IT’S starting to seem like the only people not making TV documentaries about the Hamptons are those who are the subjects. You’ve heard all about Barbara Kopple’s June 2-3 ABC miniseries on the last, bittersweet summer on the East End, but there’s at least one more series about the mating grounds Margaret Mead would be studying if she was still in the anthropology business.
Airing its first segment the same night Kopple’s series debuts is the WE (Women’s Entertainment) cable network’s “Single in the Hamptons,” which documents the sometimes desperate, always hilarious scene as young men and women try to hook up with a suitable mate before their summer shares expire.
The subjects of “Single in the Hamptons” (including society snapper Patrick McMullan, club operator Andrew Sasson, heiress Marjorie Gubelmann and weird Ivan Wilzig) aren’t exactly losers looking for love in all the wrong places.
Wilzig, for example, seems to think he’s a great catch. “They’ve compared me to Hugh Hefner because he has a Playboy mansion and I have a castle,” he tells the show. He neglects to add that his poor old rich daddy has taken possession of and is desperately trying to unload the ersatz castle in Water Mill – that would be a bit of a turn-off for Ivan’s dates, I guess.
In her segment, Gubelmann unconsciously pinpoints why so many of this privileged set can’t find true love. They’re not interested in non-trust-fund kids. “In European terms, we’re nouveau riche,” she says. “In American terms, I’m sure we’re old money. But as they say, new riche is better than no riche at all.”
It goes on in that vein, and you’re left with the impression that maybe the young people who go to the Jersey Shore are a lot more down to earth about dating and having a real summer time. It seems the Hamptons just raise everyone’s expectations way too high.
(Footnote: Writing about the Kopple documentary in his Independent weekly, Jerry Della Femina credits me with “inventing” the Hamptons. I don’t know about that, but back in the late ’70s, while writing Page Six, I used to rent a sweet little carriage house in Bridgehampton and wanted an excuse to spend the season there. So I started throwing in the big names of the hither-to unreported celebrity visitors and have been getting away with it ever since. I guess I have a lot to answer for.)
European vacation
WHEN Dubya is through with his Moscow summit (I suppose it’s still a summit, even though Russia is greatly diminished), he’ll make his first grand tour of Europe and will be staying in some very spiffy accommodations. Italy’s big bucks Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi just bought yet another villa on Sardinia for VIP guests, including George and Laura.
Westchester’s Bill and Nancy O’Shaughnessy are just back from Venice and report that Italy is flourishing under the flamboyant Berlusconi. Venice itself has never looked better and the crowd around the pool at the fabled Hotel Cipriani again includes the international set.
Owner James Sherwood (whose Orient Express empire also includes our beloved ’21’ Club) is there most days chatting with the hotel’s managing director, Dottore Natale Rusconi, which is having no trouble filling the Cip’s new $6,000-a-night suite. Elton John, who has had a battalion of workmen gutting his new villa just down the canal from the hotel, drops by there for lunch most days. (I guess those stories about Elton being broke were exaggerated.)
May I quote you on that?
NICE to see that Jim Bouton, the renegade Yankee pitcher who shocked the baseball establishment with his tell-all book “Ball Four” way back when, hasn’t gone totally nice in his old age. Jim was doing a charity event at Mickey Mantle’s on Central Park South the other day, and someone asked him about the claim by Jose Canseco that 85 percent of major leaguers are doing steroids. Bouton curled his lip. “He’s just blowing smoke, hoping to get a publisher for his book,” Jim said. And if Canseco does get into print, it won’t be much of a read. “He didn’t keep a diary, like I did, to substantiate his allegations” of drug use, etc., Bouton added.
No matter of principle
GEE, I’m really sorry if it was something I said that made Wallace Matthews so hot that it got him fired as a Post sports columnist. I quite liked Wally’s stuff, although I never realized that in the eight years he labored here for his handsome remuneration, he actually despised our paper. It’s good to know that before he took his principled stand, Matthews already had lined up a better-paying gig at ESPN Radio – where he’ll be able to say anything he likes – just so long as it doesn’t offend the princes of professional sports.
Last dance
FORMER GE honcho Jack Welch is enjoying his well-paid and well-earned retirement. I hear the great man is spending the holiday weekend with his girlfriend, former Harvard Business Review editor Suzy Wetlaufer, at a plush Mexican resort. It’ll take his mind off the messy divorce and vast alimony assessments he’s facing when he comes back.
Jack’s back
REPORTING in from the Cannes Film Festival is rotund Bobby Zarem, who’s been walking the beach each morning in competition with the topless starlets. Zarem says his pal Jack Nicholson’s new movie “About Schmidt” is the toast of the festival and looks certain to get Jack another Oscar nomination. Nicholson’s only competition for the best actor accolade at Cannes appears to be Ralph Fiennes in “Spider.” New Line’s Bob Shaye, who has the distribution rights to “About Schmidt,” threw a lavish party after the screening and it seemed like money well spent.