One year as a joke Lardner renamed his house The Mange. Next door is the house built by his pal Grantland Rice, the prince of sportswriters in the nineteen twenties. And that’s Michael Cimino’s house. Four acres. He might have bought it in part with his fee for making one of the great flop movies of all time, Heaven’s Gate.” Cimino wanted to call the house Heaven’s Gate as well, but that name was usurped by television journalist Judy Licht and her advertising-executive husband, Jerry Della Femina, for their own oceanfront home. Cimino sent Della Femina and Licht a letter demanding that they cease and desist using the name Heaven’s Gate, to which the couple pointed out that Cimino didn’t invent the expression; it was from the Old Testament. The Della Feminas stuck with the name.

  Farther along, hidden up a curving drive, was the former Juan Trippe estate, which was the subject of a court battle between the Trippe heirs, who wanted to divide the eight and a half acres into smaller parcels, and their next-door neighbor, Cox Communications heiress Katherine Johnson Rayner. The grown Trippe children hadn’t occupied the 8,000-square-foot estate since matriarch Elizabeth Stettinius Trippe died in 1983. They wanted to divide the property into four buildable plots and applied for a zoning board variance, which would have raised the value of the property from $6 million to $8 million. The estate was still intact when Calvin Klein and his wife, Kelly, came along to rescue it.

  “I sold this to Calvin and Kelly Klein in 1991,” said Allan. Klein leveled the main building and, with the design talent of Thierry Despont, had it rebuilt into an airy palace, a paean to one of his own commercials. Other than the stained dark floors, made of antique wood planks brought from a Vermont barn, everything in the house is white or muted shades of sand and gray, including sheer white drapes on every window that billow like spinnakers in the ocean breeze. In perhaps the most unusual move of any homeowner in the Hamptons, Klein filled in the large terraced swimming pool behind the house (because he said it distracted him from the vista of the dunes, ocean, and horizon) and had it sodded over. As a final touch the dunes were hand-planted with 7,000 blades of saw grass and 4,000 square feet of pine trees, to make them look as perfect as a fragrance ad. Total cost, purchase and renovation: $10 million.

  Finally, Schneider came to the last on the road, perhaps the most privileged tract of land in all the Hamptons. “It is the only house in the Hamptons from which you can see both the Atlantic and Georgica Pond in one sweeping gaze,” he said reverently. The huge barnlike structure was a wedding gift from Ann Cox Chambers, the daughter of the 1920 Democratic presidential candidate, James Cox, to her daughter Katherine on the occasion of her marriage to former Condé Nast publishing executive William Rayner. Mrs. Cox paid approximately $4 million for the house, buying the adjacent wetlands for an additional $3 million. With views so extraordinary, the Rayners have kept the inside of the house strikingly simple. The southern side of the living room is all sliding doors of wood and glass, an impractical touch because the damp continually warps the wood. The rooms were decorated by society designer Mark Hampton, the bleached-blond floors covered with sisal carpets and the furniture upholstered in Hamptons signature khaki-and-white stripes. Although Mrs. Rayner had a small second story added to the house, there are still only six bedrooms. Mrs. Rayner prefers a more formal country lifestyle than many, and there’s a ritual time for breakfast, lunch, tea, massage, and cocktails.

  Schneider always ended his tour not on West End Road but on Main Street in the village of East Hampton, pulling his Mercedes beyond the white picket fence of his own home, one of the most charming and distinguished houses in all the Hamptons. “This is the Summer White House,” Allan explained, his head tilting back. “‘Tyler House,’ we call it, the former summer residence of John Tyler, the tenth president of the United States. 1836 Greek Revival.” Situated on a rise across the road from the manicured town green and pond, the immaculately kept four-bedroom house had deep green shutters; a low, overhung porch; and an American flag fluttering outside the side door.

  The house was furnished with a museum-quality collection of antiques—Chippendale cupboards and lowboys, a $45,000 Empire dining room table, a $40,000 George III linen press and bar, and hundreds of nineteenth-and twentieth-century hunting prints. Hunting scenes were everywhere in the house, from the embroidered place settings on the dining room table to the rim of the teacups. The scent of lilies, overflowing from tall Chinese vases, mixed with the clean smell of furniture polish filled the air. In the plush master bedroom on the second floor, Allan slept in a Federal four-poster bed worth $20,000.

  Even in the highly social world of the Hamptons, an invitation to one of Schneider’s elegant parties was a coveted ticket. At one time or another the gamut of the inner Hamptons’ hierarchy, what Schneider called the “local noblesse,” was invited to a party at Tyler House, to mingle with visiting notables such as Donald Trump or Governor Mario Cuomo. Schneider gave parties nearly every week in the summer, strawberries and champagne for as many as 100 people. Other times he would give intime dinner parties for eight, after which he would play piano in the living room and challenge his guests to Name That Tune.

  Christmas was Allan’s favorite time to entertain, and under his direction the house took on a storybook quality. The florist literally decked the halls and mantels of Tyler House with holly, there were wreaths and candles in every window, and the pine trees on the front lawn were roped with blue lights. On Christmas Eve, near midnight, Schneider and a small group of close friends would bundle up in their coats and hats and mufflers and step out onto Main Street of “the most beautiful village in America,” according to one register of historic landmarks. The group would wend its way past the serene pond with the Christmas tree frozen in place, along a path by the textured tombstones of the South End Burying Ground, where the town fathers were laid to rest, and into the brick-and-mortar sanctuary of Saint Luke’s Church. Later, a little teary-eyed and sentimental, Allan Schneider took communion at midnight mass.

  One night, after one of the many parties, when the staff was in the kitchen cleaning up and Allan was seeing a last guest to the door, the man turned to him and said, “Allan, your house is beautiful. Picture perfect! The only problem is, there’s nobody sharing it with you.”

  Allan looked flustered. “Yes there is,” he said, and shut the door.

  3

  IN 1969, when Allan Schneider arrived on the East End of Long Island, as the fin-shaped piece of l
and is sometimes called east of the Shinnecock Canal, the Hamptons were on the brink of enormous change. Until then the only phone book the Summer Colony needed was the Blue Book, and when you picked up a phone to make a call, it was still possible that a local operator would ask with a brisk Yankee twang, “Number please?”

  Until then, the string of villages and hamlets that collectively compose “the Hamptons”—Southampton, Water Mill, Bridgehampton, Sagaponack, Wainscott, and East Hampton—was home to only 27,000 year-round residents and some 6 million ducks (originally imported from Peking). But in 1951 a tiny airport was developed in East Hampton and in the late sixties a roadway from the Long Island Expressway was extended to Route 27, challenging what had kept the Hamptons safe for two centuries—its remoteness. Also, the prosperity of the postwar economy afforded upper-middle-class families vacation homes for the first time. These newcomers to the Hamptons, although wealthy by any normal standard, weren’t rich enough to build the kind of grand summer “cottages” (they were always called cottages, no matter how big they were) that lined the grassy dunes of Gin and Lily Pond Lanes. Instead, they built fashionably low-key “second homes,” as they came to be called. So great was the influx that between 1950 and 1960, the population of East Hampton alone grew by 68.3 percent and three out of every four new homes built were for “summer people.” The migration of these common millionaires—many of them self-made in the manufacturing or retail business—was so distressing to Hamptons society that the determinedly protective local newspaper of record, the East Hampton Star, which for nearly fifty years had run a column called the “Summer Colony,” officially declared 1969 as “the end of the Summer Colony” and did away with the heading in the paper.

  The seventies were chaotic for the staid Hamptons. There was even a jingle about the neatly discernible lines that had divided them until then: Southampton was for the sporting rich (inherited wealth); Bridgehampton for the nearly rich (working on it); and East Hampton for the really rich (a meritocracy of the self-made). In each community the Summer Colony denizens knew one another, their children went to private boarding schools together or to summer camp in Maine, they all belonged to the same clubs: in Southampton, the Meadow for tennis, the Southampton Bathing for the beach, and the Shinnecock or the National for golf and in East Hampton, the Maidstone Club, of course, for everything.

  At the same time the new wave was arriving, the Blue Book hegemony that made the Hamptons famous was breaking down—the du Ponts, Fords, Bouviers, Vanderbilts, Auchinclosses, Hearsts, Mellons, and Murrays were dying off or moving out. The cost of keeping up the rambling, unheated cottages became exorbitant, especially for the diluted resources of the grandchildren of the families who built them before there was such a thing as income tax. Thus, the legendary estates of the Hamptons began to be sold off one by one. One of the first to go, in 1949, in East Hampton, was “The Fens,” a twenty-five-acre estate owned by Mrs. Lorenzo E. Woodhouse, a pillar of society and a member of the Maidstone Club, whose husband had been president of the Merchant National Bank of Burlington, Vermont. The formal, Italianate gardens were famous for their boxwood topiaries of birds and animals in trellis-enclosed compartments, and the Summer Colony was stunned when the hedges were mowed down, the land parceled off into lots, and the outbuildings sold off as individual homes. A few years later, when ranch houses were built along Three Mile Harbor, it seemed as if the end had come. “The implications,” moaned the East Hampton Star, “are staggering.”

  When Allan Schneider first came to the East End, he didn’t need a crystal ball to see what was happening. After being brought up in Brooklyn Heights and graduating from Princeton, he spent most of his life in New York City, visiting the Hamptons on summer weekends. He did the debutante circuit and dated his fair share; he had conquests from Dallas to Philadelphia’s Main Line. After a brief stint writing advertising copy on Madison Avenue, he went on to public relations, for Mattel, where, he always joked, his greatest success was the promotion of a little red truck.

  In 1969 he abruptly moved to the Hamptons. He was fed up with Manhattan, the crime and the dirt. He told his brokers that he came out for a party one Saturday afternoon, intending to drive back to New York the same night, but his beat-up old Mercedes died on him and he was forced to stay over. He spent the next day in Southampton, found it difficult to tear himself away, and stayed another night; finally on Monday morning he had to force himself to return to Manhattan. Allan had succumbed to Hampton’s land lust—that inexorable gnawing desire to own a piece of the landscape—which has been bewitching visitors for centuries. By 1970 he had ditched his New York life and invented a new one in the Hamptons.

  His first job was selling real estate for a small firm called the Carolyn Rose Agency in Water Mill. Schneider was a natural at the job, so proud of the first house he sold on the corner of Maple and Lumber Lanes that he framed a black-and-white photo of it and hung it on a wall in his office for the rest of his life. As he began to assess what was happening in the real estate market, he was surprised to find the local real estate business so frozen in time. In the early seventies there were only half a dozen or so brokers operating in all the Hamptons, about the same number there had been for twenty years. They were mostly mom-and-pop operations, ancillary businesses of insurance brokerages, with scratched oak desks, green metal filing cabinets, a yellowing assessor’s map, and a fern shedding in the corner. Many of the salespeople were retirees, housewives, or widows, frequently tough old Yankee women in slacks and cardigans. There was no financing advice and not much of a sales pitch.

  The only money to be made was through sales to the rich Summer Colony crowd, but the rich bought from only two brokers, Lyda Barclay, in Southampton, a charming Southern lady who had the touch, and Mrs. Condie “Boots” Lamb in East Hampton, who bought artist Thomas Moran’s historic house and was a member of the Maidstone Club, which meant that she was on the inside. Being on the inside in the Hamptons was what it was all about, Allan decided. He joked that he was “our man in Havana” in the insular world of Hamptons real estate, a New York—style broker with an inside track in the East End. But Allan also held that the real secret was not knowing just the blue bloods but the workmen who fixed the houses, the farmers who were selling off their land, and the local builders who had their ear to the ground. So while he memorized the names of the Fortune 500 presidents and ingratiated himself over cocktails on Gin Lane, he was also just as chummy with the local police and schoolteachers. He gave cocktail parties in his modest house in Mecox, a farming area around a scenic pond; he lunched; he networked; he frequented local bars—and he loved every minute of it. He kept himself so busy that few people ever stopped to question why he was alone.

  It wasn’t so lonely at Bobby Van’s, where Allan went to drink every night. Bobby Van’s, the celebrated Bridgehampton saloon and restaurant, became Schneider’s “real estate central” for much of the seventies and eighties. Bobby Van’s opened the same year Schneider showed up in town. It was a roomy wood-paneled bar and grill on the north side of Main Street. The eponymous owner was a Juilliard School dropout and as good a schmoozer as he was a saloon piano player, the perfect kind of host. In the off-season, when the rest of Bridgehampton was like a ghost town, Bobby Van’s was filled with people at night. The food was cheap and hearty, and the farmers and workmen ate dinner there, as did Truman Capote, who lived nearby in Sagaponack, and James Jones and Kurt Vonnegut and Willie Morris, who wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times mythologizing Bobby Van’s as an oasis of warmth and country bonhomie in the bleakness of the gray Hamptons winter. Allan Schneider began to spend several nights a week there too, drinking at the bar till the early hours of the morning and chatting up strangers; soon he felt he knew half the town.

  It was one night in the winter of 1971, two years after Allan Schneider moved to the Hamptons, that he met Paul Koncelik at Bobby Van’s. Koncelik, twenty-three, an unemployed carpenter, looked little more than a fresh-scrubbed kid, tall and
handsome, with wavy brown hair and a roguish grin. He certainly didn’t look old enough to have a wife and a small son and to be struggling to kick-start his own construction company. Schneider had seen him work the bar around Bobby Van’s, quite the ladies’ man. One night Koncelik and Schneider struck up a conversation about an Andy Warhol movie they had both seen called Heat. Schneider remembered all the funny dialogue from the movie—he had a talent for quoting movie dialogue, Broadway lyrics, and poetry—and he and Koncelik downed martinis and talked until nearly closing time.

  Paul Koncelik grew up in the Northwest Woods, one of the last undeveloped areas of East Hampton, unfashionably far north of the highway. He was the oldest of ten kids, a gentle man whom his brothers and sisters admired. His father was a teacher at Bridgehampton High School, and several of his siblings were attorneys. Paul was a gifted carpenter, a master at his trade from the time he was a teen, able to build an entire house practically by himself. He just somehow had a hard time holding down a job. Although he was married, he prowled the local bars, priding himself on his charm and good looks. He had known lots of unusual types from the summer crowd, but he had never met anyone as fascinating, and certainly nobody who had ever taken as keen an interest in him, as Allan Schneider. “You are a diamond in the rough,” Schneider would reassure Koncelik. “A diamond in the rough!”