Ironic as it might seem in light of present-day East Hampton’s litigious culture, between 1650 and 1665, the first fifteen years of the town’s existence, slander was the single most common lawsuit in East Hampton. Sociologists say that societies in formation sometimes use slander lawsuits to establish pecking order and status among themselves. Perhaps that’s why almost every adult member of the thirty-five or so families in town was involved in a slander suit, even Lion Gardiner and his wife, either as a plaintiff or defendant or witness. The townsfolk challenged one another in court over perceived slurs that now seem bizarre. One of the most exhaustively documented on record centers on whether Goodwife Edwards was bragging when she told her neighbor, Goodwife Price, that she brought her petticoat with her to East Hampton all the way from London. Never mind that nobody ever saw this petticoat or that Goody Price had already had her tongue put in a “cleft stick” for speaking badly. Goody Edwards sued Goody Price for calling her a “base lying woman” and received damages of twopence after tying up the town court with testimony for several weeks.
In 1658 Mary Gardiner’s servant, John Wooley, sued one of his mistress’s friends, Goodwife Hand, for saying he had made a “bow-wow” sound behind Mrs. Gardiner’s back, mocking her. Mrs. Gardiner—she was the only woman in town important enough to be called “Mrs.” in lieu of “Goodwife”—was revered as the town’s first lady (and resented as a Dutch woman), and Wooley’s suit against her friend Goody Hand turned into a full jury trial, with half a dozen witnesses testifying on either side. After several days of trial and testimony, Wooley was awarded ten shillings plus court costs from Goodwife Hand for his tarnished character.
But the slander lawsuits didn’t reach their apotheosis until Goody Garlick was nearly burned alive for being a witch. By 1658 Goody Garlick’s reputation had already been sullied when her twenty-something indentured servant, Daniel Fairfield, was caught masturbating with three other men—two of whom were married and over forty years old. The four men were brought to the church meeting hall and tried before three magistrates—one of them the father of one of the accused—on charges of “spilling their seed.” The entire town turned out for the trial, and the four men were found guilty of being “notorious masturbators,” but “not deeming the offense worthy of loss of life or limb,” the magistrates determined that two of them be pilloried in punishment and that the ringleader, Daniel Fairfield, be publicly whipped.
Goody Garlick refused to take Fairfield back into her household, a wise move since immediately thereafter he sparked the second-biggest scandal in the town’s history by seducing not only the Reverend Mr. James’s maid but the Reverend Mr. James’s daughter as well. “Acting filthy,” they called it. Fairfield’s eventual fate, alas, was never consigned to town records.
But Goody Garlick’s was. In February 1658, twenty years of ill will against Goody Garlick bubbled to the surface when Lion Gardiner’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, fell ill with a high fever and in her delirium accused Goody Garlick of bewitching her. One afternoon the child bride told her husband, “Love, I am very ill of my head”; her nursing baby was taken from her, and Elizabeth was put to bed. Her fever raged out of control, and at one point she opened her eyes wide in terror and shrieked, “A witch! A witch!” Her mother was summoned and begged her child, “Who do you see?” Elizabeth said that Goody Garlick was at that very moment standing at the foot of her bed, pricking her with pins.
Elizabeth continued to accuse Goody Garlick through the night to several neighbors who took turns sitting vigil. The neighbors also reported a mysterious presence in the room that night, a “black thing,” at the foot of the bed, and deep in the night came a hollow and mournful sound from the fireplace. The next day Elizabeth went into convulsions and died in her father’s arms.
For the next three months, anybody in the town of East Hampton who ever had a grudge against Goody Garlick was given the opportunity to vent his or her spleen in court. Garlick’s neighbors recounted volumes of horror stories about her alleged witchcraft. Goodwife Edwards in particular held the court mesmerized when she testified that years before, while nursing her newborn infant, as soon as Goody Garlick wandered by and said how pretty the baby was, Edwards saw “death in the face” of the infant, who never opened its eyes again and died days later. After months of intermittent testimony, it was suggested that the only sure way to find out whether Goody Garlick was a witch was to hold her underwater in the Town Pond to see if she would drown.
Lion Gardiner would have none of this. He appeared at the courtroom and forbade the magistrates to allow anyone to harm Goody Garlick. He said that his daughter died of sickness, not an evil spell, and that only the heathen Indians believed in witchcraft. Gardiner saw to it that Goody Garlick was brought to a more sophisticated court in Hartford, Connecticut, where they knew more about witches than in East Hampton. Gardiner himself, along with armed guards, accompanied Garlick and her husband to Hartford. None of the witnesses ever appeared, and Gardiner was able to arrange for the charges to be dismissed.
“Lion Gardiner returned Goody Garlick to East Hampton himself,” Robert Gardiner explained to the historians sitting in the shade at the manor house. “She had to spend the rest of her life with the neighbors who had accused her. One version of her story has it that she returned to town and made the best of it, the other is that Gardiner gave her a cottage on this island, where she lived her last years in disgrace. Wherever she spent them, they were long years. Town records show that Goody Garlick lived to eighty-seven, and her husband to over a hundred.”
3
THE INTERIOR of the manor house is decorated in taste so low-key as to be bland. There are unremarkable upholstered chairs and anonymous slipcovered sofas flanked by dark-wood occasional tables. The wallpaper pattern is leafy and unobtrusive. The dining room is large but gloomy, the table and chairs polished and dark. Nature prints and old oils adorn the walls, each of whose significance Gardiner dutifully recited. Often the tour was too comprehensive. He even insisted that his guests follow him down to the basement to see just how large the fuse boxes are or to touch the hot-water tanks to see how warm they feel. Bounding up the cellar steps like a young man, Gardiner shouted, “Now, my bedroom!” and darted up to the master bedroom on the second floor with the two dozen visitors trudging after him.
The master bedroom is essentially a dowdy room with faded peach-colored walls and a handmade multicolored hook rug on the floor. There is a double bed with a clean white duvet and a headboard tufted in a salmon-colored fern-print fabric. The historians spread out around the room, looking at the personal articles lying about, at the history books on the mahogany bedside tables, at the women’s clothing in the closets. They peeked in the bathroom and at the objects on top of the dressers. As Gardiner spun one of his tales about an uncle who married Hungarian royalty, he plopped down on the bed, clasped his hands behind his head, and put his muddy shoes up on the white duvet. The historians knew a photo opportunity when they saw one and their flash cameras went off in a rain of strobe light.
Next to the bed was a small wire cage with a carpet remnant inside. “Is that for your little pet?” one of the historians asked Gardiner. He glanced at the cage warily and said, somewhat reluctantly, “Yes.” The present location of Gardiner’s pet was not pursued, but a more savvy visitor might have realized that Gardiner didn’t have a pet, that the cage was for the pet of Alexandra and Robert Goelet, and that the clothes in the closet didn’t belong to Gardiner but to the Goelets, as did the bed and duvet that Gardiner was intentionally muddying with his shoes. The historians were unwitting collaborators in a gross invasion of privacy of the Goelets’ bedroom. Yet the only clue that alternative occupants of the manor house even existed was a large handwritten sign on a blackboard in the kitchen that said, THESE THINGS DO NOT BELONG TO MR. GARDINER.
Later, Gardiner’s guests loaded themselves back into the overcrowded vehicles for a tour around the island. Gardiner’s suburban careened into Bo
stwick Forest at breakneck speed. The 1,200 acres of forest are as lush and green as something in a Grimm fairy tale. The jeep flew by herds of unperturbed deer grazing in sunlit glens, and he passed a flock of wild turkeys in a ravine of rich dark grapes. The low tree branches whiplashed into the open windows of the jeep. He made various stops, including the highest point on the island, where the white-bearded David Gardiner, the sixth lord of the manor, cried aloud to the wind in his isolation in 1734. (“No one,” he wrote in his diary. “Rien.”) He pointed out the low wooden building where the “bound boys” were quartered and made to say their Sunday catechism to the lady of the manor, and to T’Other House, where sick British sailors had been bivouacked.
Finally, he came to another unique claim of Gardiner’s Island, the spot where Captain Kidd buried treasure in 1699. John Gardiner, Lion Gardiner’s grandson, was roused from his bed one night by Captain William Kidd and forced to watch as his men buried gold and jewels on the island. John Gardiner was a huge man, called “the Powerful One” by the Montauks. He knew of Kidd before that night. Kidd wasn’t a pirate at all, but a well-known businessman who owned a fine home on Wall Street and a pew in Trinity Church. He had gone into the ugly but perfectly legal business of bounty hunter of the seas. He had letters of marque from the Crown permitting him to raid the ships of French and African privateers on the high seas, then bring the spoils back to London and divvy them up with his backers.
In 1699, after one particularly good score—a ship carrying the dowry of the sultan of Madagascar—Kidd was on his way home to London when he heard that he had been declared a pirate by his partners. He decided that instead of returning home to London to certain trouble, he would set out for Boston, where he could clear his name. On the way it occurred to him that it might be prudent to hide the treasure until the matter was settled, and stumbling upon Gardiner’s Island as he pushed northward in his six-gun ship, he thought he discovered the perfect place to hide it. He woke John Gardiner in the middle of the night and forced him to witness the burying of fifty-eight rubies, several sacks of gold ducats, bars of gold and silver, and a sultan’s ransom in emeralds and pearls. Kidd warned that “If I come back for this treasure and it’s not here, I’ll have your head or the head of your sons.”
Kidd never came back to Gardiner’s Island. He didn’t have much luck clearing his name in Boston; he was arrested and sent to London, where he was tried and convicted. They hanged him in 1701—not for piracy but for killing one of his sailors by hitting him over the head with a wooden bucket. The governor of Massachusetts, Lord Bellomont, who had a detailed list of the treasure, was most eager for John Gardiner to dig it up and return it, which he did. However, one diamond somehow remained in Gardiner’s portmanteau, and his wife snatched the stone for herself, a large, uncut dull diamond, which was later set and worn in a ring, but has been lost to the tyranny of time.
4
THE HISTORIANS’ PATIENCE was also lost to the tyranny of time. It was late in the afternoon, they had been Gardiner’s wards all day, and they were eager to return to the mainland for the long drive home in the holiday weekend traffic. On the way to the boats Gardiner stopped by the manor house to pick up the coolers and supplies from lunch when he at once noticed something that perked his interest: Parked next to the house was a jeep that hadn’t been there earlier. He stopped his own vehicle at the front door and, without a word to his mystified guests, hurriedly disappeared.
Moments later, like hornets exploding from a disturbed hive, Alexandra and Robert Goelet and their namesake children, Alexandra, nineteen, a student at Middlebury College, and Robert Jr., sixteen, a sophomore at a New England prep school, burst through the front door of the house. They spilled out the door, with Robert Gardiner behind them in hot pursuit, screeching after Robert Goelet, “How dare you ask me if I went upstairs when I had a perfect right?”
The Goelets look stunned to discover two dozen people staring blankly at them from the two vehicles on their lawn. One of the historians asked loudly, “Who are those people? Do those people live on the island? How are they going to get home?”
They were a handsome family, the Goelets, considering that they were cringing. Alexandra is a beautiful woman in her fifties, managing a youthful elegance, as does her sixty-six-year-old husband in his khaki slacks and blue Oxford shirt. It would be impossible to divine how very rich they are by just looking at them. They had spent the day at a beach on the far side of the island, assiduously avoiding any confrontation with Gardiner, who was supposed to be gone by five o’clock. But now they’d returned to find not only that he was still there, complete with audience, but that there was mud on their bed upstairs.
At the sight of the two dozen strangers gawking at them, the Goelets scattered in four directions. Gardiner went after them one at a time, trying to pick them off and confront them, but they evaded him. As though in a Keystone Kops movie, he began to chase them around the house—in one door, out the other. First he cornered Alexandra Sr., then her daughter, then he went after Robert Sr. The historians, uncomprehending, began to unfold slowly from their cramped quarters in the truck and jeep to watch the show.
“And you say that I’m making it up!” Gardiner shouted at Goelet, who was now ducking around the far side of the house. “I’m not making this up!” Gardiner howled. “You’re the one who’s making it up!”
Alexandra Goelet, the strain showing on her face, politely canvassed the confused historians as if nothing were happening, asking if they had enjoyed their day on Gardiner’s Island. “Who’s she?” one of the wives asked, her patience at an end, and Alexandra just smiled. “We want to go home,” one of the men in the jeep told Alexandra.
“What do you need to leave?” Alexandra asked the man.
He pointed to Gardiner. “That man.”
“We’d love to give him to you,” she said, managing a wry smile.
“Why don’t you get lost?” Robert Goelet was now saying to Gardiner. “You’re just upsetting yourself.”
“Why don’t you get lost! You tried to kill me! Before two witnesses you tried to run me over.”
“The implication being that I’m a lousy driver?” Goelet asked with a sardonic laugh.
This mockery caused Gardiner to shriek, “You said that I had no right to go upstairs! How dare you say that?”
A silence fell over the scene as Goelet simply walked away.
Gardiner decided his last best hope was his nephew, Robert Jr. A handsome teenager with large brown eyes and sandy hair, gangly at six feet five inches, who his father hopes will not get any taller, he was also the only member of his family who didn’t run from his uncle. Although he was clearly embarrassed with the audience of strangers watching, he managed to maintain his dignity as he stood his ground, his hands jammed into the pockets of his khaki pants.
“Will you hear me out?” Gardiner implored the boy, and with a wan smile on his face, the young man resigned himself to a few moments. Gardiner began to speak hurriedly, like a man begging for his life before a lynch mob. He asked the boy to have lunch with him, that there was something important he had to tell him. The legacy must not die. The Gardiner legacy is too rich, too worthy. It’s a fantastic legacy, and it’s his, for one day he will be the seventeenth lord of the manor. There are witches and pirates, and the man who founded the town of East Hampton… But Gardiner is too upset to impart all this, and all that came out were fragments, pieces of his dreams, “The first English child… the lord of the manor…”
After a few minutes of listening to his uncle’s rant, Robert Jr. excused himself. He said that he had to return to prep school in Massachusetts that week, and that it would be impossible to schedule a lunch. Gardiner’s shoulders fell in defeat as he turned to walk away, but his nephew watched him contemplatively as he left.
This brief moment over, Gardiner returned to his jeep and got behind the wheel. “That never happened before!” Gardiner exclaimed, not very convincingly, to his passengers about the alte
rcation. He turned over the engine. “What a mess!” There was silence in the jeep. “What a mess,” he repeated, and set off for the pier and Laughing Lady and escape.
“Well, for the Historical Society this was not a good day,” Gardiner said in summation. “But at least I had enough champagne to go around, I think, good French champagne.”
He stopped the car at the dock, and all the doors flung open simultaneously, passengers fleeing to the waiting boats as Gardiner muttered behind them, “What a mess! What a mess!”
The Creeks
THE CREEKS, Ronald O. Perelman’s fifty-seven-acre estate, is the cynosure of Hamptons nouvelle society. It is “the most important house in East Hampton,” Allan Schneider declared to the New York Times, and for once he wasn’t exaggerating: The Creeks is perhaps the most important house in all the Hamptons. Not only is it the largest privately held estate but the copper-topped, two-story Mediterranean villa, with its half a dozen guest houses, outbuildings, and 2,000 feet of Georgica Pond front, is the crown jewel of all the sprawling mansions that grace the shores of the most coveted location in the Hamptons. The 290-acre tidal pond is a willowy fingered estuary separated from the assault of the Atlantic Ocean by a wide, white strand of East Hampton beach. The water is brackish, opened to the nourishing waters of the ocean each fall by a trench dug with a shovel, and its views are arguably the most superb on the South Fork.
Past and present luminaries with homes on the pond include film directors Robert Benton and Steven Spielberg; communications executive Christopher Whittle; Donald Petrie, a partner in the banking firm Lazard Frères; former New York Yankees general managing partner Robert Nederlander; and author and heir to the Uris building fortune, B. H. Friedman. Most of the pond’s west side is made up of a private enclave called the Georgica Association, which up until the fifties had no Jewish or gay residents (it now has both). The association is an exquisite encampment of narrow roads with speed bumps, where dogs run free in open fields and there is a beach cabana and tennis courts for members.
Philistines at the Hedgerow Page 9
