A Hamptons Christmas Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter One - … the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade.

  Chapter Two - As Cotton Increase and Mather might’ve said, the man was “a hissing and a byword.”

  Chapter Three - It’s my fault, the Mexican problem? I killed “Viva Zapata,” por favor?

  Chapter Four - Among Santa Claus’s “elves” were all those Spielberg children …

  Chapter Five - Outside, a light snow fell, the first of the season …

  Chapter Six - Bit of trouble scrambling about in small boats in the Yellow Sea …

  Chapter Seven - A randy old fellow, always trying to peek at girls in the ladies’ …

  Chapter Eight - “Just what is keelhauling? And does it hurt?”

  Chapter Nine - When Jackson Pollock crashed and burned, they planted him there …

  Chapter Ten - He drank hard and drove fast. And died trying not to hit a deer …

  Chapter Eleven - “Thats’s the honey wagon. John K. Ott’s cesspool service …”

  Chapter Twelve - Corny cards, silly notes. “You shall have great expectations . . .”

  Chapter Thirteen - Had I been prettier, my father would have spent more time with me …

  Chapter Fourteen - Burning churches, shooting priests, raping nuns at a great rate …

  Chapter Fifteen - Emma looked about as harmless and vulnerable as a scorpion.

  Chapter Sixteen - “Bill Gates? A nerdy guy in glasses. Invented the laptop or something …”

  Chapter Seventeen - Lefty Odets “nearly” helped break “the Westies” and “almost” went on Letterman …

  Chapter Eighteen - You fall in the Atlantic in winter. You’re dead within the hour …

  Chapter Nineteen - Sis drove a powerful Range Rover with the logo altered to read “Deranged Rover.”

  Chapter Twenty - He’ll look into a man’s eye and tell his age within a year.

  Chapter Twenty-one - Sister Infanta is repudiated privately by the order of Mother Teresa …

  Chapter Twenty-two - With Emma, not as a guest, but as a member of our family …

  Chapter Twenty-three - There’ll be some happy little Shinnecocks this Christmas.

  Chapter Twenty-four - “The count kept ordering wine. My mom had to speak sternly.”

  Chapter Twenty-five - “Not a child’s fault, of course. Your choice of parents.”

  Chapter Twenty-six - Like one of those old movies about Welsh coal miners. With Donald Crisp leading …

  Chapter Twenty-seven - Damned Marleys shut us out. Them and their Hollywood friends …

  Chapter Twenty-eight - I love Alix’s feet but prefer them toasty warm, if you know what I mean …

  Chapter Twenty-nine - Then Peanuts and the lads raised their voices a cappella with the Marines’ Hymn …

  Chapter Thrity - “Small blue sharks and dogfish was biting chunks out of me.”

  Chapter Thirty-one - The Danube, ferocious mit cannons, und Turks! Dose bastards!

  Chapter Thirty-two - The walk-in closet—the goddamned closet!—needs a $6,500 carpet …

  Chapter Thirty-three - A promising little firm headed by two men called Allen and Gates …

  Chapter Thirty-four - Jake and Brett are perfect together, always having cocktails and meeting bullfighters …

  Chapter Thirty-five - The Brides of Christ have a mail-order account at Bloomie’s.

  Chapter Thirty-six - “You’re not at all a plain girl. You’re a thin girl. Quelle différence …”

  Also by James Brady

  Copyright Page

  For my grandchildren, Sarah, Joe, and Nick

  Chapter One

  … the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade.

  Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner, heiress, and executor. She signed it. And Sis Marley’s name was good upon anything she chose to put her hand to. Old Marley was dead as a doornail. Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was dead as a doornail.

  This must be distinctly understood or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.

  A story which began here in East Hampton last December, the fortnight before Christmas, at 2:50 P.M. (just nine minutes late, which, for the Long Island Railroad, is precisely on schedule), when at our sleepy, single-track railroad station, a solitary passenger stepped off the noon train from Manhattan.

  The traveler was a convent schoolgirl from Switzerland, unexpected, alone, and unmet, but for the usual local cab idling at the curb and hoping for a fare. The child, perhaps nine or ten, no more, was small and slender, toting a few well-thumbed books, a glossy but carefully annotated year-old December issue of an American magazine, a Louis Vuitton duffle and matching backpack. She also clutched in one mittened hand—and from time to time consulted—a crudely drawn map which she now handed to the cab driver, before climbing into the back of his vehicle. The girl’s destination was a big old shingled house and tailored gardens on Lily Pond Lane, just off the Atlantic Ocean behind some hedges and an ivied, redbrick wall. I happened to know that house and who lived there. And would, within a few hours, become acquainted with our young visitor from abroad who, for private reasons of her own, and without the knowledge of its famous owner, had chosen the shingled house on Lily Pond Lane to celebrate her Christmas.

  Chapter Two

  As Cotton Increase and Mather might’ve said, the man was “a hissing and a byword.”

  Maybe you already know the Hamptons out of season, with the “summer people” gone. I’m not saying it’s a better place in winter, just that it’s interesting in different ways. Those who keep their houses open year-round, either locals who have no other homes or fortunate folk whose work can be done from here, or who no longer need to work, are, in the main, very cool people indeed. They maintain a low profile, not bothering about image or needing to make an impression, which may be the most impressive thing about the people who winter out here: They are so secure they don’t have to impress anyone. And that’s what, for many of us, makes this the best “season” of all.

  East Hampton, where my family’s lived for generations (the Beechers and the Stowes, both), starts getting into its out-of-season mode right after Thanksgiving. Which is when each year Buell-Meserve, the Gin Lane magnate, ships the potted palms south to his Palm Beach compound adjacent to the Breakers, where they will sit until he ships them back north in April. Buell-Meserve’s palms seem to be a sort of signal, like the lowering of a flag, and by late November the private jets are no longer flying in, and the big, sleek yachts have pulled out of the local marinas and gone south to wherever it is big yachts go in winter. In the waterfront bars and restaurants, at the boatyards and the docks, you no longer encounter the yachtsmen’s tough, smart-as-paint professional crews and craggy, squinty-eyed seafarer skippers, or the silver-haired, mahogany-tanned boatowners with their younger women.

  This is not to suggest a flight of cash or of beauty or, heaven forfend, celebrity! from East Hampton. Simply that the village’s pace slows and its frenzy calms. An example of what I mean: down that little alley past the side porch of Ralph Lauren’s shop, The Blue Parrot restaurant (“Killer Mexican!” cuisine) has staged its absolutely final Surfer Dude party of the season, with bikinied waitresses taking turns lying on the bar so Kelly the barmaid or Bruce the bartender can pour tequila into their belly but
tons, to be lapped up (neat, no limes, no salt) by the regulars.

  Winter people in East Hampton are slightly superior to such inseason capers. And a good thing, too, you might echo.

  And unless we have a nor‘easter, even the weather can be pretty good. Well into December you see bikers swift as Anquetil, bent over the handlebars, smoothly shifting gears and whisking silently along under the boughed canopies of our narrow country lanes, past the courts where well-groomed people in tennis whites are pock! pock! pocking! yellow balls around the red clay, and glimpse the occasional foursome out there playing an unhurried eighteen at the Maidstone Club. There’s usually a spirited season-ending football game between East Hampton and Southampton Highs. And the Montauk Rugby Club fields a powerful team every weekend through the winter, thick-legged young men with bloody rags around their heads, playing hard rugger at Herrick Field, behind what until recently was the A & P, but is now called Waldbaum’s and is only marginally less tacky.

  All those trendy new boutiques that opened in May, fully stocked with merchandise and hope, are shuttered, gone bust most of them. The Wally Findlay Galleries have cut to a skeleton staff (Cartier is closed for the year), and the Irish kids who work summers as maids and barmen and caddies are all back at Trinity College, Dublin. And making mischief there, too, you can be sure. Migratory ducks in their thousands squawk and call as they whistle overhead, scooting in low and navigating south, leaving the place to far-too-many Canada geese and to our resident swans that winter here and don’t migrate further than from one Hamptons pond to the next. Without any summer people, you can park on Main Street and get a seat in the movie house. There’s no need to reserve a table (except perhaps on Saturday night) for dinner at Jerry Della Femina’s or Peconic Coast, or queue up for hot, fresh doughnuts in the morning at Dreesen’s on Newtown Lane. And Schmidt’s the grocer (which used to be The Chicken House) doesn’t run out of the New York Times halfway through Sunday morning (in midsummer, the cause of more than the occasional fistfight over a Style section).

  And if we’re lucky and get a hard freeze early, the shallow, algaegreen town pond turns overnight into a Brueghel painting (Brueghel the Elder, I believe but can’t be certain), with kids playing hockey, tweedy old gentlemen in long wool scarves skating with their hands elegantly behind their backs, little girls twirling, boys loudly chasing, and long-legged honeys gliding smoothly along, short-skirted and all rosy. A few miles to the west there’s iceboating on the polished, glistening first-ice of Mecox Bay, where the fearless get up terrifying, madcap races. In some years we have one of those Atlantic-effect blizzards that comes booming up the coast and drops a couple of feet of snow out here on the east end of Long Island before it moves on to Nantucket and the Vineyard and ends up whacking Cape Cod. That’s when our precious four-wheel drive vehicles cease being mere grownup toys and status symbols and earn their price, and cross-country skiers materialize on Huntting Lane, and toboggans on the Maidstone fairways, and distinguished, elderly gents are not at all embarrassed to be seen down on their knees building snowmen for the grandchildren, while in New York and Hartford and New Haven, they may be settling for flurries or a gray inch of slush. And there’s our annual Santa Claus Parade Saturday morning along Main Street which, for corniness and good cheer, even Mr. Rowland H. Macy might approve and envy.

  Then, around Memorial Day, summer returns and another “Hamptons Season” begins. And from then through Labor Day, forget it. You’ve read Liz Smith and Page Six and the other columns, and New York magazine, so you know all about that and don’t have to be told.

  This story isn’t about the “season,” but about Christmas, and specifically a Hamptons Christmas, even though, among our sensible winter people, there are some who slough off Christmas as bunkum, Hallmark Card sentimentality, strictly for kids or oldsters reliving their youth. Not me, of course; I’m not like that about Christmas.

  Never will be!

  I realized, of course, how and why it all began two thousand years ago, a long way off in Bethlehem, and how it was then popularized in various places and a dozen styles: in Prague by Good King Wenceslas, in Victorian England by Scrooge and his Three —Ghosts, in the Black Forest by “Stille Nacht,” and in Flanders fields by British Tommies and German soldiers calling brief halt to the killing and singing carols to each other from the trenches, and by a defeated Jimmy Stewart jumping from that smalltown bridge, and by a letter in the New York paper (was it the Evening Sun?) which began, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus …”

  I’d seen Christmas in plenty of places, starting in Paris where I was born and largely raised. And in Harvard Square and Boston Common as a student and while covering wars in odd corners and once in Moscow where they didn’t have Santa Claus at all but Grandfather Frost. And once aboard QE2 between Southampton and New York with a smiling, broad-faced, flaxen-tressed, blue-eyed girl who shortly afterward would break my heart by marrying someone else (and richer).

  Now there was a Christmas!

  Yet I never realized just how fully Christmas is meant not merely for children and old men, but for damned near all of us. Not until last December, when so much happened along Further Lane, did that realization truly get hold of me; Further Lane, where my father the Admiral has his big place and I have the gatehouse, and to which Her Ladyship, Alix Dunraven, flew in on the morning BA flight from Heathrow to spend the hols with us.

  Even though I wasn’t at all sure a sophisticated Londoner like Alix, being a Sloane Ranger, stabled in blue-blood Belgravia and all, a name perennially dropped by Nigel Dempster in the Daily Mail, would be charmed by our out-of-season Hamptons. Mightn’t she be bored dotty, considering the high drama and derring-do of our adventures over recent East Hampton summers? But feeling as I did about Lady Alix, as nuts about her as I was, I thought the game surely worth the candle.

  And I was very excited, almost childlike, in the realization that of all the times we’d been together, the days and nights and loving sunrises, I’d never, not even once, waked on a Christmas morning with Alix in my arms, with Her Ladyship drowsy there beside me, the best gift of all.

  But then it turned out no one in East Hampton last winter was to be even marginally bored. All because Martha Stewart chose to keep Christmas, not at the gracious shingled house on Lily Pond Lane, but at her home in Connecticut. Which meant that a little girl with Louis Vuitton luggage, a platinum card, a return seat to Europe on the Concorde, and visions of a fairytale Christmas filling her head, got off the train at East Hampton station on a chill December day, only to find there was no one there awaiting her, “no room in the inn.” Which swiftly caught up my father, Lady Alix, the Methodist pastor, Reverend Parker, Jesse Maine of the Shinnecock Indian Nation, the Bonackers, and all of us, in the strange child’s concerns, and in plots, intrigues, and conspiracies of every manner and sort. As well as in related events at the historic Old Churchyard in the East Hampton village of Springs, where for two centuries they’ve buried our gallant Baymen, at least until the mischief recently done there by the estate of the late Mr. Jacob Marley.

  De mortuis nil nisi bonum, we are taught. “Speak nothing but good of the dead.” Yet only a year or two after his death, people were not only speaking ill of Marley, there were those who insisted “Mean Jake” deserved to be denounced from the pulpit. Condemned in sermons as “a hissing and a byword,” much as was done hundreds of years earlier by colonial preachers Increase Mather and his brother Cotton. Nor would many in today’s East Hampton—and I include our local priests and ministers and other clerics, charitable, even saintly, men all—deny that’s precisely what Jacob Marley seemed to have become with his cranky, selfish, mean-spirited last will and testament:

  A “hissing and a byword,” damn him! “A hissing and a byword.”

  But had we been fair to Mean Jake? Or had the Village been too quick to draw up indictments and issue judgments? Surely, as Mark Twain once said of the devil, Marley, too, might have a case. Not much of a case, granted, but
a case nonetheless.

  Chapter Three

  It’s my fault, the Mexican problem? I killed “Viva Zapata,” por favor?

  My name is Beecher Stowe, linear descendant not of Cotton and Increase Mather, but of another early American family of preachers, among them the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher and hot-blooded (and lecherous) Lyman Beecher, who made their mark here a century and a half ago, some generations after the Mather brothers had their run up in nearby (and every bit as sanctimonious) Massachusetts Colony. And, as I’ve earlier established, I yield to no one, and that includes Bob Cratchit and the missus, as a sucker for Christmas. This despite the fact that we professional journalists are expected to be hard, skeptical, unemotional, cool cookies and nobody’s pushover. But we know all about stereotypes, don’t we?

  Let me admit my Christmas weaknesses up front: I love snow, the Three Wise Men, eggnog, Lord & Taylor’s windows, shepherds in the hills guarding their flocks, Salvation Army kettles on Fifth Avenue, reruns of Holiday Inn, the evergreens lighted along Park Avenue, “Adeste Fidelis” in Latin, crayoned letters to Santa, red noses, envelopes pressed into the hands of Manhattan doormen, how the windows steam up on cold evenings at P. J. Clarke’s, pretty girls throwing snowballs, Saks Fifth Avenue, the original Miracle on 34th Street with Maureen O’Hara and John Payne, red wool scarves, Wall Street bonuses, midnight mass (even, or maybe especially, for non-Catholics), Brooks Brothers’ main floor at 346 Madison, the yule log on television, “Silent Night,” the tree at Rockefeller Center, mittens, and a nostalgic Christmas Eve martini or several at the bar of the 21 Club with a couple of CBS ad salesmen I’ve known since our college days on the Harvard Crimson.

  Then just why was I, a few weeks before Christmas of last year, in that least Yule of neighborhoods, Beverly Hills, California 90210?

  Blame Walter Anderson, the editor of Parade magazine, who’d sent me out. He wanted an interview done, and when the editor wanted something, you tended to make serious efforts. No matter the season, regardless of Christmas.