One recent Thursday morning I rushed to the station for a day trip to the Hamptons, New York. The concourse was packed with people in chinos and summer dresses. I saw a friend who was heading out there with a huge party for the weekend. “How did you manage that?” I asked, amazed.
It is still possible to get to the Hamptons from Manhattan, by train or by bus, but staying there is another matter. The place is so packed with billionaires that the millionaires are complaining. This month, Vanity Fair published a piece on the “new headache” of Hamptons regulars: “Even richer people.”
“There’s so much money now it’s nauseating,” one longtime homeowner told the glossy magazine. “I’m a 1-per-center, but I bear no resemblance to these people.”
They feel poor and downtrodden, the high street is clogged with Lamborghinis and even a simple thing such as reserving a restaurant table is now regarded as a high-wire act beyond the means of many ordinary mortals. There are just too many rich people who would also like to eat dinner and are willing to offer the maître d’ the use of their yacht. A restaurateur out there told me recently that a grocery store magnate had paid him “a five-figure sum” just to hold a table for him for the season. “You are basically renting a house,” he said.
As for actually renting a house, it seemed to compare, cost-wise, to renting an international footballer. It would be interesting, obviously, but not something your accountant would recommend. So how had my friend managed it?
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Well, she replied, one of her friends had grandparents who had bought a place out there in the 1950s, a lovely rambling house by the beach. The neighbourhood had gone upmarket since then, obviously. They now lived next door to Jon Bon Jovi and Martha Stewart.
Our train appears on one of the boards and there’s a general rush for the platform: couples in Ralph Lauren and young princelings dressed like hip-hop artists heading to the family home. The truly loaded go by helicopter because the train is a faff; it’s always crammed and you have to change at a station in Queens with everyone racing across the platform in the hope of a seat.
Long Island looks rather like a crocodile, stretching eastwards from Manhattan and opening its jaws. The Hamptons are on the lower jaw, 80 miles or so from Times Square. “Southampton is for the nouveau riche because it’s closest to New York,” my friend said. “East Hampton and Amagansett is the old money; Paul McCartney, Jackie Kennedy’s place was out there.”
I suppose McCartney has been knighted, but I love it that we refer to him as old money. Alec Baldwin, who also lives out there, told a story on his podcast of people running into McCartney in the Hamptons as he pootles about on his bike and becoming overcome by the sight of him. He hugs them and tells them it’s all right, Baldwin said.
I had to work on the train and when someone shouted the name Amagansett, and it seemed to be about the right time, I jumped off. It turned out to be Bridgehampton, a stop too soon. I asked a group of young women, apparently dressed for a cocktail party, if there was somewhere to get a taxi and they looked at me as if I were a simpleton. Eventually a Lyft driver arrived, explaining that the 20-minute journey would take at least an hour and would set me back $60. It was 2pm and an unending line of large cars was rumbling slowly east through cornfields.
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It probably says something about the Hamptons, as it is now, that I’ve only been there for work. One of my predecessors used to have a house out there to which he would surreptitiously migrate during the summer months, hoping that when his editors called they wouldn’t catch the sound of seagulls. Once, a lady rang him to say that she represented a leading American sportsman who was then engulfed in a huge and newsworthy scandal. She said the guy would meet him in midtown in 20 minutes, which would have been fine if he were in Manhattan, but is more or less impossible from the Hamptons. “I remember thinking, ‘Maybe I could get a helicopter,’ ” he told me. Then it turned out the whole thing was a prank, set up by one of his rivals.
By the time I arrived, ten years ago, the Hamptons was already prohibitively expensive. You’d see adverts in the papers, offering nice-looking pads for $30,000 a month. Occasionally there would be stories about tiny lots of land, just large enough for a caravan, selling for more than a million dollars.
A New York socialite advised me that it was important, if I were going to advance in society, to become friends with someone who had a place there, but we’ve never quite pulled it off.
“It’s hideous,” a friend assured me, when I called him to ask about his trip there. He and his wife had miraculously become friends with someone who owned a house in East Hampton. “It’s not on the Beyoncé side,” his wife said. “Their house is probably a [million dollars], but it’s not crazy.”
“When you walk to the village, the shops are all Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein,” my friend continued. “Everyone looks like a child of Trump. Pink trousers, buttoned-up shirt tucked in, a lot of paunches, slicked-back hair. That’s the look. The restaurants are all massively overpriced. The interesting thing is people who live in the city, who know the restaurants aren’t about the food, still rave about the food. They know it’s not that great.” At garden parties, where rosé is served around the pool, “no one is interested in what you do. It’s all about the money,” he said.
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“Everyone is white,” he added. His wife, who is Asian, said she sometimes sees a famous Indian-American actor at some of the parties. “It would just be me and him,” she said.
Once, a few years ago, I had to rush out to the Hamptons to cover a shark fishing tournament. It was being held in Montauk, at the furthest tip of Long Island, once popular with artists and now visited by surfers and a younger crowd who can club together to rent a room there. It was still impossible to find accommodation at the last minute. I considered sleeping on the beach until someone involved with the tournament found me a spare bed, sharing a hotel room with two war veterans who had been given a free spot in the contest. It was beautiful, out on the water. Riding home on someone’s speedboat, we saw a whale leap fully out of the water and land with a crash just off the bow.
“Come on. That’s like Disney World,” one of the fishermen said. That’s more or less how I think of the Hamptons now. When I went more recently, it was to interview the writer Michael Wolff, who had bought a place in Amagansett. If you’re thinking of doing this, it is helpful to have written a book about Donald Trump that sold four million copies. I asked him and his wife what they did out there.
“That’s a very good question!” he exclaimed. “What do we do?”
They were planning to eat in a restaurant that night and discussed the plan carefully: someone had dropped out, did they have a back-up? A gorgeous beach lay ten minutes in one direction, facing the surging Atlantic; another lay in the other direction, on a calm inlet. There was a swimming pool in the garden. It all looked pretty good from where I was standing.
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Walking back with me along the main road, Wolff pointed out a shop where “you can get everything you could get in a normal shop for three times the price”. Then he waved me off and I climbed on to a bus for the long ride back to reality.
