A Hamptons Christmas Read Online Free

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    Jerry Seinfeld chose the dead of winter to offer $35 million to Billy Joel for his oceanfront place on Further Lane. There was talk that Hillary (yes! that Hillary) was shaking her begging bowl again and might include East Hampton on a fund-raiser. The mere possibility of which set members of the Maidstone Club to oaths and swearing not heard on Club property since FDR ran for a third term. Bunny Halsey, scion of one of the earliest Southampton families, was divorcing his fourth wife. An historic barn in Amagansett burned down. Thibaut de Saint Phalle had visited his place on Middle Lane from his place in Naples, Florida, a rare thing in winter. There was a continuing stink along Further Lane about developers being allowed to sell off five-million-dollar lots of the Rock Foundation Nature Preserve. And a right whale was seen cruising off Main Beach, not two hundred yards from shore.
    Sag Harbor’s Michael Thomas had read a brilliantly persuasive and richly footnoted paper to the Tuesday Forum at the Maidstone Club that had everyone talking, and for an expanded version of which, Vanity Fair and Tina Brown’s latest magazine were both said to be vigorously bidding. Mr. Thomas’s thesis? That the fatal lapses which led a savvy, cagey Nixon to disgrace and resignation derived from the fact that his three best friends were Bebe Rebozo, Elmer Bopst, and Robert Abplanalp. Wrote Mr. Thomas, “No man is entirely normal whose three best friends are named Bebe, Bopst, and Abplanalp. Nixon, clearly, was a whack-job.”
    Down the beach at Montauk, an exotic novelty one might have expected in southern California but not here: the establishment of an actual government-in-exile set up in the second-best suite at Gurney’s Inn (off-season rates applied). Professor Wamba-dia-Wamba, noted Congolese opposition leader and founder of the
People’s Popular Front (the FPP), was in residence under tight security. There were concerns about assassination attempts and rumors an actual shot had been fired, but as an East Hampton cop explained following a cursory investigation, “These things happen out of season.” The FPP’s agenda, the professor explained to a reporter from Reuters, was one of nonalignment, universal suffrage, and deep-breathing exercises. The Hamptons had never had a government-in-exile before, and, except for the reported shooting, Wamba was locally quite a popular figure.
    Less dramatically, Julian Schnabel, the famous artist who smashed dinner plates and then cleverly glued them up in attractive collages, was preparing a new gallery showing of his work; Uma Thurman had been seen jogging prettily behind her baby’s sleek perambulator with its outsized racing wheels; the wine critics were all talking up this latest vintage from the Channing Daughters’ Vineyard in Bridgehampton; Tom and Daisy Buchanan had closed their big place on Gin Lane and gone South, but Demaine the oil man was in residence on Georgica Pond and was giving a white-tie dinner for sixty at his home in the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Prince Charles’s paramour (“mistress!” the more literal insisted), Camilla Parker Bowles, visited friends in Shinnecock Hills. Sybil Burton, who used to be married to Richard before Miss Taylor happened along, was staging a new revue at the Long Wharf theater in Sag Harbor. The sale of Tommy Mottola’s house was final (eight million plus, it was said). George Plimpton was working on a new book, an oral history of his entire graduating class at Harvard. Tony Duke scored an extraordinary late-season hole-in-one at the Maidstone and cheerfully stood a round of drinks. The new Kmart opened in Bridgehampton just in time for Christmas. In Springs, Madame Rand assured friends that architect Howard Roark was over his flu and taking nourishment. The North Haven Bridge was again closed amid fears of structural collapse. A Hamptons Coach driver went missing