Philistines at the Hedgerow

by Steven Gaines

  It was the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, the peak of the end-of-summer frenzy in the Hamptons. Despite predictions of a possible glancing blow from a nor’easter, it was a clear, sunny day, and the famous light ricocheted across limpid blue skies. Behind Gardiner, receding with the rest of the flat mainland, roads were thick with luxury cars, the restaurants were fully booked, and lines had already formed at the counters of gourmet food shops. The subtle hysteria of the summer renters, who had to clear out of their rentals by the stroke of midnight Sunday night, gave the Hamptons a frenetic, if slightly desperate, celebratory air.

  Gardiner was on his way to give his last tour of the summer of Gardiner’s Island, indeed, what might be his last tour ever. He is, as he is fond of pointing out, eighty-five years old and will be lying in a grave on Gardiner’s Island “soon.” In three days he was going to close up his mansion in East Hampton, retrieve his wife from San Diego, and go on to Palm Beach, where they spend winters in Gardiner’s condominium building “filled with billionaires.”

  But today he was in all his glory. He was a walking historiography, an indefatigable tour guide and minister preaching the glory of the Gardiner clan. Today Gardiner had what he likes best, a captive audience. Packed in the Laughing Lady with him, and in a second, larger boat following close behind, were two dozen historians from various small towns in the Suffolk County Historical Society. Each summer, as part of his responsibility to the family legacy, Gardiner escorts historians and academics on rare tours of the island. The middle-aged historians and their spouses might have been mistaken for any group of American tourists just departed from a bus in front of the Colosseum in Rome, dressed in their comfortable clothes, canvas caps, and sensible walking shoes. Earlier, on the dock in East Hampton, they had slathered themselves with sun block shared from passed containers and had drenched their clothing in the insecticide DEET to protect them from the island’s notorious ticks. Shoulder to shoulder, crossing Gardiner’s Bay with Instamatic cameras hanging around their necks, they expectantly awaited their tour of the Colonial Jurassic Park.

  “I can’t keep household servants on the island because it’s too lonely,” Gardiner shouted, although a married couple who live in a small cottage are paid caretakers of the island year-round. “There is only direct current, and the television doesn’t work properly. There used to be an underground telephone cable, but a fishing boat tore it out thirty years ago. People don’t understand how complicated the full underpinnings of the island are to run. Tankers from Connecticut have to bring oil to fill the underground tanks. It costs fifty thousand dollars a year just for oil. Trucks have to be transported to the island on immense barges. We have twenty-seven miles of dirt road—laid out in the 1600s—which we have to clear every year by ourselves, and yet we pay a huge road tax to East Hampton. Yes, a road tax to East Hampton! Not only that, but I pay a school tax! And we’re miles from the nearest dock! That kind of taxation was what the Boston Tea Party was about.”

  What Robert Gardiner didn’t mention is that he pays for none of this, none of the taxes and not a penny of the $50,000 for the oil. The entire $1.8 million it currently costs to run the island each year is footed by Robert Gardiner’s bitterest enemies: his niece, the pale, blond, aloof Alexandra Creel Goelet, fifty-six, and her fantastically rich husband, Robert G. Goelet, sixty-seven, with whom he uneasily shares the island.

  For fifteen years Robert Gardiner and the Goelets have been enmeshed in a series of bitter, bizarre lawsuits over the island’s upkeep and its future, during the course of which Gardiner has charged that the Goelets have stolen valuable paintings belonging to him, that they put his portrait in an outhouse (the island has no outhouse), and that Robert Goelet attempted to murder him by running him over in the presence of two historians to whom Gardiner was giving a tour. Whatever happened that day, the historians are suing for $20 million, claiming they were hurt in a car accident while Gardiner was driving. In another incident heard before the New York State Supreme Court, Gardiner alleged that Goelet menaced him by slamming the door of the manor house in his face, saying, “If you come through this door, I’ll bash your brains in. I could crush you to death. I hate your guts.”

  The feeling is clearly mutual. How Robert Gardiner found himself sharing the island with his niece and her husband in the first place is like some Chekovian nightmare to him. When Gardiner’s grande dame aunt, Sarah Diodati Gardiner, died in 1953 at age ninety, she left the island jointly to Robert Gardiner and his sister, Alexandra Gardiner Creel, with the stipulation that it remain in family hands when they passed away. In 1990, when Gardiner’s sister died, her share of the island passed to her steel-willed daughter, also named Alexandra, who married Robert Goelet. Alexandra and Goelet were a duo made in naturalist heaven. He was a past president of the American Museum of Natural History, the New York Zoological Society, and the New-York Historical Society; she studied environmental science at Barnard and is a graduate of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

  He is also very rich. It is of endless aggravation to Robert Gardiner that Goelet’s family is almost, but not quite, as old and important as his own. The Goelets arrived in America in 1676, a mere forty years after Lion Gardiner. The family mansion in Newport, Ochre Court, was at least as grand as the Gardiner mansion in East Hampton, and their family mausoleum, worthy of a resting place for Zeus, was designed by McKim, Mead and White. Robert Goelet himself, called “the good Bobby” by family members (there are sixteen generations of male family members named Robert, a situation that confuses the family itself), was born in France on a “family shooting place called Sandricourt which comprises a respectable château and ten thousand acres,” he once recounted. He attended boarding school in Normandy, Brooks School in Massachusetts, and graduated from Harvard University. He was also a dive-bomber in the U.S. Navy.

  Goelet’s family has owned some of New York’s most prestigious chunks of real estate, including the land beneath the Ritz Carlton Hotel, the Lever Building on Park Avenue, and all the land under the Fulton Fish Market. In the early 1800s the family owned all the land contiguous from Union Square to Forty-eighth Street and Fifth Avenue. Curiously, for a family that helped found Chemical Bank (a Goelet has always sat on the board), not many New Yorkers have ever heard of them. They are not the kind of people you find on the pages of Women’s Wear Daily. They are not just secretive WASPS, they abhor attention and publicity. The family is almost clannish in its aversion to public identification. They have even managed to remain invisible in Manhattan business. The family doesn’t have offices in an office building with other companies; it operates its far-reaching real estate holdings from an unmarked townhouse on East Sixty-seventh Street just off Fifth Avenue. Although Robert Goelet has run the family business and sat on the board of Chemical Bank, he has for the most part lived the life of a country gentleman, a fishing buff and expert in wildlife and forest fauna. He was older than fifty when he married Alexandra in 1976, much the same age as his nemesis Robert Gardiner was when he married.

  “Bastard!” Gardiner spat out at the mention of Goelet’s name. Gardiner claims that not only is Goelet an attempted murderer but he is the destroyer of the Gardiner legend. Given a chance, Gardiner swears, Goelet will fell the primeval forest and destroy Gardiner’s Island. “When I’m gone, he is going to sell that island off,” Gardiner warned, his voice quaking with rage, and “develop it into a golf course and condominiums.” Although Gardiner’s prophecies sound far-fetched, it is true that Gardiner’s Island is zoned for five-acre housing. It could be developed into a fantastic private retreat of huge mansions with individual docks and a small, private landing strip. It would be the unbeatable baby-boomer address, where some Wall Street turk could build a manse on the very spot Captain Kidd buried his treasure. “Just think,” a forlorn Gardiner said at the thought. “Just think.”

  The possibility of the development of Gardiner’s Island sends a chill up the collective spine of the East Hampton town father
s and conservationists, and Robert Gardiner swears that Goelet is evil enough to do it. As proof, he points to the fact that the Goelets have been assiduously buying up rights to the island from the only other possible heirs, Alexandra’s brother, J. Randall Creel Jr., who died in 1988, to whom they paid $300,000 to relinquish any claim on the island, and his two sons, to whom the Goelets reportedly paid only $5,000 each. Goelet has repeatedly denied he has any intentions of developing the island when it eventually falls into his hands and points out that he’s spent nearly $20 million to keep it in good care.

  Perhaps the most diabolical of Gardiner’s plots to foil Alexandra and Robert Goelet from getting the island all to themselves was for him to produce a male heir. Clearly, although his sperm “all wiggled,” after years of marriage to Eunice without producing an heir, a natural-born child was not in the cards. So Gardiner decided to adopt a member of the Gardiner clan. After years of researching the Gardiner bloodlines, he found a very distant but certifiable Gardiner heir, Gardiner Green Jr., fifty-two, a wealthy cousin many times removed, from Laurel, Mississippi, who had made money in the oil business. Gardiner proposed to legally adopt Green and leave him his share in Gardiner’s Island. Green, who looked like a smiling Jimmy Carter, was happily married and had two children. He was chairman of the board of a local museum in Mississippi and drove a Rolls-Royce. He was bemused with Gardiner’s scheme and reluctantly agreed to come up north to meet his distant relative and take a grand tour of the island and manor house.

  While Green was making up his mind, Alexandra and Robert Goelet sued Robert Gardiner in New York State Supreme Court to prohibit him from adopting an heir, claiming it a fraudulent means of depriving them of the island, and Gardiner paid nearly $1 million in legal fees to defend his rights. The court eventually found in Gardiner’s favor, but the legal battle was for naught. After some consideration, Gardiner Green Jr. declined the privilege of becoming the seventeenth lord of the manor and incurring its costs, and he has never seen or heard from Robert Gardiner since.

  In another scheme that backfired, in 1977, when the trust left by Sarah Diodati Gardiner to support the island ran low, Gardiner stopped paying his share of the upkeep, unable or unwilling to, saying he was trying to force the island into the safe hands of New York State receivership, which would protect it as a historical place. In 1980 the Goelets took over the entire support of the island and sued Gardiner, asking New York State Supreme Court Justice Marie Lambert to ban him from the island since he wasn’t paying for its maintenance. Lambert—whose name enrages Gardiner just behind Jeannette Rattray’s and Leslie Bennets’s—concurred and banished Gardiner from his beloved island for twelve years.

  Those dozen years without his ancestral turf were torture. No monarch suffered more greatly in exile than Gardiner, except during the summer of 1989, the island’s 350th anniversary, when he paid over half a million dollars toward his share of the upkeep for the privilege of usurping the Goelet’s residence for three months. It was well worth it to him, he gleefully remembered. “The Goelets couldn’t go” that summer. “They had to hire Faye Dunaway’s house in East Hampton. They were furious.” Gardiner battled the Goelets through the courts until, in 1992, a New York State appellate court overruled Marie Lambert’s decision and decided that since Gardiner was one of the island’s true owners, he couldn’t be banned despite not paying for its upkeep, and he was given limited access and use.

  When he first returned to the island in 1992, he said, “I got down on my tummy and hugged it.” He claims he discovered that while he was gone, the Goelets had thrown his linens and blankets and towels into an outbuilding, where they had been “eaten by rats and rained on,” and that he was forced to drive all the way to Caldor in Bridgehampton and buy $2,000 worth of linens to replace them. His niece was furious at his return, calling him a “freeloader.” Gardiner can now visit the island only under special circumstances and by prior arrangement, like the autumnal shoot he leads of twenty hunters to thin out the deer, or the twice-a-summer tours on which he is permitted to take a group of historians, like today. At those times the Goelets are obligated to clear out of the manor house and make themselves scarce, presumably somewhere off the island, safe from the wrath of Robert Gardiner.

  2

  FOR THE MOST PART, the historians knew none of this bitter feud as they crossed Gardiner’s Bay, watching as the verdant island came up before them. Gardiner edged Laughing Lady to a small dock in a sheltered cove with surprising skill. The second boat, manned by Gardiner’s assistant, was close behind. As Gardiner spryly alighted from the boat, the joy and excitement of being on the island was apparent on his face. The caretaker waited for him and his guests with a flatbed pickup truck, rigged with bench seats in the back like an army transport, and a ten-year-old Chevrolet suburban jeep with the words ROBERT D. L. GARDINER, GARDINER’S ISLAND monogrammed on the doors. The two-tone jeep has no license plates, and the inspection sticker expired five years before, but as Gardiner reminded his passengers, it doesn’t matter, because there is no law on Gardiner’s Island except for himself.

  “Over in Bostwick Forest,” he said, “there’s a hanging oak. We hanged a man here for murdering his brother on the island. We had a legal right to, we ruled this island.” In fact, legend holds that four men were hanged on the island for various crimes, all of them black.

  Gardiner led the way, driving his own jeep, flying up the hilly dirt road like a kid in a go-cart. His passengers in the backseat were trounced around unmercifully, and farther behind, the people following in the open flatbed truck driven by Gardiner’s assistant were holding on to the sides for dear life. Gardiner came to a stop in front of the thirty-eight-room manor house, modeled after the Governor’s Palace in Colonial Williamsburg. What is lovely about the three-story, dark-brick house is how easily it stands on the island without manicured landscaping or elaborate gardens. The grass around the yard and dirt driveways is scrubby, and not a flower in sight has been planted by hand, only by nature, save for the red geraniums in a 300-year-old try-pot used to cure whale oil.

  This is the fourth manor house, the three previous ones having been reduced to smoldering rubble. The first was burned to the ground by eighty Spanish pirates in 1728, who were so angry not to find the family jewels, “cleverly hidden down the well, hung on a string,” said Robert Gardiner, that they slashed the hands of the third lord of the manor, John, Lion’s grandson, and left him tied to a tree. The second house burned to the ground in 1774, a fire caused by someone smoking in bed the tobacco that once grew on the island. The third house, a grand Georgian mansion 173 years old, burned on January 24, 1947, while Sarah Diodati Gardiner was leasing the island as a hunting retreat to Winston Guest, the multimillionaire polo-playing sportsman. Sarah Diodati Gardiner supported the island for years by turning it into an executive resort. Previous to Guest the island had been leased to Clarence Mackay, the silver-mine millionaire, and to Baron von Blixen Finecke, the husband of Isak Dinesen. Winston Guest built an airstrip on the island and flew in hunting aficionados from all over the world, including UN Secretary-Generals Dag Hammarskjöld and Trygve Lie, Indian diplomat Madame Pandit, and Ernest Hemingway. Extraordinary shooting parties were held at which 300 wild turkey were taken in a morning’s shoot, and the men took lunch at a stand in the woods, brought to them by liveried servants.

  The night the third house burned, only the writer Van Campen Heilner was in residence, and he escaped in his nightclothes from a second-floor roof, but a Pekinese dog perished in the flames, as did many of the house’s historic antiques. Robert Gardiner, then a young man, rushed to the island the next day to see the damage and found it a ruin. Wandering through the charred timbers, he stumbled upon the remains of a secret closet that he had only suspected existed, from which floated the shreds of silk dresses that had been hidden away for centuries. It took Sarah Diodati Gardiner fourteen months to rebuild the house at a cost of $1 million, having to ferry every piece of wood, every brick, and each workm
an to the island by boat from the mainland.

  It is in front of this rebuilt manor house that Gardiner’s guests paused for a brief lunch. Gardiner’s assistant helped carry an upholstered armchair out of the house for him to sit on, and delicatessen sandwiches brought from the mainland were produced from a corrugated-cardboard box. Several bottles of domestic champagne, floating in a chest of watery ice, were poured into paper cups. The historians settled under the shade of a broad oak that stands on the front lawn and contentedly ate their sandwiches and sipped their drinks while Gardiner, with Gardiner’s Bay a milky cuticle on the horizon behind him, told his audience that the one building they would not see was the cottage of Goody Garlick, the woman accused of killing Lion Gardiner’s darling daughter, Elizabeth, with witchcraft. The cottage is long since gone, Gardiner said, but the story remains as good as the day it happened.

  “You had to believe in witches in Puritan days,” explained Gardiner, “because Cotton Mather said that to deny witches was to deny evil and was to deny God. But Lion Gardiner didn’t believe in witches, and he was the one who wound up saving Goody Garlick’s life.”

  Goody Garlick’s 1658 witch trial in East Hampton was the trial of the century for the town, no doubt. It took three months to conclude, and a great deal of the testimony still exists verbatim in the town records, dialogue dutifully recorded by hand. But more than just the workings of a seventeenth-century witch trial, the transcripts reveal what a mean little Calvinist town East Hampton was. By all accounts, Goody Garlick had it coming. She had a bitter disposition and was universally disliked by her neighbors. Goody (married couples were addressed as “Goodwife” and “Goodman” at the time) Garlick worked as a servant on Gardiner’s Island for twelve years before she and her husband, Joshua Garlick, were able to afford their own place in East Hampton. Not long after moving to town, they became entangled in numerous slander lawsuits.