“Well,” said Artie Gimlet, “it just goes to show-not even
the fanciest S.U.V. can always handle snow.”
And with that he hung up, leaving me puzzling over exactly
what he was trying to say.
Artie had called to complain that I wasn’t writing about him
and his life at “da beach” anymore. He’s finally seen the light and bought into
the Age of Clinton theory that any publicity is better than none. Of course, it
worked better under Bill Clinton, who believed that if everyone’s lying, no one
is, and therefore whatever is said by anyone at any time under any
circumstances-but especially for money-must be true.
What precipitated Artie’s call was that a local Hamptons
parasite who conducts a gossip column in the Post had apparently printed that I was spending four days a week on
the East End, and Artie was porked off that I hadn’t given him a bell or rested
my head overnight on one of the Pourthault pillows for which the Denise Rich
look-alike who was three girlfriends ago had made him shell out $300 a copy. I
explained that this particular gossipist had it wrong, as is not uncommon in
his work. I go out there one night a week to keep Francis company while his
mother comes up to the city, and now and then I drive out to play golf with
friends at a club we’ve all belonged to for 40 years. When I mentioned the
last, I swear I detected an audible curse at the other end. It seems that Artie
has managed finally to join a new golf club, and bought “all the right s-,” as
he puts it, but the town fathers of the district in which it’s located won’t
allow the course to be played on for environmental reasons. Artie’s not a big
conservationist. He subscribes to a theory of Nature set forth by F. Scott
Fitzgerald in his 1931 short story “Babylon Revisited”: “… the snow of
twenty-nine wasn’t real snow. If you didn’t want it to be snow, you just paid
some money.”
You should take up polo, I advised Artie. It’s palpably less
exclusive and probably, by now, less expensive: For $250K, one is likely to
meet a class of people no worse than at a new Hamptons golf club. Of course, I
reminded him, there are always risks, aesthetic as well as physical, associated
with getting on a horse, and I urged him to pin a picture that recently
appeared in Dan’s Papers -of Wilbur
Ross mounted-above his mallet rack and study it every day as an example of what
one must never look like. Never!
I went on to explain to Artie that the reason I had stopped
writing about him was that there had been complaints to my editor that “The
Gimlet Chronicles” showed the crowd to which Artie belongs-and, even worse, the
crowd to which he aspires-in a less-than-flattering light. The complaints had
been accompanied by the sort of pressure which a Hodding Carter or William
Allen White would have been hard-pressed to resist, and as I love my editor,
and respect him, and value his well-being both physical and mental, I felt that
my discretion would be a better alternative than his valor.
“That’s B.S.!” declared Artie. “You’re just sour grapes
about here. You couldn’t cut it. You didn’t have the money. You couldn’t handle
the change. Loser!”
It was like trying to have an intelligent conversation with
that aviator-goggled maggot in East Hampton who also keeps calling me names. In
the interest of civility, I pleaded guilty on all counts. Actually, I had a
nice stroll round Sag Harbor the other day. Much seemed agreeably unchanged. On
the porch of the American Hotel-a venue I shall never again darken with my
presence-Ted Conklin was engaged in lively conversation with a person I took to
be an Irish washerwoman from the fact that she was brandishing the flag of
Eire. Upstreet, Ned Parkhouse still purveys the absolute best in classical,
jazz and decent pop music. Canio’s remains an incomparable bookstore. Gary has
the Ideal humming along. BikeHampton is nonpareil in its field. I took the kids
to Superica for a light Mexican collation. Tip-top! Other old standbys are
still going strong: Connoisseurs of the grotesque cannot do better than the
party pictures in Dan’s Papers ,
especially when they feature someone called Dennis Basso. Hamptons magazine is still a piece of s-.
Some changes are for the better. I love what the new owners have done to my old house on Madison
Street. Workmen are swarming like ants over the big house my briefly former
squeeze Nancy Richardson bought a few years ago; when the restoration is
finished, the place will be a marvel.
We switched the subject to what might be called “the State
of the Hamptons.” Artie tried to sound upbeat, but there was an edge to his
voice that I read as a subconscious admission that the fun isn’t there any
more. The parties stink, hardly worth the money it takes to buy one’s way in;
real estate is in the toilet; all one thinks about from dawn to dusk is “Where
can I park?” These were the messages that flowed along the bottom edge of our
conversational screen like TV weather alerts.
I suggested he sell the Wainscott house that the Peggy
Siegal look-alike who was five girlfriends ago made him buy. It’s on a dreadful
new road, still unpaved, called “[Something] Close,” and I’m told that when the
wind blows, you think you’re in the Moroccan Sahara. Move to Saint Tropez, I
counseled. There are really good real-estate deals there, I told him, now that
the interesting people who made Saint Tropez a glamour spot have thrown in the
towel in the face of the barbarian hordes and are selling up and moving out. I
could tell from Artie’s sulky tone that he thought I was equating him and his
Hamptons ilk with the Visigoths who have ruined the South of France, and I hastened
to correct the impression. We talked a bit more-about cabbages and kings, about
recent sensational Hamptons doings-then he made his enigmatic S.U.V. remark and
rang off.
I don’t miss Artie much. One call a summer from him is
plenty. There are bigger things to think about, heart-tearing stuff like the
death last week, from long illnesses bravely borne by all concerned, of two
ornaments of my generation: Billy Breed, dead at 66 of Alzheimer’s, and Nick
Potter, dead at 62 of cancer.
These were the kind of guys that gave WASP’s a good name,
that made you understand why people envy the tribe, why they copy it, try to
pass, buy up our stuff at auctions. William Constable Breed III was in my class
at Buckley, then went off to St. Paul’s, on to Middlebury and the Army, and
then a good marriage and a good life and a good career. He was a great
athlete-could run like the wind, play any sport you’d name, and was handsome
enough in a classical way to belong in the Greek galleries at the Met.
Edgewood, the firm he founded (and which a second generation now runs), handles
my family’s modest affairs. They’ve done wonderfully, and they treat us as if
we were Phippses. You can’t ask for more. C. Nicholas Potter got it all done,
too, 1-2-3: Yale, the U.S. Navy and then a super marriage, life and career. Son
of a schoolmaster, he built up the investment end of J.P. Morgan over three
decades. He was a scholar, he was a gentleman, he was an athlete, he was fun,
he was foursquare. He was a great father, a great friend. Like Bill, he hadn’t
a phony bone in his body. I can’t tell you how much their families and people
like me are going to miss these two.
The older I get, the more I look around and see who’s taken
and who’s left standing, the more I tend to think the so-called cosmic joke is
sick. And then I think again. For some time, I’ve turned to the death notices
in The Times and read every single one first thing: not out of morbid
interest, but because reading them brings home the truth of Donne’s observation
that we are not islands unto ourselves, but pieces that Lethe’s current will
some day tear away and carry off. That all these people I never knew, and the
survivors that I don’t know, are caught up, as am I-as are you, Dear Reader-in
a common fellowship of mortality and grief.
In the way of our tribe, the remains of Bill Breed and Nick
Potter will be put to rest in privacy, with discretion. In future times, their
graves will be visited by their loved ones, and now and then by friends. They
never got their pictures in Quest ,
were never habitués of Page Six. But there is a truth to their lives that we do
well to meditate upon. It’s best expressed in the last sentence of Middlemarch : “… for the growing good of
the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so
ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number that
lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” Artie Gimlet
would do well to consider that statement.
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