Philistines at the Hedgerow

by Steven Gaines

  As Mrs. Duke was led off by the guard, she cried out in indignation, “Southampton is a friendly place!”

  “Southampton is a friendly place,” Harris repeated solemnly, stubbing out a cigarette and lighting another. The thought of it, Ginny Salomon and Robin Duke being told to move along! The incident so haunted her that she was spurred to do the kind of thing she used to do when she was drinking. She got in her car and drove the two miles to Ocean Castle, the mansion where the Trupins were temporarily living while Chestertown House was being renovated. On the pretense of asking the Trupins to sign a petition to stop the village from assessing beachfront homeowners for road repairs, she rang the front doorbell. Renee Trupin appeared on her doorstep and said, “I am a very big property owner out here, and I have no intention of paying for the repairs.” Renee later denied saying it, but Harris insisted that before she could speak, the door was shut in her face.

  “Imagine!” Harris said.

  After that it was war.

  2

  IT WASN’T as if Charlotte Harris didn’t know what it was like to be on the outside. God knows, there was no welcoming committee on hand when her tribe arrived in Southampton in 1927. The only reason the Irish showed up in Southampton in the first place was that they weren’t wanted by the WASPs in Newport. They weren’t wanted in Southampton either, but they overran the place. Southampton was “founded” as a summer resort in 1875 by a rich Presbyterian dry-goods merchant from Manhattan named Depeyre De Bost, who was the grandson of one of the ministers of the Southampton Presbyterian Church. The wealthy retailer spent most of his youth in Southampton before he left to find fortune in Manhattan. For years he longed to return to the idyll of his youth; when the Long Island Railroad finally extended tracks that far in 1870, De Bost built a house there. (Railroads were built coast to coast, crisscrossing the United States for twenty years, before one ever made it to Southampton.)

  There wasn’t much to do in Southampton back then, unless you liked to hunt or fish. The isolation helped retain the town’s antique charm of being the oldest English settlement in New York State, started in 1640 by the same group of Kentish Puritans, via Massachusetts and Connecticut, that later moved on to East Hampton. De Bost’s house was the genealogical grandfather of all summer houses, and it was remarkable to the local gentry because it was the first house built to be used for just the summer. It had never occurred to the farmers and fishermen of the 1870s that an individual could afford to build a three-story, unheated house to be used for only one season of the year. So remarkable was this white wood house that it became the village’s preoccupation to watch it being built. It was erected on a naked field on the east side of Main Street, with nary a tree or hedge in sight. It had a wide veranda surrounded by railings and a sunporch shielded by a canvas awning. Out front on the semicircular driveway stood De Bost’s surrey with fringe on top.

  De Bost was a consummate sportsman who appreciated the East End for its game bird hunting, and he highly recommended it to his wife’s gynecologist, Dr. Theodore Gaillard Thomas, as a place for a visit. Legend has it that Dr. Thomas fell so completely in love at first sight with the East End that he walked seven and a half miles along the beach, from Southampton to Water Mill, in an ecstatic trance. The charismatic Dr. Thomas was the most celebrated gynecologist of his age. He was responsible for the invention of dozens of lifesaving gynecological instruments and surgical techniques, including the first surgery for ovarian cancer. His fame brought him an international following as a healer, seats on the boards of half a dozen prestigious metropolitan hospitals, a handsome house at 600 Madison Avenue in Manhattan, and in 1877, what was to become Southampton’s second summer cottage, The Birdhouse.

  The Birdhouse was a silly-looking house, encased by two stories of wraparound porches with closely spaced picket railings, which made the house look like an ornate canary cage. This time the villagers thought Dr. Thomas just plain dumb when he built this enormous house out on the dunes, unprotected from damp and hurricanes. “It is difficult to understand,” sniffed Long Island Magazine, “why anyone should wish to imitate the inconveniences that plagued our ancestors, and which they endured because they could not avoid them.” The writer was correct. The Birdhouse was soon lost to a hurricane, and Dr. Thomas rebuilt farther inland, closer to Lake Agawam, on what had once been the cattle enclosure of early settlers.

  Dr. Thomas almost single-handedly midwifed Southampton into being as a summer resort. He began by encouraging his wealthy Park Avenue clients to visit its shores for the recuperative effects. In short time the area gained such a salubrious reputation that another issue of Long Island Magazine claimed, “Southampton water is of the purest quality… the prevailing winds being from the ocean, the air comes laden with no germs or disease, and malaria, with its attendant evils, is utterly unknown. It is for these reasons that physicians, with the greatest unanimity, recommend the place as a most desirable resort for invalids and especially as a summer home for children.”

  By 1890 there were more than 200 houses, giant cottages with rooms for thirty servants. The new owners came from Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Chicago: financiers, businessmen, judges, and clergy. Some were notables of their time, like Robert I. Lincoln, the son of the president; W. K. Vanderbilt, of the railroad fortune; and Harry Payne Whitney, who made millions manufacturing streetcars. One of them, Judge Henry H. Howland, was such an important social leader at the turn of the century that “not to know him,” wrote one commentator, “argues oneself unknown in Southampton.” As popular as the resort had become, in 1897 there were still only five telephones in Southampton, and the only way for the outside world to keep in contact with the wealthy men who owned the mansions was through Western Union. All summer long, under the hot sun, the exhausted delivery boys bicycled up and down the sandy paths from the telegraph office in the center of the village to the houses that dotted the shores of Lake Agawam.

  The cottages had in common a fresh, bald look, without any shade or privacy, and the first thing the new homeowners did was to disguise the flatness by planting impenetrable walls of fast-growing privet hedge. Privet had made a brief appearance in the South Fork 150 years before, until a mysterious epidemic of something they called “lung disease” killed more than 100 people. The medical experts of the day suspected that the illness was caused by some poison given off by all the hedges, which were subsequently hacked down and destroyed. When they returned to fashion years later, the privet was of a new, heartier variety imported from California, Ligustrum ovodifolium, which grew as high as fifteen feet. While in East Hampton friendly picket fences and primrose were common dividers, in Southampton canyon walls of privet in a Minotaur-like maze became the symbol of its intolerance. (In the early sixties, Frank Sinatra once rented a house in Southampton on Meadow Lane. He arrived to discover that the owners had cut back the privet, hoping to please him, but it so exposed the house to prying eyes that he refused to move in.)

  With the growing need for an Episcopalian church, Dr. Thomas purchased an old lifesaving station from the government and moved it to a site on the dunes not far from his own house. Saint Andrews on the Dune stands there today, with four oak corbels supporting the belfry roof, representing an abbot, an angel, a friar, and a devil. It was almost wrecked in the hurricane of 1938, when floods carried the church organ out the door and onto the road.

  The only Irish in Southampton were servants, and their spiritual needs were tended every four to six weeks by a visiting priest, Father Joseph Bruneman, who journeyed east from up island. In 1881 Mrs. Fredric H. Betts, who worshiped with the Summer Colony at Saint Andrews on the Dune, worried that her Irish help would leave without a place to worship weekly, so she instigated the building of the first Roman Catholic church in Southampton.

  The Golden Clan didn’t show up until the 1927 arrival of Charlotte Harris’s grandfather, the legendary Thomas E. Murray, a businessman and inventor who held more than 1,100 patents, second only to Thomas Edison. He shunned th
e Presbyterians by building his own very big house, with both freshwater and saltwater swimming pools, on the other side of the village, near Wickapogue Beach. Legend has it that Murray fell so in love with Southampton that in early 1929, he sold off most of his stock to buy up 160 acres of Southampton, narrowly avoiding being wiped out in the stock market crash. This 160 acres became the Murray family compound, where the rapidly expanding clan all built houses to join the patriarch. The Murrays intermarried with a few Cuddihys and many McDonnells, and soon dozens of houses sprang up on the landscape on the Golden Clan compound, many of them by the staid architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White. There were so many Murrays and McDonnells in Southampton that the priest, Father Killeen, would click off the sixty or so first cousins with a hand counter as they arrived for church every Sunday morning.

  The Golden Clan was ignored by the rest of the Summer Colony, and probably would never have cracked into Southampton society if it hadn’t been for the pool filter Thomas Murray invented, which removed sand from seawater. The Bathing Corporation, which had only a freshwater pool, was so covetous of Murray’s invention that they invited him and his family to join. Charlotte Harris remembered that in the beginning “we used to sit by ourselves [at the beach club]… all in a row. People called us the Irish group. I don’t know why we sat alone. Then we sat by ourselves because we wanted to. By God, we were going to show them.”

  Eventually, the line blurred between the Catholics and the Protestants. All good Christians had to band together. They had a common interest in keeping out the real riffraff. In the summer of 1929, a writer who profiled Southampton for the New York Times Magazine noted, “All of social Southampton stands firm against one dreaded danger. This is the invasion of the quiet town by swarms of New Yorkers who do not even know what the Social Register is. Good roads have brought motorists to the eastern end of Long Island. Make the village of Southampton too amusing for these outsiders and its exclusiveness would vanish overnight. The Summer Colony, functioning as human nature normally functions under such circumstances, will fight such a development to the last ditch.”

  3

  “ASSHOLES,” Renee Trupin said when she heard that the village was going to make a fuss over her turrets. If they carried on about it, Renee told the press, she just might cut the turrets down and use them as planters on her front lawn.

  Barry Trupin had a different approach. “Moses was accepted because of Ziporah,” he said, “and when these people in Southampton meet Renee, they’ll see how fine she is.” For Barry Trupin, who grew up in a three-room apartment in Brownsville, Brooklyn, this house would be his legacy. This house would be a testament to what a shrewd boy who had been smiled on by God could do. Not long ago he had had seventy-six dollars in his pocket, and his idea of a big night on the town was to drive to Coney Island and buy a hot dog at Nathan’s. Now he owned a house with 100-foot-long hallways. “For a kid from Brooklyn,” he said, “you gotta live grand when you make it.”

  Burton Howard Trupin was short and pear-shaped, with a wide grin, dark woolly hair, and a boyish face. A man of considerable charm and warmth, he had a glibness that all great hucksters share. The son of a silver craftsman, he had a colorful past. After attending Hofstra University in New York and running a short-lived nightclub in Manhattan called the Charlie Bates Saloon, Trupin worked in the nuclear power industry with a top-secret “Q” clearance. His specialty was a “mobile combat reactor for tanks.” He also had a significant role in developing the first handheld pocket computer.

  But what made Trupin really rich was his 1976 discovery of a tax loophole from which he would spin a personal fortune of $300 million, a “money machine,” he called it. Trupin found that a company could earn huge tax deductions by leasing computers instead of buying them. Almost every aspect of the transaction was deductible: the devaluation of the computers, the money paid to lease—all of it. Then in a year or two, the company could lease all new computers and get brand-new tax advantages. He was able to demonstrate to Wall Street the financial advantage of leasing by securing an IBM mainframe computer for Mattel and a fleet of trucks for UPS, saving both companies millions of dollars, so he said. Trupin began to sell limited partnerships in the leasing companies, so the little guy could buy in, perhaps with his life savings, for as little as $16,500 a share. Within a few years Trupin’s Rothschild Reserve International had nearly 200 leasing companies in operation, with hundreds of investors. Although perfectly legal, the dodge was a little cloudy. He began to proudly proclaim himself the “master of the corporate veil.” The structure of his RRI umbrella corporation was so complicated that he hired one employee solely to keep a loose-leaf “bible,” as it was called, to help unscramble the maze.

  His wife, the former Renee Cornelius, thirty-seven, was working for one of Trupin’s companies when she met her husband at the Xerox machine. She told the local papers that she was from a prominent Midwestern steel family, although others reported she was the daughter of an air force man who moved a lot when she was a kid. “She was goyim” was the way Trupin’s father, Benett, put it, before she converted to Judaism for Trupin. Renee eventually became vice president of RRI. She was noted for tooling around Southampton village in a Rolls-Royce with the license plate TRUP, and she dressed in eye-catching costumes—color-coordinated show-stoppers complete with fanciful matching hats.

  The Trupins wanted to enjoy their money and didn’t care who knew it. They were in love, they had money to burn, and they spent for pleasure. They bought the former Cartier mansion at Ninety-sixth Street near Fifth Avenue and a 150-foot yacht (which they docked next to Malcolm Forbes’s yacht) with its own Chagall painting, Le Petit Concert, that Trupin kept safe from salt water behind a hand-carved wooden cabinet. And when they bought a piano, it wasn’t just a Steinway, but a $500,000 museum piece, the Alma Tedema, which they loaned to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

  Trupin also liked to collect unusual things. He owned one of the largest private collections of Judaica in America, as well as a world-renowned collection of medieval artifacts and suits of armor. His pride and joy was a suit of armor from Hever Castle in England that had belonged to Henry II. Trupin wanted to own the armor so passionately that he paid $3.2 million for it at auction, outbidding both the Tower of London and the Louvre. (“The Louvre!” he shouted in recounting the story to a reporter.) Even Prince Charles was impressed with Trupin’s armor collection and invited him to dine at Kensington Palace. During dinner Trupin was bragging to Lady Lindsay that he had bought Henry F. du Pont’s home in Southampton, New York, when she interjected, “Henry to you, but Harry to me.”

  It was the same kind of thing with the renovations on Chestertown House. Trupin was the first to agree that they had gone beyond their original scope. At first, they thought they’d just “throw up some chintz curtains and redo the bathroom,” Renee said, but when they tried to paint the walls, the plaster came off with the brush. So after putting in new walls, they decided to fix up one of the kitchens (for $15,000) so Renee could cook a decent meal. But they soon realized that the kitchen was too small for catering—after all, what’s the use of having such a big house unless you’re going to throw parties? So they built a second kitchen, this one as big as a kitchen in a catering hall. But where would all those cooks and waiters and bartenders and kitchen staff change? So the Trupins decided to build locker facilities near the kitchen to accommodate the staff.

  And if everybody in the East End had an outdoor pool, why not then an indoor pool? Perhaps an indoor saltwater pool? No, better yet—an indoor barrier reef. So then began the construction of a vast sunken aquarium, sixty by forty feet, with a twenty-foot waterfall cascading down chunks of rock imported from Vermont, into a pool in which guests could not only swim but skin-dive, with hidden underwater air nozzles. The reef was stocked with 500 species, including lobster, parrot fish, sea anemones, grouper, and octopus. The creation and maintenance of such an ecosystem, dubbed TIME (for Trupin Indoor Marine Environment), w
as so scientifically challenging that Trupin was obliged to hire a full-time marine biologist.

  Up a tight corkscrew staircase from the reef was du Pont’s old bedroom, which the Trupins discovered to be “a fahrkukte mess” when they moved in, with flaking walls and warped floors. So they built a “real” master bedroom in its place, thirty-five by thirty-five feet, with its own sitting room and a green soapstone fireplace, adjoined by his-and-her exercise rooms, nine-by-twelve walk-in closets, and a Jacuzzi complete with underwater “love benches” from which one could watch the stars over the black ocean in a glass-walled tower.

  And if there could be a marine environment, why not an animal one? So plans were filed to build a private zoo that included burros, goats, and miniature Arabian horses. And since the traffic out to the Hamptons was such a nightmare, why not build a helicopter landing pad on the roof? (The village saw this one coming and had passed an ordinance banning them before the Trupins even applied.) And everybody on the East End had fireplaces, but what about a hand-carved jade hearth imported from Bolton Castle? And not just a sunporch, but a wide promenade on which to stroll in the sun named Muhammed’s Alley because it was decorated in tents and pillows. And a paneled, two-story library with a hidden door. And out over the sea grass, a maze of wooden boardwalks with benches, so his parents could sit and rest as they walked to the beach. “It’s really just a simple three-bedroom country French design,” Renee Trupin said.