Philistines at the Hedgerow

by Steven Gaines

  Only thirty of the seventy houses around the pond have ocean views, and the waiting list of interested buyers for those houses is prodigious, including actor Tom Hanks and his wife, actress Rita Wilson; Barbra Streisand; media entrepreneur Barry Diller; and impresario David Geffen. Pondfront property is so coveted that art dealer and cineaste Arnold Glimcher spent an estimated $1 million reclaiming a swampy area so he could build a house with a pond view. Prices start at about $3 million for one of the smaller houses that previously served as servants’ quarters for the large homes. What little undeveloped land there is sells for more than $2 million an acre. It is rare that houses on the pond are put up for rent; on any given summer only two or three houses are available, and a recent listing asked $500,000 for “the season”—Memorial Day to Labor Day—for an eight-bedroom house with a six-car garage, screening room, “kitchen garden,” and two pools.

  Gracious-living doyenne Martha Stewart proved what a good shopper she was by snatching up a $3.2 million travertine-and-glass house that Gordon Bunshaft, the Skidmore, Owings and Merrill managing partner, built for himself and his wife, Nina, on the pond as a weekend retreat in the sixties. (Bunshaft was the first Jew ever to own property on the pond.) When Nina died in 1995 the modestly sized, 2,600-square-foot house passed into the hands of the Museum of Modern Art. This was the only residential house that Bunshaft, who built some of Manhattan’s greatest skyscrapers, ever designed, and so has tremendous historical importance as well as its prime location on the pond. Of course, it was the antithesis of Martha Stewart’s Victorian style. It has only two small bedrooms and a galley kitchen without even a window; its sleek rectangular minimalist design dictates furniture sans chintz slipcovers. Stewart also already owned an elaborately gardened, thirteen-bedroom shingled gray mansion with teal blue (a color coined “Martha Stewart blue,” in a paint available from Sherwin-Williams) trim on venerable Lily Pond Lane in East Hampton. Not satisfied with the classic design of the Bunshaft house, Stewart immediately filed plans to build a four-foot-deep lap pool and a separate studio.

  Most of the Georgica Pond houses have pedigrees. The house now owned by Dr. Richard Axel was previously owned by art collector Ben Heller, was built in the 1800s by New York society physician Dr. Tod Helmuth Jr., and rented by artist Alfonso Ossorio his first summer in the Hamptons. In the sixties it was bought by art dealer Leo Castelli, who shared it one summer with Elaine and Willem de Kooning until the artist and his wife bought their own house on Springs Fireplace Road. But none of the houses on the pond have the provenance of The Creeks. Isadora Duncan danced in its theater. Jackson Pollock attacked a piano with an ice pick in the music room. Enrico Caruso dozed one summer away on its deck chairs. The estate’s parklike grounds, with $5 million worth of rare specimen trees, have been called “the eighth wonder of the horticultural world” by the American Horticultural Society. Forty-six species of wildlife live along the estate’s two and a half miles of private roads, and in the summer the magnificent ospreys, who nest atop towering pitch pines, lazily float just above the pond’s calm surface, casually plucking perch from the clear waters and carrying them back to their mates.

  The Creeks’ current owner, billionaire Ronald O. Perelman, is a former Philadelphian who cobbled his estimated $3.5 billion fortune from his father’s modest $12 million business complex. Perelman assembled an eclectic and always glamorous portfolio of companies that have included Revlon, Inc., Consolidated Cigar Corp., Marvel Entertainment Group, and the behemoth foodstuff conglomerate Pantry Pride. He purchased The Creeks in late spring of 1992 at a bargain price—$12.5 million. He bought it in a hurry, as he was rebounding from an expensive divorce from gossip columnist Claudia Cohen, who walked away with a reported $80 million cash settlement as well as half of the couple’s $8 million estate on Lily Pond Lane.

  Because of Perelman’s wealth and paranoia—or perhaps simply because its entrance and exit are located prominently on Montauk Highway—The Creeks is the most heavily guarded and secure compound in the East End. This is particularly unusual in a community where year-round residents leave the doors to their homes unlocked and the summer crowd feel safe enough to park their foreign sports cars with the tops down on Newtown Lane while they pick up a pizza at Sam’s. The only other house known to employ guards is Steven Spielberg’s Quelle Barn. Several of Perelman’s burly security men sit ominously behind the steering wheel of twin green Jeeps parked just off the highway on The Creeks’ private roads. All security wear white polo shirts with Adirondack green logos that say, The Creeks. On the pond side security guards patrol the waterfront on foot, and one of them with a gun showing in his shoulder holster warned a couple canoeing on the pond not to come closer than 100 feet to shore. Perelman hates that his security and privacy are compromised on the pond side by transient boaters who rent canoes from a nearby surf shop and gain public access to the pond on the highway and then paddle around to gawk at his house. Famously short-tempered and controlling, Perelman reportedly demanded to rent all the boats in the shop for the entire summer to get his privacy, and when the owner refused to accommodate him, he asked to buy the store. (Ironically, Perelman owns Coleman, the well-known camping-goods company that manufactures canoes, of which Perelman keeps dozens on hand for his own guests.) So annoyed is Perelman by the possibility of boaters (or reporters or photographers with telephoto lenses) paddling by his house that he has floated little buoys in front of his property to mark off an area, as if that part of the pond belonged to him. This so incenses Perelman’s neighbor and longtime pond resident B. H. Friedman that Friedman periodically rows through Perelman’s barricade to show that he will not be intimidated from public waters.

  The richer Perelman has become and the greater the notoriety, the more futile his Orwellian attempts to control his environment. In late August 1995 Perelman’s caution backfired when his security chief and a maintenance man tried to extort $500,000 from him by threatening to blow the whistle on an eavesdropping device Perelman had planted in the house, which they claimed he was going to use to listen in on guests attending a fund-raiser for Senator John Kerry. Perelman contended that the device was only used to monitor the safety of Samantha, his daughter with Claudia Cohen. The case is not resolved.

  By the summer of 1996, it appeared that Perelman’s need to control everything around him began to unhinge his marriage to his third wife, Patricia Duff, the former wife of Tri-Star chairman Mike Medavoy and stylishly blond Democratic Party fundraiser, whom Perelman married when she was pregnant with their daughter, Caleigh. The couple were in a limousine in Chicago on their way to the Democratic National Convention when Perelman learned that Duff had disobeyed him by attending a party for Vice President Albert Gore without him. Perelman jumped out of the limousine in a rage and took his Gulfstream jet back to New York, stranding her at the convention. The following Saturday, after he had calmed down, Duff arrived at The Creeks to talk things over, and Perelman had her searched. A tape recorder was found in her pocketbook, which she hadn’t turned on but that her lawyer had suggested she bring. Duff left The Creeks in less than an hour, and two years later she and Perelman quietly divorced.

  All this family drama has leaked its way out of The Creeks despite a strictly enforced veil of secrecy. Since staff turnover is high (mostly because Perelman frequently fires people), each member of the corps of maids, cooks, handymen, cleaning and grounds maintenance crews, and landscapers is asked to sign a confidentiality agreement. It is also said that the household staff is asked to make themselves scarce if they see Mr. Perelman in passing. Each Friday at a roll call for the staff, a set of dicta and rules are handed out to every employee. Perelman, who is an observant Jew and keeps a kosher household, has standing orders that no food, not even candy bars, may be carried into the “kosher buildings” on the estate. (Sheds and barns are considered nonkosher.) There are two pantries off the kitchen, one for dairy plates and one for meat, as well as four individual stainless-steel refrigerators, separated for dairy an
d meat. On the frame of most every door at The Creeks, from the front door down to the linen closets, there is a gold mezuzah.

  The Creeks was remodeled by Peter Marino, the designer of Barneys department store on Madison Avenue and Andy Warhol’s townhouse. Calling the black circular pool that had been part of The Creeks fame a “birdbath,” Marino had it torn out and a rectangular one put in. The Creeks is decorated in a simple, unpretentious style, in colors of white, cream, and hunter green, with sisal rugs on the floors and overstuffed, slipcovered furniture. The art on the walls, ever changing, is by the biggest names of the modern art world—Lichtenstein, Schnabel, Bleckner. On every table is a telephone with several lines, a cigar, a cigar clipper, a lighter with the logo of MacAndrews & Forbes, Perelman’s umbrella company, and a pen and cream notepad with the hunter green logo The Creeks. Most guest rooms have their own refrigerators with snack foods, as well as a list of activities that can be arranged, including horseback riding and screenings in the estate’s own movie theater, created out of a vast artist’s studio. The movie theater has its own candy counter and popcorn and soda machines; instead of seats, there are fifty chaise longues made of teak, each with a forest green cushion and red wool blanket bearing the Revlon logo. Behind the screen is a stage on which stands a professional drum kit, which Perelman plays along with practice tapes.

  There are no guest bedrooms in the main house. The second floor consists of two nurseries and the master bedroom suite. Perelman’s bedroom suite has its own sitting room and fireplace, and not only his-and-her bathrooms but his-and-her offices. Across from a comfy double bed with a plump duvet stands a large-screen television, as well as smaller TVs on the night tables next to the bed. Perelman first saw the pale green marble that covers his bathroom walls and floors in a hotel in Italy. When he learned that the quarry where the marble came from had been closed, he bought the bathrooms from the hotel and had the marble shipped to The Creeks. Perelman also has a room-sized, walk-in closet, lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves and drawers, each labeled with the name of a designer: Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Yves Saint Laurent. Some garments are brand-new: slacks hanging in neat rows; pairs of blue jeans, in several different sizes, many still with price tags hanging on them; and more than a dozen pairs of sneakers of every purpose and brand.

  In the Hamptons, Ron Perelman is both envied and despised. For the baby-boomer billions, he’s the one to beat—the richest guy with the best house. But for many others, he is a figurehead of impending doom, the personification of big, new money, Hollywood pretensions, and political flirtations—turning a gentle place into an armed camp. For them, the worst aspect is that The Creeks was so rich in culture and history that even the richest man in New York State has managed to cheapen it. To buy a house is one thing, to inhabit it is another.

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  IF THE POND ever really “belonged” to anyone, it was to Jeorgkee, a wizened Montauk who lived and fished on its shores most of his life. In the 1600s he signed on as a whaler with a Dutch hunting company. There is little more known about this Indian, except that by the time the pond became part of a parcel bought up by Puritan settlers in 1648, it was already known as Georgika’s Pond.

  By the 1770s the parcel of pondfront land that became known as The Creeks was called Sheep Point, a grassy dune where a rugged army captain and farmer named John Dayton took his sheep to graze. Dayton was a stalwart descendant of one of the original founding families of the town of East Hampton, eight generations removed. The bearded good captain, who was an experienced fisherman as well as an army officer, paid one pound an acre for a seventy-acre tract, a good value for land at the time even though the pond was inconveniently located two miles from the safety of town. He built himself a two-room farmhouse close to the muddy road that led to and from East Hampton village, about where the gatehouse to The Creeks stands today.

  Dayton had not lived at Sheep Point long when one snowy February night during the Revolution, while the British still occupied Long Island, English soldiers tried to plunder the house for food. No sooner had Dayton slipped his little son, Josiah, clothed in only a nightshirt, out the back door, telling him to run quickly into the woods for safety, than a bullet whizzed past his head and shattered his weaver’s loom. The farmer began to return fire feverishly, running from window to window, calling the names of an imaginary regiment, “Nathanael! Joseph! Simon! Wake up men and come to arms!” The ruse scared off the marauders, and at daybreak Dayton found copious British blood soaked in the snow. It wasn’t until later that he learned his son had made it safely to a neighbor’s house.

  That afternoon, while Dayton was working in the barn, a British major appeared on horseback and accused Dayton of killing one of his soldiers the night before; the man whose blood Dayton had found in the snow had later bled to death. Dayton, enraged, grabbed a pitchfork from a bale of hay and told the major that he would “rip [his] guts out and string them along the cow-yard fence” if he didn’t hightail it off his farm. The British officer retreated and was never heard from again.

  Eventually, living in a damp house primitively insulated with seaweed and corn cobs took its toll on John Dayton’s joints, and by the time he was in his fifties, he was virtually crippled with severe rheumatism. One particularly bitter winter, doctors gave him up for bedridden. Determined to prove them wrong, Dayton painfully dragged himself out of bed one night and, dressed in only his nightshirt, pulled himself up on his horse and rode slowly through the frigid night to the gut where the ocean joined the pond. There, with the help of his son, Josiah, now a young man, Dayton dipped himself three times in the freezing water. Then Josiah wrapped his father in a blanket and took him home to bed. The next Sunday, so the story goes, Dayton walked sprightly into church, a new man. He said the shock of the cold had cured him—frozen out his rheumatism—and now he was able to “run, jump, and wrestle,” as good as any man. Indeed, he lived another thirty years, into his eighties.

  It was Josiah Dayton’s grandson, Edward, who sold Sheeps Point out of family hands for the first time. In 1894 he deeded the seventy-acre tract over to Mary Miles Herter, who paid $10,500 for the land and farmhouse, “a large advance from the original cost,” noted the East Hampton Star. The powdered and perfumed Mrs. Herter was the trim, rich widow of Christian Herter Sr., of Paris and New York, the man who had practically invented the trade of society interior decoration. For a fee of approximately $100,000 (the equivalent of $3–4 million today), Christian and his brother, Gustave, decorated mansions of Civil War profiteers and robber barons around the world. The Herter brothers designed rooms for President Ulysses S. Grant in the White House and ornate mansions for Mary and Mark Hopkins in San Francisco, Milton Slocum Latham of Menlo Park, and J. Pierpont Morgan’s elaborate New York Midtown manse. They were the leaders of the “aesthetic movement” of America’s Gilded Age of design. They created the hyperluxurious look that Edith Wharton captured in her novels: furniture inlaid with mother-of-pearl, cascading crystal chandeliers, opulently heavy rugs and drapes, and hand-carved moldings. Since no store-bought furnishings were good enough for the Herter brothers, they simply manufactured their own. They opened their own looms and brought weavers from France to make their own tapestries and rugs. They manufactured their own furniture, including chairs that were wrought with such brilliant craftsmanship that they are now considered priceless and are on display in museum collections around the world.

  Christian Herter’s pièce de résistance was William H. Vanderbilt’s block-long mansion on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-first Street, opposite Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. Herter designed the sumptuously baroque interior, down to the design of the hardware pulls on the doors and the marquetry around the woodwork. In 1882, after creating a worldwide sensation with his work on the Vanderbilt mansion, Christian Herter was so rich that he was able to retire to fulfill his lifelong dream of becoming a painter—only to die of tuberculosis a year later at age forty-four. He left his wife, Mary Miles Herter, with a vast and
unexpected fortune, $10 million, the equivalent of ten times that today.

  Mrs. Herter bought Sheep Point on Georgica Pond not for herself but as a wedding gift for her rather extraordinary son, Albert. He was a sandy-haired, handsome boy, six feet two inches tall, with a proud, Germanic face. Educated by private tutors in Paris and New York, Albert was a sweet young man, kind and friendly. He was also in some ways the personification of his father’s style of decorating, a man who lived his life with ornate flair in pursuit of good taste. He was a brilliant painter, a gifted writer, and as talented an interior decorator as his father. His personal style was markedly flamboyant, and he sometimes wore a red fox-hunting jacket to drama school classes or a swank dinner jacket at home. He smoked cigarettes in an ivory-inlaid cigarette holder to keep his fingers from nicotine stains and stayed up late into the night writing memoirs and musicales. His greatest gift, however, was painting murals—vast, dramatic, tableaux of heroic battles, some of them fifty feet long with hundreds of characters.

  In the 1890s, while studying art at the Académie Julian in Paris, Albert, then twenty-two, met Adele McGinnis, twenty-four, the beautiful and spoiled daughter of New York banker and broker John McGinnis. In fin-de-siècle Paris, Adele and her four small-boned, pale-skinned sisters were known as the “McGinnis Beauties.” Adele had deep blue eyes and struck a chord in Albert that most other women had not. Bright and easily bored, she was a “modern” woman who smoked cigarettes in public and enjoyed a martini. She was also the first woman who understood Albert’s desire to lead a somewhat affected lifestyle dedicated to art. He would adore her for the rest of his life. They married in New York at Saint Thomas Church on April 5, 1893, after which Mary Miles Herter sent her son and new daughter-in-law on a honeymoon to Japan. They lived and painted for six months in the Orient, becoming imbued with the Eastern spirit, and on their return brought with them enough crates of Orientalia to fill a warehouse—or a mansion.