That photograph became part of a six-page spread in Life magazine, and the rampage at Ocean Castle made headlines across the country. It became one of the most widely reported news stories of its day, filling not only the tabloids but the front page of the New York Times. Robert Mallory Harriss refused to press charges, and some money quietly changed hands to pay for the damages, assessed at $3,202—curiously low. Harriss wanted to put an end to the matter by saying, “I’m appalled that these youths who are meant to head up their generation could stoop so low.” He encouraged them to “return to God and their religion.”
But interest in the incident would not go away. The public and the press were strangely fascinated by the dissolute behavior of the children of the rich. Didn’t they have to pay a price like the rest of us? Or were they spoiled so rotten that they could rip apart a famous old mansion and get away with it? DO THE RICH HAVE IMMUNITY? asked a front-page article in the New York Times. Finally, in late September, after intense public pressure, the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office convened a grand jury in Riverhead and indicted thirteen young men and one woman to stand trial for the destruction of Ocean Castle. Five of the defendants were in the Social Register, and the one girl, Mimi Russell, age seventeen, who lived at One Sutton Place, was the granddaughter of the duke of Marlborough and the daughter of Lady Sarah Churchill. (Charges against her were later dropped.)
The defendants each stood to get six months in jail and a $250 fine, and the trial in Riverhead turned into a media sideshow. Photographers and reporters camped out on the front steps of the courthouse to crowd round the glamorous young accused. They arrived in expensive sedans with high-priced attorneys who protested that the attendant publicity was “punishment enough” for their clients. Inside the courtroom a partylike atmosphere prevailed as the defiant youngsters took the stand. When James Curtis 3d, of Glen Head, Long Island, was asked if he slept in the house, he said, “Only when I passed out.” When Eaton Brooks, the one who had swung from the chandelier, was asked by the assistant district attorney how he had been invited, he snapped, “There is a social secretary. If you’d like to have me explain it, I will.” Samuel Shipley 3d accused the police of “ruthlessness” in even indicting them, saying that the authorities used “innocent people’s lives as instruments of publicity.” To which the assistant district attorney responded, “He’s just a snotty kid.”
In the end, the judge reluctantly acquitted all involved, saying that it was unfair to punish a few for the deeds of many. As for Fernanda Wanamaker Wetherill, who was not charged, she was “tired of the whole thing,” she told the New York Times, which described her as “blonde, tanned, golden brown by a Bahamas vacation” upon her arrival in court to testify. Fernanda lost most of her enthusiasm for debutante parties after her own. A supper dance scheduled for later that year in Philadelphia was canceled to avoid “another unfortunate incident,” explained the family. Fernanda said that she intended to get on with life by signing a contract to appear in the next James Bond movie, but her career as an actress never took flight. In 1967 she married James Niven, the son of actor David Niven, and settled down to become a solid citizen and philanthropist, later working as head of special projects for Manhattan’s Center for Alcohol and Substance Abuse and for the New York Parks Conservation Program. She remains a vital part of Southampton society.
Her mother was not as lucky. One night in September 1974, after unsuccessfully undergoing treatment for alcoholism for more than seven years, Fernanda Sr. fell or jumped from the window of her fifth-floor apartment on the Upper East Side and broke almost every bone in her body. She died two months later at Lenox Hill Hospital.
Back in 1963, the columnists and pundits tried to figure out what the destruction of Ocean Castle meant. They dissected and examined it, predicting that “affluent delinquency” would become a growing menace. For its analysis, Life hired the same psychiatrist who had treated Ted Dragon, Dr. David Abrahamsen. In explaining the malaise of the children of the rich, Abrahamsen called the rampage “an expression of mass psychosis—mass madness… the irrational actions of people temporarily unbalanced.” An essayist for the New York Times surmised that the wanton behavior was a product of too much time on affluent hands. “In modern society,” posited the Times writer, “teenagers are given fewer useful outlets than their predecessors in rural society.”
It turned out that it meant nothing.
That fall John Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, and the nagging question of what was wrong with the rich kids didn’t matter anymore. As it turned out, the leaders of the next generation of the country weren’t a bunch of towheaded aristocrats, who were, in fact, on their way to extinction, dinosaurs of a gilded age and debutante balls. The leaders of the next generation were wearing hippie beads, smoking pot, and making love, not war or money. For the moment, the party was over for the Southampton swells, only they didn’t know it yet.
2
BARRY TRUPIN bought Ocean Castle from the darkest homeowner in the history of Southampton, Roy Radin, a six-foot, three-inch, 300-pound cocaine addict who made a fortune producing traveling vaudeville shows for Police Benevolent Associations across the country. “The Roy Radin Review,” as it was called, headlined the likes of George Jessel and Tiny Tim, backed by opening acts of Elvis impersonators, singing dwarves, and fire-eaters. It brought millions of dollars into the coffers of police fraternal organizations and widows’ funds, and even more money into the hands of Roy Radin, who sometimes took 75 percent of the proceeds and was able to pay $300,000 cash for Ocean Castle in 1978.
Everything about Radin was smarmy, including his impeccably trimmed black beard and his hucksterish smile. Helicopters flew him and his guests in and out of town, and it was said that movie stars visited him in the dead of night. It made the goings-on at Ocean Castle all the more curious when it was discovered that everyone who worked for Radin was required to live with him, including Mickey Deans, Judy Garland’s widower. In the summer of 1979 Radin was asked to leave the Parrish Art Museum Ball when his female companions bared their breasts. There were also rumors that Radin and his entourage frequented local Southampton bars, where they sent drinks to attractive customers and invited them back to Ocean Castle for late-night parties at which drugs were used.
But nothing seemed more freakish than Radin’s gluttony. Several nights a week, ensconced at his favorite table at Herb McCarthy’s restaurant, Radin would order “one of everything” on the menu as his dinner. At Herbert’s, the town’s old-fashioned grocery, Radin’s minions would roam the aisles, one day purchasing every kind of yogurt in the shop, the next day every kind of bread. Eventually he got so fat that he needed first a cane to waddle down Jobs Lane, and later a wheelchair.
Then came the Friday afternoon in April 1980, when twenty-two-year-old Melonie Haller and Robert B. McKeage IV, forty-two, both of Manhattan, appeared at a drugstore in Southampton Village and bought several dog collars and leashes before disappearing into Ocean Castle for the weekend. Haller was a show-stopping blonde with a long torso and slim hips who had been that May’s Playboy magazine’s playmate of the month. The next time Haller was seen in public was Sunday morning, when she was discovered by a Long Island Railroad motorman—unconscious on the 8:42 A.M. train to Penn Station.
According to Haller, there were seven guests staying at Ocean Castle that weekend, two men and five women, some dressed in leather gear and dog collars. Haller contended that after consuming a great deal of alcohol and cocaine, the other guests entered her bedroom and held her down, biting her breasts, while Radin raped her. Later Radin had his minions drive the dazed Playboy bunny to the Long Island Railroad station and deposit her on a train, where she was found and taken to a hospital.
Radin scoffed at the story, saying that Haller was asked to leave the house because she drunkenly broke things. Sure, they had spent part of the weekend in “suggestive and exotic leather uniforms,” Radin blithely admitted, but that didn’t mean he raped her. In any event,
he was too busy to pay much attention to what Haller did that weekend because in a bizarre sidebar to the story, Mickey Deans tried to commit suicide that Saturday by overdosing on the antidepressant Elavil, and Radin spent most of the day at Southampton Hospital with him. Eventually, the police searched the castle, and Radin was arrested for the possession of an unloaded gun and released on $250 bail but was never charged with rape.
The publicity destroyed Radin’s vaudeville review. No police fraternal organization would touch him, and within the year he fled to Los Angeles, where he expected the kinky, drug-ridden movie industry to embrace him. Radin listed Ocean Castle with Allan Schneider, and the moment it went on the market, in 1983, Barry Trupin jumped at the chance to buy it for a little more than $8 million. In an article published in the Southampton Whale, a well-read giveaway weekly paper, it was coyly noted that “[no] connection was found between Radin and Trupin except the property transaction.”
In California Radin descended into a byzantine world of petty L.A. gangsters and coke dealers. He tried to use cocaine money to help bankroll the movie The Cotton Club, but before the movie was made, his body was found in a creek bed outside Los Angeles, one side of his head blown off by a stick of dynamite that had been stuck in his mouth after he was shot eighteen times. What was left of him was shipped out to Southampton, where he was buried in Southampton Cemetery, in a plot just next to busy Montauk Highway.
Now Barry Trupin was the master of Ocean Castle, where he moved his medieval armor and twelve-foot-tall taxidermie bears, a brown kodiak and a white polar in attack position. It was at Ocean Castle one balmy summer night in 1984 that he gave a lavish, medieval-themed banquet in the flickering light of burning torches. While Charlotte Harris quietly fumed in the Murray compound two miles away, Trupin’s guests—most of them “outsiders,” people imported for the weekend—were dressed as if they had just stepped out of Robin Hood’s Sherwood Forest, in tights and brocade jackets, the women in ornate gowns and veiled tricornered headgear. The smell of seared meat cooking over an open pit wafted through the night air as a thirteen-course dinner was served, including roast suckling pig prepared on a spit and delivered to the table supine on a litter, with an apple in its mouth. Later guests watched displays of jousting in the courtyard and were entertained by jesters and lute players. The party went on deep into the night, while just down the block, Chestertown House stood dark and unfinished, its turrets and peaks the lightning rod for a brewing storm.
Dragon’s Head
NOTHING STAYS the same,” Charlotte Harris conceded in a soft, raspy voice. She was sitting in the sunroom of her Squabble Lane house in a cloud of cigarette smoke, her corgis curled up next to her. One opened pack and a backup were squared off on the table, along with a pad and a telephone. “The only thing that’s stayed the same here is the ocean,” she said. “Sure, it would be ideal to be able to look out over farmland for the rest of your life, but that’s not realistic.”
The thing about Southampton that very few outsiders understood was that Southampton never pretended to be anything but a close-knit enclave. It didn’t have a summer theater or art galleries or a welcoming reputation for writers and artists. It didn’t want all that. What Southampton wanted most of all was to be left alone. That’s why the village was so unprepared for the sudden and drastic development explosion in the early eighties. Unlike East Hampton, Southampton had been notoriously lax about zoning and land preservation—it wasn’t until 1957 that a simple town zoning ordinance was adopted. Subsequent plans hadn’t saved it from the developers, who were flocking to Southampton from up and down Long Island, parceling it off. Even Fordune, the former 215-acre estate of Henry Ford II, was being developed into forty-eight lots.
“The village is disappearing overnight,” Harris said. “Quite literally. Now you see it, now you don’t.” It struck terror in the hearts of the Summer Colony in the winter of 1983 when the von Stade house on South Main Street vanished. Leveled to the ground without a demolition permit. It had been a legend in the village, a Tudor mansion set on six and a half acres fronting Lake Agawam. It had twenty-two bedrooms and servants’ quarters for fifteen; the floor of its ballroom was inlaid in a herringbone pattern. But it was useless, unheated, a relic of a bygone era. It passed through the hands of the von Stade family for five generations until it was quietly bought by a developer from Palm Beach. One night between Christmas and New Year the house disappeared, so quickly that locals drove by the empty lot several times in disbelief. “Symbolically, it seemed sinister,” Harris said.
Or if not destroyed, great mansions were being transmogrified into condominiums. The Orchard—the James L. Breese mansion, with its music conservatories and hand-carved ceilings and eighteen-foot gilded columns and wall-sized tapestries, the last house designed by Stanford White before he was shot—was chopped up into two-bedroom apartments. There were already four condominium complexes—the Canterbury Mews, Farrington Close, The Colony, and Southampton Meadows—and no matter that they allowed the elderly and retirees safe housing close to the village or that the great ballet master Balanchine had bought an apartment there.
They should have seen it coming in the sixties and seventies. Oh, the people who showed up! Singles. Democrats. Divorcées. Liberals. “The litter of humanity,” said one Southampton dowager. Betty Friedan was touting women’s lib, and George Plimpton was hosting cocktail parties for the prisoners of Attica. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton rented in Quogue. Larry Rivers made videotapes of Lee Radziwill’s masseur massaging Truman Capote. Andy Warhol, attending Chessy Rayner and Mica Ertegun’s benefit for the Southampton Parrish Art Museum, said he would “rather go over to Jane Holzer’s and sit on the floor and drink champagne.” Even Ethel Scull, the eccentric art collector and wife of the Scull’s Angels taxi fleet baron, had had enough. “A lot of people are talking about leaving the Hamptons for Pound Ridge…,” she told a society reporter at the time. “We’ve just bought a hundred and seventy-five acres in Connecticut, and the best thing about it is it’s an unchic area. Thank God. Look what happened here when things got chic.” Finally, in 1981 New York magazine ran an article titled “Forget the Hamptons, Now It’s Country Chic,” saying that the Hamptons were over and that Connecticut was in.
The small business district of the village itself became unrecognizable. At one time forty of Manhattan’s better shops had summer annexes in Southampton, including Saks, Abercrombie and Fitch, Lily Pulitzer, and Elizabeth Arden. Now trendy boutiques lined Jobs Lane, including four Christmas tree ornament shops and a shop that sold a T-shirt that said, GRANDPA WENT TO SOUTHAMPTON AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT. Not so very long before, on a Saturday morning before going to the beach club, a smart young couple could stroll down Jobs Lane and see everyone they knew, the women in cotton dresses that never wilted in the heat, the men and boys in their blue linen blazers and summer chinos. At the Irving Hotel the wealthy old people sat on the porch facing Hill Street and watched as the Summer Colony strolled up from the beach to buy locally grown, fresh-cut flowers from a horse and wagon on the front lawn. But the Irving was a condo now.
The straw that broke the camel’s back for Harris was Mayor Roy Wines’s approval of a plan to extend Nugent Street in a route that would funnel all the bumper-to-bumper summertime traffic onto First Neck Lane, a street that was laid out in 1644 and was one of the wealthiest in America. This was a betrayal. It was Mayor Wines’s job to protect the estate area, not to endanger it. For more than 100 years a symbiosis had existed between the Summer Colony and the year-round community. Because of the quirky way Southampton was laid out, almost the entire estate section—all the important houses—fell within the jurisdiction of the small “village,” and the Summer Colony wound up paying 65 percent of the village property taxes. The estate dwellers entrusted the village to the local people to keep it safe for them. “Mayor Wines has a real debt of honor to the Summer Colony,” Harris said, “not to develop the village out of greed and make a Hicksville
out of it.”
Fifty-six-year-old Mayor Roy Wines Jr., in his trademark aviator glasses and cardigan sweaters, was so popular with his constituency that he was known as “Mr. Southampton.” He was the perfect small-village mayor, a good guy, low-key and so accessible that if your neighbor’s dog barked too much, you could call Wines and he’d put in a word with the neighbor for you. Public service was in Wines’s blood: In 1894 his grandfather became the first elected trustee of the newly incorporated town of Southampton. Wines had unsurpassed experience. He was deputy mayor of Southampton from 1971 to 1979; a past trustee and chairman of the police committee; past president of the Suffolk County Village Officials; a member of the New York State Conference of Mayors; a former chairman of the Southampton Town Planning Board; a trustee of the United Methodist Church; a member of the Southampton Volunteer Fire Department; past president of the Rotary Club; and a trustee of the Southampton Hospital and the local library. In 1974 he became a hero when as a member of the Southampton Fire Department he saved a family of three from their burning upstairs bedroom.
“He was also,” Harris said, “a terrible businessman who was infamous for not paying his bills.” He was rumored to have gone through a substantial fortune that his father, who founded the family plumbing business, had left him; he was notorious for owing people money. He probably bounced more checks than any single person in the history of the village. Southampton was certainly the only village in the United States where there was a sign up at the local post office warning clerks not to take checks from the mayor. Yet somehow his constituency just didn’t seem to mind that the mayor bounced checks. He was one of them.
Philistines at the Hedgerow Page 25
