But Charlotte Harris minded. And she minded the unchecked development. And there was something else about Wines, something bad, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. So one day in April 1983, tired of complaining and in a “fit of pique,” Harris shocked the community by resigning from her position as vice president of the Southampton Association and announcing that she was forming her own political party, the Tradition Party, and that she intended to run for one of the two open village trustee seats. Her doctors were against it, and her friends thought she was crazy. She went to see Roy Wines himself to tell him, and he tried to talk her out of it, but she was determined. To fill out her ticket, she enlisted as her running mate a respected Southampton high school teacher and longtime president of the local teachers union, Kevin Guidera, forty-eight.
Harris didn’t as much run for trustee as run against Roy Wines for mayor. Although her slogan was “Trust Me for Trustee,” it might as well have been “Wines Is a Wimp,” she repeated that phrase so many times. She said it everywhere she went. Wines was a wimp for not standing up to the special interests of the construction trade, and Wines was a wimp for selling out the village to “condocrats.” Harris took her campaign much more seriously than Wines did, who was so securely entrenched that he hardly lifted a finger. He held only one fund-raiser, at the Polish Hall, pulling in $6,000 in campaign contributions, most of which he didn’t even bother to use. Harris raised money daily, bringing $15,000 into her campaign coffers—a whopping amount considering that only 200 voters had turned out for the previous election. She used the money to bombard the local radio airwaves with commercials, 160 a week, and to take ads in the Southampton Press, ads not with political endorsements but with a reproduction of quotes from an article written in W magazine, a fashion publication that doted on the Summer Colony crowd, about how the “BP” (beautiful people) were fighting to save Southampton from the “veritable freak show” of “merchants, strollers in cheap tee-shirts, daytrippers… condominiums spread[ing] like a disease.”
Despite her poor health and fear of crowds, she seemed dauntless. She screwed up her courage and marched up and down the streets of the village, from the Sip N’ Soda on Hampton Road to Shep Miller’s haberdashery on Jobs Lane, where her husband bought those velvet slippers with a pheasant embroidered on the vamp, handing out pamphlets. She pressed the flesh in the curtained cubicles at Elizabeth Arden and at the perfume counter at Saks Fifth Avenue. On Sundays she drove her red Cougar with its corgi hood ornament over to the black churches and spoke passionately about upgrading property to two-acre minimums to parishioners who cleaned her house and cut her hedges during the week.
She also despaired. Two or three days before the election, she sat in her house with her head in her hands and said, “Why? What in God’s name am I doing?” Sometimes she thought of drinking again, but instead, she fixed herself an iced tea and lit a cigarette and thought about how much she hated Roy Wines and what a hideosity the du Pont house had become.
That June Harris at least captured the imagination of the electorate; the election brought out 1,437 voters, the second-biggest turnout in village history. But alas, the Guidera-Harris ticket came in third, with Harris losing to incumbent trustee Orson Munn, 771–700, and Guidera losing to Mayor Roy Wines Jr., 799–619. On election night, while the Wines campaign machine was celebrating at Herb McCarthy’s Bowden Square restaurant, Charlotte Harris was smoking cigarettes in her sunroom on Squabble Lane, good and angry. In a conciliatory gesture, the other side offered her a seat on the architectural review board, but “I refused,” she said, “because I have no intention of being buried.… Show me a good loser, and I’ll show you a loser.” She drank black coffee into the small hours of the night.
On the morrow she would call for public “sanctions” against Wines and his administration. It would be a real shocker, these sanctions, a call to arms. In protest of Wines’s reelection, she was asking that all her supporters who gave so generously throughout the year to local charities cut their contributions by 50 percent—except to the hospital and fire department—to punish the Wines administration. That would wake them up. “The Summer Colony has power and rights too,” she said. “Sanctions may be the only language they understand.”
Then she discovered something else they might understand.
2
HARRIS DISCOVERED—probably through an attorney hired by the Southampton Association—that Barry Trupin had never received building permits for most of the construction at Dragon’s Head. He had poured $10 million into the place with permission only to renovate a kitchen for $15,000. “Imagine!” Harris said. “In Southampton you need a permit to put up a new gate, let alone renovate a mansion!” (This was a law Harris knew well; years before she was roundly criticized herself for not applying for a building permit to add a second story to her home until after the construction began.)
Harris also learned that she had been right all along about the height of the turrets; Trupin’s hideous cupolas violated the thirty-five-foot height limitation in thirty-three different places. One, the southwest cupola in the master bedroom—the one with the vulgar Jacuzzi and “love benches”—reached an arrogant 65.3 feet.
As if that wasn’t enough, Harris was also tipped off that many of the construction crews were being paid “under the table” in cash and that thick rolls of hundred-dollar bills were being flashed around at Dragon’s Head. The project had become a favorite of the local construction workforce. In fact, the Trupin site was such a money font that a member of the architectural review board was warned not to meddle if she “knew what was good for her.”
Broken laws. Tax evasion. Threats. Harris was apoplectic. Her blood pressure soaring, she sat in her chair in the sunroom and dialed every single person she knew in Southampton. She spent hours on the phone, haranguing friends with an indignance for which there was no solace. “And where was the voice of authority while all this was happening?” she demanded of everyone she spoke to. “Why wasn’t a stop-work order issued by the building inspector? Where was the mayor all this time?”
Doing Mr. Trupin’s plumbing.
Roy Wines and Sons was Barry Trupin’s plumbing contractor. It was Wines’s company that installed the miles and miles of copper pipe needed for those waterfalls and grottoes. And it was Roy Wines Jr. who collected nearly $400,000 for doing the plumbing when Trupin didn’t even have a building permit to begin with.
“I had no idea Mr. Wines was mayor of the village,” Barry Trupin said, flabbergasted, when approached by the press. “How could I know? Our plumber, the mayor?”
Sitting in his high-backed chair in the mayor’s offices at Southampton Village Hall, Roy Wines Jr. was completely unbowed. “I had no idea the building inspector hadn’t given Trupin a building permit,” Wines told the Southampton Press, despite the fact that the mayor was the village trustee in charge of the building inspector. His sons had been supervising the Trupins’ plumbing, but the mayor did admit that he had been out to the worksite a couple of times. Wines also pointed out that there was nothing illegal in doing Mr. Trupin’s plumbing—when his father was alive, he did the plumbing for half of the Summer Colony. “I have been very careful to avoid any conflicts of interest,” Wines insisted. “I do not tell my building inspector what to do, and Mr. Trupin has never raised the issue with me. Charlotte Harris’s personal attack on me is bringing village politics to a new low.”
Labeling the story “Southampton’s own Watergate,” Harris launched into a one-woman media campaign. The Southampton Association took a full-page ad in the Southampton Press with the headline THE LAW IS BEING BROKEN IN OUR VILLAGE: “Did you ever—Build a house, Add a room, Erect a fence?… If you did, you know you had to get a building permit.… Why doesn’t Mr. Barry Trupin have to do what you had to do?” In February, with Harris’s encouragement, W magazine ran a piece called “How to Ruin the Hamptons.” Newsday followed suit with an article titled “Turrets Called Height of Hideosity,” using Harris’s pet word in
the headline. Even the New York Times took on the story, headlined, SOUTHAMPTON SPLIT WIDENS OVER MANSION.
It wasn’t until June that New York magazine detonated the heart of Southampton with a cover story by Marie Brenner called “Mr. Trupin Builds His Dream House,” in which Harris was quoted asking her now infamous “What if he’s just another rich Jew?” question. (Trupin threatened to build a shul on Main Street in retaliation, a threat Evan Frankel had already made good on in East Hampton.) Harris said she wanted to sue for libel but claimed that she couldn’t afford it. The following week Dan’s Papers in Bridgehampton came out with an editorial deploring the open anti-Semitism of Charlotte Harris and praising the Trupins’ pioneer spirit of wanting to build their dream castle. If that wasn’t enough, in September Harris contributed heavily to another major piece in the Washington Post, in which she demanded of the reporter provocatively, “Did you know that Trupin has installed slot machines in the basement of Ocean Castle?” (He had not.)
Trupin was on his yacht in the Caribbean when a copy of W magazine was delivered to him and he first discovered that his house had become a national object of scorn. By the time he returned from vacation, Dragon’s Head had become so notorious that tourists from all over Long Island were driving out to Meadow Lane to gawk at it. The Trupins had become media stars. “People look at us and say, ‘They’re the Trupins,’” Barry fumed. “We’re the Trupins. The Trupins. That’s the uncomfortable level. We hear it from people in Turkey, in England, all over the world. People don’t like us who have never met us. People I never saw before in my life. What I would really like to do,” he said, “is drop off the tax rolls and let the town blame Charlotte Harris. What’s really going on here is that this is a Charlotte Harris witch-hunt.”
In late May 1984 Charlotte Harris attended a standing-room-only meeting at Southampton Village Hall at which Bill Hattrick, the longtime chairman of the zoning board of appeals, issued a sixteen-page decision formally denying Barry Trupin’s application for height variances, saying that Trupin had built the turrets with “intentional and knowing disregard” for the law and that a “stop work” order should be issued bringing all construction at Dragon’s Head to a halt until it conformed with Southampton law.
Harris rejoiced after the meeting, walking around the hall shaking hands and congratulating friends. “It just goes to show what perseverance can do,” she said. Later that night in a letter to the Southampton Press, she wrote, “Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.”
But Barry Trupin also knew how to stay up and fight. In August 1983 he filed three lawsuits. The first was to force the village to give him a work permit to finish all Dragon’s Head construction below the disputed roofline; the second was to legalize the height of the existing turrets; and the third was a federal civil rights lawsuit seeking $4.5 million in punitive damages, claiming that his constitutional rights had been violated intentionally, out of malice and prejudice. He claimed that he had become a political football between Roy Wines Jr. and Charlotte Harris in a village rife with anti-Semitism and that he sought retribution. Trupin sued not only the village but sixteen of its individual officers—members of the board of trustees, the zoning board of appeals, and the architectural review board. And because he knew that the village’s insurance carrier, the Hartford Insurance Group, would cover the personal liability of the village officials, he specifically asked the court to hold each of the sixteen defendants personally liable for damages, because, he contended, this was personal. He wanted them to have to pay out of their own pockets like he had to pay, and if they didn’t have the money, they would lose their homes, just like he had. Within days seven law firms were embroiled in protecting local citizens and the village of Southampton against the lawsuits of Barry Trupin.
One small irony was that Charlotte Harris didn’t have an official capacity in the village, or Trupin would have certainly sued her too. Harris would have relished going head to head with Mr. Trupin, but friends and family were glad she wasn’t involved any deeper than she was. Her health had grown much worse, and in recent months she had trouble walking. She began to see a pulmonary specialist in New York once or twice a month and was under a cardiologist’s supervision at Southampton Hospital. Of course, she would not stop smoking—she never stopped smoking. She had slain a lot of demons in her time, but cigarettes would not be one of them. Mr. Trupin and Mr. Wines, however, were still in her sights. Indeed, if not for them to keep her going, Harris might have been a lot sicker.
In June 1984 Roy Wines Jr. was up for reelection for his fourth term, and Harris was determined not to let this happen. “It’s going to take a lot of work to unseat our present government but it’s got to be done,” she wrote in the Tradition Party Newsletter. The key was to find somebody who was acceptable to the local people as well as to the estate crowd, and she thought she had just the man to bridge the gap, somebody everybody trusted—and a good Irish Catholic, to boot—in Bill Hattrick.
3
“DRAGON’S HEAD ruined my life,” Bill Hattrick once said. He regrets saying it now, because he’s had a good life, and Dragon’s Head didn’t ruin it, it just consumed him and the village of Southampton for five years. In 1985 he was a forty-nine-year-old stockbroker and the chairman of the village’s zoning board of appeals. A soft-spoken man with a round face and easy smile, he went to mass every morning and said “Gee-dee” in conversation instead of “Goddamn.” Many of his wealthy clients were members of the Southampton Association, who trusted and liked him, as did the local community, where his six children had grown up and gone to public school. Hattrick himself grew up in Riverhead and moved to Southampton twenty-five years earlier. “But living in Southampton for twenty-five years doesn’t make you local,” he said. “You’re never really local unless you’re born in Southampton Hospital.”
That March Charlotte Harris paid a visit to Hattrick’s unprepossessing farmhouse on Hill Street. Hattrick knew that Harris was having problems with her heart, but he was surprised at just how tiny and frail she looked that winter’s day, fumbling for her cigarettes as she sipped hot black coffee in his kitchen. She was determined in her mission to oust Wines. Hattrick thought, How can anybody so fragile have such strong feeling about going to war? “But she had the heart of a tiger.”
Harris said many people in the village believed that Hattrick was their best hope against Wines, and if the genial stockbroker agreed to run, she would throw her considerable support behind him. But Hattrick didn’t think he had a good enough chance. “I thought Wines was unbeatable,” he said. “Wines was entrenched, a talented politician who could get up in front of a crowd and make inspiring speeches. He could put on a cardinal’s robe and walk on the water. I was just a guy trying to pay for the orthodontist.”
On the other hand, as mayor, Hattrick could take on Barry Trupin. He was one of the local officials that Barry Trupin had asked the court to hold personally responsible in his civil rights lawsuit, and he was righteously angry about it. “If it gets to the point that my house and life savings are at risk,” said Hattrick, “then, well, I’ve got some caveman in me someplace. What would a caveman do? He would say, ‘You steal my ox, I beat you over the head.’ Mr. Trupin better not come in person to take away my house.” But Hattrick was not ready to run for mayor, and Harris left his house disappointed.
A week or so later a small article appeared in the Southampton Press, “Hattrick Declines to Run,” and shortly thereafter Hattrick got a call from Roy Wines asking him to attend a meeting at his house with some of the village officials. “Wines beat around the bush for a while,” Hattrick said, “and then he asked if I would consider running with him, as a member of his slate, for village trustee. Would I consider that?
“I said to Wines, ‘My real problem is with the Trupin affair,’ and Wines stood and pointed his finger at me and said, ‘Don’t give me that! As chairman of the zoning board of appeals, you’re as guilty as I am!’”
Hattrick excused himself in a cold f
ury. “I went home, went upstairs to my office, picked up the phone and called Michael Meehan, the president of the Southampton Association, and said, ‘Get out the horses, I’m ready to run for mayor!’”
A week later a gift-wrapped antique cane, with a hand-carved horse’s-head handle, was delivered to his house. Attached to the neck was a note in Harris’s unmistakable neat handwriting: “Speak softly,” it said, “but carry a big stick.”
Charlotte Harris never got to see Bill Hattrick become mayor of Southampton. By early spring her circulation was so bad that she couldn’t walk more than a few yards without sitting down. She knew she was in a downward spiral, and she said to a young journalist helping her prepare one of her newsletters, “You are just starting out in life, I am coming to the end of mine.” Perhaps the coup de grâce came when she was subpoenaed by Barry Trupin’s attorneys to give depositions in his civil rights lawsuit. One of the assertions in the lawsuit was, in essence, that Charlotte Harris was the leader of a band of anti-Semites who intentionally deprived Trupin of building his dream house. Unable to smoke cigarettes, the videotaped depositions were a nightmare for her. When it was over, she wrote in her newsletter about her exhaustion after being “subjected to grueling hours of testimony.” It took her several days to recover, and by then she was more preoccupied with getting voters out for the upcoming mayoral election than with seeing a pulmonary specialist in Manhattan, and she began to miss appointments.
On a bitterly cold Thursday, April 4, 1985, Harris went to work as a volunteer at a voter-registration drive at Town Hall. She had only just arrived when she began to have chest pains and feel short of breath. “She looked white as a ghost,” said her friend Dorothy Brown, who was with her. Brown called an ambulance, but by the time Harris was rushed to the coronary care unit at Southampton Hospital, she was in full cardiac arrest and never regained consciousness. Her family was summoned to her bedside, and she passed away later that afternoon.
Philistines at the Hedgerow Page 26