Hampton Style - August 15, 2008 -

"I think some of my best training as a writer came from the years I spent at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service. They taught us how to write brilliant diplomatic apology letters. It's come in very handy over the years," suggests Colacello. He found the experience particularly useful in his next incarnation, as the founding editor of Interview magazine-the Factory's "school newspaper," as Andy Warhol called it. Referring to that time recently at a "Fridays at 5" lecture he gave at the Bridgehampton Library, Colacello remarked that he never needed to social climb because he was "airlifted to Mt. Olympus from the outset, arriving in Andy's helicopter." Among Colacello's myriad duties was to be Andy's stealth photographer. Colacello recently compiled these images along with pithy narratives in his 2007 release OUT, now in its third printing. "I can't believe after all of the hard work I put into Ronnie & Nancy, [the biography of Nancy and Ronald Reagan], OUT should prove to be the runaway bestseller," remarks a bemused Colacello. The second half of the hefty two-part series on Reagan, dealing with the White House years, is currently in the works. When asked if he spends much time among the literary community of the East End, Colacello names Carl Bernstein, Jason Epstein and Judith Miller comrades, but adds, "You're just as likely to find me in the company of artists, journalists and photographers. Out here, the lines between professions tend to blur."

News that A.M. Homes is feverishly at work on an HBO pilot about the Hamptons comes as something of a surprise to the literary world, which has long dubbed her a fearless iconoclast.With subject matter ranging from pedophilia to arson, Homes has never had much of a stomach for frivolous subjects. After reading her groundbreaking End of Alice in 1996, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham called her one of the bravest, most terrifying writers working today. Her slyly comic and probing works of fiction were joined by a memoir in 2007. "I'm fascinated with human behavior," Homes insists, defending the HBO project. "And what better a place to study its depths and peculiarities than the Hamptons." She's writing the upcoming series, described as a cross between Grapes of Wrath and Desperate Housewives, from her East Hampton beach house, but she considers it no light-hearted romp. "I've always loved sitting on Georgica Beach and watching people, " says the author, who has frequented these shores for 25 years. "The show will be about class division and the layers of wealth, the sense of entitlement in a place with a cross-section of immigrants, artists, millionaires and people who mow lawns. "Anyway,"she jokes, "everyone writes a pilot for HBO. It's the one way novelists can get health insurance."

Leave it to Jay McInerney to add some clarity to the growing imbroglio surrounding John Edwards' mistress, Rielle Hunter, a woman Jay met 20 years ago at Nell's, dated, and then immortalized in his book The Story of My Life. Amanda Poole was her character's name, a sexually voracious minx who left such an imprint on the author and his friends that she later had cameos in books by Jay's close friend Brett Easton Ellis. Of course "Reille Hunter" now appears to be every bit as fictional a moniker for the 42-year-old former Edwards staffer as the name she earned as that recurring literary character; when Jay met her, the It Girl went by the name Lisa Druck. The late-night club crawls must all seem like distant memory by now for the celebrated author who wound up on our shores by way of a good deed his did for his former wife, Helen Bransford. He rolled up here in 2005, driving a rented RV, filled with his two children, six cats, a potbellied pig, 20 cases of 1982 Bordeaux and Helen, whom he had promised to help move from Nashville to East Hampton. Upon their arrival, McInerney discovered that the house wouldn't be ready for another week. Remembering old friend Anne Hearst, and her guesthouse, McInerney called her, and was promptly welcomed in, along with his expansive menagerie. Days later, Jay and Anne were dating. These days, it would appear that art is reflecting life for Jay, with The Good Life, the celebrated book he published in 2006.