The Hamptons 'R Us. Not!

Every time some schmuck builds a box store of a house that’s 10,000 square feet or even a squidge more, a whole bunch of us say, “We’re turning into the Hamptons!”

Well, if we keep letting schmucks build homes that huge instead of encouraging them to send the same message in an alternate way—i.e., plant a sign on their land that says, “I’M SO RICH AND YOU’RE NOT!”—we’ll be worse off than the Hamptons, because you could fit five Vineyards into one Long Island. A runaway trend of bulgy-big estates would end up pressing together the way they do in Beverly Hills, where people haven’t even left themselves enough soil for vegetable gardens. (Just in case the global economy collapses and even the former-rich will need to grow their own food; it might almost be worth it.)

Actually, a blogger in the Hamptons recently called his turf “Beverly Hills with the sea on three sides.”

A story in the June issue of Vanity Fair led me to think Hamptonites are from Mars and Vineyarders from Venus: The three-generation owners of the last big farm in Sagaponack sold a few corner acres of their land to an excruciatingly rich couple from Manhattan. When the deal was struck, the couple assured the farmers, “Don’t worry, we won’t build a house over 18,000 square feet.”

Was that a typo? Did a legal assistant, perhaps over-caffeinated by being forced to do the bidding of Triple-Type A Manhattan multi-millionaires, add an extra zero to what was supposed to pass as a soothingly cozy size for a Hamptons seaside cottage?

Another commodity that the Hamptons pack in far larger numbers are celebrities. We have Carly Simon, James Taylor, Ted Danson, Mary Steenbergen, Bill Murray, Larry David and David Letterman (although the last maintains a life style so under the radar I wonder if some prankster on his staff designed a Letterman dummy and stuck it in his own living room window in Katama). With a couple of exceptions, the older generation of the revered have all gone to rejoin their Maker (of martinis, stirred, not shaken). But the Hamptons is so celebrity rich, you can’t help thinking of a clogged artery. You wonder why the Chamber of Commerce doesn’t impose a waiting list. Here’s a sampling: Paris Hilton, Alec Baldwin, Lindsay Lohan, Shaquille O’Neil, Lionel Richie, Chevy Chase, Christy Brinkley, E.L. Doctrow, Steven Spielberg, P. Diddy, Warren Buffett and Ralph Lauren.

My friend, journalist and social critic Gwyn McCallister, who’s lived both here and in the Hamptons, mostly here, says the crucial difference between their celebs and ours is that theirs flock to the chichi parts of Long Island to see and be seen. “They’re continuously camera-ready,” she maintains. Ours, on the other perverse hand, have a deep desire to get away from all that, to don shades and baseball caps, and to nod to the locals with the only comment in return being, “That’ll be $13.95.”

The Hamptons has flashy nightclubs. No way would we describe Seasons or even Nectar’s that way. They allow franchises from K-Mart to Gucci, and everything is quite simply pricier. Nowadays, if you’re too impoverished to afford your own plane, yet rich enough to forego the deadly milk train or three-hour bumper-to-bumper ride along the Long Island Expressway, there’s a new 8-passenger Cessna seaplane company that will levitate you from the East 23rd Street docks to East Hampton for the inarguably reasonable price of $495 one-way or just under a cool thou for the round-trip. The flight includes a basket of swag (just like the one Christopher Moltisanti swiped from Lauren Bacall in The Sopranos), a bottle of Andre’ Balazs rosé and glossy magazines rife with Hamptons glitz from cover to cover.

Hampton locals are more ferocious in their ire at summer crowds. They call short-term visitors “cidiots,” and those looking to back a new restaurant or club speak of catering to a class of visitor above the “summer share” crowd. As opposed to our distinction between natives and wash-a-shores, they have locals and transplants. One multi-generational Hamptons dweller sniffed to the New York Times, “You never become a local unless you go back to the Mayflower.”

Excuse me? The Mayflower anchored off Plymouth and its passengers off-loaded to the Cape, except for the few families that slipped across the Sound and put down roots in Great Harbour, known today as Edgartown. If anyone on Long Island had ancestors who shipped over on the Mayflower, they would have needed to catch the bus to Buzzard’s Bay, then change over to the New York line.

Hamptonites do actually have a founding lineage known as the “Bonac” families who landed at Accabonac Harbor, the Algonquin word for root place. Or was it root beer? That might have been more conducive to getting the settlers to stay.

Some other differences: “Affordable living” is defined as paying under a million dollars for a home. And perhaps not surprisingly, their high-falutin' visitors are even more self-entitled than ours. A story went out over the wires this summer of a couple in a Mercedes stopping at the scene of a grisly car accident to ask the police for directions to their next party. A waitress on Plum TV in The Hamptons said a customer poured coffee on the waitress’s foot and then glared at her as if to say, "Why aren't you dashing to refill my cup?!".

Would anyone here do that? Indeed not. All our cidiots are courteous, benevolent people.