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House and Sullivan & Cromwell at 125 Broad had a small but expert team of white-shoe attorneys assigned permanently to the Hannah Cutting lawsuit account.
    Which was one reason those privet hedges were significant. As the tulip is to Holland and the palm to Beverly Hills, the privet hedge is to East Hampton. There were those who believed in having their privet trimmed with geometric precision by gardeners using plumb lines and surveying instruments; others who preferred their hedge wild and thick and bushy. Whatever its shape, the privet is everywhere, tall and green, dividing up enormous properties. And a good thing: neighbors (like Hannah) can be difficult and a tall privet, like a stout fence, settles more arguments than it causes. What is it they say, good fences make good neighbors?
    I don’t mean to sound patronizing or smug about Hannah’s crowd. I knew some of them. Liked a few. I even had a sneaking, contrarian admiration for my hostess. Hannah Cutting was a grand story. The Czechoslovakian potato farmer’s daughter from Riverhead who’d become “America’s Homemaker.” Hard work, guts, taste, an instinct for what Americans wanted, an enormous vitality, a physical toughness that had driven her in her thirties to become something of an alpinist. Meanwhile, left behind in her luminous wake, a weak and malleable husband bearing an old East Hampton family name. To some, she was a self-made success story of heroic proportions; to others, Lucrezia Borgia. As a reporter, I delighted in colorful originals like Hannah Cutting.
    Which didn’t mean we were pals.
    Unless they were strictly Maidstone Club, High Episcopalian, Ladies’ Village Improvement Society, and all that, Hamptons parties in high season, even along Further Lane, occasionally had their freak-show aspects, not quite up to Fire Island or Key West standards, but still.
    Hannah Cutting’s season-closing party was campier, more outrageous than most. The man who was then editing New York magazine (and would shortly be sacked on account of falling subscription renewal rates, down from 71 to 67 percent) was something of a genius who had sent out a virtual SWAT team of reporters and photographers to capture on paper that final weekend of summer at Hannah’s. As industrious were their efforts, what the occasion really called for was William Hogarth. Only a Hogarth of Gin Lane and The Harlot’s Progress could do justice to this bunch. Maybe the Hogarth who painted A Representation of the March of the Guards Toward Scotland, with its magnificent chaos of weeping and roistering, drunken kisses and brawling, a portrait of his countrymen and women that was chaotic and ludicrous, ghastly and insolent.
    Hannah’s invited gallery of grotesques, her real-life imagining just who were truly the rich and famous, was everything Old Money found wrong about East Hampton last summer:
    Ross Bleckner, the artist, showed up with his latest Boy Toy who went about assuring people, “but I have a real job! Really I do. I know you despise me. But I work! I work!” Demi Moore came in with her head shaved for a role, compulsively spanking Donna Karan on the ass. And what was that all about? Bianca Jagger lectured people about poverty in Central America and denied she was a fag hag. Yoko Ono ran back and forth to a car, opening and slamming its doors as a pretty boy sprinted after her, calling out, “Mother!” Susan Sontag, of the skunk-streaked hair, sat silent and staring at walls. A man who poured drinks on people until they threw him out. Another fellow who said he kept a tiger shark named Smiley in his swimming pool. But didn’t swim, himself. A third who pugnaciously challenged people to hit him. “Hit me! Go ahead! Take a swing at me. Maybe I’m HIV-positive. How can you know until you hit me?”
    One husky blonde with a crew cut who’d driven up on a Harley introduced herself, possibly mistaking me for