Philistines at the Hedgerow

by Steven Gaines

  For a man eighty years old, Frankel’s quest for money was formidable and unrelenting. To be cornered by him was sometimes a costly thing. In one of his most bravura feats of fund-raising, he ran into an old business acquaintance in the elevator at the Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan and extracted a $50,000 donation from the man between the twenty-fourth and twenty-seventh floors. When Frank Farrell gave him a check for $10,000, Frankel held onto it for months before depositing it, waving it in everybody’s face. “Now here’s a friend,” he would say, unfolding the check. “Ten thousand dollars! He’s a black Irishman, and yet he gave me ten thousand dollars!”

  There was one other, unexpected contributor to the new sanctuary: Evan Frankel himself. It is not known exactly how much money he donated, but it is likely to have been many hundreds of thousands of dollars, since Frankel intended to have control over the project. It would not be just a sanctuary, of course, but an Evan Frankel production, from the man who brought you the Distilled Spirits Industry Exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair, from the man who saved East Hampton. It would be the most prominent building along the approach to the village. Evan even chose the site and axis of the new building before he chose the architect.

  Or, more appropriately, the architect chose him. Norman Jaffe, a lanky, handsome man in his early fifties, was already an architectural legend. Although he had proved his mettle in Manhattan with a prize-winning, shimmering skyscraper at 565 Fifth Avenue, and a capacious waterfront office complex called Seven Hanover Square, it was Jaffe’s houses in the Hamptons that made him famous. Nothing else looked like them, at peace with the land, each one a sculpture, sweeping angles and low, low, overhangs, half walls of quarried stone and slate, the landscaping built against the house like a verdant cushion.

  By the mid 1980s Norman Jaffe’s houses were so exalted, they had become a status chip. Jaffe found himself becoming a brand name, like Mercedes. The next step was a line of sheets, and Jaffe hated it. He hated that kind of notoriety; he disliked, in particular, the kind of people it drew to him. “Weary from earning and spending,” Jaffe said contemptuously, “my clients make a long perilous journey each weekend to escape the city.” Jaffe was so disapproving of the motives of most of his prospective clients, desperate to write him a check for his $500,000 fee so they could tell their friends, “We live in a Norman Jaffe house,” that he turned down nine out of ten commissions. The tenth, lucky client who passed his scrutiny wound up with a brilliant house, an ulcer, and sometimes a lawsuit, like the prolonged litigation Jaffe got into with actor Alan Alda and his wife, Arlene, over his fee. Jaffe became so famous for being difficult that the New York Times architecture critic, Paul Goldberger, said Jaffe had “raised the alienation of clients to an art form.”

  Unhappy with building houses for people, Jaffe decided that his talents were more worthy of building a house for God. He just didn’t expect Evan Frankel to be the client. When Jaffe offered his architectural services, completely gratis, to the Jewish Center, he found a cool reception from Frankel. “I don’t see why a builder of skyscrapers and modern houses would know anything about building a house of God,” Frankel said. Jaffe set out to show him. For the next nine months the architect submitted eight sets of plans to Frankel, all of which were dismissed. Frankel seemed almost frightened to make a decision. It had to be something special, he kept saying, “East Hampton isn’t just anyplace.”

  One night the elderly man and the architect were having dinner, trying to find common ground over the design, when Frankel told him the story of his childhood, of selling chewing gum on the Staten Island ferry when he was six years old and of being bar mitzvahed in a sweatshop. “I saw in Evan then,” said Jaffe, “something I hadn’t seen before. I saw for the first time the struggling Yiddish-speaking child lost in a gentile world.” Inspired by this thought, Jaffe turned for inspiration to an old book of photographs of synagogues in rural Poland, which he had found at the Jewish Center. They were mostly shingled buildings in the woods, not very different from the setting in East Hampton. All of them had been destroyed by the Nazis.

  The next plan that Jaffe drew up is the one that stands today on Woods Lane. The resulting collaboration took nearly three years of titanic egos vying for their own perception of perfectionism, and the building that resulted is for many transcendent. The theme of the building is ten, the minimum number to complete a minyan, or prayer group. The exterior is set off by a series of multileveled, rectangular arches, between which tall, narrow windows let in the warmth of ambient light. The spacious interior is made completely of smooth, blond Alaskan cedar, with beams in a series of ten staggered, angled shapes, derived from the tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, yod. The south wall is penetrated by ten floor-to-ceiling windows, and the soaring arches seem to pull the congregation upward. All the lighting is diffuse, and the only direct sunlight falls on the ark, which contains the Torah.

  The Gates of the Grove has in some ways become a monument to Norman Jaffe’s work, as well as to Frankel’s. On the morning of August 19, 1993, Jaffe drove out to the end of Ocean Road in Bridgehampton and went for a morning swim on the beach, never to be seen again. Mysterious rumors circulated that he had faked his own death, sick of his life in the Hamptons. A month later, his pelvic bone washed up on shore a quarter of a mile from where he had been swimming and was identified by the medical examiner’s office.

  The placement of the Jewish Center so prominently at the entrance to the town gave Frankel great satisfaction over the years and had its desired effect, particularly during the Jewish High Holidays, when Woods Lane was lined end to end with the luxury cars of those attending the services. One year, a local man was provoked to count the number of German-made cars parked in front of the synagogue and remark in an indignant letter to the East Hampton Star that the Jews must have forgotten the Germans’ war crimes. The following week another letter writer suggested counting the number of Japanese cars in front of church on Sunday, to determine if the Christians had apparently forgiven the Japanese for Pearl Harbor. The contretemps eventually died away, but the synagogue remains an indisputable reminder of Evan Frankel’s legacy.

  In October 1987, on Yom Kippur, Frankel collapsed coming out of the Jewish Center. He was never completely well again. He lingered in bed at home for a year, tended to by nurses and friends, shouting out, “The lord of the manor is not dead yet!” He was right. He lived another four years, and when he turned eighty-nine years old, all the women he had loved in his lifetime, save Peggy Goldsmith, held a symbolic “ninetieth” birthday party for him at Brigadoon because he wanted to live to be ninety years old. “Evan’s girls” gathered around him for one last ensemble photograph. Frankel lived long enough to see the changing of one more season in the living paintings he so loved, until one spring morning in April 1991 he passed away in his bedroom at Brigadoon. His memorial service was held at the Gates of the Grove, and when the service let out, Woods Lane was closed to traffic in his honor.

  Toward the end of his life Frankel had liquidated much of his property and left a large amount of cash to establish a philanthropic foundation, the Evan M. Frankel Foundation, for the enrichment of life on the East End. It is one of the largest endowments of its kind on the South Fork. He also left thirty-seven separate bequests to friends and relatives, totaling nearly $3 million. One of the largest personal bequests was a $200,000 trust fund established for Sam Glinn, Elena Prohaska’s son with Burt Glinn.

  The family that bought Brigadoon from Frankel’s estate built a new, modern house on the property that Frankel would have loathed, all his friends agree. The new owners gave the old house to the local fire department to use for practice in putting out fires, and it was slowly burned down. The wandering maze of paths with their surprises, the pool built in the foundation are gone now—but after all, the legend of Brigadoon is that it appears only one day every 100 years.

  Philistines at the Hedgerow

  THERE WAS CONSTERNATION in the wicker-filled sunrooms of Southampto
n. They fretted about it on the grass courts of the Meadow Club. On warm afternoons at the Southampton Bathing Corporation, the members nibbled away at the details of what “those Trupin people” were doing to Henry F. du Pont’s famed Chestertown House the way they munched on cold, crisp cucumber sandwiches as the ocean crashed onto the clean sand at their feet.

  By spring of 1983 everyone in Southampton had heard some morsel. The indoor barrier reef with underwater grottoes and a twenty-foot waterfall. A freshwater aquarium large enough to swim in, with underwater oxygen jets. An entire sixteenth-century Normandy pub imported from France and reassembled inside Mr. du Pont’s former library. A private zoo for burros. A heating system that could run on gas, coal, or oil at the flip of a switch. And not just one Rolls-Royce—which in Southampton would have been considered gauche enough—but seven, one a wicker-and-ivory model that belonged to a maharaja.

  But perhaps the worst part: The first thing the Trupins did when they bought the house was to Scotch-tape a 24-karat gold mezuzah to the front door.

  “Hank” du Pont must have been spinning in his grave.

  “Mr. Trupin has insulted the memory of my family’s old friend, Henry du Pont,” said socialite Henry Mortimer, who was married to the granddaughter of Lord Curzon.

  “Here I am,” sputtered John Randolph Hearst, Trupin’s exasperated neighbor, “with a grandfather who built San Simeon—but he didn’t build it in someone else’s backyard!”

  Yet nowhere in Southampton was Barry and Renee Trupin’s assault on Chestertown House more decried than at the Squabble Lane residence of Charlotte McDonnell Harris, sixty-two, the former sister-in-law of Henry Ford II. Harris was a small woman of aristocratic bearing, her hair gone gray, at her ears diamond clip-ons. Her deeply lined face and whiskey-throated voice attested to the cigarettes that seemed to drip, always, from the long, bony fingers of her right hand. She took deep, Tallulah Bankhead drags on her Parliaments, talking sharply as she exhaled through her nostrils, dragon-style. She talked mostly about Barry Trupin and how Southampton was “going to hell in a handbasket.”

  Harris knew all about going to hell in a handbasket. She had been there herself and back. After her son Richard Jr. was born in 1945, she became agoraphobic and was subject to panic attacks—afraid to go out of the house, afraid of crowds, afraid of people in general. It became a struggle for her to play bridge at home with friends. “I spent the next thirty-five years with a psychiatrist,” she said, “back when only crazy people went to psychiatrists.” To make matters more difficult, Richard, her tall, handsome husband, cheated on her from almost the start of the marriage. She would have divorced him, but she was a devout Catholic, and “nobody is closer to God than the Irish,” she deadpanned. To deal with it, she began taking tranquilizers and drinking, and before long she was a full-fledged alcoholic and drug addict. “There wasn’t a rehab center on every corner in those days,” Harris said, and she underwent a series of “cures” for her drinking and pills, all of which failed.

  Harris hit a low in 1974 when her daughter, Laurie, took an overdose of pills at age twenty-four and lapsed into a coma before dying in New York Hospital weeks later. Asked whether Laurie committed suicide or if it was an accident, Harris would only say, “Debatable,” and let out a long plume of smoke. After Laurie’s death, she kept herself in a drunken stupor, and the following year, on a holiday in Russia with her family, she was too drunk one night to attend a party at the American embassy. “That’s the night I knew I was an alcoholic,” she said. Eventually, she signed herself into Silver Hill, a private hospital in Connecticut. “Quite enjoyed it” she was fond of telling people. “Very attractive. Very nice people. It’s low-key, and I’ve never had a drink since.”

  Instead, after mass each morning, Harris went to AA meetings, where she appeared in Gucci loafers and simple sleeveless summer dresses with pockets, or little cardigans, and when she smiled her gap-toothed smile—a warm, real smile that crinkled her already very lined face—it was still easy to see all these years later why John F. Kennedy was once so smitten with her that he proposed marriage before he met Jacqueline Bouvier. But the McDonnells wouldn’t hear of Charlotte marrying Jack: The Kennedys weren’t good enough. The McDonnells considered Joe and Rose nouveau riche—riding around in those big black limousines, looking like dowdy Boston Irish made good. The McDonnells had every bit as much money but they drove station wagons. And they played tennis and hunted, not chased women. They were the famous Golden Clan, the Brahmins of Irish society, descendants of the chief pooh-bah Irishman of them all, Thomas E. Murray. Their money was old—old compared to the Kennedys, when twenty years meant a lot to Irish immigrants. And Charlotte married well anyway, to Richard Harris, whose father owned the U.S. Lines shipping company.

  The McDonnells and their in-laws, the Murrays, hadn’t just summered in the village for the past seventy-five years, they were of the village, some of its fiercest protectors. Harris was vice president of the Southampton Association, a tax-exampt, nonpartisan group of concerned estate owners formed in 1962 to “preserve the character and environment of the village.” She knew damn well that this Trupin thing would signal the beginning of the end if they didn’t put their foot down. The philistines were upon them. Not just across the Shinnecock Canal in Westhampton (not really a “Hampton” anyway, but a tacked-on invention), where the divorced dentists bought homes for their second wives, or in Sagaponack, where the screwy or alcoholic writers like James Jones and Truman Capote lived, or in East Hampton, where the artist community paved the way for the show business crowd and the Jews, but close by, just outside the hedgerow, on Meadow Lane.

  Harris was sitting in command central, her favorite chair in her favorite room in the house, the sunroom. It had double-paned glass—on the rare winter’s day in the East End when there was sunshine, the room stayed just as toasty warm as it remained cool in the summer from the ocean breeze blowing beyond the privet. A corgi, the breed favored by the queen of England, panted silently in a chair next to her. On the chintz-upholstered sofa was a pillow needlepointed with the words “I Love the Irish.” The house was roomy yet somehow plain and quiet on an otherwise remarkable street; Squabble was a private lane with a dozen magnificent houses, carved out of her family’s own private compound.

  What irked Harris about Trupin and Chestertown House, what irked everyone, was the arrogance of it all—not just to tamper with a famous old house, but to tamper with it so badly. “The house is a horror, a hideosity!” Harris said. It was her favorite expression for it, “a hideosity.” The house was indeed a grotesque creation, part faux—Normandy castle, part Disneyland on LSD. It was the largest private renovation project ever undertaken in New York State. It stood ominously on Meadow Lane, ringed in barbed wire and laced with scaffolding, while hundreds of workmen swarmed over it daily like bees tending a hive. The handsome Georgian facade had disappeared behind walls of steel and mortar, with cathedral-like windows, fanciful spires, and pinnacles worthy of a fairy castle.

  Darius Toraby, of Manhattan, was the architect of record, but according to the gossip, the construction was proceeding at Mr. Trupin’s own caprice. Chimneys were built and knocked down at whim; a newly installed kitchen was destroyed so it could be moved six feet to the right; and one day architectural columns were covered in malachite, the next day in onyx. Trupin even renamed the house Dragon’s Head. That really galled Harris. “Dragon’s Head,” she grumbled. “With any luck, and given cyclical hurricanes, the whole thing will be blown away by Christmas.

  “And don’t be misled about what you read in the press about anti-Semitism. This isn’t about anti-Semitism, this is about bad taste.” Harris sparked a controversy when in one of her many outspoken interviews, she admitted, “If Mr. Trupin is involved in drugs or gambling, we don’t want him. What if he’s just a smart Jew who made a lot of money? In that case, we don’t want him either.” Harris later claimed not to have said it. “I thought he was Italian,” she said, or because Trupin’s
company used the name Rothschild Reserve International, “we thought some Rothschilds fleeing France were fixing up the old place. After all, we’ve gotten a lot of those Euro-types out here recently.” She had also heard rumors that he was a front man for Imelda Marcos or a big-time drug dealer, so who knew what to think?

  “I didn’t say, ‘We don’t want him, he’s Jewish,’” she pointed out, and launched into her “wives of Jews list,” a litany of Charlotte’s Southampton friends who were married to prominent Jewish men and who were accepted in her circle: “Carroll, Ginny, Carolyne, Allison, Judy…” Carroll was the wife of drugstore tycoon Milton Petrie; Ginny was the wife of William Salomon, the founder of the brokerage firm; Carolyne was Carolyne Roehm, the designer, who was married to millionaire takeover king Henry Kravis; Allison was the wife of Hartz Group chairman and Village Voice publisher Leonard Stern; Judy Taubman was married to root-beer mogul and Sotheby’s chairman A. Alfred Taubman.

  “But these people are names,” said Harris, borrowing a sentiment from the movie Sunset Boulevard. This man Trupin—this stranger who appeared out of nowhere, in his gold chains, with his “cute, hip number” of a wife who wore black leather minis or tight white pants with ankle boots with hats that teetered on the outlandish—“is a complete mystery.” Not even the name of his company was real—Rothschild Reserve International. It was reported that the Rothschilds of the French banking dynasty demanded that Trupin stop using the name, a request he satisfied by occasionally removing the middle s. When New York magazine asked the Trupins if they were related to the French Rothschilds, Renee Trupin answered, “Please don’t compare us to them—we see them socially.”

  “Socially?” Charlotte Harris chortled. The Trupins didn’t seem very social to her. They didn’t give to charities or try to ingratiate themselves, the way people did when they first moved there. After all, this was a small place, Southampton. Of all the stories told around the village about the Trupins, one in particular rankled Harris in a way that some friends thought was a tad obsessive. Ginny Salomon had stopped by Chestertown House on a neighborly stroll with Robin Duke, the wife of Angier Biddle Duke, to take a better look at the saltwater pool that everybody was talking about, when they were told by a member of Mr. Trupin’s security force to “move along.”