Philistines at the Hedgerow

by Steven Gaines

  “Even against the backdrop of his estate,” Elena remembered, “Evan managed to be a scene-stealer.” Indeed, the New York Times described him as “a cross between General Rommel and Laurence Olivier with a touch of Somerset Maugham” thrown in. “He was spectacular company,” Elena said. “He could just as easily jump to his feet and launch into a Shakespearean soliloquy”—“If you have tears, prepare to shed them now,” the funeral oratory from Julius Caesar, was his favorite—“as he could drop an anecdote about having a stein of beer with Hitler, or explain why Jackson Pollock was miffed at him.”

  “I once owned a Pollock,” Frankel said, “but Pollock took it back. The guy who was renting my house one winter didn’t like the painting. Nobody knew who the hell Pollock was back then, so I called Pollock from Jamaica and asked him to temporarily store it. He was so angry at me for agreeing to take it down that he went and got it from my house and never gave it back—even though I had paid him for it.” Frankel seemed to relish this.

  “Do you know why they call me the Squire of East Hampton?” he asked. “Because I wear a houndstooth cape and deerstalker cap in the winter. And I walk, every day, over my property. And many years ago, when the townspeople first spotted me in the distance, they dubbed me ‘the Squire of East Hampton,’ and I liked the nickname so much, I adopted it myself.”

  Elena told Frankel about leaving East Hampton for New York, and her part-time job at the Museum of Modern Art, where she had fallen in love with a young security guard. “He’s really a talented painter,” Elena said, “but he works nights as a guard so he can paint during the day. He’s saving up enough money so we can go away together, to live in a commune, where he can paint and I can study.” She was concerned, though, because he drank and smoked pot.

  Frankel did not try to hide his disappointment. “A commune! Pot! That’s a shame you have a boyfriend like that, sweetie,” he said. “If you were free, I could show you the world and you could study art in a grand way. You should spurn him for me.” Elena, flattered, laughed. “You know I’m right,” he told her. “I can make up my own mind in two seconds and someone else’s in three.”

  After a moment Frankel rose and said, “Now, my young lady, let me show you Brigadoon! I will be your tour guide nonpareil.” He linked his arm in hers, and they set off down the sweeping lawn together, her father trailing behind. “I named this place Brigadoon not just because I produced the show Brigadoon on Broadway but because, like the legendary Brigadoon, this place is enchanted. If you fall in love here and then leave, you can never come back again!”

  Down the far end of the lawn they approached a sylvan copse, and Frankel led them to an unexpected break in the foliage, concealed from the undiscerning eye, where they slipped into a hidden world. A few yards beyond, there was a brick path, like a secret passageway from Alice Through the Looking Glass. “This is Temptation Path,” Frankel said, taking Elena’s hand. This part of the estate was more like a maze, a series of hidden glens or meditation nooks, statuary concealed around every corner. A white marble dove, captured in flight, seemed to spring from a bed of sage; farther on, in a shady glade a statue of a young girl reclined in the grass, staring off into the distance, where statues of gladiators stood frozen in combat. Around another turn there was a quiet pergola covered in wisteria, with chairs to sit and think, and then, ahead, or maybe back—she was losing her way by now—was a children’s playhouse complete with working fireplace, protected by a platoon of life-size Tin Woodsmen. Off to the left there was a large pen for rare ostriches, who paced and pecked, snow-white and preening. “And here,” Frankel said, “is a thicket of bamboo taller than the Great Wall of China.” He led them through a passage in the bamboo to the other side, where they skittered across stepping-stones in a pond fed by an overflowing stone bowl.

  “There was also,” Elena said, “about five hundred feet from the house, hidden from view, the notorious swimming pool.” The pool had such éclat that The New Yorker even ran a “Talk of the Town” piece about it in 1951, dubbing it “Mr. Frankel’s Folly.” Frankel himself relished the controversy. “My idea was to build the pool into the charred foundation and basement of the original house, which had burned down fifty years before,” he explained. He had the debris of the old house removed, the overgrowth excavated, the sides cemented and waterproofed, but one end was left open and unformed, melding into a glade of canna, mimosa, and tamarisk, with a gushing stream that cascaded over craggy boulders imported from Vermont on the back of a flatbed truck. Set into niches built along the irregularly shaped sides were busts of the Roman emperors, and in the quirkiest stroke, Frankel kept the original fireplace just where it was, imbedded in the side of the pool, complete with logs and andirons. In addition, he pointed out to Elena, the pool had the first “underwater” lights installed in all of East Hampton so guests could swim at night.

  But it wasn’t the design of the pool that everyone found so provocative, but Frankel’s rule that people had to swim nude. The first thing Elena noticed was a large sign in the changing room, NO TOPS, NO BOTTOMS. “A pool is not a Laundromat,” Frankel scolded guests who tried to wear swimsuits. “Come on, now, take off your clothes!” Noncompliance was met with an icy invitation to leave. Frankel himself was only too happy to set an example, and he darted about in the altogether at every opportunity. An eclectic assortment of people over the years accepted Frankel’s invitation to swim naked in his pool, including Marilyn Monroe, Yul Brynner, Jackson Pollock, Ted Dragon, and many of his men and women dancer friends; to be able to announce over cocktails that one swam nude at Brigadoon is a distinction in East Hampton to this day. When Winston Churchill’s daughter Sarah first saw the pool, she tore off her clothes, crying, “It would be sacrilege not to swim naked!” and dove in.

  However, Frankel’s voyeurism was but one of his many peccadilloes. He also loved to shock people with inappropriate behavior. On one occasion he climbed up onto the lower roof of his house to peek inside the guest bedroom windows, hoping to catch his houseguests in flagrante delicto. Another time he paraded past his neighbor’s house on Hither Lane and shouted up at the bedroom windows, “Did you screw your wife last night?” “He also unfailingly referred to the Ladies Village Improvement Society as the ‘Ladies Vaginal Insertion Society,’” added Elena.

  For many, his behavior went too far. An otherwise suave and gallant companion, Frankel might easily reach out in conversation and caress the breast of a woman he hardly knew or run his fingers over her buttocks. When he was rebuked—or his hand slapped away, as it was countless times (and his face as well)—Frankel would just smile his dimpled smile and go on about his business. He somehow couldn’t be convinced that his behavior was offensive. “It is the liking of women,” Frankel told one reporter who questioned his reputation as a wolf, “it is not lechery.” In one famous incident, he gave a large party at which three generations of women he had bedded from the same family were his guests, unaware that each one of them had been a Frankel conquest. “Every girl in East Hampton knew Evan Frankel’s reputation,” said Elena with a wry laugh.

  It was also rumored that Frankel bedded not only women but men too. His close friends deny it. “Evan loved the idea that people were going around saying he was gay,” said Joan Cullman, “while he was secretly screwing all these young girls—and everybody’s wife.” Evan seemed to encourage the ambiguity by keeping prominently displayed in his library a hardcover book with the title Evan Frankel’s Sex Life, inside of which all the pages were blank.

  Till there was Elena. All the more reason it raised so many eyebrows when the night after the tour of Brigadoon, Evan Frankel arrived at the crowded opening of a new play at Guild Hall’s John Drew Theatre with twenty-year-old Elena Prohaska on his arm and the self-satisfied look of a cat who just swallowed the canary. “I’m sure it gave everybody a lot to talk about,” Elena said. “But I really didn’t care. He was fascinating and charming, and not for one moment was he disrespectful of me.”

 
Elena continued to see Frankel intermittently that summer. “He invited me to dinner in the city at his penthouse apartment at One Hundred Riverside Drive. It had views of the skyline and the Hudson River, with art deco glass-brick walls and a wraparound terrace. We had great times. He was immature in a lot of ways and I was mature in some ways, so we sort of balanced things out. Yes, he did have that mischievous side to him. And I had a mischievous side to me. But we weren’t mischievous with each other.

  “He asked me to travel with him that winter. He wanted me to spend a month or two in Jamaica, where he rented a large estate every year, but I was going back to school at NYU, and anyway, I had a boyfriend. He called me many times from Jamaica that winter, offering to fly me down. He was at the retreat of Rosser Reeves, and it was immense. He said he had five girls staying with him. ‘You see,’ he said to me, ‘it takes five girls to make up for one of you!’”

  Nearly an entire year of flirtation passed until “the other man in my life started making ultimatums to me in June of 1968,” said Elena. “He was leaving for the Laurentian Hills, where he was going to start a commune with another couple. He wanted me to go, or he was leaving without me. I had a week to make up my mind. One beautiful June day I was sitting in my apartment in New York in a funk, and Evan called me and said, ‘Well, sweetie, what are you doing inside on a beautiful day like this? Come hither with me. Spend the weekend at Brigadoon with me, and we’ll figure out what to do.’ And I realized that he was just what I needed to pull me out of it. He was like a white knight coming to save me.”

  “It is a terrible idea, my sweet, to go to Canada with that man,” he told her that weekend. “You know I’m right. It is bound to end in unhappiness. Get rid of him and live here with me. If you lived with me, you would be secure. If you lived with me, when you wanted to go traveling, we could travel together and see the world, not from a knapsack, but in style. And you can live in my apartment in the city and continue your education. That’s what’s most important.”

  “I thought for a moment and said okay,” Elena remembered. Evan was so shocked that he was speechless at first. “Then he sort of snorted, ‘Oh? Yes? Well, okay!’”

  “It started out, for a few minutes,” Elena said, “as a sexual relationship. But after that was over, we became good companions for each other. Neither of us was easy. Evan said I was his mother. I’m sure he was my father. We were all these things to each other, but the least of them was sexual. It’s still a mystery to me. We had such an unusual relationship. It might have started out as one thing, but it ended up as another. At the root of it, we cared for each other.

  “There I was,” she said. “I was living in a penthouse apartment in the city. There was an estate in the country, where I had my own room and my own bath. There was a housekeeper and a handyman. I lived a very orderly kind of life. There was a reassuring formality about our days. Every night we went somewhere wonderful for dinner, like Gordon’s restaurant in Amagansett, where they greeted him as ‘m’lord’ and everyone stopped by our table to pay court.”

  She became known politely as his “ward.” Among their friends she was his “no girl”—the only person in a world filled with “yes men” who could say no to m’lord and get away with it. They became a familiar duo at art galleries, where he introduced her to art dealers with a sly wink as his “curator.” In winters they went south, usually to Jamaica, and every spring they traveled through Europe. They had dinner with Aldo Gucci in Rome and spent a week at the Villa Medici in Florence. In London they were entertained by Sarah Churchill. At Las Brisas, in Mexico, Elena nearly died of typhoid, and Frankel’s friend Jacob Javits, the U.S. senator from New York, who was staying at the same hotel, used his influence to summon a doctor to her hotel suite.

  Elena’s mother and father were sanguine about the relationship, but not everybody was as generous. “What are you doing with a young girl like that?” Evan’s friends demanded of him. “You’ll ruin her life. It’s not fair. She’s wasting all these years,” they told him.

  Evan would say, “She’s wasting nothing. I’m giving her one of the greatest educations a young person can get. If it wasn’t for me, she’d be off with some drunken boyfriend.”

  Elena heard it too. “People said, ‘You know, he’ll never marry you”—as if that was what I wanted.” What did Elena want? “What everybody wants, I suppose. To be happy.”

  “If anybody criticizes you,” Frankel told her, “tell them I’m giving you the best years of my life.”

  3

  PERHAPS EVEN MORE unusual than Frankel’s penchant for young women or his preoccupation with the human body was his obsession with the earth. Nobody in East Hampton, not even the oldest family or the staunchest preservationist, seemed to care quite as much about the land as Evan Frankel. “His land was his children,” Elena said.

  “We are in love with the land,” Frankel would sigh, his eyes misting over. “This place is blessed. These aren’t just landscapes, they are living paintings. Some of this land could be a Corot, a Courbet, or a van Gogh. Just as other people collect paintings to hang on the wall, I decided to collect what I call my ‘living paintings’—a stretch of grassy dunes, a luxuriant potato field framed by hedgerows, or a weather-beaten barn silhouetted against the sky. I ask you, Who could be so lucky to live in a place such as this?”

  Every morning after breakfast, Frankel walked his land the way some men went off to play golf. He set out down sun-dappled Hither Lane at an energetic gait. “Look at this day!” he cried out. “When you look at the fields, when you see the plants reappearing year after year, when you’ve watched the harvest for twenty-five Octobers—it doesn’t seem possible that it’s all going to end soon. But all around every field there are more new houses each year, and the land is being nibbled away faster and faster.”

  Indicating a swath of land between the town and the Maidstone golf course, he said, “I picked up these fifty-four acres back around 1950. I bought most of it from James T. Lee, the grandfather of Jacqueline Kennedy. He was leasing it to a farmer, and I felt that it wouldn’t stay in farming very long if I didn’t control it. I paid Lee something under two thousand an acre for it. Last week, three men offered me a hundred and fifty thousand an acre for it. They pleaded and begged me to take their money, but I refused. I may sell some soon, and I may not. I don’t have to until I feel like it. People call me a land hog, a monopolist, a profiteer, for refusing to sell them land so they can ruin it with their abominations, their cheap tasteless developments, and their ghastly neon lights.”

  The truth be known, although Frankel was as cutthroat in acquiring land as any real estate speculator, in forty years he had sold off only seventy-five acres, and those only when in dire need of money. For a man who owned so much land, Frankel was unusually cash poor. He held on to his property way beyond good business sense, to prevent it from being developed. At one point in the late 1970s he was so strapped that he was forced to sell off thirty acres of gorgeous farmland on Further Lane. This was the stretch of land abutting Two Mile Hollow (East Hampton’s gay beach) that Frankel referred to as his Corot. He found a remarkable buyer who was willing to sign a covenant agreeing to build only one house on the entire thirty-acre property and not to divide the land or sell it off. But at the closing, one of the attorneys remarked, “That property is fine if you don’t mind living next to the homosexual beach.” The buyer, astonished to learn this, pulled out of the deal on the spot.

  Now out many millions of dollars of working capital, Evan reluctantly sold a smaller parcel of the same land to a man who wanted to build a house and didn’t give a damn who used the beach. But despite a host of covenants about what the house could look like, the new owner built a “cheesy house,” according to Frankel: stark, modern, with a V-shaped wing jutting into the sky. “An eyesore,” Frankel moaned when he saw it. “And you can’t erase it.” Frankel was so distraught, he wanted to punch the man in the nose and had to be dissuaded several times by friends from driving
over and ringing the doorbell.

  He swore never to allow that to happen again, and not only did he put even more ironclad covenants into all of his land-sale contracts, he began to pay surprise visits to the construction sites to make sure the new houses were going up the way he wanted. He drove a few of the new homebuilders around the bend with his pestering; he even began trespassing on construction sites that had nothing to do with him. Once, he accidentally left his little dog behind in a house under construction, and Frankel received an indignant phone call from the builder the next day when he discovered that the dog, locked in the house all night, had peed all over the floor.

  And if Frankel was asked why East Hampton was so important to him, he would reply, astonished that anyone need ask, “The land is important. Menschen are geborgen, land nicht.” Men are born, land is not. Elena remembered when he showed her around Brigadoon that first day, he whispered it to her reverently, as if he were imparting the secret of life. “This is all there is of it,” he said, exhaling. “Menschen are geborgen, land nicht.”

  4

  FRANKEL HADN’T BEEN much of a preservationist before he moved to the East End in 1946. His only interest in property had been the “vertical real estate” he owned in Manhattan, the odd parcels of commercial properties scattered around Midtown, including half a dozen apartment buildings, a few parking lots, and the site of the current New York Hilton—all of which he hated. “Go into the city for a day,” Frankel said. “What do you see? Blocks and blocks of cubicles, narrow streets congested as hell, sirens all night so you can’t sleep, miserable air.”