Photo credit: “WH Correspondents Insider”
“When you mix them all together, it’s mayhem,” author Holly Peterson told Hollywood on the Potomac at a book launch in her honor at The Jefferson Hotel in Washington, DC for her latest tome it Happens in the Hamptons hosted by Constance Milstein, Tammy Haddad, Kathy O’Hearn, Hilary Rosen, Juleanna Glover, Carol Melton and Heather Podesta.
The mix refers to any summer community whether it’s Martha’s Vineyard or Nantucket or Aspen or Amelia Island or other lake communities. “When you have a summer community, the difference between the classes is shown in Technicolor, especially in the summer. You often have a group of people, often one-percenters, who are coming in for the summer and invading with their second homes or their rentals, or certainly people with a lot more means who have enough money to vacation or own a second home. Then you have the whole rest of the local population. You have a huge clash of cultures, of classes, and of different backgrounds intermingling,” she explained.
Holly Peterson
“For any writer, that tension is our lifeblood. That’s what the book is really about. The book is about the class conflict that’s going on that is railing this country and politics and everything everybody’s talking about these days. But it’s wrapped up, hopefully, in a sexy, fun little present of life in The Hamptons with these ridiculous new money people who are worth half a billion dollars, these hedge fund guys, and old money people who have grown up in country clubs for generations, who have a lot less money, but are still by all measures well-off. Then there is a very vibrant local population of AV technicians and vintners and restaurateurs and teachers and painters.”
Holly Peterson is the New York Times best-selling author of four books. Her latest, a work of humorous social satire, is titled it Happens in the Hamptons, and is a tale about the clashing of classes and cultures on the Eastern tip of Long Island. New money, old moneyed types on their tattered couches, and the vibrant local population collide in this comedy of manners…a missing person, a floating Gucci loafer in nighttime inky seas, a preppy pervert on the loose, and a mixed-up cocktail of classes. “Think of it as Downton Abbey in bikinis,” says Peterson.
There were no bikini take-aways, but lots of flip-flops for the “one percenters” crowd. “I know you’re really cheering for the flip flops. So let’s hear it for the flip flops,” said Tammy Haddad before introducing Megan Murphy, now Editor of Business Week who moderated a panel with Holly. “We knew her when she was running the Washington bureau of Bloomberg. And Holly, can I just say this book is remarkable and we’ll all be meeting you in the Hamptons later this summer; but I gotta be honest it was hot all day and it wasn’t because of the independent counsel.” “One thing I can say to Washington tonight,” added Murphy, “is that Donald Trump has tweeted in the past thirty minutes if people want to check their phone. He said that he’s, of course, going to be proving that there’s gonna be no collusion. So I’m just summing that up for people so you don’t have to check all the alerts that are buzzing on your phone for the next twenty minutes or so. I wanna talk about the book and talk a lot about the issues it raises. The book is amazing, it’s a great beach read and it sort of surfaces stuff that I write a lot about at Business Week, that we think a lot about in the current context, which is just the changing nature of America, in terms of not just the haves and the have nots, but sort of the super haves, the sort of kinda haves, the wanna haves, and the truly poor. And you actually do depict that society in a place where a lot of people don’t think it exists, but that’s the Hamptons.”
Megan Murphy and Holly Peterson
“Sometimes their second homes in the Hamptons are forty million dollar estates on the ocean,” acknowledged Holly, “and they have helicopters, and these people are worth half a billion dollars. Those are the uber one percenters. But even the one percenters that can afford a vacation home, or even a vacation, the rest of the country can’t afford that. And so there’s this amazing tension between the classes in these communities and that’s the life blood for any author. So that’s the setting for my book and I have spent about fifteen or twenty years writing social satire. Why? Because I think wealthy people, I think people who have made it big in Manhattan are some of the most fascinating people around because they’re so intensely neurotic. These guys, mostly guys unfortunately, that have millions and millions of dollars, they’re making millions and millions of dollars weekly and monthly off these stock markets and hedge funds and all these things. And that’s what’s creating this enormous divide between the 0.0001 percent and the one or two percent.” Think Michael Douglas in Wall Street where Greed is good. “They make insane money. Money makes money and there’s anger and envy.”
“I think there’s three worlds in my book. You’ve got the old WASP-y protestants that run these country clubs and drink a lot and play tennis with their Exeter roommates and are on their tattered couches and have money, but don’t have serious money. That’s a huge amount of people in the Hamptons – golf clubs, and tennis, and all of that. And then you have these super rich, accomplished New Yorkers. But you also have a very vibrant local community and you have, actually, all three worlds interacting all the time. You have them interacting on the beach, they have sex with each other, they play tennis together, you know there’s store situations, restaurant situations, social situations. And I’ve seen it myself because I surf and I spend a lot of time with the local community. I also come from a family of pretty large means in Manhattan and so I’ve always had a nice house in the Hamptons. But I intermingle with all these people all the time and I invite surfer friends over for parties and I watch how people treat them because if they’re not going to advance them socially or professionally they don’t really want to talk to these guys and I think, but that guy’s so cool and he’s so interesting and you’d really like him. I watch the snobbishness, I watch the sex, I watch the sparks, I watch the tension, I watch the incredibly awkward situations. I think it’s interesting because I think it’s what’s going on in this country. You have all kinds of people interacting in ways that are uncomfortable. And you also want people to get along better. With what’s going on in this country politically we kind of want more empathy, and we want people to understand each other, and we want people to talk. And so the book is really about these different worlds – kind of trying to talk and get along. And I don’t write caricatures. The rich people aren’t awful and the local people aren’t angels. Everybody’s messed up in their own way.”
“I like to analyze situations and I like to see things. So, how did I write about this? I did start surfing. I did start really getting entrenched in the local population. I fell in love with someone I was surfing with and then I started writing about it. And then I started writing about wealthy people. And then I started writing about self made people. And then I started interviewing CEOs. I mean, you do this all the time, but I’m particularly interested in the people – how did you get there? What did you do? What is the drive that made you leap frog over divisions constantly that means you’re absolutely number one with ten thousand, fifty thousand, hundred thousand people? What is it about you that did that? What drove you? Are you smarter than everyone? Are you just nervous all the time that you’re just better at things? I mean, what is it? I think it’s fascinating. And those people that are at the top, they’re anxious, right? They wanna be real and they wanna be liked. And that whole, social messiness of people who, like you were saying before, who are so apart from the rest but they’re trying to jive with regular people is just so awkward….. and wonderful to write about and wonderful to create situations where, if it isn’t sexual, it’s just a conversation that isn’t quite working.”
Hollywood on the Potomac has been to the places described by Holly, but we do see some differences in the venues so we asked her if she also found some discerning features. She did: “Martha’s Vineyard or The Cape is obviously a lot less testosterone-charged than The Hamptons. It’s a lot more people just enjoying themselves on their porches, drinking rosé, having people over for a lovely dinner and going to the beach all day and clamming. It’s not quite as socially pressured as The Hamptons. Nonetheless, my point stands, I think. When you get into a summer community where there’s people that are coming in just for three months, there is a conflict of classes. There’s people who are servicing another group of people. I surf a lot in The Hamptons. The people that are usually in the water are all the local people. I spend an enormous amount of time with painters and carpenters and teachers and land surveyors, those guys that look through the tripods to figure out the bumps and turns in land. I talk to them a lot. A lot of them are surf instructors and they teach a lot of wealthy people, their children. I sit in the sand and I watch the interaction between people who are worth half a billion dollars or $10 million and people who are making $40,000 or $50,000 a year. When they intermingle and when they socialize, and when these families invite these local population people over for lunch, it’s just weird. It’s tension-filled. There’s obviously sexual sparks when there’s an illicit affair between people of different backgrounds.”
“I’ve seen a lot of situations,” Peterson told us. “I think the book is a narrative. It’s a romance. There’s a lot of sex in it. There’s a lot of fun. But I think it’s a grander thing about the financial differences between people and what that means and if there are enormous differences that that creates that bring us apart. I think that’s really what the country’s talking about these days. Is it empathy? Is it caring about each other? Is it an ability to relate even though we’re different? Is it an ability to talk to each other? All those things are what’s causing upheaval right now in this country. I consider myself a real social analyzer. I like to look at the different groups. In The Hamptons, you really do have these old money people who’ve been going out there for generations, who live in these torn-down, rundown, adorable cottages. That’s a huge set of people out in The Hamptons. They’re not particularly flashy and they play golf and they play tennis and they drink a fair amount. They have their kids over and they have a lot of fun. Then you have a celebrity culture out there with Christie Brinkley and Andy Cohen and Anderson Cooper and all kinds of news celebrities and glitterati and Ron Perlman and big CEOs. They go to restaurants that no one else can get into and they have their usual tables and they have fabulous Hollywood parties on the beach.That all very much exists in The Hamptons. Then, as I said, the local population is something that needs to be considered, as well, ’cause these people have lived there for years and years and years and they’re servicing these people. A lot of times these books are just about one sector of what I’m talking about, but my book looks at all these different worlds at once and the intersection between all of them. I think that hopefully it’s a fun, sexy romp through all these worlds.”
“There’s a lot of really silly posturing and shenanigans that goes on,” Peterson added. “You’ll find that in my book there’s party scenes and there’s club scenes and there’s going out scenes. Because I’ve been a journalist for 25 years at ABC News and Newsweek and all these places, I really very carefully depict exactly which shoe people are wearing, what they’re eating, what they’re wearing – it’s indicative of which of these sectors they fit in. There’s clothes and cars and food and all that fits a certain group of people. It’s different among each of them. I straddle a bunch of different worlds out there. I’m a journalist, so I’m a fly on the wall person. I dated a local artist for a long time. I come from a family that has some means. I was able to have a nice house there in the summers. I’ve done a lot of different things. I have brothers who golf at some of the snooty clubs. I’ve pretty much seen a lot of it. I like being part of all of it. I don’t get invited to everything all the time, but I like seeing it because I take notes. It’s always good fodder for magazine articles and books.”
This is Holly’s fourth book, one being a cookbook which kind of surprised us. We asked her to elaborate: “I entertain a lot. I got a pizza oven that I got a little bit too excited about. I put it in my backyard and I started putting 20 bowls in the middle of the table with frizzled leeks and roasted corn and sun-dried tomatoes and prosciutto that you can actually fry up like bacon, which makes it just unbelievably delicious. We brought dough out and tomato sauce and people made their own pizzas. Then we started entertaining that way, where everyone just made their own. Then we had contests for the best one and then I did a photo shoot and I wrote a bunch of articles about the pizza oven. Then we had a lot of lobster bakes on the beach and I said, ‘You know, this is really a way of entertaining that’s important right now.’ There’s been a lot of suffering in this country and the whole snooty pomp and poofy shoulder pads and hair and place cards is not the way people are entertaining anymore. There’s a lot more buffets and there’s a lot more sitting on people’s couches with a lot of candles and signature cocktails and just come over and be excited you have the pink margarita in your hand and call it a party. I did a book about outdoor entertaining that shows that fun but in a casual way. I came up with all the different ways you can entertain outdoors. I did a clam bake. I did shrimp boil in New Orleans. I did a Cuban pig roast in a vineyard. I did lots of Hamptons events.”
The host committee with the author
“I just think fiction gets you closer to the truth than nonfiction. I would like to say that because if you’re a journalist and you’re writing fiction, it really frees you up to depict a situation accurately. You’re not actually making things up, you’re depicting it fully. In nonfiction, if you work at “Newsweek” or ABC as I have and you need everything double sourced if you’re going to the dinner party, you can’t write about it. If you’re wrong you get fired. You’re amazingly constricted in what you can cover and how you can cover it. With fiction – if you care about being accurate which I’m trying to do and I’m trained to think I’m gonna get fired if I’m not and I’m fearful of not being accurate – you can write it in such a way that it absolutely, 100% depicts the flowers and the glasses and the forks and the clothes and the shoes and the food and conversations and everything that goes on in these different worlds in The Hamptons that I’m talking about – the old money and the new money and the local population. It’s very freeing as a writer to write fiction. I’m really enjoying it because I think I’m writing as I call it – journalistic satire. It’s accurate. It’s satire. I don’t know what’s happening at the end when I start.”
We asked Peterson one last question. “If you were a political journalist right now, how would you feel about covering this administration? What do you think of everything that’s been happening to the media?” A: “I think the media’s so stratified just like the one percent, the 99% are stratified in this country. I think there’s just enormous cleavage of divisions that’s happening right now. If I were a political journalist, I’d be very carefully reporting what I saw and what I understood to be the truth, and I would be very careful not to be posting anything on social media that was seen as one-sided. I think that the media taking sides and trying to report from a certain angle is detrimental to the fourth estate and what the profession’s all about. Hopefully, I’d be immensely well-valued about being truthful.”
Back at the Q and A, moderator Megan Murphy also had a final question: “In all of your studies – if we look at this as almost a zoological experiment – what is the unifying characteristic of people you’ve seen that have taken it to that level of success? Whether they’re flawed as human beings, whether they’re flawed as parents, whether they’re flawed as in many aspects, what is the one thing that you would say joins them together in that pursuit of astronomical financial success?” A: “Raging narcissist,” Holly responded without hesitation. “A narcissist is someone who very often has been wounded in childhood and they’re making up for it and they spend their life kind of proving that getting the attention they didn’t get as a child or overcoming their dyslexia or a parent dying or something that was really psychologically wounding and they never get over it. And so they’re just going and going and going seeking something that’s filling some enormously empty emotional hole. I really totally believe that. I have rarely met a hugely powerful guy that, unfortunately as I say it’s often men, that got to the top who isn’t just unbelievably, weirdly driven. It doesn’t mean they’re all mean. It just means that’s what drives them.” Both agreed that panicked narcissists are some of the nicest people they have ever met. Sometimes they’re fabulous and charming and fascinating too.
“Tweet the flops! We wanna tweet the flops,” we were reminded on the way out. We did.
