Foreword
By Edward Albee
Dan Rattiner has lived in "the Hamptons" even longer than I have. It's forty-four years for me now, although on the ocean in Montauk, which many of us who live there do not consider to be a part of the Hamptons. Montauk, as Dan succinctly points out, is of an independent turn of mind, and while the "McMansions" are starting to turn up here and there, Montauk manages to retain much of what endeared it to Dan and me so long ago.
While Dan's book evokes the changes that have threatened what those of us who have been here a long while love and treasure about the Hamptons, it is, in the main, a long love poem to the area and the extraordinary people who have occupied it and, more often than not, helped to preserve its character.
Dan is, front and center, a journalist-and a damn good one-and this book, a journal of a place and its people, is wonderful reading. In its pages I've learned a lot I didn't know and met a lot of people I wish I had.
If I write here that I cannot imagine a chronicle more inclusive and revealing, fascinating and objective, yet for the greater part affectionate, I am not piling it on too thick. This book is damn good work.
SOME addenda.
I wish I had known Dan while he was writing his piece on Nixon's stays at Gurney's Inn in Montauk. My house, looking down on the beach, is not far from that spot and, one day, I was looking over my gradual cliff and I saw an extraordinary sight: There was a man in a suit and tie and shoes walking the beach among the sunbathers, shaking hands with those who were willing to have their hands shook. Five paces behind him were two other men, similarly dressed but with their right arms extended and covered with beach towels. It is so clear to me now: There was Nixon and there were his bodyguards with guns. The mind boggles: What if I'd been gifted with insight into the future and what if I'd been, by nature, a killer. Just think what I could have saved the country, from my perch on my cliff!
I have one quarrel with Dan's pungent writing about the disaster that was Sag Harbor in the 1960s, and it concerns his appraisal of John Steinbeck who was, I must state here, a close friend of mine, though we disagreed politically very frequently.
In his quoting of John's letter outlining his theoretical invention of more efficient killing weapons for the Vietnam War, Dan fails to understand the deep and awful humor that motivated the suggestions. John wouldn't have hurt a fly, and I read in his advice the subtext "Well, I disapprove of this brutal and wrongheaded war, but, if you want to do it in a really effective brutal and wrongheaded way..."
Sorry, Dan; I can't let you have that one the way you saw it. Friendship can blind us, though, and while I doubt it, you may be right.
A minor quarrel, I guess, with a book I feel anyone who wants to fully understand the Hamptons must read.
New York City, 2007
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