Philistines at the Hedgerow

by Steven Gaines

  By daybreak the next day, Saturday, Paul Koncelik was cut off from any access to Allan Schneider’s estate by the more prudent senior members of Schneider’s business. He was asked to return the 1991 Pontiac Grand Am that the company leased for him and to turn in the gas credit card too. He had to hitchhike to Williams Funeral Parlor for Allan’s funeral, where he showed up, his clothes rumpled, reeking of alcohol. The alarm codes were changed at Tyler House, and Koncelik was once again without his own home. “There was a general closing of the ranks on Paul,” said Mark Sanne, Schneider’s new chef.

  The news of Allan Schneider’s death was a bombshell in the Hamptons. It was greeted with a combination of morbid fascination and ill-disguised schadenfreude. It was not without irony that Schneider, well known for his gluttonous love of food and drink and money, had ended this way. And even more ironic was that Schneider’s death would quickly unravel a carefully embroidered life.

  Not having a will turned out to be a foolish challenge to fate for Schneider. Because he was intestate, by law everything would go to his next of kin: his parents.

  Parents? Over the years Allan had given the impression that they had died somewhere in Salzburg, Austria, in the family castle. But his parents turned out to be very much alive, albeit nearly eighty years old and living in an apartment in Tamarac, Florida. “Allan’s purgatory,” said Rob Barnes, the architect who had lunch with him at Gordon’s that final day, “would be that his image was almost instantaneously destroyed the moment his parents showed up.”

  Sol and Celia Schneider arrived in East Hampton two days after Allan’s death, about as bereaved and baffled as any two people in their late seventies could be. They had lost a son with whom they had rarely exchanged a word in the past twenty years and had no idea of what to expect. Allan’s father had polio as a child and walked with braces and two canes. Peggy Griffin remembered when they first saw Allan’s mansion on Main Street, Celia Schneider asked in a whispered voice, “Whose mansion is this?”

  “This is your son’s mansion,” Griffin told her.

  The elderly couple went from room to room, very slowly, shaking their heads in disbelief at the silver and china, the hunting prints, the antiques, and the Chippendale sofas upholstered in Scalamandré silks. They asked again and again in amazement, “Who does all this belong to?”

  “It belonged to your son,” Peggy Griffin told them. “Now it belongs to you.”

  But the most stunning revelation of all for the elderly couple was that their son’s funeral service was being held the next day at Saint Luke’s Church.

  “But Allan is Jewish,” Celia said.

  He was not only Jewish, he wasn’t an only son. Allan had a half brother, Harvey, who was part Hispanic and had married a woman with six children. Allan despised Harvey, who worked in the restaurant business, and refused to acknowledge any association with him at all. It also became evident that Allan didn’t grow up in a brown-stone in Brooklyn Heights overlooking the Lower Manhattan skyline, but in an apartment building in Flatbush, where he attended P.S. 193, and then Midwood High School, where under his graduation photo his predicted profession was “thespian.”

  Yet perhaps the most astonishing revelation was that Allan Schneider had no cash. He was running a $150 million operation without any cash reserves, juggling money from deals on the table on a day-by-day basis. The court-appointed coexecutors of Schneider’s estate, Ray Wesnofske and Sol Schneider, discovered that Allan had been doing this high-wire act for years. Tyler House had several mortgages on it, one of which hadn’t been paid in six months, and he had managing to leverage the house’s debt to $1.2 million—more than it was worth. One quick remedy would have been to sell off some of his real estate holdings, but an inventory of his other property proved to be surprising. The eight-bedroom house in Dark Harbor turned out to be rented. So was the apartment at Forty Central Park South. The elegant office complex that Schneider was building on Montauk Highway in Bridgehampton—well, that actually belonged to Ray Wesnofske, who had bankrolled it for Schneider. What saved the estate were two life insurance policies, one for $1 million and another for $500,000, which kept it from immediate bankruptcy.

  Schneider, it became clear, had lied about almost everything, from attending Princeton (it’s possible he took some courses there) to who sold which property on West End Road. As it turned out, although his office had indeed sold Calvin Klein his house, almost every broker in the Hamptons had had a hand in the sales of the other houses on West End Road. As people put bits and pieces together, it became clear that Schneider was a master of juggling truths. The day after his death, three local caterers were comparing notes and discovered that Schneider not only left them with unpaid balances but, in a typical move, had hired all three for his Christmas party in a few weeks. That way he could play them against one another for the best price, and at the last minute cancel two. The caterers, of course, would have been apoplectic. “Schneider choked,” said caterer Brent Newsom, “so he wouldn’t have to tell us.”

  Schneider’s death precipitated a small crisis in the food chain of the real estate business in the Hamptons. One of the many ironies of Schneider’s story was that although his personal and financial life might have been in shambles, he had left behind a well-oiled real estate sales empire with a corps of the best-trained brokers in the business. There was literally tens of millions of dollars’ worth of pending business on the table, and without anyone at the helm, the agency was up for grabs. With no heir apparent strong enough to unite the powerful players, internecine warfare broke out for control among the top brokers. There was an immediate splinter as five of the star salespeople in the East Hampton office, led by Charles Bullock, formed Dunemere Associates Real Estate, a competing agency that continues to represent exclusively the lucrative high end of the real estate market in East Hampton. Another contingent of six managing partners, including Peggy Griffin, Schneider’s original employee, and Peter Hallock, a star player from the East Hampton office, banded together and made an offer to buy the use of the Allan Schneider name for $1 million from Allan’s parents, who gratefully accepted the deal and left for Florida. Presumably, Schneider’s maligned brother will become the eventual beneficiary of his estate.

  4

  A MONTH AFTER Schneider’s death, Paul Koncelik brought suit against the estate in Riverhead Surrogate’s Court. In sworn statements, Koncelik claimed that he and Schneider had “lived together as emotional and physical companions” for ten years and that he had given up a lucrative career as a builder to become “Doctor Watson to Allan’s Sherlock Holmes.” Koncelik claimed he was available to Allan “for his business, social and personal needs.… He went out and made all the money, and I was basically his man Friday, his Doctor Watson. He adored me.” More important, Koncelik claimed, Allan had promised Paul that he would get all the antiques and half the house.

  How could Paul Koncelik have been Schneider’s gay lover for ten years without half the town knowing it? Well, there were rumors, but because Koncelik had been married, no one knew for sure. “Allan Schneider was very high profile,” said Koncelik’s attorney—and younger sister—Theresa Quigley, trying to explain to the press how a homosexual lover had materialized seemingly out of nowhere. “His image did not include being a homosexual. He tried to come off as Mr. WASP. He was in total denial. He denied he was Jewish and he denied he was homosexual.”

  “He was in triple denial,” corrected Paul Brennan. “He denied that he was Jewish, that he was gay, and that he was an alcoholic too.”

  Koncelik’s attorneys made a motion to freeze the assets of the estate until its distribution could be determined, but the court ruled that the contents of the house could be liquidated. In late June 1992, in what might be called Allan Schneider’s last big gala, Sotheby’s erected a festive white tent and held a public auction of Schneider’s personal possessions on the lawn of Tyler House. Nearly a thousand curious bargain hunters came to rummage through the scraps of Schneider’s life
; so many people showed up that the police towed away cars blocking Main Street. The sale of 347 items brought nearly $400,000. The house was put on the market too, eventually being bought in 1993 by Alfred Morgan, the owner of the White Rock soda company, for $1.35 million.

  In October 1993, nearly two years after Schneider’s death, a nonjury trial was held in Surrogate’s Court in Riverhead before Judge Ernest Signorelli. Twenty witnesses were paraded before the judge over a six-day stretch, including Koncelik; his brother; his son; his brother’s girlfriend; several brokers from the office; Mark Sanne, the chef; and Schneider’s protective housekeeper, Eula Ellsworth. Every sordid detail of Schneider’s personal life was brought out at the trial, including his prodigious spending and drunkenness. But no one was tarred as unmercifully as Paul Koncelik, who was portrayed as a “severe alcoholic” and gold digger. He sat at the plaintiff’s table, mildly drunk, and listened to the details of how many times he had been thrown out in the street by Allan’s cruelty and whim, and how Eula Ellsworth had put his belongings in a garbage bag in the back hall closet until Koncelik would come to collect them. When asked if he had anything in writing from Allan promising him the antiques or half the house, Koncelik said, “I never asked for anything in writing. I’m sure if I had, he would have done that. But, in fact, that wasn’t my nature.”

  Aside from Koncelik’s own family, only the chef, Mark Sanne, who is openly gay, felt strongly that Koncelik was without a doubt in a spousal relationship with Schneider and had a just claim.

  But the court disagreed. On December 2, 1993, Judge Signorelli handed down a ruling against Koncelik that served as a harsh condemnation. “Allan Schneider was revealed to be a strong individual, manipulative in nature,” Signorelli wrote, “and known to make vague unfulfilled promises to close friends and associates.” He called the nature of Koncelik and Schneider’s relationship “amorphous.” He called Koncelik’s claim that Allan had given him the antiques as a gift “deficient.” “Apparently,” the judge wrote, “the frequent arguments which took place between the two of them was precipitated by their excessive drinking habits, and the respondent’s undesirable work ethic.” Paul Koncelik has “failed to substantiate his claim.”

  Now publicly shamed and degraded, Koncelik found the next three years nightmarish. Without Schneider to anchor him, he drifted from place to place, drunk most of the time. A talented carpenter, he was able to find work but was frequently too sick in the morning to show up. His large and loving family tried interventions and residential treatments to help him, without success. In the spring of 1996 he managed to sober up for a few months, but on June 1 of that year the lease on the house he was renting expired, and with no place to move he started to drink again. “His world was that fragile,” said his sister Theresa Quigley. On a Monday afternoon, June 24, Koncelik was driving his Honda Civic on Swamp Road in the Northwest Woods when he passed out at the wheel and ran into a tree, killing himself instantly.

  The following week, one of his sisters, Leah, wrote a letter to the East Hampton Star. “My brother’s weakness, failings, and poverty were there,” she wrote, “for everyone to see and judge. But, through it all, he retained one shining virtue: his loving heart, his kindness. He never judged, never competed, and never rejoiced in others’ pain. He was a kind man, and his kindness now clothes him in glory.”

  Allan Schneider remains a legend in the Hamptons. His namesake agency, manned with the same people he discovered and trained, continues to be the single biggest player in the Hamptons real estate business, with an estimated $200 million a year in revenue. He not only substantially changed the face of the landscape, but his own life was in some ways a metaphor for the new Hamptons: a stage upon which nouvelle society could invent itself.

  Lord of the Manor

  ALLAN SCHNEIDER did not live in the Summer White House!” insisted Robert David Lion Gardiner, the sixteenth lord of the manor, his hands fluttering from his lap like gray birds startled from the brush. “Jeannette Rattray got it wrong! This is the Summer White House. I have the letters written to this house by the president of the United States to prove it!” His voice began to rise with anguish, and his British accent became more clipped as he spat out the address, “One Twenty-seven Main Street. Although, of course, it wasn’t called One Twenty-seven Main Street then.” He rolled his watery blue eyes up into his hooded lids in exasperation, as if he could just shake Jeannette Rattray by the shoulders. The only trouble is, Jeannette Rattray, the former owner of the East Hampton Star, has been dead for sixteen years. “Tear it down, tear it down,” he chanted. “Nettie Rattray just wants to tear it down.”

  The air of Gardiner mansion is filled with dust motes lazily drifting in the yellow light streaming through the deeply set windows. Gardiner, eighty-five years old, was splayed on a cracked leather sofa in a small sitting room. His energy unfailing, he is vigorous for his age. His complexion is ruddy, but the years have set his long features into a sneer. He seemed indifferent to his appearance. He hadn’t shaved with care (or perhaps at all), and tufts of white hair sprouted in patches on his face and heavy jowls like feathers on a poorly plucked chicken. As he pushed his arms into the sofa for balance, his cuffs rose to reveal a gold Rolex wristwatch and his buttoned navy blue blazer strained open to show a patch of dingy white shirt.

  “In any event, how do I know I can trust you?” he demanded of a visitor seated to his right on a hard-backed chair. “You say you want to see Gardiner’s Island, and yet you could be a socialist, against inherited wealth! Or you could be like that bitch from Vanity Fair!”

  Gardiner’s Island lies nine miles off the coast of East Hampton, a primeval gem, nearly 3,500 acres of lush Eden with twenty-seven miles of pebble beaches and towering cliffs. “Treasure Island,” they call it, “the Sandbar of Sorrow.” It is the never-never land of private estates in America. The shape of an elongated starfish, often enveloped in mist and fog, it is a sanctuary not just for wildlife but from time as well. It is blessed with the finest existing untouched white oak forest in America, plus dense thickets of cedar and chestnut trees, from which no wood has been cut for three centuries. Four freshwater streams provide abundant water for herds of white-tailed deer, and wild turkeys scatter through its fields and grape marshes. The island has historical buildings that date to the 1600s with names like T’Other House, where British prisoners carved a checkerboard into the floor, and a mansion house with secret passages to fake tombs in the cemetery. Captain Kidd buried treasure there, and an accused witch lived on the island for many years.

  If going to Gardiner’s Island is like stepping through a time warp, very few ever get invited to take that step, except for academics, historians, anthropologists, or occasional visiting dignitaries with an interest in forestry, like Prince Philip, who visited the island in 1974. The Gardiner family stopped hosting benefits on the island thirty years ago, and no one dares drop by unannounced either. Notices run in the East Hampton Star warning would-be trespassers that the island is private. The curious circle the island in their boats, close enough to see the PLEASE LEAVE signs. The caretaker with his shotguns and a pack of hunting dogs is less polite. Perhaps the island’s best protection are the estimated 1 million ticks that inhabit the brush, carriers of debilitating Lyme disease.

  “It’s late in the season to see Gardiner’s Island,” the autocrat said huffily. Gardiner’s words come out italicized, accompanied by an imperious sneer, which is why around East Hampton they sometimes call him the “sixteenth lord of the grand manner.” “It’s the end of August, and on September third I’m joining my wife, Eunice, in San Diego. She was bitten by the tick, you see. She cannot be exposed to a possible second infection and she’s had to go to San Diego to recuperate with friends. It’s exhausting, taking people to the island, but as the sixteenth lord of the manor, it’s my responsibility. I bothered to learn the family history. I had that mission in life, to be a custodian. I am the living product of four hundred years of American history! The Ford
s, the du Ponts, the Rockefellers, they are noveaux riches. The Gardiners”—he swallowed hard and repeated each syllable of the name carefully—“Gar-din-ners are the oldest English family in New York State. It’s a dynasty. Gardiner’s Island is the first English settlement in the state of New York! Elizabeth Gardiner, daughter of Lion Gardiner, was the first English child born in the state of New York. We founded the town of East Hampton. We are part of his-sto-ry.”

  Clearly, Gardiner is a man possessed of the holy spirit. He speaks of his ancestors not only in the royal “we” but as if they were in the room with him. He has memorized his entire family genealogy, sixteen generations’ worth, as well as his relatives’ professions, bankrolls, and birthplaces; which ones were drunkards and which were whoremasters. But most of all, he knows their resourcefulness, their luck, and their fortitude; how they fought pirates and Indians; how they even fought one another, the decent always triumphing over the greedy. He doesn’t just love the lore of the Gardiner family, he is enslaved by it.

  According to Gardiner, his ancestors were always at the crux of history, like Forrest Gump, in the “right time at the right place.” by chance seeing Napoleon’s casket being carried through the streets of Paris, or Mussolini’s body hanging from a meat hook. Gardiner himself tells of once playing the piano for Enrico Caruso. “It was at the former Herter place called The Creeks.” Gardiner said. “Very badly built. Just stucco on lathe. The Herters were good friends with my parents, and one summer when I was a little boy they rented their house to the great tenor Enrico Caruso. He was married to Dorothy Park Benjamin—society—and my mother knew her. One afternoon we were invited over there for tea and I went into the big studio and there on the stage was a Steinway grand piano. I sat down and played Il Trovatore and suddenly I heard a beautiful tenor voice and it was Caruso singing along with me.”