His eyes focused on a portrait of his benefactor and aunt, Sarah Diodati Gardiner, painted by Adele Herter. Her largesse is the cause of much of his wealth and all of his grief. “They say I have an eight-million-dollar trust but, you know, I have eighty-five million dollars outside of the trust,” Gardiner said. “Money I made on my own. I didn’t inherit it, no, I got up in the morning and I paid a nickel and took the subway to work every day at a Wall Street bank, the Empire Trust Company, for seventeen dollars a week, that’s how you do it.” He now owns a forty-two-acre shopping center in Islip and recently sold his ten-room Fifth Avenue apartment in Manhattan. “Of course, eighty-five million dollars is nothing in East Hampton these days; Mr. Perelman, who now owns The Creeks, is worth billions. I understand these days you have to have a fortune of three hundred and forty million dollars to even be listed in Forbes, and all my fortune put together is about only a hundred and thirty-five million dollars.
“You see, I attend to all my own business affairs,” he said. “Not like my cousin Winnie, who had his first scotch at two o’clock in the afternoon and died broke.” Whitney Gardiner Jr., a handsome playboy of the forties and fifties, and his wife were known as “Manhattan’s most streamlined couple” in the social columns. Winnie is the black sheep of the family, the one who nearly lost the island out of family hands (in which it had been held for 298 years). In 1937, when the island was about to be put up at public auction, it was saved just in the nick of time by Sarah Diodati Gardiner, then a seventy-five-year-old spinster, who shelled out $400,000 for it. She left half to Robert Gardiner, the other half to his sister, Alexandra.
She also once owned the mansion in which Gardiner sat. Right in the middle of the village of East Hampton, set back from the street down a circular drive behind a tall privet, the house is built of whitewashed Georgian stone, its walls three feet thick, the roof a beautiful patina of weathered tan Lucovvici tile, “the same tile used on the Vatican,” Gardiner pointed out. Because the walls are so thick, in a Gothic touch ornate security bars are sunk into the stone, the bars covered with “real gold leaf, not gold paint,” said Gardiner, “so thin a craftsman has to blow it on them when the air is still.”
This house is a replacement of the original wood house built on the six-acre site in 1835 by local architect John Dimon and consequently owned by intertwining tributaries of the Gardiner family. That house, along with 123 prized fruit trees, was damaged in the great hurricane of 1938. Gardiner’s aunt, Sarah Diodati Gardiner, from yet another branch of the family, this one with an Italian strain, had the house torn down and replaced with the huge stone one. As formidable as the mansion may be, in 1953, when Sarah Gardiner died and left it—plus a $40,000 trust—to the town as “the Gardiner Memorial Building for literary and artistic purposes,” the town declined to run a huge white elephant for vague literary and artistic purposes, so the house passed through private hands into those of Robert David Lion Gardiner.
“And how do I know you’ll get it right?” he demanded of his visitor. “First Nettie Rattray got it wrong! Then that bitch from Vanity Fair.” He raised his nose in the air as if he’d just whiffed something awful. Of all the thousands of articles written about the Gardiner family, two disturb him greatly. One is a dead-on, and equally as deadly, 1992 Vanity Fair piece written by Leslie Bennets, which commented about Gardiner that “if it were not for his royal bearing you would think he was a derelict” and questioned Gardiner’s regard for daily hygiene. He had spent the entire day on the island with Bennets, “wining and dining” her, according to him, and the last thing he said to her as he deposited her on the dock in East Hampton was “Don’t do a hatchet job.”
The other article that so riles him—angers him even more than the one in Vanity Fair—is an old clipping by Jeannette Edwards Rattray, the late editor and publisher of the East Hampton Star. She was a ubiquitous Queen Mother figure in the village. She not only owned the newspaper with her late husband but was also descended from one of the town’s very first families. Joshua Edwards settled in the village in 1650—technically a few years before even the Gardiners moved there, a distinction she never let Robert Gardiner forget. Rattray was the closest the town ever came to having a social arbiter or society columnist. For nearly forty years she wrote a weekly chronicle of her activities in the East Hampton Star, basically a gossip column called “Looking Them Over,” which she pointedly signed, “One of Ours.” She was a writer of some charm and grace, and much of the worthy material written about social life in East Hampton over the past hundred years comes from her pen.
Robert Gardiner would have liked to be her friend and ally—but no, who does she pal around with but Evan Frankel! At one point Frankel owned more of East Hampton than anybody else in history except Lion Gardiner himself. And then, worse, years ago Rattray wrote that she had visited with the widow of President John Tyler at the Summer White House, 217 Main Street, the house that Allan Schneider later bought. Allan Schneider seized upon Rattray’s debatable facts and capitalized on them, repeating over and over that he lived in the Summer White House. This made Gardiner frantic, and although he forced Rattray to retract the error, people still think, much to Robert Gardiner’s eternal anguish, that Allan Schneider’s grand house was the real Summer White House.
“Jeannette Rattray says she met the president’s widow in that house,” Gardiner said, burning, “but she actually met the widow of the president’s son—John Alexander Tyler! Then, after having in headlines that I was wrong, Nettie wrote, where the Lost and Found department is, in tiny little diamond type, ‘I was mistaken.’ The trouble is, if anyone caught her wrong, Nettie Rattray had it in for them, and she’d crucify them.
“This is how it happened that this house became the Summer White House,” Gardiner said, settling back, his eyes half closed, entering a trancelike state, like a virtuoso preparing to play his instrument. “In the 1840s, my aunt Julia Gardiner was a great beauty—‘the Rose of Long Island,’ they called her. She had large round eyes, hair pulled back severely in a bun, and a saucy figure.” Gardiner explained that in 1844 Julia accompanied her father, state Senator David Gardiner, as part of a large congressional delegation that had been invited aboard the USS Princeton to witness the firing of the Peacemaker—the greatest gun ever cast in America, which they said would end all wars.
“There she was, corseted, small-waisted, with a pushed-up bosom, showing cleavage—the big skirt from the best dressmakers in Paris, all embroidered, lovely jewels,” said Gardiner. “It was hot, and shortly before the firing of the gun, my aunt Julia said to President Tyler”—and then, in a startling transformation, Robert Gardiner became coquettish Julia Gardiner and spoke in a falsetto—“‘I’m afraid of the gun, Mr. President, I can’t stand the noise. I’m scared of it and I’m… I’m dying of the heat. Mr. President, would you take me below and give me a glass of champagne?’”
Gardiner sneered at the thought of the president, “the silly old goat, in his striped trousers, tailcoat, and top hat,” taking the girl belowdecks. “Julia was younger than the president’s daughter—the first Mrs. Tyler had died in the White House. Julia was looking at him with her famous mascara eyebrows, flirting with him, and they were drinking the champagne, when a roar and a rumble went through the ship! A tremendous cloud came into the cabin, and a sailor rushed downstairs and said, ‘Miss Gardiner, your father has been killed!’” The sailors had overloaded the gun, and when it was fired, it exploded from the breech shaft and went into shrapnel, instantly killing the secretary of state, the secretary of the treasury, the secretary of the navy, and Julia Gardiner’s father.
“It would have killed the president too, but my great-aunt was flirting like mad with him,” Gardiner said. “When she heard her father had been killed, she swooned into the president’s waiting arms—where else?—and woke up in the White House. The rest is history,” Gardiner said smugly. “Of course, she was also a bitch, and she cheated on the president too, with Sam Houston. The state of Texa
s was practically annexed in her bed!
“In any event, in the summer of 1845, when the president wanted to escape the heat of Washington in July and August, he stayed here, at the home of Julia’s widowed mother. He then wrote a letter to this house thanking his mother-in-law for letting him stay here,” a letter Gardiner said he has in a vault. “They came to this house, not Allan Schneider’s house,” Gardiner said, shaking his head. “How could they have gone to Allan Schneider’s house when Tyler was dead by the time Nettie Rattray visited there? How! How—?” The thought incenses him. “It was the wroooooong generation!” he whooped.
“Here, look!” he said, propelling himself up off the sofa. “Here!” He commanded a visitor’s attention to a long wood trestle table covered in Colonial treasures. “This is the oldest sideboard in New York State,” he said, stroking its surface, as if the sideboard proves everything he’d been saying, “and over here is a Queen Anne desk of full mahogany. It’s got hidden compartments to secret away rubies and jewels from pirates.” He fumbled with drawers and secret niches. “We are survivors!” he sang out as the hidden compartments came into view.
He next moved through a dark hallway, past the dining room and a collection of Chinese exports from the 1700s (“But of course the gold service for eighty-four is in a vault at the Bank of New York!”) and into the living room, where, going faster, he pointed out the rugs, the floor, the walls, the satin-lined doghouse, a painting from the Diodati palace, and a Hans Memlinc that he “bought from the Krupps.” His narrative became too dense to grasp as names flew by—Delanois, Migéon, Tuart—incomprehensible except for the aside “These chairs are made by Madame du Barry’s own chairmaker. She was pretty dumb, but she was a famous cocksucker.”
Gardiner entered the grand foyer, where an imposing curved staircase to the second floor is lined with the portraits of the Gardiner family, lords of the manor all, their brides, and children. At the foot of the staircase is a small portrait of an alabaster-skinned woman from another time, the emeralds in her necklace the same color as her eyes. The painting is distinctly the work of Dalí, but its surrealism is constrained to a vivid portrait of an ethereal redhead with high cheekbones, an Audrey Hepburn neck, and thick red hair tumbling voluptuously to her shoulders. “This is my wife, Eunice, painted by Salvador Dalí,” Gardiner said. The portrait is undersized because Gardiner bargained Dalí down $5,000 from his usual $25,000 commission.
Gardiner married Eunice Bailey Oakes in March 1961 when he was fifty-one years old. Until then he had lived with his mother. Those who knew Gardiner considered Eunice a surprising choice for a confirmed bachelor. She was a petite, one-time British model and the widow of William Pitt Oakes, the son of Sir Harry Oakes, a Canadian financier. They wed at Saint Thomas Church in a high-profile wedding with eighteen ushers in top hats and tails. The Vanity Fair article that Gardiner so detests reported that on the receiving line of his wedding, two guests were overheard to comment, “I understand our host is looking for volunteers tonight.” In explaining why he and Eunice never had any heirs, Gardiner said that he had his sperm tested, “and they wiggled,” and left it at that.
“It was a great society wedding,” Gardiner said, relishing the memory before Eunice’s portrait. “I had the reception at the Colony Club, which is very restricted, only four hundred guests allowed. It was the wedding of the season. The orchestra that played at the White House played, and I took my bride out on the dance floor and started the waltz, and Eunice had these fabulous jewels on, a million dollars’ worth, a tiara and diamond earrings, and she wore a magnificent gown and my mother’s wedding veil, all Brussels lace with petals of roses.…” Although the couple were quite social when they were first married, appearing at balls and dinner parties in New York and East Hampton, for the past ten years Eunice has disappeared from view and has become something of a mystery.
Gardiner broke from his reverie and took his visitor through open French doors, onto a brick patio. Beyond it is a lovely palladium more than 100 feet long, lined with statues on tall pedestals and a backdrop of dark green arborvitae. East Hampton could be 3,000 miles away back there, it is so quiet and peaceful. At the far end of the walk there is a small hedge and, a ways off, an old tile swimming pool, the blue water glass-flat except for the tiniest ripple of bugs tapping the surface. “Those new people put the pools right near their houses,” Gardiner sneered. “They’re so proud, ‘Oh, look, we can afford a pool!’” To the right is a small stand of unusual trees. “This is the biggest ginkgo tree in America,” Gardiner said, caressing a deep-green leaf the size of a fan. “And those over there are varnish trees from China,” he said. “The Gardiners brought these trees from China to Sag Harbor. The sap from this kind of tree is what makes the varnish on Chinese furniture so gorgeous.”
Gardiner looked around and sighed. He was quiet, finally, for a moment. Then he brought up Evan Frankel, the man who was Jeannette Rattray’s friend. “He lived in the old McCord house on Hither Lane,” Gardiner said, “and put a swimming pool in the basement somehow. Frankel called himself a ‘squire,’ but that was just a nickname.” He squinted into the sun. “He was an insufferable man, Frankel, rude for absolutely no reason, and a snob, but even Evan Frankel, when he came here, said, ‘Now, this is old money.’” Gardiner relished the words, whispering them again, “Old money.”
The thought of Evan Frankel’s validation pangs him, and suddenly he cried out, “Jeannette Rattray! No! No! No! No! No! Erase it! Erase it!” The words fell dead against the stone house. “Erase it! Erase it!” He motioned wildly to the house, to the trees, to the statuary. “But Nettie Rattray can’t tear it down. It’s four hundred years of history. You can’t tear that down. Like the three-foot-thick walls. You can’t change the fact that we started this town.”
2
GARDINER HAD locked up the mansion and clambered into his lumbering eight-year-old Cadillac, which he was driving erratically down Main Street, the windows shut and the air-conditioning off. He seemed as oblivious to the August heat as he was to the people Rollerblading or to the Range Rovers sharing the street with him. Coming round the back of Town Pond, he drove his huge automobile up onto a sloping knoll and parked it at such a steep angle that the force of gravity nearly tore the driver’s door off its hinges when Gardiner opened it. He hoisted himself out of the car and made his way past an old iron gate into the cemetery. He pointed out the graves of his ancestors as he weaved his way among them. “See, here are the graves of my mother and father,” he said, gesturing to two tombstones side by side, the Gardiner crests pitted with age. “There is the grave of Senator Gardiner, who was killed on the USS Princeton, and this is my great-great-grandfather, Captain Averill Gardiner—his house is the one the Ladies Village Improvement Society is in—and here is my grandfather, with a duplicate of the tomb of [Sextus] Africanus, the tomb of the Roman emperor, which I’m having duplicated for my own tomb on Gardiner’s Island.”
Ahead is Lion Gardiner’s unusual grave. He lies in a neo-Gothic sepulchre under an ornate sandstone tomb designed by James Renwick, the architect of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and Grace Church. Eight pillars support a rectangular stone roof with a shingled pattern, under which is a carved stone bas-relief of Lion Gardiner clad in the accoutrements of knighthood, his hands folded on the scabbard of a sword. He wanted to be buried on Gardiner’s Island, his namesake homestead, but he dropped dead unexpectedly of a heart attack in East Hampton the summer of 1663 at age sixty-four, and in those days they didn’t have refrigeration. Before the townsfolk could get him back to the island, his stomach began to swell from natural gasses—and it was decided to bury him quickly in town. Years ago, when the body was exhumed, it was discovered that he had been buried seven feet deep, facing west, so he would rise facing his friends on Judgment Day. His ivory-white skeleton showed that he had had a strong jaw and large forehead, and his curly copper-toned locks were still intact on his skull.
The heavy traffic on Main Street that sunny summer
day seemed to fade from view. Vines and natural grasses had grown up around the edges of the tomb, and Gardiner fell upon them, shouting, “Look! Here!” He knelt and pulled at the weeds with shaking hands. “I was here last week and it was covered with vines. It looked deliberate. My family has left thirty-six thousand dollars for the care of the cemetery, and Lion Gardiner’s grave was covered deliberately—not only with vines but with a big bush! Someone must have planted it! Why, this town is like Peyton Place! It looks deliberate to me! This is so that she could say, ‘You know the Rattrays are the old family here, and the Gardiners are just common nouveau riche parvenu.’ Crazy! Absolutely nuts!… They did it so you couldn’t read this inscription.”
Gardiner pushed himself to his feet and began to scratch away at the carved inscription on the tomb with his jagged thumbnail, scraping like an emery board at the hardened lichen. “Here it is,” he said, growing excited. “Here is what it says!” He breathlessly recited fragments of the long inscription, “… an officer… English army… an engineer… why he was sent… fortifications, you see! He was fighting in Holland in the Thirty Years War… Gardiner’s Island—Look!—of which he was sole owner and ruler.” Gardiner was triumphant. “Born in 1599! How can you not say he was the first? And Nettie Rattray says, ‘One of the first…’ Here! Look! ‘Lord. L-O-R-D of the island.’ I mean, I did not make it up!” He began to dig again at the offending weeds with the determination of a terrier.
The man at whose grave he dug, Lion Gardiner, was the town’s first de facto mayor, fixer, real estate broker, and probably the first recorded case of a white man succumbing to Hampton’s land lust. Gardiner was a huge man for his time, six feet two inches tall, wiry and tough, with a silky red beard and mustache upturned at the ends. His exploits are almost mythological. He was a military engineer with a shrewd eye for self-promotion. In 1635, when he was thirty-six years old, not a young man in the 1600s, he hired out his services to Lord Saye and Lord Brook to build a palisaded fort and moat in Connecticut to protect English settlers from the rancorous Pequot. He was a respected but controversial commander. He had married the enemy—a Dutch woman, Mary Willemsen Duercant, whom he had brought to the New World with him from Holland. The Dutch in New Amsterdam threatened English expansion to the south and had become bitter adversaries of the Crown. Gardiner had a child with the Dutch woman as well, a son, the first white child born in the state of Connecticut.
Philistines at the Hedgerow Page 6
