Philistines at the Hedgerow

by Steven Gaines

  The zoning board of appeals frequently becomes the arbiter of disputes between neighbors. The zoning board of appeals denied resident movie stars Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger a variance to enlarge their Amagansett farmhouse in anticipation of Basinger’s becoming pregnant. The Baldwins’ neighbor’s complained to the board that because the house stood only eleven feet from the property line, the new roofline would cut off their sunlight, and a taller chimney would spew soot in their direction. (A few years later, when Basinger did become pregnant, the couple sold the Amagansett farmhouse and moved north of the highway to a historical eighteenth-century, eight-acre farm called Stony Hill, which they purchased for the very good price of $1.7 million. This is the same farm on which Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe spent their honeymoon summer together and is the setting of his play After the Fall.

  A contingent from the village zoning board also once marched through the bedroom of Lee Radziwill, the sister of Jacqueline Onassis, and her husband, film director Herb Ross, to look out their window to decide whether a neighbor’s wall was a “fence” or a “wall.” Eighty-one-year-old Alice Lawrence, the widow of Sylvan Lawrence, the man who owned a good many of the office buildings on Wall Street, had built a vast, dramatic modern house of concrete and marble on the dunes right next to the Rosses. It had a sweeping gray roofline like the TWA terminal at Kennedy Airport and an ornamental wall that obliterated their western light and view. The house was so bizarre-looking that it quickly became one of the famous architectural atrocities of the Hamptons, like Dragon’s Head, and all day long people would drive down the street to gape at it. Much to the Rosses’ distress, after peering carefully out of the bedroom window, the board determined that because the wall had living space in it, it could stay. The Rosses planted trees, and Mrs. Sylvan put the house for sale at the reduced price of $12.5 million, with no takers in sight.

  The ugliest of all Hamptons celebrity slugouts is the ongoing feud between Martha Stewart and the notorious real estate developer, Harry Macklowe, over their shared property line on Georgica Pond. Stewart and her daughter Alexis are ubiquitous in the Hamptons. Martha is a regular presence at fund-raisers and parties, frequently photographed in the local press; Alexis owns a motel and a gym. Martha owns two houses in East Hampton (in addition to a house in Connecticut). Her Lily Pond Lane house is an archetypical Martha Stewart Living showcase: a twenty-room Victorian-style shingled house that can be seen daily in the opening credits of her syndicated TV show. Located in the area known as Divinity Hill, this former 1878 home of Reverend DeWitt Talmage has become one of the most photographed and fussed-over houses in the Hamptons—and a giant tax write-off.

  But the house that is really Stewart’s passion is her second home, a stark two-bedroom residence that Gordon Bunshaft designed for himself on a wedged-shaped piece of land on Georgica Pond. This is the house that shares a property line with Harry Macklowe, a tough New Yorker who first came to public attention in 1985 when in the middle of the night he illegally tore down two single-occupancy hotels that he owned on Times Square, to beat a city ban on razing housing for the indigent. When Stewart moved into the Bunshaft house, she had workmen clear away dead brush between their properties, and it started a war. Macklowe claimed that Stewart cleared protected wetlands, some of it on his land, to better her view. He accused her of trespassing on his property and of violating village code and wetlands laws. In retaliation, he planted a stand of fourteen-foot evergreens and installed high-powered spotlights on the boundary line. Not only did the trees block Stewart’s view of the pond, she claimed that some of them were on her property. When Stewart repeatedly had a surveyor mark off which trees were on her land, the surveyor’s stakes mysteriously disappeared overnight. Macklowe’s lawyers then moved to have Stewart evicted from her house by appealing her certificate of occupancy, claiming that she had illegally built a kitchen and bath in an accessory building on the property. While that battle continued in court, Stewart’s lawyers asked the East Hampton zoning board of appeals for permission to remove fourteen of the offending trees and bushes planted on her property, and to tear out the lighting. Knowing that the moment the board granted her permission to cut down the trees, Macklowe’s lawyers would get a restraining order, Stewart had a team of twenty landscapers with chainsaws and environmental consultants standing by. As soon as the board gave their okay, most of the trees were cut down and bushes ripped out before Macklowe was able to get an official notice to desist. One of the zoning board members called it “Showdown at the O.K. Corral.”

  The nastiness reached operatic status when in the summer of 1997 Stewart arrived at her house to discover a crew of landscapers building a fence between her property and Macklowe’s and flew into a rage. While she was simultaneously cursing and making frantic calls for help on her cell phone, she backed her vehicle up against Matthew Munnich, one of the workmen, pinning him against a fence pole and reportedly bruising his torso. The local police were called to the scene, but they declined to press charges. Munnich reportedly appealed to the district attorney’s office to convene a grand jury and have Stewart arrested for attempted murder, but the D.A. declined without comment. The various matters with Macklowe over the property line are before a New York State Supreme Court of Appeals, and legal fees for each side are estimated to be approaching $500,000.

  Other contretemps have been settled with finesse more worthy of the Hamptons reputation as a place of refinement. In 1985 Mort Zuckerman, then publisher of U.S. News & World Report and future owner of the New York Daily News, righteously offended his neighbors, Frances Ann Dougherty, the heiress to the Cannon bath towel fortune, and her husband, Frazer Dougherty, founder of the local television station, LTV, by installing an eight-foot-diameter satellite dish high on the dunes in front of his Lily Pond Lane house, which he bought from Pete Peterson, chairman of the Blackstone Group, for only $1 million because it was so exposed to the beach. (Peterson moved to Watermill, where he bought a $7.5 million waterfront estate.) Although having a satellite dish wasn’t illegal, it stuck out on the horizon like a sore thumb. Zuckerman rebuffed the requests of the Doughertys and other neighbors to remove it, saying that the dish had to be positioned where it was for the best reception.

  Mrs. Dougherty called the publisher “a spoiled brat” and, instead of phoning up her lawyers, turned to local sculptor William King. The Doughertys commissioned King to build and install on their property a forty-foot-high depiction of Don Quixote, complete with a soaring aluminum lance, from which was strung a thirty-foot-long assault banner of orange sailcloth, charging the offending satellite dish. It was a mocking comment, visible for all to see along the beach. “Don Quixote was chosen,” Frazer Dougherty said, “because Quixote was the greatest champion of beauty… against the philistines, and he never stopped trying.”

  Zuckerman knew when he was beat by a metaphor. His office issued the statement “Don Quixote has had so few victories over time that Mr. Zuckerman has decided to take down the satellite dish until the trees have grown large enough to shield it.” The neighbors have lived in great harmony since.

  3

  IN 1988 a real estate broker took Jerry Della Femina and Judy Licht to see the house right next door to Mort Zuckerman’s. It was a three-level brick mansion, a fixer-upper, high on a dune, with a bargain price tag of $3.4 million. The property had been purchased as an investment by Hartz Mountain CEO Leonard Stern and had been uninhabited for many years. When they first laid eyes on it, the house was so run-down that Judy wouldn’t even get out of the car when the broker pulled into the driveway. Jerry dutifully climbed the grade to see the view. “When I got to the top,” Jerry said, “the weeds were so high, you couldn’t see over them, so I parted them, and there was the ocean.” Not just the ocean, but a chunk of sand, water, and sky. Jerry didn’t even bother to go inside the house. He turned around, climbed back down to the car, and knocked on the window. “You’d better get out,” he said to Judy, “I’m buying the house.”

 
There is a rare dynamic between Jerry Della Femina and Judy Licht, as much a synergy as it is a marriage. To experience the two of them together cajoling, adoring, interrupting, is like being in the presence of a legendary fit, like Molly and Fibber McGee, or Dag-wood and Blondie. Jerry and Judy are so entertaining that they even taped five pilot episodes of a TV talk show together. Judy is the star, well spoken, irrepressibly candid, and always charming, with her trademark thousand-watt smile and giant blue eyes. At WABC-TV she’s called the “sparkplug” of the evening newscast. She grew up in Brooklyn, not far from Jerry, and although warmer than Jerry, she has street smarts developed as a reporter on the streets of New York and does not suffer fools gladly either.

  She met Jerry when she was a workaholic reporter doing upbeat human-interest stories for WNEW-TV in New York and Jerry was the wise-ass advertising executive who wrote the slogan “The Magic Is Back” for the New York Mets. (“The magic wasn’t back,” Jerry said. “They sucked.") They were both separated from their first spouses—Judy had been married six years to a Broadway stage manager—and were dating other people. She expected to loathe the smart-alec advertising mogul, but when she arrived at his offices with a camera crew in tow, she was struck by how shy he was off camera, and gentlemanly. After the interview they exchanged phone numbers and for the next three years became nightly phone pals, addicted to calling each other late at night to compare notes before falling asleep, all the time dating other people. It took her a while before it dawned on her that she loved the guy. “As corny as it sounds,” Judy said, “this marriage developed as a friendship.”

  They married in 1983, in a penthouse overlooking Lincoln Center; not long after, Judy did something that she previously thought impossible; she stopped working to have two children, a daughter, Jessie, born in 1985, and a son, J.T., born in 1988. When the kids were old enough, Judy resumed her TV career, juggling being a TV personality, mother, and wife to a controversial advertising man—all with such aplomb that the National Mother’s Day Committee named her an Outstanding Mother of America.

  Judy wasn’t a Hamptons person before they bought the house next to Mort Zuckerman’s, but she fell in love quickly enough. The house was just off Lily Pond Lane, the oceanfront “Park Avenue” of East Hampton, famous for its Gatsbyesque mansions set on towering dunes, with green lawns so vast that the semicircular driveways look like small racetracks. The wide lane, once almost exclusively the address of Maidstone Club members, now boasted a more eclectic assortment of neighbors, including corporate raider Carl I chan; Westchester developer Lowell Schulman; New York developer Sheldon Solow; and TV gossip personality Claudia Cohen, who lives in the house she bought from her ex-husband, Ron Perelman, when their marriage ended. Lily Pond’s most recent arrival is Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks Coffee, who bought the Gwathmey-designed home of financier Robert Steinberg. The lane also boasts the home of Loida Lewis, an attorney and the widow of Reginald Lewis, the former chairman of TLC Beatrice International Holdings, Inc.

  Judy and Jerry put a million dollars into the renovation of the house. They whitewashed the brick, restored the terraced walks and gardens, and installed an oceanside, gun-metal-blue gunite pool. The interior of the house was rebuilt, with six bedrooms, tented dining room, oceanfront kitchen, and wood-paneled den with large picture windows overlooking the beach. The first five years they lived there were sheer bliss for Judy and Jerry. “Nobody knew we were around,” she remembered wistfully. “Jerry would cook funny, sloppy pasta dinners for friends and family, and we would stay home a lot. It was dreamy, and we fell more in love with East Hampton.”

  By the early 1990s, things were not going as dreamily for Jerry back in the city. The huge British conglomerate that owned him, WCRS, had sold his company to an even bigger French company, EuroRSCG, and Jerry had instant contempt for the elegant French advertising men who were his new bosses. He was suddenly one spoke in a very large international wheel. “The French reduced my role,” Jerry said, “to being Ed Sullivan who introduced the acts.” It didn’t help corporate relations any when he began to publicly refer to the new French owners as “the Frogs.” All this happened at a time when Madison Avenue was moving away from the kind of flippant, outrageous campaigns that had put Jerry on the map, and his agency began to leak accounts, including big spenders like Isuzu and Dow. In June 1992 Jerry was forced out of his own company by EuroRSCG. The French bought out the remainder of his employment contract for $3 million, and he was obligated not only to leave the business he had founded but to relinquish the rights to the name Della Femina as well. Jerry formed his own small agency, Jerry Inc., but the glory days were gone. He packed his bags and moved pretty much full-time to his Lily Pond Lane palace.

  “I knew,” he said, “and this was a real thought, that I had to reinvent myself. There were a lot of headlines in the Wall Street Journal and the Times. People see those headlines and then, maybe fifteen years later, they see you and say, ‘Hey, I remember him.’ So I decided to reinvent myself with another high-profile, high-risk business—my own restaurant. There’s something about a restaurant that makes it… theater—your name is out there, people are talking about it, waiting for you to fail, waiting for you to succeed.” When Jerry told Judy that he intended to open his own restaurant, she wanted to punch him. “Do you know the number of an all-night divorce lawyer?” she asked him.

  In the summer of 1992, in short order, along with business partners Ben Krupinski, a successful local builder and speculator, and Larry Dunst, another wealthy advertising executive, Jerry went on an East Hampton spending spree. On June 29, 1992, he bought a down-on-its-heels 200-seat restaurant and forty-eight-slip marina situated on picturesque Three Mile Harbor, for $3.2 million, and completely refurbished it as the snazzy East Hampton Point; on July 29, he bought the Red Horse shopping complex, an abandoned, weedcovered eyesore on Montauk Highway, for $1.3 million, and tossed in another million or so to restore it; and he bought his favorite property, a building at Ninety-nine North Main Street in which to open Della Femina’s.

  It made perfect sense that Jerry would want to open a namesake restaurant just when restaurant life in the East End had taken on such desperate importance. For nearly 100 years, summer visitors hardly thought about going to a restaurant. Home-cooked meals were part of the summer weekend tradition, or summer visitors went to dinner parties at the homes of friends or to the club. Even if one was inclined to eat out, there weren’t many restaurants to chose from, except for a few provincial grills that served local duck or Italian food. The economics of a four-month season made running a first-rate restaurant financially unfeasible. But as the decades passed, the East End slowly began to change from just a summer place to more of a year-round weekend getaway, and with the arrival of the socially ambitious baby boomers—a generation whose cultural life in Manhattan revolved around eating in trendy restaurants—there was a general champing at the bit to find a place to show off.

  In 1988 restaurateur Pino Luongo, who owned Le Madri in Manhattan, kicked things into high gear by opening a handsome, high-priced Italian eatery called Sapore Di Mare, on Georgica Creek. When word spread that Sapore was grossing $2 million a year, other upscale, Manhattan-quality restaurants began to appear in every hamlet, most notably, Nick & Toni’s on North Main Street, in East Hampton. Owned by Toni Ross, the daughter of the late Time Warner chief, and restaurateur Jeff Salaway (“Nick” was his college nickname), this small Italian restaurant in an unprepossessing wood-frame house managed to capture the Hamptons 1990s zeitgeist of high finance and show business royalty in much the same way Studio 54 became emblematic of its era. There are no velvet ropes, but for the new money, getting a table at Nick & Toni’s, and sitting shoulder to shoulder with the big names of the new Hamptons—Steven Spielberg, Martha Stewart, Ronald Lauder, Ron Perelman, Wilbur Ross—has became a ticket to instant Hamptons social validation of its own sort.

  Jerry knew there was room for another high-profile, A-list restaurant, and he wanted
it to be his. The building he and his partners bought to refurbish on North Main Street had for many years been the home to a dingy Chinese restaurant, famous among certain circles as a place where it was easier to buy a gram of cocaine from one of the characters sitting at the bar than it was to get an egg roll. In the back of Jerry’s mind he expected that he and his partners would be hailed as heroes for renovating and glamorizing this small corner of the village into a handsome redbrick-and-green-trim restaurant with large French doors. But when he appeared before Clayton Morey and the design review board for the final approval on the exterior, the dialogue was quite different.

  Indicating a drawing of the plan, Clayton Morey said, “You know, there’s this blank wall, and when you drive into town from Springs you see it. If you could cover it somehow, maybe you could keep it from being this big, cold wall.”

  Jerry thought to himself that it had been a big cold wall for as long as anybody could remember, but he kept his mouth shut. He came back to the board the next week with a new drawing and a new plan. “I said I’d put up a picket fence,” Jerry recounted “with a lawn and flowers and vines covering the wall.”

  Clayton Morey said, “Wait a minute. If you put grass over here, somebody is going to take their drinks outside, and the next thing you know, there’ll be outdoor dining. As you know, we can’t allow outdoor dining in East Hampton. But if you sign a document saying that you’ll never have outdoor dining, then we’ll give you a certificate of occupancy to open.”