He also wouldn’t have a telephone at the club until 1904, and only then just to be able to call the fire department (the building had twice burned down). The club’s hallmark was always stoicism and strength in the face of adversity; when the original club burned to the ground on Friday, August 9,1901, the members built a temporary shed, eighty feet long, and Dr. Herrick ordered tea served for 200 members while the ruins were still smoldering.
Dr. Herrick died at the age of eighty-four on April 11,1914, with his hands still on the controls of the Maidstone Club, and it took years to pry them off. He left $7,500 to the club under the conditions that it could never serve liquor, that it must maintain its “present character,” and that its tennis matches must be decided three sets out of five, not two out of three. Otherwise, the club had to donate the money to the library. Alas, on June 11, 1934, when the club applied for its first liquor license, one of the members gladly ponied up the $7,500 for the library.
As the years passed, the club became the center of social life in East Hampton. Membership was considered such a dire necessity that applicants who were rejected often moved. Traditionally, the club’s membership consists not of names from social columns but of those more familiar to readers of the financial pages, men like Julian S. Myrick, “Mr. Life Insurance,” who started Mutual of New York; John Hamlin, president of Douglas Elliman, the real estate company; Juan Terry Trippe, who founded Pan American Airlines; William Clay Ford of the motor company family; John A. Dix, president of the Union Pacific Railroad; and John Deere Velie, the tractor trailer manufacturer. The revered sportswriter Grantland Rice was a member too, and his locker and original nameplate are kept as a shrine in the clubhouse, last offered to Vice President Dan Quayle when he came to play golf.
Despite the club’s distinguished membership list and its contributions to the community, its ultimate reputation has always been about its restricted membership policy. The membership committee made no secret or apology about keeping the club exclusive. “I don’t understand why it matters to people,” snapped one Maidstone matron. “Why would people want to go where they’re not wanted, anyway?” It wasn’t just Jews who weren’t wanted but also people of color, and even entertainers. Although one of its original founders, John Drew, was the most popular matinee idol of his day, the only show business figures who belonged to the club became members through family or marriage, like actor Cliff Robertson, who married Maidstone member Dina Merrill (the daughter of Marjorie Merriweather Post), the actress and Post cereal heiress, or Sonja Henie, who became a Maidstone member when she married polo-playing Winthrop Gardiner. When singer Diana Ross married Maidstone member Arne Naess Jr., the Norwegian shipping magnate, in 1985, the president of the club was asked by a reporter if Diana Ross was going to become the first black member. “I have absolutely no idea who Diana Ross is,” the president, an investment banker, snapped. Arne Naess subsequently resigned from the club.
The Maidstone Club is also famously touchy about who plays on its premises. Legend has it that in the 1960s, when through some unavoidable circumstance Senator Jacob Javits played on the golf course, the grass turned brown wherever he stepped. Once, when a South American housekeeper swimming off the public beach was swept down the shore by the strong currents and managed to drag herself out of the ocean and collapse on Maidstone sands, the members promptly complained to the management. The Bouviers knew to bring servants for a swim in the club’s pool only on Sunday nights, just before the pool was going to be drained; even years later, in the early 1980s, a teenage member of the Bridgehampton Racquet and Surf Club intramural swim team was called a “dirty Jew” when she arrived for an ill-conceived swim meet. (Founded in 1961, the Bridgehampton Racquet and Surf Club’s membership requirements amounted to a driver’s license and a MasterCard.)
Maidstone members are relieved that the Jews aren’t knocking on their club’s door anymore, wanting to play on their links. Jews now have their own course, the swank Atlantic Golf Club in Bridgehampton, which Maidstoners refer to as the “Hebrew National.” The Atlantic opened on May 1,1992, on $6 million worth of farmland sold to the founders through the Allan Schneider Agency. It was the first golf club built on the South Fork since 1963, and the only one that encourages a Jewish membership. Its founding members include financier Henry Kravis, Seagram’s Edgar Bronfman Jr., Blackstone Group partner Stephen Schwarzman, and Loews Hotels CEO Jonathan Tisch, who each paid a $125,000 initiation fee (which has now soared to $250,000). So democratic is the Atlantic that Lawrence Taylor, the football player, was asked to apply (but did not).
The first Jew in the Maidstone Club was Theodore Kheel, a labor lawyer, in 1977. Recently, because of newly passed anti-discrimination laws, the Maidstone has admitted three (nonobservant) Jewish members, whose greatest ambition in life is to be mistaken for WASPs. Not surprisingly, the newest generation of real blue-blooded WASP Hamptonites do not care for the club’s rigid formality, nor do they need its tennis courts—they all have their own. They also don’t want to dine at the club with the same people every Saturday night; they want to be seen at a celebrity hot spot like Nick & Toni’s. Still, a few Maidstone members cling to the notion that although the Hamptons may be changing all around them, within the walls of their hallowed club, everything will remain safe.
Evan Frankel never lived long enough to see the club accept its half a dozen or so Jewish members. In his lifetime, he took the Maidstone Club as a personal affront. And he wasn’t alone. He didn’t have a way to bring it down, but he would find a way to checkmate it. He didn’t know exactly what that way would be, until one day, serendipitously, it presented itself to him.
3
FOR ALL of Evan Frankel’s bluster about anti-Semitism, he rarely went to synagogue in the Hamptons. If he went at all, he preferred the elegance of Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue in New York City. All the years he lived in the Hamptons, the only indication he saw that Jewish life existed was an untidy Jewish cemetery on Route 114, hardly even noticeable when driving by, and a damp, Orthodox schul called Adas Israel, in the unlikely Jewish outpost of Sag Harbor, the historic whaling village.
Adas Israel was the oldest Jewish temple on Long Island. It had hardwood benches with room enough for fifty men, and a small, bowed balcony where, in the Orthodox tradition, the women were segregated behind a lacy curtain. Also for women, much to Frankel’s astonishment, was a mikvah in the basement, an Orthodox ritual bath the size of a hot tub where women could come for a monthly hygienic blessing. The synagogue’s Torah was one of Adas Israel’s greatest distinctions, in that it was a gift from Theodore Roosevelt. In 1898 Roosevelt and 1,200 of his Rough Riders were briefly quarantined for malaria in Montauk after the Spanish-American War; when the troops departed, Roosevelt left behind the Torah, used by his handful of Jewish soldiers, as a gift to the schul.
The Jews first came to Sag Harbor in the 1880s, when it was a fading honky-tonk town, formerly the sixth-busiest shipping port in the world, whose economy was totally dependent on whale oil. The last whaling ship had set sail in 1871; ten years later Sag Harbor was on the brink of financial insolvency. An unlikely hero by the name of Joseph Fahys came to the rescue. He was a tall, barrel-chested man who owned one of the largest watch-case manufacturing plants in the world in Carlstadt, New Jersey. After marrying a young woman from Sag Harbor, Fahys moved his operation to a Dickensian-looking, four-story redbrick factory on Division Street. The plant would employ 400 watch-case makers, which would be a huge percentage of Sag Harbor’s workforce. The townsfolk rejoiced, but instead of needing to hire local people, Fahys’s business depended almost entirely on watch-case engravers from Eastern Europe, where engraving had been turned into an art.
Fahys made monthly trips from Sag Harbor to Ellis Island, where he solicited immigrants just off the boat looking for a steady job and a place to settle other than the confines of the Lower East Side of New York. Almost every single one of these immigrants was Jewish, and within a few years, Fahys was responsible
for bringing more than 100 Hungarian and Polish Jewish families to Sag Harbor, almost 15 percent of the population.
Although through the years there had been an odd Jew in the East End, this was the first time they had arrived in force. Simon Bonan, a jeweler who appraised Captain Kidd’s stolen jewelry, was a Jew, as was Aaron Isaacs, an Ashkenazic Jew and merchant who owned property in East Hampton, Montauk, and Sag Harbor. Isaacs married a Christian woman descended from one of the original settlers, Mary Hedges, and embraced her religion. One of their eleven daughters, Sarah, became the mother of John Howard Payne, who composed the song “Home Sweet Home” about his Jewish grandfather’s house. He’s the only person of Jewish birth buried in the town cemetery, where his small tombstone reads, “an Israelite in whom there was no guile.”
With Fahys’s workforce, a whole Jewish subculture began to flourish in Sag Harbor, including peddlers, mohels, and even a shochet, Schmere Heller, whose profession was to slaughter fowl and beef in the kosher manner. At one point there were so many Jewish peddlers in the Hamptons that Heller turned his home into a kosher boardinghouse. Many of the peddlers stayed to open shops along Sag Harbor’s Main Street; first a clothing store, then a confectionery, a crockery shop, a fruit seller, a shoemaker, and seamstress shop opened. By the turn of the century, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted that “in business, the Jews have pushed rapidly to the fore in Sag Harbor. They control the clothing and fruit trade, and upon the main business thoroughfares 15 large stores testify to their industry. This does not include the number of wagon and pack peddlers who work the surrounding country, making the village their headquarters.”
From the start, a cultural rift developed between the aristocratic Hungarian Jews and the bumpkin Polish and Russian Jews from the provinces. The Hungarians so despised Eastern Europeans that they called them “orientals.” In 1890, when the Russian and Polish Jews bought for $50 a patch of land for a cemetery on what is now Route 114 between Sag Harbor and East Hampton, the Hungarian Jews immediately bought the adjoining property and consecrated their own duplicate cemetery with their own gate—separated from the Eastern European Jews by a two-foot-tall rusted iron “spite” fence. Eventually, in 1898, the Eastern European Jews scraped together $2,500 to build a synagogue on the corner of Elizabeth and Atlantic Avenues, a self-consciously churchlike structure with Gothic stained-glass windows that was later named Adas Israel; years later the Hungarians Jews joined them there to worship.
But the Jews never flourished as a tribe in Sag Harbor. In 1925 a fire destroyed most of the Fahys watch-case factory, and the Jews stopped coming. The Bulova watch company later purchased the plant and operated it for a few years before closing it for good after World War II. In time the parishioners at Adas Israel became so elderly that they had to be carried up the steps of the synagogue in chairs.
When Evan Frankel moved to the Hamptons, Adas Israel was so poor that it had to “rent” a rabbi from a congregation in Riverhead to drive to Sag Harbor on Wednesday nights, when he would preside over “pretend” Sabbath services. The membership had dwindled to only thirty-five members, although, as Irving Markowitz, an Adas Israel member and CPA who moved to East Hampton in 1946, remembered, “There were a lot of Jews hiding under rocks.”
Agreed his business partner, Bernard Zeldin, “Clearly, Adas Israel wasn’t growing as a synagogue. If a synagogue had a chance to make it, it would be in East Hampton,” where it could attract the newly arriving Jewish weekend homeowners, or “summer Jews,” as they were called.
In 1951 Zeldin, Markowitz, and five other families, determined to build their own synagogue in East Hampton, broke away from the Adas Israel congregation and started holding Reformed services wherever they could find a place each week—in rented or borrowed halls, in their own living rooms. For seven years they made do, all the while fund-raising to build their own synagogue. At one point they approached Alfonso Ossorio and Ted Dragon about having a benefit for them at The Creeks. Dragon personally called Evan Frankel to suggest that it would be more appropriate for him to hold the benefit at Brigadoon. “Are you out of your mind?” Frankel snapped at Dragon. “Why would I want those peasants to rip up my estate?”
However, Frankel occasionally worshipped with “those peasants” because they began to hold their High Holidays services just a mile from his house, in the Parish Hall of the East Hampton Presbyterian Church on Main Street. In a gesture worthy of a Norman Rockwell painting, the Parish Hall was loaned to the Reformed Jewish congregation by the sympathetic church elders. In return for their generosity, Zeldin held the Yom Kippur appeal on behalf of the Presbyterians and presented the congregation with a check for $1,300 toward the purchase of a new organ.
In 1959 ten members of the wandering sect borrowed $15,000 to purchase two acres of a scrub oak forest north of Montauk Highway in East Hampton, on which they hoped to build a synagogue. The ten families cosigned a loan from Osborne Trust, each promising to pay off $150 a year for ten years. “We immediately put up a sign at the side of the road,” said Zeldin, “lit up with spotlights at night, that said, ‘On This Site Will Be Built the Jewish Center of the Hamptons.’”
Zeldin was shocked at the negative reaction from summer Jews. It seemed that they left their Judaism in the city on Friday afternoons. “What the hell are you trying to do?” one of the weekend crowd demanded of Zeldin. “We come out here to avoid all that crap. This is a vacation spot, not a religious retreat.”
But Zeldin and Markowitz found unexpected support from Jacob Merrill Kaplan, who called them one day with a $10,000 contribution to their building fund along with a challenge to Evan Frankel to match it. Jake Kaplan, then sixty-seven, shunned publicity but got plenty of it. He was the only Jew in town richer, and in some ways more controversial, than Evan Frankel. The president of the Welch’s Grape Juice Company, among other businesses, he was a tiny old man with a warm, wrinkled face and a white halo of hair. In 1956 he stunned the business world by selling Welch’s to a grape-growers cooperative in upstate New York; in the rabidly anticommunist fifties, this was perceived as a very suspicious thing to do. He also controlled half the export of blackstrap molasses in Cuba and, it turned out, was a major backer of Fidel Castro’s munitions factories. It caused no less than a national scandal when in 1964 a congressional investigative panel claimed that the CIA was using Kaplan’s J. M. Kaplan Fund as a pipeline for $1.25 million in funding for a Costa Rican CIA training center.
The Kaplan Fund continued to contribute to such liberal causes as Planned Parenthood and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—charities unfamiliar to most folks in East Hampton, where Kaplan and his family summered on a huge family compound unfashionably north of the highway on Route 114. Kaplan kept mainly to himself over the years, quietly becoming one of East Hampton’s greatest private benefactors. He was moved by an article in the local newspaper about the wandering Jewish congregation, and he suggested that perhaps Evan Frankel would match his pledge of $10,000.
Frankel was incensed to learn that Kaplan was daring him into coughing up $10,000 and was in a pompous mood when Markowitz and Zeldin arrived at Brigadoon with a drawing of a one-story brick synagogue, modest and unassuming. Frankel examined the plans for a minute before dismissing them with a shake of his head. “It’s not balabatish enough,” he said. “If this is going to be the only temple in all of East Hampton, then it must be important.”
Markowitz and Zeldin left Brigadoon disappointed, certain they would never hear from Frankel again, but first thing the next morning he was on the phone. “Meet me at the Borden house on Woods Lane,” he said, “Do you know where that is?” The two men knew well where the Borden house was. Woods Lane, with its arbor of giant oaks and gracious homes, was the curtain-raiser to the whole town of East Hampton. The last house on the right was the Herricks’ famed Pudding Hill. The house at which Frankel had asked Markowitz and Zeldin to meet him, just down the lane, was known throughout town as the “house that mooed”—the 189
9 estate of Gail Borden, the grandson of the man who invented condensed milk. The Borden family and descendents had lived in the beautiful house with its expansive entrance foyer for fifty years, Maidstone Club members in every generation.
Frankel purchased the twenty-two-room, four-acre property for $21,000 from Gilbert Smith, a local businessman who owned a fish-processing plant in Amagansett. Frankel had heard for years that Borden was an anti-Semite, and upon taking title, sure enough, he found stacks of anti-Semitic materials stored in the upstairs closets. Frankel had hoped to resell the property at a large profit, but something happened the night before that changed his mind, he told the two accountants when they met him on the lawn of the old estate.
“I went to sleep last night thinking about the services that I went to as a young boy,” Frankel told them, unlocking the front door and leading them inside. “They were held in a sweatshop—all we could afford to rent. My bar mitzvah was held in that sweatshop, at seven in the morning on a Saturday before the weekend workers came in. I can still remember the stench of it.” He fell into an uneasy sleep and in a dream his late, dear, departed sister, Annie, came to him. “‘Evan,’ she said to me, ‘I will not rest until there’s a synagogue in East Hampton.’” Evan stopped and looked at them with a pleased look on his face. “So, I will lease this house to you for a dollar a year. How’s that? What will the Maidstone Club think of that, huh! A synagogue at the entrance to town!”
“It’s a generous offer,” Markowitz said, “but probably an imprudent idea. Jews running around in yarmulkes and prayer shawls right on the highway as you come into town? Who needs to look for trouble, Evan?”
“What is more,” Zeldin added, “how can fifteen families pay the upkeep of this big house and grounds? Where would we get the money?”
“I’ll tell you what. You go tell Jake Kaplan with his ten thousand dollars that I’m leasing you this building for a dollar a year and that if he’s such a big shot, he should give you an endowment that would cover the yearly maintenance cost.”
Philistines at the Hedgerow Page 20