Philistines at the Hedgerow

by Steven Gaines

  And so it grew, by leaps and bounds, concrete and steel, from 36,000 square feet to 42,000, then 55,000. They hired a “fast track” engineer who had experience in building hotels and skyscrapers and who could work around the constantly changing design. Foundations were poured and walls erected without plans. Every time Barry and Renee changed their mind, instead of suspending construction until new permits were granted, the Trupins went along pell-mell, changing and fixing, figuring they’d get the variances later. Between 1981 and 1984 Barry Trupin poured an estimated $10 million into Dragon’s Head without almost one thing being legal.

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  PERHAPS if Barry Trupin had fooled around with another house, he would have gotten away with it, but Chestertown House, with its 535 feet of beachfront property, was one of the proudest summer homes in town, at least as famous as William Paley’s Four Fountains or Jay Rutherfurd’s Malaprop. Not only was this the “sister” summer cottage to du Pont’s famed Winterthur mansion/museum in Delaware, but du Pont’s wife, Ruth Wales du Pont, was a direct descendent of Phoebe Halsey, whose husband, Thomas, built the very first house in Southampton, in 1648. And for all the scandal that had befallen it in recent years, Chestertown House had somehow managed to retain its physical grace, even when it was deserted and forlorn.

  Built of whitewashed brick in a formal Georgian style in 1925 by the architectural firm of Cross and Cross, the street facade was the most modest aspect of the 30,000-square-foot, H-shaped house. The estate comprised three large buildings: a main house, with an upstairs hallway one hundred feet long and fifteen feet wide, a separate servants’ building (which would later become someone else’s entire mansion) in addition to the servants’ quarters in the wing behind the kitchen, and a separate two-and-a-half-story, ten-car garage with five apartments above. The house was built with walls thick enough to withstand the fiercest nor’easter, and in the basement, in a pit two stories deep, stood one of the world’s largest furnaces ever installed in a private home, large enough to heat a Manhattan apartment building (although all two dozen bedrooms had their own fireplaces). To protect the house from the encroaching ocean, du Pont virtually erected a cement factory at Chestertown House and had a seawall built. Alas, even cement was no match for a good nor’easter, and it was gone in six months.

  The rooms of the main building contained the third-largest collection of early American furniture in the world. Du Pont had entire rooms of early American homesteads dismantled and reassembled inside the house. Each and every door hinge and cabinet knob was museum quality. The living room, a thirty-nine-foot wainscotted room facing the ocean, with brick fireplaces at either end, was one of the most famous rooms in Southampton for its elegant paneling. Despite the enormity of the estate, du Pont had few guests and was a shy man who partook little of the Southampton social life. The long oak table in his paneled dining room seated three dozen, and behind the high-backed chair of each guest stood a servant in full livery with white gloves. Du Pont was so particular about his food that even though the East End was known for its produce, he had his own flown in from family vegetable farms in Wilmington, Delaware.

  The du Ponts lived quietly ten weeks out of the year in Southampton, from 1925 until Henry’s death in 1969, when the house and its contents were inherited by his daughters, Pauline Louise and Ruth Foster du Pont. The early American furniture was tagged by appraisers, and what wasn’t given to the museum in Winterthur was sold off. The house was on the market for years. It was a hopeless sale, a house so huge, so impractical; the buyer needed to be someone either very rich or with a madcap sense of the absurd, and the house found them both in Leonard and “Baby Jane” Holzer.

  Lenny Holzer and his blond, lion-maned wife, Jane, were the toast of Manhattan’s Swinging Sixties demimonde. Baby Jane, a nickname she now understandably abhors, was discovered at a party by Diana Vreeland, who explained, “She just happened to have the greatest head of hair. And a tiny face like a narcissus.” Tom Wolfe named her “girl of the year” in 1964. She was in reality a Jewish, Park Avenue housewife born in Palm Beach who at the moment had no greater ambition than to catapult herself to fame on the pages of Women’s Wear Daily and to appear in half a dozen Andy Warhol movies.

  Jane was funded in her endeavors by her husband, Leonard, a Princeton graduate who built apartment buildings in Manhattan. Along with the Holzers came bubble furniture with speakers inside, Warhols on the walls, and wild parties—a mixture of tanned young girls from the Topping Ranch and decadent New Yorkers—along with so many drugs that Lenny Holzer says he hardly remembers living in the house. Baby Jane Holzer told New York magazine that the house was a mélange of “jet setters, rock and rollers, every producer in Hollywood, degenerates, whatever. You name it, we did it all.” One Southampton resident complained to the local papers at the time, “She has a lot of parties with a lot of weirdos.”

  In August 1974, two months after Baby Jane attended Sly Stone’s all-gold wedding at Madison Square Garden, Lenny Holzer defaulted on $22,000 in taxes due the town of Southampton, as well as $12,000 in back mortgage payments to the du Pont sisters. When the sisters went to visit the house, they discovered that it had been stripped of everything worth salvaging, including every last early American door handle and brass hinge from the hundreds of cabinets. On a bleak and cold April morning in 1975, a sparse crowd assembled around the steps of Town Hall to watch as the town of Southampton auctioned off Chestertown House to the highest bidder, a mysterious and romantic figure named John Samuels III.

  Samuels was a handsome man in his forties, with inestimable wealth and well-realized pretensions to a Gatsbyesque lifestyle. So dedicated was he to his literary doppelgánger that he actually purchased Salutation, the forty-five-room, Glen Cove mansion upon which F. Scott Fitzgerald fashioned the fictional West Egg home of Jay Gatbsy. However, Samuels’s background was less mysterious than that of his alter ego. He was the son of a postman from Galveston, Texas, and the numerical appendage to his name was as much of an acquired accessory as his Savile Row suits and vaguely British accent. A shrewd man whose mother worked as a secretary to send him through Harvard, Samuels made his money almost overnight in a brilliantly staged international coal-mine deal that netted him more than $500 million, thanks to the Arab oil embargo of the seventies.

  He also made a smart marriage to a woman who gave him four beautiful children. They bought UN ambassador Marietta Tree’s double-width Manhattan mansion on East Seventy-ninth Street, where they gave elegant dinner parties. He also purchased Chestertown House in Southampton as his growing family’s summer retreat. Southampton liked Mr. John Samuels III, no matter how new his money was. He did the right things with it. He became a supporter of the arts and turned himself almost overnight into the most powerful culture baron in New York. He became, in breathtaking succession, chairman of the board of directors of Manhattan’s City Center, the New York City Opera, the New York City Ballet, and the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center, upon all of which he began imposing his personal tastes. For a time, he was the toast of Manhattan.

  And then things began to go differently for Mr. Samuels. At the end of the seventies, he surprised very few of his intimates, except perhaps for his wife, by declaring his sexual preference for men. A quiet divorce followed. While the Southampton Summer Colony feigned shocked disapproval, in Manhattan this soupçon of scandal only increased his cachet, and he began to chum around with Andy Warhol, for whom he helped back a Broadway show called Man in the Moon, and was regularly seen with an entourage at Studio 54. Chestertown House, which he never much decorated, stood empty as the years passed, unheated, and he occasionally loaned it to friends who camped out there on weekends and kept themselves warm against the ocean winds with the heat of the fireplaces.

  In the 1980s one of Samuels’s partners in his coal ventures sued him, claiming that $5.8 million had been diverted from the business to buy Salutation and Chestertown House. The suit was settled out of court. In the early eighties the price of c
oal began to plummet, and Samuels’s clever business deal lay shattered. He was forced to sell off pieces of his holdings to meet the payment on his business loans, and possession by possession he lost his kingdom, including, eventually, Chestertown House. In the late eighties, his life in a quagmire of debt, Samuels left America to start his life over again, this time, improbably, in an oil deal in Bahrain, an oil boomtown. But within two years he was accused of criminal fraud in a business deal and summarily thrown in a Bahrainian jail, which could have meant the most unpleasant end of Mr. John Samuels III had he not been freed by his attorneys and allowed to return to New York City, from where he continues to do business.

  The great house stood empty again, until one day in 1979, on a lark, Renee Trupin dragged her husband out in their 1932 Rolls-Royce to Southampton for the first time. Trupin was reluctant to take so long a ride. “I thought that’s where the secretaries went,” he said. But succumbing like his predecessors, within just a few hours of arriving on the blessed shores, Barry Trupin plunked down $700,000 to buy Chestertown House.

  Ocean Castle

  IN WHAT SEEMED to everyone in the village like a delirious act of Beverly Hillbillys indulgence, Barry Trupin bought yet another landmark mansion just down the road from Chestertown House, an extraordinary, 25,000-square-foot citadel known as Ocean Castle, easily the most notorious house in the Hamptons. Trupin bought it, he said modestly, “really, so we could keep an eye on construction at Dragon’s Head just down the block.”

  The Castle, as locals refer to it, was a fairy-tale relic of a bygone era, a rambling complex of tile-roofed buildings and cobblestone courtyards that looked like a fishing village had been plucked from northern France and nestled into a spit of sand between the Atlantic Ocean and the great Shinnecock Bay. It had been commissioned in 1929 by stockbroker William F. Ladd, a dashing character from Galveston, Texas, who made a great fortune advising the rich on how to invest. He built two other formidable mansions, one in Cedarhurst, Long Island, and one in Palm Beach. Even by Southampton standards, the Castle was immense. The single longest house on Long Island, it has seventy-two rooms, three turreted towers, stables, garages, and five kitchens. To prevent their bowing, each massive interior support beam was milled from oak that had been buried in the Shinnecock Bay for two years to season. The house was also a marvel of engineering, built in a huge excavated hole in which stilts and pylons were shunted two stories deep and sand pumped in around them to anchor the foundation. Later the dunes around the house were contoured to varying heights and shapes and planted with sea grass and beach pines so the Castle would look as if it had been there forever.

  Although the construction of the Castle was completed in the year of the stock market crash, and most brokers were jumping out windows and not building mansions, Ladd’s financial status seemed strangely unaffected by the ensuing Great Depression. This was most likely because Ladd’s finances were in part aided by a bootlegging operation that he ran out of the Castle. The harbor and coves of the irregular coastline made safe haven for ships carrying liquor up from Cuba or down from Canada, so the Hamptons became a major distribution center during Prohibition. Speakeasys, some with dancing girls, abounded in the village, and once or twice a week thirty or forty young men, looking to make a few extra bucks, would form a human chain from ship to shore, unloading cases of liquor in the moonlight. (Even years later the Southampton Chamber of Commerce boasted that the village was “the Queen of America’s Drinking Spots.”)

  After Ladd’s death a secret suite of six rooms were discovered in the Castle, a warehouse to accommodate contraband booze, as well as a secret room above the dining room that was kept full of hooch, accessible only by standing on the top of the dumbwaiter. The good townsfolk of Southampton probably knew about the operation, but a case of Scotch now and then helped them turn a blind eye.

  Ladd married three times, the last in September 1948 at the age of sixty-three in a quiet ceremony at the Castle. Alas, less than six months after taking a new bride, he was diagnosed with virulent cancer and given only a few weeks to live. After writing a tearful note of apology to his wife, he went into the bathroom of his Palm Beach estate and shot himself in the mouth. Unfortunately, the bullet didn’t do the trick, and Ladd was brought back to his New York apartment, where he lingered for three months before mercifully passing away.

  Yet it wasn’t bootlegging or suicide that first made Ocean Castle famous, but a society coming-out party on Labor Day weekend of 1963. On August 31, Fernanda Wanamaker Wetherill, the most celebrated debutante since Brenda Frazier, was being feted at a party for 800 guests at Westerly, her stepfather’s thirty-five-acre estate on Ox Pasture Road, not far inland from Ocean Castle. Fernanda, the great-granddaughter of Captain John Wanamaker Jr., the Philadelphia department-store founder, wasn’t just the “deb of the year,” she was the essence of her breed and the envy of millions of young girls across America: pretty, blond, rich, surrounded by boys with perfect teeth and good addresses, a girl whose nightclubbing and dinner parties were chronicled in the pages of Women’s Wear Daily. So many fine young men of the Social Register were expected in Southampton on Labor Day weekend for Fernanda’s introduction to society that her stepfather rented Ocean Castle from its then owner Robert Mallory Harriss, a wealthy cotton broker, to be used as a “dormitory.”

  Westerly was booked solid that weekend. It was a redbrick Georgian Colonial mansion, with a putty-colored slate roof, built in 1929 by the Chicago millionaire Henry Kaiser. Set at the end of a long, tree-lined white-gravel driveway, the formal house had rows of dormer windows trimmed in white wood. It was one of the few estates in Southampton to still have its own ballroom, which was put to good use by Fernanda’s heiress mother, also called Fernanda, and her stepfather, Donald Steward Leas Jr. Favorites of the Southampton social set, the Leases were famous for their extravagant parties, like their 1955 “Night in Baghdad” celebration, at which a 734-pound elephant mingled with 250 guests under a silk tent, or their “Gone With the Wind” evening, where the estate was turned into Tara and one of the guests dressed as a Ku Klux Klansman. They were also known for their teeny eccentricities, like being tipsy half the day and keeping three chimpanzees as permanent houseguests. (“We used to take them to El Morocco,” Mrs. Leas explained of the chimps, “but naturally we dressed them.”)

  Not since Anne McDonnell married Henry Ford II in 1940 on the Murray compound had Southampton seen such a party as Fernanda’s coming-out. It had been in the society columns for weeks that pink was the color scheme; pink invitations and floral arrangements and pink champagne, Fernanda’s pink evening dress, and the pink, three-pole tent—one of the largest tents ever erected in Southampton—that billowed over the vast green lawn of Westerly that splendid night. Fernanda took to the dance floor with her handsome escort, Sheldon Prentice, of Westbury, New York, a Yale student, who also delivered the toast. The actress Joan Fontaine and cartoonist Charles Addams joined them on the dance floor, as did Fernanda’s mother, and Roy Chapin, the vice president of American Motors. The Twist was the popular dance of the moment—everyone in Southampton knew that Jackie Kennedy had recently been to the Peppermint Lounge in New York, and the crowd was thrilled to swivel to a “twist band,” the first all-black rhythm-and-blues band ever to play in Southampton to anyone’s knowledge.

  The party thinned out about 2 A.M., but the younger crowd, fueled on what one of them called a “liquid diet,” continued to dance and drink until the first light of dawn. When the band tried to pack up and leave, a group of well-heeled young men chipped in a few hundred dollars and hired them to play an additional three hours at Ocean Castle. Just as the sun rose, more than 100 of the young guests, the boys with their evening clothes in disarray, Fernanda Wanamaker Wetherill barefoot in her party dress, marched through the quiet Southampton streets to Ocean Castle and proceeded to destroy it in a drunken rampage.

  It seemed at first like harmless fun. They began by dancing on the polished antique tables and doing
the Charleston across the marble mantelpieces. A cheer went up as twenty-one-year-old Eaton Brooks, a student at the University of North Carolina from Darien, Connecticut, swung Errol Flynn—style from a huge chandelier and brought it crashing to the floor. Roving packs of young men ransacked the bedrooms, jumping up and down on the antique beds until the springs gave way and the wood frames cracked. One lad from Boston amused himself by shattering every piece of china and glass in the house with an air gun.

  But all hell didn’t really break loose until Granville Toogood, twenty-one, of Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia, while dancing on a tabletop, was “checked” by another boy and went sailing through the glass panes of the French windows out onto the terrace, where he emerged miraculously unharmed. At that point another reveler threw a rock through one of the exquisitely mullioned windows, and then another, until the crowd was stoning the house in a frenzy, the sound of crashing glass filling the early-morning air as every one of the estate’s 1,600 panes was smashed.

  It wasn’t until late the next afternoon, alerted that there had been a disaster at the house, that Fernanda’s stepfather went to investigate. He discovered dozens of young men passed out on the beach in their evening clothes, sprawled on mattresses they had dragged from the house. The beach was littered with broken glass from bottles and the windows of the house, so much broken glass that the town of Southampton had to sift the sand for it, and decades later shards still emerge around the mansion. Inside the house another dozen or so revelers continued to party; when the stragglers defied Leas’s order to leave, he summoned the Southampton police. The small police force, so baffled by such a well-bred bunch of ruffians and incapable of dealing with them en masse, for identification purposes, insisted that all of them pose for a group photograph on the front steps of the beautiful stucco mansion. There they stood—handsome, unsmiling and unrepentant, looking very much like a Ralph Lauren ad in their Brooks Brothers slacks and blazers, surrounded by sturdy urns of Chinese-red geraniums.