Philistines at the Hedgerow

by Steven Gaines

  He was born Meshulam Frankel on January 9, 1902, in Laicia, a Polish-speaking province of Austria, and was brought to America at the age of three. He was one of ten brothers and sisters raised in a Lower East Side tenement. His first job was selling chewing gum on the Staten Island ferry when he was six years old. At thirteen he was bar mitzvahed in a Lower East Side sweatshop that was converted into a synagogue on Saturdays. “I was starved for greenery and land,” he remembered. “I used to sit and wonder what a blade of grass looked like.”

  At twenty-one, after studying drafting at Columbia and NYU, he formed his own company with a master carpenter, Isaac Ross, to design and install unusual storefronts and office reception areas. Frankel was a good draftsman and designer but an even better salesman. By the time he was thirty, he had built the first New York offices of Joseph E. Seagram & Sons and the Fifth Avenue stores for the Bulova watch company and Doubleday Books. In 1939 he built the much-photographed fifty-foot marquee for the Distilled Spirits Industry Exhibit at the World’s Fair. Young and prosperous in wartime, he began to buy up distressed Midtown Manhattan real estate—in particular, apartment buildings and vacant lots.

  As he became rich, he shed his Lower East Side background and strove to assimilate into gentile society. He became an Anglophile, dressing in Savile Row tweeds and camel hair overcoats. He rented the terraced penthouse apartment at One Hundred Riverside Drive and had it designed like a movie set. He spent winters in Palm Beach, where he learned to ride horses and play polo. He dined with young beauties at the Copacabana and 21. Winston Churchill’s actress daughter, Sarah, became a friend of Frankel’s, and they were frequently photographed leaving nightclubs in New York and London, Frankel in black tie. He accompanied her to dinner at Buckingham Palace and was her escort and overnight guest at Windsor Castle. In the 1950s he dabbled in the theater, becoming an angel for the original Broadway productions of Gentleman Prefer Blondes, The Music Man, and Brigadoon, after which he named his East Hampton estate, and he produced the film version of Gian-Carlo Menotti’s The Medium.

  It was World War II that first brought Frankel to the Hamptons, where his company was given a lucrative government contract to build a string of “early warning” radar towers along the South Fork from Westhampton to Montauk. These wooden pyramids housed a small room with a radar device to warn against the Nazi U-boats that lurked off the U.S. coast. In June 1942, through no fault of Frankel’s tower design, the system failed to detect a German submarine surfacing 500 yards off Amagansett beach. A band of saboteurs paddled ashore in a rubber boat with cases of explosives with which they intended to blow up buildings crucial to the war effort, including the Pennsylvania Railroad terminal in Newark. The German spies were arrested two weeks later without doing any damage, but the incident went down in history as the only time Nazis ever invaded U.S. shores, and it rankled Frankel’s pride to the day he died.

  It was while his company was building the radar towers that Frankel first lived full-time in East Hampton, renting a suite of rooms at an old hotel on Main Beach called the Sea Spray Inn. “As I toured around working at my job,” Frankel remembered, “I simply fell in love with the land. It had an ineffable quality. I wanted to preserve that quality. This land was more than mere countryside. It was beauty, it was poetry, it was art.” By then, Frankel had accumulated a personal fortune of more than $2 million, at the time a considerable sum, and was anxious to change the direction of his life.

  When Frankel decided to buy his first piece of property, he went not to a real estate broker but to the barber shop. In his travels he had discovered that the best local news was to be had at the barber’s. It was there that he heard about a rubble of a house at 150 Hither Lane, the old McCord mansion. D. W. McCord, who made his money in grain markets, had built the large shingled house as a summer retreat in the early 1900s. One scorching July day in 1920 his daughter, Janet, was sneaking a forbidden cigarette in an upstairs room and tossed the lit butt out the window, where it landed in old dry vines and started a fire. By the time the fire truck was summoned, the entire third floor of the west wing was already ablaze. In any event, the water pressure was so low that only a dribble came out of the hoses; all anybody could do was watch. The younger men from the town and the Summer Colony banded together and raced in and out of the house, rescuing belongings, silverware, even managing to drag the grand piano outside. Within four hours the entire house was burned to the ground, at a loss estimated at $60,000 in 1920 dollars. All that was left were the foundation and the charred fireplace that had been in the living room. McCord was so disheartened, he never rebuilt.

  However, a few hundred yards away, still unscathed, stood a charming yet modest wood carriage house, with a hand-crank elevator. Twenty-six years after the fire, the carriage house was overgrown with vines and weeds—“Wuthering Heights when I first saw it,” Frankel said. He paid $21,000 for it, a king’s ransom in 1946. It was around the carriage house that Frankel decided to build and amend and enlarge what eventually turned into a twelve-room, Sussex-style country estate behind a long cement wall, its diamond-paned leaded windows sparkling in the sun.

  Soon after Evan moved in came the stories of what he was doing to the grounds—not only his display of indecent nude statuary but the construction of a swimming pool that sounded alarmingly bacchanalian for the demure Hamptons. On top of that, Frankel had a series of girlfriends barely of legal age, some of them quite beautiful, including, back in 1937, a ravishing Lucille Ball, then an unknown actress who was introduced to Frankel by mutual friends. There are pictures of them together, stiffly posed, Lucille Ball perched on the edge of a chair with Frankel lounging on the arm behind her. When Lucille Ball first went to Hollywood, she sent him a letter that was tantamount to a marriage proposal, but the idea of marriage suffocated Frankel, and he ended the relationship.

  He came to a similar end with a young beauty named Peggy Goldsmith. In 1942, when he was forty and she was twenty, he spotted her standing at a bus stop in Long Beach, Long Island. He pulled over in his “mile-long” Packard convertible and offered to give her a lift. That night they went to Radio City Music Hall and later to the Stork Club. She was a stunning young girl, perhaps even more beautiful than Lucille Ball; when Frankel discovered that their twenty-year age difference left her unfazed, he asked her to move in with him.

  By all accounts, they had an extraordinary ten years together. However, the question of marriage always hung in the air. “One day,” Frankel told Elena, “I found myself engaged to Peggy. I don’t know how it happened. I had a friend who was in the diamond business and I had some loose diamonds in my pocket and I showed them to Peggy.” The next thing he knew, Frankel claimed, he saw his forthcoming marriage announced in the newspapers. Of course, Frankel knew exactly what he was doing; he not only showed Peggy loose stones but gave her an engagement ring. Yet the thought of marrying anyone made Frankel so sick that he took to bed for several weeks after the engagement was announced. A month later, in 1952, Peggy moved out.

  For the next fifteen years there were dozens of beautiful women in and out of Frankel’s life, but not one struck his fancy until the night he met Elena.

  Gates of the Grove

  BEFORE ADOPTING East Hampton as his hometown, Evan Frankel never really embraced his Jewishness. In fact, most of his life was about WASP assimilation, learning the dress, sports, and manners of the gentile rich. Ironically, though, in East Hampton society, he was not only primarily a Jew but the most prominent Jew of all. “The King of the Jews,” as one nasty nickname had him; “Evan Bagel,” another.

  “Evan knew that people in East Hampton called him names,” Elena said, “and it infuriated him.” Frankel always recounted the shock he felt when he first came to East Hampton in the 1940s and discovered that anti-Semitic materials were prominently displayed on the wicker furniture in the lobby of the Sea Spray Inn or that up until the 1950s, Gurney’s Inn and the Montauk Manor were known not to accept Jewish guests. He was mortified at the
unembarrassed way first-generation Polish farmers openly called Jews “Bejid” and blamed the “Jew swimming pools” when they were forced to stop using insecticides that polluted the fragile aquifer.

  “This is a town,” Frankel said, “where some of the deeds to houses and land still contain a covenant prohibiting the transfer to ‘Jews, Negroes, and entertainers.’” Even in the 1980s pop star Billy Joel had to form a corporation to buy his Further Lane house because of such a covenant, and back in 1946, when Frankel bought the McCord estate, it was unheard-of for a Jew to be living in the triumverate of Further, Middle, and Hither Lanes. Owners simply wouldn’t sell to Jews. “What is the name of your client?” they would demand of brokers, slamming down the phone at the sound of a Semitic name like Cohen or Frankel.

  Frankel had to resort to obfuscation to buy the McCord house. He asked his gentile friend Emerson Thors, who was a partner in Kuhn, Loeb, to buy the house in secret partnership and later transfer ownership of the deed to him. Having to buy the house through this deception chagrined Frankel no end, and with great bitterness did he put the Thors name on a sign at the entrance to the driveway for the first three months he owned the house, to complete the deception. It didn’t make the Maidstone Club very happy with Thors either when they found out; he was never extended membership, lest he bring his friend Frankel around.

  “It is the Maidstone Club that is at the root of all this, that perpetuates this,” Frankel insisted to visitors at Brigadoon. He marched his guests upstairs to the master bedroom and pulled aside the window curtains with a flourish. “There!” he said, pointing to the west. “A bastion of bigotry!”

  Off in the distance, like a grand dowager high on the dunes of Wiborg Beach, stood the ivy-covered Maidstone Club, its gambreled roofs silhouetted against the ocean sky. The club’s twenty-seven holes of manicured, verdant golf links—180 acres of the most exclusive seaside golf course in the world—spread out like a floating green gown. The large, handsome clubhouse, with its behemoth ballroom on the second floor, straddled a sturdy dune; below, down long staircases, was a sprawling beach club complex, rows of rustic wood cabanas, painted tan and gray, the awnings comfortably faded in the WASP style. There was also a seaside restaurant for lunch, and an Olympic-sized saltwater swimming pool that had its water changed every Sunday night.

  It certainly didn’t look like a bastion of bigotry. In fact, it looked quite bewitching. But no matter how much Frankel assimilated or dressed like an Englishman or spoke like a WASP, he would never be welcome there. Nor would people of color. Or what they called “single men.” “And if they told the truth,” Frankel said, “they wouldn’t have let the Irish in either if so many of the WASPs didn’t jump out of windows during the crash of 1929.” Frankel was so rankled by the club, he planted a thick stand of pines to block the view from his bedroom window, and every morning he would dramatically exhort to them, “Grow, trees, grow! I wish you’d grow tall and fast so I wouldn’t have to see that place!”

  2

  IT WAS IRONIC that the club Frankel hated so bitterly also defined many of the wonderful things about the town. More than just a country club, the Maidstone Club was the dominant influence in East Hampton life for over half a century. It determined the entire character of the village, its social graces, even its look. Every significant institution was founded, donated, or controlled by Maidstone Club members, from Guild Hall to the East Hampton Free Library. Maidstoners supported the volunteer fire department, the Ladies Village Improvement Society, and the Garden Club. They put in the sidewalks and the streetlights and helped saved the town in crises. After the devastating 1938 hurricane, during which 524 of the town’s famous elm trees were uprooted and destroyed, it was Maidstone members who raised $65,000 to replant them. During World War II they gamely donated their lawn ornaments to be melted down for scrap iron. They also kept forever safe from development the magnificent rolling grounds on which they—and only they—could play golf, and even Evan Frankel begrudgingly had to be grateful for that.

  The Maidstone Club was founded in 1891 in the living room of Dr. Everitt Herrick, the man Evan Frankel referred to as the “chief anti-Semite.” Herrick wasn’t so much an anti-Semite as he was a tyrant. His authority over the early Summer Colony was practically absolute. He was not only the Summer Colony’s social arbiter, he was also the physician to most of them. Herrick was also a pompous ass who never doubted the correctness of his own opinion. Perhaps some of his authority came from his being a tree trunk of a fellow, six feet three inches tall, with a bald pate from which sprang bushy muttonchops, conjoining an untamed mustache worthy of Buffalo Bill. Herrick was a flinty New Englander, born in New London, New Hampshire. He formed the Maidstone Club initially as a place to play tennis and golf with a tight-knit group of twelve other summer visitors, who appropriated the name “Old East Hampton”—much to the consternation of the real Old East Hampton, locals who had lived there for generations.

  Dr. Herrick’s Old East Hampton was composed of wealthy and refined families of bankers, industrialists, and prominent clergy who had been lured to East Hampton by the talk in chic publications of playing tennis in dappled orchards. They were the flower of Northeastern society in their age, what one turn-of-the-century writer called “a society based on intellectual tastes rather than a feverish craving for display and excitement.”

  Another journalist in the New York Herald wrote that East Hampton “excluded the vulgar parvenus that so often make life wretched at the conventional summer resort [because] six miles to the nearest railroad at Bridgehampton keeps off the rabble.” When Dr. Herrick and the first hundred or so summer visitors arrived in East Hampton, that extra six miles from Bridgehampton was managed by a stagecoach ride over a long dusty road, so dusty that each wagon fought to be first loaded and away from the train station so as not to eat the dust of the wagon ahead. During dry spells the dust got so thick that the drivers blew bugles like foghorns to avoid collisions. Once the visitors arrived in the village, they found a sleepy town completely unprepared for guests. Main Street was a wide green lawn, like a meadow, with grazing cattle and geese. It was lined with plain farmhouses and at the far end, a working windmill. The village was so bucolic that the town’s only justice of the peace, Henry B. Tuthill, had been blind since childhood.

  Since there were no hotels, Herrick and his crowd had to convince the wary locals to rent them rooms. At first suspicious of the tourists, the local families soon realized that summer visitors were a dependable source of income—and the Boardinghouse Era was born. These boardinghouses were elegant and formally run, not fleabags. Their guests were often celebrated, people like John A. Roebling and his family, who spent a summer on Main Street while he designed and built the Brooklyn Bridge. Rooms went for seven dollars a week, payable sixty days in advance by post, and hearty Yankee-style breakfasts were served at dawn, with a main meal, or “supper,” served at noon.

  Within a few years the boarders began to rent entire houses for the summer for about $200, and two of the local stagecoach drivers, B. M. Osborne and C. E. C. Homans, reinvented themselves as real estate men, waiting at the Bridgehampton train station in their horse and carriages for prospective clients to disembark. The train was finally extended to East Hampton and Montauk in 1895, and visitors began to build their houses. Sommarvaria, the very first summer “cottage” in East Hampton, was built in 1873 by Philadelphian Charles P. B. Jeffreys, a civil engineer who helped plan the Pennsylvania Railroad and was also president of Old East Hampton.

  Dr. Herrick built a house too. He married, for the first time at age fifty-one, Harriet Ford, the daughter of John R. Ford, a prominent East Hampton summer visitor; together they built Pudding Hill, the dark-shingle house that still stands at the entrance to town, on the site of the farmhouse where Mrs. John Osborne rolled a “pudding” down a dirt hill rather than turn it over to marauding British soldiers.

  Herrick walked about town every day in his spats and cutaway with a wheezing little P
ug, Bessie, harnessed to a tether, and he passed judgment on just about everything that he laid eyes on. His authority was as complete as it was arbitrary. He banned women wearing white gloves as being “too citified” and disapproved of “afternoon tea” as a barbaric interruption of the day. At 6 P.M., an hour he regarded as the end of the day’s pursuit of pleasure, he personally stopped summer visitors from playing tennis by dropping the nets. He further insisted that parched tennis players abstain from drinking water for ten minutes after playing, and then only from a jug of “oatmeal” water he had concocted himself and hung from the branch of a tree next to the grass court.

  Perhaps Herrick’s most trying ordinance was that no matter how sweltering the weather, not a single member of Old East Hampton was allowed to swim in the ocean until he deemed the water warm enough. Toward the end of May every year, in what became a breathless ritual, Herrick would go down to the beach, covered from neck to ankle in a dark flannel bathing suit with white braid, carrying a huge wooden thermometer. Half the town would follow him, standing expectantly on the shore as Herrick waded into the water and dipped in the thermometer, soon raising it into the air to read. When the temperature finally met his approval, a cheer went up from the crowd, and Old East Hampton plunged into the surf—but only after Herrick deemed every bathing suit appropriate.

  As it turned out, Dr. Herrick’s most unpopular mandate was that there be no golf on Sunday, the day of the Lord. Since Herrick leased some of the land under the golf course, there was little arguing with him. Eventually, in 1906, the disgruntled golf-loving membership summoned the courage to challenge him and took up a petition, signed even by members of the clergy. In the face of insurrection, Herrick relented and allowed Sunday golf—but not until after 12:30, when church was finished.