Further Lane
Authors: James Brady
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Contents
Everyone is Raving about James Brady's Further Lane!
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This book is for Sarah Kelly Konig.
ONE
Here, if anywhere in America, you could still find the sweet life â¦
I'd been away from East Hampton, working in Europe and North Africa as a correspondent, and now I was back in a wonderful place where I'd grown up and found it even more desirable than I remembered, lovelier, more lush and sensual, richer if that was possible. More glitz as well, you had to admit, and that discomfitted the local gentry, who saw celebrity and its attendant publicity as a cross that decent Protestants were expected to bear. No matter. Here, if anywhere in America, it seemed you could still find the sweet life. A little money was required, of course. If only you had a little money, New Money or Old; in East Hampton anything was possible â¦
A pretty nice place.
Just east of our house, where Further Lane meets Spaeth Lane, there used to be an actual landing strip that Mr. Roberts put in, so that the small planes of that era belonging to the rich, to men with flair and imagination, could land and deposit their passengers within, quite literally, a few hundred yards' stroll of their own homes. You would have had to offer sedan chairs to provide greater ease and consideration. From my own bedroom at night when birdsong and the whir of insects and most things had stilled, you could hear the ocean, the surf slamming down, in a metronomic
bang! bang! bang!
over and over. If that didn't help you sleep, what would? And toward dawn, you might hear the far-off wailing whistle of the night freight at the grade crossings. That was nice, too, suggesting the lonely sounds Americans used to hear in lonely places. And as many houses had gone up here, how much development, the vast monies spent, early mornings along Further Lane you might still see, through the kitchen window, a deer browsing on the lower boughs of our fruit trees or a young red fox trotting purposefully along the road or a covey of pheasants scuttling to safety in the hedge or a rabbit rousing itself for a new day's frolic. Pretty nice as well to be back amid such memories in a familiar and congenial place, where generations of my family lived and where I had spent pleasant chunks of my own youth.
On my return, even the women seemed more gorgeous than I remembered.
You could see them, too, from the house, passing on Further Lane, the long-legged flat-bellied young women and girls who belonged to the rich men. Or who, arguably more erotic and exciting, were themselves rich. You couldn't really tell whose the wealth was; no Dun & Bradstreet reports being issued on the matter. Now that I was back and writing, I took occasional breaks from the laptop to stand lazily smoking in the sunshine of my father's lawn, and felt the familiar tug when they ran and biked and Roller-bladed by, or sped past in cars specifically designed to show off the exquisite aerodynamics of freshly washed hair, riding the slipstream in a summer's sun. Even their cars were right: old Bentleys and new Ferraris, classic Jags and the odd Aston-Martin, Land Rovers and Lamborghinis, tiny Porsches and histrionically stretched limos.
It was hard to tell along Further Lane which were more beautiful, which sleeker and more expensive: the cars or the women.
Further Lane is only two miles long but offers bonus glimpses of the Atlantic as it ambles parallel to the ocean, across rich men's lawns and working cornfields and slim groves. Green farms, blue waters, and crashing surf; you might well be in Mayo or elsewhere on the west coast of Ireland. These were the pastures of what geologists call the “Eastern Plain” of the village. A local historian described Further Lane as “large estates ⦠grand country houses with extensive gardens on parcels of five to ten acres and more,” and concluded, glumly I thought, “The era of prosperity in America which made these estates possible ended in the 1930s.”
Oh, but they were splendid, those estates, those gardens, those country houses, every bit as splendid as the hard-bodied women and girls who pranced last summer on Further Lane before the eyes of a young man who was roughly handled by the mullahs in far-off Algiers and, even more painful, bruised by a distant, careless London beauty. How could I resist being drawn to such women, smoothly cool yet erotically beckoning, all the while (and realistically) suspecting they were unattainable.
TWO
The most beautiful Main Street in America â¦
If you follow Liz Smith and
People
magazine or watch
Entertainment Tonight
on the tube and have a subscription to
Vanity Fair,
you may get the impression East Hampton is a Hollywood production, founded quite recently by Steven Spielberg, Demi Moore, and the Baldwin brothers. Those of us who live here know it wasn't motion picture people who first settled East Hampton but dry, cranky old Puritans out of Maidstone, England, wandering down via Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1640; the first movie stars not to arrive until slightly afterwards.
In 1921 Rudolph Valentino made
The Sheik
along the beach between East Hampton and Montauk at Napeague, our local dunes impersonating the Sahara, the tents and horses imported on the Long Island Railroad. Wally Reid, the silent film actor so admired by Scott Fitzgerald for his Arrow shirt-advertisement good looks, owned that big ivied house with its mullioned windows on Further Lane adjacent to the golf course, just west of Lasata, which was “Black Jack” Bouvier's place where Jackie and Lee grew up. Mary Pickford, briefly, had a place. So did Ring Lardner and one of the Barrymores. In the postwar summer of 1946, Clark Gable visited East Hampton, played a couple of rounds of golf at the Maidstone Club, and lunched there on the clubhouse patio, thrilling female members. Frederic March came out and so did Kate Hepburn and Spence-ah. She played ferocious tennis while his tastes ran sedately to croquet and old-fashioneds. Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe consummated their marriage here, one supposed passionately, honeymooning in a borrowed Amagansett cottage. More recently, Faye Dunaway took a place on Egypt Lane but sold it back when the Village wouldn't let her put in a pool that close to the wetlands. Until they split Dina Merrill and Cliff Robertson lived in a beach house set atop the dunes just off Highway Behind the Pond. She's still there. Designer John Weitz and his wife, Susan (she starred with Monty Clift in
Freud
), own a hilltop red barn of a place. Roy Scheider's here. Alan Alda. Alan Pakula who made
To Kill A Mockingbird
and
Klute
lives on Georgica Pond. Woody Allen was supposed to be building or buying a place. Never did, I don't believe. Randy Quaid. Kathleen Turner. Anna and Rupert Murdoch, before he purchased 20th Century-Fox, rented a beachfront place on Mrs. Tyson's Further Lane compound, and made an offer to buy but the old lady wasn't selling. Or else we would have had another Hollywood tycoon out here. When we already had Spielberg and Geffen and, of course, Mickey and Mikey: Mickey being Mr. Schulhof, who had been head of Sony USA and therefore the boss of Michael Jackson, among others; and Mikey being Mr. Fuchs, who headed HBO and did other clever things for Time Warner.
Diana Ross almost lived here; but you knew that. Nearly became a member of the Maidstone Club as well, which for some time now had Catholics and Jews, but not yet an African-American. There was considerable stir when Ms. Ross married her Norwegian shipbuilding magnate, who'd long been a member of the Maidstone, though rarely dropping by. And now, as his wife, Diana Ross would also be a member in good standing. Except that, for reasons of his own that may have had to do more with sailing than with snobbery, the Norwegian decided to drop his membership and concentrate his loyalties instead on a yacht club in Greenwich, Connecticut.
The Maidstone would have gathered Diana Ross to its bosom and been the better for it, I believe. But it was not to be. And off she went to Connecticut and an entirely different cast of snobs.
But hers was a somewhat unique situation. What it came down to was that film people liked the place and took to the Hamptons almost from the start. Trouble was, until the jetliner, planes from the coast were too slow and lacked range. By now, of course, all that's been fixed. Not only has the jet come along but the fast chopper, landing at small local airports and on spacious private lawns, and seaplanes, some of them quite old and classic, others new wave and high tech, that splash down on our myriad bays and coves and even the larger ponds. So that, to an extent that amuses or perplexes or infuriates local people, East Hampton is referred to as “Malibu East.” Or rather more elegantly by the newly arrived essayist Peter Mayle, as “Hollywood
sur mer.
”
Old Money East Hampton chose to pretend the cinema had not yet caught on and that nothing at all had changed. Old Money out here is like that. But even in East Hampton things had changed and it was foolish to deny it. Take last summer.
With the great Barbra Streisand, Demi and her fashionable pal Donna Karan, Patricia Duff Perelman (was she about to drop the Perelman?), New Money Hannah Cutting and her decidedly Old Money rival Pam Phythian, Kim Basinger, and one-woman conglomerate Martha Stewart all in residence simultaneously for the summer, it seemed only a matter of time before, having achieved critical mass, East Hampton went up in some sort of spontaneous combustion.
The only surprise, with so many dazzling and impossibly high-powered egos enjoying “the season” in the same little old resort village, was that until the very end, nothing happened.
Well, almost nothing.
In mid-August a great white whale came ashore dead, gashed and bloody, a very rare thing here, leading those who believed in omens and portents to ponder and cluck about what it meant, if anything. The whale floated in after a collision at sea with the whirling steel screws of a big ship and already dead, but still bleeding, drew vast schools of feeding sharks that tracked its reeking course all the way in, until it grounded foully ashore on our famous Old Beach, where the sharks, large and small, slid wriggling on their bellies literally up onto the wet sand to hit again at the huge whale and tear away another chunk of flesh, before wriggling back again into the bloody water. That was something to see, eight-foot sharks up and feeding, on the same sand where pretty girls sunned and your kids built castles. A bloody whale in the shallows, with hungry sharks to boot, pulled crowds of the curious from all along the East Hampton shore, especially delighting little boys who darted excitedly this way and that, much too near the sharks for their nervous, scolding mothers. But as the novelty of a beached whale wore off, its stench became more powerful in the heat, and the whale eventually drove us all away, even the camera crews and small boys, until, at last, the Coast Guard threw a cable on the carcass and towed it out to sea. That, finally, emptied the beach.