"Dan Rattiner has been chronicling the people and events of the Hamptons for as long as I've been going there (since the sixties). If anyone wanted some insight into what made this area such an interesting place, all they'd need was a copy of In the Hamptons. It's as close to rubbing elbows as you can get. Enjoy!"
"If a guy says it happened in the Hamptons, and Dan Rattiner doesn't know about it, it didn't. Welcome to the high stool at the bar in the Memory Motel."
"Dan Rattiner, a first-rate observer of life, has been observing the life of the Hamptons for nearly fifty years. In the Hamptons, the result of all that clear-eyed observation, gives us every facet of the place - the strange and ridiculous, the artistic, the funny, the lovable and beautiful. Fifty years from now when people ask, 'What were the Hamptons?' they will need only to pick up this rich, sparkling book."
"A great read! Rattiner has done a terrific job with Dan's Papers, and his book, In the Hamptons, is as colorful and engrossing as you would expect. He describes the coming-of-age of the Hamptons with insight and affection."
"Wonderful reading... 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."
"(This) intrepid guide to native life in the fabled Long Island utopia offers a memoir of a half century spent tracking its inhabitants as proprietor of the Hamptons's newspaper of record.
Well-known to the beautiful people and old timers of resort villages from Shinnecock to Montauk, the weekly Dan's Papers (probably the nation's first free newspaper) reports the doings of literary lions, blue bloods and red bloods. Though he now has a staff to do most of the work, for years Rattiner set the type, snapped the photos, wrote the stories and, he gleefully admits, when news was slow invented something entertaining. Here, he tells a few tales of porgies, fluke and blackfish, then moves on to the bigger fish swimming around former potato farms now flooded with rich and infamous painters, writers, performers and patricians. From the depths of his files Rattiner draws names like Cavett, Plimpton, Steinbeck, Pollock, Warhol, de Kooning, Billy Joel and Richard Nixon. Read about the building of his father's corner pharmacy, movies made just down the street, impossible young love, seasonal liaisons and East Hampton's annual Artists and Writers Baseball Game, guest-umpired in 1988 by Gov. Bill Clinton. Geographic highlights include private clubs, local bistros, Sag Harbor's garbage dump, a historic lighthouse and a pond with imaginary monsters. Bucolic concerns and innocent gossip are guilelessly interspersed with business and beach news....redolent of saltwater and printers' ink-perfectly suited for comfortable days at the beach".
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.
Hamptons Memories
By Mike BarryIn keeping with the financial sensibilities of Dan Rattiner, Harmony Books has decided that making money requires giving some of its products away for free.
Rattiner's In the Hamptons, released officially on Tuesday, May 6, will be distributed as part of a giveaway promotion to hundreds of Hamptons Jitney riders over the Memorial Day weekend. The concept is simple: favorable word-of-mouth from a targeted audience will prompt others to purchase In the Hamptons.
Dan's Papers are a fixture on Suffolk County's East End, a free newspaper that is filled with advertisements and multiple by-lined articles by its founder, the aforementioned Mr. Rattiner. In the Hamptons chronicles in a very lively manner the author's life and times, starting with his pharmacist father's momentous decision to move the Rattiner clan in 1956 to Montauk from Millburn, New Jersey when Rattiner was 16. Rattiner started The Montauk Pioneer, a weekly newspaper, while still in college, correctly believing advertising dollars would flow to a free publication with high-quality editorial content about local events and personalities.
The company's expansion into the Hamptons also gave Rattiner a larger platform from which he launched various civic crusades, such as saving the Montauk Lighthouse, a landmark the federal government appeared ready to let fall into the Atlantic Ocean through erosion. Preserving Bridgehampton's Bull's Head Inn was another Rattiner cause and, while I'm glad it didn't become a gas station, it is a harder to get excited about the Inn's fate.
Most of the media coverage about In the Hamptons has focused on the celebrities, both dead and alive, that turn up in its pages. There are some terrific anecdotes about the late novelist John Steinbeck's twilight years in Sag Harbor in the 1960s, an era when the biggest thing in that town was a Bulova watch factory.
Moreover, the Montauk-related back story about The Rolling Stones' song Memory Motel and tales about the impact singer Billy Joel and model Christie Brinkley have had on the Hamptons scene are also a great read.
The minor chink in In the Hamptons' armor is Rattiner's apparent glee in the occasional publication of false stories. For me, even the best joke isn't worth the hit a newspaper's credibility takes if it knowingly prints incorrect information. The author disagrees.
"I sometimes write hoaxes because I feel it is important every once in a while to break the trust between reader and writer in order to keep the reader on his guard," Rattiner wrote, in an e-mail to me last Friday. "Not everything in a newspaper should be taken at face value. Reporters have their opinions too, and I think they sneak in. Be skeptical of what you read. In other words, it's ALL opinion, in my opinion."
While we may disagree on that point, Rattiner remains a great storyteller and redeemed himself in my eyes by apparently not contributing one dollar to the $109 million the Clintons have amassed since 2001.
That piece of information emerged when Rattiner met former President Clinton last summer in the Hamptons. Rattiner asked him whether he remembered umpiring the 1988 Hamptons charity softball game, an annual tradition in which the region's artists and writers square off against one another. Not only do I remember it, Clinton said, I wrote about it in my autobiography. To his credit, Rattiner had not read the former president's memoirs, and many Americans probably would not do so, even if they were given to them for free.
"Eye On the Island"
Anton Publications (May)
Dan Rattiner's new memoir In the Hamptons: My Fifty Years with Farmers, Fishermen, Artists, Billionaires, and Celebrities is hot off the presses. Dan Rattiner, of course, is the publisher and editor of Dan's Papers and, as the title reflects, has spent many years on the East End, covering intrigue, scandal, news and celebrity sightings. With genuine affection and humor, he recounts the coming-of-age of the Hamptons, from the sublime to the ridiculous. Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Billy Joel, Frank Mundus and George Plimpton are just a sample of his cast of characters. His memoir is compulsive good fun.
