Dan's Papers - August 24, 2007 - After Ten Years, Our Towns Learn How to Party Responsibly

The Town of East Hampton has come a long way in figuring out how to have a major party. Last weekend, they approved of a private party for 250 people at the home of P. Diddy in the Northwest Woods facing out towards Gardiner's Bay. Almost nobody objected.

It was just nine years ago that P. Diddy, who then called himself Puff Daddy, held a party in this town for just about the same number of people, and it was a huge mess.

Let us recall how things were handled in the summer of 1998. There was not only the Puff Daddy party, but also another party, or series of parties, that summer over a long weekend that sort of brought the house down. The result of this second party was that the Secret Service took over the town, Georgica Pond got drained of all its water and the people running the party ran off with about $4 million.

But first, there was the Puff Daddy party.

At the time, Hip-Hop was new on the national stage - there was an element of danger about it and several Hip-Hop stars had been shot and killed just the year before. And so Puff Daddy marched into town with his girlfriend Jennifer Lopez and announced they were going to have a White Party on the Fourth of July.

The issuance of town permits for large private gatherings was a new thing at the time. Many people felt it was somehow against the freedom of assembly laws in the constitution and there was much debate about this. But there was a party permit issued for Puff Daddy, whose security crew, the town was reassured, would be stopping all cars a block or two from the gates of Puff Daddy's house to make sure they weren't harboring any gate crashers. Mike Zimet, head of security, told the Town that by using this procedure, they'd be able to keep the party under 250 people.

On the night of the party, however, crowds of people and papparazi swarmed over the neighborhood. Thousands of uninvited guests showed up to bang on the gates of Puff Daddy's house on Hedges Banks Road. Hedges Banks Road was gridlocked for many hours and afterward, it turned out that several babysitters in this quiet residential neighborhood were unable to return home for the simple reason that their parents were unable to get through the traffic. The police, working under orders from Puff Daddy security, were stopping cars and nobody could get in or out. The sitters slept on couches where they were working.

Probably the most poignant image of that party was that of Colonel J. C. Barb, a World War II vet and neighbor of Puff Daddy, who sat in a lawnchair for the entire time the party was in progress, defending his driveway from interlopers who might either want to park on it or make K turns by driving down it. The police tried to get him to move. He refused. He stayed there in his lawnchair on his property, barking at the interlopers, for much of the night.

Inside the party, the music went on late into the night - way beyond the curfew hour - there were a lot of naked people running around and all the neighbors were unable to sleep because of the noise, which was finally brought to an end by the arrival of the Town police, instructed to come in by Mike Zimet.

Later that summer, Bill and Hillary Clinton came to town to raise money for what turned out to be the unsuccessful 1998 Presidential Campaign of Al Gore. Bill and Hillary stayed at the home of Steven Spielberg on Georgica Pond in East Hampton and those who attended said Bill and Hillary weren't on particularly good speaking terms inasmuch as the Lewinski affair had just taken place a few months before. The next day there was a reception held at the home of Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger. There was another party at the home of another celebrity. Helicopters flew overhead. Secret Service men were all over town. And somebody illegally drained Georgica Pond - down to flies and mud - in the middle of the night, just before the Clintons arrived. (Was it so gawkers could not canoe out and take pictures of the Clintons at Spielberg's lawn? Who knew? Could a sitting President's Secret Service order that done? Nobody was ever arrested as a result of this.)

The next summer, two bachelor brothers with the last name of Wilzig held a giant bash at their "castle" in Water Mill, which I attended. The disconcerting thing about that was they had armed security guards with exposed weapons walking along patrolling on Deerfield Road - keeping "law and order," as you drove up toward the event.

Well, everyone's learned how to hold a party in the past nine years.

The P. Diddy party will take place between four p.m. and midnight, at which time it will be at an end. It will take place on Saturday night, September 3, on the same night that the Fourh of July fireworks, postponed from Independence Day because of Piping Plovers nesting on the beach, will be going off at Main Beach in downtown East Hampton. P. Diddy's representatives requested that the upcoming party Diddy was holding include a fireworks display of its own, shot off from a barge in Gardiner's Bay by the world's foremost fireworks firm, Grucci Brothers - but the town denied it on the grounds that where the barge would be set up and where boaters would drop anchor - is dangerously close to Hedges Banks, an area fraught with underwater rocks and boulders.

"We don't want to see somebody with a keel busted up on some rocks someplace," said councilman Brad Loewen.

As for the parking, well, there won't be any. All parking, even for the help, will take place in the field at the East Hampton Airport two miles away, where a team of shuttle busses will transport everyone to the party and back all evening. The busses are owned by the same firm that, for each of the past four weekends, has transported the occupants to a fundraising party at the Ross School in an orderly fashion. There, partygoers enjoyed performances by Prince, Billy Joel, the Dave Matthews Band and James Taylor.

Whether Colonel J. C. Barb will sit out in his lawn chair is not known. But clearly everyone has learned a whole lot on how to run a celebrity party. It's important to have these laws to guide everyone, even if they might press a little on our freedom of assembly.