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Connections: Star Power

The cult of celebrity is alive and well out here in the Hamptons
By
Helen S. Rattray

Local note for Dec. 29: On this date, two East Hamptoners were featured in a New York Times story — with photographs — about how they “exploited an esoteric tax loophole that saved them millions in taxes.” 

Daniel S. Loeb and Steven A. Cohen, who are part-time residents, along with Louis Moore Bacon, who owns Robins Island, were cited as exemplars of the mega-rich who manipulate federal tax law in ways that the rest of us 99-percenters could never fathom doing. 

The story ran on page one, with The Times detailing how these “hedge fund magnates . . . have managed billions of dollars in capital, earning vast fortunes,” and how they have invested “large sums in art — and millions more in political candidates.”

I am sure most East Hamptoners are delighted to have Mr. Loeb and Mr. Cohen here. They are famous now, after all, and the cult of celebrity is alive and well out here in the Hamptons. 

Also, as the continuing success of Donald Trump proves, lots of people just love big shots. I haven’t seen the houses owned by these two hedge fund magnates, but I suspect they are large; big shots generally like big mansions. (And people who like big shots — and big mansions — also, generally, like the economic boost generated by the building of said big mansions.)

The tax-loophole story appeared on a day when I found myself musing about how real estate brokers have lately been playing into our culture’s celebrity obsession. For some time now, realtors have been soliciting clients by including photo-portraits of themselves in their property advertisements. Do big smiles mean big success? Apparently. I myself find this real-estate-agent-as-mini-celebrity trend a bit confusing, but I guess when you are shopping for a house it would make a certain sense to want to do it in the company of an agent who appears friendly. 

It’s kind of akin to the way dating websites, like Match.com or Tinder (so I’m told), work: a snap judgment based on a photograph.

Local note for Jan. 7: The Ramblers club of East Hampton will observe its 115th anniversary on Jan. 22, having been founded on Jan. 22, 1901, by Florence Nightingale Osborne. 

What is Ramblers, you ask? Beyond being a club that shuns celebrity — providing an amusing contrast with the fame-chasing elements of our local society — it is a women’s educational group. Its original mission was to “ramble through various countries by studying them,” and members were known to sometimes wear appropriate costumes. Today, they still meet to present informational programs on a wide variety of edifying subjects. 

Ramblers is described in “Smart Women,” a recently published directory and history of some 90 all-women study and literary groups, based on four years of research by Ann Dodds Costello into what she described as their pursuit of “knowledge and entertainment.” 

Ms. Costello, of Los Angeles and Maine, is (and I hope you can follow me, as I can hardly follow this myself) the mother-in-law of one of my husband’s nieces; we met at a baby shower. My own late mother-in-law, Jeannette Edwards Rattray, and her mother, Florence Huntting Edwards, were both members of Ramblers, and we have a few of the papers they presented. Before she got married and moved to Canada, my daughter was once very, very briefly a member, delivering a talk on shore whaling that, she reports with amusement, put some of the members to sleep. 

I guess Rambling without rambling takes practice.

Ramblers was not, and is not, a sewing society. But thinking about wholesome women’s activities as winter finally arrived this week put me in mind of a wonderful pair of wool socks I bought in Nova Scotia from a women’s craft guild. Delicately and ingeniously hand-knit, with a repeating pattern of lines and designs in four colors, they are almost too attractive to wear. Whoever made them is more talented than any Kardashian, if you ask me.

 

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