Philistines at the Hedgerow

by Steven Gaines

  “Wait a minute,” Jerry said, “Does the design review board have the authority to grant me outdoor dining?”

  “Well… no,” Morey said.

  “So then, you’re not empowered to take it away either.”

  At this there was heated debate among the agitated board members; minutes later they grudgingly voted to give Jerry’s restaurant a certificate of occupancy. Jerry went home triumphant, and the following week invitations were mailed for an opening party on August 8. Yet just two days before opening, Jerry was at home in Heaven’s Gate when he was informed that the design review board had later reconvened in an emergency session and rescinded the restaurant’s certificate of occupancy. He was told that Clayton Morey and the board felt railroaded, that they had second thoughts about giving the go-ahead, and that unless he signed a document stating he would not have outdoor dining, he could not open. If he hurried, he had just enough time to cancel the party.

  Jerry was standing in the kitchen of his home, looking at the ocean, when he dialed Clayton Morey at his condominium on Pantigo Road. “You fuck!” Jerry roared at him. “I am going to kill you! I am going to destroy you!”

  Said Morey, “That Jerry has got the biggest ego. There’s nothing like his ego. He surrounded himself with yes men and when somebody said no to him, they got fired. Well, he couldn’t fire me.”

  After things calmed down a bit, and Jerry threatened to take full-page ads in the local papers, Morey and the design review board decided to give Jerry his certificate of occupancy after all, without the no-outdoor-dining pledge, as long as he guaranteed he wouldn’t enlarge his seating capacity. Della Femina’s opened in August 1993 with a celebrity-packed gala, and it has been packing them in ever since. The New York Times awarded Della Femina’s three stars, and the eighty-one-seat eatery generates an estimated revenue of $180,000 per seat annually. The ugly wall in question is covered by a trellis and vines and has never looked prettier, and there has never been any outdoor dining.

  But there was blood of honor spilled on the streets of East Hampton. A little more than a year later, when Jerry was told to remove the pumpkins, he said no.

  4

  JERRY DELLA FEMINA and David Silver were arraigned by Judge James R. Ketcham on twenty-seven violations of the East Hampton village sign laws and were released on their own recognizance. The public-relations backlash was swift. Screenwriter-director Nora Ephron had T-shirts printed that said, FREE THE EAST HAMPTON 2. Writer Suzanne O’Malley offered to create a Della Femina Defense Fund, and a friend of Jerry’s sent him a chocolate cake with a file inside. The upcoming trial, predicted Newsday, would be “East Hampton’s version of the Scopes monkey trial.”

  It turned out that there was no trial. Several months later Judge Ketcham dismissed twenty-three of the twenty-seven counts against Jerry and David, saying that the pumpkins “failed to utilize letters, words, or figures” and under the law could not be considered signs. Ketcham later recused himself from the case, and the Pumpkin Prosecution was moved to neighboring Southampton, where on March 22, 1994, Judge Edward Burke dismissed the remaining charges “in the name of justice.”

  “A pumpkin is what it’s been since the beginning of time,” Jerry exalted outside the courthouse, “and that’s a pumpkin.”

  But Jerry was far from finished with the village. Even before the charges against him were dismissed, he lodged two federal lawsuits, one challenging the constitutionality of the sign law, the other claiming that his civil rights had been violated by the village, charging “false arrest, malicious prosecution, and false imprisonment.” He was asking $500,000 in damages and demanding a jury trial, saying that he hoped the village board members lived long lives, “because I’m going to sue them until either I’m dead or they’re dead.”

  David Silver did not join Jerry in the lawsuit against the village. Although he was “behind Jerry from the start” on the issues, he felt that his point was made when the charges were dismissed. Silver instead turned his energies to raising $5 million to build a much-needed recreation center for local children. He was still punished for his involvement in the Pumpkin Prosecution. He was turned out of his seat on the village planning board, he was told, for having been party to an incident that was perceived to publicly embarrass the village.

  “The cartoon version of what happened,” Judy Licht said, “is that Jerry was the brash outsider, and the traditional people picked on him. But this was something deeper, this was happening long before we ever got there. Evan Frankel was possibly another example, and it was probably happening for thirty years before that. What was different about Jerry is that he’s not very Christian when he’s crossed. He became a lightning rod. He brought it out into the open. He became a symbol of every newcomer who ever wanted to do something in East Hampton and was told he couldn’t. But what happened in the briar patch that is the Hamptons is, that like Tar Baby and Brer Rabbit, they wanted to stick it to him, and instead they got stuck.”

  In 1996, while his lawsuit was still wending its way through federal court, Jerry Della Femina decided that in the grand old American way of political dissent, he would run for village trustee. He noted that in the past 401 votes, the town board had voted unanimously 400 times and that the 1,500 residents of East Hampton village were so complacent with the status quo, the village board had been composed of practically the same men for the past fifteen years. In the last election, the races for trustee and mayor went uncontested. Two of the trustee seats were up for grabs in 1996, and although the election was a runoff, and candidates didn’t run against anyone specifically, Jerry announced that he was running against one trustee in particular, William C. Heppenheimer III, one of the most respected and influential men in East Hampton.

  5

  VILLAGE TRUSTEE William C. Heppenheimer III—“Heppy,” as he was known at the Maidstone Club, where he was a past president (1973–79) and third-generation member—lived in a large shingled house on Cove Hollow Farm, located on one of the knuckles of land that protrudes onto Georgica Pond. As a village trustee, he was always impeccably dressed in public, often in tan slacks and blue blazer, but at home dressed casually, like a gentleman farmer, in blue jeans, green sweater, and expensive hiking boots. Seventy-five years old, Heppenheimer had a ruddy complexion and cold blue eyes. Although he mumbled a little and mispronounced names (he repeatedly called Harry Macklowe “Matlow”), he was fit for his age, continuing to ski in the winter and vacation in Montana in the summer. His mother’s family were Millers, one of the oldest names in the village, and his father’s family, he said, have roots back to the Mayflower. Heppenheimer’s aunt and uncle once owned all the land on which he sat, Cove Hollow Farms, which over the past ten years he has subdivided into an elite pondview community of homes in the $5–$10 million range. Before Heppenheimer went into real estate development, he was a retired executive at a printing ink company. It was from Heppenheimer that Steven Spielberg and Steve Ross bought the stretch of farmland just across the pond from their homes to protect their view.

  Heppenheimer was eager to be interviewed about the village and its problems but was wary of being quoted. This predicament is a little like that of the village itself: anxious to have its say in affairs, but not willing to take the responsibility that goes with it. Heppenheimer admitted he was, frankly, afraid of Jerry Della Femina and stirring up a hornet’s nest that he believed was at rest. He handily defeated Jerry in the village trustee race, and the civil rights lawsuit had been settled. In any event, the village officials already had more trouble on their hands. Developer Harry Macklowe was suing them now, for much the same reasons Jerry did, saying that village officials had an “all-out vendetta against him,” accusing them of favoring Martha Stewart in their property dispute.

  Bad publicity. Heppenheimer believed it was that kind of bad publicity, and the publicity Jerry generated, that’s really hurt East Hampton. He thought these new people were arrogant, that they had no respect for rules. He was astonished to be told
that Jerry may have polarized the Them versus Us issue in East Hampton, because according to Heppenheimer, Them versus Us simply did not exist. “That’s their vision,” he said. “I’m objective and I don’t see it. The new people could fit right in,” he added. “They could go to the beach or join the tennis club.”

  “Are you married?” he asked a visitor to his spacious home, which was decorated in cheery white and yellows. The pond glittered just beyond the large windows of his book-filled den, the sun hard and bright, and across the way, Calvin Klein’s mansion stood darkly against the dunes. An old yellow Labrador retriever stretched out on the carpet at Heppenheimer’s feet. “The Maidstone Club is a family place,” he said, for “families,” and for “families with kids.” He was affronted to hear that the Maidstone Club might be thought anti-Semitic, because as he said, there were now several Jewish members. He was even more affronted when his visitor pointed out to him, after he suggested that East Hampton could “look like Coney Island” if rules weren’t adhered to, that in some quarters “Coney Island” is believed to be a code word. Heppenheimer was outraged, in fact.

  For two years before Jerry ran against Heppenheimer, ostensibly for trustee, the advertising executive had been excoriating him in a weekly column he began writing in the Independent, the newspaper his daughter, Jodi, had founded with several partners in 1993. Jerry bought a 20 percent interest in the newspaper in 1994 and awarded himself a column, called “Jerry’s Ink.” Although the circulation of the weekly Independent was less than 10,000 at the time, “Jerry’s Ink” became some of the best-read 1,000 words in the East End. The column was just like him—clever, outrageous, and for many, too close to the bone. Some of the columns, although perhaps perfectly honest, seemed too ruthlessly mean, even nasty, and they began to divide public opinion about him. In describing his inspiration for the columns, he once wrote that a little devil alighted on his shoulder and said, “Go make fun of them.”

  “Them” were usually Clayton Morey, Bill Heppenheimer, and the village’s respected mayor, Paul F. Rickenbach Jr., who was a former East Hampton police detective and onetime estate manager for Time Warner’s Steve Ross and other wealthy residents. Jerry described Rickenbach as a former “house-sitter… a fine house-sitter from what I’ve heard, since nobody has reported their houses missing recently.” In one column Jerry suggested that he might enlist his dog, Jackson, to run for mayor against Rickenbach in the next election, although Jackson bit people. Among other talents Jackson had that Rickenbach did not, Jerry wrote, was that “Jackson could lick himself.… Anyway, it would be better to be known as East Hampton the town with the dog mayor than East Hampton the town who handcuffs a merchant.”

  As for Heppenheimer, Jerry accused him of being “the man who pulls all the strings in the village of East Hampton.” Jerry wrote a column in which he tried to enlist his Thanksgiving turkey to run for trustee against Heppenheimer. When the turkey reveals to Jerry that he’s Jewish (“Reformed,” the turkey explains), Jerry is unabashed. “I must confess,” he wrote, “the thought of running a Jewish turkey against trustee Heppenheimer amuses me.”

  It did not amuse Heppenheimer. Indeed, the columns drove Heppenheimer and his colleagues “up the wall,” he said. But no matter how nasty Jerry got, Heppenheimer and the other village officials made a pact not to publicly respond. They managed to keep a stiff upper lip for more than a year of taunting, until finally someone responded for them, if unofficially. Few could have had better credentials than Averill Dayton Geus, a woman whose ancestors founded the village of East Hampton, who was the manager of the Home, Sweet Home Museum, and who was the author of the elegantly written commemorative book The Maidstone Club, The Second Fifty Years, 1941 to 1991 (Jeannette Rattray wrote about the first fifty years). Mrs. Geus wrote not to the Independent, where Jerry’s column appeared, but to the East Hampton Star, and brought the issue of Them versus Us into the bas-relief of black-and-white. Mrs. Geus dubbed Jerry’s column “Jerrysink,” and Jerry himself, “Mr. DeMeena.” She called him a “misguided, misinformed wannabe set loose in the Hamptons.” She said he was a “short-term resident with a beach-baked brain” and called him “New York ego gone berserk.” She lectured him on the sign laws and the town history, and added, “He should know we have been bullied many times through the years by more famous people.… We are still here. They are not.”

  The following week, Judy Licht responded on her husband’s behalf. “Silly Jerry,” she wrote. “He actually believes that hard work and democracy can take the place of years of refinement and good breeding. I’m sure the Indians felt the same way about your ancestors as you feel about my husband. It’s called the ‘there goes the neighborhood’ syndrome. Certainly you can crush my husband the same way your ancestors crushed those ungrateful Indians. And believe me, he deserves some crushing. The man is a hopeless egomaniac who thinks that just because he employs over 100 village citizens in his establishments, he has the right to have some measure of control over his own life.”

  In the spring of 1996 Jerry officially announced that he was running for trustee on his own ticket, the Village Party. The three men up for reelection, Heppenheimer, Mayor Rickenbach, and trustee Edwin L. Sherrill, a twenty-one-year veteran of the board whose family roots in East Hampton went back to the 1700s, marshaled forces and formed the Hook Mill Party. “We took his challenge very seriously,” Heppenheimer said. “With Jerry, you had no choice. If Jerry had gotten on the board, he would have wrecked it.” Another independent candidate, Tony Minardi, a local businessman and owner of a fish store, joined the race under the East Hampton Party banner. One small blessing was that as soon as Jerry announced his candidacy, he was obligated to stop writing columns about political issues in the Independent.

  Heppenheimer still couldn’t help but laugh out loud when he thought about the campaign. “You gotta say it was a comedy,” he said, chuckling. “East Hampton had never seen anything like it. In the past, village elections were low, low key.” So relaxed, in fact, that one year the incumbent didn’t even bother to vote for himself. “I ran four times myself and never raised a penny,” Heppenheimer said. “You didn’t have to. But with Jerry coming into the picture, we raised thirty-six thousand dollars.” That turned out to be only half the $70,000 campaign fund that Jerry put together, mainly from his own pocket. It was the most money ever spent on a village election in the history of New York State.

  Jerry, whom the Hook Mill Party described as “unsuited” for public office, characterized the campaign as “past nasty and headed for dirty” for the New York Times. Trustee Sherrill gravely warned the voters, “A former mayor once told me that once the outsiders take the village away from us, we’ll never get it back.” Rickenbach agreed that the situation was dire. “In some factions,” the mayor said, “this is being looked at as a potential hostile takeover of the village.” Everybody grumbled about “Madison Avenue muscle” taking over Main Street.

  The campaign reached some sort of a nadir the night of the televised debate, shown locally on cable channel 27, LTV, one week before the June 18 election. The general tone of the evening was set in the opening moments when Heppenheimer, meeting Jerry face-to-face for the first time, refused to shake his hand. The bad feeling escalated after Edwin Sherrill called Jerry an “asshole” under his breath, clearly picked up by his lapel microphone and broadcast over the air. And the discussion completely disintegrated when Mayor Rickenbach contemptuously accused Jerry of running for trustee out of a “personal vendetta” over the Pumpkin Prosecution.

  “I won!” Jerry insisted. “I don’t have any vendetta! I won. People who lose have a vendetta. I won.”

  “The charges were dismissed, you didn’t win!” Heppenheimer interjected.

  “You alleged your civil rights were violated!” the mayor hissed at Jerry. “You poor guy! You media mogul! You advertising guru! You brought Madison Avenue onto Main Street in East Hampton, and that’s not what we’re all about. Learn to live in East Hampton and emb
race and work with the community, Jerry.”

  A record number of voters turned out at the polls—857 of them, more than half the population. People were so eager to vote that some turned up who weren’t even registered. One determined man arrived at the polls in a wheelchair with an oxygen mask. Mayor Rickenbach won his uncontested election with 690 votes, and Edwin Sherrill and Bill Heppenheimer won their trustee seats in a landslide, with 568 and 492 votes, respectively. Tony Minardi came in third with 280. Jerry was five votes behind, at 275. It cost him a grand total of $200 a vote in campaign spending. “It was worth every penny,” Jerry insisted. “I showed my children how the American system of politics and dissent worked.”

  The Hook Mill Party may have won the election, but it still hadn’t won the war with Jerry; his $500,000 civil rights lawsuit was still pending trial. Apparently, having learned a lesson from the Trupin affair in Southampton, the trustees decided that although it was a bitter pill to swallow, in March 1997, they agreed to pay Jerry $42,500 to cover his legal fees—$10,000 of which was the village’s out-of-pocket insurance deductible. Presumably, the expense of the settlement will trickle down to the residents of the village in higher insurance premiums. In retrospect, the settlement seems like a small amount of money for such a big to-do. “It was never about money,” said Jerry, “it was about principle, and I won.”

  Months later, sitting in his den, Heppenheimer didn’t think anybody won. He mumbled that neither side was really happy with the settlement, but he couldn’t comment further because of a court-imposed gag order. “If it was true that Jerry somehow managed to polarize the village,” he said, “the results of the trustee election would have been very different.”

  Heppenheimer offered to escort his guest outside to his car, and the old yellow Lab waddled along by his side. The sky was cloudless and the air cool and still as Heppenheimer absentmindedly scratched the dog behind the ear. “To say that Jerry divided the community is way overexaggerated,” he said, squinting. “What Jerry did is, he gave East Hampton too much goddamn publicity. Now everybody wants to come to the Hamptons, and it got worse since he started shooting off his mouth.”