In the Hamptons
My Fifty Years with Farmers, Fishermen, Artists, Billionaires, and Celebrities
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Long before the Hamptons became famous for its posh parties, paparazzi, and glitterati, it was a sleepy backwater of fishing villages and potato farms, literary luminaries and local eccentrics. As the editor and publisher of the area’s popular free newspaper, Dan’s Papers, Dan Rattiner, has been covering the daily triumphs, community intrigues, and larger-than-life personalities for nearly fifty years.
A colorful insider’s account of life, love, scandal, and celebrity, In the Hamptons is an intimate portrait of a place and the people who formed and transformed it, from former residents like Andy Warhol and Willem de Kooning, colorful locals like bar owner Bobby Van and shark fisherman Frank Mundus (who the character Quinn from Jaws was based on), and literary figures like John Steinbeck and Truman Capote, to present-day stars like Bianca Jagger and Billy Joel.
An insider who lived there—as well as a Jewish outsider amid the WASP contingent—Rattiner both revels in and is rattled by all he witnesses and records in one of the world’s most famous places. With dry wit and genuine affection, he shares a story of the Hamptons that few know, one defined by the artists, painters, fishermen, farmers, dreamers, hangers-on, celebrities, and billionaires who live and play there.
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As publisher of the Montauk Pioneer in the early 1960s, which branched into the longtime Hampton free newspaper, Dan's Papers, Rattiner knows his territory and shares a collection of charming early memories of the people among whom he lived and worked. Most of the recollections are from the 1960s, when the author, a Harvard graduate student in his 20s, having been introduced to Montauk when his father moved the family there to take over White's Pharmacy in 1956, runs the press largely by himself, borrowing a thousand dollars from local banker Merton Tyndall. While knocking door-to-door to sell ad pages and drum up stories, he meets the remarkable seasonal denizens of the Hamptons, such as the lovely daughter of Harrison Tweed III, Babette; the drinkers at Jungle Pete's, tightlipped about their dead crony Jackson Pollock; artist Balcomb Greene; the sun-bathing lady proprietors of the Memory Motel; reclusive John Steinbeck; and the real-life shark hunter Frank Mundus. As the Hamptons change from sleepy beaches to celebrity enclaves, the likable Rattiner boasts (modestly) about refusing an interview with then nobody Richard Nixon and playing baseball with notables such as George Plimpton and Bill Clinton.
