He became rich and famous in the process. His audacious campaigns became Madison Avenue legend, and in 1969 he wrote a bestselling book about his adventures in the advertising trade, From Those Wonderful Folks Who Brought You Pearl Harbor. He became a national symbol of Madison Avenue cleverness; his partner, Ron Travisano, and he started to bill upward of $800 million a year. In 1986 he caught what seemed like the brass ring when a British advertising giant, WCRS, bought out his interest in the company for $30 million, plus a seven-figure-a-year employment contract to stay on and oversee U.S. operations.
Jerry was so clever that he even turned himself into an instantly recognizable logo. A lumbering six-footer, he had a shaved, egg-shaped dome and wore omnipresent nonprescription, dark-tinted glasses—even though he wore contact lenses—because he liked the way it looked. With his dark mustache and spreading goatee, he appeared to be one of those cartoon faces that you can turn upside down so the beard becomes hair and the smile becomes a frown. People mistake Jerry’s hard stare from behind his tinted eyeglasses as menacing, but Judy says it’s only the way his contact lenses make him focus. In fact, Jerry’s not the least bit threatening, his friends discover. He’s sweet and very funny and oddly shy. That’s what made Jerry scarier to the village than, say, an obvious interloper like Barry Trupin; Jerry was insidious. Jerry gave to charities. He rescued decaying buildings. He created jobs. He opened up three major businesses: two restaurants and a gourmet food store. And his daughter, Jodi, owned part interest in a new weekly newspaper, the Independent, the first new paper in East Hampton in 300 years. (“When you’re expecting a pogrom,” Jerry said, “buy your own newspaper.”)
To some, Jerry seemed rapacious. One letter writer to the East Hampton Star suggested that if Jerry bought any more businesses, the area might be renamed the “Della Hamptons.” New York magazine ran a piece called “The Ad Man Who Ate the Hamptons,” repeating an unfounded report that Jerry walked down Newtown Lane one Saturday in a T-shirt that said, I’M JERRY. The most damning epitaph came from the acid pen of Michael Thomas, the “Midas Watch” columnist of the New York Observer, who named Jerry one of the Four Horsemen of the Hamptons Apocalypse, along with Martha Stewart, Mort Zuckerman, and publicist Peggy Siegel.
When the village administrator first ordered Jerry to remove the pumpkins from the triangle of grass in front of the Red Horse Market in October 1993, Jerry said, “No, I will not remove them. Pumpkins are not signs. Signs are advertising. Pumpkins are display. Don’t tell me what advertising is.” Furthermore, Jerry contended, the only reason the village was going after other outdoor displays of merchandise was so that it wouldn’t look as though it was singling him out. “You are doing this to me because of who I am,” Jerry told Clayton Morey and the design review board at one of their cantankerous meetings, a quote that appeared in the East Hampton Star. It’s a mistake to say this in East Hampton—the hubris of “who I am.” The phrase alone heats the air; everybody in East Hampton is somebody, each more privileged than the next.
Jerry not only kept the pumpkins displayed, he upped the ante by publicly taunting Clayton Morey and the design review board in the press. He took out a full-page advertisement in the East Hampton Star, demanding that Clayton Morey and the entire design review board resign. “I say you’ve let your hatred of me get in the way of your innate sense of decency,” the body copy said. He invoked the American way and the Constitution, and insisted that he would continue with seasonal displays in front of Jerry and David’s Red Horse Market, including Christmas trees and a Santa at Christmas, and an Easter display with an Easter Bunny. (“Oh my gosh,” said the mayor, Paul F. Rickenbach Jr., “we have nothing against the Easter Bunny.”)
Since the village trustees couldn’t let Jerry flout the law, the East Hampton Justice Court appointed a special prosecutor, Scott Allen, of a Brentwood, Long Island, law firm that handled the village zoning cases, to pursue the pumpkin matter. Jerry immediately dubbed the hapless Allen the “Pumpkin Prosecutor,” and the name stuck. In late November 1993, after repeated requests to remove the pumpkins were ignored, the village sent a series of letters to Jerry and his partner, asking them to appear in East Hampton Justice Court before Judge James R. Ketcham as a formality, to resolve the issue. Instead, their lawyer appeared to complain that they hadn’t been properly served. With Jerry and David seeming to thumb their nose at the court, in the heat of the moment, the Pumpkin Prosecutor demanded that Judge Ketcham swear out a warrant for Jerry and David’s arrest. Ketcham concurred. “If we’re going to do this,” he said, lifting the lid on a Pandora’s box, “let’s go all the way.” Suddenly Jerry Della Femina was a wanted man.
That balmy December morning when Jerry arrived at the Red Horse in his Range Rover, dressed in a multicolored knit sweater and tan slacks, there was a small group of reporters and photographers waiting for him. Jerry hotly contests the accusation that he had tipped off these reporters to be there, as several reporters claim. The presence of the media, and the ensuing news reportage of the Pumpkin Prosecution, became a matter of great significance to Jerry’s adversaries. They pointed to it as proof of his insincerity, holding that his refusal to abide by the sign laws was part of a greater manipulation of a self-promoting huckster. Jerry was infuriated at the thought that the matter would not have been news without his having alerting the press. “How do you arrest a high-profile advertising executive, who owns three businesses in town, and not have it noticed by the press?” he demanded.
That being said, Jerry, “a walking sound bite,” as Judy calls him, took full advantage of the situation. “My high school teachers voted me most likely to get the electric chair,” Jerry smirked to the waiting reporters. “Thank God they did away with the death sentence in New York State.” “Handcuffs will be slimming, don’t you think?” he asked one reporter. Why did he want to be handcuffed? “A better photo op.” “East Hampton is the only place you can get arrested for displaying pumpkins, except for Stalinist Russia,” he told another. “The tangerines at the Red Horse market are on sale. They’re sweet and at prices that beat the A and P.”
He also openly gloated that Jerry and David’s Red Horse Market was getting millions of dollars of free publicity. The market was the anchor of a handsome twenty-three-store, white-brick shopping complex on Montauk Highway and Cove Hollow Road, which lay 90 percent within the jurisdiction of the village. Jerry’s partner, David Silver, fifty-four, was waiting for him inside the shop, casually dressed in a sweatshirt and sneakers. Silver wasn’t very happy with all the attention, although he stood solidly with Jerry on the issue of the pumpkins. A small, pleasant man with a wry smile, Silver was the CEO of Regency Home Fashions Corporation, one of the largest home-furnishings manufacturers in the world. He lived most of the year in East Hampton with his wife and family, not far from Steven Spielberg’s house. He was an alternate member of the village zoning board of appeals and an esteemed philanthropist with an interest in the welfare of local children. He got to know Jerry and Judy when he and his wife, Patti, cochaired the 1992 Planned Parenthood benefit held at Jerry’s newly opened East Hampton Point restaurant, at which fireworks were supplied by the Gruccis. More than 1,000 people attended the event, a charity highlight of the summer; when Jerry asked Silver if he wanted to be his partner in a gourmet food shop at the Red Horse, Silver thought that it would be fun and wrote a six-figure check. “I came along for the ride,” he said, “which I didn’t expect to include being arrested.”
Jerry called East Hampton police chief Glen Stonemetz from the Red Horse market to say that he and Silver were ready to be arrested and that the police could come get them. “That’s not surrendering yourself,” Stonemetz replied. He suggested that they just go on down to the court building on Pantigo Road and present themselves, and forget about being arrested.
“No, no,” Jerry insisted, “I want to be arrested. I’m turning myself in at the police station.”
With a caravan of reporters following, Jerry and David drove
to the police station and presented themselves at the front desk. A young female police officer, Janice Beedenbender, escorted them into a small room, where she explained, somewhat apologetically, that it was the police department’s policy to handcuff everyone. They extended their arms, and the officer fastened the steel bracelets lightly around each man’s wrists. Then Jerry and David were led out a back door into the parking lot, where a police car was waiting to take them to the courthouse.
As soon as they stepped from the shadow of the police station, they could hear the camera shutters going off. Jerry began to take tiny steps to give the photographers time to get all the pictures they wanted. For a moment it seemed so surreal that he wanted to laugh, and he bit his bottom lip. But in another instant it stopped being funny; David Silver’s nine-year-old daughter, Annie, who was watching from the sidelines with her mother, began to sob. Silver had promised his concerned child that despite what she heard from the other children in school, he was not going to jail and had promised her that she could come to court to watch and that he would drive home with her afterward. But the sight of her father in handcuffs overwhelmed the child, and her sobbing could be heard above the sound of the shutters clicking.
“It became a very bad feeling,” Jerry said. “I tried to remember how ludicrous the situation was, but the only word I can think of to describe how it felt is disgusting.” Jerry and David were put in the back of a police cruiser and were driven to the courthouse, the reporters and cameramen trailing behind. The image of Jerry being led away in handcuffs, biting his lip and smirking a bit, went out over the wire services that night, and the story about the wealthy man who was arrested by the uptight town for displaying pumpkins appeared in newspapers across the United States, and as far away as London.
In the police car, Jerry turned to David and said, “A few months from now you’ll forget, and you’ll stop being angry, but I’m going to kill those fuckers for this. They are really going to die.”
2
EAST HAMPTON is the “Land of No.” Its physical appearance is probably one of the most highly regulated in America. It is a trophy town, filled with trophy houses that are owned by some of the most opinionated tastemakers of the twentieth century. In East Hampton people are very self-conscious about the way things look. The reactionary, literate, and very vocal population gets stirred to noisy debate over things as small as whether the color of the bulbs on the Christmas trees that line Main Street should be blue or white. The stated raison d’etre of almost every one of these debates has always been “to preserve the historical character of the town.”
There are dozens of local organizations riding posse on taste offenders in East Hampton, from the Ladies Village Improvement Society to the town and village design review boards. The town would have instituted an architectural review board too, if it wasn’t illegal to tell a citizen how to design his or her own house, and even some design issues are obliquely controlled through the town and village planning and zoning appeals boards, like denying homes taller than two stories. East Hampton is one of the only towns in America to have a resident architectural historian, whose responsibilities include driving around the village and looking at people’s houses to make sure they’re not changing them. There’s even a woman whose sole job is to search out and tear down illegal yard-sale signs tacked on trees and poles. Backing up all this is a byzantine codex of rules and ordinances that govern the size, location, and appearance of almost everything in East Hampton—even the dress of people on the street. In 1954 the village adopted a law prohibiting the exposure of breasts, buttocks, or other body parts and disallowing any person from wearing a bathing suit farther than 500 feet from the water; in 1970 miniskirts were banned outright.
The signage law that Jerry Della Femina crossed is one of the most strictly enforced. The village passed its very first signage ordinance in 1921, just a year after it was incorporated. By that time the highway already had eighty billboards, and the women of the Ladies Village Improvement Society actually went out with saws and hatchets and cut them to the ground, so that by 1926 East Hampton was known as the “signless town.” Currently the size, color, and placement of all signs in the village must be pre-approved by the design Review Board. A retail store’s awning can have only the name of the store on the flap, not what it sells. Nothing sold inside the store can be placed outside, not even newspapers on a wire rack. Nor are florists allowed to have wagons of colorful flowers in front of their stores. Even roadside farm stands are regulated—they have to grow on their own land 80 percent of whatever is displayed.
Neon signs have also been banned, even those already in place are being slowly phased out. A neon sign inside a place of business in the village—for example, a sign for a brand of beer—has to be hidden so that it can’t be seen through the window from the street and, in any event, at least four feet from the entrance. Stickers on the front door, including those for credit cards, must be orderly and leave 80 percent of the door unobscured. Vending machines with lights are forbidden. Bottle-redemption machines are banned from in front of the A & P. Except for ice cream, stores are not allowed to sell take-out food, on the principle that it would be unseemly for people to eat while walking up and down the streets. Entire kinds of businesses are outlawed in the village as well, including car dealerships, convenience stores, and gas stations, except for the ones already there. The design review board has also banned the display of outdoor art in the historical district; even Guild Hall, the repository of the town’s artistic heritage, was once forced to remove the sculptures of artists William King and Tony Rosenthal from its front lawn. “East Hampton has an image to uphold,” King griped. “Prissy and tearoomy.”
All these strictures and covenants are imposed in an already contentious atmosphere. Lawsuits and legal brawls are rife between the town and its citizens, neighbor against neighbor, for many reasons similar to the causes of so many libel lawsuits in East Hampton in the 1600s: to define status and turf. Also there are so many “killers” in the Hamptons, as Jerry puts it. Not many of its denizens arrived there by being mediocre in their endeavors. A lucky few might have inherited their money, but most of the newcomers in the Hamptons made their money by being the toughest, most competitive in their fields. “It’s very difficult to believe,” Jerry said, “that people who work twenty-four hours a day Monday through Friday doing what they do, which includes screwing people out of things, would stop screwing people on Saturday and Sunday.”
Inarguably, the summer weekend crowd finds it hard to leave the aggression of Manhattan behind. They arrive in droves each year with a sense of entitlement, and the level of rudeness and violence palpably rises. (“The Hamptons are so beautiful,” sighed one fashion editor from Italy, “but so violent.”) The local newspapers annually carry editorials beseeching civility on the streets and roadways, and in the late eighties the East Hampton Chamber of Commerce tried to launch a “Be Cool” campaign, which presumably failed. During the summer season the local papers are filled with reports of visitors in their $80,000 luxury cars having punch-outs over parking spots, or shoving matches at East Hampton’s swanky foodstuffs store, the Barefoot Contessa, over who will get the last of the wheat berry salad. Motorists can’t seem to be bothered to pull to the side of the road to let an ambulance through—and as for the local authorities, a few summers ago an irate Manhattan woman beat a police officer with a baguette for trying to give her a ticket.
Spoiled people get frustrated easily in East Hampton, in part because it is the great sociological leveler: Everybody is rich or famous. Celebrities and millionaires are chock-a-block, many richer and more famous than Jerry Della Femina. Fame has never proved to be an advantage with the establishment. Faye Dunaway found out how unmoved the village zoning board of appeals was by her acting ability when she made a tearful appearance at a meeting in an attempt to get permission to build a swimming pool in the wetlands behind her house off Egypt Lane. Standing at a podium in Town Hall, she spoke dramatical
ly of her son’s need to learn to swim, her eyes tearing. When she was finished, one of the board members, a Bonacker with fifteen generations behind him, said to her, “Miss Dunaway, we have a Maidstone Club up there you can join and let your son swim anytime he wants, you know? But we can’t let you build a swimming pool in the wetlands.” Of course, the Maidstone Club would never accept Faye Dunaway, not that she would join anyway. She sold the house and moved away.
The various boards sometimes seem guilty of caprice when confronted with power and unlimited money. Developer and onetime New York Post owner Peter Kalikow spent $40,000 to successfully petition the zoning board of appeals for permission to build a floating dock in Three Mile Harbor to accommodate his 137-foot yacht, and then he was denied permission to build a catwalk to get to it. It took Paul Simon more than three years to find a sunny spot on his Montauk property to put a swimming pool that would satisfy the various zoning boards and environmental agencies, and the zoning board of appeals flat-out turned down violinist Itzhak Perlman’s request to build a tennis court on a piece of property that didn’t have a house on it. (Perlman has a sign in front of his house that says OLE KESEF, which loosely translates from Hebrew as “serious money.”)
Philistines at the Hedgerow Page 28