Group Portrait on Flying Point Beach, 1961 "In 1960, Jane and I did the maddest, most terrifying, most wonderful thing in our entire lives: we bought a house in Water Mill, a beautiful, shingled, two-storied carriage house that we still live in today. We all rushed to Flying Point for our tans because we wanted to be beautiful for the night's dancing. This is a shot of one of those days in the sun. Look at us! Utterly and shamelessly happy and young in the Hamptons." Left to right: Jim Tommaney, Alvin Novak, Chuck Turner, Maxine Groffsky, Arthur Gold, Robert Fizdale, Jane Wilson, Julia Gruen, Jane Freilicher, Joe Hazan.

Throughout the 1960s, the Hamptons served as a playground for the vociferous giants of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Here, they once roamed freely. Quite freely, according to John Gruen, their intimate chronicler, gatherer and enabler, who played host to the irreverent pioneers at his home on Cobb Road in Water Mill.

From that same home, some four decades later, Gruen begins telling his stories. He speaks of "Lenny" (Leonard Bernstein) and his 50th birthday party. "It got wild and wonderful!" explains the effervescent octogenarian. "There were people in the bushes. Flirtations. I'm not saying we had an orgy, but..." Pregnant pause, raised eyebrow. "Well, you know." Gruen picks up a photograph he took of Larry Rivers, then one of Rauschenberg on the beach, staring out into space. "I think we were at our happiest out here," he says, "That's what I see when I look at these pictures."

Robert Rauschenberg, Flying Point Beach, 1959 "The young Bob was quite a witty, endearing and highly motivated fellow. When we met him, he was very much in love with Jasper Johns, and the two were a radiant pair. There was real electricity between them. After they split up, Bob became more reserved. As his fame grew, the drinking began. Being in the grips of so much alcohol put a pall on some of his friendships, including ours. But Bob was a fearless, hugely inventive artist-a visionary, who turned art upside-down and made it as thrilling as it was original."

A prominent critic and biographer, Gruen has been a fixture in the art world since the '50s, when he began contributing to the Herald Tribune, Vogue, the New York Times and Art News, documenting the private worlds of some of the most influential artists, dancers, composers and writers of our time. In his orbit, and lounging on his lawn, were Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock, Leonard Bernstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Fairfield Porter, Franz Kline, Jim Dine, Mark Rothko, Jane Freilicher, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, Edward Albee, Peter Duchin, Joan Mitchell and Charlie Chaplin, to name a few. There were dinner parties that lasted all night; birthday parties for his daughter Julia where no children were invited; dressy soirées and makeshift parties where portraits were dashed out and verse written in boisterous collaboration. The assembled cast were iconoclasts, rare talents and binge-drinking pioneers. They were artistic guides for one another, muses, friends and lovers. "Boundaries were shifting," says Gruen. "People weren't concerned about men sleeping with men, or women sleeping with women anymore."

"I've always had a fixation with stardom and greatness. Either mine or someone else's," admits the raconteur with a chortle. "Not only did I want to interview these people," he says, "I wanted to be their best friend."

Willem de Kooning, 1959 "I remember that day on Flying Point Beach. We were all talking and smoking and our kids were romping around in the water. Bill went on a long walk, as he liked to do, and hours later I saw his silhouette moving slowly towards us. He was carrying this giant stick. I was stunned. What a marvelous-looking creature he was! "Look at him," I said to Jasper Johns, "he's like a prophet." And then I snapped this picture. "Bill was always around in those days. I loved him. We all did. He was a truly wonderful man-kind, funny, quirky, smart. There was something gentle and pure in him that seemed incorruptible. Don't get me wrong, he was a lethal drunk-but not in the way Jackson Pollock was." Above: de Kooning, Water Mill, 1961.

Jasper Johns, 1959 "Jasper and Robert Rauschenberg were lovers at the time they visited us in Water Mill. Johns seldom smiled. Here, he positively beamed. Rauschenberg was the dreamer."

The Long Island Expressway was still unfinished when Gruen and his wife, the landscape painter Jane Wilson, made their first trip to Water Mill in 1957. Four years later, they bought an old carriage house on Cobb Road, where the two played host to their clan of contemporaries. They were not unlike Sarah and Gerald Murphy, the famed Jazz-Age-era couple from East Hampton, who trekked off to the South of France and created "Villa America," a sort of salon on the beach where they gathered such luminaries as Pablo Picasso, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Ferdinand Leger and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the latter of whom immortalized their hospitality in Tender is the Night, casting them in the roles of Dick and Nicole Diver. Like the Gruens, the Murphys loved nothing more than the company of brilliant minds, and both couples had a healthy appetite for fostering friendships of all stripes. But unlike the Murphys, instead of waiting for one of his writers to chronicle his own journey, John Gruen set about writing his memoirs: Callas Kissed me...Lenny Too! It is his 15th book and this one brings full circle the cadre of biographies and critiques that have been his life's work.

This revealing memoir captures the bravado, irreverence, camaraderie and overt sexuality of one of the most volatile and creative moments in American art history, and the personal stories of its heroes.

Leonard Bernstein, 1959 "Lenny and Felicia spent weekends with us all the time in those days. He was hugely famous, and everywhere we went, people called out his name. 'Lenny! Hello Lenny!' It was like walking down the street with Marilyn Monroe. He was interested in everything-a blade of grass, religion, politics, the stars. We talked about it all. He was a genius of monumental complexity, and to watch him conduct the Philharmonic, the music of Mahler, was to know an ecstasy that is rare. He had an ego the size of the Hollywood Bowl. But when he cared, he cared hard. Our relationship was very complicated. A kind of love emerged in me. And when, during those late-night sessions, Lenny felt inclined to be affectionate and sometimes more than affectionate; when during a particularly poignant session of recollection he needed to pause and physically reach out to me, to hold me or be held, to kiss me or be kissed, It would happen-easily, silently, often passionately." Above: Jane Wilson, Julia Gruen and Bernstein, Flying Point Beach. Above: Felicia and Leonard Bernstein, Water Mill, 1968.

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