Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [3]
Our green, wood-paneled Ford Torino wagon reached the East End of Long Island in early summer. The local white corn, tomatoes, and gin and tonics would soon be coming up. A friend of my father’s from St. Louis, a preposterously tan writer named Berton Roueché, had arranged a house for us. It was a small, two-story converted horse barn on Stony Hill Farm in Amagansett. The farm was surrounded by potato fields. There was a handwritten wooden sign nailed to a tree at the entrance that read STONY HILL FARM. A woman named Penny Potter owned the place. (My dad would later tell Penny Potter to go fuck herself, when she didn’t invite my parents to cocktails until three months after we had arrived from St. Louis. In my father’s opinion, “Go fuck yourself” was the only civilized response to bad manners.)
Penny had been married to a writer named Jeffrey Potter. Writer Peter Matthiessen and his wife had lived in what was now our house. The hill house was the storied spot where Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe spent the summer of 1957, arriving by helicopter on the front field. When people came from St. Louis to visit, my dad gave them the dead-artistsand-writers tour, driving them to the Green River Cemetery, where A. J. Liebling and Jackson Pollock and Stuart Davis were buried, highlighting the curve on Fireplace Road where Pollock cracked up.
My mother wasn’t thrilled about leaving her mother for a year, but she was up for a place with more scope and more glamour. Both my parents wanted a bigger game, and New York was it. And Dad was about to be it. He had been selling pieces to Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, and the New York Times Magazine, and the great literary novel was the next obvious step. She believed in him.
Besides the Rouechés, the other friends my parents spent time with were more writers, like Mike Mooney, Willie Morris, Martin Quigley and Eloise Spaeth, an industrialist’s widow and art collector whom my parents also knew from St. Louis. Mrs. Spaeth and her late husband had been huge figures in the New York art world in the ’50s and ’60s, involved in promoting artists like Picasso, Calder, and Willem de Kooning. Mrs. Spaeth was a big deal at the Whitney, and she lived in a modern house that had art and sculpture everywhere, like the Picasso birdbath out by the pool. She was respected for her impeccable taste and vision, and I thought it must mean Dad was really up-and-coming if she was friends with him.
Everyone was “interesting”: “Hell of an interesting gal, very bright, has a piece in The New Yorker, is researching something terrific, was friendly with so-and-so, working on a collection of stories.” It seemed there was no shortage of little stories about the writers and artists who lived around us. “Quigs [my father’s friend Martin Quigley] said he used to ride the train with Pollock. ‘Jack and I used to drink together in the bar car of the Montauk Cannonball.’” They called it that because it was the slowest train of all time. Big, black, slow.
“Saul Steinberg, who lives down the road from Quigs, calls Martin’s wood-burning stove ‘the black cat,’” my father would tell his old friend Hereford on the phone.
My parents had a cocktail party one night, and my dad pulled me aside and said, “Now, Jean, there’s a woman coming over tonight and I want you to pay attention to her, to what she’s like, because you’ll read Tender Is the Night someday and the couple in it, the Divers, were based on her parents, Sara and Gerald Murphy. She’s the living continuation of the American social novel.” This was just a normal direction from my father, like “Don’t slouch at the dinner table.” I want you to pay attention to this woman tonight because she is the living continuation of THE American social novel. Okay, Dad. “Dorothy Parker was her nanny. Played on the beach in Antibes with Picasso.” All right, all right. I heard ya.
In addition to socializing with the local literati, my parents also hosted a number of friends from St. Louis that summer—ironic since the reason we’d come here in the first place