Philistines at the Hedgerow

by Steven Gaines

  When Kaplan heard this challenge, he wasn’t impressed. “Lease it to you for a dollar?” he demanded. “If he’s such a big shot, why doesn’t he give it you? Then I’ll endow its upkeep.” Within a few days the deal was done. Frankel signed over the deed to the house, and Kaplan established a six-figure endowment to support the synagogue. Since then the synagogue has never held a mortgage or been in debt. Shortly before the opening ceremonies of the newly named East Hampton Jewish Center, Frankel was outraged to learn that Jacob Kaplan wanted a plaque in the lobby attesting to his generosity. “What a vainglorious man!” Frankel said, insisting that if Kaplan got a plaque, his own would hang right next to it.

  Beaches of Mammon

  BY THE 1970s Evan Frankel was a celebrity in East Hampton, a familiar presence in photographs in the local papers or darting up and down the village streets in his Jeep, waving hellos with the back of his hand like a royal figure. Journalists considered him an authority on everything from East Hampton history to politics in Israel, and he gave numerous interviews to newspapers and magazines, portraying himself as the “the fair-haired boy” whose outspoken voice on the town planning board had made him the “savior of East Hampton,” a credit that he knew would rankle many. Yet the septuagenarian land baron seemed to relish the controversy, and only half-jokingly told a reporter from the New York Times that “I am the only man alive who not only wears a crown of laurel but grows it himself.” In the great tradition of the Roman emperors, he had not one but two busts of himself commissioned, one for his house and one for his pool.

  Frankel consolidated his status by becoming a public companion and “walker” to none other than Jeannette Rattray of the East Hampton Star, in whose honor he raised a considerable sum of money for an addition to the local library named after her. “When Jeannette’s husband died,” Elena remembered, “she became Evan’s very good buddy. She used to come over quite frequently for dinner. Sometimes I was not asked to join them. They would be a ‘date,’ the two of them, and they were very regal. They’d both get dressed to the nines and go out to Guild Hall or to dinner at Spring Close House or Gordon’s, and they became quite the item, the nearest thing that East Hampton ever had to lord and lady.”

  At the same time, he was also becoming a curmudgeon. Years before, when he was at the top of his game, his pointed comments could be bracing or witty; now they were downright rude. Even Robert D. L. Gardiner complained that Frankel was “unnecessarily mean.” “God, I didn’t recognize you,” Frankel told a neighbor he met walking down the street. “You’ve gotten so fat!” The woman lost twenty pounds after the encounter, but she stopped talking to Frankel.

  Yet much of his pompous behavior and braggadocio hid an increasingly vulnerable man, one gripped with a helplessness about impending old age. “I am not one to believe my days get sweeter as I get older,” he said. “I shall not go quietly into that good night.” He clung to Elena as if she were youth itself. He wanted her with him always, and yet he did not make himself easy company. In 1970, much to Frankel’s dismay, Elena went off to graduate school for two years at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. “You’ll probably take up with the first guy you meet at school,” Frankel worried, and Elena said that was nonsense. But it wasn’t nonsense. She did have an affair at graduate school, possibly with the first guy she met, she admitted, suddenly out from under Frankel’s hawklike eye. “I made it my policy not to tell Evan about my affairs,” Elena said, “and he put me on a pedestal.” To Elena’s mind, she and Frankel had a discreet agreement: “We went out with other people but still came home to each other.” Whether Frankel understood this agreement remains in some dispute, but she pointed to an article in Long Island Newsday headlined THE OUTRAGES OF M’LORD, in which Frankel is quoted as saying, “I have a lovely girl, but I’ll make every girl feel that she’s the most desired creature on earth.”

  When she returned from graduate school, in an effort to keep her around, Frankel financed an art gallery for her on Newtown Lane in East Hampton, the Upstairs Gallery. The smart-looking, sunny gallery, with its many windows, was located on the second floor of Oddfellows Hall, a historical village meetinghouse that Frankel had bought years before and had turned into retail property. Larry Rivers taped the gallery’s opening party, to which Frankel escorted Jeannette Rattray. Given that Elena had access to the works of John Little, James Brooks, and pieces from Frankel’s own collection (as well as being the paramour of one of the town’s richest men), the Upstairs Gallery had instant cachet and success. Elena worked hard at it for a few summers, changing the shows every three weeks through the season and building a trade, but she was drawn back to Manhattan, as always, in the winter.

  In early 1972 Frankel moved to a rented villa in Freeport, the Grand Bahamas, and insisted that Elena come down and spend time with him and his friends. Elena demurred, saying that she was feeling depressed and was considering going into therapy. “Well, come down here,” Frankel said, “you’ll have your own room, you can walk the beaches and think, and my new doctor, Ray, will be here. You can talk to him about finding a good therapist.” Elena flew down sometime in February and met Frankel’s new young doctor. He had just returned from scuba diving and was wearing a bathing suit. The handsome doctor was married, but his wife was back in New York. “That trip to Freeport,” said Elena, “was the beginning of an intense, four-year relationship with Evan’s doctor, without Evan’s knowing, because he didn’t need to know.”

  2

  “I THINK EVAN was bitter because he was disillusioned,” Elena said. “I think it made him unhappy that he couldn’t save the whole place and that he couldn’t save himself. It made him angry that he couldn’t make people think the way he did. He began to believe that he was responsible for the fate of the town, and he was scared.”

  There was certainly reason to be scared. By the mid-seventies East Hampton was experiencing the highest growth rate on Long Island. More than a third of the developable 43,000 acres (an estimated $100 million worth) had already fallen into the hands of speculators and builders, while men like Allan Schneider were expanding their factories of destruction—multiple real estate offices to help chop up the land and sell it away. The woeful zoning plan that East Hampton had adopted in the late sixties allowed for a year-round population cap of 64,000 people—nearly 40,000 more residents than were already there. On a summer weekend the number might easily swell to 100,000. The thought was unimaginable to Frankel. With the town of Southampton’s growth plan capping its year-round population at 127,000, sometime in the new millennium it was possible that 300,000 people might try to squeeze onto the South Fork at any given time.

  To see what lax planning had wrought, one needed to look no further than right next door, in Amagansett’s Beach Hampton. Once a primeval landscape of untouched dunes and cranberry bogs, Beach Hampton had been divided into half-acre lots of tacky summer houses in which shares were allowed. The adjoining beach became so crowded with singles standing around, trying to pick up one another, it was nicknamed “Asparagus Beach.” In 1972, much to Frankel’s relief, East Hampton passed a “grouper” law prohibiting four or more adults from sharing a rental house.

  In his frustration, Frankel became a Bible-thumping evangelist. His battle cry was “upzoning.” He stunned the community in the early seventies by voluntarily upzoning the most expensive parcels of his own land south of the highway. He donated tracts to the Nature Conservancy as well. Through the pure Herculean strength of personality and persuasion, he managed to get all his neighbors along Further Lane, from East Hampton to Amagansett, to pledge not to build south of the second line of dunes for the next fifty years. He helped crusade to ban convenience stores, motels, and fast-food franchises. He was crucial in drafting a master plan for the village outlawing buildings taller than two stories. He made impassioned public speeches against a Gristede’s food store on Newtown Lane, even though the extra traffic would benefit his own properties across the street. But he lost his quest t
o ban a huge parking lot at Two Mile Hollow Beach, which he predicted would become a “shimmering mass of molten cars” (which it did).

  His greatest tool was his bully pulpit on the town planning board. The board was created in 1952 by the town fathers, but Frankel considered the group too pro—real estate and development. The board was composed of five members—two town trustees and three local citizens—whom Frankel lectured and berated without mercy for years. “What do we have here on this board?” he would demand of them. “People who are concerned with their owwwwwwwn little bailiwick?” He pointed to a local mortician who sat on the board, saying, “You’re pro-development because you want more people to move here, because the more people who move here, the more people will die and the more business you’ll get.” He turned to the owner of a local shoe store. “Here we have a shoe salesman; more feet mean more shoes.” Charles J. Osborne, a real estate broker and Maidstone member, from an old esteemed family, was another of Frankel’s favorite targets. But no one infuriated Frankel more than Clayton Morey, a local architect. Frankel didn’t think Morey, another Maidstone member, “knew a fig” about architecture. It galled Frankel that Morey, who didn’t even move to East Hampton until 1964, had more sway over how the town looked than any other person. Over the years Morey was chairman of the village planning board, chairman of the town planning board, chairman of the design review board, and a member of the town housing authority. His every utterance drove Frankel mad with frustration, and he took to calling the powerful official “Mr. Moron” in public.

  This kind of discourse and name-calling soon became tiresome, no matter how righteous Frankel’s position was, and the elderly man faced several moments of public humiliation at town meetings. One night he was railing against a proposal to build a 7-Eleven in Amagansett and threatened, “If that thing happens, I move out of here!” The audience spontaneously broke into applause of approval. “Evan almost had a heart attack at that meeting.” Elena remembered. “He was really sick after that.” On another occasion, Frankel was lecturing a crowded town meeting about upzoning when a dog wandered into the building, moseyed up to where Frankel was standing at a podium and barked loudly at him. It caused peals of laughter from the audience.

  One day it came to the attention of the village trustees that a New York State law forbade town trustees, like real estate broker Charles J. Osborne or George B. Hand, from sitting on the town planning board. But instead of Osborne and Hand simply resigning, very quietly one Friday night in autumn, the board was dissolved and then reformed—without Evan Frankel on it.

  Frankel was in a rage when he discovered what had happened. “Of course they got rid of me, those bastards!” he ranted in his living room the day after the news appeared in the East Hampton Star. “I was the voice of reason! But they have made a very grave mistake, very grave, because they have made me a martyr.”

  When the members of the town planning board were asked by a reporter if there was some specific reason why Frankel wasn’t reappointed, not one of them could explain it. They said to ask the town trustees, who said to ask the mayor, Ronald P. Rioux, who could only shrug and say, “I can’t answer that question.” Maybe Mrs. Charles Osborne herself answered it when the following week she wrote a letter to the East Hampton Star quoting Chekhov: “The most intolerable people are provincial celebrities.”

  3

  “BY 1975,” Elena said, “I was in full Freudian analysis, seeing a psychiatrist four times a week, paying for it myself. I was trying to figure it all out.” In retrospect, Elena was hard-pressed to explain why she would do anything as capricious as having a torrid affair with Frankel’s own physician, except that it was an overpowering physical infatuation and that she was the pursued, not the pursuer.

  “It wasn’t fair,” Joan Cullman, Frankel’s longtime friend said. “Even the doormen in Evan’s building knew she was having an affair with the doctor.” Cullman sat Elena down and had a talk with her. “‘Look,’ I said to her, ‘We’ve all had affairs, but there is such a thing as discretion. Don’t have an affair in the man’s own apartment.’ But Elena just didn’t get it.”

  Elena couldn’t bring herself to end the relationship with Frankel either. “Evan and I had exhausted our repertoire,” Elena said, “yet he wanted me to be there all the time, and when I was there, we argued. He was restless and wanted me to travel with him or come out to East Hampton, and I just couldn’t. Not only was I in therapy but I was teaching art at a private school, the Towne School, twenty-two classes a week, and I was also in training as a docent at the Guggenheim.

  “The winter of 1975 he wanted me to drop everything and go to Saint Moritz with him. It was very important to him, his friends were going, the Bigars and the Cullmans, and so I finally said I would join them. It was a long, tiresome journey, and as soon as we got there, Evan didn’t like the place. It was too snooty, and the altitude didn’t agree with him or me. Since we couldn’t ski, there was nothing to do except bundle up and walk through the streets in a blowing snowstorm. One day we got back to the hotel and Evan discovered that one side of his face was paralyzed, as if he had had a stroke.” The paralysis was eventually diagnosed as Bell’s palsy, a virus of the muscle that often disappears by itself, but at the time “he was scared of having a stroke,” Elena said, “and anxious to get back to East Hampton right away.”

  Later that winter, Frankel went to Manhattan on business without alerting Elena and arrived at his apartment to discover her having a drink with his physician. Frankel was stunned to see his doctor in his apartment with Elena, but he behaved like a gentleman. “Is this anything I should be jealous about?” he asked them.

  Elena and the doctor both said no, and Frankel, wanting it to be true, believed them.

  Elena’s deception continued for a few more months, until a bizarre denouement. Frankel was godfather to one of his sister’s children, Seymour, who had been born deaf and dumb. Frankel had a special relationship with his nephew and helped support and send him through school. Seymour had his own key to Frankel’s penthouse, and one night he went to his uncle’s apartment unannounced to pick up some books Frankel had left for him. To his great distress, he stumbled in on Elena and the doctor in a compromising situation.

  Knowing how much his uncle cared for Elena, Seymour burst into tears and ran from the apartment in anger. Unable to call his uncle on the telephone to tell him what he had seen, loyal Seymour got on the last train for East Hampton that night. He arrived in the small hours of the morning and took a taxi to Brigadoon, where he woke his uncle and tearfully wrote down for him exactly what he had seen.

  Frankel was devastated. “He was crushed,” Elena admitted. “Really crushed. It was awful. He was very hurt, very quiet. Of course, he fired the doctor. We were very adult about the way we handled it from there. I continued to live in his apartment and go out to his house for weekends, but it was decidedly different.” One gloomy weekend when Elena was at Brigadoon with Frankel, the doctor appeared at the estate uninvited, and a boisterous screaming match ensued between Elena’s two suitors. Frankel’s friend Frank Farrell was also present and escorted the doctor to his car, with Elena sobbing in her room.

  Coincidentally, in October 1976, Frankel’s New York apartment building was going cooperative; instead of buying the apartment and giving it to Elena, he declined the offer and moved out, forcing Elena to find her own place. He was gentle about it and even helped Elena buy furniture. Now completely on her own, Elena broke up with the doctor. “We decided we had hurt enough people,” she said.

  Evan’s friends never forgave her, and they never forgave Frankel for loving her the best. Elena held a place in Frankel’s heart that none of his other adoring friends could reach. They remained connected. When she decided to get married to a young investment banker, Evan gallantly paid for the wedding reception at 21. When the marriage didn’t work out, Evan was there to support her. In 1982 she came to Evan and told him that she was going to marry Burt Glinn, a respected photog
rapher and partner in Magnum, the international photo agency. Elena wanted Frankel to meet Glinn and give the wedding his blessing. Evan prepared for the meeting for days. It was late fall and he had his raccoon coat taken out of storage and wore his best Squire of East Hampton half-belted tweed sport jacket and hunting cap. He met Glinn and Elena in his study for a drink, and then the two men left Elena behind to have a man-to-man talk during one of Frankel’s tours around Brigadoon. After about half an hour of conversation, Frankel said to Glinn, “I don’t know if you’re the right man for my girl.”

  Glinn was indignant at Frankel’s gall but held his tongue. Moments later, as they passed the side of the peacock shed, Frankel unzipped his fly and peed on the side of the peacock house in full view of Glinn. “What you do think you are doing?” Glinn demanded, appalled.

  “See,” Frankel said proudly, full of mischief, pointing to his penis and the birds, “pee-cock.”

  Later, driving back to Manhattan, Glinn repeated the story to Elena and asked, “What kind of thing was that?”

  Elena couldn’t help but laugh. “Oh, he was just showing you his colors,” she said.

  5

  AT AGE EIGHTY, Frankel turned his prodigious energy to what he knew would be his last great contribution to the town of East Hampton, a new sanctuary for the Jewish Center. Just as he had hoped, the East Hampton Jewish Center had become the core of Jewish life in the Hamptons. On High Holidays, easily 1,200 people would overflow the small original sanctuary into a white tent erected on the lawn. A large new building was needed, one big enough for everyone, and Frankel set out to find $1 million to build it, mortgage-free.