Hampton Style - July 13, 2007

Five years ago, Eleanore Kennedy found a note on her husband's 1937 brown pickup truck that's always parked in front of her gorgeous beachfront house, in the Georgica Association, which they have owned since 1975. The truck was a gift from a grateful client to her husband, lawyer Michael Kennedy, who drives it to the weekend softball games in the association, a private community on Georgica Pond in Wainscott. (Neighbors include Ron Perelman, Arthur Ross, Kelly Klein, and Robert Tishman.) "Someone put a flier on the truck saying, 'We love this location, call us,'" says Eleanore, while giving a tour of her house, Kilkare, whimsically named for the concept of killing off all your cares while at the beach. "Everyone thinks it's Irish," she says.

It turned out the note was from a location scout for the 2004 movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which ended up featuring the home. The Kennedys agreed to have their treasured beach house used for the movie because Eleanore loves Kate Winslet, and they wanted to use the considerable fee from the deal to pay for a new roof, shingles, and gutter. (Movie industry sources say producers typically pay about $50,000 per day for a location like Kilkare.) "It was pretty scary seeing the movie," she says, referring to the computer-generated scenes where a storm washes through the house, a classic Victorian constructed by Brooklyn ship builders in 1879. It was the first and highest house to be built on the South Shore of Long Island. "It was pretty much watching our biggest fear."

The Kennedys have survived through plenty of storms at Kilkare, evacuating when necessary to their neighbors, Chris and Priscilla Whittle, across the pond. After a hurricane washed away their back porch, builder Ben Krupinski found the missing structure on the association's tennis court down the road and nailed it back on. A shoot of the home's exterior for the upcoming film The Nanny Diaries paid for that renovation, which included replacing the dune. The Kennedys now call it "Nanny Dune."

In addition to the movie shoots, the house has appeared in numerous home decor books and shelter magazine spreads.

"It's the ultimate Hamptons icon," says Corcoran broker Michael Schultz, a close friend of the Kennedys. "It's the most classic oceanfront house I have ever seen." Schultz thinks Kilkare is worth around $40 million--but the proud owners would never sell.

"People have come here with a blank check," says Eleanore, who also owns homes in Manhattan, West Palm Beach, and Ireland. "We bought it for very little and now we could sell it for very much, but it doesn't matter. We're not going anywhere."

Except to Italy, where they're spending the month of July in a rented villa. A television executive and his family have rented the house for about $225,000.

Over the years, the Kennedys have hosted many friends and family in their 6-bedroom house. There's a collection of shells and rocks in the living room that have been used for placecards at dinner parties, and they used to throw themed parties for 300 of their friends and neighbors. On the wall hangs a framed collection of photographs, yellowed with age, of the house being built for the family of Jonathan Edwards, who founded the Yale Divinity School.

The Kennedys restored everything they could to maintain the house's original condition; even personal items like Edwards' golf clubs, saddles, and beach chairs. Eleanore saved needlepoint and family photographs, and they now adorn the walls, adding to the photo collection of the Kennedy's own family and friends, like Candice Bergen and Bianca Jagger.

They had to add a kitchen because it was previously in the basement with a dumb waiter going to the main floor. They also converted the basement level into "teenager quarters" with a pool table and a separate entrance to encourage their three now-grown kids to hang out at the house.

Eleanore furnished Kilkare with 19th-century antiques from India, including Buddhas that were picked out by her husband, who she calls "my constant gardener," because he spends a lot of time tending to his Zen garden, which has 12 hidden Buddhas nestled in the trees and paths. It also includes a yoga platform where he practices with Iyengar star teacher John Seelye, of One Ocean Yoga in Bridgehampton. "My husband's yin is being a killer in court, and his yang is the garden," she says.

Kilkare also has a pool, a vegetable garden, and a large lawn on 2.8 acres. The main guest bedroom is the best room in the house for its stunning ocean view. Four couples have spent their wedding night there.

The Kennedys used to also own the house next door, but they sold it in the mid '90s to banker Frederic Seegal. When they first moved from San Francisco to Kilkare, they got a call from the legendary real estate broker, the late Allan Schneider. He said he had the perfect client to rent the house next door: a man named Donald Trump. It was the pre-Google era, so Eleanore went to the New York Public Library to research the young real estate developer. She found a bunch of pictures of The Donald partying with gaggles of girls and nixed the idea. She told Schneider that she wouldn't rent to any randy single guy.

Schneider promised that Trump was getting married to a very nice woman named Ivana that summer so Eleanore agreed to rent him the house. The Trumps rented the house for several years. "They were very good tenants," recalls Eleanore. "They always left it in better condition than when they arrived." Michael ended up representing Ivana in her epic divorce from Donald, but that's another legendary real estate tale.

"Living in this house has been the best 30-some years of our lives," says Eleanore. Perhaps one of the most majestic features of Kilkare is that it won't last forever. "I can't worry about erosion," she says. "You can't control nature. This is a piece of history that may eventually be taken by the ocean."