Philistines at the Hedgerow

by Steven Gaines

  The young couple spent the next summer in a rented house on Georgica Pond (where they managed to scandalize neighbors by using nude young girls as models for nymphs in their nature paintings). That summer Albert and Adele began to covet Sheep Point and the old Dayton farmhouse that stood on it, which local lore held was the oldest farmhouse still standing in New York State. “Before the summer was over,” wrote Albert in a reminiscence years later, “we had persuaded my mother to buy the place, crazy as she thought us.”

  Also with mother’s funding, Albert and Adele set out to build a summer cottage in which to put all the Orientalia—not just another summer cottage, but one in the great luxe tradition of the Herter name. For this task they hired New York architect Grosvenor Atterbury, who had spent boyhood summers in Southampton and knew the area well. Atterbury had designed Southampton’s Parrish Art Museum and was known for harmonizing color and style by “painting” a house into its background, often using reds, browns, and buff stucco. Building the house with such perfectionists as Albert and Adele as his clients was probably Atterbury’s most stressful collaboration; on top of everything, his own house in Southampton burned to the ground. It took a year alone for Albert and Adele to decide the exact spot on which the house would stand, a decision they made by living one summer in a series of canvas tents (again managing to scandalize the local gentry) and tracking the course of a full moon in August or the arc of the solstice sun. It took nearly a decade to complete the house and all its outbuildings, which they first named, appropriately enough, Prés Choisis.

  The long, two-story Italianate villa was designed in a gentle U shape to allow maximum light and unobstructed views of the pond. The outside walls of cream-colored stucco had been mixed with sand from the beach to give it texture. The windows, with a mullioned waffle design, were fitted with copper screens to match the copper of the roof, which hung low over the walls, connected by rose-covered arbors and trellises. The main building had five guest bedroom suites, all with ocean views. Adele and Albert had separate bedrooms on opposite ends of the second floor, along with their own discrete staircases. Because the Herters loved the effect of a roaring fire, there was a fireplace in every room, nineteen in all in the main house. It was also one of the first summer cottages to have heat—the ultra-new-sounding “oil vapor” heat. Adele was loathe to see servants about, so beyond the kitchen and pantry, the maids had their own separate kitchen and sitting room, where they would be out of sight.

  The building that housed Albert’s massive studio was linked to the main house by a trellised arbor of Concord grapes. Because the ugly purple squish marks on the laced-brick path upset Adele, there was a servant whose sole job was to sweep the porte cochere of grapes three times a day. Albert’s ivy-covered studio was one of the largest artist’s workspaces in the world, fifty-six feet long by thirty-five feet wide, with the north wall full of windows that kept the room bathed in soft light all day. The building also included three more guest bedrooms and a bath. The studio itself doubled as a professionally equipped theater, complete with a hand-carved proscenium arch, scenery flies, dressing rooms, and gaslit handblown footlights. It was in this studio that in the summer of 1929, as Albert and Adele’s weekend guest, Isadora Duncan danced in a dramatic presentation that Albert wrote and directed called “The Gift of Eternal Life.”

  On the opposite side of the main house was another long, low building, a three-car garage (in which the Herters kept a red Phaeton automobile) over which there was a “tower,” where there were two more guest bedrooms with views of the pond. Finally, at the farthest end of the property near the highway stood another guest house with its own sitting room, fireplace, bedroom, and bath, plus a small gatekeeper’s cottage.

  The interior of the main building was like an Oriental jewel box. The moldings were Chinese-red lacquer, and the walls ornately flocked with a 14-karat-gold Chinese-lantern pattern. Every door and wall panel had hand-painted scenes of Eastern life. Herter chairs were mixed with wicker fan backs, and Chinese-themed rugs covered the floors. In Adele’s second-floor studio, the entire entranceway of a Japanese house that the Herters had dismantled and carted back from the Orient was installed as a frame for the huge hearth and festooned with giant peacock feathers.

  At the apex of the house, multileveled, basket-weave brick terraces led down to a landscaped glen at the sandy banks of the pond. To the left was a stucco boathouse, where the Herters moored Robert Browning’s gondola, which they had purchased in Venice. Adele used the gondola to visit friends who lived on the pond. Harry Easer, the jowly caretaker who worked for the Herters for three decades, was Adele’s gondolier. As Harry poled the ornately carved black gondola away from the shore, Adele slowly unfurled a fifty-foot blue tulle scarf into the water behind her, where it floated like a train. This particular blue was Adele’s signature color, a faded robin’s egg blue that to this day decorators refer to as “Herter blue.” When the gondola reached its destination, Adele unwrapped the scarf from her neck with a flourish and abandoned it for Harry to retrieve.

  It was Adele’s gardens that turned The Creeks, as the property later came to be known, into a legend. Landscaping and horticulture had previously been the exclusive province of the man of the household. “Landscape architect” was a novel profession in America, newly required only because so many mansions were being built, abetted by the cheap brawn of Victorian labor. Women were only just beginning to participate in landscape design as a way to express themselves. In East Hampton it was also a way for rich ladies to compete; extravagant gardens were a sign of status and wealth. Many of the gardens designed in East Hampton at the turn of the century ultimately had some historical value in the annals of landscaping, like the twelve-acre walled Italian gardens of the Frank Wiborg mansion, Dunes; or Emma Woodhouse’s seventeen-acre Japanese water gardens at Greycroft, with its pools and streams and lily ponds and Japanese teahouses, designed for her by a horticulturist she imported from the University of Dublin; or Mary Woodhouse’s more formal gardens of boxwood topiary she called The Fens.

  But there was nothing quite like Adele Herter’s gardens. Her gardens were so massive and complex to maintain that every summer she imported thirty gardeners from Japan for the chore, bivouacking them in a small tent city built on a remote corner of the property. Aided by the beautiful natural backdrop of pines, saw grass, and wild flowers, Adele’s formal gardens spread out around the house in large geometric shapes, each whimsically themed. Some were solid colors—all white flowers in one, all pink in another; others were labyrinths, with concentric patterns of flowers radiating colors, which she called her “gardens of the sun.” Perhaps the most-talked-about garden on the estate was Adele’s Herter-blue garden of blue hydrangea and delphiniums, with the blue waters of Georgica Pond just beyond. Adele also had the decorating notion that gardens should be coordinated with the rooms of the house that overlooked them; therefore, outside the windows of the blue-and-white music room, the garden was planted with blue and white foxglove, larkspur, and bachelor’s button, and the orange lilies that fringed the walk to the estate’s front door echoed the color orange in the house’s many awnings.

  On occasion, to impress houseguests, Adele would change the entire color of a garden overnight, so guests would wake in the morning to discover a garden of pink flowers where an all-white one had been the night before. To achieve this, Adele’s frantic Japanese gardeners uprooted the old garden and planted thousands of water-filled glass vials with cut flowers in them. Because Adele was offended by the sight of the gardeners’ toiling in her gardens, her edict was that they had to work only at night. This made their chores rather difficult, especially since the perfection of the gardens was such an obsession with Adele that she decreed they must always look in fresh bloom; so every night the gardeners had to deadhead thousands of fading blooms by lantern or moonlight.

  The Herters also planted evergreens, but without much interest—they grew slowly and never seemed to change. There was, however, ne
ar the house one extraordinary red cedar that the Herters had turned into living art, much like the bonsai plants they had admired in Japan. Over the years they repeatedly topped the cedar’s branches off at ten feet, forcing the branches to spread outward in compensation. When the limbs grew so long that they were in danger of breaking off under their own weight, Adele designed “crutches” of poles to hold up the sprawling, deformed limbs. The Herter children loved the cedar with its odd crutches and called it “the organ tree.”

  Every Sunday afternoon Albert and Adele had open house at The Creeks for friends, a tradition that would carry on for decades. Albert recalled one of those Sundays when guests arrived for tea. “The late afternoon sunlight slanted through the trees, the water lapped musically on the shore, sails flapped lazily, the tethered horses neighed in the woods, and a feeling of peace and well-being descended upon everyone who had a sense of beauty.” Sometimes Albert and Adele wore full Kabuki regalia when they entertained, and when guests went home at night, the two and a half miles of driveway were lit with Japanese lanterns placed every ten feet, as a small army of schoolchildren hid behind the bushes waiting to replace the candles as they burned down.

  Adele slept only three or fours hours a night—the rest of the time she read, always biographies and other nonfiction and every morning at dawn Albert would come to her room and over breakfast they would discuss what she had read the night before. Then a set of tennis on the grass courts before going off to their respective studios for a day’s work. They would reunite in the late afternoon over a cocktail in the music room and criticize each other’s work. Albert gained a reputation as one of the country’s best-known muralists, and Adele painted softly muted decorative florals as well as formal portraits of some of the wealthiest women of her time, including Florence Harriman and Laura Spelman Rockefeller. They also carried on in the great tradition of the Herter brothers as decorators, even opening their own looms and furniture shops, importing craftsmen from Aubusson in France to weave their carpets.

  For many years Albert and Adele’s marriage seemed quite well made. Although Adele could be imperious with servants and outsiders, she was a source of strength for Albert and the beacon of the family. The couple had three children. Their firstborn, Everit Albert Herter, was Adele’s favorite. A talented muralist himself, Harvard class of 1914, he was the first doughboy killed in action in World War I at the Battle of Château-Thierry on June 13, 1918. The local Veterans of Foreign Wars hall, which still stands just across the highway from The Creeks, is named after him. Their second child, Christian A. Herter Jr., educated in Paris, was so brilliant that they had to hold him back from going to college at fifteen. He married Mary Pratt, the granddaughter of Charles Pratt (the founder of Standard Oil and the Pratt Institute in New York), and later became a U.S. congressman from Massachusetts and served as secretary of state under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The third Herter child, a daughter named Lydia, was developmentally disabled and behaved in a way the family characterized as “socially awkward.” Lydia spent her entire life with a full-time companion, Miss Ingabrig Praetorious, who lived with her at The Creeks in a specially built guest cottage that the Herters nicknamed “the Happy Hour,” in honor of Lydia’s perpetual state. It had a bell that rang in the main house when help was needed. She died in Santa Barbara in 1954, Miss Praetorious at her side.

  It seemed hardly to cause a ripple in their lives when Albert himself took a companion. His name was Willy Stevens, and their meeting was pure fate. One day in the early 1900s, Albert stood smoking a cigarette on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-second Street, waiting for the light to change, when he tossed the cigarette down an open manhole. When the light changed, he set out to cross the street, but before he could reach the other side, an electric-company worker scrambled out of the manhole with his hair on fire. He accosted Albert, shouting and screaming at him. Albert surrendered his hat to help smother the fire and invited the chap “up for a drink.” Willy Stevens was a poor but handsome young man, with no family or education. He was blond and blue-eyed, and Albert said he would make a good artist’s model and offered Willy a permanent job. He became not only Albert’s favorite model but his “most constant friend,” as Herter described it. Albert never seemed to tire of looking at Willy, who was moved into one of the outbuildings at The Creeks, where he posed as the male in most of Albert’s work, including the likeness of Benjamin Franklin in the painting in the Massachusetts State House.

  As the decades passed, Adele and Albert began to spend more of the year at El Mirasol, the estate in Santa Barbara Mary Miles Herter had left them, but the cost of operating both The Creeks and El Mirasol became a financial burden. They had spent lavishly over the years, and there was no longer much interest in formal society portraits or the need for Albert’s decorating talents. As Albert and Adele’s resources began to dwindle, they tried to cut back; caviar was no longer served at parties and flowers were bought at roadside stands instead of at the best florists. Eventually, Adele was distressed to find that she had to make do without a laundress; when she discovered that it took her a full hour to iron her own nightgowns, for the first time in her life she opted to sleep in her bloomers. Finally, the hurricane of 1938 battered them physically and emotionally. “Mr. and Mrs. Albert Herter,” reported the East Hampton Star, “isolated on their large estate west of the village, watched the surf breaking on their terrace, washing away their boathouse, and destroying their big oak trees one by one. Within a few hours the place they had loved for forty years was a ruin.” They never had the money to repair it. By the 1940s they could afford only one full-time servant at The Creeks, Harry Easer, who performed as gardener, chauffeur, and handyman. They were also forced to turn El Mirasol into a hotel with luxury cottages, all of which they sold off except one that they kept for themselves.

  On Tuesday morning in early October 1946, while having her hair done at a beauty parlor in East Hampton, Adele Herter closed her eyes and slid off the chair, dead of a stroke. The frantic beautician called The Creeks trying to find Albert but could reach only Harry Easer. Easer dusted off the red Phaeton and drove to town. When he found his mistress dead on the floor, he became so distraught that he picked her up in his arms and carried her through the streets to the Williams Funeral Parlor. Adele was cremated, and her ashes were spread under “the organ tree.”

  Albert took Adele’s death hard. Already ailing, he drained the water from the pipes at The Creeks, covered the furniture in sheets, and moved with Willy Stevens to the Algonquin Hotel in New York for a year or so. He died in his sleep on February 15, 1950, at the age of seventy-eight, in a small cottage in Santa Barbara. Willy brought Albert’s ashes back to The Creeks to be spread under the tortured red cedar along with Adele’s. He was never seen again.

  The Creeks was left to Christian A. Herter Jr. Christian Jr. had grown into a brilliant but coldly analytical man, with little interest in the creative arts, substantially unlike his extraordinary mother and father. Although he had renewed the family fortune by marrying heiress Mary Pratt, she didn’t care much for East Hampton or The Creeks. In any event, Christian’s political career prohibited them from taking advantage of the house, and it was put up for sale in 1950. It sat empty, unheated, damp, exposed to the changing seasons. The walls began to rot through in places, and the furniture was soon covered in a diaphanous frosting of spiderwebs. The fabulous gardens, now untended, were overgrown with weeds, fodder for deer. The Creeks remained like that, deserted and forlorn, on the edge of the elegant pond, waiting for an owner worthy of its heritage.

  Ossorio

  TED DRAGON sold The Creeks to Ron Perelman for $12.5 million. “People ask me, ‘What does Ron Perelman look like?’” Dragon said, “and I always say, ‘He looked like Christ descending from a cloud to me.’ If it wasn’t for Ron Perelman buying The Creeks whole, I would have had to sell it off to developers.”

  Dragon is a youthful-looking man for someone in his seventies, his graying hair cut conserv
atively short. He has a gentle face and small, fluttering blue-green eyes that practically throw off sparks when Ron Perelman’s name is mentioned. Some of the spark is resentment, but most of it is just a wicked kind of mirth. As he served tea and cucumber sandwiches in the oversized living room of his handsome East Hampton house, Dragon was virtually unrecognizable as the bloated man in the famous photograph of him in the 1970s that was printed in so many magazines and newspapers, the one of him in the Bird Room of The Creeks, seated thronelike in a fanbacked wicker chair, glaring imperiously at the camera. In the photo he is surrounded by tall ferns and caged African parrots and is decked out in a brocade caftan worthy of a Pharaoh, open sandals on his feet, a clutter of rings on his fingers, and strands of semiprecious jewels hanging from his neck.

  These days, he dresses in navy blue slacks and mohair wool sweaters, like a fashionable country gentleman, and keeps to himself a lot. He delivers meals-on-wheels a few times a week to the needy and goes to church every morning (“What’s twenty minutes a day for God?” he asks), but otherwise, he rarely goes out. His friends worry that he is too reclusive. Although he’s a local celebrity and could easily be the toast of the Hamptons cocktail circuit, he’s seldom seen in public. “People say, ‘Why don’t you travel?’” he said, “and ‘Why don’t you go away for the winter?’ But I like it in East Hampton. I like being home.”

  His house on Pantigo Road is a large gray-and-white postmodern, with beautifully tended but modest gardens and a small herb-and-spice patch outside the kitchen door. He calls it “a simple cottage with no upkeep.” An interior decorator built the house for himself and his boyfriend, and Dragon got the place for a bargain. “I must have seen one hundred houses before I bought this,” he said. He liked most of all the big eat-in kitchen and the spacious “great room” of a living room, where he stores some of the treasures from The Creeks. Standing in the center of the great room is the famous horned loveseat that artist Lee Krasner bequeathed to him—the only object she left to anyone in her will. There is the Chinese opium bed that has been pictured in the hundreds of articles about The Creeks, the snake’s skull that once belonged to an Indian raja, the “tramp art” birdcage, and, of course, all the “congregations” by Alfonso Ossorio.