In 1988, at the age of seventy-two, Ossorio was hospitalized for triple-bypass heart surgery. “Years of smoking and rich foods,” Dragon sighed. “After that bypass, he was never really well again. By autumn of 1990 he was confined to his bed. We talked a lot about what to do when he passed on.” Everything, of course, would be left to Dragon, but Ossorio’s family trust-fund money would stop completely when he died since Dragon was not his legal spouse. Ossorio had already sold off the most valuable paintings to support his conifer addiction, and although there was still a handsome art collection left, the cost of keeping up the huge estate and its gardens would deplete the resources within a couple of years. “When I die,” Ossorio said to Dragon one afternoon, “there is no choice but to sell it.” The two men were silent. “But no matter what happens, don’t divide it. Just don’t let the developers get it.”
“I said I would do my best,” remembered Dragon, “but I didn’t know what would happen when Alfonso passed on. You must remember, in all those years, I had never even balanced a checkbook.”
Ossorio died at the New York University Medical Center on December 5, 1990, at the age of seventy-four, of a ruptured aneurysm. He and Dragon had been together for forty-two years. His body was cremated, and a memorial service was held at The Creeks. One-third of his ashes were strewn into Georgica Pond, another third spread under the tortured red cedar outside the house where they joined Albert and Adele Herter’s, and the last third brought to Green River Cemetery, where they were buried just a stone’s throw from Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. One day, Dragon will be there too.
4
“I COULD HAVE SOLD the Creeks to developers the minute Ossorio died,” Dragon said, “but I held out, hoping for a buyer who would want it intact.” Dragon formed the Ossorio Foundation, located in Southampton, to protect and maintain Ossorio’s extensive personal art legacy and extraordinary archive of historical records, documents, and ephemera of the magic era of The Creeks under his reign. The estate itself was offered to several wealthy institutions, including Harvard University, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and the South Fork Nature Conservancy, but it was too expensive a chore to take on, maintaining the sixty acres of rare trees. “Streisand came,” Dragon said, “and Elizabeth Taylor was interested in turning it into an AIDS center, but that didn’t pan out. Anne Bass inquired. Mort Zuckerman was interested, and German princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, they all looked at The Creeks.” Finally, in desperation, Dragon drew up plans to subdivide the estate into four waterfront lots, with the main house on a seven-acre plot priced at $7.5 million.
It was then that the broker Tina Fredericks brought Ron Perelman to see the estate. At first, he said he wasn’t interested because it was right off the highway, but Fredericks persisted. When the billionaire showed up, “Perelman had four security people with him,” Dragon said. “North, south, east, and west. They were with him all the time. It was like a compass, and the joke is they looked just like what you see in Dick Tracy. They’re in gray suits and you see the bulge [of their guns]. He just walked in the door—he didn’t examine the ceiling, the cellar, or the floor—he just walked through the front door and said, ‘I’m buying it. The whole thing. I don’t know anything about what’s going on here. I can’t understand the sculpture, I don’t know anything, I don’t know one damn tree from another. But I was halfway down the road and I said, “This has the look.” ’”
The catch was, Perelman was eager to move in right away. The imperiously demanding businessman wanted a country love nest to house his then affair with fashion consultant Elizabeth Saltzman. Perelman told Dragon that he would pay him $12.5 million, but only if Dragon would clear out of the house in two weeks. He would let Dragon live in the gatekeeper’s cottage for a while until he found a new home. When Dragon asked how long he could live in the cottage, Perelman said, “When is your birthday?” Dragon said, “April twenty-fourth,” and Perelman gave him until April 24, 1993, to move out.
The following days at The Creeks were packed with hurried activity. It was nostalgic and wrenching, “fifty years of things going in and nothing going out,” said Dragon. Ossorio’s art was moved to the new foundation in Southampton, and the Strand Book Store in Manhattan sent out three trucks and took away most of Ossorio’s 8,000-book library. The roomful of pornography was given to Dragon’s grateful friends. “I thought to myself, Why not have the greatest yard sale the Hamptons have ever seen?” So, in late May 1992, the residual contents of The Creeks went on sale to the public in a three-day event that the East Hampton Star called “the Mother of All Yard Sales.” More than 2,000 people attended, and parked cars stretched three miles in either direction down Montauk Highway from the entrance to The Creeks. The first day when the doors opened at 9 A.M., there was practically a buying frenzy, even in 96-degree heat. “The rich are ready to kill each other,” said one doctor from Wainscott. Martha Stewart bought all of the estate’s Christmas decorations, Kelly Klein tried on Dragon’s old Greek sheperd’s costumes (which fit her perfectly), and Betty Friedan considered the vicuña lap robe that came from Ossorio’s mother’s limousine. By the end of the third day, the house was stripped, barren, emptier than it had ever been in eighty years.
The day before the deed to The Creeks actually changed hands, Ted Dragon’s attorney called to remind him to bring the front-door key, which had to be turned over at the closing. “The key?” Dragon said, amazed. “There is no key. The front door has never been locked. We never went away; we never left the house alone; and anyway, there are so many doors, how can you lock up The Creeks?” Well, said the lawyer, a key would have to be produced at the closing to satisfy the terms of the contract, so Dragon hurriedly called a locksmith and had a brand-new lock installed on the front door. The keys were so shiny, they embarrassed Dragon with their newness, so he fastidiously rubbed them in the dirt by the front door to age them and tied them with an antique ribbon.
The next morning, when Dragon pulled out onto the highway on his way to the closing, he was greeted with a startling sight. “As far as you could see,” Dragon said, “on the right and on the left, it was lined up with one truck after another.” There were trucks from lumberyards, panel trucks from electricians, heating and air-conditioning trucks, and a small army of craftsmen and construction crews, twelve different contractors in all, sitting on the side of the road waiting for the sale to take place so they could enter the property.
Dragon remembered, “The moment I signed the papers at the lawyer’s office and the deal was done, one of Perelman’s men spoke a single word into his walkie-talkie, ‘Shoot,’ I think it was. That was the signal that the property had changed hands and that it was okay to open the gates and move the trucks into The Creeks and begin to tear it apart. By the time I drove back to the gatehouse, every sink, every john, every tub, every lighting fixture, every doorknob, had been removed and thrown into the parking lot. They even tore out the circular pool.”
In a hurry to be able to entertain Hamptons society by July 4 weekend, Perelman wanted the legendary mansion stripped, renovated, and put back together again from cellar to attic, including the installation of new floors, walls, bathrooms, plumbing, electrical wiring, and ducts for central air-conditioning—in about six weeks. Perelman insisted that he be in residence on weekends to keep an eye on construction, and during the week all the furniture in the house was carried outdoors, covered with tarps, and then carried back inside for him on the weekends. At one point nearly forty painters worked in tandem on the house, the exterior of which changed color several times over the summer until Perelman settled on light beige.
Perelman dug several new wells and installed a sprinkler system in the vast estate for the first time, tearing out many of Ossorio’s sculptures in the process, bulldozed and thrown into a junk heap. Dragon couldn’t bear it. “I couldn’t live there for long, I felt like I was suffocating, in a prison. So in a few months I bought this house.” He gestured around his new home on Pantigo
Road. “The Creeks now looks like any expensive estate in Palm Beach or San Francisco or Michigan or anywhere,” he said. “It’s just got a look of money, like any other estate with miles of grass. There’s not one bit of originality in it.”
Dragon giggled gleefully when he related that Perelman built a guest house on top of the pet cemetery. Dragon also claimed that he never bothered to inform Mr. Perelman that Ossorio’s and the Herters’ ashes are sprinkled under the spreading red cedar next to his house.
It is a bitter irony that since his death, Alfonso Ossorio’s work has been rediscovered and celebrated. Recent biographies of Jackson Pollock have helped to fix his linchpin importance in the history of American art, and the New York Times belatedly acknowledged him as the “grandfather of Neo-Expressionism.” His outsider art is perhaps more pertinent today than ever, and his once-mocked congregations are now valued at mid—six figures and steadily rising. His artistic legacy hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
But his greatest work is still his collaboration with Ted Dragon: The Creeks.
The Squire
AT FIRST, she thought she must be dreaming. Elena Prohaska, twenty-one, was standing in the crowded garden of a Bridgehampton art gallery at sundown, the silvered branches of the trees heavy with leaves. The odd East End light, first orange, then pink, was playing tricks with faces and shadows, when from out of the milling crowd the Magus appeared before her, as beguiling in real life as he was on the pages of the book she had been reading that afternoon.
It was a warm Saturday evening in July 1967, and the beautiful young girl was still a little light-headed from some painkillers she had taken for a recently extracted tooth. She spent the day lazing in bed at her father’s house in Sagaponack, drifting in and out of sleep in the cool comfort of the extra bedroom, curled up like a cat. She had been reading The Magus, John Fowles’s novel about a young man who is the victim of a plot by his ex-girlfriend and a powerful older man with sorcerorlike powers. Just an hour before, her father, Ray Prohaska, a well-known Hamptons artist, had roused her from her solitary day to be his escort at an art opening at the Benson Gallery.
The Benson Gallery is in a renovated Victorian farmhouse, just a few hundred feet off Montauk Highway in Bridgehampton. It had opened just the year before, and already it had become the hub of the booming local art market in the Hamptons. The Pollock legend had taken hold, and hundreds of artists, along with all the people who follow them—writers, psychiatrists, and creative advertising types—were invading the East End, an estimated 5,000 of them. There were so many painters in particular that East Hampton began to be called the “rich man’s Provincetown.” Jim Dine, Larry Rivers, Adolph Gottlieb, and Roy Lichtenstein were sixties émigres, “après Jacksons” as they were called. Truman Capote bought a house in Sagaponack, James Jones and George Plimpton moved to Sagaponack, and John Steinbeck and Betty Friedan were encamped in Sag Harbor. New York show business put down roots in the sixties as well. Gwen Verdon and Bob Fosse moved to Amagansett; Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson bought in East Hampton; and Nora Ephron, then a journalist, rented her first house in the Hamptons in 1966, with eleven other singles in Amagansett. Edward Albee bought in Montauk, and Guild Hall even put on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in the sixties, but only because Mary Woodhouse, the mother of Guild Hall, finally died at age ninety-two. There were so many artists and writers in East Hampton that artist Syd Solomon organized a softball game between the two groups that would in two decades become a legendary sporting event.
The gays were arriving in force as well, and not much favored by the locals either. One East Hampton village police chief didn’t think twice about bemoaning to the East Hampton Star that “on any given weekend afternoon, you can go down to Two Mile Hollow Beach and see three, four hundred head of queer.” Late at night newly arriving gays patronized a ramshackle bar called the Elm Tree in Amagansett, where they were forbidden to dance because it was illegal for two people of the same sex to touch each other. The police vigorously ticketed their cars, and all the artists supported the gays.
That July night at the Benson Gallery, it seemed to Elena that every one of the 5,000 après Jacksons was attending the opening. She and her father could hardly see the canvases on the walls for the crowds of people and the cigarette smoke. They stepped onto the nubby lawn in back of the barn for a breath of fresh air and a glass of cold white wine when out of the crowd the Magus materialized before them, or so Elena thought. I’ve got to stop reading that book, she said to herself.
Evan Frankel, the Squire of East Hampton, had the tanned good looks of an aging matinee idol and the mischievous smile of a teenager with a dirty mind. He easily managed, even at sixty-three, to be as robust and sexy as a man half his age. It didn’t hurt his attractiveness that he was the largest private landowner in all of East Hampton. He held the deed to more than 1,000 acres of developable land—400 acres of it south of the highway—and owned several prime pieces of property in East Hampton village, including the Old Post Office movie theater and Oddfellows Hall. At one point he owned so much land that it was estimated he paid 50 percent of all the real estate taxes in East Hampton. Not coincidentally, at various times, he held seats on the town planning board, the board of directors of Southampton Hospital, and the advisory board of the East Hampton Free Library.
That night at the gallery, elegantly dressed in pale linen slacks and a summer-weight sport jacket, he was accompanied by an old friend, Joan Cullman, the attractive young wife of Joseph Cullman, chairman of the board of Phillip Morris, the tobacco company. Ray Prohaska had known Frankel for years, had even sold him some art, and he nervously introduced everyone. Frankel’s eyes never left the luminous Elena. She was a tall girl, with a voluptuous figure, green eyes, and long black hair parted in the middle and worn down her back in the “hippie” style that was popular that summer. “You know,” Frankel told her, “I am the most eligible bachelor in East Hampton.”
“That’s a shame,” Elena responded coolly, “because I date only married men.” Everyone laughed, even her father.
Elena was clever and quick, as much fun as she was pretty, but perhaps a bit too sophisticated for her own good. She was a “townie” who didn’t belong in the town. She was born in East Hampton in 1946 and grew up on Main Street in Amagansett, but her parents were “from away,” and Elena felt that she was too. Her father, Ray Prohaska, had been one of America’s premier magazine illustrators before giving up his career and moving to East Hampton to paint watercolors and surf cast; her mother, Carolyn Pierson, was a former John Robert Powers model and actress before she became an East Hampton housewife.
Elena hated the isolation of East Hampton in the winter, and even at the height of the summer season, when the streets were busy with people from New York, it was never crowded enough for her. Ironically, it made her feel just a bit more like an interloper when after her sophomore year in high school, she started dating a boy whose family belonged to the Maidstone Club. When the season was over, he went back to his Ivy League school, and Elena, spurned, was left behind. That’s when she convinced her mother and father that at age sixteen, she had learned all she could in East Hampton; they agreed to let her finish high school at Professional Children’s School in Manhattan, where she lived with her brother. After graduating, she attended New York University for two years and was working at the Museum of Modern Art and living in a tiny studio apartment on the Upper East Side.
Ray Prohaska—who at sixty-two was only a year younger than Evan Frankel—thought to remind the land baron about the day he bought Brigadoon, his baronial fifteen-acre estate on Hither Lane in East Hampton. They had run into each other on the street. “I bought a house today!” Frankel had announced excitedly, and Prohaska answered, “I did you one better—I had a baby girl today!”
“And here you are all grown up!” Frankel said, smiling. “Twenty years later, almost to
the day! Well, then, it was meant to be that we meet this day. It is bershart. You must come see the house that I bought on the day you were born. You and your father will be my guests at Brigadoon tomorrow, and we will have lunch under a groaning arbor of bittersweet, and later I shall take you down Temptation Path.”
2
BRIGADOON, like the mythical village after which it was named, seemed to half appear in the distance, protected behind a low stone wall with creaky iron gates. The twelve-room carriage house was simple; half-timbered, sand-colored stucco, no doubt the doppelgänger to some country squire’s house that existed in eighteenth-century Scotland. Elena and her father came down the long gravel drive just as the noon sun was burning off the remnants of a thin white fog to reveal the undulating green lawns dotted by massive wood and bronze impressionistic sculptures. Nora Bennet, Frankel’s housekeeper of twenty-five years, greeted them at the front door and brought them out back to where Frankel was waiting at a glass-topped table set with linen and china. The arbor above, laced with thatches of blooming bittersweet, was as fragrant as promised.
“Can life be sweeter?” Frankel gently asked Elena and her father, gesturing for them to be seated. He waved his hand over the sweeping landscape and the luminescent sky, the few clouds like drawings from a child’s picture book. From the distance came the plaintive cry of a peacock. “Can life be more rich and full and giving of its great beauty than this?” he asked.
Philistines at the Hedgerow Page 17
