Dan's Papers - May 29, 2009 - Bulldozers at Work

For the last six months, I have been corresponding with an American woman named Renee d'Aunay, who lives in the south of France. She is the beautiful daughter of an American military officer who, in another life and another name, was someone I knew 30 years ago here in Southampton.

And I think she started this correspondence with me, and also, she let me know, with Stephen Gaines, who wrote Philistines at the Hedgerow, because she wanted to tell the story of a truly traumatic few years she went through all those years ago when she was married to a secretive multi-millionaire named Barry Trupin.

She wrote at length about that time, and I would not tell you much about what she wrote because it was, in many ways, a private correspondence. However, I will tell you that her telling of this story, I think, acted as a kind of catharsis for her, and as I was fond of her when I knew her all those years ago, I was happy to hear her tale. There were certain things she wanted said that would set the record straight. And she said them.

I wouldn't be writing at all about her at this time, except to say that the extraordinary house that Renee and Barry lived in right on the ocean on Meadow Lane is, during this week and next, in the process of being torn down by its present owner, Calvin Klein.

Three months ago, when Klein applied for a demolition permit for the house so he could build another smaller and more manageable - it is easily the largest house in Southampton - I wrote her about it and her immediate instinct was to say she would fly home to watch it go. But then she wrote again and said she had thought better of it. Perhaps it was better to remember it the way it was.

Now I have to write her again. The Old English Pub, bought in Devon in its entirety in 1982 and shipped here and re-assembled as a bar and pub in that mansion, is currently being chewed to pieces by a bulldozer. Another bulldozer is attacking the indoor glass enclosed shark lagoon that Barry built. You could scuba among the sharks and other fishes if you liked. Still another is about to tear into the living room - about the size of a high school gymnasium - that is right off the grand front entryway. The turrets on the roof, or what remains of them, are falling.

I don't know. Life moves on. This house has had an extraordinary history. And now it is over.

The house was originally built as a classic and very boring three-story Georgian home with 62 rooms and 27 baths by Henry DuPont as a summer home in 1927. I have seen the plans for this house. Among other things, in each room, there is drawn where all the furniture, the beds and sofas and night tables and so forth go. If something were awry, DuPont would know about it. DuPont called the mansion "Chesterton." He and his family and their servants and then their descendants lived there as part of Southampton society until the early 1950s when, essentially, this grand, brick three-story affair became abandoned.

It remained abandoned for 20 years. And then Barry Trupin, who may or may not be in jail as I write this, bought "Chesterton" as a present for his beautiful young wife, Renee. The two of them would turn it into a magnificent French Chateau. And they would be accepted and invited into Southampton society.

The 1970s, as it turned out, was not a good time to buy yourself into Southampton society, particularly if the husband is a shady businessman and his wife, beautiful as she might be, is the daughter of a military officer used to moving around from place to place. Those were not the official reasons, however, why Southampton society wanted these people gone from Southampton. The official reason was that Renee and Barry were not "our kind of people." In other words, she was Catholic. He was a Jew.

Also, the turrets were being built higher than allowed without proper variances.

A tremendous battle ensued during the years of 1981 and 1982, as the Trupins proceeded to spend tens of millions of dollars on renovating their house and converting it into a French castle complete with turrets. They did complete it, or almost complete it. But in the end, after a mayor was forced to resign for giving the Trupins a building permit, after a Southampton matron was quoted making an anti-semitic remark about the Trupins in New York Magazine, after a stop work order and a calculated shunning by the powers that be in Southampton took place, Barry just got mad. He filed a lawsuit against the Village of Southampton for violating his civil rights. And he won. The Village appealed. They had no choice but to appeal, because in spite of their insurance coverage, to pay the Trupins the amount the judge awarded them for doing what they did to them would force the Village into bankruptcy.

Amazingly, the appeals judge overturned the ruling on a technicality and the Trupins left town, with their castle abandoned.

During the two years that this battle went on, the Trupins were never allowed to be in residence at their home. There was no CO. However, they did sleep there surreptitiously from time to time. Renee, when giving me a tour of the place on one occasion, showed me the partially completed bedroom and bath where they camped out.

"This was the only place in the house where we had running water," she told me gleefully. "We did this from time to time."

During the construction, fine craftsmen from Italy who did not speak English were living in trailers on the property, there to build the elaborate carvings and quoins and balustrades that were to be part of the architecture of this house. Planeloads of European antiques and suits of armor were brought in. No expense was spared.

Amazingly, Barry and Renee rented another house five houses down on the ocean from their French castle under construction, which had a fantastic and bizarre history of its own.

The house they rented, another old mansion, had been the home in the early 1970s of a man who got murdered. He was another shady character. This former owner was Roy Radin, a young man who began a boiler room telephone telemarketing business at the age of 22 and was, by the time he was 28, one of the richest men in town.

You'd see him on Jobs Lane, this very obese man with a black cape, a silver handled cane and a great shock of long hair. He had a predilection for wild sex parties that featured whips, chains, drugs and alcohol and even a taping system where he could make permanent records of the proceedings on videotape. His mother lived at the house too. They were discrete about these parties. Except once.

The police raided one such party at Radin's house after one of the hundred or so participants, a young woman in a cocktail dress, had been put on a Long Island Railroad train for the ride back to New York City in a slobbering drugged state where, on the train at midnight, not knowing where she was, people came to her aid and learned from where she had come.

The following year, Radin decided he wanted to produce motion pictures. There was a plan to make a movie called Cotton Club. He flew to Los Angeles where he apparently began to pal around with other investors, drug dealers, and who did not want Radin involved. Radin's body, with a bullet in the back of his head, was found in a canyon outside of Los Angeles one day by a park ranger. He was 32.

What kind of luck does it take for a handsome young couple such as Barry and Renee, flush with money, to wind up renting a star crossed orgy mansion five houses down from the dream castle they were building against the wishes of the powers that be in the Southampton summer community?

Barry, as I mentioned, may or may not be in jail today. He got caught up in the Savings and Loan scandal. He got arrested and convicted of buying wildly expensive impressionist paintings and antiques from a New York dealer at rock bottom prices because, well, they had been stolen.

When the Trupins left Southampton in the late 1980s, Barry vowed to sell Dragon's Head to either drug dealers or homeless shelter operators. But, of course, none of those stepped up to the plate. As Chesterton had remained abandoned for 20 years, the house that Barry and Renee had renamed "Dragon's Head" remained vacant after they left for 12 more ears.

Eventually it was picked up for pocket change - well, $3 million - by a prominent and upstanding New York City developer named Francesco Galesi who made peace with the community, tore down some of the offending turrets that had been ruled to have been built too high, and used it as a summer home for his family for the next 15 years.

In 2005, Galesi, having paid the vast heating and maintenance bills for all those years, was told by brokers that if he wanted to sell the place they could probably get more than $20 million for it. Galesi thought it a good idea.

I don't know how much Klein paid for it, but now I have brought you up to date. "Dragon's Head" is coming down. What will be there in its place, probably by this time next year, will be a glass and stone modern structure designed by Richard Meier.

In one of her letters, Renee D'Aunay did tell me this: When she first stood on the bluff behind the abandoned DuPont house where the sun rose and the mist from the waves billowed up into the morning sunshine, she felt its magic and she wanted it. Even from Cote d'Azur, she remembers this. And so do I, about that spot anyway. I remember a wonderful luncheon we had with Barry and Renee on a terrace the Trupins built behind the house, under a silk canopy held up by medieval spears, with uniformed servants bustling about. As I recall, the catch of the day was poached salmon. The wind blew and blew, the silk rippled, the wine flowed and the mist billowed in from the sea below on what was surely a great day to be in the Hamptons.